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Sklyarenko replies to VN & electricity query
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----- Original Message -----
From: alex
To: chtodel@cox.net
Sent: Sunday, September 08, 2002 9:24 AM
Subject: re: VN & electricity query
As I suggest in my paper "Russian subtexts in Nabokov's ADA..." read at the recent Nabokov Conference in St. Petersburg (to be published soon at the site of the Nabokov Museum), the source of the "L disaster" and of the electricity motif in ADA may be the short story by Konstantin Sluchevski (1837-1904) "La Pointe". This "sketch" opens the last (sixth) volume of his Collected Works (Spb., 1898 or 1906, the second edition; as far as I know, most of this author's works have not been translated into other languages, at least not his prose). One of the characters tells a story about a long defunct country which has allegedly existed in ancient times at the place of the present St. Petersburg. Electricity was known in that country (and later forgotten), but its use was restricted: very expensive patents ("privileges") were given out for electric gadgets - "quite an ordinary thing for that highly educated country, where even above the cradles of children, who were born in a very small number, lullabies were sung in telephones that provided connection with the steppes of Ukraine where there still remained some good voices; cradles were rocked also by electricity."
That country perished from a kind of "L disaster", but L here has nothing to do with electricity, meaning just "lack of love." (The word "lyublyu", I love, couldn't be heard anymore and became almost obscene). The low birth-rate led to the gradual desolation of the country and to its sinking eventually into the swamp.
I think we are faced in ADA with another "Nabokovian" shift of meaning, a kind of "qui pro quo", when L as the first letter in "love" (also in Russian) is made to denote (euphemistically, as it were) an obscure technological disaster.
There are allusions in ADA to many other works by Sluchevski that I discuss in my paper.
Apart from that, several puns and jokes in ADA may stem from the article "The poetry & prose of electricity" that has appeared in the Russian magazine Slovo ("Logos", for that matter) for January/February of 1880 in its "Scientific News" section. The article begins with the statement that "the question about what the electricity is remains open." Faraday, who has refused to answer this question, is called "the apostle of the modern electricity lore." In ADA, he is given a further promotion, so to speak, to the god of electricity ("Faragod"), via Latin dei. The article is signed with the Russian capital letter "Ya." (probably the author was Ieronim Yasinski, who published fiction under the pen name Maxim Belinski, Chernyshevski's favorite writer in THE GIFT).
I would also note that in the same issue of Slovo a Russian (anonymous) translation of Paul Alexis' story La Fin de Luci Pelegrin (1880), to which there is an interesting and complex allusion in ADA (at the end of the floramor chapter), was published. Van lives in Cordula's former flat on "Alexis Avenue" in Manhattan, and trying to ascertain who that Alexis was (of course, there can be some local name, which is played upon and about which I don't know), I came upon this story and the scientifical article.
Alexey