Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0025752, Sat, 4 Oct 2014 19:35:23 +0300

Subject
Milord Goal, Governor of Lute
Date
Body
Goal + Gogol' + barn = glagol + ogon' + rab/bar
Goal + kolos/sokol + gol' = golos/Logos + alkogol'
Goal + nauka + ad/da = Kalugano + Ada

Goal - Milord Goal, Governor of Lute (2.2)
glagol - verb; obs., word
ogon' - fire
rab - slave
kolos - ear (of a plant)
sokol - falcon
gol' - the poor; bare place
golos - voice
alkogol' - alcohol
nauka - science
ad - hell
da - yes
Kalugano - the city where the composer Philip Rack (Lucette's music teacher) lives and where Van fights a pistol duel with Captain Tapper

In his article «В ЧЁМ ЖЕ, НАКОНЕЦ, СУЩЕСТВО РУССКОЙ ПОЭЗИИ И В ЧЁМ ЕЁ ОСОБЕННОСТЬ» ("What is at Last the Essence of Russian Poetry and what is its Peculiarity") included in The Selected Passages from the Correspondence with Friends (1847) Gogol says that the first time he saw the tears on Pushkin's face (Pushkin never wept, as he admits in his poem "To Ovid") was when he read Yazykov's poem "To Davydov:"

Живо помню восторг его в то время, когда прочитал он стихотворение Языкова к Давыдову, напечатанное в журнале. В первый раз увидел я тогда слёзы на лице Пушкина (Пушкин никогда не плакал; он сам о себе сказал в послании к Овидию: «Суровый славянин, я слёз не проливал, но понимаю их»). Я помню те строфы, которые произвели у него слёзы. Первая, где поэт, обращаясь к России, которую уже было признали бессильною и немощной, взывает так:

Чу! труба продребезжала!
Русь! тебе надменный зов!
Вспомяни ж, как ты встречала
Все нашествия врагов!
Созови от стран далёких
Ты своих богатырей,
Со степей, с равнин широких,
С рек великих, с гор высоких,
От осьми твоих морей.

И потом строфа, где описывается неслыханное самопожертвование — предать огню собственную столицу со всем, что ни есть в ней священного для всей земли:

Пламень в небо упирая,
Лют пожар Москвы ревёт.
Златоглавая, святая,
Ты ли гибнешь? Русь, вперёд!
Громче буря истребленья!
Крепче смелый ей отпор!
Это жертвенник спасенья,
Это пламя очищенья,
Это фениксов костёр.

Lyut pozhar Moskvy ("the ferocious Moscow fire") brings to mind Lute (on Antiterra Paris is also known as Lute) and its Governor, Milord Goal:

Western Europe presented a particularly glaring gap: ever since the eighteenth century, when a virtually bloodless revolution had dethroned the Capetians and repelled all invaders, Terra's France flourished under a couple of emperors and a series of bourgeois presidents, of whom the present one, Doumercy, seemed considerably more lovable than Milord Goal, Governor of Lute! (2.2)

A sort of hoary riddle (Les Sophismes de Sophie by Mlle Stopchin in the Bibliotheque Vieux Rose series): did the Burning Barn come before the Cockloft or the Cockloft come first. Oh, first! We had long been kissing cousins when the fire started. In fact, I was getting some Chateau Baignet cold cream from Ladore for my poor chapped lips. And we both were roused in our separate rooms by her crying au feu! July 28? August 4?
Who cried? Stopchin cried? Lariviere cried? Lariviere? Answer! Crying that the barn flambait? (1.19)

Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): Mlle Stopchin: a representative of Mme de Segur, nee Rostopchine, author of Les Malheurs de Sophie (nomenclatorially occupied on Antiterra by Les Malheurs de Swann). Mme de Segur was the daughter of Count Rostopchin, in 1812 the Governor of Moscow and author of anti-Napoleonic leaflets (afishki).

It is Kim Beauharnais, the kitchen boy and photographer at Ardis, whom Ada must have bribed to set the barn on fire. His name hints at Napoleon's first wife (on Antiterra known as Queen Josephine, 1.5).

In his poem Yazykov compares the Moscow fire of 1812 to Feniksov kostyor (the fire in which Phoenix burns itself). Golos Feniksa is the Russian newspaper that Dorothy Vinelander (Ada's sister-in-law) reads to her sick brother:

Dorothy, a born nurser, considerably surpassed Ada (who, never being ill herself, could not stand the sight of an ailing stranger) in readiness of sickbed attendance, such as reading to the sweating and suffocating patient old issues of the Golos Feniksa (3.8).

Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): Golos etc.: Russ., The Phoenix Voice, Russian language newspaper in Arizona.

In the Kalugano hospital the male nurse Dorofey reads the Russian language newspaper Golos (Logos):

After a long journey down corridors where pretty little things tripped by, shaking thermometers, and first an ascent and then a descent in two different lifts, the second of which was very capacious with a metal-handled black lid propped against its wall and bits of holly or laurel here and there on the soap-smelling floor, Dorofey, like Onegin's coachman, said priehali ('we have arrived') and gently propelled Van, past two screened beds, toward a third one near the window. There he left Van, while he seated himself at a small table in the door corner and leisurely unfolded the Russian-language newspaper Golos (Logos). (1.42)

In his poem Prorok ("The Prophet," 1826) Pushkin uses glagol in the archaic sense "word:"

И бога глас ко мне воззвал:
«Восстань, пророк, и виждь, и внемли,
Исполнись волею моей,
И, обходя моря и земли,
Глаголом жги сердца людей».

And then God's voice called out to me:
"Arise, O Prophet, watch and hark,
Fulfill all my commands:
Go forth now over land and sea,
And with your word ignite men's hearts.

In a letter of November 25, 1892, to Suvorin Chekhov complains of the absence of alcohol in the works of contemporary artists and mentions nauka (science) and Denis Davydov (the hero of the Patriotic war against Napoleon and poet to whom Yazykov's poem quoted by Gogol is addressed):

Tell me honestly, who of my contemporaries—that is, men between thirty and forty-five—have given the world one single drop of alcohol? Are not Korolenko, Nadson, and all the playwrights of to-day, lemonade? Have Repin's or Shishkin's pictures turned your head? Charming, talented, you are enthusiastic; but at the same time you can't forget that you want to smoke. Science and technical knowledge are passing through a great period now, but for our sort it is a flabby, stale, and dull time. We are stale and dull ourselves, we can only beget gutta-percha boys, and the only person who does not see that is Stasov, to whom nature has given a rare faculty for getting drunk on slops. The causes of this are not to be found in our stupidity, our lack of talent, or our insolence, as Burenin imagines, but in a disease which for the artist is worse than syphilis or sexual exhaustion. We lack "something," that is true, and that means that, lift the robe of our muse, and you will find within an empty void. Let me remind you that the writers, who we say are for all time or are simply good, and who intoxicate us, have one common and very important characteristic; they are going towards something and are summoning you towards it, too, and you feel not with your mind, but with your whole being, that they have some object, just like the ghost of Hamlet's father, who did not come and disturb the imagination for nothing. Some have more immediate objects—the abolition of serfdom, the liberation of their country, politics, beauty, or simply vodka, like Denis Davydov; others have remote objects—God, life beyond the grave, the happiness of humanity, and so on. The best of them are realists and paint life as it is, but, through every line's being soaked in the consciousness of an object, you feel, besides life as it is, the life which ought to be, and that captivates you.

Chekhov story "Women from the Point of View of a Drunkard" (in which girls under sixteen are compared to aqua distillata) is signed Brat moego brata ("My brother's brother"). The last note of Aqua's was signed: My sister's sister who teper' iz ada (now is out of hell). (1.3)

According to Gogol, Pushkin regretted that Yazykov had not entitled his book of poetry Khmel' ("Drunkenness"):

Когда появились его стихи отдельной книгой, Пушкин сказал с досадой. «Зачем он назвал их: Стихотворенья Языкова — их бы следовало назвать просто: хмель! Человек с обыкновенными силами ничего не сделает подобного; тут потребно буйство сил».

The name Yazykov comes from yazyk (tongue; language). In "The Prophet" Pushkin mentions yazyk:

И он к устам моим приник,
И вырвал грешный мой язык,
И празднословный и лукавый,
И жало мудрыя змеи
В уста замершие мои
Вложил десницею кровавой.

And then he bent down towards my mouth,
My sinful tongue he ripped right out-
Its slander and its idle lies-
And with his bloody hand inserted
Between my still and lifeless lips
A cunning serpent's forked tongue.

Pushkin's poem, inspired by the book of Isaiah in the Bible, was written after the execution of five Decembrists. Isaiah (the Prophet who lived in the 8th century B.C.) and another biblical Prophet, David, are mentioned by Vyazemski in a poem quoted by Gogol in his article on Russian poetry:

Среди холодных строф польются вдруг у него такие строфы, что не знаешь сам, где ты находишься. Точно, как бы, выражаясь его же словами:

Божественный пророк Давид
Священными шумит струнами,
И бога полными устами
Исайя восхищен гремит.

The heavenly prophet David
thunders with holy strings,
and enraptured Isaiah with full voice
sings the praises of God.

The second king of Israel, David (died c960 B.C.) brings to mind Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825), a French painter (author of "The Death of Marat," 1793, and "The Coronation of Napoleon," 1806), and Baron Klim Avidov, Marina's former lover who gave her children a set of Flavita (Russian Scrabble):

The set our three children received in 1884 from an old friend of the family (as Marina's former lovers were known), Baron Klim Avidov, consisted of a large folding board of saffian and a boxful of weighty rectangles of ebony inlaid with platinum letters, only one of which was a Roman one, namely the letter J on the two joker blocks (as thrilling to get as a blank check signed by Jupiter or Jurojin). It was, incidentally, the same kindly but touchy Avidov (mentioned in many racy memoirs of the time) who once catapulted with an uppercut an unfortunate English tourist into the porter's lodge for his jokingly remarking how clever it was to drop the first letter of one's name in order to use it as a particule, at the Gritz, in Venezia Rossa. (1.36)

Baron Klim Avidov = Vladimir Nabokov
Flavita = alfavit (alphabet)

Poprishchin, the hero of Gogol's "Notes of a Madman" (1835), imagines that he is the King of Spain Ferdinand VIII. Poprishchin's maidservant Mavra believes that all Spanish kings look like Philip II. The name Philip Rack seems to hint at the Spanish Inquisition.

"Goal" also means "aim; end; purpose." In his poem "May 26, 1828" (Dar naprasnyi, dar sluchaynyi...) Pushkin says that he has no tsel' (goal) before him:

Дар напрасный, дар случайный,
Жизнь, зачем ты мне дана?
Иль зачем судьбою тайной
Ты на казнь осуждена?

Кто меня враждебной властью
Из ничтожества воззвал,
Душу мне наполнил страстью,
Ум сомненьем взволновал?..

Цели нет передо мною:
Сердце пусто, празден ум,
И томит меня тоскою
Однозвучный жизни шум.

Gift haphazard, unavailing,
Life, why were thou given me?
Why art thou to death unfailing
Sentenced by dark destiny?

Who in harsh despotic fashion
Once from Nothing called me out,
Filled my soul with burning passion
Vexed and shook my mind with doubt?

I can see no goal before me;
Empty heart and idle mind.
Life monotonously o'er me
Roars, and leaves a wound behind.

To Pushkin's Lenski (Eugene Onegin, Two: VII: 11-14) tsel' zhizni (the purpose of our life) was an alluring riddle.

Цель нашей жизни для него
была томительной загадкой.
Над ней он голову ломал
и чудеса подозревал.
He racked his brains over it
and suspected marvels.

Goal + voda = golova + da/ad

golova - head (cf. lomat' golovu, to rack one's brains)
voda - water

Speaking of nauka, in EO (One: I: 5) Pushkin uses it in the sense "lesson:"

Его пример другим наука
To others his example is a lesson.

Onegin is thinking of his uncle who "has most honest principles: when taken ill in earnest, he has made respect him and nothing better could invent" (One: I: 1-4).
Milord Goal is the uncle of Charlie Chose (5.5).

In a note to his elegy Andrey Shen'e ("Andre Chenier," 1825) Pushkin quotes Andre Chenier's last words: "pourtant j'avais quelque chose la" (still, I did have something here [in my head]). Chenier died under the guillotine.

Alexey Sklyarenko

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