NABOKV-L thanks Dmitri Nabokov for both his
enlightening note and his good wishes for the Russian Xmas which is today
Jan.7th.
You might want to
post what follows, to be read around the campfire:
I would like to help
disentangle the slightly tricky relationships of this family Christmas
tree.
Rozhdestvo
means "Christmas" (the holiday).
rozhdestvenno is one neuter form of the
adjective rozhdestvennyi, as in zdes' ochen'
rozhdestvenno (it's very Christmassy here), the other being
rozhdestvennoe, as in rozhdestvennoe ukrashenie (a
Christmas ornament). It is also an adverb (actually not very far,
syntactically, from the first neuter adjectival form, above) as in dom
byl ubran rozhdestvenno (the house was decorated
Christmas-style). There are other variants and nuances, e.g.
rozhdestvenskiy,
po rozhdestvenski.
Rozhdestveno
[a "d" and one "n"] is a fairly recent variant of the name of the
estate of my maternal grandmother's family, the Rukavishnikovs. The
mansion had been used by my father for an occasional tryst, and was given
to him by his uncle "Ruka" shortly before political events made
it impossible for him to inhabit it. Having been once nearly destroyed, it
was painstakingly rebuilt and was to be shown and presented to me during my
first visit to Russia, in June, 1995. It was destroyed once again by fire not
long before
my arrival (it was built entirely of wood -- one reason why it was, I am
told, the last large structure of its kind to survive intact as long as it did).
It has since been rebuilt again, promised to me again, but that is where,
after I had signed various official papers, things have stopped. I have
shed no tears because I've had enough hassles with real estate in Sardinia,
Florida, and Switzerland. Anyway, I would have used it more or less as
it is being used now: for cultural events in honor of my father. I could
also, in theory, have laid claim to elaborate properties in Spa and Rome,
but have not bothered. Nearby Vyra had belonged to my maternal
grandfather, had become the Nabokovs' summer place, and was totally
destroyed by hyperkinetic belligerents. As happens with language, the
name Rozhestveno was gradually corrupted, in everyday speech and writing, by its
proximity to "Rozhdestvo" and
"rozhdenie" ("birthday") into a half-way form with
a "d" and one "n". On the other hand, Rozhestveno had its own, older form of
"Christmas" to mimic:Rozhestvo. And one can
dig further.
My father wrote the
short story "Rozhdestvo" ("Christmas") pub. in Russian
in Rul' in two installments, Jan. 6 and 8, 1925; pub. in English
in Details of a Sunset and Other Stories, tr.DN in
collaboration with the author, McGraw-Hill, 1976; collected
in The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov, ed. DN,
Knopf, 1995. He also wrote "Rozhdestvenskiy rasskaz" ("The Christmas
Story") pub. in Russian in Rul', Dec. 25, 1928; pub.in Eng., tr.
DN, in The Collected Stories, ed. DN, Knopf, 1995.
It is possible that
Françoise Richard saw the endings of the two installments and concluded they
were different endings for the same story.
VN wrote two poems
entitled "Rozhdestvo" ("Christmas"), one in 1921 ("Moi
kalendar' polu-opalyi..."), another in 1923
("Svecha prozrachnaia migaet...").
S Rozhdestvom
Khristovym,
DN
,