"The Bourbonian-chinned, dark, sleek-haired, ageless concierge, dubbed
by
Van in his blazer days 'Alphonse Cinq,' believed he had just seen Mlle
Veen
[Lucette] in the Recamier room where Vivian Vale's golden veils were
on
show." (ADA, Part Three, chapter 3)
As I believe I told Brian when
I saw him last time at the VN Museum a year and a
half ago, the nickname
given by Van to the concierge of the Alphonse Four
hotel is a play on the
name of a minor female character in "The Adolescent,"
Alfonsinka (a Russified
diminutive form of the French feminine name
"Alphonsine"). In Dostoevsky's
novel, she is the girlfriend of a
blackmailer, a certain Lambert, and "a spy"
herself.
Note that Vivian Vale's golden veils are certainly connected to
the "Golden Veil"
that on Antiterra "conceals," so to speak, Tartary from the
rest of the world. Compare this to
the fact (not mentioned in my "Traditions
in a Russian Family" essay) that
in the epilogue to "The Adolescent"
Dostoevsky quotes the famous saying (its
authorship is ascribed to Napoleon):
"Grattez le russe et vous verrez le
tartare" (Scratch a Russian and you will
find a Tartar"). Now, I would like to suggest that, on Antiterra, this saying
(it also exists in Russian: "poskrebite russkogo i vy naidiote tatarina")
would read differently:
"Grattez le tartare et vous verrez le
francais" ("Scratch a Tartar and you will find a Frenchman"). What makes me
think so? As you remember (or, if you
happen not to know it, I shall tell
you), Stalin's secretary and
"aid-de-camp" was a certain Poskriobyshev. That
name derives from the word "poskriobysh" (which means "the youngest
child of the family's many children"). But semantically it is kin to the verb
"poskresti" ("to scratch") that we met in the Russian version of the
French dictum ("Grattez... etc.").
In Ada, Joseph Stalin (aka Sosso Djugashvili) is present in two copies, so
to speak. One is Khan Sosso, the ruler of the ruthless Sovietnamur Khanate
(2.2), and the other is Colonel St. Alin, a scoundrel, one of the seconds in the
Demon-d'Onsky duel (1.2). Why does Nabokov need him (Stalin) in two copies
on Antiterra? Is not one more than enough? I suspect that Nabokov is playing on
the name of Stalin's secretary, Poscriobyshev (just as he is playing on the
names of the two Soviet secret police heads, Yagoda and Beria, in ADA and on the
name of the third NKVD head, Ezhov, in his play "The Event"). , if you would
scratch Khan Sosso (who is a Tatar), you will probably find Colonel St.
Alin, a scoundrel (who is a Frenchman). "Grattez le tartare et vous verrez le
francais." I think that this reversal is a kind of personal revenge of
Nabokov upon Napoleon. It also makes a nice sequence. A Frenchman says: "scratch
a Russian and you find a Tartar." But a Russian gently hints: "scratch a Tartar
and you find a Frenchman." I guess I'm going to elaborate this note and publish
it in the next issue of The Nabokovian.
It is two things that I would like to know. Was the name Poskriobyshev
familiar to Nabokov (I think it is not impossible) and was not Poskriobyshev, by
any chance, a Colonel? Stalin was, as everybody knows, a
generalissimo.
Another interesting detail is that, in modern Russian (but not
in
Dostoevsky's time, I believe), "al'fons" is a slang term for
"gigolo"
(mainly, in the sense "professional souteneur"). That term is pretty
old
though and Nabokov certainly knew it. But "gigolo" also means in Russian
(as
it also does in English) "a young male lover of a rich elderly lady."
The
connection to Pedro the actor (who is Marina's gigolo)?
By the way,
despite Lucette's words (3.3), "Alph" (Alphonse the Second of
Portugal)
marries Lenore Colline after all. So, she becomes his Queen and he
becomes
her "alphonse" (because she must be older than her
husband).
best,
Alexey
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Thursday, April 21, 2005 11:32
PM
Subject: Fw: Brits and Brazilians?
----- Forwarded message from jansy@aetern.us -----
Date: Thu, 21 Apr 2005 08:19:49 -0300
From: Jansy Berndt
de Souza Mello <jansy@aetern.us>
Reply-To: Jansy
Berndt de Souza Mello <jansy@aetern.us>
Subject: Fw:
Brits and Brazilians?
To: Vladimir Nabokov
Forum
Dear B.Boyd and List,
Brits and Brazilians?
1.
Peter and Margaret/ Pedro and Inês/ Camões
2. Wellington/ A. M.Cabral da
Gama &C./ Camões
and, of course, among them, Van/Mascodagama/Vasco da
Gama in the epic of Camões.
detailing:
The unhappy Portuguese
lovers Pedro and Inês ( whose sufferings were
extensively
described by Vasco da Gama - our Mascodagama link here - in the
epic of
Camões ) have a connection with another Pedro who is not the actor
who
went to Rio in Ada.
It is the famous old British pair of
lovers( I don´t mean Charles and Camilla!),
Princess Margaret and the
photographer Peter Townsend.
They are alluded to in connection to the
poem Lucette was deceitfuly given to
learn by heart. The entire scenery
that sorrrounded Peter and Margaret was
created by Nabokov as a parody of
the Romantic and the"Arcady" theme with
milkmaids and cows and laureate
Browns or century-old lithographs by a certain
Peter de Rast "an old swing
that hung from the long and lofty limb of Baldy, a
partly leafless but
still healthy old oak (which appeared - oh, I remember,
Van! - in a
century-old lithograph of Ardis, by Peter de Rast, as a young
colossus
protecting four cows and a lad in rags, one shoulder bare)";
The poem
Peter and Margaret had been "composed in tears forty years ago by the
Poet
Laureate Robert Brown, the old gentleman whom my father once pointed out
to
me up in the air on a cliff under a cypress, looking down on the
foaming
turquoise surf near Nice, an unforgettable sight for all concerned.
It is
called "Peter and Margaret."
This poem "Van (...)was to recall it
with a fatidic shiver seventeen years later
when Lucette, in her last note
to him, mailed from Paris to his Kingston(...)'
wrote: 'I kept for years -
it must be in my Ardis nursery - the anthology you
once gave me ; and the
little poem (...) Find it in Brown and praise me again
for my
eight-year-old intelligence as you and happy Ada did that distant day,
that
day somewhere tinkling on its shelf like an empty little bottle. Now
read
on:
'Here, said the guide, was the field,/There, he said, was the
wood./This is
where Peter kneeled,/That's where the Princess stood/ No, the
visitor said,/You
are the ghost, old guide.Oats and oaks may be dead,/But
she is by my side.'
There is also another Peter, Count Peter de Prey
who with King Victor ( in
disguise as Mr. Ritcov ) and Demon's father (...)
and a certain "Mire de Mire"
( the "Mironton Mirontaine" observation and
the poem given to Lucette? ) who
were the members of the first Venus Club
Council ( a dream???);
The Duke of Wellington ( also mentioned in
Ada as the name of a mountain the
Wellington Mountain and the second
cane of vengeful Van ) commanded the
expedicionary forces
against the Napoleonic invasions ( at the time when Dom
João VI moved the
Portuguese court to Brazil )
His field-valet (?) António Maria Osório
Cabral da Gama e Castro owned the
bucolic park and fields which
Wellington visited in Portugal where the unhappy
lovers and cousins Inês
and Pedro found refuge. Wellington planted two trees
known as "
Wellington´s sequoias" during his stay. The Duke of Wellington
also
had a memorial inscribed with a sonnet by Camões ( canto III, verse
135) telling
the story of the romantic pair Pedro and Inês.
(The son of
Pedro and Inês was made into the First Duke of Valência, named
D.João
and who was born in the fourteenth century).
When D. João VI in 1815 came
to Brazil he established "The United Kingdom of
Portugal, Brasil and
Algarves which comprised the: Reino de Portugal (Europe),
Reino
do Brasil ( America), Ilhas no Atlantico, Angola, Guiné,
Moçambique,
(Africa), Goa and Macau, (Asia), and Timor ( Oceania). Acording
to my google
source it had a "planetary extension" and served as a model
for the "United
Kingdom of Britain", organized half a century later, in
1867.
----- End forwarded message -----
Dear B.Boyd and List,
Brits and Brazilians?
1. Peter and Margaret/ Pedro and
Inês/ Camões
2. Wellington/ A. M.Cabral da Gama &C./
Camões
and, of course, among them, Van/Mascodagama/Vasco da
Gama in the epic of Camões.
detailing:
The unhappy Portuguese lovers
Pedro and Inês ( whose sufferings were extensively described by
Vasco da Gama - our Mascodagama link here - in the epic of Camões ) have
a connection with another Pedro who is not the actor who went
to Rio in Ada.
It is the
famous old British pair of lovers( I don´t mean Charles and
Camilla!), Princess Margaret and the photographer Peter
Townsend.
They are alluded to in connection to the
poem Lucette was deceitfuly given to learn by heart. The entire scenery
that sorrrounded Peter and Margaret was created by Nabokov as a parody of
the Romantic and the"Arcady" theme with milkmaids and cows and laureate Browns
or century-old lithographs by a certain Peter de Rast "an
old swing that hung from the long and lofty limb of Baldy, a partly leafless
but still healthy old oak (which appeared — oh, I remember, Van! — in a
century-old lithograph of Ardis, by Peter de Rast, as a young colossus
protecting four cows and a lad in rags, one shoulder
bare)";
The poem Peter and Margaret had been "composed
in tears forty years ago by the Poet Laureate Robert Brown, the old gentleman
whom my father once pointed out to me up in the air on a cliff under a
cypress, looking down on the foaming turquoise surf near Nice, an
unforgettable sight for all concerned. It is called "Peter and Margaret."
This poem "Van
(...)was to recall it
with a fatidic shiver seventeen years later when Lucette, in her last note to
him, mailed from Paris to his Kingston(...)’ wrote: ‘I kept for years
— it must be in my Ardis nursery — the anthology you once gave me ; and the
little poem (...) Find it in Brown and praise me again for my eight-year-old
intelligence as you and happy Ada
did that distant day, that day somewhere tinkling on its shelf like an empty
little bottle. Now read on:
‘Here, said the
guide, was the field,/There, he said,
was the wood./This is where
Peter kneeled,/That’s where the
Princess stood/ No, the visitor
said,/You
are the ghost, old
guide.Oats and oaks may
be dead,/But she is by my side.’
There is also another Peter, Count Peter de Prey who
with King Victor
( in disguise as Mr. Ritcov ) and Demon’s father (...) and
a certain "Mire de Mire" ( the "Mironton Mirontaine" observation
and the poem given to Lucette? ) who were the members of the
first Venus Club Council ( a
dream???);
The Duke of Wellington ( also mentioned in
Ada as the name of a mountain the
Wellington Mountain and the second cane of vengeful Van
) commanded the expedicionary forces against the Napoleonic
invasions ( at the time when Dom João VI moved the Portuguese court to Brazil
)
His
field-valet (?) António Maria Osório Cabral da Gama e Castro
owned the bucolic park and fields which Wellington visited in Portugal
where the
unhappy lovers and cousins Inês and Pedro found refuge.
Wellington planted two trees known as " Wellington´s sequoias"
during his stay. The Duke of Wellington also had a memorial inscribed
with a sonnet by Camões ( canto III, verse 135) telling the story of the
romantic pair Pedro and Inês.
(The son of Pedro and Inês was made
into the First Duke of Valência, named D.João and who was born in
the fourteenth century).
When D. João VI in 1815 came to
Brazil he established "The United Kingdom of Portugal, Brasil and Algarves
which comprised the: Reino de Portugal
(Europe), Reino do Brasil ( America), Ilhas no Atlantico, Angola, Guiné,
Moçambique, (Africa), Goa and Macau, (Asia), and Timor (
Oceania). Acording to my google source it had
a "planetary extension" and served as a model for the
"United Kingdom of Britain", organized half a century later, in
1867.