A chance reference to "Lenore" in the chapter related to "sublime
Dublinois" [ Lolita: "I
choose? C'est entendu?" she asked
wobbling a little beside me. Used French only when she was a very good little
girl.[...]"Okay. Entendu.
Now hop-hop-hop, Lenore, or you'll get
soaked."] and the proximity bt. Appel's notes on
Joyce and Lenore, led me to...Arcady itself,ie,Zembla & New
Wye. This happened because A.Appel's clarification led me
to VN's own notes ( EO, vol III pages 152-54)
where I found out that the Lenore theme, that originally comes from
a German poem by Bürger, passes thru Goethe's Erlkönig riding in the
wind, Pushkin's "Zhenih"and only then it reaches E.A.Poe
(but it also initiates with Poe because of the connection VN had
earlier established on bt. forever-lost
Lenore/Lolita and the raven-theme).
Here are some excerpts
from VN's EO:
"Lenore is the
celebrated ballad written at Gelliehausen, near Göttingen, in the summer of
1773, by Gottfried August Bürger [...] This pattern is exactly imitated by
Zhukovski [...] and is exactly the stanza of Pushkin's
The Bridegroom (Zhenih,1825), a poem far
surpassing in artistic genius anything that Bürger wrote. His
Lenore owes a great deal to old English ballads; his
achievement is to have consolidated and concentrated in a technically perfect
piece the moon-tomb-ghost theme that was, in a sense, the logical result
of Death's presence in Arcadia, and the cornerstone of Goethe's
Romanticism {...} Incidentally, the idea of magically rapid transit
occurs, with a curious echoing ring about it, in The Song of Igor's
Campaign, ... concerning a necromancing prince
(Vsleslav), the latter is said to have been able to travel so fast...a
kind of Slavic Michael Scot[...] After Lenore, grieving over her William's
absence...her lover, a dead man by now, comes to fetch her[...] Off they go in
the famous lines[...]Und hurre hurre hop hop
hop!....
Reading
Nabokov's notes on EO we see the
non-chronological mixture relating the Lenore-theme
to Raven/Gradus, the latter set in close association to death,
dementia and Arcady (who is Michael Scot?)
Btw: New Wye must be
Arcady, the Second, for Kinbote's Zembla and his crossing-over
seems be related to Arcady, the First ...
In
PF Lenore herself is already lost ( I don't suppose she could
have been represented by Hazel Shade, inspite of Goethe's "cornerstone
of Romanticism" in PF's Erlkönig reference and prowling
Kinbote...).
Jansy
................................................................................................................................................................................................
Quotes
from Pale Fire:
1. Jakob Gradus called himself variously Jack Degree
or Jacques de Grey, or James de Gray, and also appears in police records as
Ravus, Ravenstone, and d’Argus. p.77,line
17
2. "Six o´clock was
being chimed[...] I reached Arcady...
p.158
3.. ... Shade penned this
lambent line (the last one on his twenty-third card) Gradus,
alias Degré, had flown from Copenhagen to Paris, thus completing the second lap
of his sinister journey! Even in Arcady am I, says Death in the tombal
scripture. p.174, line
286
4. "I know who you
are," cried Bretwit [...] The vulgar nuisance of it! Nothing is sacred to you,
neither cancer, nor exile, nor the pride of a king" (alas, this is true not only
of Gradus — he has colleagues in Arcady too). p.180, line 286
5. Zemblan theologians who generally hold the view that even the most
demented mind still contains within its diseased mass a sane basic particle that
survives death [...] Personally, I have not known any lunatics; but have heard
of several amusing cases in New Wye ("Even in Arcady am I," says
Dementia, chained to her gray column). p237,
line 629
6. I spent a couple of pleasant months visiting
the libraries of New York and Washington, flew to Florida for Christmas, and
when ready to start for my new Arcady p.249,line 691
7.Where was I? Yes, trudging along
again as in the old days with John, in the woods of Arcady,
under a salmon sky. "Well," I said gaily, "what were you writing about last night,
John?" p.259 line
802
8.... the
particular dislikes, and hence the motives, of our "automatic
man," as I phrased it at a time when he did not have as much body, did
not offend the senses as violently as now; was, in a word, further removed from
our sunny, green, grass-fragrant Arcady. [...] so that in
final judgment of the Gradus versus the Crown case [...] we may
concede, doctor, that our half-man was also half
mad. p.279 line
949
9.
The madman sat
on the porch step, dazedly nursing with bloody hands a bleeding head
[...]at the bottom of a closet, from which I exited as if it had been the end of
the secret passage that had taken me all the way out of my enchanted castle and
right from Zembla to this
Arcady. p.295,line
1000
....................................................
additional
links through
Brian Boyd on Lenore, Raven, Demon
in
ADA (Ada on-line)
13.22-23:
"Eugene and Lara" or "Lenore Raven": "Eugene and Lara"
seems to be the adaptation of
Eugene Onegin that we have watched with
Demon[...]"Lenore Raven" blends two famous poems by Edgar Allan Poe, "Lenore"
(1831) and "The Raven" (1845)[...] The title "Eugene and Lara," by highlighting
the coupling of hero and heroine, indicates the amatory link Demon is about to
discover between d'Onsky/d'O. and the Marina who played d'O.'s lover in her
play. "Lenore Raven," on the other hand, seems to link Demon (known as "Raven
Veen") with Marina playing the role of Lenore, the woman just lost in both of
Poe's poems.
....................................................
Palimpsestuous VN brings up Arcady and Shade, Hades and
Paradise, in the last chapter of Ada...(curious anagram-mirror
words...)
[...] Ardis Hall — the Ardors and Arbors of
Ardis — this is the leitmotiv rippling through Ada,[...]Nothing in
world literature, save maybe Count Tolstoy’s reminiscences, can vie in pure
joyousness and Arcadian innocence with the ‘Ardis’ part of the
book."
(a little before these lines we read that Van
and Ada, soon to die into the book - "had spent most of the morning reworking their translation of a
passage (lines 569-572) in John Shade’s famous poem:...Sovetï
mï dayom / Kak bït’
vdovtsu: on poteryal dvuh zhyon;/On ih
vstrechaet — lyubyashchih, lyubimïh,Revnuyushchih ego drug k druzhke...)
Apparently, they still shared the same kind of worry that
plagued John Shade, concerning in what manner and who they'll
be meeting in the
hereafter!