Nina Kressova: "I think that Brian Boyd is very right
when he links “Osberg” to
“iceberg”. Some acquaintances and critics of the
borgesian work have defined it
as “cold”. Also, I could point out the
possible Jewish origin of the surname “Osberg”..."
I belatedly realize that the names Osberg and
Floeberg, of the Antiterran writers, possibly refer to Mitrich's words
in Ilf and Petrov's "The Golden Calf" (1931): "Aisbergs! We can
understand this. For ten years now they've been making one's life
intolerable. Aisbergs, Weisbergs, Aisenbergs, all
those Rabinovichs" (chapter XIII: "Vasisualiy Lokhankin and his Part
in the Russian Revolution"). The former chamberlain of the Imperial
Court (and apparently a member of the ultra-nationalist "Union of the
Russian People"), Aleksandr Dmitrievich Sukhoveiko (Mitrich, as he is called by
his neighbors, is a short colloquial form of "Dmitrievich," his
patronymic), is one of the shrewish inhabitants of the so-called
Voron'ya Slobodka ("Raven's Nest"). His anti-Semitic
rhetoric is caused by the newspaper article "Among the Ice-Hummocks
and Icebergs" (Sredi torosov i aisbergov), about the brave aviator
Sevryugov, another inhabitant of the Raven's Nest, whom his neighbors believe
dead having perished in the Arctic (where he had been looking for the lost
Polar expedition), but who turns out to be alive, having got stuck,
because of a chassis problem, on the eighty fourth parallel. (Btw., I notice
that norte, Spanish for "North", is an anagram of nôtre,
French for "our", and of tenor. Cf. Hugo's Notre Dame de
Paris and Akhmatova's famous words about Blok, the author of "The Twelve":
"A tragic tenor of the epoch". I mention Blok's poem, because its title echoes
that of Ilf and Petrov's first novel, "The Twelve Chairs". Note that
chair is French for "flesh".)
About the connection between the fire that, in
"The Golden Calf", destroys the Raven's Nest and the Burning Barn in
ADA see my Russian essay “Will
the Grandma Get the Xmas Card, or Why does Ada’s Baronial Barn
Burn?” in Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/sklyarenko6.doc.
Alexey
Sklyarenko