Jansy,
Thanks for telling me about the cognac Bras d'Or.
Mixed with Napoleon (the only French cognac I've ever heard of and
have even tasted), and a number of other liquors (a strange cocktail
indeed) mentioned in my in-vino-veritas piece, it will make
my charadoid article (or, if you prefer, "spheroid* book", because,
practically finished now, it has almost four hundred pages) even
stronger.
Libra: if mirrored (say, in the clear waters
of the Mediterranian), the Latin letter L turns into the Cyrrilic
letter Г (corresponding to the Latin G). Blended with "altar" (in
Mtsyri, Lermontov compares Caucasian mountains to smoking altars; see
Speak, Memory, p. 129 of the Penguin edition), Libra, with the inverted
initial, becomes Gibraltar (known as "Altar" on Antiterra; cf. "A small map of
the European part of the British Commonwealth - say, from Scoto-Scandinavia
to the Riviera, Altar and Palermontovia": 1.3). Gibraltar is paired with
Tsarskoe Selo (the site of Pushkin's Lyceum) in Pushkin's poem "The
stirless sentinel drowsed on the treshold of the tsar's palace..." (1824), in
which Napoleon's shade visits tsar Alexander I:
"From the billows of the Tiber to the Vistula and
the Neva,
From the lindens of Tsarskoe Selo to the
towers of Gibraltar"
(see also my article "Russian Poets and Potentates
as Scots and Scandinavians in ADA" in The Nabokovian # 56, 57)
Note that
Tibr (Russian name of Tiber) = Brit, Visla (Russian name
of Vistula) = sliva (Russian for "plum") = vials, not to
mention again the anagrams of "Neva". There are more anagrams in ADA and in the
books to which there are allusions in ADA than it can seem. No one,
except Nabokov, seems to have noticed that Yashvin (Vronsky's friend in
"Anna Karenina") = vishnya (Russian for "cherry").
*shar, present in charadoid (a
charade-like puzzle, the word coined by Ilf and Petrov, after the model of
German Arithmomoid), is Russian for "sphere" (but
in Polar regions can also mean "strait", cf. Matochkin shar
separating the two islands of Novaya Zemlya; cf. Bering Strait, "the ha-ha
of a doubled ocean", as Van calls it, 1.3, separating Russia from
America that was absent, because of a publisher's
overlook, on a globe that drove mad the poor geographer in Ilf and
Petrov's "The Golden Calf"; cf. Strait of Gibraltar ). In German, Schar
means "multitude".
As to your suggestion that I accept British pounds,
I can accept everything, even Mongolian tugriks. In parenthesis, I would like to
say that I need money not to taste expensive champagne (Veuve Clicquot,
Moёt, etc.), cognac (which I do not drink anyway) and exotic cocktails but
to continue my work on Nabokov. I can get really drunk only on books and I
find VN by far the most intoxicating writer. It will be a pity if I have to
abandon the Nabokov studies because of financial reasons.
Alexey Sklyarenko