from Alexey Sklyarenko:
It is a well-known fact that the names of
several heroes of celebrated Russian novels have a fluvial origin. Onegin comes
from Onega, the river and the lake in NW Russia; Lensky, the name of
another character in Pushkin's "Eugene Onegin", comes from Lena, the river in E
Siberia; Pechorin, the protagonist's name in Lermontov's "A Hero of Our Time",
comes from Pechora, the river in NE European Russia. Nabokov was of course aware
of this fact, for in his memoir Speak, Memory he named one of his
tutors 'Lenski' and another, 'Volgin' (after Volga, the longest river in
European Russia). The name Luzhin, of the hero of Nabokov's The Luzhin
Defense, comes from Luga, the town in the S province of St. Petersburg and
the river that flows into the Gulf of Finland (Oredezh, the river that flows
through the Nabokov-Rukavishnikov Vyra-Rozhdestveno estate, is Luga's
tributary). Finally, the river that flows form the lake Ladoga through St.
Petersburg, Nabokov's home city, into the Gulf of Finland is the
Neva. Neva is Finnish for "bog", "marsh".
But, as has been pointed out by many
scholars before, the family name Veen, of practically all of ADA's
main characters, including the protagonist, Van Veen, means "peat bog" in
Dutch. Via the Neva, "the legendary river of Old Rus" (2.1), Van Veen is related
to Pushkin's Onegin and Lermontov's Pechorin.
A few additional notes:
The lake Ladoga was known to the inhabitants
of ancient Novgorod as Nevo. Nevo = Noev (Noev
kovcheg is Russian for "Noah's ark") = oven ("ram", also the Zodiacal
constellation) = veno ("bride-price") = Evno (male given name; cf. Evno Azef,
the notorious agent-provocateur who is mentioned in Nabokov's The Eye
and Speak, Memory).
Like Ladoga, both Luga and its rhyme-city,
Kaluga, are mentioned several times in ADA. Like the name Luzhin,
Lugovoy (the pen-name of Alexey Tikhonov, the writer who settled down in
Luga) derives from Luga. Lugovoy is the author of Pollice verso (a once
famous novel consisting of four novellas, 1900). Cf. "'You can catch a glint of
it [the Tarn, or the New Reservoir] from here too,' said Ada,
turning her head and, pollice verso, introducing the view to
Van..." (1.5).
Kaluga is a city SW of Moscow. The Oka river
(Volga's tributary also mentioned in ADA) flows through it. As has been
pointed out before, kaluga is a dialectal Russian word meaning
"marsh," bog".
Common Russian for "marsh", "bog" is boloto
(it differs only in one letter from zoloto, Russian for "gold").
We have a saying in Russian: Bylo by boloto, a cherti budut ("Where
there is a marsh, there are also devils"; the ancient Slavs believed that devils
lived in marshes). ADA is set on a planet named Demonia (like devils, demons are
evil spirits). Ad, so explicitly present in Ada, is Russian
for "hell" (the place where the devils are universally believed to
dwell).
Vinelander, the name of Ada's husband, points to
Vinland, a region in E North America, but sounds rather like "Finlander", an
inhabitant of Finland, esp. a native who customarily speaks
Swedish.
Happy birthday to Dmitri Nabokov who is
just seventy five!!