A.
Sklyarenko: I notice that шулер, Russian for "card-sharper," is
explicitly, not only implicitly, present in Ada: "Mr Plunkett had been, in the
summer of his adventurous years, one of the greatest shuler's, politely called
'gaming conjurers,' both in England and America." (1.28) Because in his
"Annotations" Boyd doesn't mention uncle Ruka who, like Van, managed to cheat a
cheater in a poker game, I deduce that the Russian passage I quoted in my
previous post isn't in Conclusive Evidence either. It is only in "Другие берега"
and proves inaccessible not to Jansy alone...
Jerry
Friedman [ to JM "somebody had said that triplets and
heraldic dracunculi often occurred in trilingual
families..."]...Just as something that someone might find
to lead somewhere. I think it's much more likely that "spigotty" is
supposed to suggest the derogatory "spiggotty" as well as "spigot".By the way, I
didn't remember it; I searched the archives for "Artemisia"...All very
tempting....[ JM:Aren't we being misled by
Artemisia/Ada to be drawn away from the much simpler link:
"dracunculus/draoncle/festering wound"? ] I
think "heraldic" suggests that it's not that simple, although the festering
wound is probably part of it (and "draguncel", swelling of the lymph nodes in
the groin, could be specifically relevant)...Incidentally, I feel sure the
mythical Artemisia was named after Artemis, a virgin goddess...
JM: Biographical facts
are often closer to police records than to art, and most discomfitting
(like the Merzky- Mirskii exchanges)*.
I think that there's something "Nabokovian" in google-searching ( it may be
poised bt. modern and supermodern times), for the retrieval of past information (Ada/Artemisia/Artemis), will
serve to recycle projects or circumstances ( Dracunculi/Rankle)
and turn them into parody ( Uncle Ruka's and Van's card tricks).
When historical acuity is set in an
atemporal dimension in the closed space of a novel, that is,
moving from "Draonle-Ruka," from VN's personal world, onto
"Lucette/Artemis," as a wound turned into fiction, we
get pastiche. And Art - to be able to recover "the wayside murmur of a hidden
theme" in a dimension (recently described by Anne Hathaway in
one of Sandy Klein's postings about Wonderland Alice)
of "something universally specific."
........................
* a)Does anybody remember the source
of the following Nabokov's words: "merzky Mirsky"? (D. Mirsky was a
Russian emigre literary scholar and the author of great "The History of
Russian Literature" who left his position at Oxford, returned to the Soviet
Russia and perished in a prison or camp). Sincerely yours, Mikhail
Efimov
(b) It is really odd. Nabokov highly appreciated
D.Mirsky's History. I can't recall any negativity towards him. Plus
"merzky" is not in active vocabulary of
Nabokov. Vladimir Mylnikov
(c) I agree with Volodya. I can't
recall anything negative VN said or wrote about Mirsky. Brian Boyd
(d) From VN's letter to Gleb Struve
(December 2, 1932): "А МЕРЗКИЙ МИРСКИЙ, кажется, приезжает в Париж" (Zvezda,
2004, No.4, p.150) See also other negative remarks about Mirsky in previous
letters and my annotations to them. Actually "Prince Merzkii" was an old
derogative nickname of Mirsky. Alexander
Dolinin