Victor Fet Re 'aerial adjutant,' Colonel Peter Gusev::."in Alexey Nikolaevich Tolstoy's cult sci-fi novel, "Aelita" (1923), made into a famous film by Protazanov (1924), probably the first full feature film about spaceflight...Los' and Gusev fly to Mars, where Los' falls in love with the Martian princess Aelita, and Gusev leads a popular uprising of Martian proletariat. Tolstoy was influenced by H. G. Wells and E. Burroughs novels, but his talented (and somewhat tongue-in-cheek) book became a model for generations of the best Soviet sci-fi writers. See detailed plot in English at http://www.sovlit.com/aelita."

JM: Wikipedia informs me that: "Few families have produced a higher literary talent than Leo Tolstoy, but few have sunk to one as degraded as Alexei Nikolaevich."# and I hoped this item would inform about "Pale Fire's" Colonel Gusev, later the Duke of Rahl, one of Sylvia O'Donnell's husbands and Oleg's father ("a beloved friend of K"). Sylvia O'Donnel was also the mother of Odon (a patriot, fond of cinema and acting) - but not of don's half-brother Nodo ("a cardsharp and despicable traitor").

It didn't... for all the enjoyment I got from Victor Fet's links to "Aelita's" detailed plot about a clash between nobility and proletariat extended to Mars, magic potions and fuels, undying star-crossed lovers, and the indication of Tolstoy's Gusev in connection to King Alfin's "aerial adjutant" and to Sylvia and Oleg.

Following the movie-thread, today I read that Graham Greene confessed that "When I describe a scene...I capture it with the moving eye of the cine-camera rather than with the photographer's eye - which leaves it frozen. In this precise domain I think the cinema has influenced me," a motivation he might share with Nabokov*. Greene was not only a renowned novelist, but he also wrote excellent film reviews and he recommended Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita as his "Book of the Year", a banned work at that time, in the Sunday Times, making all the difference for this novel's initial success. He lived his later years in Corseaux (above Vevey) and he was James Mason's (Kubrick's choice for Humbert Humbert) neighbor. The two used to visit Charles Chaplin, settled in Corsier, another little village above Vevey. Also in Vevey (Montreux) we'll find Vladimir Nabokov (1960-77)**Nabokov died in July 2, 1977 and was cremated in Vevey and his ashes are buried in the cemetery of Clarens between Vevey and Montreux. Nabokov's Grave in Vevey, Switzerland | Flickr - Photo Sharing! www.flickr.com/photos/maxgrinev/5297888425/

* - While searching for examples about what I considered a "shared motivation" (but I found no explicit sentence in his novel "Ada"), I came to "Filming Nabokov: On the Visual Poetics of the Text" by Yuri Leving, who writes: "...what, exactly, makes Nabokov’s texts so attractive to the writers of screen adaptations, and how relevant are those adaptations to an understanding of the artist’s original intent? Our assumption is that not only the power of the author’s imagination but also certain narrative mechanisms render the Nabokovian discourse suitable for translation into the cinema idiom. In Nabokov’s case, moreover, the text itself may be viewed as having been structured according to certain “cinematic” laws. The first part of this article is devoted to a reconstruction of Nabokov’s unique method of cinematic vision and presents an analysis of the literary text as a model that is implicitly invested with cinematic techniques. The second part offers a brief overview of screen adaptations of Nabokov’s works in the modern American and European cinema and defines the level of correspondence between them and the author’s original.

** From a wiki-note I learned a few curiosities to link Chaplin and Nabokov. "In her book, 'Tramp: The Life of Charlie Chaplin,' Joyce Milton claims that a major inspiration for the novel [Lolita] was Charlie Chaplin's relationship with his second wife, Lita Grey, whose real name was Lillita and is often misstated as Lolita. Graham Vickers in 'Chasing Lolita: How Popular Culture Corrupted Nabokov's Little Girl All Over Again' argues that the two major real-world predecessors of Humbert are Lewis Carroll and Charlie Chaplin. Although Appel's comprehensive Annotated Lolita contains no references to Charlie Chaplin, others have picked up several oblique references to Chaplin's life in Nabokov's book. Writing in the journal The Explicator, Bill Delaney ["Nabokov's Lolita," The Explicator 56, no. 2 (Winter 1998): 99 - 100] notes that at the end Lolita and her husband move to the Alaskan town of Grey Star while Chaplin's The Gold Rush, set in Alaska, was originally set to star Lita Grey. Lolita's first sexual encounter was with a boy named Charlie Holmes, whom Humbert describes as "the silent...but indefatigable Charlie." Chaplin had an artist paint Lita Grey in imitation of Reynold's painting The Age of Innocence. When Humbert visits Lolita in a class at her school, he notes a print of the same painting in the classroom. Delaney's article notes many other parallels as well." Dagta about Vevey's famous came from wwwpinkthink.blogspot.com/.../famous-people-in-montreux-vevey.html -

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