Alexey Sklyarenko on ADA: "
Speaking of Demon Veen (Dark Walter) and his cousin
Daniel (Durak Walter or Red Veen), I mentioned in my previous posts
[...] Barma = ambar = rabam
JM: How about returning to Vladimir
Nabokov's own text, writings and novels to run alongside present-day enthussings
on happiness and ecstasies or on failing technology?
Here's a selection of references to electricity,
magnetism, lammer, amber (ambar) and eclipse.
The BB episode (barn) is related to
merciless lettrocalamity, I think...
Ada, or Ardor:
a. Van regretted that because
Lettrocalamity (Vanvitelli’s old joke!) was banned allover the
world, its very name having become a ‘dirty word’ among upper-upper-class
families (in the British and Brazilian sense) ... [ notes:p.118. Lettrocalamity: a play on Ital. elettrocalamita,
electromagnet.]
b. she felt tickled at the thought that she, poor Aqua,
had accidentally hit upon such a simple method of recording and transmitting
speech, while technologists (the so-called Eggheads) all over the world were
trying to make publicly utile and commercially rewarding...hydrodynamic
telephones ...with the banning of an unmentionable ‘lammer.’
Soon, however, the rhythmically perfect, but verbally rather blurred volubility
of faucets began to acquire too much pertinent sense. note [p.25.
lammer: amber (Fr: l’ambre),
allusion to electricity].
...............................................................................
b2. ‘What was that?’ exclaimed Marina, whom certicle
storms terrified even more than they did the Antiamberians of
Ladore County.
‘Sheet lightning,’ suggested Van.‘If you ask me,’ said Demon,
turning on his chair to consider the billowing drapery, ‘I’d guess it was a
photographer’s flash....’... Nobody was taking pictures except Perun, the
unmentionable god of thunder
b3.No pill could cope with that torment. There he
sprawled, curled up, uncurled, turned off and turned on the bedside light (a
gurgling new surrogate — real lammer having been forbidden
again by 1930), and physical despair pervaded his unresolvable
being.
b4. He put on his tinted glasses and
watched her stand on the diving board, her ribs framing the hollow of her intake
as she prepared to ardis into the amber. He wondered, in a
mental footnote that might come handy some day, if sunglasses or any other
varieties of vision, which certainly twist our concept of ‘space,’ do not also
influence our style of speech.
..............................................................................
Pale Fire:
[it's interesting to compare Lucette's "ardis into the amber" and Van's
musings (in b4) with John Shade's verses in the earlier novel ( in a1
below) or Kinbote's addition related to electricity and gravity]
a1. (verses
550-53) "Iph borrowed some peripheral debris/ From mystic
visions; and it offered tips/(The amber spectacles for life’s
eclipse)
—"
b1.
Kinbote (note to line 238 on an empty emerald case) The
cigale’s companion piece, the ant, is about to be embalmed in
amber.