We enter an extremely tricky semantical area. Idioms do (by definition!) develop specialized meanings, but never quite relinquish their original, ‘literal’ connotations. When the context is playful-prose or mock-serious-poetry (a common case with Pushkin and Nabokov), we must expect idiomatic metaphors to coexist intentionally with literals.
Right away (I hope), we spot Pushkin’s rather lewd joke:
He is not interested in ‘turning her head’ (in either sense*) -- his aim is lower! Physically, morally lower: the more appealing erroneous** zones!
Which he services (a stronger, sexier verb than serves) comme-il-faut.
Variants abound in naughty sea-side postcards:
Woman: Are you staring at my legs?
Man: Madame, I’m above that ...
** A Joycean pun.
* ‘Turn’ has one of the longest entries in most English dictionaries. As a verb it carries more ambiguous baggage than the French ‘tourner.’ Compare ‘You turned your head’ with ‘You turned my head.’ The latter could (rarely) be direct physical manipulation, or figurative, as noted by Marie, where the use of ‘faire tourner’ disambiguates (at least partly!): ‘You caused my head to turn.’ English relies more on context, and one side-effect is the very humour of the double-entendre.
Heads can be turned both physically and metaphorically. In the latter case, ‘head’ subsumes the mind and feelings below the skull. Spinning, in the sense of rapid turning, can equally apply to real skin- and bone-heads, and to their dizzy emotional trappings.
Stan Kelly-Bootle
On 09/07/2011 23:06, "marie bouchet" <mmariebouchet@HOTMAIL.COM> wrote:
Dear all,
In French "faire tourner la tête", which is to me the meaning of Mlle Larivière's sentence, does not mean "to turn one's head", but to "make someone's head spin" (like in Edith Piaf's famous song "tu me fais tourner la tête", you make my head spin, i.e. you make me lose my mind). This particular expression is especialy used in amorous contexts, to describe love torments.
All my best to you all,
Marie C. Bouchet, PhD
Chair of the English Department
University of Toulouse II, France
Date: Fri, 8 Jul 2011 02:02:47 +0300
From: skylark1970@MAIL.RU
Subject: [NABOKV-L] Lucette - tete
To: NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU
She [Lucette] complained to her governess who, completely misconstuing the whole matter (which could also be said of her new composition), summoned Van and from her screened bed, through a reek of embrocation and sweat, told him to refrain from turning Lucette's head by making of her a fairy-tale damsel in distress. (1.23)
Mlle Larivière probably uses the phrase tourner la tête.* As I pointed out before, this phrase was used by Pushkin in a four-line French poem written in 1821:
J'ai possédé maîtresse honêtte,
Je la servais comme il <lui> <?> faut,
Mais je n'ai point tourné de tête, -
Je n'ai jamais visé si haut.
Lucette + fire = Lucifer + tête
golova + in vino veritas + barn = Ivan Golovin + satira + brevno
golova - Russ., head
Ivan Golovin - the hero of Tolstoy's story "The Death of Ivan Ilyich;" the admiral Ivan Mikhailovich Golovin (d. 1738), Pushkin's great-great-grandfather (whose daughter, the poet's great-grandmother, was murdered, when she was pregnant, by her husband in a paroxism of madness); Van Vin (Russian spelling of the name Van Veen) looks like a "decapitated" version of Ivan Golovin
satira - Russ., satire
brevno - Russ., log (brevno was used by young Pushkin in another frivolous epigram)
Incidentally, the name Karenin was derived by Tolstoy from karenon, Greek for "head" (see Sergey L'vovich Tolstoy's memoirs).
*cf. vskruzhit' golovu (the Russian equivalent of "to turn [one's] head")
Alexey Sklyarenko