D'Onsky's son, a person with only one
arm...
It belatedly occurs to me (better late than never!) that
Cervantes was one-armed. The author of Don Quixot is mentioned in Ada
(3.6):
Howard Hool argued after the release
that he had been made to play an impossible cross between two Dons; that
initially Yuzlik (the director) had meant to base his “fantasy” on Cervantes’s
crude romance; that some scraps of the basic script stuck like dirty
wool to the final theme; and that if you followed closely the sound track
you could hear a fellow reveler in the tavern scene address Hool twice as
“Quicks.” Hool managed to buy up and destroy a number of copies
while others have been
locked up by the lawyer of the writer Osberg, who claims the
gitanilla sequence was stolen from one of his own
concoctions. (from Demon's letter to Van)
Osberg = Borges (J. L. Borges is the author of
Pierre Menard, the Author of "Don
Quixot")
"One of Osberg's concoctions" mentioned by Demon must be his
novel The Gitanilla. The gitanilla's name is Lolita (cf. "the child was permitted to wear her lolita (thus dubbed after the
little Andalusian gipsy of that name in Osberg's novel...):" 1.13). As
has been pointed out before, a character in VN's
Lolita is big Frank who has a crippled hand. "A ruddy mosaic of scars,"
Frank "had been blown through a wall oversees." An indirect evidence that
d'Onsky fils lost his arm in the Crimean War? It is even possible that
he was taken prisoner somewhere near Bakhchisaray* and spent a number of
years in captivity, as Cervantes did.
Btw., the nickname of Prince Dmitri Donskoy (1350-89) means
"of the Don" and alludes to his great victory against the
Tatars in the Battle of Kulikovo (1380) which took place where the
Nepryadva flows into the Don.
*The Fountain of Bakhchisaray is a poem by Pushkin;
and Demon and d'Onsky wept comme des fontaines at Marina's funeral
(3.8).
Alexey Sklyarenko