p.s. Now, if you had mentioned the theme of the
you would really have grabbed my interest. Iris Murdoch wrote a novel so entitled;
(at least in the film) appears as a severed head. One is featured prominently in
, by the Canadian writer Robertson Davies, and there was an Elizabethan that is somehow involved by the name of Bacon. Well, now perhaps I'm getting to be a bit like you and running on. Forgive me, if so. Most Americans will think of Ichabod Crane, in the comic
by Washington Irving, a much underrated American author.
oo, is a favorite Nabokovian theme of mine.
И царевич узнаёт в звериной морде лицо
человечье - широкоскулое, пучеглазое, с усами торчком, как у "Кота-котабрыса".
(Merezhkovski, "Peter and Alexey", Book Eight "The
Werewolf", chapter III)
On Antiterra Pushkin's poem Mednyi vsadnik (The
Bronze Horseman, 1833) is known as Headless Horseman: He [Van] could
solve an Euler-type problem or learn by heart Pushkin's 'Headless Horseman' poem
in less than twenty minutes. (1.28)
Falconet's equestrian statue of Peter I (mednyi
vsadnik) is alluded to in Ilf and Petrov's "The Golden Calf" (chapter
34 "Friendship with Youth"):
Дружба, подогреваемая шутками подобного рода,
развивалась очень быстро, и вскоре вся шайка-лейка под управлением Остапа уже
распевала частушку:
У Петра Великого
близких нету никого.
Только
лошадь и змея,
Вот и вся его семья.
Peter the Great
has no relatives at all.
Only a horse and a snake
are his whole family.
The statue's pedestal is the enormous Grom-kamen'
(Thunder stone). Grom (thunder) reminds one of Mr Gromwell,
Van's lawyer. While Gromwell rhymes with Cromwell, mednyi (copper;
brazen) rhymes with bednyi (poor). Before shooting him dead, an old
Tartar compassionately calls Percy de Prey bednyi (poor
fellow):
A smiling old Tartar, incongruously but
somehow assuagingly wearing American blue-jeans with his beshmet, was
squatting by his side. 'Bednïy, bednïy' (you poor,
poor fellow), muttered the good soul, shaking his shaven head and clucking:
'Bol'no (it hurts)?' Percy answered in his equally primitive Russian
that he did not feel too badly wounded: 'Karasho, karasho ne bol'no
(good, good),' said the kindly old man and, picking up the automatic pistol
which Percy had dropped, he examined it with naive pleasure and then shot him in
the temple. (One wonders, one always wonders, what had been the executed
individual's brief, rapid series of impressions, as preserved somewhere,
somehow, in some vast library of microfilmed last thoughts, between two moments:
between, in the present case, our friend's becoming aware of those nice,
quasi-Red Indian little wrinkles beaming at him out of a serene sky not much
different from Ladore's, and then feeling the mouth of steel violently push
through tender skin and exploding bone. (1.42)
"Those nice, quasi-Red Indian little wrinkles" bring to mind
Captain Mayne Reid, the author "The Headless Horseman" (1866).
Antilia Glems + Gerald + Ada + Sevan = Gitanilla
+ Esmeralda + navsegda
Antilia Glems - a
character in Van's novel Letters from
Terra
Gerald - Moris
Gerald, the hero of Mayne Reid's The Headless
Horseman
Sevan - a lake in
Armenia
Gitanilla - La
Gitanilla, a novel (1613) by Cervantes; on Antiterra, a novel by
Osberg
Esmeralda - a
character in Victor Hugo's Notre Dame de Paris (1831); Van and Ada
call Lucette "our Esmeralda and mermaid" (2.8); the butterfly in VN's poem
"Lines Written in Oregon" (1953)
navsegda - Russ.,
for ever, for good; VN's "Lines Written in Oregon" end: Esmeralda, immer,
immer
Alexey Sklyarenko
All private editorial communications are
read by both co-editors.