Alexey Sklyarenko:"But Greg had to be asked to come after all: on the previous day he
had called on her bringing a 'talisman' from his very sick father, who wanted
Ada to treasure as much as his grandam had a little camel of yellow ivory carved
in Kiev, five centuries ago, in the days of Timur and Nabok. (1.39)
Max Voloshin (1877-1932) was born in Kiev. In Chetvert' veka ("A Quarter of the Century.
1900-1925"), a poem written in Koktebel in December, 1927, in the
days of the Crimean earthquake, Voloshin mentions Tamerlane ("Timur")
and Kakangelie (a play on kakos, "bad," and
Evangelie, "the Gospels, good tidings") of Marx [ ]
In Pustynya ("The Desert," 1901) Voloshin (who as a
young man was exiled to Turkestan) mentions verblyud (a camel)
and "the colored tiles of Tamerlane's palaces and temples:[
]Tamerlane and Kiev occur in Pasternak's Vtoroe
rozhdenie ("The Second Birth," 1931). In the book's opening
poem, Volny ("The Waves"), Pasternak mentions the proverbial
camel going through a needle's eye.
Jansy Mello: In AS's other posting he
clarifies that "certicle" is an anagram of "electric" (L-disaster). Here
he brings up ADA's lines with camels and Tamerlane.
In Pale Fire, long before the L-Disaster
appears, there's embalming amber, lightning, camels and Shade's poem
about "Electricity." These "themes" must have a private significance to
Nabokov that is hard to discern.
CK
line 347 and "The Haunted Barn"
"Two minutes pass. Life is
hopeless, afterlife heartless. Hazel is heard quietly weeping in the dark. John
Shade lights a lantern. Sybil lights a cigarette. Meeting
adjourned.
The
light never came back but it gleams again in a short poem "The Nature of
Electricity," which John Shade had sent to the New York magazine The Beau and the Butterfly, some time in
1958, but which appeared only after his death: The dead, the gentle dead — who knows?
—
In tungsten
filaments abide,
......
And when above the
livid plain
Forked lightning
plays, therein may dwell
The torments of a
Tamerlane,
The roar of tyrants
torn in hell.
Science tells us, by the way, that the
Earth would not merely fall apart, but vanish like a ghost, if Electricity were
suddenly removed from the world.
CK line
80: "Her fragile ankles, he said, which she placed very
close together in her dainty and wavy walk, were the "careful jewels" in Arnor’s
poem about a miragarl ("mirage
girl"), for which "a dream king in the sandy wastes of time would give three
hundred camels and three fountains." Who is
Arnor?