Stalking Nabokov (77 page)

Authors: Brian Boyd

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BOOK: Stalking Nabokov

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3
. Ángel Gurría-Quintana, “Orhan Pamuk: The Art of Fiction Interview No. 187,”
Paris Review
175 (Fall–Winter 2005): 139–40.

4
. Peter Atkins,
Galileo’s Finger: The Ten Great Ideas of Science
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 139.

5
. Helen Vendler,
The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets
(Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1997), 29, xvii, 12, 28, 31.

6
. See D. Barton Johnson, “A Field Guide to Nabokov’s
Pale Fire
: Waxwings and the Red Admiral,” in
The Real Life of Pierre Delalande: Studies in Russian and Comparative Literature to Honor Alexander Dolinin
, 2 vols., ed. David M. Bethea, Lazar Fleishman, and Alexander Ospovat (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 2:652–73.

7
. The words Hazel asks her parents to gloss, “grimpen,” “chthonic,” and “sempiternal,” identify what Shade dismisses as “some phony modern poem that was said / In English Lit to be a document ‘Engahzay and compelling’—what this meant / Nobody cared” (
PF
46). For more on Shade’s polemical engagement with Eliot, see
NPFMAD
. For Nabokov’s, see his chapter “First Poem” (written in July–August 1948), which in the first version of his autobiography contains this passage: “For I did not know [as a poet in his mid-teens] that beyond the archipelago there was the continent; that beyond mere verse, rime-bangled or blank, fettered or free, falsely clear or falsely recondite (concealing triteness beneath
ashen
obscurities—the
waste
product of some recognized religion) there existed a Russian prose which borrowed its romantic sweep from science and its terse precision from poetry” (
CE
158; italics added); see also the parodies of “Gerontion” and “Ash Wednesday” in
Lolita
, and more jabs in
Ada
. Interestingly, although Shade singles out three rare words as a means of referring obliquely but unequivocally to Eliot, his diction in “Pale Fire” is actually more diverse than Eliot’s in
Four Quartets
: 369 unique words per 1,000, versus 287 unique words per 1,000 for
Four Quartets
(2,821 types [different words] in the 7,632 tokens [occurrences of any word] of Shade’s poem, 1,937 types in the 6,732 tokens of Eliot’s), and despite the apparent homeliness of Shade’s poem and the foregrounded exoticism and stylistic innovation in Eliot’s.

8
. Kathleen Raine,
The Collected Poems of Kathleen Raine
(Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 2001).

9
. “Transformation . . . Transformation is a marvelous thing,” Nabokov used to tell his students: see
N’sBs
472.

10
. As first noted by Johnson, “A Field Guide to Nabokov’s
Pale Fire
,” 2:652–73.

11
.
http://www.birds.cornell.edu/AllAboutBirds/BirdGuide/Wood_Duck_dtl.html
.

12
. Nabokov,
Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revised
, ed. Brian Boyd (New York: Knopf, 1999), 248.

13
. Nabokov,
Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revised
, 250.

14
. Robert Michael Pyle (personal communication).

15
. Better known as the West Virginia White,
Pieris virginiensis
; see
NPFMAD
135–37.

16
. Note the species names: the Toothwort White is
Pieris virginiensis
(Hazel, like Lucette in
Ada
, drowns herself because she feels doomed to remain a
virgin
); the wood duck is
Aix sponsa
,
sponsa
meaning “bride.”

25.
ADA:
THE BOG AND THE GARDEN; OR, STRAW, FLUFF, AND PEAT: SOURCES AND PLACES IN
ADA

1
. Paul H. Fry, “Moving Van: The Neverland Veens of Nabokov’s
Ada
,”
Contemporary Literature
26, no. 2 (1985): 123–39; Wilma Siccama and Jack Vander Weide, “Een sleutel in Meppel: Nederlandse aantekeningen bij Vladimir Nabokovs
Ada
,”
Maatstaf
6 (1995): 17–27.

2
. Nicolas Freeling,
Double-Barrel
(London: Victor Gollancz, 1964). Citations will be from the Penguin edition (Harmondsworth: 1967), hereafter
DB
. Nabokov “rediscovered” the surname because “there was a Cornell professor van Veen whose name was painted on the letterbox of a home in Highland Road, Cayuga Heights, Ithaca, when Nabokov was living further along Highland Road in 1957” (BB, “Annotations to
Ada
1: Part 1 Chapter 1,”
The Nabokovian
30 [Spring 1993]: 26); also see
Ada
Online.

3
.
Time
, August 4, 2003, 12.

4
. The Nabokov summer estates of Vyra, Rozhdestveno, and Batovo were surrounded by bogs and by places whose names reflected that terrain, like Gryazno (“Muddy,” a village just to the north of Vyra: see Nabokov’s not-always-reliable map in
SM
), Chornaya Rechka (“Black Brook,” after its peaty water), Gryaznaya (“Muddy,” again: the sluggish short river running past the Rozhdestveno manor). See Dmitri Ryabov,
Toponimiya Verkhnego Pooredezh’ya: Slovar’-spravochnik
(St. Petersburg: Muzey-usad’ba “Rozhdestveno,” 1995).

5
. Which makes him sound exactly like the background characters in
Double-Barrel
.

6
. Further confirmation of how closely Nabokov consulted the area of Drenthe in a detailed map of the Netherlands can be seen in the name Valthermond, a town lying between three
veen
towns to the north (Eexterveen, Gieterveen, and Gasselternijeveen) and three to the south (Emmer-Erfscheidenveen, Klazienaveen, and Barger-Oosterveen). To anyone who knows
Ada
the town’s name suggests both Walter (Demon) Veen and Van’s nom de plume in
Letters from Terra
, Voltemand. And since Voltemand is a courtier in
Hamlet
, and the most
Hamlet
-saturated chapter of
Ada
takes place while Van is at Voltemand Hall, we should note in
Ada
book 1, chapter 5, the doubling of
Gamlet
(a village in the boggy area near Ardis but also the Russian transcription of “Hamlet”) and
Torfyanka
(or Tourbière), whose name means “peaty”: in other words, a veen-
Hamlet
conjunction from Van’s first arrival at Ardis. Also see note 21 and text.

7
. “All the hundred floramors opened simultaneously on September 20, 1875 (and by a delicious coincidence the old Russian word for September, ‘
ryuen
,’ which might have spelled ‘ruin,’ also echoed the name of the ecstatic Neverlander’s hometown)” (
Ada
350). Van notes that Ruinen is “somewhere near Zwolle, I’m told” (350): Zwolle is indeed the nearest city, and a Nabokovian hint that we really should consult a map. An additional significance may be that the family of the great art dealer Joseph Duveen, certainly in Nabokov’s mind while composing
Ada
, hailed from Meppel, between Ruinen and Zwolle; for the Duveen theme, see Siccama and Vander Weide, “Een sleutel in Meppel,” 23–25.

8
. From Lucius Annaeus Seneca’s
Omnius tempus edax depascitur, omnia carpit
; translated by Nabokov in his Vivian Darkbloom notes as “mountains subside and heights deteriorate.” See J. E. Rivers and William Walker, “Notes to Vivian Darkbloom’s Notes to
Ada
,” 289–90.

9
. Discussed in a Nabokv-L posting, August 25, 1998. Available at http://listserv.ucsb.edu/lsv-cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind9808&L=nabokv-l&P=R4027.

10
. Mario Bussagli,
Bosch
(Florence: Sadea, 1966), 3; trans. Claire Pace (London:Thames and Hudson, 1967). The source was first identified by Julia Bader,
Crystal Land: Artifice in Nabokov’s English Novels
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 147.

11
. Siccama and Vander Weide, “Een sleutel in Meppel,” 25, notes the theme of multiple intermarriage also present in the Duveen clan.

12
. In various places outside
Ada
, Nabokov discusses eavesdropping in other writers, including in Lermontov (translator’s foreword,
A Hero of Our Time
, trans. Vladimir Nabokov with Dmitri Nabokov [Garden City, N.Y.: Double-day, 1958], x–xii), in Proust (
PF
87 and
LL
230), and in Pasternak (Gilliat interview, 279).

13
. It is also a brief minor theme in Nabokov’s autobiography, where he reports that a tutor spied on his dalliances with “Tamara” (Valentina Shulgina) and a gardener reported to his mother on the snooping. Nabokov added more details on this matter in each version of the autobiography, the last between November 1965 and January 1966, as he made final revisions to
SM
, at the time
Ada
was beginning to take shape in his mind: see
VNAY
506.

14
. See also BB, “Annotations to
Ada
, 7: Part 1 Chapter 7,”
The Nabokovian
37 (Fall 1996): 63–64; also see
Ada
Online.

15
. See
NAPC
51–57, 291–97; BB, “Annotations to
Ada
, 10: Part 1 Chapter 10,”
The Nabokovian
39 (Fall 1997): 43–63;
Ada
Online.

16
. BB, “Annotations to
Ada
, 10,” 50;
Ada
Online.

17
.
NAPC
51–57, 150–51, 154–55, 215–16, 294–95; “Annotations to
Ada
, 10,” 57–60;
Ada
Online.

18
. For discussion, and a black-and-white reproduction, see
NAPC
129–31; that book’s cover reproduces in color the photograph of models and poster.

19
. See BB, “Annotations to
Ada
, 16: Part 1 Chapter 16,” 54–76, and Liana Marie Arangi Ashenden, “Mimicry, Mimesis, and Desire in Nabokov’s
Ada
,” M.A. thesis, University of Auckland, 2000.

20
. Nabokov twice associates Eric Veen’s Villa Venuses with Cypros: “Cyprian party” (
Ada
399), “Cyprian dreams” (419). Ashenden, “Mimicry, Mimesis, and Desire,” 89.

21
. See note 6.

22
. See BB, “Annotations to
Ada
, 5: Part 1 Chapter 5,”
The Nabokovian
35 (Fall 1995): 56–57; also see
Ada
Online.

23
. In a bitter moment, when Ada decides to stay with the dying Andrey Vinelander, Van will explode in scorn: “Helen of Troy, Ada of Ardis!” (
Ada
530).

24
. On the night of the Burning Barn, Ada turns around to Van, “naively ready to embrace him the way Juliet is recommended to receive her Romeo” (
Ada
121).

25.
The Paris–“already married” theme is played in two other keys in the chapter preceding Van’s meeting with Lucette at Ovenman’s bar. In Paris, Van encounters first Greg Erminin, whom he discovers to be already married (a theme strikingly emphasized by the sustained echoes of
Eugene Onegin
, where One-gin in the final chapter finds that Tatyana has already married Prince N.), and then Cordula, whom he happily, hurriedly makes love to, despite knowing she is already married to Ivan Tobak.

26
. Nabokov, interview with Bernard Pivot, “Apostrophes,” TF-1, May 30, 1975.

27
. Cited in Bobbie Ann Mason,
Nabokov’s Garden: A Guide to
Ada (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis, 1974), 163.

26. A BOOK BURNER RECANTS:
THE ORIGINAL OF LAURA

1
. Véra Nabokov to Fred Hills, April 20, 1976, cited
VNAY
654.

2
. Martin Amis, review of
Look at the Harlequins!
,
New Statesman
, April 25, 1975.

3
. Tadashi Wakashima, “Watashi no Keshikata” [The effaced I],
Gunzo
11 (2009).

BIBLIOGRAPHY