Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0017467, Mon, 15 Dec 2008 09:03:38 -0200

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[NABOKOV-L] Swinburne, Dolores, Mazeppa , a query
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In Lolita, an entry about the actress Dolories Quine stimulates HH's words: How the look of my dear love's name even affixed to some old hag of an actress, still makes me rock with helpless pain! When HH mentions Quine next he almost suggests that Quine is Quilty's killer: The Murdered Playwright. Quine the Swine. Guilty of killing Quilty.

The reference to Mazeppa and the actress who played him as a Tartar boy (in the Bowery theatre, New York) took me to Lord Byron's hero, although his heroism was later contested by Pushkin, in "Poltava".
Dolores McCord ( or Adah Menken) ,as Mazeppa, in NY, "let herself be strapped quasi-nude to the back of a black, spirited horse. When the horse ran away, the audience gasped; their excitement, insinuates Author Oursler, for some reason of his own, being more spiritual than physical."
Dolores Quine "Made New York debut in 1904 in Never Talk to Strangers."

I've been puzzling over the varios references to "swine" but I cannot see any relation bt. weight-lifting Trapp (Quilty) and "Quine,the Swine."
I looked in VN's EO for references to Pushkin's long poem "Poltava" and there were only three laudatory, but short, entries, making reference to it and mentioning Maria Volkonski ( Pushkin was courting her and the heroine of Poltava is called Maria).
In V&V, Nabokov translated from Poltava (1951-57) its "Dedication" ending with "your woeful wilderness, the last sound of your words, are the one treasure, shrine, the one love of my soul."
The clues are too confusing for me to follow with profit because I lack all the needed information on Byron, Swinburne, Pushkin, Decembrists, false heroes.Perhaps, should they be significant, someone else could clarify for me this link bt Quine and Quilty, or Quine and HH himself.

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