Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0025684, Thu, 11 Sep 2014 20:22:04 +0300

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Aksakov & Vengerov in Ada
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Van remembered that his tutor's great friend, the learned but prudish Semyon Afanasievich Vengerov, then a young associate professor but already a celebrated Pushkinist (1855-1954), used to say that the only vulgar passage in his author's work was the cannibal joy of young gourmets tearing 'plump and live' oysters out of their 'cloisters' in an unfinished canto of Eugene Onegin. (1.38)

On Antiterra S. A. Vengerov (1855-1920) is granted a much longer life than the one he lived in our world. In a letter of June 14, 1889, to Vengerov the philosopher and poet Vladimir Solovyov (1853-1900) wishes to Vengerov to reach if not Methuselah's then at least Galakhov's age in order to complete his enormous bibliographic work ("monumentum aere perennius"):

От души желаю Вам сравняться в долготе дней если не с Мафусаилом, то по крайней мере с Алексеем Дмитриевичем Галаховым, чтобы довести до конца monumentum aere perennius. (В. С Соловьёв — С. А. Венгерову, 14. VI. 1889; Письма, СПб., 1909. т. 2, с. 315).

Vengerov is a friend of Van's Russian tutor Andrey Andreevich Aksakov (AAA). In his Literaturnaya ispoved' ("The Literary Confession," 1854) Vyazemski mentions A. D. Galakhov (1807-92), a historian of literature, compiler of textbooks and anthologies (the so-called khrestomatii), and S. T. Aksakov (1791-1859), the author of The Family Chronicle, The Childhood Years of Bagrov Grandson, and Notes of a Gun Hunter in the Province of Orenburg:

Сознаться должен я, что наши хрестоматы
Насчет моих стихов не очень тoроваты.
Бывал и я в чести; но ныне век другой:
Наш век был детский век, а этот — деловой.
Но что ни говори, а Плаксин и Галахов,
Браковщики живых и судьи славных прахов,
С оглядкою меня выводят напоказ,
Не расточая мне своих хвалебных фраз.


...Почтенной публикой не очень я забочусь,
Когда с пером в руке за рифмами охочусь.
В самой охоте есть и жизнь, и цель своя
(В Аксакове прочти поэтику ружья).

The hunting [for rhymes] has its own life and goal
(Read in Aksakov the poetics of gun).

Ada's husband Andrey Andreevich Vinelander (a namesake of Van's tutor) is a great sportsman who knows the Western game remarkably well (3.8).

Speaking of Stalin ("a certain Crimean Khan" whom Churchill in his memoirs calls "a great good man"), Solovyov is the author of Povest' ob Antikhriste ("The Tale about Antichrist," 1900) included in Tri Razgovora o voine, progresse i kontse vsemirnoy istorii ("Three Conversations about the War, Progress and the End of the World History"). The authorship of "The Tale about Antichrist" is ascribed to a monk named Pansofiy (Pansophius).

Alexey Sklyarenko

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