Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0023158, Tue, 31 Jul 2012 03:58:53 -0700

Subject
Re: zhiletka blades
Date
Body
Dear Alexei,

Sometimes you feed us more than we can absorb - and I am just now
starting to catch up with you. So you are suggesting something like
Masc-oda-gama-liel? Masc = mask; oda = Ada perhaps?; gama = ama --
dear god, you've got me doing it. It's catching!

Carolina Utka

p.s. Could you sort of add up all your airplane disaster/accident (not
the same thing, right?) ideas and tie them up with a ribbon so we
could discuss them further? Oh, and please translate the Tolstoy - I'm
terribly busy and the cyrillic hurts my eyes.


On Jul 30, 2012, at 4:06 AM, Alexey Sklyarenko wrote:

Mike Marcus: Has anyone pointed out that the word itself appears in
Pale Fire: "Some of the pranksters were much younger than the King,
but this did not matter since his pictures in the huts of mountain
folks and in the myopic shops of hamlets, where you could buy worms,
ginger bread and zhiletkablades, had not aged since his coronation."?

Despite a Russian diminutive suffix, "zhiletka blades" (invented by
VN) exist only in Zemblan. Therefore, my apologies to Carolyn (I
thought thatzhiletka, as meaning "safety razor," was her invention).

As to Gamaliel, Tolstoy quotes him in his letters several times. In a
letter of March 31, 1891, to L. P. Nikiforov he wrote: Скажу,
как Гамалиил: "Если от бога это дело, то
как бы не быть врагом дела божья, а если
не от бога, то оно само погибнет". In a letter
of April 20, 1896, to Goremykin (the Minister of Internal Affairs)
Tolstoy repeats Gamaliel's words about the spread of
Christianity:Сказанные Гамалиилом слова о
распространении христианского учения,
что если дело это от человеков, то оно
разрушится, а если оно от бога, то не
можете разрушить его; берегитесь
поэтому, чтобы нам не оказаться
богопротивниками, — остаются всегда
уроком истинной правительственной
мудрости в её отношениях к проявлению
деятельности людей. (apologies, no translation)

Btw., good Gamaliel (not reelected after his fourth term and dining in
Demon's club in Manhattan in his informal gagality) is also mentioned
in Part Three, chapter 4.

The first four letters of Gamaliel's name are Mascodagama's last four
letters (I spare you the anagram).

Russian for "canard" is gazetnaya utka. It is a calque of German
Zeitungsente (non testatum - NT - Ente, "duck"). Btw., Van learns of
the airplane disaster in which his father ("a bank president lost in
the closing garble") died from an American daily paper published in
Nice. (3.7)

Alexey Sklyarenko
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