Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0023275, Sun, 19 Aug 2012 14:05:39 +0300

Subject
comme des fontaines
Date
Body
Ada to Van (3.8): He [Demon] looked positively Quixotic when I saw him at Mother's funeral... D'Onsky's son, a person with only one arm, threw his remaining one around Demon and both wept comme des fontaines.

From Pushkin's The Fountain of Bakhchisaray (ll. 501-504):

Младые девы в той стране
Преданье старины узнали,
И мрачный памятник оне
Фонтаном слёз именовали.
(Young maidens in that land
learned the old legend
and named the grave monument
"the fountain of tears.")

As I pointed out before, the name of d'Onsky pere and his oneway nickname Skonky (anagram of konsky, "of a horse") suggest that he is a horse (Onegin's Don stallion, donskoy zherebets, being his ancestor).

At the beginning of Eugene Onegin (One: II: 14) Pushkin says that the North is harmful to him.

Nord + Gemini = Erminin + god/dog = Gremin + odin

Gemini (the Twins) is a zodiacal constellation. As far as horoscopes are concerned, Pushkin and Peter I (the founder of St. Petersburg, VN's home city) were Gemini.

While god means in Russian "year," dog is our word for "Great Dane."

Gremin is the name of Tatiana's husband ("old general") in Chaykovski's opera (known on Antiterra as Onegin and Olga by Tschchaikow). Odin means "one; alone."

Speaking of twins, the Dioscuri (Leda's children by Zeus and Tyndareus) were regarded as the patrons of sailors, to whom they appeared as St. Elmo's fire, and were also associated with horsemanship. Cf. Aqua's delirium in Ada (1.3): "a silly pillar commemorating, he said, the 'elmo' that broke into leaf when they carried stone-heavy-dead St Zeus by it through the gradual, very gradual shade..." Poor mad Aqua is a twin sister of Marina (Van's, Ada's and Lucette's mother). Like sever (North), Zeves (Zeus) is mentioned in the second stanza of EO Canto One. Three ample-haunched Ledas (in a painting) and as many eggs (in another painting) are mentioned in Part Four of Ada.

Alexey Sklyarenko

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