I don’t know about real-life Peters de Rast. And I hope that I haven’t somehow missed what follows in a previous post. But given the passage’s mixing of sex and childhood, doesn’t Peter de Rast (alias Pieter Rast, for democratic Netherlanders) suggest “pederast”? This would link to the lad’s bare shoulder. This makes more sense in this passage, I think, when we recall the marked emphasis in HH’s pederasty in Lolita on stolen/elided childhood--as opposed to the more commonplace interpretations of this crime, which arguably are concerned more with tarring and feathering the pederast than with comprehending the effect on the victim. Meanwhile, Lucette looks on . . . .

Humbly submitted,

David Powelstock

From: Vladimir Nabokov Forum [mailto:NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU] On Behalf Of Donald B. Johnson
Sent: Thursday, April 21, 2005 8:55 PM
To: NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU
Subject: Fwd: Re: Meaning of "Enchanter" and a new question about "Rast"

Dear List and Anthony Stadlen,

Nabokov never ceases to surprise us and show how inattentive one can be. I saw Kubrick´s movie several times and never noticed the "hunted enchanters" inversion. Would Nabokov have suggested it? You say it was not in his screen-play.

Today, reading again the message I had posted, where there is a reference to a Peter de Rast, I thought that there we could see the image of Nabokov himself, who composed the lines atributed to Brown as the "balding but still strong old oak".
Then I became curious about the word "Rast".
The sentence is: the long and lofty limb of Baldy, a
partly leafless but still healthy old oak (which appeared - oh, I remember,Van! - in a century-old lithograph of Ardis, by Peter de Rast...)

In my regular dictionary I found a reference to the latin rastrum "rake" from "radere ras" that means " to scrape".It was not very convincing. Google took me to Van Veen´s Holland and their paintings with pastoral scenes. In it there was Rast as : Koerdisch voor geluk of een rechte lijn, een toonladder (makam) in de Turkse muziek, Perzisch voor waarheid.

I don´t speak Dutch but I understood there were references to the Curds, to the Turks and to the Persian. Rast, in Persian, would mean " Truth".

I´m still confused about Nabokov as a balding oak in Ardis, if the reference is indeed to our VN. Would he be the colossus in the painting? And what of the four cows and the lad in rags?

"as a young colossus protecting four cows and a lad in rags, one shoulder bare"

Any known rural painting? Any known painter or lithographer called Peter de Rast? The "rake/scratch" meaning could apply to how a lithography is produced by scratching a slab of stone, or so I imagine.

Jansy

I have asked the List this question before, but nobody answered. In Kubrick's film "Lolita" (but not in VN's published screenplay) the hotel is called The Hunted Enchanters. Can anyone see the point of this jokey but (as far as I can see) utterly unfunny inversion, and does anyone know whose idea it was?

Anthony Stadlen