A. Sklyarenko: "Mascodagama's
spectacular success in a theatrical club that habitually limited itself to
Elizabethan plays, with queen and fairies played by pretty boys, made first of
all a great impact on cartoonists. Deans, local politicians, national statesmen,
and of course the current ruler of the Golden Horde were pictured as
mascodagamas by topical humorists. A grotesque imitator (who was really
Mascodagama himself in an oversophisticated parody of his own act!) was booed at
Oxford (a women's college nearby) by local rowdies. (Ada, 1.30). According to
Pushkin, England is the home country of cartoon and parody:
[snip]."
JM: AS reminded me of a
particular passage in ADA, in which Uncle Dan is, himself, a living cartoon
(as most of his gestures, perplexities and world-travels were).
Would the Red Veen be inspired on
someone Nabokov knew?
"Uncle Dan was feeding. He wore suitable clothes for a suitably
hot day in the country — namely, a candy-striped suit over a mauve flannel shirt
and piqué waistcoat, with a blue-and-red club tie and a safety-goldpinned very
high soft collar (all his trim stripes and colors were a little displaced,
though, in the process of comic strip printing, because it was Sunday)."