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Re: [NABOKOV-L] Serendipities:RLSK and ADA: glory holes
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The garden pavilion of the elegant American Embassy (the Schoenborn Palace) in Prague is also know as the Glorietta. It rests halfway up the Petrin Hill and has a wonderful view of Prague Castle and the city.
Prague, of course, is also the resting place of VN's mother.
Here is the link to the embassy's Facebook photo gallery of pictures of its Glorietta.
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=223176&id=45298246708
Here is the descriptive text from the Embassy website (note the orchard and Kafka mentions):
The U.S. Embassy is currently housed in the Schoenborn Palace in the Mala Strana district of Prague. Richard Crane, the first U.S. Ambassador to Czechoslovakia, sold the Palace to the United States Government in 1925 for $117,000.
It is built on the site of an earlier house that was destroyed during the Thirty Years War (1618 - 1648) when the Mala Strana quarter was occupied by invading Swedish forces. The present palace was erected in the period 1643 - 1656 by Count Colloredo-Mansfeld, an Austro-Hungarian general. The Count, having lost a leg at the battle of Lutzen, had the flight of steps leading to the first garden terrace built with a special incline to enable him to ride on horseback into the palace.
The palace was remodelled in 1715 by Italian architect Giovanni Santini, who was architect for Prince Charles of Lichtenstein. The decorative mouldings around the windows are adorned with ornamental heads and garlands in the baroque style, and the arch leading to the central courtyard is supported by two gigantic caryatids (Atlantes), the work of Matthias Braun, one of the best sculptors of the age. Behind the palace stretches a terraced garden and orchard of seven acres which extends up a hillside topped by the Glorietta, from which the American flag flies.
The palace is built in four wings around three courtyards. Altogether, it contains over one hundred rooms, many originally hung with damask and decorated with stucco. The ceilings of the rooms on the first floor are over 30 feet high.
The palace is referred to as Schoenborn after the last titled owner before it was purchased by Crane (whose family, incidentally, was related by marriage to the Masaryk family). Among the owners of the palace before it was acquired by Crane were Cardinal Prince Dietrichstein; Count Rudolph Colloredo; Charles, Count of Hatzfeld; The Prince of Hatzfeld; and Count Schoenborn. Franz Kafka also lived in the palace briefly in 1917.
David Krol (lately of Prague)
ardismanor@aol.com
-----Original Message-----
From: Jansy <jansy@AETERN.US>
To: NABOKV-L <NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU>
Sent: Fri, Mar 4, 2011 10:57 am
Subject: [NABOKV-L] [NABOKOV-L] Serendipities:RLSK and ADA: glory holes
Nowadays a lot of rare or difficult information has become easily accessible to lay-readers. When one reaches a particular thrilling find,by perusing google-entries not real books, it almost seems unfair... bt there's no point in denying the possible significance of what sometimes chance places on our way. After searching for parhelia and brocken (both words employed by Nabokov), I came to the light-effect creating an aureole, a halo, a "glory." Next, I wondered if garden pergolas (such as the Schöenbrunn Palace's belvedere, named "gloriette", where I first heard this word*) were anywhere connected to some kind or aureole. Apparently, not.
What led me on to extend the search was a sentence from Nabokov's memoirs, indirectly related to his brother Sergey:
"That twisted quest for Sebastian Knight (1940), with its gloriettes and self-mate combinations, is really nothing in comparison to the task I balked in the first version of this memoir and am faced with now" (SM, 257).
Suddenly, I alighted onto two words related to a "gloriette". Both, perhaps, strongly emphasized in "ADA" (and, in retrospect, they add a coloring to Nabokov's sole reference to "gloriettes" in connection to the hard task it was for him to write about his brother.
One of the words is the English term: "Glory Hole." The other, "Arbor".
The first one, a Glory Hole, indicates a place where objects are thrown or lie in confusion, but the author, Adrian Room, notes that the "place is not so called since there is a glorious muddle in it, even though there probably is. The origin may well be in Scottish "glaury", meaning "muddy", "miry". However, by a curious but disconcerting coincidence, the French word for 'summer house', 'arbour', is "gloriette", and this does actually come from Latin "gloria"m "glory". But the original meaning of this word was "palace", so there is unlikely to be any association with the English glory hole. A dictionary of true etymologies - Adrian Room - 1986 - Language Arts & Disciplines books.google.com.br/books?isbn=0415030609...
The other, Arbours or Arbors, originally " herber " or " erber," comes from O. Fr. herbier, from Lat. herbarium, a collection of herbs, herba, grass; Later the word came to be spelt " arber " through its pronunciation, as in the case of Derby, and by the 16th century was written " arbour" See also: Lat. arbor, tree, and garden:from O. Fr. garden, mod. Fr. jardin; this, like our words " garth," a paddock attached to a building, and " yard," comes from a Teutonic word for an enclosure which appears in Gothic as gards and O. H. Ger. gart, cf. Dutch gaarde and Ger. .garten); The application of the word has shifted from the grass-covered ground, the proper meaning, to the covering of trees overhead . " Arbor " (from the Latin for " tree ") http://encyclopedia.jrank.org/APO_ARN/ARBOUR_or_ARBOR_originally_herb.html#ixzz1FeF6CnJ6
There are no gloriettes in ADA, but "arbors" in profusion. The various references to arbor indicate (to me) Nabokov's familiarity with the link bewteen a luxuriant bower and the gloriette, and a fascination this architectural appendix, herbarium, cage and dirty hole exerted on him.**
........................................................................................................
* wiki: "A gloriette (from the 12th century French for "little glory") is a building in a garden erected on a site that is elevated with respect to the surroundings. The structural execution and shape can vary greatly, often in the form of a pavilion or tempietto, more or less open on the sides..The largest and probably most well-known gloriette is in the Schönbrunn Palace Garden in Vienna. Built in 1775 as the last building constructed in the garden according to the plans of Austrian imperial architect Johann Ferdinand Hetzendorf von Hohenberg as a "temple of renown" to serve as both a focal point and a lookout point for the garden, it was used as a dining hall and festival hall as well as a breakfast room for emperor Franz Joseph I...The word "gloriette" can also refer to a large birdcage, similar in form to the architectural gloriette, often made out of wrought iron or, more rarely, wood. In the garden of the Priory of Notre-Dame d'Orsan, many wood gloriettes decorate and overshadow the alleys. Climbing plants are often associated with this type of construction".
http://www.azsia.net/index.php? module=My_eGallery&do=showpic&pid=580&orderby=dateD
See also: "Recent research at Chepstow Castle has identified a chamber known by the name Gloriette. Other buildings with this name have previously been identified at Corfe, Leeds and Hesdin Castles and at Canterbury Cathedral Priory. Gloriette has usually been explained as a reference to a type of garden building in the Islamic world, transposed to northern Europe either from Spain or Sicily, though the word's etymology, and the particularities of each site make this interpretation difficult. The architectural differences between oriental garden pavilions and 13th-century Gothic chambers, and the particular association of the term with castles rather than unfortified manors, suggest an alternative meaning. It is proposed that Gloriette was more immediately a reference to a 12th-century chanson de geste, la Prise d'Orange, in which the name was used for an exotic marble tower. In this chanson, Gloriette was the scene of romantic and military adventures of the kind to which Christian knights might aspire. However, the recurrent association of the word with Islamic Spain suggests that European patrons adopted it with these connotations of a sophisticated alien culture in mind." www.ingentaconnect.com/content/maney/jba/2004/00000157/.../art00006
.** - Excerpts from "ADA" mentioning "Arbor"
1. "In fact he was beginning to like very much arbors and ardors and Adas. They rhymed. Should he mention it?"
2. "As the first flame of day reached his hammock, he woke up another man and very much of a man indeed. Ada, our ardors and arbors a dactylic trimeter that was to remain Van Veens only contribution to Anglo-American poetry sang through his brain."
3. "That night because of the bothersome blink of remote sheet lightning through the black hearts of his sleeping-arbor, Van had abandoned his two tulip trees and gone to bed in his room."
4. "Last night I tried to make a poem about it for you, but I cant write verse; it begins, it only begins: Ada, our ardors and arbors but the rest is all fog, try to fancy the rest."
5." Because it had come from the blood-red érable arbors of Ardis."
6. "Because the particular floramor that I visited for the first time on becoming a member of the Villa Venus Club (not long before my second summer with my Ada in the arbors of Ardis) is today, after many vicissitudes, the charming country house of a Chose don whom I respect..."
7. " he was in the middle of his twentieth trudge back to the ardors and arbors! Eros qui prend son essor! Arts that our marblery harbors: Eros, the rose and the sore, I am ill at these numbers, but een rhymery is easier than confuting the past in mute prose. Who wrote that? Voltimand or Voltemand? Or the Burning Swine? A pest on his anapest!"
8. "She had never realized...that their first summer in the orchards and orchidariums of Ardis had become a sacred secret and creed, throughout the countryside. Romantically inclined handmaids... adored Van, adored Ada, adored Ardiss ardors in arbors. Their swains, plucking ballads on their seven-stringed Russian lyres under the racemosa in bloom or in old rose gardens (while the windows went out one by one in the castle)... Gardeners paraphrased iridescent Persian poems about irrigation and the Four Arrows of Love...And another century would pass, and the painted word would be retouched by the still richer brush of time.Members usually had their chauffeurs park in a special enclosure near the guardhouse...But that night several huge police cars occupied the garage boxes and overflowed into an adjacent arbor...His favorite walled walk soon took him to one of the spacious lawns velveting the approach to the manor."
9. " I cannot express, dear Van, how unhappy I am, the more so as we never learned in the arbors of Ardis that such unhappiness could exist."
10. "When after three or four hours of frenetic love Van and Mrs Vinelander would abandon their sumptuous retreat ...they had the feeling of still being under the protection of those painted Priapi that the Romans once used to set up in the arbors of Rufomonticulus."
11. "Ardis Hall the Ardors and Arbors of Ardis this is the leitmotiv rippling through Ada, an ample and delightful chronicle...Nothing in world literature, save maybe Count Tolstoys reminiscences, can vie in pure joyousness and Arcadian innocence with the Ardis part of the book"
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