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Re: [NABOKOV-L] Serendipities:RLSK and ADA: glory holes
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(continuation of) "...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'. "
Adrian Room ("A Dictionary of True Etymologies") admits that it's unlikely that there's an association between the "glory hole" and the "gloriette".However, he takes the trouble to indicate it by stating "by a curious but disconcerting coincidence, the French word for 'summer house', 'arbour', is "gloriette", and this does actually come from Latin 'gloria', 'glory'." The Nabokov family's residence, in Vyra, included a wooden pavilion with stained-glass windows patterned with lozenges of color, but Nabokov didn't refer to it, in "Speak, Memory," by any other word (arbor, gloriette, summer-house). The associations to this place are mostly exultantly happy, but there are exceptions* and this is why I was interested in the link brought up by A.Room to Nabokov's troubled "gloriette." Unfortunately I couldn't locate a description of a birthday-party in which children played hide-and-seek and young Nabokov was sadly left behind, in a colored cache. Perhaps Mnemosyne is serving me wrong!
According to Brian Boyd (AY 631) "women and words are repeatedly joined by the rainbow arc of the spectrum theme....As he falls in love time after time, the theme of colored glass develops...[His] last glimpse of Colette, his first passionate childhood love, brings to mind a 'rainbow spiral in a glass marble.'... [and the] "wine-red and bottle-green and dark-blue lozenges of stained glass" in the pavilion at Vyra" It will be "in that same 'rainbow-windowed pavilion,' he meets for the first time the girl he calls Tamara."
In ch.11 of Speak, Memory, Nabokov mentions the shared etymology of butterfly (SM 216).** In this chapter he writes about his experience of looking through its stained windows to find a rainbow outside, duplicating its colored patches, and to writing his first poem, "Drip."
...............................................................................................................................
* Examples from Look at the Harlequins:
"My battle with factual, respectable life still consisted of sudden delusions, sudden reshufflings--kaleidoscopic, stained-glass reshufflings -- of fragmented space"; "...echoes of her pangs in the darkest corridors of my brain and a frightening stained window at every turn--the afterimage of a wounded orifice--pursued me and deprived me of all my vigor".; " '--this batch of thirty cards from Ardis' ... I left you reclining in a lounge chair with the sun reproducing the amethyst lozenges of the veranda windows on the floor."; "I wished to go back to you, to life, to the amethyst lozenges, to the pencil lying on the veranda table, and I could not. What used to happen so often in thought, now had happened for keeps: I could not turn."
** - Origin of Pavilion: Middle English pavilloun, pavillioun, from Anglo-French, from Latin papilion-, papilio butterfly; perhaps akin to Old High German fifaltra butterfly
First Known Use: 13th century Synonyms: alcove, casino, gazebo, kiosk, belvedere, summerhouse www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/pavilion
1250-1300; Middle English pavilon < Old French paveillon < Latin papilion- (stem of papilio ) butterfly dictionary.reference.com/browse/pavilion
......................................................................................................................................
A Nabokov sighting related to "pavilions":
DRINK AND LEISURE: THE SEMIOTIC SIGNIFICANCE OF TWO NEW ENTERPRISES ON A FORMER COLLECTIVE FARM IN ESTONIA
Sigrid Rausing University College London
"As in the case of the bar and the culture house, the new firm is situated within a space which embodies a diametrically opposite ideology to the one expressed in the material culture of pavilions. If drinking constitutes the rougher side of the decadence which Soviet socialism opposed, pavilions represented the more genteel aspect of it. Nabokov, for example, born to a liberal aristocratic family in pre-Revolutionary Russia, writes the following about pavilions in his autobiography:
'In order to reconstruct the summer of 1914, when the numb fury of verse-making first came over me, all I really need is to visualize a certain pavilion.'...'I dream of my pavilion at least twice a year. As a rule, it appears in my dreams quite independently of their subject matter, which, of course, may be anything, from abduction to zoolatry. It hangs around, so to speak, with the unobtrusiveness of an artist's signature. I find it clinging to a corner of the dream canvas or cunningly worked into some ornamental part of the picture (Nabokov 1989: 214)'. "
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Adrian Room ("A Dictionary of True Etymologies") admits that it's unlikely that there's an association between the "glory hole" and the "gloriette".However, he takes the trouble to indicate it by stating "by a curious but disconcerting coincidence, the French word for 'summer house', 'arbour', is "gloriette", and this does actually come from Latin 'gloria', 'glory'." The Nabokov family's residence, in Vyra, included a wooden pavilion with stained-glass windows patterned with lozenges of color, but Nabokov didn't refer to it, in "Speak, Memory," by any other word (arbor, gloriette, summer-house). The associations to this place are mostly exultantly happy, but there are exceptions* and this is why I was interested in the link brought up by A.Room to Nabokov's troubled "gloriette." Unfortunately I couldn't locate a description of a birthday-party in which children played hide-and-seek and young Nabokov was sadly left behind, in a colored cache. Perhaps Mnemosyne is serving me wrong!
According to Brian Boyd (AY 631) "women and words are repeatedly joined by the rainbow arc of the spectrum theme....As he falls in love time after time, the theme of colored glass develops...[His] last glimpse of Colette, his first passionate childhood love, brings to mind a 'rainbow spiral in a glass marble.'... [and the] "wine-red and bottle-green and dark-blue lozenges of stained glass" in the pavilion at Vyra" It will be "in that same 'rainbow-windowed pavilion,' he meets for the first time the girl he calls Tamara."
In ch.11 of Speak, Memory, Nabokov mentions the shared etymology of butterfly (SM 216).** In this chapter he writes about his experience of looking through its stained windows to find a rainbow outside, duplicating its colored patches, and to writing his first poem, "Drip."
...............................................................................................................................
* Examples from Look at the Harlequins:
"My battle with factual, respectable life still consisted of sudden delusions, sudden reshufflings--kaleidoscopic, stained-glass reshufflings -- of fragmented space"; "...echoes of her pangs in the darkest corridors of my brain and a frightening stained window at every turn--the afterimage of a wounded orifice--pursued me and deprived me of all my vigor".; " '--this batch of thirty cards from Ardis' ... I left you reclining in a lounge chair with the sun reproducing the amethyst lozenges of the veranda windows on the floor."; "I wished to go back to you, to life, to the amethyst lozenges, to the pencil lying on the veranda table, and I could not. What used to happen so often in thought, now had happened for keeps: I could not turn."
** - Origin of Pavilion: Middle English pavilloun, pavillioun, from Anglo-French, from Latin papilion-, papilio butterfly; perhaps akin to Old High German fifaltra butterfly
First Known Use: 13th century Synonyms: alcove, casino, gazebo, kiosk, belvedere, summerhouse www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/pavilion
1250-1300; Middle English pavilon < Old French paveillon < Latin papilion- (stem of papilio ) butterfly dictionary.reference.com/browse/pavilion
......................................................................................................................................
A Nabokov sighting related to "pavilions":
DRINK AND LEISURE: THE SEMIOTIC SIGNIFICANCE OF TWO NEW ENTERPRISES ON A FORMER COLLECTIVE FARM IN ESTONIA
Sigrid Rausing University College London
"As in the case of the bar and the culture house, the new firm is situated within a space which embodies a diametrically opposite ideology to the one expressed in the material culture of pavilions. If drinking constitutes the rougher side of the decadence which Soviet socialism opposed, pavilions represented the more genteel aspect of it. Nabokov, for example, born to a liberal aristocratic family in pre-Revolutionary Russia, writes the following about pavilions in his autobiography:
'In order to reconstruct the summer of 1914, when the numb fury of verse-making first came over me, all I really need is to visualize a certain pavilion.'...'I dream of my pavilion at least twice a year. As a rule, it appears in my dreams quite independently of their subject matter, which, of course, may be anything, from abduction to zoolatry. It hangs around, so to speak, with the unobtrusiveness of an artist's signature. I find it clinging to a corner of the dream canvas or cunningly worked into some ornamental part of the picture (Nabokov 1989: 214)'. "
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/