Subject
castration
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Date
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In a letter to Marina Demon wrote: "you spoke, I suppose, to the man with whom you had spent the night (and whom I would have dispatched, had I not been overeager to castrate him)" (1.2). Demon had a sword duel with Marina's lover, Baron d'Onsky (according to Marina, a physical wreck and spiritual Samurai, who had gone to Japan forever). "From a more reliable source Demon learned that the Samurai's real destination was smart little Vatican, a Roman spa."
In A. K. Tolstoy's poem "Bunt v Vatikane" ("A Riot in Vatican," 1864) the Pope Pius IX is nearly castrated by his castrated singers. On Terra, Vatican is not a spa. But one remembers Lucca, an old Roman spa (cf. "Die Baeder von Lucca" by Heinrich Heine). Lukka = kulak = kukla (Lukka - Russian spelling of Lucca; kulak - Russ., fist; Tatar, ear; kukla - Russ., doll; dummy).
According to Stanislav Kunyaev, a Kaluga-born Soviet poet, dobro dolzhno byt' s kulakami (good should have fists). On the other hand, in Pushkin's poem "The Czar Nikita and his Forty Daughters" dobo is used in the sense "testicles" (to make them silent about a certain secret the czar threatened to castrate men):
Ukho* vsyak derzhal vostro
i khranil svoyo dobro
(Everybody was on the qui vive
and took care of his property).
Uzun-kulak (Tatar, telegraph; literally: "long ear") is mentioned and explained in Ilf & Petrov's "The Golden Calf;" Uzun-Ada (a Caspian port in Turkmenia; literally: "long island") is mentioned and explained in Jules Verne's "Claudius Bombarnac."
As to kukla, Marina is several times refered to as "dummy:" "Marina, essentially a dummy in human disguise..." (1.38), "Dummy-mum..." (5.6). Pushkin's Don Guan calls cold northern women kukly voskovye ("waxen dummies"). His Tatiana "even in those years a doll took not in her hands" (EO, Two: XXVII: 1-2).
*Ukho means in Russian what kulak does in Tatar: "ear."
Correction of an earlier mistake: in my post of June 6 ("Children of the Sun Horse") I wrote that Chernyshevsky died in Astrakhan. Of course, he died in Saratov, his home city. He moved there from Astrakhan in 1889, a few months before his death.
Alexey Sklyarenko
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In A. K. Tolstoy's poem "Bunt v Vatikane" ("A Riot in Vatican," 1864) the Pope Pius IX is nearly castrated by his castrated singers. On Terra, Vatican is not a spa. But one remembers Lucca, an old Roman spa (cf. "Die Baeder von Lucca" by Heinrich Heine). Lukka = kulak = kukla (Lukka - Russian spelling of Lucca; kulak - Russ., fist; Tatar, ear; kukla - Russ., doll; dummy).
According to Stanislav Kunyaev, a Kaluga-born Soviet poet, dobro dolzhno byt' s kulakami (good should have fists). On the other hand, in Pushkin's poem "The Czar Nikita and his Forty Daughters" dobo is used in the sense "testicles" (to make them silent about a certain secret the czar threatened to castrate men):
Ukho* vsyak derzhal vostro
i khranil svoyo dobro
(Everybody was on the qui vive
and took care of his property).
Uzun-kulak (Tatar, telegraph; literally: "long ear") is mentioned and explained in Ilf & Petrov's "The Golden Calf;" Uzun-Ada (a Caspian port in Turkmenia; literally: "long island") is mentioned and explained in Jules Verne's "Claudius Bombarnac."
As to kukla, Marina is several times refered to as "dummy:" "Marina, essentially a dummy in human disguise..." (1.38), "Dummy-mum..." (5.6). Pushkin's Don Guan calls cold northern women kukly voskovye ("waxen dummies"). His Tatiana "even in those years a doll took not in her hands" (EO, Two: XXVII: 1-2).
*Ukho means in Russian what kulak does in Tatar: "ear."
Correction of an earlier mistake: in my post of June 6 ("Children of the Sun Horse") I wrote that Chernyshevsky died in Astrakhan. Of course, he died in Saratov, his home city. He moved there from Astrakhan in 1889, a few months before his death.
Alexey Sklyarenko
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/