Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0021917, Sun, 7 Aug 2011 14:14:29 -0300

Subject
Re: sudak
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Date
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Alexey Sklyarenko:At the family dinner in Ardis the Second (Ada: 1.38) Van tells Demon:'You still beat me at fencing, but I'm the better shot. That's not the real sudak, papa, though it's tops, I assure you.' ...In Chapter Six of Pushkin's novel Onegin kills Lenski (in Speak, Memory VN calls his Russian tutor 'Lenski') in a pistol duel./ Although he is a good shot, Van is wounded in his pistol duel with Captain Tapper (1.42). He recovers in the Kalugano Lakeview hospital where he makes advances to the Russian nurse Tatiana (who spurns Van's advances but later writes him a passionate love letter).Even before Van's birth Demon Veen had a sword duel with Baron d'Onsky (nicknamed 'Skonky:' 1.2) In 1871, when Marina (Van's mother, but, officially, his "aunt") was pregnant with Ada, she spent a rukuliruyushchiy month with Demon at Kitezh (1.3). A great fisherman in his youth, Demon owned Lake Kitezh** (the estate comprising, and practically consisting of, that large, oddly rectangular though quite natural body of water near Luga) jointly with his cousin Daniel Veen (who married Marina in December, 1871). A perch uncle Dan had once clocked took half an hour to cross the Lake Kitezh diagonally (1.1).[ ***on April 23, 1869, Demon married Marina's twin sister Aqua in Kaluga ]

JM: Great assembly of links, Alexey. The most surprising for me were Van's nurse Tatiana (she spurns him and later writes him a love letter as it happens in EO) and SM's tutor's designated by Lenski.

I wonder if any scholar has ever isolated the dates related to his characters that VN makes coincide with his birthday. There must be a pattern waiting to emerge from them.*

btw: I noticed something of "mimetic interest' in relation to the find-the-cat quizz I sent in my previous post. I found it hard to spot the cat but,after I managed to find and miss it four or five times, something was learned about its setting and colors for, as soon as I look at the photo, my eyes automatically target the cat. Should I qualify as a predator in this case, there seems to be a lesson to be learned from that.

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* - Here's a special Sunday bonus...Statistically Speaking ( A Dictionary of Quotations, C C Gaither & A E Cavazos-Gaither, Institute of Physics Publishing, 1996.)
Number of quotes citing: Bob Dylan = 1; Trollope = 2; Virgil = 2 ; Tolstoy = 3; Thurber = 4; Voltaire = 6; Albert Einstein = 8; Stan Kelly-Bootle = 9


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