Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0020060, Tue, 18 May 2010 12:55:36 +0400

Subject
Golovin & Lermontov
Date
Body
Ivan Golovin ("Russian Chateaubriand", as he was called by his contemporaries) was indignant at the fact that some called Lermontov (whom Golovin once met at a dinner and whom he denies all talent) "Russian Goethe". "Why not [Russian] Platen?" he wonders in his Zapiski (Memoirs).
August Graf von Platen (1796-1835) was a minor German poet and dramatist. Heine (whom I'm tempted to call "German Lermontov") speaks of Platen in Die Baedern von Lucca ("The Baths of Lucca", 1829) and of Platen's likes in his poem Plateniden (1851).

Platen = plante = planet (cf. Antiterra, Earth's twin planet in Ada)

Lukka = kulak = kukla

plante - Fr., plant
Lukka - Russian spelling of "Lucca", an ancient Roman spa
kulak - Russ., fist; rich peasant; middleman; Tatar, ear; cf. uzun kulak (steppe telegraph) mentioned in "The Golden Calf" and Uzun Ada (a port in Turkmenistan, on the Caspian sea) mentioned in Jules Verne's Claudius Bombarnac; Kulak ("The Middleman") is a long poem (1859) by Ivan Nikitin; "Dobro dolzhno byt' s kulakami ..." ("Good should have fists...") is the famous first line of a poem (1959) by the Kaluga-born Soviet poet Stanislav Kunyaev
kukla - Russ., doll

Alexey Sklyarenko

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