Subject
"gory trophy" and "sobaka"
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Thanks to Jansy for pointing out that, like Napoleon, Bras d'Or is a cognac and bringing up Dack's "gory trophy" (1.11). Indeed, trofey (trophy) = torf (peat) + ey (to her) = Orfey (Orpheus) + t = foyer + t = foreytor (postilion) - or. A synonym of "trophy" is "loot" (cf. "lootless bad dog" in the sentence quoted below). Loot = tool = loto = stool - s = lotos (lotus) - s = molot (hammer) - m = doloto (chisel) - do = zoloto (gold) + L - zlo (evil) = zoloto + zhele (jelly) - zhelezo (iron). (All non-English words in this series are Russian. There was molot, a hammer, in the Soviet State Emblem. The word zhele occurs in a jocular little poem by Mandelstam: Kushaet seno korova, / A gertsoginya zhele..." "A cow feeds on hay, / And the duchess eats a jelly," c. 1913, where it rhymes with shale, "chalet").
Another interesting word introduced in this little chapter of Ada is sobaka (dog). Cf. Ada's words to Dack whom she just took a blood-soaked tampon: "Nekhoroshaya, nekhoroshaya sobaka," crooned Ada... as she gathered into her arms the now lootless but completely unabashed bad dog" (1.11). Sobaka = Sobak + a. Fima* Sobak is a character in Ilf and Petrov's "The Twelve Chairs," a cultured girl whose vocabulary consists of about one hundred and eighty words (her friend Ellochka the cannibal** successfully manages with only thirty). In Fima's vocabulary there is one such word that Ellochka couldn't even have dreamt of: gomoseksualizm ("homosexuality"). In Ada, Cordula de Prey (Ada's school mate whom Van suspects of being a Lesbian and Ada's lover and who later becomes Van's girlfriend) marries Ivan G. Tobak.*** When Van meets Cordula (now Mrs. Tobak) in Lute,**** she is bending over two unhappy poodlets. Van greets her with the lines he knew since his school days: "The Veens speak only to Tobaks, / But Tobaks speak only to dogs." (When translated back to Russian, the language in which Van addresses his former mistress, as the rhyme seems to suggest, these lines go as follows: "Viny govoryat lish' s Tobakami, / A Tobaki govoryat lish' s sobakami.")
Interestingly, while dog = God, sobak ("of the dogs," stressed, unlike the surname Sobak, on the second syllable) = Boska (Polish for "of God;" cf. Matka Boska, Mother of God) = skoba (Russian for "cramp," "clamp"). In his poem "Dikaya koshka, armyanskaya rech'..." ("The wild cat, Armenian tongue," 1930) Mandelstam compares letters of the Armenian alphabet to blacksmith's tongs (kazhdaya bukva - kuznechnye kleshchi) and Armenian words, to cramp-irons (kazhdoe slovo - skoba). On the other hand, Tobak - t = Sobak - s = Koba (Stalin's nickname, after the hero of "The Parricide," a novel by the Georgian writer Kazbegi).
In a conversation with Van (2.8), Ada calls Cordula "Mme Perwitzky:" "I know somebody who is not simply a cat, but a polecat, and that's Cordula Tobacco, alias Mme Perwitsky." According to Wikipedia (http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pelzarten) and the 1911 edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica (http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/1911_Encyclop%C3%A6dia_Britannica/Bulgaria/Description), Perwitzky is the fur of the rare tiger polecat, Foetorius sarmaticus. Which instantly reminded me of Ellochka the cannibal's "Mexican jerboa" ("meksikansiy tushkan," as she calls tushkanchik). Ostap Bender, who wants to get from Ellochka the two Gambs stools from Vorob'yaninov's old house that she happened to buy in the auction (in one of the twelve stools of the complete set a treasure is concealed under the upholstery), assures Elochka that her dressing-gown (actually made out of her husband's tolstovka,***** a long belted blouse) is trimmed with a much finer fur, that of Shanghai leopards (shankhaiskie barsy, note the "barsy"!).
On the other hand, sobaka = kolbasa (sausage) - L. It reminds me of the piece of cheap lyubitel'skaya kolbasa that hungry Father Fyodor (who also hunts for Vorob'yaninov's furniture and who returns penniless from Batum where he rummaged the wrong set of stools) steals from Vorob'yaninov and Bender when they meet on the Military Georgian Road, after which he promptly climbs a steep inaccessible cliff and can not go down anymore. On the next day the remains of the sausage are stolen from poor Father Fyodor by an eagle. He reproachfully says to the bird: "Akh, orlusha, orlusha, bol'shaya ty sterva!" (Ah dear eagle, what a stinker you are!"). On Antiterra, Sterva (which literally means "dead animal," "carrion") is a place name. As Lucette tells Van (2.5), Ada, who, like her mother, became an actress, regularly goes to Sterva for auditions.
Note that sterva = versta ("verst," a Russian measure of distance equivalent to 3500 English feet, or 1.067 kilometers; this word also occurs in Ada: "Ten miles [from the railway station to Radugalet, the 'other Ardis'], she [Ada] guessed. Ten versts, said Van:" 1.24) and Batum = tumba ("Morris pillar"). Cf. "The old Morris pillar, upon which the present Queen of Portugal figured once as an actress..." (Ada, Part Four). The Queen of Portugal is Lenore Colline, the former actress (to whom Ada bears a physical resemblance; G. A. Vronsky, the film director, told Ada that she could serve one day as a stand-in for Lenore Colline: 2.9) who married Alphonse II of Portugal. In the "The Twelve Chairs" Ostap Bender accuses Vorob'yaninov, during their stay in Pyatigorsk, of "alfonsizm" (for the meaning of this word, see my article on Kim Beauharnais in the latest Nabokovian).
* short of Serafima, female given name that comes from serafim (Russian for "seraph")
**called thus because of her extremely limited vocabulary. The chapter in which she figures begins: "According to calculations of the researchers, William Shakespeare's vocabulary consists of 12000 words. The vocabulary of a negro from the cannibal tribe called "Mumbo-Jumbo" consists of 300 words."
***Demon, Van's father, jokingly calls him "Tobakovich" (2.10), which reminds one of Sobakevich, a character in Gogol's "Dead Souls" (after whom the cocker spaniel in Nabokov's Pnin was named).
****The Antiterran name of Paris, short of "Lutecia." By the way, Lute = Leute (German for "men") - e. Cf. Man, as New York is known on Antiterra.
*****cf. bayronka (from Bayron, the Russian spelling of Byron), a piece of clothing Van wears in one of the photos taken by Kim (2.7).
With your permission, I'll leave that theme to you and you may say whatever you want about my method (which, I repeat, you won't grasp from these fragments, just as one can not get the idea of disposition of rooms in a house from merely having seen the flowers on a window-sill), while I turn to another alphabet letter, trying to solve yet other tantalizing problem.
Alexey Sklyarenko
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Another interesting word introduced in this little chapter of Ada is sobaka (dog). Cf. Ada's words to Dack whom she just took a blood-soaked tampon: "Nekhoroshaya, nekhoroshaya sobaka," crooned Ada... as she gathered into her arms the now lootless but completely unabashed bad dog" (1.11). Sobaka = Sobak + a. Fima* Sobak is a character in Ilf and Petrov's "The Twelve Chairs," a cultured girl whose vocabulary consists of about one hundred and eighty words (her friend Ellochka the cannibal** successfully manages with only thirty). In Fima's vocabulary there is one such word that Ellochka couldn't even have dreamt of: gomoseksualizm ("homosexuality"). In Ada, Cordula de Prey (Ada's school mate whom Van suspects of being a Lesbian and Ada's lover and who later becomes Van's girlfriend) marries Ivan G. Tobak.*** When Van meets Cordula (now Mrs. Tobak) in Lute,**** she is bending over two unhappy poodlets. Van greets her with the lines he knew since his school days: "The Veens speak only to Tobaks, / But Tobaks speak only to dogs." (When translated back to Russian, the language in which Van addresses his former mistress, as the rhyme seems to suggest, these lines go as follows: "Viny govoryat lish' s Tobakami, / A Tobaki govoryat lish' s sobakami.")
Interestingly, while dog = God, sobak ("of the dogs," stressed, unlike the surname Sobak, on the second syllable) = Boska (Polish for "of God;" cf. Matka Boska, Mother of God) = skoba (Russian for "cramp," "clamp"). In his poem "Dikaya koshka, armyanskaya rech'..." ("The wild cat, Armenian tongue," 1930) Mandelstam compares letters of the Armenian alphabet to blacksmith's tongs (kazhdaya bukva - kuznechnye kleshchi) and Armenian words, to cramp-irons (kazhdoe slovo - skoba). On the other hand, Tobak - t = Sobak - s = Koba (Stalin's nickname, after the hero of "The Parricide," a novel by the Georgian writer Kazbegi).
In a conversation with Van (2.8), Ada calls Cordula "Mme Perwitzky:" "I know somebody who is not simply a cat, but a polecat, and that's Cordula Tobacco, alias Mme Perwitsky." According to Wikipedia (http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pelzarten) and the 1911 edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica (http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/1911_Encyclop%C3%A6dia_Britannica/Bulgaria/Description), Perwitzky is the fur of the rare tiger polecat, Foetorius sarmaticus. Which instantly reminded me of Ellochka the cannibal's "Mexican jerboa" ("meksikansiy tushkan," as she calls tushkanchik). Ostap Bender, who wants to get from Ellochka the two Gambs stools from Vorob'yaninov's old house that she happened to buy in the auction (in one of the twelve stools of the complete set a treasure is concealed under the upholstery), assures Elochka that her dressing-gown (actually made out of her husband's tolstovka,***** a long belted blouse) is trimmed with a much finer fur, that of Shanghai leopards (shankhaiskie barsy, note the "barsy"!).
On the other hand, sobaka = kolbasa (sausage) - L. It reminds me of the piece of cheap lyubitel'skaya kolbasa that hungry Father Fyodor (who also hunts for Vorob'yaninov's furniture and who returns penniless from Batum where he rummaged the wrong set of stools) steals from Vorob'yaninov and Bender when they meet on the Military Georgian Road, after which he promptly climbs a steep inaccessible cliff and can not go down anymore. On the next day the remains of the sausage are stolen from poor Father Fyodor by an eagle. He reproachfully says to the bird: "Akh, orlusha, orlusha, bol'shaya ty sterva!" (Ah dear eagle, what a stinker you are!"). On Antiterra, Sterva (which literally means "dead animal," "carrion") is a place name. As Lucette tells Van (2.5), Ada, who, like her mother, became an actress, regularly goes to Sterva for auditions.
Note that sterva = versta ("verst," a Russian measure of distance equivalent to 3500 English feet, or 1.067 kilometers; this word also occurs in Ada: "Ten miles [from the railway station to Radugalet, the 'other Ardis'], she [Ada] guessed. Ten versts, said Van:" 1.24) and Batum = tumba ("Morris pillar"). Cf. "The old Morris pillar, upon which the present Queen of Portugal figured once as an actress..." (Ada, Part Four). The Queen of Portugal is Lenore Colline, the former actress (to whom Ada bears a physical resemblance; G. A. Vronsky, the film director, told Ada that she could serve one day as a stand-in for Lenore Colline: 2.9) who married Alphonse II of Portugal. In the "The Twelve Chairs" Ostap Bender accuses Vorob'yaninov, during their stay in Pyatigorsk, of "alfonsizm" (for the meaning of this word, see my article on Kim Beauharnais in the latest Nabokovian).
* short of Serafima, female given name that comes from serafim (Russian for "seraph")
**called thus because of her extremely limited vocabulary. The chapter in which she figures begins: "According to calculations of the researchers, William Shakespeare's vocabulary consists of 12000 words. The vocabulary of a negro from the cannibal tribe called "Mumbo-Jumbo" consists of 300 words."
***Demon, Van's father, jokingly calls him "Tobakovich" (2.10), which reminds one of Sobakevich, a character in Gogol's "Dead Souls" (after whom the cocker spaniel in Nabokov's Pnin was named).
****The Antiterran name of Paris, short of "Lutecia." By the way, Lute = Leute (German for "men") - e. Cf. Man, as New York is known on Antiterra.
*****cf. bayronka (from Bayron, the Russian spelling of Byron), a piece of clothing Van wears in one of the photos taken by Kim (2.7).
With your permission, I'll leave that theme to you and you may say whatever you want about my method (which, I repeat, you won't grasp from these fragments, just as one can not get the idea of disposition of rooms in a house from merely having seen the flowers on a window-sill), while I turn to another alphabet letter, trying to solve yet other tantalizing problem.
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/