I've been thinking for some time about the multilingual wordplay in ADA's "Morzhey," and I guess I can cite another instance in Nabokov when the themes of sex and death are neatly combined in a single word (also a place name) in a kind of the book's final counterpoint. I'm speaking of the Bagration Island in LOLITA. In the famous scene of Quilty's murder, the latter tries to tempt Humbert with various precious things in his household. One of them is his

"absolutely unique collection of erotica upstairs. Just to mention one item: the infolio de-luxe Bagration Island by the explorer and psychoanalist Melanie Weiss, a remarkable lady, a remarkable work - drop that gun - with photographs of eight hundred and something male organs she examined and measured in 1932 on Bagration, in the Barda Sea, very illuminating graphs, plotted with love under pleasant skies - drop that gun..." (LOLITA, part 2, chapter 35).

Brian Boyd has suggested last year (Nabokv-L, the posting of April 10, 2003) that the island's name is a play on "buggeration," the slang elaboration of "bugger." But I suspect that the wordplay is much more complex here and covers, like the "Morzhey" pun, three languages. In his Annotations (unfortunately, I don't have them at hand),

Alfred Appel notes that the island's invented name plays on the name of Prince Peter Bagration, the general felled at the battle of Borodino. "The Barda Sea" seems to hint (via Russ. "brada", a form of "boroda", beard) at Borodino, the name of the village near which the battle took place. Now, we know from history (and from Tolstoy's "Voina i Mir") that, in the battle of Borodino, Prince Bagration and the First Army he commanded had to defend, according to the disposition, the so-called "bagrationovy fleshi" (from "fleche," a fieldwork consisting of two faces forming a salient angle with an open gorge). "The fleches of Bagration " are mentioned in Tolstoy's novel: vol. 3, part 2, XXXIII, and elsewhere. This word, "flesh'," has no other meaning in Russian and is extremely rare. For that reason, it tends to be confused with another, much more common, word: "plesh'" ("a bald patch"). In fact, one can easily imagine that many Russian soldiers who took part in the battle mispronounced it as "bagrationovy pleshi." But the word "plesh'" happens to mean also "glans penis" and in that sense it was widely used in Russian pornographic poetry (see Barkov & co.). Pushkin, who is usually believed to be the author of the obscene ballad "Ten' Barkova" (Barkov's Shadow, 1815), uses it several times in his poem (cf., for instance, ll. 25-28: "Povis!..votshche svoey rukoy / Eldu Malashka drochit, / I plesh' szhimaet pyaternyoy, / I volosy eroshit!" May be it would be better to leave this untranslated. Anyway, my English is to chaste to translate this accurately).

The couvert wordplay flesh'/plesh' seems the likelier as there are other allusions to Tolstoy's novel in that very chapter of LOLITA. A little earlier in it, Quilty says to Humbert that a Frenchman once translated his The Proud Flesh as La Fierte de la Chair (changed to "Zhivoe myaso," the live flesh, and "La Vie de la Chair" in VN's Russian translation of LOLITA). In "Voina i Mir," Prince Andrey Bolkonski sees, a few days before the battle of Borodino, naked soldiers bathing in the pond and thinks of them: "flesh, body, la chair a canon!" looking at his own body, too (vol. 3, part 2, V). When, he gets wounded in the battle and is brought to the field hospital, he remembers that French phrase again (XXXVII). It may be worth to note that during the battle, Andrey himself plays the role of "cannon fodder." He gets mortally wounded by the French grenade, or "a ball" (again that double entendre), that has exploded right in front of him (note that he could have escaped death by simply falling off his feet, but he remains standing, because he is too proud and doesn't want his soldiers think him a coward).

Finally, The Proud Flesh mistranslated by a Frenchman is probably a title of some work by Quilty. And Tolstoy's "Voina i Mir" is the title which is often, no, almost always, mistranslated. It should be "War and World" (or "War and Community"), not "War and Peace" in English. In the old Russian orthography, the words "mir," world, and "mir," peace, were spelled differently (they are full homonyms now). In Tolstoy's spelling (m, the Latin i, r, hard sign), the word meant "world," not "peace."