Dear List,
 
I once posted a message about the word "Alptraum", mispelled as "Albtraum" in the newspaper announcement of VN's German translation of "Speak Memory".
At the time I was trying to establish a link with "Transparent Things" and the oscilations between "Alpentraum" ( Alpine dreams...) and "Alptraum" ( Nightmare).  I was not successful. Yesterday I picked up "ADA" to check if the mention to Attic, Stabian girl and Pompeiianella might point to Freud's 1906 work about Wilhelm Jensen's novel "Gradiva". There was no way to discover any connection...
In between, the word "Alptraum" came back through Nabokov's various references, in ADA, to the Alps, alpine flowers, Dr. Lapiner and Dr.Alpiner.
Might VN have hidden any nightmare word-play association to the Alps? 
 
There were the already explored word-plays and allusions concerning "nightmares":
(a) "...protected from nightmares and stallions" ( Lucette).
(b) Van had a ‘verbal’ nightmare, caused, maybe, by the musky smell in the Miramas (Bouches Rouges-du-Rhône) Villa Venus.
 
Below are sentences that gained, for me, a special emotional flavor when I  thought about Alp and Nightmare, added to rouge (red & hot) and rude.( Freudians: a mockery with castration anxiety?Oedipus? Partial repressions?)
 
1. Aqua:  I know you want to examine my pudendron, the Hairy Alpine Rose in her album[ ...] the anguish increased to unendurable massivity and nightmare dimensions, making her scream and vomit.      
 
2. highly romantic blizzard, in a mountain refuge on Sex Rouge, where a Dr Alpiner, general practitioner and gentian-lover, sat providentially waiting near a rude red stove ...
 
3. the old Cyrillitsa, a nightmare alphabet which Dan had never been able to master... 
 
4. ‘Van,’ she said, ‘I must tell you my dream before I forget. You and I were high up in the Alps — Why on earth are you wearing townclothes?’ (...) she had always known that disaster would come today or tomorrow...
 
5.This was a rude, stout article with a convenient grip and an alpenstockish point capable of gouging out translucent bulging eyes (a nightmarish point)
 
6. We all know those old wardrobes in old hotels in the Old World subalpine zone. At first one opens them ...the growing groan...the hellish hinge is taken by surprise... Van and Ada... knew that certain memories had to be left closed, lest they wrench every nerve of the soul with their monstrous moan.. ( skeleton in a wardrobe?)
 

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