JM: The references to an elm tree
"breaking into leaf," stemming from an ancient
florentine legend, explicitly point to this city's patron
saint, St. Zenobius, as well as to his miracles of restoring the dead
to life, as B.Boyd succintly informs in Ada Online*.
I was already familiar with a less ancient
(medieval) legend about a Minnesänger, Tannhäuser, as it is
presented in R.Wagner's 1845 opera "Tannhäuser und der Sängerkrieg aus Wartburg" (related to
sexual excesses in Mount Venus and to religious penance). Recently, another
story about a piece of dead wood from which fresh leaves
miraculously sprout, now to signal Allah's forgiveness, came to
my attention.
Its
interest lies in that it is written by a Russian contemporary of Tchekov,
Gorki and Andreiev, but whose path may one day have crossed Nabokov's in
Paris: Aleksandr Ivanovith Kuprin (1870-1938). His short-story, referred to
as "an oriental legend," is named "Demir-Kaia." Kuprin left Russia in 1919
to live in Paris, where he stayed until 1937, when he returned to
Leningrad, a year before his death.
I don't know if this additional version about a flourishing piece of
wood is relevant but, considering Nabokov's multiple allusions, I thought it was
worthwhile to bring it up in the Nab-List. The meaning associated to the
sprouting wood-pole, in Tannhäuser and Demir-Kaia is of a "heavenly pardon,"
unlike the "revival" indicated by miraculous Zenobius.
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* -Excerpts from "Ada or Ardor" [ "... the guide will go
on demonstrating as he did this very morning in Florence a silly pillar
commemorating, he said, the "elmo" that broke into leaf when they carried
stone-heavy-dead St. Zeus by it through the gradual, gradual shade..."]
and B.Boyd's annotations on 23.29-32: St.
Zenobius was a patron saint and bishop of Florence in the 5th century. When his
remains were being carried through the city, to be deposited under the high
altar, his body was "thrown against the trunk of a withered elm . . . and the
tree which had for years been dead and dried up, burst into fresh leaves" (A.
Jameson, Sacred and Legendary
Art, II, 102-03).