Alexey Sklyarenko: re Blok and burning
peat bogs: "It can be proved, I think, by published records
that Alexander Blok was even then noting in his diary the very peat smoke I saw,
and the wrecked sky." (Speak, Memory, Chapter Twelve,
2)
JM: Do you think that Nabokov, in
ADA, could have been criticizing the ecological dangers of using peat
to obtain energy, when he describes Lettrocalamity and the
Burning Barn episode? There are the names related to it, the lineage
of Veen that stops with Van, Ada and Lucette, Torfyanka, the flavita
word Torfyanuyu (peaty), the ghostly Cinderella-Blanche de
Torf variations (La Torbière).
I suppose that, although the dangers of flammable
peat bogs and their drainage represent a real threat, independently of their
importance for the economy, all the peats and torfs must have another meaning,
as a metaphor of something passing through Cinderella (ie,ashes)
and that's connected to the work of Alexander
Blok?? (I read Brian Boyd's important
"Ada, the Bog and the Garden: or, Straw, Fluff, and Peat:" too long ago to
recollect this link and I don't have it at hand right
now).