Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0021453, Sat, 12 Mar 2011 23:45:10 +0300

Subject
Glass city and glass houses
Date
Body
As I pointed out before, in Tynyanov's story Voskovaya Persona ("Wax Person") Stockholm is mentioned as Stekol'nyi gorod ("Glass city"). In Tynyanov's novel Pushkin (Part One, Chapter Four, 5), Vasiliy Lvovich Pushkin (the poet's uncle and a poet himself) praises Mme Recamier's mansion to his Moscow friends: Steklo, steklo i steklo. Vezde steklo ("Glass, glass and glass. Glass is all around"). Vasiliy Lvovich Pushkin is the author of Opasnyi sosed ("The Dangerous Neighbor," 1811). Shade's dangerous neighbor, Kinbote once tells him: "People who live in glass houses should not write poems."

According to Kinbote, after line 274 of Shade's poem there is a false start in the draft: "I like my name: Shade, Ombre, almost 'man' / In Spanish..."

In Tynyanov's Pushkin (Part One, Chapter Six, 2), Montfort (Pushkin's tutor, "a homeless Frenchman") recites Scarron's famous lines about the Otherworld:

Tout pres de l'ombre d'un rocher
J'apercu l'ombre d'un cocher,
Qui, tenant l'ombre d'une brosse,
En frottait l'ombre d'un carrosse.

Tynyanov + bulat = Buyanov + altyn + t

Tynyanov - Yuri Tynyanov (1894-1943), Soviet writer, critic and literature scholar
bulat - damask steel; sword; cf. Pushkin: Zoloto i bulat ("Gold and Steel")
Buyanov - the hero of V. L. Pushkin's "The Dangerous Neighbor" (and a character in Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, the author's first cousin)
altyn - Tatar, gold; a three kopeck coin

Alexey Sklyarenko

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