Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0020525, Fri, 13 Aug 2010 13:57:49 +0400

Subject
newspapers & homosexuality
Date
Body
In a recent post I quoted the couplet:

Душа горит на сотне вертелов -
Лишь вспомню переулок Эртелев.

(I have but to think of the Ertelev lane,
And my soul is burning on hundred spits.)

and Saltykov-Shchedrin's epigram on Novoe Vremya (the newspaper that had its office and printing house in the Ertelev lane):

Неуклонно идти вперёд -
Но через задний проход

(Steadily go straightforward,
but via the back passage).

вертел* + к = клеврет**
клеврет + а = левретка***

Cf. entry in Pushkin's diary (Jan. 8, 1835): "Его клеврет Дундуков (дурак и бардаш) преследует меня своим ценсурным комитетом." (His [Uvarov's] minion Dundukov (a fool and bardache) persecutes me with his censorship committee.)

Bardache is French for "passive male homosexual". Pushkin was mortally wounded in his duel with Georges d'Anthes, Baron van Heeckeren's adopted son and bardache.

In Ada (1.42), Van fights a pistol duel and is wounded by Captain Tapper, a homosexual.

VN's faithful Zoilos, the critic Georgiy Adamovich (d'Anthes's namesake), "had really only two passions life: Russian poetry and French sailors".

On the other hand, in Speak, Memory (pp. 147-151) VN tells the story of his father's duel (cancelled at the last moment) with Suvorin fils, the editor of Novoe Vremya.

Suvorin + Uvarov + stalk = Suvorov + kurva + Stalin

Uvarov - minister of public education in the !830s, a target of Pushkin's epigrams
Suvorov - Russian field marshal (1729-1800)
kurva - Russ., whore

*spit
**minion
***Italian greyhound

Alexey Sklyarenko

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