Subject
Re: Lenin-plus-rab anagram
From
Date
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Alexey: Lermentov’s Nostril-damus Prediction is wonderful. Spaseeeba!
You claimed recently that while your anagrams might be irrelevant, at least
they were never be-laboured. Your current offering confirms the latter
claim! The ubiquitous Slavonic root ‘enin’ survives unmangled on both sides
of your equation, which certainly reduces your be-labouring.
To add more VN-relevance to this posting, I report my THRILL as an early
Brit owner of amazon’s Kindle e-book reader that it worked out-of-the-box
and within a few minutes’ browsing, I had downloaded Nina L Krushcheva’s
Imagining Nabokov. Within a few pages, some of my earlier list enquiries
(VN’s attitude to Lenin and the ‘alien’ Westernization of Russia) were being
addressed.
Incidentally, NLK steps dangerously into the linguistic mine-field of the
deflated Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis by claiming that the Russian use of mne
rather than ya, as in mne kholodno; mne grustno (it’s cold to me; it’s a
shame to me, rather than I am cold; I’m ashamed) somehow betrays a deep
secret lurking in the Russian soul:
“These grammatical forms reflect a culture in which people refuse
responsibility for their feelings, sensations, and emotional experiences. It
seems that is not ‘I’ who is the master of my feelings but someone else,
invisibly manipulating my fortune and misfortune. The Russain ya always sees
itself as an object of action, not its subject, leaving it to the collective
we to define the world.” (location 146-7)
This reads SO convincingly that it’s a crying shame to be linguistically
FALSE! So many of the world’s 6,000 extant languages use variants of to-me
in place of I-am (or I-have). The Irish forainmneacha réamhfhoclacha
(prepositional pronoun) to cite a familiar nearby example, can hardly be
accused of revealing some inherent cultural tendency towards shedding
personal responsibility. Come outside and say that! You need to wrestle with
the endless, accidental, grammatical vagaries of language, even within the
same Indo-European family, to become suspicious of Sapir-Whorf.
Kindle (reviving the old gerund kindling*) will be vieux chapeau to American
VN-listers to whom the gadget has been available for some time. To them I
address this observation and query:
Besides NLK, there are 7 other Nabokov-search-matching titles in the on-line
Kindle catalogue. But no works by VN. Is this a question of COPYRIGHT? Can
DN comment?
Stan Kelly-Bootle
* One under-informed letter to the London Times complained about use of
Kindling and Blackberrying as nasty American ‘verbing of gadget nouns!’
On 09/04/2010 21:10, "Alexey Sklyarenko" <skylark05@MAIL.RU> wrote:
> I mentioned in my previous post Arbenin, the hero of Lermontov's play
> "Маскарад" (The Masked Ball, 1836) who poisons his wife, because
>
> Arbenin + L = rab + Lenin
> (rab is Russian for "slave"; L is for Lermontov)
>
> Among young Lermontov's poems there is "Предсказание" (Prediction, 1830) that
> begins:
>
> Настанет год, России чёрный год,
> когда царей корона упадёт...
>
> The year will come, Russia's black year
> when the tsars' crown will fall...
>
> Alexey Sklyarenko
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Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/
You claimed recently that while your anagrams might be irrelevant, at least
they were never be-laboured. Your current offering confirms the latter
claim! The ubiquitous Slavonic root ‘enin’ survives unmangled on both sides
of your equation, which certainly reduces your be-labouring.
To add more VN-relevance to this posting, I report my THRILL as an early
Brit owner of amazon’s Kindle e-book reader that it worked out-of-the-box
and within a few minutes’ browsing, I had downloaded Nina L Krushcheva’s
Imagining Nabokov. Within a few pages, some of my earlier list enquiries
(VN’s attitude to Lenin and the ‘alien’ Westernization of Russia) were being
addressed.
Incidentally, NLK steps dangerously into the linguistic mine-field of the
deflated Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis by claiming that the Russian use of mne
rather than ya, as in mne kholodno; mne grustno (it’s cold to me; it’s a
shame to me, rather than I am cold; I’m ashamed) somehow betrays a deep
secret lurking in the Russian soul:
“These grammatical forms reflect a culture in which people refuse
responsibility for their feelings, sensations, and emotional experiences. It
seems that is not ‘I’ who is the master of my feelings but someone else,
invisibly manipulating my fortune and misfortune. The Russain ya always sees
itself as an object of action, not its subject, leaving it to the collective
we to define the world.” (location 146-7)
This reads SO convincingly that it’s a crying shame to be linguistically
FALSE! So many of the world’s 6,000 extant languages use variants of to-me
in place of I-am (or I-have). The Irish forainmneacha réamhfhoclacha
(prepositional pronoun) to cite a familiar nearby example, can hardly be
accused of revealing some inherent cultural tendency towards shedding
personal responsibility. Come outside and say that! You need to wrestle with
the endless, accidental, grammatical vagaries of language, even within the
same Indo-European family, to become suspicious of Sapir-Whorf.
Kindle (reviving the old gerund kindling*) will be vieux chapeau to American
VN-listers to whom the gadget has been available for some time. To them I
address this observation and query:
Besides NLK, there are 7 other Nabokov-search-matching titles in the on-line
Kindle catalogue. But no works by VN. Is this a question of COPYRIGHT? Can
DN comment?
Stan Kelly-Bootle
* One under-informed letter to the London Times complained about use of
Kindling and Blackberrying as nasty American ‘verbing of gadget nouns!’
On 09/04/2010 21:10, "Alexey Sklyarenko" <skylark05@MAIL.RU> wrote:
> I mentioned in my previous post Arbenin, the hero of Lermontov's play
> "Маскарад" (The Masked Ball, 1836) who poisons his wife, because
>
> Arbenin + L = rab + Lenin
> (rab is Russian for "slave"; L is for Lermontov)
>
> Among young Lermontov's poems there is "Предсказание" (Prediction, 1830) that
> begins:
>
> Настанет год, России чёрный год,
> когда царей корона упадёт...
>
> The year will come, Russia's black year
> when the tsars' crown will fall...
>
> Alexey Sklyarenko
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/