Subject
Fw: Proposal & query: Bagration Island: solution and riddle
From
Date
Body
Message
----- Original Message -----
From: Mark Bennett
To: 'Vladimir Nabokov Forum'
Sent: Thursday, April 10, 2003 4:16 PM
Subject: RE: Proposal & query: Bagration Island: solution and riddle
The "Bugger" and "Beggar" bit does refer to Herzen. In one of the early Nabokov-Wilson letters VN discusses a book review that he has submitted to Bunny for placement in the New Republic, whose literary editor he was at the time. As I recall, in the review VN twits Herzen for confusing the use "beggar" with "bugger" in the British idiom, and using this confusion as evidence for incorrigible British class consciousness (something about the mercenary nature of British culture being revealed by the fact that the most common epithet used by Britons was "beggar" ["bugger"].) VN tells Bunny in the letter that he can omit the "bugger, beggar bit" if Bunny thinks it appropriate. I believe in his response, Bunny takes the opportunity to sternly inform VN that puns are not a device used by serious American literary critics. So early were the seeds of discord sown!
-----Original Message-----
From: D. Barton Johnson [mailto:chtodel@cox.net]
Sent: Wednesday, April 09, 2003 9:14 PM
To: NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU
Subject: Proposal & query: Bagration Island: solution and riddle
EDNOTE: See EDNOTE at end. Can anyone locate my recollection re Herzen in VN's oeuvre?
----- Original Message -----
From: Brian Boyd (FOA ENG)
To: 'Vladimir Nabokov Forum'
Sent: Tuesday, April 08, 2003 10:48 PM
Subject: RE: Bagration Island: solution and riddle
From Brian Boyd:
A solution and a new riddle in search of a solution.
In Lolita's murder scene, Quilty tries to tempt or distract Chum-toting Humbert with an almost random spray of often perverse delights:
I have an absolutely unique collection of erotica upstairs. Just to mention one item: the in folio de-luxe Bagration Island by the explorer and psychoanalyst Melanie Weiss, a remarkable lady, a remarkable work-drop that gun-with photographs of eight hundred and something male organs she examined and measured in 1932 on Bagration, in the Barda Sea, very illuminating graphs, plotted with love under pleasant skies-drop that gun.
As Appel notes, this invented Bagration Island plays on the name of Prince Peter Bagration, the general felled at the battle of Borodino. It is also a play on the names of islands in the Arctic, Atlantic and Pacific Oceans named after Russian military figures. In the Pacific, for instance, in Alaska, near Juneau (which features in Lolita under the name of Gray Star) lie Baranof Island, Kruzof Island, Kupreanof Island, near a Petersburg and a Wrangell (and near Sitka, which features in Ada), and many more. In the South Atlantic, the South Sandwich Islands include Zavodovzki and Leskov Islands; South Georgia includes an Annenkov Island.
My doctoral student, Matthew Brillinger, has noted that Bagration Potage is a kind of soup, cream of veal with asparagus tips. (See http://www.londonfoodfilmfiesta.co.uk/Filmma~1/slavic%20food.htm).
Asparagus spears are, as it were, natural mimics of the "male organs" in Quilty's folio volume, especially in Europe where the fat purplish or whitish varieties predominate; Ada Veen makes the most of this in her voluptuous way of swallowing asparagus at the dinner scene in Ardis the Second (ADA I.38).
I would now like to propose that in this context Bagration must be a play on "buggeration," a long-time playful elaboration of "bugger," presumably formed on the model of "damnation" as used to dilate and dilute the expletive "damn."
Nabokov complains about not having a native speaker's English. He does brilliant things with words gleaned from dictionaries, from "botkin" to "borborygmic," but he shows here he can also do rather well with words he has never found in any lexicon: buggeration isn't in even the latest and least prudish OED.
I suspect there is more to it, all the same. For some reason, Nabokov associates "buggary" and islands and ethnography and sexology again in ADA I.21:
Another hearty laugh shook Van when he unearthed for entomologically-minded Ada the following passage in a reliable History of Mating Habits. "Some of the perils and ridicule which attend the missionary position adopted for mating purposes by our puritanical intelligentsia and so justly derided by the 'primitive' but healthy-minded natives of the Begouri Islands are pointed out by a prominent French orientalist [thick footnote, skipped here] who describes the mating habits of the fly Serromyia amorata Poupart. Copulation takes place with both ventral surfaces pressed together and the mouths touching. . . . "
Why on Earth or Antiterra do these things link up in Nabokov's mind?
-----------------------------------
EDNOTE. To add to the potpourri, I have a very hazy recollection (not handily verifiable) that somewhere in Nabokland there is a posited pseudo-correlation between "buggery" and "beggary." The context had something to do with some Russian with minimal English and a bad ear who heard the two as identical and inferred that the English mind equated poverty and sodomy. At first I thought it must be Kornei Chukovsky in Drugie berega but that didn't check out. I now suspect it was an andecdote about Alexander Herzen (who once twitted one of his Moscow U. professors for failing to discriminate between "foutre"and "foudre".
----- Original Message -----
From: Mark Bennett
To: 'Vladimir Nabokov Forum'
Sent: Thursday, April 10, 2003 4:16 PM
Subject: RE: Proposal & query: Bagration Island: solution and riddle
The "Bugger" and "Beggar" bit does refer to Herzen. In one of the early Nabokov-Wilson letters VN discusses a book review that he has submitted to Bunny for placement in the New Republic, whose literary editor he was at the time. As I recall, in the review VN twits Herzen for confusing the use "beggar" with "bugger" in the British idiom, and using this confusion as evidence for incorrigible British class consciousness (something about the mercenary nature of British culture being revealed by the fact that the most common epithet used by Britons was "beggar" ["bugger"].) VN tells Bunny in the letter that he can omit the "bugger, beggar bit" if Bunny thinks it appropriate. I believe in his response, Bunny takes the opportunity to sternly inform VN that puns are not a device used by serious American literary critics. So early were the seeds of discord sown!
-----Original Message-----
From: D. Barton Johnson [mailto:chtodel@cox.net]
Sent: Wednesday, April 09, 2003 9:14 PM
To: NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU
Subject: Proposal & query: Bagration Island: solution and riddle
EDNOTE: See EDNOTE at end. Can anyone locate my recollection re Herzen in VN's oeuvre?
----- Original Message -----
From: Brian Boyd (FOA ENG)
To: 'Vladimir Nabokov Forum'
Sent: Tuesday, April 08, 2003 10:48 PM
Subject: RE: Bagration Island: solution and riddle
From Brian Boyd:
A solution and a new riddle in search of a solution.
In Lolita's murder scene, Quilty tries to tempt or distract Chum-toting Humbert with an almost random spray of often perverse delights:
I have an absolutely unique collection of erotica upstairs. Just to mention one item: the in folio de-luxe Bagration Island by the explorer and psychoanalyst Melanie Weiss, a remarkable lady, a remarkable work-drop that gun-with photographs of eight hundred and something male organs she examined and measured in 1932 on Bagration, in the Barda Sea, very illuminating graphs, plotted with love under pleasant skies-drop that gun.
As Appel notes, this invented Bagration Island plays on the name of Prince Peter Bagration, the general felled at the battle of Borodino. It is also a play on the names of islands in the Arctic, Atlantic and Pacific Oceans named after Russian military figures. In the Pacific, for instance, in Alaska, near Juneau (which features in Lolita under the name of Gray Star) lie Baranof Island, Kruzof Island, Kupreanof Island, near a Petersburg and a Wrangell (and near Sitka, which features in Ada), and many more. In the South Atlantic, the South Sandwich Islands include Zavodovzki and Leskov Islands; South Georgia includes an Annenkov Island.
My doctoral student, Matthew Brillinger, has noted that Bagration Potage is a kind of soup, cream of veal with asparagus tips. (See http://www.londonfoodfilmfiesta.co.uk/Filmma~1/slavic%20food.htm).
Asparagus spears are, as it were, natural mimics of the "male organs" in Quilty's folio volume, especially in Europe where the fat purplish or whitish varieties predominate; Ada Veen makes the most of this in her voluptuous way of swallowing asparagus at the dinner scene in Ardis the Second (ADA I.38).
I would now like to propose that in this context Bagration must be a play on "buggeration," a long-time playful elaboration of "bugger," presumably formed on the model of "damnation" as used to dilate and dilute the expletive "damn."
Nabokov complains about not having a native speaker's English. He does brilliant things with words gleaned from dictionaries, from "botkin" to "borborygmic," but he shows here he can also do rather well with words he has never found in any lexicon: buggeration isn't in even the latest and least prudish OED.
I suspect there is more to it, all the same. For some reason, Nabokov associates "buggary" and islands and ethnography and sexology again in ADA I.21:
Another hearty laugh shook Van when he unearthed for entomologically-minded Ada the following passage in a reliable History of Mating Habits. "Some of the perils and ridicule which attend the missionary position adopted for mating purposes by our puritanical intelligentsia and so justly derided by the 'primitive' but healthy-minded natives of the Begouri Islands are pointed out by a prominent French orientalist [thick footnote, skipped here] who describes the mating habits of the fly Serromyia amorata Poupart. Copulation takes place with both ventral surfaces pressed together and the mouths touching. . . . "
Why on Earth or Antiterra do these things link up in Nabokov's mind?
-----------------------------------
EDNOTE. To add to the potpourri, I have a very hazy recollection (not handily verifiable) that somewhere in Nabokland there is a posited pseudo-correlation between "buggery" and "beggary." The context had something to do with some Russian with minimal English and a bad ear who heard the two as identical and inferred that the English mind equated poverty and sodomy. At first I thought it must be Kornei Chukovsky in Drugie berega but that didn't check out. I now suspect it was an andecdote about Alexander Herzen (who once twitted one of his Moscow U. professors for failing to discriminate between "foutre"and "foudre".