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Query re "tyrant Shiusin" mentioned in GIFT/DAR
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Date: Thu, 13 Jun 2002 08:54:46 +0200
From: "Dieter E. Zimmer" <mail@d-e-zimmer.de>
To: "Don Barton Johnson" <chtodel@gte.net>
A query to the accumulated expertise of the nabokv-l correspondents:
Who the devil is the "tyrant Shiusin"?
In "The Gift", p.122, there is this sentence: "... for some reason I recalled the tyrant Shiusin, who used to cut open pregnant women out of curiosity and who, one cold morning, seeing some porters fording a stream, ordered their legs to be amputated at the shin in order to inspect the condition of the marrow in their bones."
The name is clearly Chinese. I have gone through books on Chinese history and the history of Chinese medicine and found no such person, though there were other amputations. So I have come to doubt that Shiusin was a historical personality. He may, however, be a literary character, but not in the "Tripitaka" and the preceding accounts of the Chinese travelers who, in the first six centuries A.D., went to Central Asia and India in search of Buddhist relics and writings.
Would anybody have an idea where to search for elusive Shiusin?
In turn, I have a suggestion to offer. In "Pnin", p.168, Pnin mentions a new university course he is planning. It is to be on Tyranny. "... when we speak of injustice, we forget Armenian massacres, tortures which Tibet invented, colonists in Africa.... The history of man is the history of pain!" Tibetan tortures are a surprise in this context, for old Tibet was not known for imaginative tortures. According to one Horace della Penna, they consisted mainly in flogging, dipping men naked in cold water, smearing wounds with salt. My suggestion is that the remark goes back to a book by A. Henry Savage Landor, "In the Forbidden Land," 1897, that Nabokov seems to have known. It has pages and pages about the tortures allegedly inflicted on the author during a voyage into Tibet. I personally doubt its veracity. It reads more like a novel, or rather like a sado-masochistic fantasy.
Dieter E. Zimmer
June 13, 2002
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