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Re: [Fwd: Re: [Fwd: Kim Beauharnais]]
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Alexey Sklyarenko quotes: "The late Sumerechnikov, American precursor of the Lumière brothers, had taken Ada's maternal uncle in profile with upcheeked violin, a doomed youth, after his farewell concert. (1.6) and adds Vivian Darkbloom's 'Notes to Ada': Sumerechnikov: his name comes from Russ., sumerki, twilight..."and takes us to Van's coinage: "sumerographs" associated to "photo"(light) and others sources ("the brothers Lumière), with the lucky haphazard addition of ancient Sumerians and their inaugural cuneiform writing tablets
Following the same thread, Mike Marcus sends "corrections to my post on Kim B, as well as several corroborative points....a key factor that cements the identification of Kim with Marlowe. In 2, 7 Ada opens Kim's photo album "at one of its maroon markers meaningly inserted here and there". This is a cute allusion, since this brief passage is itself a marker, purposefully introduced in this very spot. "Mar"-oon and "mar"-ker are both clues to "Mar-lowe", here "meaningly inserted". Nabokov here gives the reader a shake and says "open your eyes!"...Kim also shows up in the words Akimovich as well as Yakim Eskimossoff, probably not coincidentally. In other news, same chapter, Ben Wright trying to rape Blanche "in the mews" probably alludes to Ben Jonson's play BartholoMEW Fair."
Jansy Mello::For years and years small serendipities, met in VN's novels and in life, lay behind my impulse to share, with the VN-L, a parcel of the effect Nabokov's writings have on me., a genuine emotion, a suspension of insights, an intake of breath, a warm glow... Such as we meet in the strange resonance between sumerographs and the Sumerians with its slight nuances that extend from "dusk" into "twilight" *.
Take this paragraph from "Lolita" (where we also find the word "twilight")
"You know, what's so dreadful about dying is that you are completely on your own"; and it struck me, as my automaton knees went up and down, that I simply did not known a thing about my darling's mind and that quite possibly, behind the awful juvenile clichés, there was in her a garden and a twilight, and a palace gate - dim and adorable regions which happened to be lucidly and absolutely forbidden to me, in my polluted rags and miserable convulsions; for I often noticed that living as we did, she and I, in a world of total evil, we would become strangely embarrassed whenever I tried to discuss something she and an older friend, she and a parent, she and a real healthy sweetheart, I and Annabel, Lolita and a sublime, purified, analyzed, deified Harold Haze, might have discussed - an abstract idea, a painting, stippled Hopkins or shorn Baudelaire, God or Shakespeare, anything of genuine kind. Good will! She would mail her vulnerability in trite brashness and boredom, whereas I, using for my desperately detached comments an artificial tone of voice that set my own last teeth on edge, provoked my audience to such outbursts of rudeness as made any further conversation impossible, oh my poor, bruised child." **
in which Humbert Humbert encounters something "of genuine kind" in Lolita and gets a glimpse of her ideas and emotions, her "garden and a twilight, a palace gate ..." her "dim adorable regions..." As I feel it, the simplestransposition of "twilight," and its multifarious manifesfestations, into a relatively fixed allusion has a deadening effect should it remain as something historical only, a mere indicator of dry informations and literary clichés, its poetry squeezed out. In one of his interviews, Nabokov mentions with impatience (blaming poor Freud), how certain readers seem to be unable to distinguish the wetness, sonority and light from a fountain (or its singular emergence in different contexts), from the plain signifier "fountain" (this is a vague paraphrasis of what I can still recollect of his words).
Although the "pattern-finding" animus is exciting and a source of learning (thanks to the google keys to some doors of perception), I wish our discussions could bring back Nabokovian literary magic ...
..........................................................................................................................
* - A reference to Sumerechnikov ( "American precursor of the Lumière brothers") and Darkbloom's two notes ( are they redundant? Never...), relating it to "dusk" and "twilight" :
p.39. Sumerechnikov: the name is derived from 'sumerki' ('dusk' in Russian).
p.314. Sumerechnikov: His name comes from Russ., sumerki, twilight; see also p.37.
** - Or VN's "glowing" admission, in his Afterword: to the same novel:
"Every serious writer, I dare say, is aware of this or that published book of his as of a constant comforting presence. Its pilot light is steadily burning somewhere in the basement and a mere touch applied to one's private thermostat instantly results in a quiet little explosion of familiar warmth. This presence, this glow of the book in an ever accessible remoteness is a most companionable feeling, and the better the book has conformed to its prefigured contour and color the ampler and smoother it glows."
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Following the same thread, Mike Marcus sends "corrections to my post on Kim B, as well as several corroborative points....a key factor that cements the identification of Kim with Marlowe. In 2, 7 Ada opens Kim's photo album "at one of its maroon markers meaningly inserted here and there". This is a cute allusion, since this brief passage is itself a marker, purposefully introduced in this very spot. "Mar"-oon and "mar"-ker are both clues to "Mar-lowe", here "meaningly inserted". Nabokov here gives the reader a shake and says "open your eyes!"...Kim also shows up in the words Akimovich as well as Yakim Eskimossoff, probably not coincidentally. In other news, same chapter, Ben Wright trying to rape Blanche "in the mews" probably alludes to Ben Jonson's play BartholoMEW Fair."
Jansy Mello::For years and years small serendipities, met in VN's novels and in life, lay behind my impulse to share, with the VN-L, a parcel of the effect Nabokov's writings have on me., a genuine emotion, a suspension of insights, an intake of breath, a warm glow... Such as we meet in the strange resonance between sumerographs and the Sumerians with its slight nuances that extend from "dusk" into "twilight" *.
Take this paragraph from "Lolita" (where we also find the word "twilight")
"You know, what's so dreadful about dying is that you are completely on your own"; and it struck me, as my automaton knees went up and down, that I simply did not known a thing about my darling's mind and that quite possibly, behind the awful juvenile clichés, there was in her a garden and a twilight, and a palace gate - dim and adorable regions which happened to be lucidly and absolutely forbidden to me, in my polluted rags and miserable convulsions; for I often noticed that living as we did, she and I, in a world of total evil, we would become strangely embarrassed whenever I tried to discuss something she and an older friend, she and a parent, she and a real healthy sweetheart, I and Annabel, Lolita and a sublime, purified, analyzed, deified Harold Haze, might have discussed - an abstract idea, a painting, stippled Hopkins or shorn Baudelaire, God or Shakespeare, anything of genuine kind. Good will! She would mail her vulnerability in trite brashness and boredom, whereas I, using for my desperately detached comments an artificial tone of voice that set my own last teeth on edge, provoked my audience to such outbursts of rudeness as made any further conversation impossible, oh my poor, bruised child." **
in which Humbert Humbert encounters something "of genuine kind" in Lolita and gets a glimpse of her ideas and emotions, her "garden and a twilight, a palace gate ..." her "dim adorable regions..." As I feel it, the simplestransposition of "twilight," and its multifarious manifesfestations, into a relatively fixed allusion has a deadening effect should it remain as something historical only, a mere indicator of dry informations and literary clichés, its poetry squeezed out. In one of his interviews, Nabokov mentions with impatience (blaming poor Freud), how certain readers seem to be unable to distinguish the wetness, sonority and light from a fountain (or its singular emergence in different contexts), from the plain signifier "fountain" (this is a vague paraphrasis of what I can still recollect of his words).
Although the "pattern-finding" animus is exciting and a source of learning (thanks to the google keys to some doors of perception), I wish our discussions could bring back Nabokovian literary magic ...
..........................................................................................................................
* - A reference to Sumerechnikov ( "American precursor of the Lumière brothers") and Darkbloom's two notes ( are they redundant? Never...), relating it to "dusk" and "twilight" :
p.39. Sumerechnikov: the name is derived from 'sumerki' ('dusk' in Russian).
p.314. Sumerechnikov: His name comes from Russ., sumerki, twilight; see also p.37.
** - Or VN's "glowing" admission, in his Afterword: to the same novel:
"Every serious writer, I dare say, is aware of this or that published book of his as of a constant comforting presence. Its pilot light is steadily burning somewhere in the basement and a mere touch applied to one's private thermostat instantly results in a quiet little explosion of familiar warmth. This presence, this glow of the book in an ever accessible remoteness is a most companionable feeling, and the better the book has conformed to its prefigured contour and color the ampler and smoother it glows."
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/