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Re: down Lemur Lane from Fulmerford to Kalmakov
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Carolyn Kunin [ to JM's Your alliterative games are great fun...] But my "games" are not alliterative at all! Fulmerford = Dr Lemuroff is an anagramatic play (n.b. to our anagrams master, this is a "krugliy" anagram, if I may put it that way). The rest of the path down Lemur Lane, to make an alliterative detour, is - I don't exactly know what it is - a series of associations of submarine and other lemurian associations. And Priscilla Meyer's link between Lehmann's and occultism is surely an important key. Throw in her "pale kings, princes and pale warriors" and you have another lane to travel - a fire road perhaps?
Jansy Mello: Right-o ! A newly invented krugliy mix. However, there's no pale "Franklin" lane for me, but a sinister krugly bend.
Our anagram-Master has been pullling my ears again because I didn't notice right away how he moves from puddle onto kidney-shaped pool of spilled milk - while practicing maneuvers that are belied in his pedagogic Foreword* and revealed along the way. In fact, Nabokov intended the Krug mnemonic "signature," that connects the recovered sensation of creamy and blue in Krug's mug to Adam Krug himself ( cf. "Mugakrad-Gumradka" after Paduk's erasures)
Knowing no Russian, I certainly miss out on most of what's going on in this novel. Sometimes there's an explanation, such as Krug's infantile "term of endearment" directed to Paduk: dragotzennyi,, itself so reminiscent of that other ring found by Gollum//Smeagol in J.RR Tolkien's novels.
I can only surmise that an all-seeing "milk" must be very important, as in the (just quoted) lemurian paragraph in ADA: "What (she asks) would they mean to a creature from another corpuscle or milk bubble whose organ of sight was (say) an internal parasite resembling the written word 'deified'?"
I selected three milky ways:
1."Yes, it reflects a portion of pale blue sky - mild infantile shade of blue - taste of milk in my mouth because I had a mug of that colour thirty-five years ago." ( during his "milk-tooth days"...)
2. 'One brandy and a glass of milk,' said Krug and hung up.[ ]'More than twenty-five years, Mugakrad,' said Paduk after a silence. 'You have remained what you were, but the world spins on. Gumakrad, poor little Gumradka.'
3. "...The various parts of my comparative paradise - the bedside lamp, the sleeping tablets, the glass of milk - looked with perfect submission into my eyes...death was but a question of style."
The obvious links to occultism popping here and there seem to be another deviant path from his particular "rosebud", like the so very reasonable explanations about the makings of "Lolita" or "Bend Sinister"...
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* - "The plot starts to breed in the bright broth of a rain puddle. The puddle is observed by Krug from a window of the hospital where his wife is dying. The oblong pool, shaped like a cell that is about to divide, reappears subthematically throughout the novel, as an ink blot in Chapter Four, an inkstain in Chapter Five, spilled milk in Chapter Eleven, the infusoria-like image of ciliated thought in Chapter Twelve, the footprint of a phosphorescent islander in Chapter Eighteen, and the imprint a soul leaves in the intimate texture of space in the closing paragraph. The puddle thus kindled and rekindled in Krug's mind remains linked up with the image of his wife not only because he had contemplated the inset sunset from her death-bedside, but also because this little puddle vaguely evokes in him my link with him: a rent in his world leading to another world of tenderness, brightness and beauty" (BS, Foreword).
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