Thanks to Jansy for pointing out that, like
Napoleon, Bras d'Or is a cognac and bringing up Dack's "gory trophy"
(1.11). Indeed, trofey (trophy) = torf (peat) + ey (to her) = Orfey (Orpheus) +
t = foyer + t = foreytor (postilion) - or. A synonym of "trophy"
is "loot" (cf. "lootless bad dog" in the sentence quoted
below). Loot = tool = loto = stool - s = lotos (lotus) - s =
molot (hammer) - m = doloto (chisel) - do = zoloto (gold) + L
- zlo (evil) = zoloto + zhele (jelly) - zhelezo (iron).
(All non-English words in this series are Russian. There was
molot, a hammer, in the Soviet State Emblem. The word
zhele occurs in a jocular little poem by Mandelstam:
Kushaet seno korova, / A gertsoginya zhele..." "A cow
feeds on hay, / And the duchess eats a jelly," c. 1913, where
it rhymes with shale, "chalet").
Another interesting word introduced in this little chapter of
Ada is sobaka (dog). Cf. Ada's words to Dack whom
she just took a blood-soaked tampon: "Nekhoroshaya,
nekhoroshaya sobaka," crooned Ada... as she gathered into her
arms the now lootless but completely unabashed bad dog" (1.11). Sobaka = Sobak + a. Fima* Sobak
is a character in Ilf and Petrov's "The Twelve Chairs," a cultured girl whose
vocabulary consists of about one hundred and eighty words (her friend Ellochka
the cannibal** successfully manages with only thirty). In Fima's vocabulary
there is one such word that Ellochka couldn't even have dreamt of:
gomoseksualizm ("homosexuality"). In Ada, Cordula de Prey
(Ada's school mate whom Van suspects of being a Lesbian and Ada's lover and
who later becomes Van's girlfriend) marries Ivan G. Tobak.*** When Van
meets Cordula (now Mrs. Tobak) in Lute,**** she is bending over two
unhappy poodlets. Van greets her with the lines he
knew since his school days: "The Veens speak only to Tobaks, /
But Tobaks speak only to dogs." (When translated back to Russian, the
language in which Van addresses his former mistress, as the rhyme seems to
suggest, these lines go as follows: "Viny govoryat lish' s Tobakami, /
A Tobaki govoryat lish' s sobakami.")
Interestingly, while
dog = God, sobak ("of the dogs," stressed, unlike the surname Sobak, on
the second syllable) = Boska (Polish for "of God;" cf. Matka
Boska, Mother of God) = skoba (Russian for "cramp," "clamp"). In
his poem "Dikaya koshka, armyanskaya rech'..." ("The wild cat, Armenian
tongue," 1930) Mandelstam compares letters of the Armenian
alphabet to blacksmith's tongs (kazhdaya bukva - kuznechnye
kleshchi) and Armenian words, to cramp-irons (kazhdoe slovo -
skoba). On the other hand, Tobak - t =
Sobak - s = Koba (Stalin's nickname, after the hero of "The Parricide," a
novel by the Georgian writer Kazbegi).
In a conversation
with Van (2.8), Ada calls Cordula "Mme Perwitzky:" "I know somebody who is
not simply a cat, but a polecat, and that's Cordula Tobacco, alias Mme
Perwitsky." According to Wikipedia (http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pelzarten)
and the 1911 edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica (http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/1911_Encyclop%C3%A6dia_Britannica/Bulgaria/Description),
Perwitzky is the fur of the rare tiger polecat, Foetorius sarmaticus. Which instantly reminded me of
Ellochka the cannibal's "Mexican
jerboa" ("meksikansiy tushkan," as she
calls tushkanchik). Ostap Bender, who wants to get from Ellochka
the two Gambs stools from Vorob'yaninov's old
house that she happened to buy in the auction (in one of the
twelve stools of the complete set a treasure is concealed under the
upholstery), assures Elochka that her dressing-gown (actually made out of
her husband's tolstovka,***** a long belted blouse)
is trimmed with a much finer fur, that of Shanghai leopards
(shankhaiskie barsy, note the "barsy"!).
On the other
hand, sobaka = kolbasa (sausage) - L. It reminds me of the piece of
cheap lyubitel'skaya kolbasa that hungry Father Fyodor
(who also hunts for Vorob'yaninov's furniture and who returns penniless
from Batum where he rummaged the wrong set of stools) steals from
Vorob'yaninov and Bender when they meet on the Military Georgian Road, after
which he promptly climbs a steep inaccessible cliff and can not go
down anymore. On the next day the remains of the sausage are stolen from poor
Father Fyodor by an eagle. He reproachfully says to the bird: "Akh, orlusha,
orlusha, bol'shaya ty sterva!" (Ah dear eagle, what a stinker you
are!"). On Antiterra, Sterva (which literally means "dead animal,"
"carrion") is a place name. As Lucette tells Van (2.5), Ada, who,
like her mother, became an actress, regularly goes to Sterva for
auditions.
Note that
sterva = versta ("verst," a Russian measure of distance equivalent to 3500
English feet, or 1.067 kilometers; this word also occurs in Ada: "Ten
miles [from the railway station to Radugalet, the 'other Ardis'], she [Ada]
guessed. Ten versts, said Van:" 1.24) and Batum = tumba ("Morris pillar").
Cf. "The old Morris pillar, upon which the present Queen of Portugal figured
once as an actress..." (Ada, Part Four). The Queen of Portugal is
Lenore Colline, the former actress (to whom Ada bears a physical
resemblance; G. A. Vronsky, the film director, told Ada that she could
serve one day as a stand-in for Lenore Colline: 2.9) who married Alphonse
II of Portugal. In the "The Twelve Chairs" Ostap Bender accuses Vorob'yaninov,
during their stay in Pyatigorsk, of "alfonsizm" (for the meaning
of this word, see my article on Kim Beauharnais in the latest
Nabokovian).
* short of Serafima, female given name that comes
from serafim (Russian for "seraph")
**called thus because of her extremely limited
vocabulary. The chapter in which she figures begins: "According
to calculations of the researchers, William Shakespeare's vocabulary
consists of 12000 words. The vocabulary of a negro from the cannibal tribe
called "Mumbo-Jumbo" consists of 300 words."
***Demon, Van's father, jokingly calls him
"Tobakovich" (2.10), which reminds one of Sobakevich, a character in
Gogol's "Dead Souls" (after whom the cocker spaniel in Nabokov's Pnin
was named).
****The Antiterran name of Paris, short of
"Lutecia." By the way, Lute = Leute (German for "men") - e. Cf. Man,
as New York is known on Antiterra.
*****cf. bayronka (from Bayron,
the Russian spelling of Byron), a piece of clothing Van wears in one of the
photos taken by Kim (2.7).
With your permission, I'll leave that theme to you
and you may say whatever you want about my method (which, I repeat, you won't
grasp from these fragments, just as one can not get the idea of
disposition of rooms in a house from merely having seen the
flowers on a window-sill), while I turn to another alphabet letter, trying
to solve yet other tantalizing problem.
Alexey Sklyarenko