Sergei
Soloviev [on Kim Beauharnais]:"the name is 'parlant' also:
literally "Beau + harnais" is "beautiful harness" but it sounds almost like
"Bearnais", and "le Bearnais" was one of the nicknames of French king Henri IV,
famous for his love affairs (he was from Bearn, small kingdom between Spain and
France).
JM :Kim (sometimes
only his flashes) is quite an important character in "ADA".
Do you know if there
are articles dealing more specifically with his influence
and his fate?
I wonder where this link
with womanizer king Henri IV will lead us
to?
J.A: "Of course
Nabokov was a very accomplished scientist and naturalist, I was mostly
referring to his complete lack of physics.[...] The
ideal specimen he discusses never, in my opinion, exists as an original
one, but acrues over time through recorded
comparison[...]
JM: VN's character wrote:"the original of a being, nonexistent in our
reality but unique and definite in
concept": we know that he believed in another
kind of "reality" but I always understood that VN's belief in an
otherworld did not interfere with his work as a "naturalist" -
one who reached his conclusions after applying original (and
consistent) criteria to his recorded comparisons.
J.A: Van Veen's walking on his hands seems to obtain a curious
extra-textual meaning when we recall that Ganin in Nabokov's first novel also
walked on his hands. Seperate though interesting details, together they
form some discrete ideal action having more meaning than anything the
specific characters do.
JM: VN made a couple of such meanings clear when
he said that Van's Mascodagama
stunt used maniambulation to "perform organically what his
figures of speech were to perform later in life" (A,185) and that
his bodily inversions would later become a visual rendering
for "the standing of a metaphor on its head not
for the sake of the trick's difficulty, but in order to perceive an ascending
waterfall or a sunrise in reverse: a triumph, in a sense, over the ardis of
time. Thus the rapture young Mascodagama derived from overcoming gravity was
akin to that of artistic revelation”. (A,184/5)
It seems to me that his vertical “vertebrate thoughts” (A,421) were
probably informed by Nabokov´s own experience while bending over to look at the
sky: “This constant shift of the viewpoint conveys
a more varied knowledge, fresh vivid glimpses from this or that side. If you
have ever tried to stand and bend your head so as to look back between your
knees, with your face turned upside down, you will see the world in a totally
different light” (LEL,228).
There is also a
verbal inversion B.Boyd pointed
out (note to part I, chapter 13) noted:“ 'King Wing
says that the great Vekchelo turned back into an ordinary chelovek at
the age I’m now.' 'Vekchelo' stands on its head the
Russian for 'person,' chelovek.".
I hadn't remembered Ganin's brachiambulation, though. Thanks, again, this
clue might shed more light about what an activity that the author also
considered to be "demoniacal".