Victor Fet
(excerpts): Once we started on kimology, let's recall that: (a)
Kipling's "Kim" promotes the concept of Great Game of influence between
England and Russia spheres, quite an Antiterran geoconcept if one looks closer
(see Alexei's treatise on Scots/Scandinavians);(b) In 1950 movie "Kim", the main
adult role of Makhbub Ali was played by Erroll Flynn who, by the way, only two
years before that was Don Juan in "Adventures of Don Juan"; (c) Kim was a
popular male acronymic name in 1920s Russia, deciphered as
Kommunisticheskij Internatsional Molodezhi (The Communist Youth
Internatonal, a section of Comintern. One of the Communist youth's desired
features is, of course, spying and informing (see classical Pavlik Morozov story
of 1930s); in this sense Kim B. is a Soviet 'young pioneer' in "Ada"'s
Amerussian world; (d) another Kim (nothing to do with Kipling) is a common
Korean surname, a North Korean dictator when "Ada" was written (a "Khan Soso"
type), and still is; spying and informing is a child's first duty in this
society as well as in Khan Soso's; (e) finally (and everything to do with
Kipling!), Kim is an obvious reverse of Mik, the famous heroic African boy of
Nikolai Gumilev's long poem "Mik" (1914).
Susan E. Sweeney:In a 1965 interview, VN lists Kipling among the writers
he was especially fond of as a boy: "between 8 and 14 I used
to enjoy tremendously the romantic productions--romantic in the large sense--of
such people as Conan Doyle, Kipling, Joseph Conrad, Chesterton, Oscar Wilde, and
other authors who are essentially writers for young people" (SO
46-57).
JM:
I had been sceptical about Kipling's "Kim" inspiring the choice
for Kim Beauharnais but, after V.Fet's explanation and Beth's
information on young VN's favorite "romantic" writers, the
hypothesis started to make sense. I don't remember Kipling's plot, but
"Kim's Game" was already a favorite among Brazilian Girl Scouts, after
a dedicated Mrs. Juliette Low extracted the idea from RK's novel
to apply it to the international Boy Scout movement, founded by Lord Baden
Powell. Kim's game reproduces some of the talents expected from VN
readers ( after finding an apparently random object, or
its image, connect it to a specific story & vice-versa), but
applying this "game" in ADA would have been "childish", unless intended to
illustrate how sentimental souvenir-pictures*, collected to engender
or substitute true reminiscences,
also served devious uses, such as spying and
voyeurism.
*- I was informed
that "Scouting" was developped after B.Powell realized that English
boys were innocently obeying the tactics of "fair play" while
fighting a real war. He intended to develop awareness and survival
abilities in the young, while simultaneously cultivating high ethical
standards and the ideals about "the Brotherhood of Man", an ideal
also cultivated in the field of literature and music by Nabokov's cousin,
Nicholas Nabokov, to approach American-Soviet artists and as a sort of
Cold War political
propaganda.