Dear
List,
I came
across a Xmas-Advent Calendar with one of the various
cathedrals in St.Petersburg. In the image one discerns a mural with
Christ surrounded by red seraphs. I remembered VN described what appeared to be a
childhood experience of attending mass during Easter, but I could not find
where he wrote about it (perhaps in The Luzhin Defense?).
I wanted to check if the
calendar-cathedral was the same as described by VN during Easter,
also if Shade's "seraph with his six flamingo
wings" was related to those serphs painted on this "Cathedral
of the Resurrection".
The "ressurrection" theme was indeed present
in PF's canto, but the lines left me doubtful about a certain hidden
irony (VN's, not Shade's) that mingled idyllic lyres, pastoral walks,
Turk's delights and Flemish hells.
Former discussions in our List were informative, but I
cannot remember anything linked to the "irony" I now see with
its hints about executions ( Socrates), tyrannies and cruelty
(Flemish hells during the domination of Philip II, as depicted by Jan or
Peter Brueghel).
If confirmed such irony might contaminate the tone of
the preceding verses( "why scorn a hereafter none can
verify")...
Searching for more information about the
"Easter"cathedral mentioned by VN, I found something
else:
Brian Boyd (RY), page 21:
"That afternoon on a St. Petersubrg street he [
Alexander II ] fell victim to a third assassination attempt, yet another
bom. Dmitri Nabokov, at home at the Ministry of Justice, dashed to the
tsar's deathbed in the Winter Palace. The future Alexander III later
handed him as a memento the buttons he had torn from his father's
blood-spattered sh irt.[...]With the detachment of time, Dmitri's famous
grandson would have only this comment to make on Alexander II's death: "Russia has always been a curiously unpleasant country despite her
great literature. Unfortunately Russians today have completely lost their
ability to kill tyrants."
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A
correction to a former posting [During a college admission
exam candidates were invited to intepret a line of a poem ... the
author of the line in question knew what he had had in mind ( ie:
nothing).]
When
I searched for O.Montenegro's original line, I discovered a
variant. Apparently he learned
about the exam only years later, and not as a candidate. He stated that
his sentence had no meaning, and added: "I've no clue about why
I wrote spearmint"
The
original line: "Fiz um drops the hortelă da bala que eu te dei para
tirar o porém da frase que eu nunca fiz": ( I made spearmint-candy from the
one I gave you so as to extract the
but
from the sentence I never made (wrote) ]
............................................................................................................