I hope nobody will mind if I say a few words as
to why of all writers Nabokov made Borges ("Osberg") the
author of "La Gitanilla" (as Lolita is known on Antiterra).
I think there were three main
reasons:
1. Borges was an Argentinean writer ("'Neath sultry
sky of Argentina" is the tango that Van dances, as Mascodagama, on his
hands; it is the same tango that Bender dances in Ilf and Petrov's
"The Golden Calf");
2. One of Borges's best-known stories is "Pierre
Menard, Author of the Quixote" (Cervantes, the real author of Don
Quixote, also authored a novella entitled La
Gitanilla);
3. Like Homer, Milton and... Panikovsky (a
character in "The Golden Calf," a petty thief who
simulates blindness), Borges was blind. There are three blind
characters (if we don't count Eros) in Ada.
Btw., "Floeberg" (a mass of ice floes resembling an
iceberg; Floeberg is the author of "Ursula," an Antiterran novel that seems
to correspond to Flaubert's "Madame Bovary") sounds even colder than "Osberg."
As to German Berg, it is also present (combined
with Russian son, "dream") in "Bergson."
I'll spare you the anagrams this time. But I
can not resist the temptation to share with you my latest major
find:
In Hugo's "The Man who Laughs" (1869) there is
a wandering artist named Ursus (Latin for "bear"). He has a tame
wolf named Homo ("man"). In Ada, 'Ursus' is a restaurant in
Manhattan (an Antiterran city also known as Man). Other characters of
Hugo's novel (set in England at the end of 17th
century) include a blind girl named Dea ("goddess") and Gwynplaine,
whose face was surgically disfigured when he was a child to make it look like a grinning mask ("...masca eris, et
ridebis semper,"* as an old scholar, whom Ursus consults, put it in
his book; cf. Mascodagama in Ada). Together with their adopted father,
Ursus, and Homo, their "brother," they perform at
fairs, until it turns out that Gwynplaine is an aristocrat, Lord Linnaeus
Clancharlie. The novel ends tragically: when Gwynplaine returns to her, Dea
dies of a heart attack (as Panikovsky does in "The Golden Calf")
and Gwynplaine commits a suicide by drowning himself (as Lucette does
in Ada). There are even more interesting things
(choses).
*"you will be a mask and will laugh forever."
Incidentally, Ridebis Semper was Nabokov's one-time pen name. "Zud," a little
self-parody written about 1940, was signed with it. A pair of shoes (cf. Paar of
Chose, Van's professor and older colleague at the Chose University in
England) plays a prominent part in this story. As far as I know, "Zud"
(zud is Russian for "itch," but in the story it happens to be the
hero's name) was never translated to English.
Interestingly, Zud sounds like the
German word for "South," minus the umlaut. "South" is a story by Borges that
somewhat resembles Nabokov's Lik (1939), the story that "Zud"
parodies.
Alexey Sklyarenko