Arbitrarily ordered excerpts:
A. Slyarenko: Accidental acrostrich is as strange and
wonderful a bird, as doubtful asphodel is a flower. But, I
confess, I too miss the point of DN's joke (or his serious
remark, what do I know?). Does he think that there is an acrostic (or a
beginning of the acrostic) in Derzhavin's last poem or that there is
none?
Jerry Friedman: I think he was agreeing
with Sergei that it's doubtful that the acrostic was intentional[...] I don't
really associate ostriches with nightingales, but maybe DN has sung Richard
Strauss's setting of "Die Liebe sass als Nachtigall".
A.
Sklyarenko: Ruina chti meaning "the ruin of glory" is, of course,
total nonsense [...].In the graveyard poetry, ruiny ("ruins") are a symbol of
cemetry[...] (Dershavin) could have used the word ruina in the sense
"tombstone" [...] By the way, there is Ruinen, a town in the Neverlands, in
ADA (2.3)[...] Eidelman calls Oxyrynchus (the Greek name of Pemdje...an
archaeological site...) "the greatest rubbish dump in the world".
Jerry Friedman [ to C.K] - Thanks for the
"sharps and flats" part.If it will help, Sergei Solvoiev (hence the nightingale)
mistyped "accidental" as "accidential" and mispelled "acrostic" as "acrostich".
(I must say that the spelling "acrostic" is unfair to learners of English. The
Russian and French words make it obvious that the word comes from a Greek
original with a chi ...)
Stan K-Bootle [ToC.K]: I take “accidential” as
portmanteau for “essential accidental.” We mathematicians prefer “martingales”
to “nightingales”:Martingale (probability theory), a stochastic process in which
the conditional expectation of the next value, given the current and preceding
values, is the current value. Any questions?
JM: Jerry reminded us of Richard
Strauss's "Nachtigall" and "Solvoiev". By coincidence, a friend
just sent me a link to Beethoven's "Die Ruinen von Athens"
(actually, an adaptation into incidental music for the
grand opening of a new imperial theatre in Budapest.)
Athenian and haughty imperial dreams, German and
quasi-Ostrich composers and ruinen, sacred places turned into rubbish dumps to
be once more restored. What value is to be
attributed to images, such as the Phoenix or Sirin, as indicators of
any cyclical recurrence? Coincidence as "accidential"?
Can anyone find, following Sklyarenkos indication
of "The River of Time, ot the Emblematic Representation of the World
History", the image of this allegoric map hanging in Derzhavin's room?
That's another painting - similar to one in one of VN's
very early short-stories and developed in "Glory" or, like the novel Lolita
described in retrospect by VN as a painting... (
and sorry for the incomplete recollection of
suspended quotes!) - worth looking
into!