May I shift, after the lively debate over PALE
FIRE, to ADA?
The novel's second paragraph begins:
"Van's maternal grandmother Daria ("Dolly")
Durmanov was the daughter of Prince Peter Zemski, Governor of Bras d'Or, an
American province in the Northeast of our great and variegated country..."
(1.1).
Bras d'Or ("arm of gold") is the name
of a salt lake on the Cape Breton island (in the
Canadian province Nova Scotia) that also hints at Labrador, a large
peninsula in NE North America and a region of Atlantic Canada (named after
Portuguese explorer J. F. Lavrador who first sighted it in 1498).
Some time ago, Victor Fet pointed out to me
that labra (pl. of labrum, Latin for "lip") was an
entomological term, meaning "part of the mouth of an arthropod". Victor
noted that there
was labra in "Labrador", "Calabria" (region in S
Italy; cf. mysterious "Gypsy politicians or Calabrian laborers" who
appear at the picnic in Ardis the Second: 1.39), and palabra
(Spanish for "word"; pah, pronounced rather like
palabra's first syllable, is Ada's beloved expletive and the first
word that Van hears her say: 1.5)
Reading Heine's Die Reise von Muenchen
nach Genua ("The Journey from Munich to Genoa", 1829), I discovered
that La Bra* was the name of Verona's main piazza.
Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet is set in Verona (city in N Italy,
E of Venice). Verona - or = Vena (Russian name of Vienna and Russian for
"vein") = Neva ("the legendary river of Old Rus", as Ada calls it:
2.1). Neva + da (Russian for "yes") = Nevada (an American State; on
Antiterra, the name of a gambling town: 2.1). Nevada + ice (cf. "with
tangible water and ice separating the political, rather than poetical,
notions of 'America' and 'Russia'": 1.3) = Ada + Venice (the city built on
numerous small islands in the laguna of Venice, in N part of the
Adriatic; the setting of Shakespeare's "The Merchant of Venice"; after
love-making to Ada, 1.31, Van compares himself to "a certain
Venetian", namely, Casanova, whose "Memoirs" are evoked elsewhere:
2.8).
We have thus bridged, in only three
paragraphs, several places in different parts of both our world and Demonia
(aka Antiterra, Earth's twin planet, on which ADA is set), including the river
that flows in Nabokov's (and mine) home city. May be, my "anagramatic" method is
worth anything, after all? May be, a €
million? :)
Alexey Sklyarenko
*In his Italienische Reise ("The
Italian Journey", 1786) Goethe refers to this square as il Bra
(il Bra = libra, Latin for "balance"; Libra is also the name of a
zodiacal constellation).