Epic Poet Luis de Camões was born one hundred
years after navigator Vasco da Gama's birthday, whose heroic feats he sung
in his poem "Os Lusiadas". Being a warrior and sometimes imprisioned in
forbidding dark cells (like another Iberic
writer, Cervantes), Camões once had to carry his precious manuscript on his head
while swiming for land, after a naufrage.
To be able to narrate Vasco da Gama 's adventures while, at the same time, praising the Portuguese
Crown of his day, Camões created a literary "time-machine", which was given
to Vasco by Venus. Through its mirrors and prisms the hero could see future
events and describe their glory, together with his own
present-day achievements and munificent King. Pushkin ( who had once praised the sonets by Camões) , in
"Eugene Onegin", mentions a "magicheskii kristall", a glass ball that reveals
some of destiny's many secrets, wherein he seeked ( in Nabokov's
words) "the far stretch of a free
novel."
As mentioned in a chapter about Russian
Romanticisms ( C.Emerson, The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature, page
105), Pushkin employed particular metaphors to represent "his ideals for
a well-balanced work of art" and the description of such a magic
crystal is to be found near the end of Eugene Onegin when "the author admits to
gazing into this crystal, many years earlier" to discover the future
countours of EO's plot.
Emerson asks: "How can a free thing be sought in a closed,
symmetrical structure?" and invites the reader to imagine a kaleidoscope while
he indicates that a "poet-novelist's task is to rotate the kaleidoscope sho
that these arbitrary shards, falling out in random heaps, are refracted withing
the funnel of the novel to form patterns," in order to reach a complexity
which "lies in the juxtaposition of multiple reflecting surfaces"...
I deduce that Pushkin's "magic crystal" metaphor had a function that was
dissimilar to Camões' Olympic crystal time-machine, but Nabokov's own
fascination with triptych mirrors and multiple reflective surfaces and patterns
might have been spurred on by these two imaginary devices ( would he have read
Sir R. Burton's translation of The Lusiads?) and been
subtly acknowledged in his reference (Ada or Ardor) to topsy-turvy
Mascodagama (or, as Van was addressed once: "Vasco da Gama, I presume?" - and
here I haven't checked the exact quote ).