Carolyn Kunin:
Please don't forget the original Iris Acht - - an
unfortunate actress who dies young in a wild novel, the victim of a gray
villain.
Stan Kelly-Bootle: ...I continue to
believe that, in spite of the fun in tracing the sources of VN’s every phrase,
his wordplay is very much incidental to his genius for capturing truth and
beauty in atmosphere, character and
plot...
JM: Yes! Nabokov's "genius for capturing truth and beauty in
atmosphere, character and plot," invites us to remember the unfortunate actress
Iris and, while tracing its sources, catch a whiff of a well-read
poliglot's atmosphere.
I'm still flabbergasted by the realization
concerning old scientists who were discovering and discerning differences
between a wide range of animals and plants, like Linnaeus. How they linked the
old in the new with the new in the old when finding names and labels for them.
Coinages applied to living organisms, garanteed by body and world while these
were independent of the power of "words."
It seems that only the evil masks stuck (larvae
&lemurian) not the neutral (manes) or the good (lares), though and we can
surmise from the quotes below that VN was aware of both designations
and their eerie suggestive powers, he later linked to evolution and
time.
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From my former posting to the List (August
18,2008) to a still older one (April 29,2003) by Carolyn Kunin, on Lemures
in VN we find:
JM: "Returning to destroyed or
sunken places, to Kitezh, Atlantis and Lemuria (after bringing up a reference by
ninety-eyar old Van to Ada's eyes and the image of misplaced "lemurian" eyeballs
in a taxi), I came to another one, equally non-geographical (lemurs and
insects):
Vladimir Nabokov, Speak Memory:
" the soaking , ice-cold
absorbent cotton pressed to the insect's lemurian head; the subsiding spasms of
its bodies..."
C.Kunin: "Thus Fulmerford is an anagram of either Dr
Lemuroff (or Muleroff or Rulemoff) or Mr Leduroff (or Duleroff or Elduroff), all
seeminly nonsensical names. However Lemuroff could be derived from the small
mammal the lemur. The interesting thing about that is that
from lemur was derived an Atlantis counterpart in the
Pacific Ocean called Lemuria. The original idea of Lemuria was posited by a
supporter of Darwin's theories (the German Ernst Heinrich Haeckel) and was later
appropriated by the Theosophists. Madame Blavatsky had some very strange ideas
about Lemurians that might have appealed to Nabokov. There may be a link to
those lemans in Ada, but I don't know.
"
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