A. Sklyarenko: If I'm
not mistaken, the Dutch pronounce the word veen ("peat bog") rather like the
Anglophones do "feign" ..
ADA: "TORFYaNUYu which went through a brown square at F and through two
red squares ...she recounted her monstrous points...like a princess narrating
the poison-cup killing of a superfluous lover...‘It’s a place name! One can’t
use it! ...Torfyanaya, or as Blanche says, La Tourbičre,...where our
cendrillon’s family lives. But, mon petit, in our mother’s tongue — que dis-je,
in the tongue of a maternal grandmother we all share...this quite ordinary
adjective means "peaty," feminine gender, accusative case."
JM:
Since "peat" appears in German (and perhaps in other languages) in relation to
"Torf" (in the appended image by Christian Fischer, thru wiki,we find the
"peat exploitation in the nature conservation area of "Ewiges Meer"
("Eternal lake"), a big moor lake in East Frisia, NW Germany,ie: Industrieller
Torfabbau im/am Naturschutzgebiet Ewiges Meer in Ostfriesland"),
there is an implied very close relation between the Veens and the
Torfyanaya/ Tourbičre descendants, particularly the multidimensional
servant, Blanche.
Cinderella, Cendrillon, Aschenpüttel or
Aschenbrödel, in wiki:
"Puschkin, Novalis, Tieck, Brentano,
Eichendorff, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Hans Christian Andersen, Tennyson, Wilde,
Mallarmé, Maeterlinck and Hofmannsthal wrote about her...the theme is explicitly
handled by Christian Dietrich Grabbe (1835, "Aschenbrödel") and
by Robert Walser (1901, "Die Insel") and, more recently, by the Russian
poet, Jewgeni Lwowitsch Schwarz. In the German versions Cinderella's
subjects are related to pigeons, shoes and hazelnuts or the hazel-tree.
The open-"knacked"* nut is a metaphor for
"fulfilled knowledge" and this signification, related to "vollendeter
Erkenntnis," is habitually rendered in Dutch still-life
paintings.(wiki)
I couldn't find an indication about what poem by
Pushkin mentions Cinderella and what are the predominant themes in it. Could the
link bt. Blanche and the Veen-descendants be explained thru it?
..................................................................
* - From Ada, back to Pale Fire,
with Hazel and the theme of the "open-nut" ( Eystein's trompe l'oeil of a
"twin-lobed, brailike, halved kernel of a walnut hiding a receptacle with the
broken nutshell). We remember thaat on his way to Kinbote's house, a few minutes
before he is shot, Shade was expected to have for dinner, among other things, a
"knackle of walnuts", a theme already discussed in the List a few years back. I
was unable to retrieve now a posting, by Victor Fet I
think, explaining "knackle".