Tiny suggestion, Alexey. Gravis fuit vita, laevis sit ei terra" might be more poetically translated as
Hard his Life; May the Soil (aliter: Earth) lie on him Softly.
NB: Latin shares with Russian the problem of definite-indefinite-article uncertainty
A new book on VI Lenin reviewed by Lesley Chamberlain in current TLS: CONSPIRATOR, Lenin in Exile, by Helen Rappaport (Hutchinson in UK; Basic Books in USA.) Rappaport explains Solzhenitsyn’s reason for hating Lenin above all the Bolsheviks: “because he forced a Westernism on a country whose spiritual self-identity was elsewhere.” This adds to the confusion in many ex-Communist Western minds, where Lenin’s reputation survived (at least for a few years in my ill-informed case!) the truth of Stalin’s Terror. My question is whether VN ever expressed his views on the apparent distinction made by Solzhenitsyn, who seems to suggest that the Revolution wasn’t quite Russian enough?
SKB
On 14/03/2010 19:04, "Alexey Sklyarenko" <skylark05@MAIL.RU> wrote:
From Mayakovski, author of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1925), back to Maykov,* author of Mashen'ka (1846). In his "Account of F. M. Dostoevski and the Petrashevskians",** Maykov describes his meeting with Ivan Aleksandrovich Nabokov (brother of VN's great-grandfather***), commander of the Peter-and-Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg, in one of the fortress' dark corridors:
После этого мне предложили ещё несколько незначительных вопросов и объявили, что я свободен и могу идти домой. Я вышел в тёмный коридор и, заблудившись, наткнулся на кого-то, который вдруг грозно спросил: "Кто тут?" Открылась какая-то дверь, и появился генерал Набоков (добрый, но суровый старик). "Вы зачем здесь?" Я объяснил и меня вывели на улицу.
Then I was asked one or two other insignificant questions and told that I am free and can go home. I went out into a dark corridor and, having got lost, stumbled across someone who all of a sudden asked formidably: "Who's here?" A door opened and general Nabokov (a kind but severe-looking old man) appeared. "What are you doing here?" I explained and was shown the way out.
The whole incident reminded me of a scene in Invitation to a Beheading.
Dostoevski and other members of Butashevich-Petrashevski's political circle were arrested on April 23, 1849 (Old Style). After eight months of imprisonment in the Peter-and-Paul Fortress they went through a terrible farce: the mock execution that took place on December 22 (January 3, 1850, by the New Style).
In Ada, January 3 is Lucette's birthday (1.1). Aqua (Marina's twin sister) married Demon Veen (Van's and Ada's father) on April 23 (VN's birthday),**** 1869, and Andrey Vinelander (Ada's husband) dies on April 23, 1922 (3.8).
The mock execution of the Petrashevskians took place on the Semyonovski square in St. Petersburg. Semyon Marmeladov is a character in Dostoevski's Crime and Punishment (1867). "Marmlad and his Marmlady" are mentioned in Ada: "when I worked on my earliest fiction, and pleaded abjectly with a very frail muse ('kneeling and wringing my hands' like the dusty-trousered Marmlad before his Marmlady in Dickens)" (2.4). Van Veen's first novel is Letters from Terra, but Nabokov's had the same title as Maykov's long poem: "Mashen'ka" (Mary, 1926). The heroine of Van's novel is a girl named Theresa (2.2). Tereza is character in Dostoevski's first novel, Bednye lyudi ("The Poor People", 1846), a servant woman who brings letters from Makar Devushkin to Varen'ka Dobrosyolov and back. In the old Russian alphabet the letter L was called lyudi. The letter D (its Cyrillic counterpart) was called dobro ("good," as opposed to "evil"). Devushka is Russian for "girl, maid, miss".
Unlike most of his comrades, Petrashevski never returned to St. Petersburg and died in 1866, in a village near Minusinsk (a town in Siberia, on the Enisey river). The inscription on his grave reads: "Gravis fuit vita, laevis sit ei terra" (His life was hard, may earth be light to him). The first article on Petrashevski (Russkaya starina, "Russian Antiquity", May 1889) ending in this Latin phrase was signed "M. Marx".*****
In Ada, the notion of Terra appeared on Demonia (aka "Antiterra," Terra's twin planet on which Nabokov's novel is set) as a result of the L disaster that took place "in the beau milieu of last century" (1.3). One wonders if it didn't happen on January 3, 1850?
*Apollon Nikolaevich Maykov (1821-97). VN mentions Maykov and Mayakovski (among his mother's favorite poets) in Speak, Memory.
**as written down by A. A. Golenishchev-Kutuzov; see "Dostevskiy v vospominaniyakh sovremennikov" (M., 1964).
***see Speak, Memory, p. 43.
****Lenin's birthday is April 22.
*****see D. D. Ashkharumov, "My Reminiscences (1849-51)" (1906, 1930)
Alexey Sklyarenko