Alexey: Lermentov’s Nostril-damus Prediction is wonderful. Spaseeeba!
You claimed recently that while your anagrams might be irrelevant, at least they were never be-laboured. Your current offering confirms the latter claim! The ubiquitous Slavonic root ‘enin’ survives unmangled on both sides of your equation, which certainly reduces your be-labouring.
To add more VN-relevance to this posting, I report my THRILL as an early Brit owner of amazon’s Kindle e-book reader that it worked out-of-the-box and within a few minutes’ browsing, I had downloaded Nina L Krushcheva’s Imagining Nabokov. Within a few pages, some of my earlier list enquiries (VN’s attitude to Lenin and the ‘alien’ Westernization of Russia) were being addressed.
Incidentally, NLK steps dangerously into the linguistic mine-field of the deflated Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis by claiming that the Russian use of mne rather than ya, as in mne kholodno; mne grustno (it’s cold to me; it’s a shame to me, rather than I am cold; I’m ashamed) somehow betrays a deep secret lurking in the Russian soul:
“These grammatical forms reflect a culture in which people refuse responsibility for their feelings, sensations, and emotional experiences. It seems that is not ‘I’ who is the master of my feelings but someone else, invisibly manipulating my fortune and misfortune. The Russain ya always sees itself as an object of action, not its subject, leaving it to the collective we to define the world.” (location 146-7)
This reads SO convincingly that it’s a crying shame to be linguistically FALSE! So many of the world’s 6,000 extant languages use variants of to-me in place of I-am (or I-have). The Irish forainmneacha réamhfhoclacha (prepositional pronoun) to cite a familiar nearby example, can hardly be accused of revealing some inherent cultural tendency towards shedding personal responsibility. Come outside and say that! You need to wrestle with the endless, accidental, grammatical vagaries of language, even within the same Indo-European family, to become suspicious of Sapir-Whorf.
Kindle (reviving the old gerund kindling*) will be vieux chapeau to American VN-listers to whom the gadget has been available for some time. To them I address this observation and query:
Besides NLK, there are 7 other Nabokov-search-matching titles in the on-line Kindle catalogue. But no works by VN. Is this a question of COPYRIGHT? Can DN comment?
Stan Kelly-Bootle
- One under-informed letter to the London Times complained about use of Kindling and Blackberrying as nasty American ‘verbing of gadget nouns!’
On 09/04/2010 21:10, "Alexey Sklyarenko" <skylark05@MAIL.RU> wrote:
I mentioned in my previous post Arbenin, the hero of Lermontov's play "§®§Ñ§ã§Ü§Ñ§â§Ñ§Õ" (The Masked Ball, 1836) who poisons his wife, because
Arbenin + L = rab + Lenin
(rab is Russian for "slave"; L is for Lermontov)
Among young Lermontov's poems there is "§±§â§Ö§Õ§ã§Ü§Ñ§Ù§Ñ§ß§Ú§Ö" (Prediction, 1830) that begins:
§¯§Ñ§ã§ä§Ñ§ß§Ö§ä §Ô§à§Õ, §²§à§ã§ã§Ú§Ú §é§×§â§ß§í§Û §Ô§à§Õ,
§Ü§à§Ô§Õ§Ñ §è§Ñ§â§Ö§Û §Ü§à§â§à§ß§Ñ §å§á§Ñ§Õ§×§ä...
The year will come, Russia's black year
when the tsars' crown will fall...
Alexey Sklyarenko