It’s strange to hear from CK that the Cabot/Lodge (aliter Lowell) aphorism is ‘an admittedly obscure bit of doggerel.’ Most Brits I know who boast minimal literary pretences are familiar with the joke in some form. One assumes that that also applies (in spades!) to reasonably widely-read Americans? I’ve heard both Lodge and Lowell in the hierarchy, and no doubt other families and locations will appear as the wealthy dynasties shift with time. Needless to say, VN’s amusing variant rings an instant bell to moi (and DBJ, although he missed the anagrams). Assigning degrees of arcanity is clearly a subjective matter, supported by anecdotal rather than statistical evidence.
In Jonathan Dimbleby’s Russia, A Tour (BBC DVD and book, 2008), he meets an itinerant Russian labourer on an overnight train journey, en route to Yasnaya Polyana. Dimbleby holds up the copy of Anna Karenina he happens to be reading. Repeating the title and author’s name in reasonable Russian fails to invoke any recognition. Anna the Obscure, nay, Tolstoy the Unknown? Pointless anecdote? Only if misused! Later, Dimbleby visits the Tolstovian shrines, their tourist-worshippers and meets the great man’s resident descendant (g-g-..g-son?)
Dictionaries rarely reflect the native speaker’s intuition for linguistic register (the common example being ‘Bye, bye, Your Holiness!’) and for which words are unnecessarily ‘obscure’ given the existence of everyday synonyms. It’s a moot point whether Nabokov deliberately used the rarer bits of Webster II as a full- or semi-tease (Laura’s omoplates!), or whether he lacked that deeply ‘in-wired’ native awareness. Some of each, no doubt. The last place for dogma is in matters sociolinguistical! VN gets an interesting, relevant mention in Steven Pinker’s The Language Instinct. The gist is that VN’s accent and command of spoken English (his preference for pre-submitted questions and written prompts when interviewed) was inevitably influenced by the age at which he acquired serious English fluency. Hilariously, Conrad was even worse off. Few, claims Pinker, could understand a word of his thick Slavonic English.
Incidentally, Alexey, did Stalin’s Georgian accent arouse any sniggers? Behind his back, of course? I’ve heard that Mao Zedong’s native Xiang dialect was unintelligble to many Chinese. This explains, they say, the absence of a strong Lincoln/Churchill-type tradition of speech-making in Chinese politics, replaced by written speeches readable by all.
The Anglophone tolerance to intellectual foreign accents is well known. I find VN’s spoken English as enchanting as Einstein’s! My mathematics lecturer, Russian-born Abram Besicovitch, proudly told us that ‘More peoples speak English like what I do than like what you do, isn’t it?’
I had the pleasure of discussing this and other Nabokovian delicacies, in the flesh, last Tuesday when Prof Victor Fet dropped in to see me in London while en route to Moscow. Having enjoyed a similarly divine visitation from Jansy Melon last month (illness, alas, prevented Carolyn Kunnin from joining us), I want to thank the VN-Forum for these delightful and unexpected membership side-benefits.
Stan Kelly-Bootle
On 29/07/2010 16:28, "jansymello" <jansy@AETERN.US> wrote:
Alexey Sklyarenko: Boyd...: "Stalin, a Georgian, admired Georgian folklore and here seems to be imagining the sweet raspberry taste of each execution and puffing out his chest as if it proves himself once again a Georgian hero." Although Stalin's nickname was Koba (after the hero of Kazbeghi's novel "The Patricide"), Dzhugashvili (whose assumed name comes from stal', "steel") desired to be not a Georgian, but Russian hero. Btw., Koba + t = Tobak. True, malina is Russian for "raspberry". But it can also mean "[to be] in clover"... Now, in Pushkin's Eugene Onegin (Canto Three, XXXIX, 7-14), in the scene travestied in Ada (1.2), girl servants picking berries are singing in chorus, so as their sly mouths wouldn't not eat in secret the seignioral berry. They also mention raspberries in their song...
JM: Ah, Stalin's nickname was Koba! Things begin to make sense to me (the importance of Cabot/Tobak instead of Lowell).
Carolyn Kunin commented on this matter in 2003 (but Lowell was left out, since the doggerel she remembered was applied to the Lodges).
Here is Carolyn Kunin's old posting ( Wed, 2 Jul 2003 10:29:17 -0700), related to the Cabot doggerel.. Its subject is: "Carolyn Kunin notes on Alexey Sklyarenko's tobakami/sobakami essaylet in THE NABOKOVIAN #50 ," with D.B.Johnson 's EDNOTE.
"I had never noticed that the "TOBAK(s)" and "dogs" were palindromes of the original CABOTs and GOD in the famous bit of doggerel that VN uses as the basis for his lines. As well, the TOBAK(s) echo the Russian word for dog SOBAKa. My thanks to Carolyn."
CK's original note (Wednesday, June 11, 2003 12:36 PM) : "Among the tasty tid-bits in the latest Nabokovian are three notes from Alexey Sklyarenko, who continues to find more allusions to Russian literature in Ada. He intriguingly argues that some passages of dialogue in Ada show traces of translation from original Russian, particularly in the conversation between Van and Greg Erminin (Part III, chapter 3). However he has missed an allusion to an admittedly obscure bit of doggerel. In Ada "The Veens speak only to Tobaks/ And Tobaks speak only to dogs." Although it may rhyme better in Russian (Tobakami/sobakami) the original is actually: Here's to good old Boston, the land of the Bean and the Cod, / Where Cabots speak only to Lodges, and the Lodges speak only to God. Also note the characteristically Nabokovian reversals of Cabot/Tobak and God/dog.
But now I'm stuck with the Kabot(chnicks), Nikto, Nicot-Tobak(off), Botkin... Perhaps we can safely strike out Lowell now? And I can safely return to my borrowed book's "Homage to Eros" (a strange title, if one examines its staid contents).
btw: C.Kunin also observed on Eberthella in the past, and linked it to Thomas Hardy's novel, " The Hand of Ethelberta"