Budding English schoolboy comics have always punned on the Russian ‘ov’=’off’ ending. Together with the accident that Ivor sounds like ‘I’ve a,’ we find, e.g., risible booktitles such as The Russian Eunuch by Ivor Knackeroff. (knacker = testicle; also found in the verb: ‘I’m totally knackered [exhausted]’ The Russian Amazon by Ivor Tittoff, The genre includes classics such as The Wild Cat’s Revenge by Claude Balls; The Nubian Princess by Erasmus B. Black; ...
And back to the current topic: Why d’you call your manservant Scrotum? ‘Cos he’s a Wrinkled Old RETAINER.
It’s misleading to call these wordplays puerile ... From the mouths of babes ...
I swear to all Ye Gods that few Anglophones educated in an English primary school would look beyond the obvious Scrotum-off pun blaring loud from VN’s Skrotomoff. The very ‘off’ spelling leads us away from real Russian and towards a punning, castrational climax. (Usually, the Russian ending is transliterated er er literally as ‘-ov’ regardless of the phonetics.)
Moving from KROTOM to KOROTOM then finding hints of KORO may well have been in VN’s fertile mind. Who knows? He might also have had in mind the less devious KROT (mole, the animal; instrumental s’KROTOM?). I can cite a convincing connection between moles and castration: VN surely knew the raunchy Ballad of the Manchester Molecatcher? The molecatcher catches his wife in bed with her young lover (in flagrante delectable!)
And while the young man’s in the midst of his frolics,
The molecatcher traps him quite fast by the bollocks [testicles]
... [lawdle-lye-day chorus omitted]
Well I’ve been a-molecatching from morning ‘til night,
But here’s the biggest mole I ever caught in my life ...
I’ll make you pay heavy for ploughing my ground [early echoes of Leadbelly’s Somebody’s Digging My Potatoes)
And the money will cost you no less than ten pound ....
Why sez the young fellow, the money I don’t mind;
It only works out about tuppence a grind!
Stan Kelly-Bootle
On 25/06/2011 18:31, "jansymello" <jansy@AETERN.US> wrote:
Alexey Sklyarenko: "Oriental Skrotomoff" may sound Russian but actually is a play on Korotom. Cf. Greg's words to Ada: "Percy started it - and was defeated in a clean match of Korotom wrestling, as used in Teristan and Sorokat - my father, I'm sure, could tell you all about it." ...Korotom seems to hint at koro, "a culture specific syndrom, occuring chiefly in China and southeastern Asia, characterized by anxiety and fear of retraction of the penis or breasts and labia into the body." King Wing (Demon's wrestling master) must have taught Van a couple of grips
JM: Let's return to the line you quoted and to one that precedes it: "Van, his crab claws on the ready, contemplated him, hoping for a pretext to inflict a certain special device of exotic torture that he had not yet had the opportunity to use in a real fight [...]
"Your cousin has treated Greg and your humble servant to a most bracing exhibition of Oriental Skrotomoff or whatever the name may be.’."
Nabokov must have had Freud's male "penis envy" in mind when he described Percy's "ugly machine" ( "In all his life, said stolid Greg to Van, he had never seen such an ugly engine, surgically circumcised, terrifically oversized and high-colored, with such a phenomenal cœur de bœuf; nor had either of the fascinated, fastidious boys ever witnessed the like of its sustained, strongly arched, practically everlasting stream."),a scene that came immediately before the scuffle started.
When I suddenly doubted that Skrotomoff was a Russian word I had no inkling of its being a hint to "koro" (safely orientalized!), but I envisaged the word in English ("Skrotom") with its ending in "off"... It looked a puerile pun (right in the mood of the boy's fight) but, if "koro" was really in Nab's mind, then its condensation is very cleverly achieved.
btw: it's not the first time that Nabokov mentions a "coeur de boeuf," is it? ( in Pale Fire?)