Had not the list of authors mentioned in my "floral"
article ("The Red Flower of Evil in Nabokov's Ada") been
so inordinately long, I would have added two more names: Gogol and Marina
Tsvetaev.
In Gogol's Inspector (Act Three) Khlestakov
sums up his philosophy as follows: "After all, that's what
life is for - to pluck the flowers of pleasure."
Marina Tsvetaev (wife of a double agent, and a poet of genius,
whom VN met in Prague in 1923 and who, in the late thirties, returned to
Russia and perished there) is a namesake of Marina Durmanov, Van's, Ada's and
Lucette's mother who collected flowers when she was pregnant with her first
child and lived in Switzerland (Ada: 1.1). The name Tsvetaev
comes from tsvesti ("to bloom") and is related to tsvety
("flowers").
re Blok and burning peat bogs: "It can be
proved, I think, by published records that Alexander Blok was even then
noting in his diary the very peat smoke I saw, and the wrecked sky."
(Speak, Memory, Chapter Twelve, 2)
Alexey Sklyarenko