After checking the name of Gogol's painter, Chartkov ("The Portrait"), with its faustian reference to "chort," I planned to locate what Nabokov wrote in the Gogol biography. Although I couldn't find any particular information about this in the internet, I was entertained by other fields of information which google-links provided. For example, there's a very interesting foot-note, by Michal Oklot, quoting Nabokov's foreword to his (and DN's) translation of Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time,*  in which he explores the duplicitous meaning of "stroke/line/border" and "devil."

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btw: Aqua's "discoveries" derived from "the running water's enunciation" (after traditional gadgets "had gone to the devil") indicate a new "method of recording and transmitting speech."  I wonder if this description is not only applicable to sounds and spoken words, but if it's also related to written records made in a different language, i.e: if it is another way by which VN refers to the problems of translation,** including the issue of interpreting symbols (delusional Aqua shied away from "pertinent sense," instead of remaining exclusively in the level of "perfect rythm"...)    

 

*n. 225: '...The name Chertova Valley comes from the word cherta - line - nor chert -  for here at one time ran the border with Georgia. " (Mikhail Lermontov, A Hero of Our Time, trans. Marian Schwartz (New York:The Modern Library, 2004), 29-30. What is interesting is that Nabokov coquettishly guarantees the accuracy and exactness of his (and his son's) translation of A Hero of Our Time ( "I'm attempting to translate Lermontov, I have gladly sacrificed to the requirements of exactness a number of important things [...]And all this, the translator should faithfully render, no matter how much he may be tempted to fill out the lapse and delete the redundancy" (Vladimir Nabokov, "Translator's Foreword" in Mikhail Lermontov, A Hero of Our Time, trans. Vladimir Nabokov in collaboration with Dmitri Nabokov (Michigan:Ardis,1988),xii-xiii)) inserts in the original his own explanation and contraction for a reading sensitive to these two semantic fields, thus, he renders the sentence: [quoted in Russian] as "You derive Chertova from chort [devil] and visualize at once, the aeria of the Evil Spirit among forbidding cliffs..." ( A Hero...Ardis, 32). Phantasms of matter in Gogol (and Gombrowicz) - Resultado da Pesquisa de livros do Google books.google.com.br/books?isbn=1564784940...Michal Oklot - 2009 - Literary Criticism  Cf. pages 129-130 for note.225 by Michal Oklot

 

** "... she felt tickled at the thought that she, poor Aqua, had accidentally hit upon such a simple method of recording and transmitting speech, while technologists (the so-called Eggheads) all over the world were trying to make publicly utile and commercially rewarding the extremely elaborate and still very expensive, hydrodynamic telephones and other miserable gadgets that were to replace those that had gone k chertyam sobach’im (Russian ‘to the devil’) with the banning of an unmentionable ‘lammer.’ Soon, however, the rhythmically perfect, but verbally rather blurred volubility of faucets began to acquire too much pertinent sense. The purity of the running water’s enunciation grew in proportion to the nuisance it made of itself." ( ADA)