A pretext is necessary to return to the List and add more alterations to my former postings. After all, not even Chaos Theory can correct a senseless verbal image such as "shaping a peasant's boast into a boundless ambition" by giving shape to a boundless urge.* Fortunately, I can offer you a rather old disproportionatelly colorful "pretext," related to Flemish masters. Namely Philologica 6 (1999/2000) with Jan ZIELINSKI's Naboakov and Marco Polo: "THE SWANS ARE TWICE THE SIZE OF THE BOATS"
(Summary) In the second chapter of The
Gift (1937-1938), Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev (Fedor Konstantinovich
Godunov-Cherdyncev) recalls his father's study, where "among the old, tranquil,
velvet-framed family photographs <...> there hung a copy of the
picture: Marco Polo leaving Venice. She was rosy, this Venice, and the water of
her lagoon was azure, with swans twice the size of the boats, into one of which
tiny violet men were descending by way of a plank, in order to board a ship
which was waiting a little way off with sails furled - and I cannot tear myself
away from this mysterious beauty, these ancient colours which swim before the
eyes as if seeking new shapes, when I now imagine the outfitting of my father's
caravan in Przhevalsk".
A few pages later the motif of Marco Polo's journey re-occurs: "In this desert are preserved traces of an ancient road along which Marco Polo passed six centuries before I did: its markers are piles of stones <...> during the sandstorms I also saw and heard the same as Marco Polo: 'the whisper of spirits calling you aside'" (trans. by M. Scammel and V. Nabokov, 1963).
The
commentator in the most recent edition of The Gift (1998) has
established that the words about "the whisper of spirits" are inspired by a
description of Marco Polo's voyage published in St. Petersburg in 1902. However,
nowhere is there any information about the picture from Godunov-Cherdyntsev
Senior's library.The first volume of a History of Venetian Culture contains a
colour illustration which fully corresponds to Nabokov's description. The swans
swimming on the azure waters of
writer
had not seen the original, then he had seen a colour reproduction of the
picture.No later than 1466 this work was located in England, and since 1605, at
the
very latest, it has been in Bodleian Library in Oxford (MS Bodley 264).
This is one of the most remarkable miniatures of a fourteenth-century codex
which
includes a manuscript of Li romans di boin roi Alixandre (in the
Picardian dialect), its summary in English, as well as Marco Polo's work Li
liures du graunt Caam. The illustrations in this manuscript book are not
anonymous: two leaves bear a signature, iohannes me fecit, which is
traditionally attributed to the Flemish painter, Jehann de Grise of
picture with a Venetian subject, preserved in an English library,
was highly appraised in a novel by a Russian (and later American) writer which
was composed in Berlin and published in Paris.
V. Nabokov, Lekcii po russkoj literature: Chexov, Dostoevskij, Gogol’, Gor’kij, Tolstoj, Turgenev (A. A. Iliushin)
V. Nabokov, Kommentarij k romanu A. S. Pushkina “Evgenij Onegin”; V. Nabokov, Kommentarii k “Evgeniiu Oneginu” Aleksandra Pushkina (I. G. Dobrodomov, I. A. Pil’shchikov)
D. Zubarev
“8 × 8”, or
“Chernyshevskij and Chess” (Some Comments on Nabokov’s The Gift.
1—2)
1999/2000 Philologica 6
J. Zieliński
“The Swans Are
Twice the Size of the Boats” (Nabokov and Marco Polo)
2001/2002 Volume 7 No. 17/18
O. Ronen
Proust’s Way in
Nabokov’s Descriptive Art
.........................................................................
* Frau Monde's records of time are unlike last century's peasant's, at least in her present satanic incarnation. Now the intervals are measured by clocks and watches, from Midday to Midnight.
Spelling mishaps, added to typos and incorrect prepositions are too many to acknowledge without turning into a total bore.