Alexey Sklyarenko
quotes: "The late Sumerechnikov, American precursor of the Lumière
brothers, had taken Ada's maternal uncle in profile with upcheeked violin, a
doomed youth, after his farewell concert. (1.6) and adds Vivian
Darkbloom's 'Notes to Ada': Sumerechnikov: his name
comes from Russ., sumerki, twilight..."and takes us to Van's coinage: "sumerographs" associated to
"photo"(light) and others sources ("the brothers Lumière), with the lucky
haphazard addition of ancient Sumerians and their inaugural cuneiform
writing tablets
Following the same thread, Mike Marcus sends "corrections
to my post on Kim B, as well as several corroborative points....a key factor
that cements the identification of Kim with Marlowe. In 2, 7 Ada opens Kim's
photo album "at one of its maroon markers meaningly inserted here and there".
This is a cute allusion, since this brief passage is itself a marker,
purposefully introduced in this very spot. "Mar"-oon and "mar"-ker are both
clues to "Mar-lowe", here "meaningly inserted". Nabokov here gives the reader a
shake and says "open your eyes!"...Kim also shows up in the words Akimovich as
well as Yakim Eskimossoff, probably not coincidentally. In other news, same
chapter, Ben Wright trying to rape Blanche "in the mews" probably alludes to Ben
Jonson's play BartholoMEW Fair."
Jansy Mello::For years and years small serendipities, met
in VN's novels and in life, lay behind my impulse to share, with the VN-L,
a parcel of the effect Nabokov's writings have on me., a genuine emotion, a
suspension of insights, an intake of breath, a warm glow... Such
as we meet in the strange resonance between sumerographs and the Sumerians
with its slight nuances that extend from "dusk" into "twilight"
*.
Take this paragraph from "Lolita" (where we also find the word
"twilight")
"You know, what's so dreadful about dying is that you are
completely on your own"; and it struck me, as my automaton knees went up and
down, that I simply did not known a thing about my darling's mind and that quite
possibly, behind the awful juvenile clichés, there was in her a garden and a
twilight, and a palace gate — dim and adorable regions which happened to be
lucidly and absolutely forbidden to me, in my polluted rags and miserable
convulsions; for I often noticed that living as we did, she and I, in a world of
total evil, we would become strangely embarrassed whenever I tried to discuss
something she and an older friend, she and a parent, she and a real healthy
sweetheart, I and Annabel, Lolita and a sublime, purified, analyzed, deified
Harold Haze, might have discussed — an abstract idea, a painting, stippled
Hopkins or shorn Baudelaire, God or Shakespeare, anything of genuine kind. Good
will! She would mail her vulnerability in trite brashness and boredom, whereas
I, using for my desperately detached comments an artificial tone of voice that
set my own last teeth on edge, provoked my audience to such outbursts of
rudeness as made any further conversation impossible, oh my poor, bruised
child." **
in which Humbert Humbert
encounters something "of genuine kind" in Lolita and gets
a glimpse of her ideas and emotions, her "garden and a twilight, a palace gate ..." her
"dim adorable regions..." As I feel it, the
simplestransposition of "twilight," and its multifarious manifesfestations, into
a relatively fixed allusion has a deadening effect should it remain as
something historical only, a mere indicator of dry informations and
literary clichés, its poetry squeezed out. In one of his interviews,
Nabokov mentions with impatience (blaming poor Freud), how certain
readers seem to be unable to distinguish the wetness, sonority and
light from a fountain (or its singular emergence in different
contexts), from the plain signifier "fountain" (this is a vague paraphrasis of
what I can still recollect of his words).
Although the
"pattern-finding" animus is exciting and a source of learning (thanks to the
google keys to some doors of perception), I wish our discussions could
bring back Nabokovian literary magic ...
..........................................................................................................................
* - A reference to Sumerechnikov ( "American precursor of the Lumière brothers") and
Darkbloom's two notes ( are they redundant?
Never...), relating it to "dusk" and "twilight" :
p.39. Sumerechnikov: the
name is derived from ‘sumerki’ (‘dusk’ in Russian).
p.314.
Sumerechnikov: His name comes from Russ., sumerki, twilight; see also
p.37.
** - Or VN's "glowing" admission, in his
Afterword: to the same novel:
"Every serious writer, I dare say, is
aware of this or that published book of his as of a constant comforting
presence. Its pilot light is steadily burning somewhere in the basement and a
mere touch applied to one's private thermostat instantly results in a quiet
little explosion of familiar warmth. This presence, this glow of the book in an
ever accessible remoteness is a most companionable feeling, and the better the
book has conformed to its prefigured contour and color the ampler and smoother
it glows."