Alexey
Sklyarenko(15.9): "In the next three stills [the
photos of Van making love to Ada taken by Kim
Beauharnais] la force des choses ('the fever of
intercourse') had sufficiently disturbed the lush herbage to allow one to
distinguish the details of a tangled composition consisting of clumsy Romany
clips and illegal nelsons." (Ada,
2.7)...In one of the next stanzas (IV) of this
fragmentary chapter Pushkin used the phrase siloyu veshchey (by
the force of the circumstances)...VN comments on it: by the force of circumstances / siloyu veshchey: A
Gallicism, par la force de choses. (EO Commentary, vol. III, p. 322)[... ] Kim Beauharnais was
blinded ...Beau ("fair") + voir ("to see") = Beauvoir.
Simone de Beauvoir is the author of La force de
l'âge (1960) and La force des choses
(1963).
Jansy Mello: In his notes to
"Terror" (reprinted in "The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov"), VN mentions J-P
Sartre
"Uzhas" was written in Berlin, around 1926, one of the happiest years
of my life. The Sovremennya Zapiski, the Paris
emigre magazine, published it in 1927 and it was included in the first of my
three collections of Russian stories, Vozvrashchenie Chorba, Slovo, Berlin, 1930. It preceded Sartre's
La Nausee, with
which it shares certain shades of thought, and none of that novel's fatal
defects, by at least a dozen years."
It would be fun if he also mentions the
novels of Simone de Beauvoir. I vaguely remember a VN-L discussion
about "bien rangé,"* related to S.Beauvoir's
childhood memoirs, "Mémoires d'une Jeune Fille Bien Rangée"*.
By the force of circumstances, VN either
indicated S.Beauvoir herself or... resorted to a
chancy "gallicisme." The link to Kim Beauharnais (name and blindness)
is, for me, a bit stretched, the additional "circumstances" are
awesome.
.......................................................................................
* "not only because the history of each
part of the amalgam did not quite match the history of each counterpart...It was
owing, among other things, to this ‘scientifically ungraspable’ concourse of
divergences that minds bien rangés (not apt to unhobble
hobgoblins) rejected Terra as a fad or a fantom, and deranged minds (ready to
plunge into any abyss) accepted it in support and token of their own
irrationality.". (ADA)