* - Laurence Hochard "... You examined and fingered my groove ..."/ Lucette couldn't find the word, but Van, who was not averse to studying anatomy, could find the thing .../ " ... you and she came simultaneously..."/ and enjoy it ! / But how poignant behind the erotic comedy the image of little Lucette!"

** - "... Licence my roving hands, and let them go
Before, behind, between, above, below.
O, my America, my Newfoundland,
My kingdom, safest when with one man mann'd,
My mine of precious stones, my empery ;
How am I blest in thus discovering thee !
To enter in these bonds, is to be free ;
Then, where my hand is set, my soul shall be.
Full nakedness ! All joys are due to thee..." JD

*** - ADA: "sunk back into dreams of prowling black spumas and a crash of symbols in an orchal orchestra [ ] DB: "p.61. horsecart: an old anagram. It leads here to a skit on Freudian dream charades (‘symbols in an orchal orchestra’)" p.62.[ ] "he whirled, and to a clash of cymbals in the orchestra and a cry of terror (perhaps faked) in the gallery, Mascodagama turned over in the air and stood on his head." That's how far it sometimes goes - Where? No idea, Carolyn....Just like in music with relinquished symbols. Following a map that is different from Alexey's Russian one, though, but as fascinating.

........................................................................................................

Date: Sun, 28 Apr 2013 03:29:53 +0300
From: skylark1970@MAIL.RU
Subject: [NABOKV-L] Ada's erotic geography
To: NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU

'- I got stuck with six Buchstaben in the last round of a Flavita game. Mind you, I was eight and had not studied anatomy, but was doing my poor little best to keep up with two Wunderkinder. You examined and fingered my groove and quickly redistributed the haphazard sequence which made, say, LIKROT or ROTIKL and Ada flooded us both with her raven silks as she looked over our heads, and when you had completed the rearrangement, you and she came simultaneously, si je puis le mettre comme ça (Canady French), came falling on the black carpet in a paroxysm of incomprehensible merriment; so finally I quietly composed ROTIK ('little mouth') and was left with my own cheap initial. I hope I've thoroughly got you mixed up, Van, because la plus laide fille au monde peut donner beaucoup plus qu'elle n'a, and now let us say adieu, yours ever.'
'Whilst the machine is to him,' murmured Van.
'Hamlet,' said the assistant lecturer's brightest student. (Ada, 2.5)

The anatomical term little Lucette did not know and therefore could not compose in a Flavita game was klitor (clitoris).
In his poem Evropa (Europe, 1919) included in Rossiya raspyataya (The Crucified Russia) Max Voloshin affirms that Europe's "maternal organs" (maternie organy), her uterus and clitoris (pokhotnik), are in the Archipelago (the Aegean Sea):

Полярным льдам уста её открыты,
У пояса, среди сапфирных влаг,
Как пчельный рой у чресел Афродиты,
Раскинул острова Архипелаг.
Сюда ведут страстных желаний тропы,
Здесь матерние органы Европы,
Здесь, жгучие дрожанья затая, -
В глубоких влуминах укрытая стихия,
Чувствилище и похотник ея...

For his floramors (palatial brothels in Eric Veen's essay "Villa Venus: an Organized Dream") David van Veen used marble columns dredged from classical seas:

He began with rural England and coastal America, and was engaged in a Robert Adam-like composition (cruelly referred to by local wags as the Madam-I'm-Adam House), not far from Newport, Rodos Island, in a somewhat senile style, with marble columns dredged from classical seas and still encrusted with Etruscan oyster shells - when he died from a stroke while helping to prop up a propylon. (2.3)
(Rhodos is the Greek name of Rhodes, one of the largest islands in the Archipelago famous for its Colossus. Newport is a city in Rhode Island, USA.)

From Ada's letter to Van: All this you are free to diagnose as a case of advanced erotomania, but there is more to it, because there exists a simple cure for all my maux and throes and that is an extract of scarlet aril, the flesh of yew, just only yew... Take the fastest flying machine you can rent straight to El Paso, your Ada will be waiting for you there, waving like mad, and we'll continue, by the New World Express, in a suite I'll obtain, to the burning tip of Patagonia, Captain Grant's Horn, a Villa in Verna, my jewel, my agony. (2.1) It seems to me that "the burning tip of Patagonia, Captain Grant's Horn" is America's male organ.

Note that Ada read a three-volume History of Prostitution at the age of ten or eleven, between Hamlet and Captain Grant's Microgalaxies. (1.35)

pokhotnik = p + okhotnik (hunter; in a letter of October 30, 1833, to his wife Pushkin uses the feminine form of okhotnik, okhotnitsa, in the sense "lover, enthusiast" and in a very frivolous context; in the same letter Pushkin chides Natalie for her coquetry and calls Ninon Lenclos staraya kurva, "old whore"; poets will be disappointed to learn that okhotnik and pokhotnik do not rhyme)
samogon krovi + on = mnogo vina skoro (Samogon krovi is the title of Voloshin's article on death penalty included "The Crucified Russia", see my previous posts; superstitious Russians often called the devil on, "he"; mnogo vina skoro - Russ., a lot of vodka soon)

Samogon krovi (the unauthorized spilling of blood) in the 20th century Russia brings to mind another Archipelago, the GULAG.

In 1918, when the Nabokovs lived in the Crimea, VN met Voloshin in Yalta.

Alexey Sklyarenko