C. Kunin [ to AS's "The name of
Aqua's talc powder, Quelques Fleurs (1.3), blends, as it were, the stock phrase
quelque chose with Baudelaire's Fleurs du mal ("Flowers of Evil")"]
But,
Alexey! I even posted photos of Aqua's talc, Quelques Fleurs! Have you
forgotten? Houbigant? souvenez-vous!
A. Sklyarenko: "Having completed his prep-school education in America , Van Veen
goes up to Chose University in England. (Ada, 1.27) A.S: Chose is French
for "thing" and quelque chose means "something". According to Pushkin (Eugene
Onegin, One: V: 1-2), ..."All of us had a bit of schooling/in something and
somehow." This is rendered by Turgenev and Viardot in their accurate prose
translation of EO as "Nous avons tous, par petites bribes, appris fort peu de
choses et fort mal."
Jansy Mello: When I first read "Pale
Fire" what enthralled me, in the first place, were Kinbote's non
sequitur commentaries to PF, his enthussing over the
various meanings of a simple "and," for example. "Quelque" falls into the
same category of fun when it's isolated from a sentence or from the
name of Aqua's talcum powder. It seems to me that Boyd has already called
attention to this in 2002* because A.Sklyarenko had already written about Chose
and "Quelquer Fleurs" in the past.
Aqua, of course, indicates the "eau de cologne" (or a
beverage, if we remember the Scandinavian aquavit, the Italian Grappa,
the Brazilian aguardente, aso) and there's a companion "aqua" to
the talc and perfume **..
The VN-List archives deserve a rereading
and quelques quick dips into it now and then.
.
.
Another addendum: It's just a silly
observation but it's one that I'd missed, until now. The name "Ada" in
"Canada," although I seem to remember past discussions about
similar occurrences.
......................................................
* In 2002, VN-L archives, we read Brian Boyd:
" Chose" is a puzzling name, and didn't come up in
association with Cambridge in my searches for annotating ADA or for the Nabokov
biography (which included scouring through, e.g., old issues of Granta, now a
famous literary journal but in Nabokov's time just a local student
magazine--named, of course, after the local term for the Cam, and supplying the
river “Ranta” associated in ADA with Chose).I'm
afraid Alexey's conjecture about "chose" and Les Fleurs du Mal seems most
unlikely; “chose” is as common in French as “thing” in English or “veshch'” in
Russian and could be found in other texts in more or less close proximity to
Aqua (such as A la Recherche du temps perdu). .. (Cf.
also his Ada notes to "18-24")
A.Sklyarenko wrote, in
the past: " Like Le Crepuscle du Soir that mentions whores and
cardsharps, Le Crepuscle
du Matin is included in
Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal. The title of Baudelaire's book
reminds one of Aqua's and Marina's talc powder Quelques Fleurs (1.3) that
brings to mind the French stock phrase quelque chose (something). So we are back at Chose.
Btw., "Dawn en robe rose et verte" (2.9)
alludes not only to Baudelaire but also to Chekhov's play "The Three Sisters."
As I pointed out before, a character in Chekhov's P'yesa bez
nazvaniya (Play without a Title) says that his tenant's daughter
is kelk shoz ("a pretty little thing," quelque chose in Russian spelling). He then calls Platonov's late father shtukar' (trickster). Shtukar' comes from shtuka, "thing" (French chose). Shtuka =
shutka (joke)."
**Cf. VN-l 2003, Marie Bouchet writest:"Indeed
"Quelques Fleurs" is a French perfume by Houbigant (one of the oldest perfume
"maisons" in France), and this perfume can still be purchased. I may add to
your comments that this flowery reference may not only be part of the
thematic network linking French literature to flowers in the novel (see the
translation of the "souci d'eau" in Rimbaud's poem, or the references
to Proust and the "jeune filles en fleurs") but may more directly hint at
the flower herbium Marina made in her youth...Indeed these "quelques fleurs"
glued in Marina's notebook told the entwining destinies of the two sisters, and
this herbium can be considered a flowery narrative of Van's birth,
mis-en-abyme within the novel telling his life."
https://listserv.ucsb.edu/lsv-cgi-bin/wa?A2=nabokv-l;
: