Julian Connolly Re "Nabokov's use of light-and-shade
names": "We recall the last words of "The Fight" (1925):
"Or perhaps what matters is not the human pain or joy at all but, rather,
the play of shadow and light on a live body, the harmony of trifles assembled on
this particular day, this particular moment, in a unique and inimitable way."
The major English novels would seem to refute that
proposition."
Jansy Mello: When Julian Connolly mentioned "the play of
shadow and light on a live body" I was carried back to Nabokov's early "The
Enchanter" where this matter is explored at length while "Arthur" watches a
little girl moving in a sunny park reflecting the play of light that's
been filtered through the leaves of shady trees. Perhaps there'd be
echoes of it in "Lolita", the same magic despair?
The sentences I found carried a similar mood but were unrelated. For
example:
1.Through the darkness and the tender trees we could
see the arabesques of lighted windows which, touched up by the colored inks of
sensitive memory, appear to me now like playing cards ...
2. As I look back
on those days, I see them divided tidily into ample light and narrow shade: the
light pertaining to the solace of research in palatial libraries, the shade to
my excruciating desires and insomnias of which enough has been
said.
3.Several times already, a trick of harlequin light that fell through
the glass upon an alien handwriting had twisted it into a semblance of Lolita's
script causing me almost to collapse..
And yet, I think that my associations may serve to indicate another
dimension to "light and shade" (not the nuanced chiaroscuro effect, not the
black and white oppositions in a checkerboard) because, in VN, shades are
not necessarily grey but may be colored too, like the shadows cast by leaves or
in a harlequin stained-glass with its blank, dirty or bejewelled
panes, or like in Victor's artful drawings in "Pnin". Of course: why
restrict my search to greyness? Stained-glass and harlequin losenges regularly
appear even as metaphors, not only as simple objects or images ), in almost
every novel or story by V.Nabokov.
I hope to locate more examples in the future.
btw: I checked the contrast to "humber/umber" in "bert". It indicates
"bright"...
Bert is a hypocoristic form of a number of Germanic male given names, such
as Robert and Albert.
There is a large number of Germanic names ending in
-bert, second in number only to those ending in -wolf (-olf, -ulf). Most of
these names are early medieval or medieval and only a comparatively small
fraction remains in modern use.
The element -berht has the meaning of
"bright", Old English beorht/berht, Old High German beraht/bereht, ultimately
from a Common Germanic *berhtaz, from a PIE root *bhereg-"white, bright". The
female hypocoristic of names containing the same element is Berta.
Modern
English bright itself has the same etymology, but it has suffered metathesis at
an early date, already in the Old English period, attested as early as AD 700 in
theLindisfarne Gospels. The unmetathesized form disappears after AD 1000 and
Middle English from about 1200 has briht
universally.