96: “rake”
96: Demon: A reference to the semi-fictitious Dementiy “Demon” Veen, of Ada, or Ardor.
From the Greek, daimon, “a divinity,” and Latin demon, “an evil spirit, a devil,” a contrast in senses characteristic of Ada. His name derives principally from the hero of the long narrative poem Demon (begun 1828, last version completed 1841, pub. 1856) by Mikhail Lermontov (1814-1841), and its derivatives in Russian culture, such as the three-act opera Demon (1871) by Anton Rubinstein (1829-1894) (libretto by Pavel Viskovatov, 1842-1905), the series of paintings by Mikhail Vrubel (1856-1910) and the long poem Vozmezdie (“Retribution,” 1911), by Aleksandr Blok (1880-1921) (see Levinton 1997: 333-34 and Kurganov 2001: 92-95). Nabokov’s father, Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov (1870-1922), an avid theater- and opera-goer, notes that “Rubinstein’s Demon was very popular” on the stage of St. Petersburg’s Mariinsky Theater (“Teatral’nyy Peterburg,” Teatr i zhizn’ 8, March 1922, 10), where he often took Vladimir and the other children; in June 1960 Nabokov travelled to Milan to hear his son Dmitri sing two arias and a duet from the opera (VNAY420). Demon, theatrical and operatic himself, first appears on Ada’s stage, as it were, in the torrid theater scene of I.2, during a stylized version of the travestied operatic version by another Russian composer, Pyotr Ilyich Chaikovsky, of another long Russian poem, Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin. Ada alludes most explicitly to Vrubel’s visual versions of Lermontov’s hero. But Levinton also comments that in Blok’s poem, “(also a ‘family chronicle’ in its own way) the nickname ‘Demon’ is constantly applied to the father of the Hero, right from the ‘Foreword’: ‘In this family there is a certain “demon,” the harbinger of “individualism.” . . . The second chapter must be dedicated to the son of this “demon,” the inheritor of his rebellious passions and painful falls, the unfeeling son of our age. . . . In the third chapter describes the death of the father, what happened to the formerly dazzling “demon,” into what an abyss this < . . . > man fell‘ ” (Levinton’s italics). Kurganov 2001 makes a long but unconvincing case for the centrality of the demonology of the Hebrew apocrypha to Ada (and Lolita).
– Brian Boyd, Ada Online
96: Vrubel: (1856-1910) Russian painter typically associated with the Symbolist movement, though he rejected his perceived connection to it.
96: Ardis (1970)
96: “The scion of a princely family devoted to a gallery of a dozen Tsars”
96: Deauville: a commune in the Basse-Normandie region of Northwestern France.
96: “resort”
96: Shelley: (1792-1822) a major literary, poet figure in the English Romantic movement, known for (among others) Ozymandias, The Cloud, Ode to the West Wind.
96: Schiller: (1759-1805) German poet, historian, philosopher, and playwright.
97: “repattern my entire life?”:
“What harlequins? Where?”
“Oh, everywhere. All around you. Trees are harlequins, words are harlequins. So are situations and sums. Put two things together–jokes, images–and you get a triple harlequin. Come on! Play! Invent the world! Invent reality!” -Vadim’s great-aunt, Baroness Bredow, (pgs. 8-9)
97: “take up chess seriously”: Despite being only a decent chess player, Nabokov was a chess problemist and published his theoretical problems.
97: “Russian translation of Paradise Lost: “Is it possible to discuss Look at the Harlequins! without making any reference to Nabokov and his other novels? It may be, but no critic, to the best of my knowledge, has attempted to do so. Nabokov is a bona fide character, the better known writer, in this novel, and the narrator is fighting bitterly against him, like Lucifer struggling against God in Milton’s Paradise Lost.” –I, X Does Not Equal Nabokov, by Maurice Couturier
97: “All I did finally was drop my pen name, the rather cloying and misleading ‘V. Irisin'” Nabokov’s actual penname for his Russian novels was Sirin.
97: The Dare. A parody of Nabokov’s novel The Gift (in Russian Дар=in transcription Dar.
97: “the émigré magazine Patria“
98: “to quote A.K. Tolstoy” This is not the famous author of war and Peace and Anna Karenina, Lev Tolstoi, but rather the Russian 20th Century writer Aleksei Tolstoi. That Tolstoi would spend time in Berlin in the 1922 when Nabokov was also there.
98: “There is no such expression in Russian”
98: welter
98: “she had read Galsworthy (in Russian)”
99: L’Atlantide
99: “which a dictionary ascribes to Pierre Benoît”
99: “romancier français nè à Albi”: French novelist born in Albi, France.
99: “Did she know Morozov’s poetry?”
99: “…The Dare (Podarok Otchizne was its original title, which can be translated as “a gift to the fatherland”).” The parody is hinted at with the inclusion of the root for gift (dar) embedded in the more common Russia word for “gift” (poDARok).
99: “When in 1934 I started to dictate its beginning to Annette, I knew it would be my longest novel.”: This line being in reference to The Gift, perhaps Nabokov thought The Gift would be his longest novel at the time of its creation. In the end, the title of his longest novel would go to Ada, or Ardor, as we are well aware.
100: “After that comes adolescence in England…then life in émigré Paris, the writing of a first novel (Memoirs of a Parrot Fancier)”: Although I was unable to find any direct references to parrots in Mary, his first novel, or The Gift, the word “parrot” does appear in Nabokov’s one-time, lecture definition of a philistine, which is as follows-
“A philistine is a full-grown person whose interests are of a material and commonplace nature, and whose mentality is formed of the stock ideas and conventional ideals of his or her group and time. I have said “full-grown person” because the child or the adolescent who may look like a small philistine is only a small parrot mimicking the ways of confirmed vulgarians, and it is easier to be a parrot than to be a white heron.”
100: “Inset in the middle part is a complete version of the book my Victor wrote “on a dare”: this is a concise biography and critical appraisal of Fyodor Dostoevski, whose politics my author finds hateful and whose novels he condemns as absurd with their black-bearded killers presented as mere negatives of Jesus Christ’s conventional image, and weepy whores borrowed from maudlin romances of an earlier age.”: In reality, the biography inset in The Gift is on Nikolay Chernyshevsky, whose politics the author appears to find deplorable. As an aside, this particular quote–which I hesitantly attribute to Nabokov–reminds me of D.H. Lawrence’s quote on Dostoevsky:
“I don’t like Dostoevsky. He is like the rat, slithering along in hate, in the shadows, and in order to belong to the light, professing love, all love.”
100: “The only real shock I experienced was when I overheard her informing some idiot woman friend that my Dare included biographies included biographies of ‘Chernolyubov and Dobrechevski.'”: As mentioned above, The Gift contains a fictitious biography of Nikolay Chernyshevsky, and the names “Chernolyubov” and “Dobrechesvki” can be trimmed and combined to form a sort of “Chernyshevsky.” They also parody the Russian historical figure Dobrolyobov.