At 213.27-28, “bound volumes of The Kaluga Waters and The Lugano Sun” can now be seen to add also a reflection of the Cornell Daily Sun, Cornell’s campus newspaper, in which Nabokov was interviewed (by Gladys Kessler, 25 September 1958) and to which he wrote Letters to the Editor (3 and 20 October, 1958).  

MOTIF: Kaluga newspapers; water.

139.10: the family dentist: Dr. Pearlman.Cf. Demon to Ada: “The last time I enjoyed you . . . was in April when you . . . simply reeked of some arsenic stuff after seeing your dentist. Dr. Pearlman has married his receptionist” (245.24-27). Cf. also 141.20.

139.10: Van, flipping through a magazine: Cf. 272.05: “Dorn (flipping through a literary review, to Trigorin).”

139.11-12: say “chort” (devil) . . . which he had never heard her do before: Van does however, in his role as narrator, record Ada saying “chort” earlier, at 96.02-03. MOTIF: chort.

139.12-14: at a neighbor’s, Countess de Prey—who tried to sell them, unsuccessfully, a lame horse: Cf. 189.21-24: Percy de Prey walks away “across a lawn which his transit at once caused to overlap in Van’s mind with the fleeting memory of the paddock where he and Van had once happened to discuss a lame horse and Riverlane”; 375.03-07: “ ‘to make a short story sort of longish—’ Old Countess de Prey’s phrase in praise of a lame mare in her stables in 1884, thence passed on to her son, who passed it on to his girl who passed it on to her half-sister. Thus instantly reconstructed by Van.” MOTIF: de Prey; de prey.

139.15-16: Chinese tumblers . . . Circassian Princess: In EO, II.87, Nabokov discusses Chinese and Circassian elements in St. Petersburg ballets and pantomimes, including the role of Dunyasha Istomina in an 1823 pantomime derived from Pushkin’s poem Kavkazkiy plennik (The Caucasian Captive, 1820-21).

139.16: Circassian Princess: In Lermontov’s Hero of Our Time, which Nabokov translated with Dmitri Nabokov, and annotated, the first story, “Bela,” involves Grigoriy Pechorin’s kidnapping a beautiful young Circassian princess, Bela. Nabokov dismisses the characterization of Bela thus: “an Oriental beauty on the lid of a box of Turkish delight” (xviii). He adds: “Bela (the name means ‘grief’ in Turkish) is apparently a Circassian (cherkeshenka, ‘Cherkes girl’). Webster defines ‘Circassian’ as ‘an individual of a group of tribes in the Caucasus, of Caucasian race, but not of Indo-European speech, noted for their physical beauty. They are tall, amiable and brave. The chief tribes are the Circassians proper and the Kabardians’” (200n35). Cf. 141.21.

139.20-27: To the average physiologist, the energy . . . abnormal. Their craving for each other . . . would have curtailed their young lives: Cf. Lolita 18: “We loved each other with a premature love, marked by a fierceness that so often destroys adult loves” (although in the case of Humbert and Annabel Leigh, their love is not love-making).

139.23: in sun or shade, . . . anywhere: MOTIF: sun-Ardis.

139.24: uncommon resources of ardor: MOTIF: ardor.

139.25: amorette (local French slang): Not in French or Canadian French slang dictionaries, though French amour (love) and –ette (a diminutive and feminine ending) would suggest “little love.” Littré (see 102.03 and n.) defines amourette as “amour sans passion, par amusement” (“love without passion, as entertainment”). Italian amoretto means “flirtation.” MOTIF: patois.

139.28-29: which had appeared in prospect as a boundless flow of green glory and freedom: Cf. 226.29-31: “vacational friendships, that seem to promise an eternal future of fun.” MOTIF: grand chêne; green [Ardis].

139.30-32: the last resort of nature . . . (when flowers and flies mime one another): That is, when flowers and flies end their brief summer existence; hint also at natural mimicry (cf. 99.11-101.20 and nn.) as well as alliteration? Ardeur 119: “quand la feuille et le phalène s’imitent” (“when leaf and moth mime one another”).

139.33-140.01: particularly picturesque: The alliterations are still continuing, before fading.

140.01-03: Ben Wright was fired after letting winds go free while driving Marina and Mlle Larivière home from the Vendange Festival: “Letting winds go free” is a literal translation of the French idiom lâchant un vent, “farting.” Cf. 78.13-15: on the way to Ada’s birthday picnic “The English coachman, Ben Wright, was still stone-sober (having had for breakfast only one pint of ale)”; on the return journey, Lucette complains about his smells, 88.01-07. Cf. also 401.29 and n.

Cf. 418.04-05, Lucette herself: “the little one letting wee winds go free at table.”

140.03: Vendange: Darkbloom: “vine-harvest.”

140.03: at Brantôme near Ladore: On Earth, a village in the Dordogne department, on the Dronne river, 13 miles NNW of Périgueux, and hence not far from such major wine areas as Bordeaux and Bergerac. Pierre de Bourdeilles, Seigneur de Brantôme (c. 1540-1616), famous for his frivolous and libertine memoirs, especially Recueil de Dames (Gathering of Ladies, published posthumously, 1665-66), Part II of which, Dames Galantes, Nabokov quotes (Discours II): “le fruit de l’amour mondain n’est autre chose que la jouissance” (“the fruit of earthly love is nothing else but delight” [or: “but orgasm”]), EO 2.418.

140.04-07: Catalogued in the Ardis library . . . printed for H.R.M. King Victor: Brantôme’s works and the “tome” in his name remind Van and Ada of a licentious tome (140.05) in the Ardis library. MOTIF: library (Ardis).

140.05: “Exot Lubr”: Presumably “Exotica Lubrica” (slippery or licentious exotica), a play on “Ex Libris”?

140.06: Miss Vertograd’s kind offices: See 131.13-17.

140.06-07: Forbidden Masterpieces: Cf. 376.05. MOTIF: Forbidden Masterpieces.

140.07: a private part: In context, a double entendre?

140.07-08: Nat. Gal. (Sp. Sct.): National Gallery (Special Section).

140.08: H.R.M. King Victor: His Royal Majesty King Victor, the Antiterran equivalent or rather reverse of H.R. H. (Her Royal Highness) Queen Victoria of England (reigned 1837-1901), famous for her prudishness, especially after her marriage to Prince Albert in 1840.

140.12-13: The volume itself had been either lost or stolen or lay concealed in the attic: A volume of Forbidden Masterpieces is found by Van and Ada “in a box of korsetov i khrestomatiy (corsets and chrestomathies) which Belle had left behind” (376.06-07).

140.15-22: might have been attributed to Michelangelo da Caravaggio in his youth. . . . veined flesh: Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1573-1610), who revolutionized European painting with his realistic immediacy, dramatic compositions, intense chiaroscuro, and brazen sensuality. Many of the works of his early period are images, often voluptuous, of adolescent boys. He was also perhaps the first painter in the modern Western tradition to paint a canvas which was entirely a still life, instituting a genre in which Nabokov was particularly interested during his work in the mid-1960s on his uncompleted Butterflies in Art project.

The painting described is imaginary but a plausible pastiche of such Caravaggio works as his Bacchus (c.1595, Uffizi, Florence), with its grapes and the lush vine-leaves in the decadent Bacchus’s hair, or his Self-Portrait as Bacchus (c. 1593, Galleria Borghese, Rome); his Boy with a Basket of Fruit (c. 1593-94, Galleria Borghese, Rome) and Basket of Fruit (c. 1596, Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, Milan), with their translucent grapes; the grottos of such paintings as St. John the Baptist (c. 1600, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City) or St. John the Baptist at the Well (c. 1607-08, Collezione Bonello, Malta); the cascade of vine leaves behind the boyish or girlish St. John the Baptist (Toledo Cathedral, on loan to the Prado, Madrid), attributed to Caravaggio; and the shadows and veined flesh in many of his later paintings, perhaps most vividly in The Conversion of St. Paul or The Crucifixion of St. Peter (both 1601, Santa Mario del Popolo, Rome). Van has other veins in mind than these.

Cf. Van’s father’s confident and correct attribution of a drawing to Parmigianino, 12.29-13.07.

140.17-24: unframed canvas. . . . felt himself transferred into that forbidden masterpiece: In the story “Venetsianka” (“La Veneziana,” 1924), Simpson is somehow transferred into Sebastiano del Piombo’s painting of a Venetian woman (SoVN). In Ada itself, Van, Ada and Lucette take part in a scene as if in “a much earlier canvas, of the Venetian (sensu largo) school, reproduced (in ‘Forbidden Masterpieces’) expertly enough . . . ” (418.29-31); “Unsigned and unframed” (420.06-07). MOTIF: Forbidden Masterpiece.

140.18-19: ivied or vined grotto or near a small waterfall: Cf. 44.05-07, during Van’s first tour through the grounds of Ardis with Ada: “a sham grotto, with ferns clinging to it shamelessly, and an artificial cascade borrowed from some brook or book.”

140.26: on the brink of the Cascade: Cf. 44.05-07: “a sham grotto, with ferns clinging to it shamelessly, and an artificial cascade borrowed from some brook or book’; 141.23: “the little cascade”; 452.05: “He had roamed in Kingston’s Cascadilla Park.” MOTIF: brook-brink.

140.26-27: in the larch plantation: MOTIF: larch.

140.27: nymphet: MOTIF: nymphet.

140.28-32: Her long straight hair . . . cleft by her raised ivory shoulder: Cf. the description of Ada’s hair, “its flow disjoined by the shoulder,” at 103.30-104.02. Cf. 13.06, in the Parmigianino drawing that resembles Marina: 13.06: “that raised shoulder.”

140.32-141.02: The texture, gloss and odor of those brown silks had once inflamed his senses . . . : Cf. 39.22-29: “As he bent toward her . . . her hair touched his neck. In his first dreams of her this re-enacted contact . . . like a lifted sword signaled fire and violent release.”

141.04: that first time she had bent over him: MOTIF: first time.

141.08-10: jutting out of a dark background, molded in profile by a concentration of caravagesque light: Caravaggio’s paintwork does mold limbs and facial features this way, but never an erect penis.

141.10-11: thus a tendril climber coils around a column, swathing it tighter and tighter: Cf. 12.33, the “convolvulus-garlanded support” on which Eve sits in the Parmigianino drawing.

141.13-14: There was a crescent eaten out of a vine leaf by a sphingid larva: Cf. 13.06-07: “certain vermiculated effects of delicate vegetation” in the Parmagianino drawing. Nabokov was interested in such effects in still life in his Butterflies in Art project. They can be seen as early in the history of still life as Caravaggio’s Basket of Fruit, or in his combination of still-life effects with portraiture, in the viny headgear of his Bacchus (see 140.15-22n.)

Sphingid: of the family Sphingidae, Hawkmoths. Cf. especially 56.06-10: “the noble larva of the Cattleya Hawkmoth (mauve shades of Monsieur Proust), a seven-inch-long colossus, flesh colored, with turquoise arabesques, rearing its hyacinth head in a stiff ‘Sphinxian’ attitude.”

141.14: microlepidopterist: Specialist in the microlepidoptera, defined in W2 as “The smaller moths, collectively, including members of several families, as the Tineidae, Tortricidae, Pyralididae, and Pterophoridae.” They have wing-spans of about an inch or less, as opposed to the often large-winged sphingids. MOTIF: micro-.

141.15-16: having run out of Latin and Greek names, created such nomenclatorial items as Marykisme, Adakisme, Ohkisme: Play on “—kiss me.” Although in the Linnaean binomial system taxonomic terms are in a neo-Latin form, Latin and Greek names, though common, are no longer necessary: witness, for instance, such recently-named butterfly species as Nabokovia ada Bálint and Johnson, 1994 or Itylos pnin Bálint, 1993. While there are species whose names end in –me (as in the butterfly Colias eurytheme), the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature issued in 1961 by the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature would now not permit a new name to have a noun-verb-pronoun combination; the species name must be nominal or adjectival.

As Victor Fet points out in "Adakisme, Dolikisme: The Kirkaldy Connection," The Nabokovian 56 (Spring 2006), 14-19, "Marykisme, Adakisme, Ohkisme" alludes to a famous entomological pun. The British American entomologist George Willis Kirkaldy (1873-1910), a specialist on so-called true bugs, order Hemiptera, "created a series of generic names for his beloved bugs, among them: Ohchisme, Dolichisme, Elachisme, Florichisme, Isachisme, Marichisme, Nanichisme, Peggichisme, and Polychisme. '-chisme' of course is pronounced 'KISS-me.'" In 1912 Kirkaldy was "posthumously criticized for frivolity by the Zoological Society of London. 'Presumably, eight years elapsed before anyone in the Zoological Society actually pronounced these names out loud. . . ' [May R.] Berenbaum, [Buzzwords: A Scientist Muses on Sex, Bugs, and Rock 'n' Roll, National Academies Press,] 2000, [159]).

Fet notes that Nabokov, who himself published in the British Entomologist in 1920, and who later enjoyed old issues, could have encountered there the original Kirkaldy paper, "Bibliographical and nomenclatorial notes on the Hemiptera. No. 3," The Entomologist 37 (1904): 279-83. Fet also observes that Kirkaldy's "Dolichisme" may be not unconnected with "Adakisme," since Ada is often associated with the gitanilla (gipsy girl) Dolores (in our earth, Lolita or Dolly), playing her role in the film Don Juan's Last Fling.

Fet suggests that Nabokov's reference to "a well-known microlepidopterist," when Kirkaldy was "a well-known hemipterist . . . appears to be an intentional hoax" (17). It may however also or primarily be Nabokov's assimilation of Kirkaldy into Ada's micro- motif.

Ohchisme and Dolichisme, Fet notes, are members of Cimicidae, the bedbug family, alluded to at 212.11: by 1884 the shooting gallery "crawled now with bedbugs."

141.17-25: Whose brush . . . . wringing-out mouths: MOTIF: woman in picture.

141.17: A titillant Titian?: Titian (Tiziano Vecelli, c. 1487-1576), greatest painter of the Venetian High Renaissance, is renowned for the sensual sumptuousness of his palette, its deep reds, darkish blues, glowing yellows, and for the voluptuousness of imagination in his mythological canvases, but hardly for titillation or, as the repeated syllable suggests, for big-busted women. Though there are many full-length and often recumbent female nudes in his paintings, they are usually thick-set but not bosomy. In the context of this scene, perhaps the most relevant factor is the flowing tresses of his women—usually a deep, almost orangey, gold—as in his Magdalene (c.1532, Palazzo Pitti, Florence), whose breasts protrude through meters-long hair. Among other famous nudes in his canvases some of the most pertinent may be in Sacred and Profane Love (c.1515, Galleria Borghese, Rome), and especially Bacchanal of The Andrians (1522-24, Prado, Madrid: note the woman in the lower right-hand corner), the Venus of Urbino (1538, Uffizi, Florence), and Danaë (1553-54, Prado, Madrid).

141.17-18: A drunken Palma Vecchio?: Jacopo Palma, born Jacopo Negretti, known as Palma Vecchio (c. 1480-1528), another major painter of the Venetian High Renaissance, renowned for his pretty, ideally feminine blondes, also long-tressed, as in his Diana and Callisto, also known as Diana Discovers Callisto’s Misdemeanours (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna) or Three Sisters (Stadtliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden), or Portrait of a Lady (Poldo-Pezzoli Museum, Milan).

141.18-19: anything but a Venetian blonde: Such as Palma Vecchio's A Blonde Woman, c.1520. Dosso Dossi, perhaps? Faun exhausted by Nymph? Swooning Satyr?: Dosso Dossi (born Giovanni di Niccolò de Luteri, c. 1489-1542), foremost painter in Ferrara in the High Renaissance. His hues were often dark. His work often imitated the idealized pastorals of Giorgione, as in his Nymph and Satyr (Palazzo Pitti, Florence), in which the nymph actually seems pure, although the satyr is wild.

141.20: new-filled molar: Cf. 139.10-11.

141.21: my circus Circassian: Cf. 139.14-18, “the fair . . . where . . . a sword-swallowing hefty Circassian Princess . . . finally engulfed . . . a tremendous salami sausage.”

141.22-25: A moment later the Dutch took over: Girl stepping into a pool under the little cascade to wash her tresses . . . : Susanna and the elders was a particularly popular biblical subject (from the apocryphal Book of Susanna, or chapter 13 of the Greek version of the Book of Daniel) among Dutch artists of the seventeenth century. Van and his maker probably have in mind Rembrandt van Rijn’s Susanna and the Elders (1647, Gemäldegalerie, Berlin), in which Susanna has one foot in the water, the other about to step off from the poolside ledge. She may have been wringing her hair, and has her mouth open just the moment before it registers surprise, as one of the elders, lusting behind her, pulls at the cloth partly covering her. A cascade can perhaps just be made out in the dimness behind them.

141.23: under the little cascade to wash her tresses: Cf. 58.02-03: “Her black hair cascaded over one clavicle.”

141.26-29: My sister, do you recollect . . . and all?: The song of 138.01-139.04 resumes. These two couplets recall the first four lines of Chateaubriand’s third stanza: see 138.01-139.04n. MOTIF: Chateaubriand; my sister; remember.

141.27: turret: Or “little tower,” in place of Chateaubriand’s tour (tower). Lucette, who has introduced the word krestik to Van at Kingston, offers to explain it when Van feigns ignorance, “though it’s just one of our sister’s ‘tender-turret’ words and I thought you were familiar with her vocabulary” (378.08-09).

141.27: yclept: Meaning “called,” “named,” this word, elsewhere obsolete, survived as an allowable archaism in poetry. OED: “Adopted by Gawin Douglas [in his Aeneis, 1513] from his M[iddle] E[nglish]models, and much affected as a literary archaism by Elizabethan and subsequent poets” such as Shakespeare (Love’s Labour’s Lost) and Milton (L’Allegro).

Afternote to Part One, Chapter 22