Pale Fire - Vladimir Nabokov [106]
Tintarron, a precious glass stained a deep blue, made in Bokay, a medieval place in the mountains of Zembla, 149; see also Sudarg.
Translations, poetical; English into Zemblan, Conmal’s versions of Shakespeare, Milton, Kipling, etc., noticed, 962; English into French, from Donne and Marvell, 678; German into English and Zemblan, Der Erlkönig, 662; Zemblan into English, Timon Afinsken, of Athens, 39; Elder Edda, 79; Arnor’s Miragarl, 80.
Uran the Last, Emperor of Zembla, reigned 1798-1799; an incredibly brilliant, luxurious, and cruel monarch whose whistling whip made Zembla spin like a rainbow top; dispatched one night by a group of his sister’s united favorites, 681.
Vanessa, the Red Admirable (sumpsimus), evoked, 270; flying over a parapet on a Swiss hillside, 408; figured, 470; caricatured, 949; accompanying S’s last steps in the evening sunshine, 993.
Variants: the thieving sun and moon, 39-40; planning the Primal Scene, 57; the Zemblan King’s escape (K’s contribution, 8 lines), 70; the Edda (K’s contribution, 1 line), 79; Luna’s dead cocoon, 90-93; children finding a secret passage (K’s contribution, 4 lines), 130; poor old man Swift, poor—(possible allusion to K), 231; Shade, Ombre, 275; Virginia Whites, 316; The Head of Our Department, 377; a nymphet, 413; additional line from Pope (possible allusion to K), 417; Tanagra dust (a remarkable case of foreknowledge), 596; of this America, 609-614; first two feet changed, 629; parody of Pope, 895-899; a sorry age, and Social Novels, 922.
Waxwings, birds of the genus Bombycilia, 1-4, 131, 1000; Bombycilia shadei, 71; interesting association belatedly realized.
Windows, Foreword; 47, 62, 181.
Word golf, S’s predilection for it, 819; see Lass.
Yaruga, Queen, reigned 1799-1800, sister of Uran (q.v.); drowned in an ice-hole with her Russian lover during traditional New Year’s festivities, 681.
Yeslove, a fine town, district and bishopric, north of Onhava, 149, 275.
Zembla, a distant northern land.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Vladimir Nabokov was born in St. Petersburg on April 23, 1899. His family fled to Germany in 1919, during the Bolshevik Revolution. Nabokov studied French and Russian literature at Trinity College, Cambridge, from 1919 to 1923, then lived in Berlin (1923–1937) and Paris (1937–1940), where he began writing, mainly in Russian, under the pseudonym Sirin. In 1940 he moved to the United States, where he pursued a brilliant literary career (as a poet, novelist, critic, and translator) while teaching literature at Wellesley College, Stanford, Cornell, and Harvard. The monumental success of his novel Lolita (1955) enabled him to give up teaching and devote himself fully to his writing. In 1961 he moved to Montreux, Switzerland, where he died in 1977. Recognized as one of this century’s master prose stylists in both Russian and English, he translated a number of his original English works—including Lolita—into Russian, and collaborated on English translations of his original Russian works.
BOOKS BY VLADIMIR NABOKOV
ADA, OR ARDOR
Ada, or Ardor tells a love story troubled by incest, but is also at once a fairy tale, epic, philosophical treatise on the nature of time, parody of the history of the novel, and erotic catalogue.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72522-0
BEND SINISTER
While it is filled with veiled puns and characteristically delightful wordplay, Bend Sinister is first and foremost a haunting and compelling narrative about a civilized man and his child caught up in the tyranny of a police state.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72727-9
DESPAIR
Extensively revised by Nabokov in 1965, thirty years after its original publication, Despair is the wickedly inventive and richly derisive story of Hermann, a man who undertakes the perfect crime: his own murder.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72343-1
THE ENCHANTER
The Enchanter is the precursor to Nabokov’s classic novel, Lolita. At once hilarious and chilling, it tells the story of an outwardly respectable man and his fatal obsession with certain pubescent girls.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72886-3