NABOKV-L discussion

Are there any existing articles that talk about the thematic importance of mid-points, in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, The Gift, and the structure of the novels themselves? (I haven't found anything yet...)

Looking at a list of the novels in chronological order, The Gift is like the body of a butterfly, the symmetrical wings of the other eight Russian novels on one side, the eight English novels on the other.

A fairly withering review of Weinman's new book in The New Yorker:

https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-salacious-non-mystery-of-the-real-lolita

I have not read it. Does anyone know if she credits Dolinin for his original article on Sally Horner?

Matt Roth

I want to add a bit more to my post of 08/04/18 about Sybil as the Queen of Spades. I have just recently come upon an excellent supporting document (Nathan Rosen, “The Magic Cards in The Queen of Spades,” SEEJ 19:3 (1975):262)

First, a more complete summary of Pushkin’s Queen of Spades:

Could this be it? Near Cedar City, Utah ("Cedarn, Utana")? Est. 1927 and currently for sale.

http://www.navajolakelodge.com/

Maybe someone has one of the books that charts the Nabovkovs' travels through the West can check.

 

In the most astute sleuthing of Pale Fire yet, James Ramey, winding his way through the index to Pale Fire, discovered that Nabokov slyly hid the crown jewels on the title page in the form of a notation of a black chess queen crown. (James Ramey, PALE FIRE’S BLACK CROWN, NOJ, VOL VI (2012) http://www.nabokovonline.com/uploads/2/3/7/7/23779748/22_ramey_pdff.pdf)

Has anyone already mined the last sentence of each translated-Russian Foreword for, for instance, anagrams? The last sentence in each case is usually a little off in some way. For instance, looking at the last line in the Foreword to The Gift, "The epilogic poem mimicks an Onegin stanza," could have easily been conflated with the sentence before it. Trying to find anagrams, one possible start is "I am happiest seeking zoologic..." with macenim still left.

Hi all,

The Sydney Review of Books has just published my long-ish review essay of Insomniac Dreams, so I thought I'd share it here on the new forum too.

https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/insomniac-dreams-experiments-with-time-vladimir-nabokov/

 WILLIAM MORRIS

I’d like to share a “find” for another possible source for Pale Fire.  (see my post of July 20 for Laughten Osborn’s Visions of Rubeta as possible source. I don’t see these conflicting in any way; an Indra’s Net of multiple allusions reflecting each other seems to be a major motif in PF)

Zachary Ross (my son) has just come across a very interesting article that I believe suggests an important source for Pale Fire:

https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/ass-foretold

Kinbote’s commentary 149 mentions two islands, “Nitra and Indra” (meaning ‘inner’ and outer’), “two black islets that seemed to address each other in cloaked parley…”

I believe these refer to two Hindu gods, Nidra and Indra.  Nabokov may have used a different transliteration for Nidra (Nitra), or he may have decided to play a little word-golf in order to obfuscate the meaning in order to have the reader dig deeper into the fact that ‘Nidra” and “Indra” are anagrams.