NABOKV-L discussion

It occurs to me that the image of Hazel as “Mother Time” is an allusion to the character “Kate” the old charwoman in Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. Kate appears with slop pail and broom, and like Time, is always cleaning up the mess after disasters, picking out various detritus which she has been throwing on her garbage heap since the beginning of time. The word “time” is frequently found somewhere near her.

Tuesday, June 15, 4:15 pm EST

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC)

UNC Center for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies

UNC Russian Flagship Program

present a talk by

Dana DRAGUNOIU (Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada)

“IT HEAVES, MANIFESTS, AND LASTS”: THE CASE OF VLADIMIR NABOKOV’S LOLITA

Pertaining to the following quote from Ada, Part 1, Chapter 17:

"I am sentimental," she said. "I could dissect a koala but not its baby. I like the words damozel, eglantine, elegant. I love when you kiss my elongated white hand."

In his Lectures on Russian Literature he pointedly makes clear his views on "sentimentality" and "sensitivity"—and the difference therein:

(Not directly a Nabokov question, but thought this might be a good place to ask.)

Is anyone here well acquainted with Anna Karenina?

I'm re-reading it for the first time, and now that I'm paying closer attention, I found I was totally surprised at the mention of Dolly giving birth (Two II), since this means she would have been quite pregnant throughout part One, and I couldn't find any hint of it (her thinness is all I can find) — am I missing anything? Was this on purpose?

Regarding the following passage:

"Sladko! (Sweet!)" Pushkin used to exclaim in relation to a different species in Yukon.

Does anyone have information on what VN refers to in Speak Memory when he writes:

'Short of suicide, I have tried everything. I have doffed my identity in order to pass for a conventional spook and steal into realms that existed before I was conceived. I have mentally endured the degrading company of Victorian lady novelists and retired colonels who remembered having, in former lives, been slave messengers on a Roman road or sages under the willows of Lhasa.'

The following are notes that I took while recently re-reading Part 1 of Ada. Brian Boyd was kind enough to include some of them in his online annotations. Apologies if there are any redundant remarks vis-à-vis previous posts by others.

John Nagamichi Cho

Chapter 1

Friends,

March continues to be an especially exciting month for Nabokov studies. In addition to the release of the latest Nabokov Online Journal, we also have the publication of two new collections of topical essays and one new monograph:

1. Teaching Nabokov's Lolita in the #MeToo Era, Elena Rakhimova-Sommers, Ed. (See news page for full description)

I personally find the idea of "cancel culture" pretty regressive (adults swept into peer trends) but anyway beyond the headline this does get into some depth:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/02/books/review/lolita-obscenity-cancel-culture-emily-mortimer.html

I want to add to my previous post (http://thenabokovian.org/node/52191) a brief chart I made demonstrating many of the similarities between Pale Fire and Finnegans Wake (attached). My suggestion, as above, is that it seems possible that VN was influenced by Northrup Frye’s acclaims of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, and purposely plagiarized the themes and motifs, possibly as parody or as a demonstration of how the same could be employed in a novel that is actually readable on a number of literary levels.