NABOKV-L discussion

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannons_(house): "...Alexander Pope was unjustly accused of having represented the house as 'Timon's Villa' in his Epistle of Taste (1731).[5]"

[the note 5] Pope confided to Lord Burlington "that character of Timon is collected from twenty different absurditys and improprieties: and never was the picture of any one human creature"; quoted in James Lees-Milne, The Earls of Creation, :148...

 

Does anyone have any information about the Field archive - in Life and Art of VN notes suggest that Field has a personal archive including letters from Nabokov to his mother, Nabokov's 1952 diary, a hand-written letter to Samuil Rosov from 1937 and 'notebooks'? 

Hi, all! Has there ever been any indication that Nabokov read or at even heard of Vladimir Propp's Morphology of the Folktale (1928)?

For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm. There are not many such books.

by Gerard de Vries

Pale Fire is quoted in the lede and referred to again in the close of a review of Larry Tye's Demagogue: The life and long shadow of Senator Joe McCarthy, by Geoffrey Wheatcroft, in the Times Literary Supplement of Dec 11 2020.

https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/demagogue-larry-tye-book-review-joseph-mccarthy/

The fictional author of LATH, Vadim, is raised by a kooky grand-aunt, Baroness Bredow who exhorts him to:

‘Look at the Harlequins…Come on! Play! Invent the world! Invent reality’

 

The ‘Pale Fire’ quotations Kinbote uses in his commentary headers intrigue me. 

Some he ends with an et cetera (eg ‘Lines 1-4: I was the shadow of the waxwing slain, etc.’):

• C.1-4, C.39-40, C.90-93, C.120-121, C.162, C.167, C.231, C.417-421, C.597-608, C.609-614, C.704-707, C.835-838, C.939-940, C.993-905.

I wonder why the single-line references used in C.162, C.167 and C.231 have etcs instead of simply quoting the full line (as he does in C.57, C.130, C.286, C.549, C.596, C.662)?

“What is the time, kot or? He pressed his repeater and, undismayed, it hissed and tinkled out ten twenty-one." (Note to Line 149)

The hissing repeater (watch) image is taken from Eugene Onegin, One: XVII, variant to lines 1-3 in the draft:

Onegin drinks, is noisy, but again
<under the finger hissing> his Bréguet
<informs him> that [a play] by Shahovskoy...

(Note: this Bréguet is a watch Nabokov describes as "an elegant repeater.")

I wanted to pop back in and give a bit of an update on my old "quoits" thread (and belatedly say thanks to Shakeeb for the encouragement there).

I've mostly been able to find possible counter-evidence, though it's shaky. In his Lectures on Literature, Nabokov spends quite a bit of time with the jingling in this passage (Part Two, Chapter 8), though he doesn't explicitly connect it to Molly's jingling bed: