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Re: [NABOKOV-L] A novel with "Real people and not my inventions",
Nabokov, 1925
Nabokov, 1925
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Re: [NABOKV-L] [NABOKOV-L] A novel with "Real people and not my inventions", Nabokov, 1925S K-B [ "Happy is the novelist who manages to preserve an actual love letter that he received when he was young within a work of fiction, embedded in it like a clean bullet in flabby flesh and quite secure there, among spurious lives." Speak, Memory, Chapter Twelve, 5]: "This masterful sentence serves as a reminder of Karl Popper's warning that one cannot write "everything all at once." At least not in a linear, natural-language text...The sentence is also a reminder, if such were needed, that Speak, Memory is a treasured insight into VN's world and mind, uniquely defying the labels of memoir and autobiography."
JM: There's somewhere in "Speak, Memory" another sentence where Nabokov states that he doesn't believe that people "think in words," and that he, himself, thinks with images (there's all that part of Joyce and "shadows of thougts," etc.)
He equally mentions that his novels are visually ready in his mind, whereas his words come tumbling and stumbling when tries to use words to set them down on paper ( for me, this is still a very curious assertion, in line with multilayered boards for synchronized chess-games).
Perhaps, later on, I'll quote from RLSK where V. reacts to Sebastian's style and the everspreading field of associations which need to be held in check before he is able to write down a simple sentence.
While discussing the signifier "GREEN" (now moving away from the sensation of color knock-knocking at my door) I affirmed that in VN's short-stories the word "viridate" appears two times, and "verdant". I must have made a mistake and I'll continue to check on my underlined texts ( one of the sentences is so clear in my mind: "before they began to viridate...", but I haven't found it yet).
In the meantime, let me bring what I found in connection to "vert" and "verdure". The first source is, of course, "Pnin": "Cendrillon's shoes were not made of glass but of Russian squirrel fur - vair, in French. It was, he said, an obvious case of the survival of the fittest among words, verre being more evocative than vair which, he submitted, came not from varius, variegated, but from veveritsa, Slavic for a certain beautiful, pale, winter-squirrel fur, having a bluish, or better say sizïy, columbine, shade - 'from columba, Latin for "pigeon ", as somebody here well knows - so you see, Mrs Fire, you were, in general, correct.' " There is a gradual variation from green into ash-gray and paloma colors.
Ver-ver occurs in Ada, I think. There's also "miniver fur". There is verdure all over, though. It's in Lolita, Ada, several short-stories. I picked only one up: " It was a pure, blue lake, with an unusual expression of its water. In the middle, a large cloud was reflected in its entirety. On the other side, on a hill thickly covered with verdure (and the darker the verdure, the more poetic it is), towered, arising from dactyl to dactyl, an ancient black castle (Cloud,Castle, Lake)
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JM: There's somewhere in "Speak, Memory" another sentence where Nabokov states that he doesn't believe that people "think in words," and that he, himself, thinks with images (there's all that part of Joyce and "shadows of thougts," etc.)
He equally mentions that his novels are visually ready in his mind, whereas his words come tumbling and stumbling when tries to use words to set them down on paper ( for me, this is still a very curious assertion, in line with multilayered boards for synchronized chess-games).
Perhaps, later on, I'll quote from RLSK where V. reacts to Sebastian's style and the everspreading field of associations which need to be held in check before he is able to write down a simple sentence.
While discussing the signifier "GREEN" (now moving away from the sensation of color knock-knocking at my door) I affirmed that in VN's short-stories the word "viridate" appears two times, and "verdant". I must have made a mistake and I'll continue to check on my underlined texts ( one of the sentences is so clear in my mind: "before they began to viridate...", but I haven't found it yet).
In the meantime, let me bring what I found in connection to "vert" and "verdure". The first source is, of course, "Pnin": "Cendrillon's shoes were not made of glass but of Russian squirrel fur - vair, in French. It was, he said, an obvious case of the survival of the fittest among words, verre being more evocative than vair which, he submitted, came not from varius, variegated, but from veveritsa, Slavic for a certain beautiful, pale, winter-squirrel fur, having a bluish, or better say sizïy, columbine, shade - 'from columba, Latin for "pigeon ", as somebody here well knows - so you see, Mrs Fire, you were, in general, correct.' " There is a gradual variation from green into ash-gray and paloma colors.
Ver-ver occurs in Ada, I think. There's also "miniver fur". There is verdure all over, though. It's in Lolita, Ada, several short-stories. I picked only one up: " It was a pure, blue lake, with an unusual expression of its water. In the middle, a large cloud was reflected in its entirety. On the other side, on a hill thickly covered with verdure (and the darker the verdure, the more poetic it is), towered, arising from dactyl to dactyl, an ancient black castle (Cloud,Castle, Lake)
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/