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Re: SIGHTING: V. V. Nabokov, Russian attorney; also, BIB
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Susan Elizabeth Sweeney: Mr. Nabokov's website includes a photo of himself...with the plaque celebrating our V.V.N.: http://lawyer-nabokov.com/ In terms of Nabokov and the law, here's a link to an interesting legal essay, "On Art and the Death Penalty: Invitation to a Beheading," that analyzes international law regarding capital punishment in the context of Nabokov's novel. "Like Vladimir Nabokov's prisoner waiting on death row, capital punishment is deemed intolerable not because it is wrong, but because it is unaesthetic," according to the abstract: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1482005. For anyone interested in this topic, please allow me to mention, as well, "Executing Sentences in Lolita and the Law," my own essay on Humbert's hypothetical sentencing at the novel's end: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/sweeney1.htm
Jansy Mello: I hadn't read before the quote: "capital punishment is deemed intolerable not because it is wrong, but because it is unaesthetic," because I could have used it in my argument about "unNabokovian convolutions," instead of merely affirming that the William Cory allusion, "in my eyes ... lacks the expected Nabokov elegance. " However, this aestheticism is highly debatable, just as it occurs with John Keats' lines (Ode on a Grecian Urn) when he concludes that "Beauty is truth and truth, beauty." More enlightening, by its broader scope, than many of the academic articles centered on Keats, I recommend Umberto Eco's "Art and Beauty in the Middle-Ages" when one is interested in examining the philosophies that lie behind the idea that links those two virtues.
Brian Boyd notes that: "Given his lifelong contempt for Freud, his attitude to the methods often used in support of one prominent anti-Stratfordian claimant could not be clearer. And for exactly the same reason: both rely on supposed positive evidence (these wolves in your dream reflect your terror at having as an infant seen your parents have sex doggie-style; this phrase, or this group of letters selected on this basis, could be an anagram that inscribes an anti-Stratfordian) without regard to the counter-evidence (that the dream was of six or seven wolves by a tree, not two wolves making love, and that as Pankejeff commented the explanation was in any case impossible, since he couldn't possibly have seen his parents making love given that children in his milieu slept with their nannies, and so on; or that-to consider only the acrostic methods of anti-Stratfordians-the texts "decoded" acrostically are fully meaningful regardless of the acrostics, and do nothing to signal they should be read acrostically, and could be read acrostically in a virtually infinite combination of other ways)./Freud, interestingly, became an Oxfordian..."..
Jansy Mello: Why bring in Nabokov's contempt for Freud at this point, or ridicule Freud's psychoanalytic probings and theories by comparing them to his adherence to the Oxfordian view? It seems that a reference to Freud, in this context, will not aid to clinch the matter related to the anti-Stratfordians. Considering that not every true and beautiful Nabokovian has to follow, to the dot, the ideas of the Master, this "analogical" line of reasoning is probably a double-edged knife should Freud's importance for XXth Century thinking be duly acknowledged.
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