Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0022500, Tue, 28 Feb 2012 13:28:44 -0300

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Re: Nabokov and Twelve-Year-Old Girls ...
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Julian Connoly [replies to JM's :I suppose that "the author" refers to Douglas M. Davis, not to Vladimir Nabokov! This author's insistence on turning "Lolita" into a story with a moral intention reminds me of Lionel Trilling's essay..] "The 'author' referred to in the Davis quotation is Nabokov. JC

JM: Thank you for the clarification. I've no way to lay my hands on "On the Banks of Lake Lemon. Mr Nabokov Reflects on 'Lolita' and Onegin," by Douglas M. Davis In The National Observer (29 June 1964) to search in its bibliography the information about when and where VN's original sentence was published. Any help?

RSGwynn: [to JM's this is a very good line of argumentation, considering Quilty "as an invention within the invention"...] So HH wrote the Foreword under the pseudonym of John Ray, Jr., Ph. D., and then conveniently died in prison a few days before his trial for the figurative murder of CQ? More meta- than this fiction needs, I think.

JM: Is it always necessary to resort to meta-fiction while exploring the possible worlds of a novel? How shall we consider the status of "Gradus" in "Pale Fire," or Kinbote's reports about his actual delusions?

If Humbert Humbert had simply been transfered from the psychopathic ward to an insane asylum after committing a crime, his notes and John Ray,Jr.'s foreword would fit into the ordinary scheme of the novel. HH might even have killed some other guy who he thought had been his nymphet's stalker and abductor (like J.Shade's murder, instead of J.Goldsworth's, in PF, as another reference to VN's father's assassination in Berlin?).

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