-------- Original Message --------




From: STADLEN@aol.com
To: NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU


You are right, and it occurred to me as I was writing it. But ‘I was not a . . .’ could have been completed by a million complements. Actually, it runs: ‘I believe that one day a reappraiser will come and declare that, far from having been a frivolous firebird . . .’ The Reappraiser will be reversing a putative previously held reputation for being a firebird. Penny.

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Second thoughts: how about ‘far from having been a frivolous firebird, I was a deadly serious one – a rigid moralist firebird’? P.



That it could have been completed by a million complements was what I meant by invoking Freud. Freud might have said: "Who used the word firebird?" But it is a reasonable equivalent of how people did (and do) talk and write about Nabokov. His own "aesthetic bliss", "no moral in tow" posture was partly to blame for this. Of course, his writing does not have a crudely didactic or propagandist "moral in tow", but it is profoundly moral.

Your second thoughts occurred fleetingly to me also, but I don't think they are convincing. Both frivolous and firebird are surely meant as opposites to what the reappraiser will rightly understand him to be.

Anthony Stadlen

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