Joseph:
as I've observed in earlier postings, it's rather unfair to expect VN's
manifest literary genius to also extend into other domains such as pure
and applied mathematics. He lived through remarkable revolutions both
socio-political and scientific. The latter included not only
Einstein/Bohr (relativity and quantum mechanics) but also the failure
of Hilbert's plan to formalize the foundations of mathematics (Goedel,
Church, Turing). I continue to explore any signs of these influencing
VN's writings.
skb
On 24/06/2008 20:19, "joseph Aisenberg" <vanveen13@SBCGLOBAL.NET> wrote:
Oh,
I very much hope you continue! I thought this and your other note
extremely interesting. Personally, I don't think Nabokov really had a
theoretical scientific brain at all. I've read this Gogol book, and his
lectures on the writer several times, and never really knew what he
meant with that "four dimension" talk other than the stories being sort
of groovy and sort of fantastic (as opposed, say to the "three
dimensions" he said Tolstoy had to his writing), since the e.g.s
Nabokov supplied of Gogolian prose really seemed like tricks of
Rhetoric taken to bizzare extremes, analogies growing into whole
independent stories and then fading away, repetivie modifications for
comic grotesque hyper-effects, etc. And you know, Nabokov's notions of
Time really have not much relationship to theories of relativity. He
mocked Einstein, whom he thought a victim of the logic of his own
erroneous thinking. There's a particularly crude gag about relativity
somewhere in the Texture of Time portion of Ada, I believe. Surely some
other Nabokovian out there will be able to provide the exact quote!