This afternoon I received a new set of reviews, selected by Jim Twiggs from old TNR issues and, among them, the much quoted John Updike article on "The Defense." (Grand Master Nabokov, sept. 26, 1964) I selected one of the Updike quotes from it because I wanted to check again its relation to another Assyrian, in "Lolita" (items which were discussed in the Nab-List, in July 2008): "Luzhin's father thinks it 'strange and awesome…to sit on this bright veranda amid the black summer night, across from this boy whose tensed forehead seemed to expand and swell as soon as he bent over the pieces,' this boy for whom 'the whole world suddenly went dark' when he learned chess and who is to glide, across the alternation of many nights and days, from the oblivion of breakdown into the whiteness of a hospital where the psychiatrist wears 'a black Assyrian beard'." Here is the same kind of beard in "Lolita": "a nifty station wagon was parked, and a handsome Assyrian with a little blue-black beard, un monsieur très bien, in silk shirt and magenta slacks, presumably the corpulent botanist's husband, was gravely taking the picture of a signboard giving the altitude of the pass."

The reason I selected this repeated item results from my wish to report a coincidence. While I was busy searching in "Lolita," I received an independent email-link to a "youtube" selection, from Verdi's opera, "Nabucco" ( "Va Pensiero"), which opens when you press over the image of an Assyrian-beard King of Babylon. Dmitri Nabokov's experience as a singer might have exposed Nabokov (no music lover) to this story about invaders, exile and loss. It is mentioned in the Bible, in the Book of Daniel, with its story about the "fiery furnace" and the "writing hand." - if memory still serves me.

All private editorial communications, without exception, are read by both co-editors.

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