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Dear List Members,
I'd like to thank G S Lipon for understanding the significance of my
discovery of a Moscow hopital that housed the insane called Botkin or
Botkinskaya in operation long before PF was published. I'm not sure
it's a "great find", but I did think it added, as he puts it, to the
"richness of the semantic web" of the novel and, to my mind, may indeed
have suggested Botkin's (a Russian and a madman) name to VN.
I regret Laurence Hochard's misapprehension that I was making a
connection between Lee Harvey Oswald as assassin and the assassin in
Nabokov's novel. It was only becaus I was browsing recent conspiracy
theory literature on the JFK assasination for a film project that I
came upon the name Botkin Hospital where Oswald was taken after a
suicide attempt. It didn't occur to me anyone would make Mr. Hochard's
imputed link, in fact it didn't occur to me to connect Oswald with the
assassination in PF at all (and I certainly am aware that the 1963 JFK
killing postdated 1962 PF). But I congratulate Mr. Hochard on the
richness of his imagination in turning up an amusing coincidence
however irrelevant.
I think I owe the list an explantion for what might seem to be an
inordinate interest in Botkin. I just find VN's comments that Kinbote
is Botkin one of the most mysterious and unexplored aspects of the
novel. Why Botkin, why the regression from Kinbote to Botkin? It seems
there is much material for discussion about this question which I'm
sure I could learn much from, from some list members, but it has been
diverted, alas, by what I regard as the ungrounded theories of the
Shadeans and Hazel Shadeans.
So does anyone have a theory about Botkin's significance. An obvious
humoroulsy self deprecating VN figure, one could say, but why the need?
What dos it say about VN's self image in reltation to Kinbote?