Dear Jansy,
It is very clear - to me anyway - that Nabokov in his Foreword was denying any human interest, any personal elements in the novel BS. Mark the irony of his 'vigorous periode of life' and the smoking of four packages a day (he had to quit because of a shadow behind the heart - 'a good title for a bad book' as he writes in Pnin), not to mention that he wrote the book after World War II had ended.
Brian Boyd does make clear that BS is about Nabokov's anxiety of losing his dear ones (his wife and child) under tyranny. 'Your soles, sir, taste like died figs' ( I am quoting by heart): he would lick a dictator's shoes just to make sure his beloved ones were safe or would not be hurt. Chaining someone with his own heart-strings was the most cruel thing he could imagine and the only situation in which he would up give all his principles (the directors Fritz Lang and Tarkovsky both said that the the biggest nightmare of men is being subjected to another man's cruelty, by the way and curiously enough).
He might have been ill and full of anxiety (he had just fled Paris because of the approaching Nazi's) during the composition of the novel and the foreword, but he didn't want these to be the heart-string of the novel. That's Nabokov for you. The novel has always struck me as being underrated and as a cerebral, philosophical mirror-tale of Lolita - more than a continuation of or a variation on Invitation to a Beheading. No lyricism, but a battle against the lyricism of the heart: '...a...growth was spread-eagled upon his chest. Under this was a dead wife and a sleeping child.'
The heart as a tomb.
That sums it up, I think.
Best,
Hafid
2011/6/23 Jansy
<jansy@aetern.us>
SES on..."Mike Stauss's
question about the quotation from the introduction to Bend Sinister. On
the structure of Nabokov's introductions, by the way, I recommend Charles
Nicol's essay in the first issue of Nabokov Studies."
JM: I checked VN&EW
correspondence about any discrepancy between VN's Introduction to BS
("Bend Sinister was the first novel I wrote in America, and
that was half a dozen years after she and I had adopted each other. The greater
part of the book was composed in the winter and spring of 1945-1946, at a
particularly cloudless and vigorous period of life. My health was excellent.
My daily consumption of cigarettes had reached the four-package
mark." 9 September 1963, Montreux ) and recollected items from his
letter to Edmund Wilson. From their exchanges I gleaned that VN
considered Bend Sinister ready in his letter dated May
25,1946. In July 18 the same year, he wrote to his friend "I am recuperating (from what was practically a 'nervous
breakdown') in New Hampshire..." and, at last, in September 13, 1946 we
find: "I am quite well again, - better in fact, than I
ever was." (Dear Bunny,Dear
Volodya"p.192-197).
I'm sure there'll be an explanation
about Nabokov's illness in May 1946 and on his recovery, in Brian
Boyd's AY.
All private editorial communications, without
exception, are
read by both co-editors.