Dennis Kelly :The Uncle Ruka Dream is probably a fake—it
smacks somewhat too much of an 'insider’s joke' by Nabokov...Perhaps I’m just
cynical, but this Brian Boyd anecdote about a Harlequin-disguised Uncle Ruka
helping his beloved nephew in The American Years sounds more like the
“Magician’s Dice” being rolled tongue-in-cheek at Cornell,..
JM: Nabokov made a point of
keeping his public persona as distant as possible from his private life.
It's highly probable that most of his reports
and tales were deliberately misleading at some point.
However he believed in coincidences and synchronicity as revelatory
of life's mysterious patterns. The Uncle Ruka dream must have
carried a grain of truth although one cannot ascertain what for him
were "dreams" outside the literary realm.
When Nabokov stated that "My
greatest masterpieces of twentieth century prose are, in this order: Joyce's
Ulysses,Kafka's Transformation, Biely's Petersburg, and the first half of
Proust's fairy tale In Search of Lost Time," his selection encompasses
novels that have been written in English, German, Russian and French. He
may not have read Kafka in its original language,though: would he have
read it in English? Why did he choose to translate Kafka's title as
"Transformation"?