[Nabokov writes: "Indeed, of all the
characters that a great artist creates, his readers are the best"
(Nabokov, "Russian Writers, Censors, and Readers").... Lara Delage-Toriel...in
her article Disclosures under Seal: Nabokov, Secrecy and the
Reader...: "In his famous essay entitled “Kafka’s Precursors,” Jorge Luis
Borges propounds the idea that great readers create their own writers in a
retroactive way. We find no such latitude for the reader in Nabokov’s own
statements"... Perhaps some of Borges's other lines are worth bringing
up...emphasizing Delage-Toriel's observation that "the act of invention is
closely linked to the discovery of something that is already there, but awaiting
disclosure." The best example of this kind of "invention" is found in Borges's
second article about Coleridge, when he mentions an ancient story about a prince
who decided to build a pleasure dome in Xanadu. He thinks that - should this be
a true fact - then the story behind Coleridge's dream antecedes Coleridge by
many centuries, without having yet reached its final form...I cannot exclude the
hypothesis that some (very few) of his readers are included in the pantheon
Nabokov inhabits...This ghostly dimension is one that, perhaps, is admitted by
John Shade ... when he writes about man's life as an unfinished
poem.]
JM: Adding another confirmation of such an "invention"
(discovering something that is already there), related to Borges's
vision about Coleridge's unfinished report of his dream, because of
Porlock's interruption*, and its legendary precursor and
to Shade's lines (939-940) "Man’s life as commentary to
abstruse/ Unfinished poem. Note for further
use," there's another example of a similar
vision, now linking Pushkin's Evguiéni Oniéguin to Tolstoy's
Anna Karenin. The source is in English but my copy is in
Brazilian. It's found in Elif Batuman's introduction to "Os Possessos,
Aventuras com os Livros Russos e seus Leitores" (The Possessed, 2010).
The author describes a nightmare she's had the night before she was
submitted to an examination. She relates her own nightmare to
Tatiana's dream in E.O., a book she'd been reading before she fell
asleep. "Tatiana's dream gained shape in real life [in EO's
fiction] on the day of the feast of her saint" (when Oniéguin breaks
off with Tatiana and the fatal duel with Liénski takes place) Elif Batuman
adds: "I read Oniéguin in Nabokov's translation to English and I was
very impressed by a note Nabokov added, in which he states that the language of
that dream not only contains 'echoes of rythms and
subjects' from Tatiana's previous experiences in the story, but it also
antecipates the future: 'a certain oneirical quality is
transported to the feast of the saint and later on to the duel.' The
guests at Tatiana's party and the balls in Moscow, writes
Nabokov, 'gain the tonality of a nightmare and they are antecipated by
the demons of fairy-tales and the hybrid monsters in her dream'." After her
examination, Elif spent the next two weeks reading Tolstoy's Anna
Kariénina "which seems to have departed exactly from the same point
where Oniéguin has stopped." It was "as if the spectators at the
Opera had also become parts of Tatiana's nightmare, in the same atmosphere
that had already infiltrated itself in Anna's experiences during the horse races
and the train that was snowed down. It was the same world, the same air, only
everything seemed larger - as it a doll house with all its minimal details had
been transformed into a real house, with long corridors, shining candelabra, a
sinuous garden. Elements from Oniéguin reappeared: a dream of snow, a faal ball,
a revolver, a bear. It was as ifeverything that took place in Oniéguin had been
dreamt by Anna who, in her own life, fulfilled Tatiana's unresolved
destiny." Batuman adds in a footnote: "The formalist critic Boris
Eikhenbaum expresses this idea in Tolstoy in the Seventies in which he
characterizes Anna Kariénina as 'a continuation of Evguiéni
Oniéguin,' and Anna as 'a sort of reincarnation of
Tatiana'."
nb: once again, the wild translations are mine. I haven't yet tried to
locate Nabokov's commentary in EO to be able to quote him correctly.
...............................................................................................................
* - I wonder if there's another coleridgean dream-connection to
life, in Nabokov's "Bend Sinister," since one of its initial titles was
projected as "The Person from Porlock" (later, "Solus Rex"), when it's
the living author, himself, who interrupts Adam Krug's fictional dream of
being a real person, instead of recognizing himself (!) as a character in a
novel by Nabokov...