After being reminded of JL Borges's 1939 short-story "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" when I encountered Krug's and Ember's project, concerning Shakespeare, I chose the wikipedia short-cut to get it quickly described in English to share it with the List.

Wiki's plot summary: "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" is written in the form of a review or literary critical piece about Pierre Menard, a (purely fictional) 20th century French writer. It begins with a brief introduction and a listing of all of Menard's work. Borges' "review" describes Menard's efforts to go beyond a mere "translation" of Don Quixote by immersing himself so thoroughly in the work as to be able to actually "re-create" it, line for line, in the original 17th century Spanish. Thus, Pierre Menard is often used to raise questions and discussion about the nature of authorship, appropriation and interpretation."

Actully, most of Krug's plans seem to be independent of Borges's original story, reflecting more on Nabokov's opinions about the "Shakespeare Authorship" debates. What set me off here was simply the first line of the paragraph in which the narrator outlines his plans.

Penguin ed. "Bend Sinister" p.77 (ch.6): "Theoretically there is no absolute proof that one's awakening in the morning (the finding oneself again in the saddle of one's personality) is not really a quite unprecedented event, a perfectly original birth. One day Ember and he had happened to discuss the possibility of their having invented in toto the works of William Shakespeare, spending millions and millions on the hoax, smothering with hush money countless publishers, librarians, the Stratford-on-Avon people, since in order to be responsible for all references to the poet during three centuries of civilization, these references had to be assumed to be spurious interpolations injected by the inventors into actual works which they had re-edited; there still was a snag here, a bothersome flaw, but perhaps it might be eliminated, too, just as a cooked chess problem can be cured by the addition of a passive pawn."

A writer (was it David Lodge?) once wrote that soon scholars would turn away from the original works they specialize in,to dedicate themselves to read other scholars's reviews, thesis and criticism of still another scholar's reading of novel and poem.

I realized that if some of the VN-L participants feel in the same way I do about Nabokov, they'll agree that Nabokov is the kind of author who will not succumb to this publish or perish academic trend. Nabokov's writing is so delightfully full of missed alusions and delicate surprises that one has to return to him over and over, independently of the overall narrative structure.

Nabokov's sentences are, if I may say so, "self-sufficient" and "substantive," i.e., they may be fully enjoyed and unfolded independently of their insertion in a plot. So, while I tried to locate the Shakespeare theme in BS, I came across a deliciously proustian paragraph (another one, I mean, but it was the first one in Bend Sinister) .

Cf. BS, ch 1, p.13: "It [a puddle] lies in shadow but contains a sample of the brightness beyond, where there are trees and two houses. Look closer. Yes, it reflects a portion of pale blue sky — mild infantile shade of blue — taste of milk in my mouth because I had a mug of that colour thirty-five years ago. It also reflects a brief tangle of bare twigs and the brown sinus of a stouter limb cut off by its rim and a transverse bright cream-coloured band. You have dropped something, this is yours, creamy house in the sunshine beyond. "

The deeply felt infantile blue and creamy house engenders not only a taste of milk in Krug's mouth. Fact is I suddenly realized that the narrator has emphasized the special quality of his name. Krug, in German, corresponds to a mug (not necessarily a celestial blue one!)