Fascinating. Thankyou AD and BB. The saddest VN portrait ... So appropriate.
Any Quantum Mechanics out there who may share my frissons on hearing Nabokov's reference to hazy waves. We have VN now and VN then, years apart, yet state-entangled until the poem’s self-observation achieves decoherence? Known in Copenhagen as the ‘collapse of the wave function.’ We know of VN’s occasional snipes at Einstein. Perhaps this poem indicates Nabokov siding with Bohr/Heisenberg?
Stan Kelly-Bootle.
On 27/06/2012 17:03, "NABOKV-L" <NABOKV-L@HOLYCROSS.EDU> wrote:
Dear all,
A reading by VN, in English and Russian, of "We so firmly believed," and a blog on the poem:
http://www.openculture.com/2012/06/vladimir_nabokov_recites_his_early_poem_of_transition_to_my_youth.html <http://www.openculture.com/2012/06/vladimir_nabokov_recites_his_early_poem_of_transition_to_my_youth.html>
The question of the dating of the poem was hard enough to answer to warrant a little article in the next Nabokovian.
Brian Boyd