Susan Elizabeth Sweeney: Mr. Nabokov's
website includes a photo of himself...with the plaque celebrating our V.V.N.:
http://lawyer-nabokov.com/ In terms of Nabokov
and the law, here's a link to an interesting legal essay, "On Art and the Death
Penalty: Invitation to a Beheading," that analyzes international law regarding
capital punishment in the context of Nabokov's novel. "Like Vladimir
Nabokov's prisoner waiting on death row, capital punishment is deemed
intolerable not because it is wrong, but because it is unaesthetic," according
to the abstract: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1482005. For anyone interested in this topic, please allow me to mention, as
well, "Executing Sentences in Lolita and the Law," my own essay on Humbert's
hypothetical sentencing at the novel's end: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/sweeney1.htm
Jansy Mello: I hadn't read before the
quote: "capital punishment is deemed intolerable not because it is wrong, but
because it is unaesthetic," because I could have used it in my argument about
"unNabokovian convolutions," instead of merely affirming that the William Cory
allusion, "in my eyes ... lacks the expected Nabokov
elegance. " However, this aestheticism is highly debatable,
just as it occurs with John Keats' lines (Ode on a Grecian Urn) when he
concludes that "Beauty is truth and truth, beauty." More enlightening,
by its broader scope, than many of the academic articles centered on
Keats, I recommend Umberto Eco's "Art and Beauty in the Middle-Ages" when one is
interested in examining the philosophies that lie behind the idea that
links those two virtues.
Brian Boyd notes that: "Given his lifelong contempt for Freud, his attitude to the methods
often used in support of one prominent anti-Stratfordian claimant could not be
clearer. And for exactly the same reason: both rely on supposed positive
evidence (these wolves in your dream reflect your terror at having as an infant
seen your parents have sex doggie-style; this phrase, or this group of letters
selected on this basis, could be an anagram that inscribes an anti-Stratfordian)
without regard to the counter-evidence (that the dream was of six or seven
wolves by a tree, not two wolves making love, and that as Pankejeff commented
the explanation was in any case impossible, since he couldn’t possibly have seen
his parents making love given that children in his milieu slept with their
nannies, and so on; or that—to
consider only the acrostic methods of anti-Stratfordians—the texts “decoded”
acrostically are fully meaningful regardless of the acrostics, and do nothing to
signal they should be read acrostically, and could be read acrostically in a
virtually infinite combination of other ways)./Freud,
interestingly, became an Oxfordian..."..
Jansy Mello: Why bring in
Nabokov's contempt for Freud at this point, or ridicule Freud's psychoanalytic
probings and theories by comparing them to his adherence to the Oxfordian
view? It seems that a reference to Freud, in this context, will not aid
to clinch the matter related to the anti-Stratfordians. Considering that
not every true and beautiful Nabokovian has to follow, to the
dot, the ideas of the Master, this "analogical" line of
reasoning is probably a double-edged knife should Freud's importance
for XXth Century thinking be duly
acknowledged.