Carolyn Kunin to Brian Tomba: "...I have recently been wondering if VN's antagonism to Freud hasn't been mis-interpreted. In other words I wonder if it isn't Freud's belief in what he called Todestrieb, that is the death drive, that VN actually objected to [   ]  Mozart's own words, "Death is the true goal of our existence, and mankind’s best friend..." Personally I find this a very sane and healthy attitude, and if I may be allowed my own prejudices, I find it rather 'Jewish,' although we too have our seekers after immortality. This inability to allow nature to take her age-old course I find very distasteful in VN. It is in an odd way a life defeating attitude. Our works should live on after us, not our selves."

 

Jansy Mello: In one of Freud's last interviews he made explicit the same idea that afflicted John Shade:

523: "I’m ready to become a floweret/ Or a fat fly, but never, to forget./ And I’ll turn down eternity unless/ The melancholy and the tenderness/ Of mortal life; the passion and the pain;[   ] Are found in Heaven by the newlydead/ Stored in its strongholds through the years.":537

 

I don't know much about Judaism, so I must take your word concerning the thought that the rejection of any hope for immortality "is very Jewish."

(I thought there existed Jewish mystics and  that the Cabbala.was an expression of just such a belief).

 

It was not the Freudian "Todestrieb"that which Nabokov rejected in Freud, but how VN understood Freud's "interpretation of symbols" and tje freudian theory about Oedipal wishes in children and the Primal Scene.

 

For those interested in this thread I recommend Freud's "Beyond the Pleasure Principle," where he affirms that the goal of life is death (Freud sometimes related it to "Nirvana"), but where he also made it clear that, for him, every organism will strive to "die its own kind of death" and that (just like VN's opening sentence in "Speak,Memory" about the life wedged between two eternities of darkness) the mixture of drives and external obstacles to individual survival, are the predominant elements that shape a living being's course of life