Eric Naiman writes: "Berberova has
supplied the dissolved epigraph for Nabokov studies... or at least a frequent
point of discursive depature. In fact, one could make a case that the best books
are composed of epigraphs too thoroughly dissolved to permit reconstruction. The
words and themes swim about, but a single syntax eludes the reader. With some
books, it isn't clear whether a term of negation is or is not part of the
epigraph. With other books (i.e. Chevengur), the glue that would bind the
lexical elements is radically insufficient."
Jansy Mello: Personally
(may I?) I wouldn't stretch that far any theory of influence. Epigraphs
are significant to particular people or group of people, mainly due to the
precision or elegancebe in the formulation of an idea or feeling
which others were unable to express with the same felicity. What's new
in them lies in the author's style, more than in the novelty of concepts,
emotions, images.When they are dissolved in the text they lose this
characteristic. They may represent a tease (i.e,no easy wisdom is offered
to be shared with z reader), an homage, a citation.
Eric Naiman's point helped me to imagine how
did VN experience his multilingual talents and wide readings. I think
that the use by John Shade of the rare word "versipel" (werewolf & its
distant association to wergeld) might simply indicate a verbal
monstrosity that some versionists, or reversionists, feel in
themselves by the wealth of semiotic systems and
languages they inhabit. The majority
of articles to which I have access speak of Nabokov's exile and nostalgia, not
of any hypothetical guilt feeling of "betrayal." We find, in an afterword
to "Lolita," a poignant testimony not only of VN's spacial and
temporal losses, but also of his new skin as an American writer.*
"Versipel" could be the verbal image that renders VN's qualms towards his
partially abandoned mother-tongue, then disguised into a parody
of a country that lies far, far away.
....
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* - "But here I feel my
voice rising to a much too strident pitch. None of my American friends have read
my Russian books and thus every appraisal on the strength of my English ones is
bound to be out of focus. My private tragedy, which cannot, and indeed should
not, be anybody's concern, is that I had to abandon my natural idiom, my
untrammeled, rich, and infinitely docile Russian tongue for a second-rate brand
of English, devoid of any of those apparatuses — the baffling mirror, the black
velvet backdrop, the implied associations and traditions — which the native
illusionist, frac-tails flying, can magically use to transcend the heritage in
his own way.."