Keith: Does anyone know where Nabokov called biography
psycho-plagiarism? It's referred to constantly, but no text that I've
encountered so far cites it.
JM: What a pity that you didn't ennumerate some of the
references to "psycho-plagiarism." Here are a few suggestions, in case
nobody comes forward with the correct indication.
I searched for VN's considerations about biography ("average reality")
and autobiographical fiction ("true reality"), as elaborated upon by G.
Green (at Cycnus), until I found one of those "references" with no
bibliographical markings*, but one that brings a promising lead, at
least into the demonstrations of VN's "jaundiced views" about biography,
as may be found in the exemplary comments written by
biographers Goodman (RLSK) and by Kinbote (PF). These two
examples helped me to conjecture that Nabokov's sentence must have been
pronounced or written down at the time he was staying in Paris. Or in the
late fifties in America?.
I also wonder if they were quoted by B. Boyd in one of his biographies
(RY and AY, or published among VN's collected letters to editors. Worth
giving it a try.
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*. "Very Nasty," an old review by John Sutherland of Andrew
Field's "VN: The Life and Art of Vladimir Nabokov," published online by
the London Review of Books. He writes that "Field was the first
critic conscientiously to excavate Nabokov’s sizeable corpus of early work in
Russian, most of it published obscurely in pre-war Europe. ...Nabokov’s career
up to 1967 was not easily brought into single focus...Field’s body-and-soul
devotion to the Nabokov cause and his mastery of out-of-the-way works was
ingratiating. ...Nabokov acceded to his young disciple’s offer despite a
ferocious distaste for and disbelief in literary biography
(‘psycho-plagiarism’) as a genre – jaundiced views given full play in the
depiction of Sebastian Knight’s Goodman and Pale Fire’s Kinbote.
"