: After trying to get
moving on the theme of "true fictions" using the internet*, inspired by Keith's
query to the VN-L, I decided to resort to the two books by Andrew Field that I
happen to own, after I realized that most of the entries related to
"psycho-plagiarism" indicated that the best way to proceed would be
through him.
My first contact with Field came through his "VN: The Life and
Art of Vladimir Nabokov" (1986), read soon after my interest in Nabokov was
roused by "Lolita" in the early eighties. More recently I got the earlier
"Nabokov, his Life in Art" (1967), which I found among the used books being
advertised by the library of Robert Morris Junior College Morris
(nobody had checked it out until that date). If I didn'd find my pencil markings
on various pages, I could have sworn that I had never set my eyes on
it! I started to browse through it right away to find myself
enchanted once again by Field's way of developping his arguments and
presenting his finds. On the theme of Nabokov and Biographies there's a lot to
rediscover already in the first chapter, travelling from a deconstrution about
the life of Pushkin's ancestor Abram Gannibal, through Fyodor's own
attempts in "The Gift" before we reach "RLSK."
Not only great novels invite us to read them over and over, sometimes good
(fair or unfair) criticism is also worth several readings, not only short
dips to glean one information or another. As he acknowledges in his
1967 "In Place of a Foreword": "This book, therefore, can attempt a service
of greater usefulness than can ordinarily be assumed by the literary
critic.."
Perhaps now I'll discover what Nabokov meant by this particular
term:"psycho-plagiarism" that, until now, has left me totally miffed (after
all, who is copying the mind or soul of whom? ) Was he the first author to
use it?
..........................................
* - "What masterpiece was
written in a Buick?", by Joel Conaroe (the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial
Foundation., November 2, 1986)N The Life and Art of Vladimir Nabokov. By Andrew
Field. : "As it happens, Nabokov, in whose work the subject of biography
looms large, was suspicious of ''mucking biographitists,'' who commit
''psychoplagiarism'' by using what an author has created to give an
impression of the inner life. If the biographitist of his own peripatetic
history errs, however, it is on the side not of looting the artist's canon but
of substituting details for imaginative speculation and analysis."
www.nytimes.com/.../what-masterpiece-was-writt... -