Two recent youtube videos stimulated me to use them as illustrations for my "birthday hommage" to Vladimir Nabokov.  The first one was a particular interpretation of  "Swan Lake." After I sent the link to our ED, SES, she sent me the second link**.  My original idea had been to write about "Mademoiselle" and the dying swan in that story. Or to explore Nabokov's interest in  bodily language and expression, as he demonstrates it by Mascodagama's ambition to transform movement into language. (upside down metaphors and "performing words"). However, a swan song is not an adequate theme to develop for a birthday celebration. The second idea seemed to be more easily presented, but it proved to be wrong because a sample of his sentences about his character's movements in space awoke in me ***, unexpectedly, an intense discomfort which I associated to a feeling of "the uncanny" #, similar to what audiences and children exmperienced after Mascodagama flipped over to stand on his real feet.  Fortunately, after a lot of hesitancy, I discovered something that might be worth sharing with the VN-L.

 

When people speak about "tongues of fire" they are making an analogy between two distinct events, it's not a "personalization." When Nabokov writes about an obsequious flamelet, it is ( "excuse me, said a polite flamelet holding open the door he was vainly trying to close"). However, I soon realized that Nabokov, in contrast to what we often find in Disney movies and cartoons, doesn't attribute human feelings to living nature, only to inanimate objects. It occurred to me that his work as a poet-scientist might have impeded him to treat "real life" as an object that could be exploited by a puppeteer's control as the one he exerted over his fictional characters ( his "galley slaves"). I don't think that this facet of Nabokov's, in his respect and awe towards life, has been sufficiently exposed. Now I was able to understand what he meant when he chose to "serve a triumphant life sentence between the covers of a book." (LS ix-x).

 

While musing about the day of Vladimir Nabokov's birth I can only wish that the cycle of his life has been as triumphantly experienced as the one he condemned his characters to live, although closer to heaven, to some unlabeled angels and tagged butterflies, than to the destiny he chose for most of his fictional creatures, caged by the covers of a book in lieu of living on, flying on, "in the reflected sky." that arises when a reader opens his novel and, finally, encounters the Author.