Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0014092, Fri, 17 Nov 2006 16:12:26 -0500

Subject
Re: Enjoying LATH ("Perfection," "Lik"), translation,
and lycanthropy
From
Date
Body
I too did enjoy LATH (and my favorite short story by VN also happens to
be
"Lik")! There was a marvelous article (don't remember its title) by Don
Johnson on that novel, included in his Worlds in Regression book, in
which
the author argues that all of the protagonist's wives, except the last
one,
"you" of the book, are his sisters. And I'm sure there remain more
riddles
in the novel to be solved, more Venice and geometry* to those
harlequins'
rhomboid patterns.

I'm still looking forward to responses from the listers wishing to help
me
with the Englishing of my piece on VN and Gorki (as yet I've received
none).
My email is skylark05@mail.ru. I'd also appreciate your enthusiastic
comments, as well as harsh criticism (abuse always pleases me even more
than praise), expressed in Nabokv-L.

As to lycanthropy, it is mentioned, if I'm not mistaken, in Nekrasov's
long
poem "The Recent Time" (Nedavnee vremya). There are versipellis in an
early
short story (Upyr', "Vampire," or a title like that) by A. K. Tolstoy, a
French book on whom I recently recommended on the List. Tolstoy was a
distant relative of Russian tsars and, as a child, a playmate of the
future
Alexander II (but, unlike Kinbote's Oleg, not a lover of the heir to the
throne, oh no!). Incidentally, his maternal uncle, the writer Antoniy
Pogorel'sky (the pseudonym of... the name escapes me), author of the
famous
fairy tale "The Black Hen," is said to have been Alexey Tolstoy's real
father.

Alexey Sklyarenko

*from VN's Russian poem "Akh, ugonyat ikh v step', arlekinov moikh..."

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