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Fw: Fw: Boyd on Zimmer on Mimicry
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----- Original Message -----
From: Dieter E. Zimmer
To: Vladimir Nabokov Forum
Sent: Wednesday, September 04, 2002 11:58 PM
Subject: Re: Fw: Boyd on Zimmer on Mimicry
Brian and I are so close on this (and much more) that perhaps we should not pursue it, especially as other readers seem to find it a great bore. Just one more remark which the bored guys and gals should by all means skip.
It is exactly because I know very well how thoroughly, profoundly and extensively Nabokov researched even minor matters he intended to use in his fiction that I was astonished by the paucity of his material on mimicry which to him was no minor matter. (Together with a collaborator I have spent the last months unraveling such a case, and when it is published Nabokophiles will be flabbergasted by how much careful and insightful reserach he invested in Chapter 2 of "The Gift," Konstantin Kirillovich Gudunov-Cherdyntsev's Central Asian voyages.) "Father's Butterflies," I suggest, was written at a very unpropitious moment when he didn't have access to the scientific libraries of Berlin he was used to, and those of America were still a year or two away. But why didn't he check (and possibly improve on) the examples he cited in chapter 2 of "The Gift"? We are reduced to guesswork, and my guess is what many have been claiming, openly or tacitly, including Brian: Nabokov was interested in mimicry mainly as the metaphysician that he was and not as a scientist he also was, and--my additional guess--he may have felt that a closer study of the phenomenon would have forced the "two souls in his breast" (a quote from "Faust") to fight it out.
Dieter E. Zimmer
Berlin, September 5, 2002 -- 9am
mail@d-e-zimmer.de
----- Original Message -----
From: Dieter E. Zimmer
To: Vladimir Nabokov Forum
Sent: Wednesday, September 04, 2002 11:58 PM
Subject: Re: Fw: Boyd on Zimmer on Mimicry
Brian and I are so close on this (and much more) that perhaps we should not pursue it, especially as other readers seem to find it a great bore. Just one more remark which the bored guys and gals should by all means skip.
It is exactly because I know very well how thoroughly, profoundly and extensively Nabokov researched even minor matters he intended to use in his fiction that I was astonished by the paucity of his material on mimicry which to him was no minor matter. (Together with a collaborator I have spent the last months unraveling such a case, and when it is published Nabokophiles will be flabbergasted by how much careful and insightful reserach he invested in Chapter 2 of "The Gift," Konstantin Kirillovich Gudunov-Cherdyntsev's Central Asian voyages.) "Father's Butterflies," I suggest, was written at a very unpropitious moment when he didn't have access to the scientific libraries of Berlin he was used to, and those of America were still a year or two away. But why didn't he check (and possibly improve on) the examples he cited in chapter 2 of "The Gift"? We are reduced to guesswork, and my guess is what many have been claiming, openly or tacitly, including Brian: Nabokov was interested in mimicry mainly as the metaphysician that he was and not as a scientist he also was, and--my additional guess--he may have felt that a closer study of the phenomenon would have forced the "two souls in his breast" (a quote from "Faust") to fight it out.
Dieter E. Zimmer
Berlin, September 5, 2002 -- 9am
mail@d-e-zimmer.de