This announcement reminds me that I was upset by something I read in the current Nabokovian. Alexey Sklyarenko states, as if it were either fact or obvious, that Aqua (deceased) sends Van (living) a dream. When I enquired of him how he could justify such a statement he told me that there is no textual evidence, but that:
there is some indirect evidence that other dreams of Van (the one he has before his duel, for example) are sent to him by Aqua. We can thus assume that his sny nayavu (dreams he has in waking life) are also sent to him from the other world.
Am I alone in finding this disturbing? I realize statements like this may have become acceptable in the wake of Brian Boyd's solution to Pale Fire. Although I do not agree with that solution, at least there was an attempt to explain the thinking behind the interpretation. Have we gone so far in accepting VN's possible belief in spiritualism, that such a claim does not need to be supported?
Recently we discussed the image from Nabokov's memoirs of life's brief span as a cradle rocking over an abyss of nothingness. How can this image be reconciled to this purported belief in spirits of the deceased acting on the living?
Carolyn