Subject
[NABOKOV] Forty years of exile, HH's confessions,
Gradus in prison...
Gradus in prison...
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Dear List,
Repetition in written works can produce the illusion of hidden meanings and this is why, after I became curious about "forty sleeping tablets" and some kind of "robbery", I felt the itch to go after another sentence, one about forty thieves.
The capsules Humbert Humbert treasured ( forty of them, all told - forty nights with a frail little sleeper at my throbbing side; could I rob myself of...) led me, at first, to Pale Fire [ forty guests, forty Arabian thieves." (Influence of the huge terracotta vases in the garden.)] but I knew it was another sentence I had in mind. I finally found it in Bend Sinister: Oh, of course I loved her like forty thousand brothers, as thick as thieves (terracotta jars, a cypress, a fingernail moon) but we all were Lamord's pupils, if you know what I mean.'
Chance made me notice other references using "forty" (numbers of poems, pages,distances, middle-aged men and women ).
There was even a different kind of repetition in RLSK with an echo of Lolita: So this was the way I got a list of some forty-two names among which Sebastian's (S. Knight, 36 Oak Park Gardens, London, SW) seemed strangely lovely and lost. ...Out of forty-one unknown persons as many as thirty-seven 'did not come to question' as the little man put it.
Cp: : "Haze, Dolores (she!) in its special bower of names, with its bodyguard of roses - a fairy princess between her two maids of honor.".
In the meantime, while oscillating between those "42" and "41" names, I remembered that VN once mentioned that he confused his age because of the turn of the Century (SM), a mistake that reappeared in Kinbote's mistakes about his own and Shade's ages. I had started to count dates in "Lolita" ( and, like Humbert Humbert confessed when calculating the mileage, gas and various others expenses he incurred, from Aug.47 to mid-August 48, I'm also poor in Arythmetics...)when I noticed that there was often a "sliding" that displaced a year in "Lolita", or made it impossible to ascertain years and ages with precision. Almost as if the year of HH's road-escapade with Lolita was so "hazy" that it could have been an invention of his, like Kinbote's Zembla...
Next I was struck by Nabokov's description in OEL..: "It had taken me some forty years to invent Russia and Western Europe, and now I was faced by the task of inventing America." and I contrasted it with a 1962 BBC interview. When asked if he would ever return to Russia, Nabokov answered: I will never return. I will never surrender [...] let us not forget that Russia has grown tremendously provincial during these forty years, apart from the fact that people there are told what to read, what to think. This kind of interval and exile is recurrently mentioned: Before diagnosing neuralgia of the jaw, she wanted me to see a dentist when sober [...] His name was Molnar with that n like a grain in a cavity; I used him some forty years later in A Kingdom by the Sea; how did you, the author, manage to think up those subtle turns [...]that only a Russian would make? Impersonation, I know, runs in the family, but still--" Iris replied (with that quaint non sequitur that I was to give to the heroine of my Ardis forty years later); The "Boyan" publishing firm [...] occupied a smart three-story house of the hotel particulier type. In my day it stood between a garage and a cinema: forty years before (in the vista of reverse metamorphosis) the former had been a fountain and the latter a group of stone nymphs. (LATH); and for no special reason the reader suddenly saw, with passionate and ridiculous lucidity, his parents, Dr Pavel Pnin and Valeria Pnin, he with a medical journal, she with a political review, sitting in two armchairs, facing each other in a small, cheerfully lighted drawing room on Galernaya Street, St Petersburg, forty years ago.; And at the heart of that heart sat the King, pale and calm, and on the whole closely resembling his son as that under-former imagined he would look at forty himself.[...] Pale and calm[...] 'Abdication! One-third of the alphabet!'[...]'The answer is no. I prefer the unknown quantity of exile.'; 'Avtomobil', kostyum [...]said Varvara, and introduced Pnin to Roza Abramovna Shpolyanski.'We had some mutual friends forty years ago,' remarked that lady, peering at Pnin with curiosity (PNIN); This was the first year of the Soviet regime; out of forty pupils in the class only seventeen remained, and every day they met the teachers with the question 'Will there be lessons today?' (The Defense)
Although my results were far from "mysterious" in relation to a real experience relating forty-years, Russia and exile, the uncertainties in Lolita ( how old was she, 12 going to 13, as HH often mentioned, or 13 already, from another complicated counting that involved a 9 year-old HH in the Riviera?) made me doubt HH's grandiose "confessions" about that which might only have been a trivial case of murder. As if it had been jailed "Gradus" who wrote Pale Fire...(I'm only teasing the list with a very old issue!!!)
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Repetition in written works can produce the illusion of hidden meanings and this is why, after I became curious about "forty sleeping tablets" and some kind of "robbery", I felt the itch to go after another sentence, one about forty thieves.
The capsules Humbert Humbert treasured ( forty of them, all told - forty nights with a frail little sleeper at my throbbing side; could I rob myself of...) led me, at first, to Pale Fire [ forty guests, forty Arabian thieves." (Influence of the huge terracotta vases in the garden.)] but I knew it was another sentence I had in mind. I finally found it in Bend Sinister: Oh, of course I loved her like forty thousand brothers, as thick as thieves (terracotta jars, a cypress, a fingernail moon) but we all were Lamord's pupils, if you know what I mean.'
Chance made me notice other references using "forty" (numbers of poems, pages,distances, middle-aged men and women ).
There was even a different kind of repetition in RLSK with an echo of Lolita: So this was the way I got a list of some forty-two names among which Sebastian's (S. Knight, 36 Oak Park Gardens, London, SW) seemed strangely lovely and lost. ...Out of forty-one unknown persons as many as thirty-seven 'did not come to question' as the little man put it.
Cp: : "Haze, Dolores (she!) in its special bower of names, with its bodyguard of roses - a fairy princess between her two maids of honor.".
In the meantime, while oscillating between those "42" and "41" names, I remembered that VN once mentioned that he confused his age because of the turn of the Century (SM), a mistake that reappeared in Kinbote's mistakes about his own and Shade's ages. I had started to count dates in "Lolita" ( and, like Humbert Humbert confessed when calculating the mileage, gas and various others expenses he incurred, from Aug.47 to mid-August 48, I'm also poor in Arythmetics...)when I noticed that there was often a "sliding" that displaced a year in "Lolita", or made it impossible to ascertain years and ages with precision. Almost as if the year of HH's road-escapade with Lolita was so "hazy" that it could have been an invention of his, like Kinbote's Zembla...
Next I was struck by Nabokov's description in OEL..: "It had taken me some forty years to invent Russia and Western Europe, and now I was faced by the task of inventing America." and I contrasted it with a 1962 BBC interview. When asked if he would ever return to Russia, Nabokov answered: I will never return. I will never surrender [...] let us not forget that Russia has grown tremendously provincial during these forty years, apart from the fact that people there are told what to read, what to think. This kind of interval and exile is recurrently mentioned: Before diagnosing neuralgia of the jaw, she wanted me to see a dentist when sober [...] His name was Molnar with that n like a grain in a cavity; I used him some forty years later in A Kingdom by the Sea; how did you, the author, manage to think up those subtle turns [...]that only a Russian would make? Impersonation, I know, runs in the family, but still--" Iris replied (with that quaint non sequitur that I was to give to the heroine of my Ardis forty years later); The "Boyan" publishing firm [...] occupied a smart three-story house of the hotel particulier type. In my day it stood between a garage and a cinema: forty years before (in the vista of reverse metamorphosis) the former had been a fountain and the latter a group of stone nymphs. (LATH); and for no special reason the reader suddenly saw, with passionate and ridiculous lucidity, his parents, Dr Pavel Pnin and Valeria Pnin, he with a medical journal, she with a political review, sitting in two armchairs, facing each other in a small, cheerfully lighted drawing room on Galernaya Street, St Petersburg, forty years ago.; And at the heart of that heart sat the King, pale and calm, and on the whole closely resembling his son as that under-former imagined he would look at forty himself.[...] Pale and calm[...] 'Abdication! One-third of the alphabet!'[...]'The answer is no. I prefer the unknown quantity of exile.'; 'Avtomobil', kostyum [...]said Varvara, and introduced Pnin to Roza Abramovna Shpolyanski.'We had some mutual friends forty years ago,' remarked that lady, peering at Pnin with curiosity (PNIN); This was the first year of the Soviet regime; out of forty pupils in the class only seventeen remained, and every day they met the teachers with the question 'Will there be lessons today?' (The Defense)
Although my results were far from "mysterious" in relation to a real experience relating forty-years, Russia and exile, the uncertainties in Lolita ( how old was she, 12 going to 13, as HH often mentioned, or 13 already, from another complicated counting that involved a 9 year-old HH in the Riviera?) made me doubt HH's grandiose "confessions" about that which might only have been a trivial case of murder. As if it had been jailed "Gradus" who wrote Pale Fire...(I'm only teasing the list with a very old issue!!!)
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/