Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0014403, Fri, 15 Dec 2006 22:33:00 -0500

Subject
New England or Virginia?
From
Date
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The concordance is already causing me problems. For the entry
"New Wye," we seem to have conflicting information. In the
foreword, Kinbote places New Wye at the same latitude as
Palermo, Italy. Jerry Friedman has pointed out that this would put
it somewhere in Virginia, just south of Washington. But in
C.149 Kinbote writes that Odon's mother (Sylvia O'Donnell)
"was an American, from New Wye in New England." I find these
statements irreconcilable. Given the degree of importance VN
gives to exact locations of things, I have to assume that the
mistake is Kinbote's. If I have to pick one or the other as
the "true" location, I choose Virginia, in part because
"Appalachia," as the term is commonly used, points to that part
of the Appalachian chain south of the Mason Dixon line in
southern Pennsylvania.

Matt Roth

[EDNOTE. In LOLITA, Humbert describes a map of America that he saw as a child, which "had ‘Appalachian Mountains’ boldly running from Alabama up to New Brunswick, so that the whole region they spanned—Tennessee, the Virginias, Pennsylvania, New York, Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine, appeared to my imagination as a gigantic Switzerland or even Tibet" (209-210). -- SES]

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