Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0005337, Tue, 11 Jul 2000 10:51:33 -0700

Subject
Re: What was Gordon wearing? (fwd)
Date
Body
From: ken tapscott <kentapscott@hotmail.com>

Perhaps this has already been mentioned re Gordon's get-up, and I may
have missed it in an earlier posting, but in addition to being dressed like
Nijinsky in his most famous role, Gordon is also attired in the classical
attributes of Bacchus, god of wine, inebriation, and uncontrolled
sensuality, as was Nijinsky's (Debussy's, Mallarme's) Faun - leopard skin
and ivy. Isn't Gradus posing as a wine merchant at least part of the time in
Pale Fire? Humbert's uncle Gustave Trapp, whom he fears as a spectral
nemesis, was a wine merchant. And one of the characters in the story about
Adam Falter (isn't it Falter (= "butterfly" in German?) himself?), the man
who accidentally tears the fabric of reality while on a business trip in the
South of France, is a wine merchant as well. And wasn't that story, whose
title escapes me now, one of the two chapters from the Ur-version of Pale
Fire, which N saved and published separately as short stories? The other one
is called "Solus Rex", I think (don't have the book of stories with me at
the moment).




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