Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0005970, Mon, 21 May 2001 16:47:30 -0700

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[Fwd: Bend Sinister's "Stevenson's engine". Chapter XVII]
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> This message was originally submitted by RAT101@AOL.COM to the NABOKV-L list
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> Regarding those trains...
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> VN's fascination with museums and technology can perhaps be further (or previously?) noted from Bend Sinister's Stevenson's Engine...in the short story, "The Visit To The Museum," in which the hapless narrator most certainly suffers a terrible fate in part due to his own lack of humor...
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> ..quoting from the story, "I turned and saw, scarcely an inch from me, the lofty wheels of a steam locomotive. For a long time I tried to find the way back among models of railroad stations. How strangely glowed the violet signals in the gloom behind the fan of wet tracks; and what spasms shook my poor heart!"
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> Indeed! For poor Krug the Younger, as can be gleaned, bears his wound from the excesses of the secret police, who only use the Children's Museum and Stevenson's Engine as an excuse...whereas our Visitor wanders endlessly in the corridors until he ends up in a snowy Soviet night...
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> Steven Millhauser has a charming novella on some of these same themes...and Lawrence Wenschler (is that how you spell his name?) wrote that article and then book (something about a Cabinet of Wonder) of a potentially real place of this nature in Hoaxton.
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> cheers,
>
> Alan Chin