Charles Kinbote, in his Foreword to Pale
Fire, discerns the unity of
Shade´s poem: "It contains not one gappy line, not one doubtful reading" (PF,
14). This is why he disclaims that Shade's poem is
merely fragmentary (unlike TOOL) and that it is not simply "a small fraction of the composition he saw in a glass,darkly...
In the poem
itself we find: "Uncurtaining the
night, I'd let dark glass/ Hang all the furniture above the
grass," and here Kinbote's words (glass,darkly) are echoed
(dark glass).
If the number of lines in Shade's poem may appear
suggestive of a long fat neunhundertneunundneunzig worm then its
metamorphosis into a butterfly ( the poem's butterfly-wing
shape) confirms Kinbote's assessment.
The the complete butterfly is already
present in the worm.
SES invites us to discuss
Nabokov's ' "Natasha," the 1924 story
that has just been translated by Dmitri Nabokov and published in the New Yorker'
although " less formally structured this time".
She notes: It's
unusual for Nabokov to make a female character the center of consciousness in a
story, particularly when the plot emphasizes her
desirability.
According to
Alexey Sklyarenko, among the already published short-stories,
there is only one female narrator, Maria Vasilevna, in "Slice of
Life".
I vote for
SES's suggestion to work on
"Natscha".