S.Klein: "top 10 ghost stories"
[Complete story at following URL: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/oct/31/best-ghost-stories]
among which Vladimir Nabokov's The Visit to
the Museum. The excerpt describes: "This is a piece of autobiography - an
extraordinary tale in which the narrator is haunted by the ghost of an entire
country. Even admirers of Nabokov may not know this one, which has only rarely
been reprinted - surprisingly, given its extraordinary vision of
pre-Revolutionary Russia."
JM: Checking "The Visit to the
Museum" seemed to be a good idea after conjecturing about a "fourth wall"
in "La Veneziana"( the story, the painting, the
jalousie). Inspite of my effort, I cannot understand why this
"ghost story" has been considered "a piece of autobiography" and "an
extraordinary vision of pre-Revolutionary Russia." My
original intention had been to check a new reference to a fourth wall
- but I found none. Only a curious reference just before the narrator
is catapulted into "hopelessly slavish" forbidden
Russia:
"Finally I ran into a room of some
sort with coatracks monstrously loaded down with black coats and astrakhan furs;
from beyond a door came a burst of applause, but when I flung the door open,
there was no theater, but only a soft opacity and indistinct
streelights." (p279/280)
There is an incomplete "sign
- ..."inka sapog ("...oe repair") which reminded me of similar eery
transitions in "Lik" and by "TT' 's recurrent shoe-boxes. The other
aspect, the one related to a door opening onto a stage, leads
us to King Charles' escape from
Zembla...
Matt Roth: Gerard de
Vries puts to good use both Hofstadter and Bach's "signed" fugue in
his article. I think Gerard's notion is that Nabokov is similarly inscribing his
own name in PF via the three main characters. I hope he will correct me if I'm
mistaken.
JM: Do you think the inscribed name would be Nabokov's,
not Kinbote's? How would this be effected?