Dear Brian,
I don't know your background... maybe you are a nabokovian, in that case, excuse my maybe obvious ideas (i'm just an amateur-reader) and skip what follows. If not, the following might be interesting to you.
First of all, you should read the "Nabokovs Otherworld" by V.E. Alexandrov... based on Vera's quote that the main theme in Nabokov is the Otherworld (an idea contested in recent criticism).
Secondly, a little idea from Lolita.
One of the most touching moments in Lolita is to me when Humbert overhears his little daughter say to a friend (paraphrased) "the most awfull thing about dying is that you're all on your own to do it". (the girl has known her little brother dying, her father died and her mother dies in the course of the novel but Humbert doesn't give a damn about all that) You should find the right quote somewhere in part II.
The whole of Lolita is full of people dying : HHs mother and father, his aunt Sibyl, uncle Trapp, Lolita's father, her little brother, her mother. Quilty, Humbert, Lolita herself and her baby, Charlie Holmes, Jean Farlow, .... A little bit as in Hamlet with its final slaughter scene (a Hamlet
comparison with its equally big obsession with death and dying might be
interesting for your topic)
A metphor for that morbidity is found on p. 262 : HH is reading through a bound Briceland Gazette, which he sees as a "coffin-black volume almost as big as Lolita"
In his lectures on literature VN said to a student that she could believe in her own death if she wanted but that he didn't believe in his own.
The motto of the Original of Laura is "dying is fun". The motto of Invitation to a beheading (paraphrase again) "as a fool thinks of himself as a God, we think of ourselves as mortals"...
Biography-wise i'm sure you know his father died by the hands of tsarists and his brother Segey was killed by fascists.
Anyway, very vast a subject for a thesis, wish you a lot of courage !
Koen Vanherwegen
Date: Sun, 8 Aug 2010 10:56:08 +0200
From: mushtary@YAHOO.COM
Subject: Re: [NABOKV-L] [Fwd: Death in Nabokov's Works]
To: NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU
If you read German I would suggest: Christopher Hüllen,
Der Tod im Werk Vladimir Nabokovs: Terra Incognita
(Arbeiten und Texte zur Slavistik 48, Herausgegeben von Wolfgang Kasack).
München, Verlag Otto Sagner 1990.
A. Bouazza.
-------- Original Message --------
-----
Dear
All,
I'm new to this immensely helpful forum, and want to put a question
to all
of you Nabokovians. I'm contemplating writing a master's dissertation
on
(what I perceive to be) one of the central themes of
Nabokov's
oeuvre--namely, his obsessive preoccupation with death. I want to
argue
that Nabokov was John Donne-like in his recurrent meditations on death.
I've found a wealth of examples of VN's intimations of mortality in
Speak,
Memory, Pale Fire, and Bend Sinister. Some of the more famous examples
include:
"The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that
our
existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of
darkness"
(SM, 19).**
"I have to have all space and all time
participate in my emotion, in my
mortal love, so that the edge of its
mortality is taken off, thus helping me
to fight the utter degradation,
ridicule, and horror of having developed an
infinity of sensation and thought
within a finite existence" (SM, 297).
Similarly, Adam Krug admits he
cannot "accept the inanity of accumulating
incalculable treasures of thought
and sensation, and thought-behind-thought
and sensation-behind-sensation, to
lose them all at once and forever in a
fit of black nausea followed by
infinite nothingness" (BS, 99).
Pale Fire is also teeming with examples
of both Shade's and Kinbote's
preoccupation with (and attempted transcendence
of) death. Related to the
opening sentence of Speak, Memory, are Shade's
lines: "Infinite foretime and
/ Infinite aftertime: above your head / They
close like giant wings, and you
are dead" (PF, 37).
I'm hoping you
will recommend other works which exhibit this tendency to
shudder in the face
of the "absolute nothingness, nichto" of death (BS,
175). Other novels and
short stories which depict death as the great
negator of human consciousness.
Also, are there any secondary works of
criticism devoted to this theme that I
should read? So far, I've only found
one monograph directly related to this
topic (Nina Allan's "Madness, Death
and Disease in the Fiction of Vladimir
Nabokov"). Any and all suggestions
would be greatly appreciated. Thank
you!
All the best,
Brian Bush
All private
editorial communications, without exception, are read by both co-editors.
All private editorial communications, without
exception, are
read by both co-editors.