Dear List Members,
In response to Ron Rosenbaum suggestion, I would like to point out that
Pale Fire was published in 1962, while JFK's assassination took place
on the 22nd of november 1963. Before that date, it seems to me that Lee
Harvey Oswald was a rather unsignificant left-wing agitator (his
assassination attempt on Wesker dates back to 1963). Even in the case
he would have heard of him, Nabokov could hardly have expected the
reader to draw a connection between him and the character of Gradus,
not to speak of the incredible prescience it would have entailed to
picture him as an assassin.
Once you consider this, the link between Pr. Botkin and Botkin's
hospital becomes extremely tenuous...
Maybe it remains interesting as an illustartion of what Nabokov meant
by giving such a central place to coïncidence in his worldview - how
unexpectedly easily they occur, how they give the illusion (or reveal
the reality) of a "hidden pattern" running behind matter of fact
reality.
Laurence Hochard