Hafid Bouazza: It is very clear - to me anyway - that Nabokov in his Foreword was denying any human interest, any personal elements in the novel BS [...]Brian Boyd does make clear that BS is about Nabokov's anxiety of losing his dear ones (his wife and child) under tyranny.[...] Chaining someone with his own heart-strings was the most cruel thing he could imagine...He might have been ill and full of anxiety (he had just fled Paris because of the approaching Nazi's) during the composition of the novel and the foreword, but he didn't want these to be the heart-string of the novel. That's Nabokov for you.  

 

JM: A beautiful exposition with rich links (particularly the reference to "Pnin"), but the time-element puzzles me (VN's flight from the Nazis and the composition of the novel). Yesterday I copied Brian Boyd's reference to this period - but I forgot to add it when I mentioned Chapter 4 in relation to "Lance".

 

Here it is:   

Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov -The American Years, pg.91 "Later he would write that he composed the greater part of the novel 'in the winter and spring of 1945-1946, at a particularly cloudless and vigorous period of my life.' This was not so much autobiographical fact as an attempt to deter any simplistic equations between the oppressive world of the novel and his own mood or circumstances as he wrote.  Actually, it was a depressing time...

On a warm rainy night in the third week of May, Nabokov completed his novel. By the middle of June, morally exhausted, as flat as en empty balloon, he had revised the book, still entitled Solus Rex. By the time it was printed, he would have altered the title to Bend Sinister.