Jansy Mello: Alexey furnishes a missing element for those who only read "Acapulco" in "Akapulkovo."  So many Nabokov's "fathers" exeunt  a novel by means of airplane disasters that I ceased to wonder about the mystery related to each event.  Demon is associated to the Gavailles (Hawaii), whereas Mexico is present in "Lolita" from the very start. Ancient territorial disputes are relocated in "Ada" and, aesthetically, there's a kind of natural simmetry between Alasca and the Pacific side of Mexico & the Russian and Spanish territories in America. D.H.Lawrence tried to recover his health in Mexico (a distant link to "The Plumed Serpent" passes through RLSK's reference to a priestly naiad and E.M.Forster's novels), whereas Leon Trotsky lost his (STalin had him assassinated in his Mexican exile).

 

I wonder if Andrea Pitzer's forthcoming book ("The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov," in which "Nabokov emerges as a kind of documentary conjurer, spending the most productive decades of his career recording a saga of forgotten concentration camps and searing bigotry, from World War I to the Gulag and the Holocaust.") we'll find news about airplanes, Mexico, Alaska or Russian explorers.