C.Kunin: Jansy will appreciate that
the original Cupid and Psyche story appeared first in Apuleius's odd novel (a
new translation gets a starred review in the current TLS) usually called "The
Golden Ass(e)", but properly called the Metamorphosis. [ ]Ovid like Dante
and VN suffered exile, but I don't recall any Nabokovian references to that
either. Some of us will recall that Dmitri used the Dantean Can Grande in his
email address to refer to that man's exile and the family connection of which he
and his father were both proud.
Jansy Mello
Thanks, CK for the information that had already
been mentioned in another posting to the VN-L (sometimes I have the
impression that you don't read the entire message you decide to comment).
There were several exchanges about the link between
Nabokov and Ovid while discussing his poem in "Speak,Memory" (the
reference to ex-Ponto").You can easily google the List.
Internet magic found me not only a precise wording for
ex-Ponto (sparing me this effort) but enriched it with information
about a book on "Metamorphoses in Russian Modernism" that will surely interest
you. Here it is:
[ ] "The words "a
couple of inseparable birches grew there (or a couple of couples, if you
conunted their reflections)" in Despair (Nabokov, 1937,46) could
be an allusion to Ovid's tale of Baucis and Philemon, the two old dears changed
into a pair of intertwining trees[ ] (Metamorphoses, 8.611-724).
The inventor of the automannequins in King,Queen,Knave may owe
something to Ovid's Pygmalion...while the landlord Enricht, who thinks he can
metamorphose himself into "all kinds of creatures -
..."(Nabokov,1968,99), is one of the author's manu Proteus figures: the
"stage manager" of Albinus' suffering ...[ ] What
matters more than putative specificities, however, is the recognition that
Nabokov is an "Ovidian" writer, that through his oeuvre, as he said about the
Index to Speak,Memory, "sometimes a gentle wind
ex/Ponto blows" (Nabokov, 1967,16)