NABOKV-L discussion: Click "Add new forum topic" to get a new conversation going.

From Virginia Woolf's "Rambling Round Evelyn" (1925) in The Common Reader (my emphasis):

"...that butterfly will sit motionless on the dahlia while the gardener trundles his barrow past it, but let him flick the wings with the shadow of a rake, and off it flies, up it goes, instantly on the alert. So, we may reflect, a butterfly sees but does not hear... But as for going into the house to fetch a knife and with that knife dissecting a Red Admiral's head... no sane person in the twentieth century would entertain such a project for a second."

Here’s an interesting literary allusion I just accidentally discovered in Pale Fire.  I was reading F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Diamond Big as the Ritz,” a short story about a young man who is a guest at a preposterously fabulous remote diamond and gilt chateau. He awakes in the morning and after being undressed by a servant,

Friends,

I'm wondering if anyone has guidance on how, going forward, we should be citing material from this list and the archives. In the past, our citations listed NABOKV-L as the container/publication. Now that all that material has been moved to thenabokovian.org, I'm not sure how to cite specific posts. If we had an official, standardized policy that we all could use, that would be helpful.

Matt Roth

I would like to announce that I have uploaded to academia.edu a major part of my work-in-progress on the Jungian substrate of PALE FIRE:

  ‘THE TRI-PART MAN: Archetype, Alchemy, and Art in Nabokov’s PALE FIRE’

It is uploaded as a draft and can be commented on, which I would find very helpful.

Has it ever been noted that Prince Charles (Kinbote) and his first love, Oleg may be half brothers? (Both sons of Col. Gusev)

It seems to me that Prince Charles’ mother, Blenda, and Colonel Gusev are intimated in an affaire and were likely in cahoots with the airplane crash demise of King Alfin (sort of a Hamlet scenario). Kinbote is likely the son of Gusev.

See attached diagram

Having not read much Nabokov criticism yet, I am still mostly indebted to annotators online, and one astute contributor on genius, points out that that lemniscate "is a standard meteorological symbol for haze", connecting to the poet's desire for his daughter Hazel's soul to be eternal.

Haze generally is a phenomenon of obfuscation, a grey filter inhibiting vision and clarity, composed of dry particles such as smoke, dust, (stardust?) and sand (the latter a unit of time, a thousand years ago). 

As someone said, an interesting association belatedly realized:

1. PF: "the three conjoined lakes called Omega, Ozero, and Zero"

2. "Signs and Symbols": "I will tell you what you are doing; you are turning to the letter O instead of the zero."

I just came across a recent publication:

Living through Literature: Essays in Memory of Omry Ronen, Upsalla University, 2019.

It contains three essays on VN:

Nabokov's First English Language Novel in the Context of the Anglo-American Prose of His Contemporaries, by Irena Ronen

Kinbote's Remorse, by Nancy Pollak

The Pleasure of Translingual Punning: Homage to Nabokov in Olga Grushin's The Dream Life of Sukhanov, by Julie Hansen

Here is the link to the full-text online: https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1268970/FULLTEXT01.pdf

Dear List,

While rooting around in the list archives, I happened on a 2006 post from the late, great Stan Kelly-Bootle (we miss you, Stan!) where he checked VN's math from the following passage in SM, and found it correct:

A few years ago, I remember reading an anecdote about how Nabokov was asked what he thought of Ayn Rand. He said he was hardly familiar with her, but would be glad to teach her how to write :) I was wondering if anyone happened to know the source of this anecdote so that I can cite it? I can't remember where I read it, but any leads would be appreciated. Thanks!