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Dear Nabokovians, 

Dear Nabokovians, 

I am writing a research paper about the intertextual parallels between “Lolita” and “The Price of Salt,” which is a 1952 lesbian romance novel by Patricia Highsmith (although to me it reads more like a novel about a creepy obsession). 

This post is a continuation of responses to David Potter’s post on the List-Serve 03/03/25, re: Nabokov’s Aunt Preskovia (Pauline Tarkovsky), who was a psychiatrist and wrote a book on “Women Who Kill” (now available in English. Nabokov writes in SM her curious final words:  “That’s interesting. Now I understand. Everything is water, vsyo—voda.”

This makes me wonder if these remarkable words were the impetus ADA’s theme of a world technology based on water, instead of electricity.

I’m sure others here have noticed this because it’s quite obvious and Sebald was famously into Nab, but there’s a direct reference to Chapter 8 of Speak, Memory at about 20% of the way through WG Sebald’s Austerlitz.  
 

I am pulling my hair out because of this. 
DECADES AGO, I read a passage by Nabokov in which he describes the translator's work as assembling diverse elements which he glues and hammers together until the resulting object throws a shadow closely resembling the subject that he is trying to transpose across languages.

AND NOW, I can't find it anywhere.

I can't find it in the Pushkin foreword, The Real Life of SK, Pale Fire, etc.

So... where is it?

Lots of gratitude and praise to anyone who knows.

Cheers,

Trevor

Edit: wrote "Ada's Foreword" instead of "Lolita's"

There are apparently some allusions to Melville and Tolkien in Lolita's foreword, which I hope can be confirmed. Apologies for any sloppiness. Unitalicized, bold mine:

For almost the past week or so I've been reviewing the opening of Ada, as well as the family tree and certain conspicuous passages, and I think I've crashed into the tip of a Melvillean iceberg. If I'm not dreaming, that is. I hope my errata such as typos will be forgiven.

I've taken to applying the vowel shift of 4.29-34 and I've come across some interesting finds.

The primal scene is defined by Laplanche and Pontalis (1967) as follows: “Scene of sexual intercourse between the parents which the child observes, or infers on the basis of certain indications, and phantasises. It is generally interpreted by the child as an act of violence on the part of the father.”