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[NABOKOV-L] commentaries: in PF, TRLSK and Spring in Fialta
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Dear List,
Following LH's, and SK-B's enthusiastic comments on reading The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, I decided to pick it up again, but stopped already in the first chapter. Sebastian's mother, flighty Virginia, brought to my mind Nina ("Spring in Fialta",1936).
[...] "with each new meeting I grew more and more apprehensive[...] I grew apprehensive because something lovely, delicate, and unrepeatable was being wasted: something which I abused by snapping off poor bright bits in gross haste while neglecting the modest but true core which perahps it kept offering me in a pitiful whisper. I grew apprehensive because, in the long run, I was somehow accepting Nina's life, the lies, the futility, the gibberish of that life."
In Pale Fire, and in TRLSK as well, there are interesting hints concerning what, for VN, an unfinished poem (PF) and an unfinished novel might mean.
They are, these lives, but commentaries to the main subject.
(TRLSK, V.Nabokov,1941, p.175, New Directions)
Pale Fire, John Shade, lines 939-40:
Man's life as commentary to abstruse
Unfinished poem. Note for further use.
(Pale Fire,V.Nabokov,1962,p.67,Everyman's Library)
Kinbote, for example, misses the point when he sets his attention on Shade's cotidian life, instead of aiming at the heart, the core, the poem's "main subject"...
Foreword(Pale Fire),Charles Kinbote:
Let me state that without my notes Shade's text simply has no human reality at all... a reality that only my notes can provide...it is the commentator who has the last word.
(Pale Fire, V. Nabokov,1962, p.28-29, Everyman's Library)
( The vague details of a biographical register comprise the first chapter of RLSK: Sebastian, born in Russia, Dec.31, 1899, from Virginia, née Knight and shared with VN - and Van and Shade - that complicated birth-date that impacts my non-mathematical reasoning: when Virginia left her husband, give and take four years after SK's birth, was it in 1903 or in 1904? Her husband divorced her and remarried in 1905 and the narrator, Sebastian's half-brother, was born in the same year ( if it is true that he was born more or less six years after SK's birth). Virginia reappears in Russia, at wintertime,in 1908. She dies a year later, during summer in Roquebrune (1909?). SK's father died after a duel he fought in January 1913 against Virginia's lover, Palchin.Should we heed these fatidic dates? Or register, simply, the vagueness that springs from these "more or less, one or two" related to years, months, seasons? )
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