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Pushkin's Third Man as a dark shadow...
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Yesterday I enquired about two verses found in Pushkin's play "Mozart and Salieri", since I had the impression these had been mentioned in our List. Unfortunately the only reference about Pushkin's "Mozart and Salieri" in the VN-List dates from a long time ago ( there was also a posting about the performance of the play, sent by Sandy Klein).
The information now retrieved is pertinent in the context of Pale Fire, since it deals with academic or poetic rivalry:
The theme of artist's envy in "Mozart and Salieri" became a blueprint for a number of situations in Nabokov's novels in which a pair of artists of unequal talent compete for supremacy. Not unlike Salieri, the lesser talent contemplates or actually commits an ethical or aesthetical crime against his superior rival. On a more arcane level, Salieri's syndrome
develops into a conflict between the hero-artist, writing inside the novel, and his ultimate creator, Nabokov, the deity outside the novel.
Nabokov's Metapoetics and Metaphysics/Sergei Davydov
Middlebury College at VN-L - Subject: Nabokov Festival abstracts: Sept. 10-12, 1989
Search the archive: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/archives/nabokv-l.html
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
The information now retrieved is pertinent in the context of Pale Fire, since it deals with academic or poetic rivalry:
The theme of artist's envy in "Mozart and Salieri" became a blueprint for a number of situations in Nabokov's novels in which a pair of artists of unequal talent compete for supremacy. Not unlike Salieri, the lesser talent contemplates or actually commits an ethical or aesthetical crime against his superior rival. On a more arcane level, Salieri's syndrome
develops into a conflict between the hero-artist, writing inside the novel, and his ultimate creator, Nabokov, the deity outside the novel.
Nabokov's Metapoetics and Metaphysics/Sergei Davydov
Middlebury College at VN-L - Subject: Nabokov Festival abstracts: Sept. 10-12, 1989
Search the archive: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/archives/nabokv-l.html
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm