Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0002067, Wed, 30 Apr 1997 14:48:23 -0700

Subject
T.S.Eliot's The Waste Land notes & Pale Fire (fwd)
Date
Body
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From: Vladimir Mylnikov
Sent: 1 May 1997 ã. 1:31 AM
To: 'NABOKV-L@UCSBVM.UCSBVM.UCSB.EDU'
Subject: T.S.Eliot's The Waste Land notes & Pale Fire

In excellent book entitled 'Nabokov's art of memory and European
modernism' by John Burt Foster, Jr. there is a part (Epilogue) which deals
with the connections between 'Pale Fire' and 'The Waste Land'. Personally
I think, a similarity between these books is minimal. I mean, the
similarity in terms of their structures. Since texts with notes or
commentaries which are written by the author himself have quite a long
tradition.
One of the fundamental achievements in 'Pale Fire' is that Nabokov due,
first of all, to his parody approach radically changed the status of texts
and metatexts (commentary) as being dialogic structures. He managed to do
it without changing the normative function of the commentary, while the
landspace of 'The Waste Land ' remained waste (in terms of the structure,
of course). Vladimir Mylnikov