Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0024040, Wed, 24 Apr 2013 16:51:00 -0300

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Re: Birthday Wish: good and bad guys
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Frances Assa: " A noble goal to compile such a list.It did seem to me with respect to your query "I have been wondering...why we do not know Humbert's birthday (in contrast to Fyodor G-Ch's, his father's, Sebastian Knight's, Pnin's, and John Shade & co's) that the list of characters for whom we know birthdays is a list of good guys, exclusively." [ ] Nabokv-L: We also know Gradus's (a Bad Guy) and Dolly's (a Good Girl). I suspect Quilty's, and Pnin's V.V. are 4/23 or a variation of it. Fran Assa: Okay. I give up. It was a flighty idea based on incomplete information. Jansy, I meant "good guys" to include "good gals". Anyway, if we stick with the theory, then Gradus is not a bad guy which leads to some interesting conjectures, but I've overdone the conjecture bit. I enjoyed the VN Birthday celebration. Do we have to wait a whole year to do it again? Jansy: Good boys and good girls, then. Following what theory Gradus is endowed with life and a certain "goodness"? ( I always thought he'd been an invention of Kinbote's who, in his Zemblan world, shows signs of pedophily?) Right now, I'm totally in the dark ( I didn't understand the "4/23/' bit either) Matt Roth: I don't know why I was surprised to find that (up until Dolores' death in 1952) for a brief period each year Hazel Shade and Dolores Haze shared the same age. Hazel was born in January or February 1934. Eleven months (or so) later, Dolores Haze was born on 1 Jan. 1935. Priscilla Meyer: "Gradus?"


Jansy Mello: Kinbote? What about "That was the end of Charles Xavier's chaste romance with Fleur, who was pretty yet not repellent[ ] There followed a sweet twang of relief - and then the door of the anteroom slid open with a merry crash and the whole heap of putti tumbled in." Those tumbling "putti" aren't actually sculptures of little chubby angels, are they?

In RLSK there's another birthday small curiosity: Although, in 1935 (the last year of his life), Sebastian Knight was aged 36, he was 37 when he died: "I have managed to reconstruct more or less the last year of Sebastian's life: 1935. He died in the very beginning of 1936, and as I look at this figure I cannot help thinking that there is an occult resemblance between a man and the date of his death. Sebastian Knight d. 1936..."

btw: is 4/23 the date of the posting, namnely, VN's birthday?
And shouldn't we not consider too the time of death and the age of VN's (good or bad) characters?

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