Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0023469, Sun, 18 Nov 2012 13:27:01 -0200

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Re: Vane Sisters precedent
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M.Roth: "...A tangle of associations led me back to a report from the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, vol. 27 (1915). The experiment described there involved a number of SPR automatists who claimed to be channeling (independent of one another) messages from a number of erudite spirits, including F.W.H. Myers. You'll recall that Myers (former head of the SPR and author Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death) contributes a poem in the séance scene in "The Vane Sisters." According to the Proceedings, one of the SPR sitters, Mrs. Piper, recorded a message from Myers which said "I gave Mrs. Verrall laurel wreath." Mrs. Verrall was another SPR automatist, and when they checked her scripts written during the same time period (but supposedly without knowledge of Mrs. Piper's scripts) they found that, three weeks prior to Mrs. Piper's message, she had written a number of lines containing references to laurels and laurel wreaths. This seems to me quite similar to the situation in VN's story, where spirits take credit for images given previously to a writer. "

Jansy Mello: I advanced the hypothesis that "The Laurels" might have been inspired in one of the houses the Nabokovs lived during their life in America, in a vain attempt to do away with ghostly mysteries or any "flawy but genunine gleam"*. Unfortunately, however, I read M.Roth's posting incorrectly. Nabokov doesn't mention laurels, but Myers, in The Vane Sisters. Besides, checking through Dieter Zimmer's exhilarating ennumeration of Nabokov addresses in America, I could find no such place in his list-in-progress, published in Zembla since 1997... Please, check Vladimir Nabokov's Whereabouts (Homes & Haunts) by Dieter E ...
www.dezimmer.net/HTML/whereabouts.htm

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* - "Frederic Myers, an old hand at the game, hammered out a piece of verse (oddly resembling Cynthia's own fugitive productions) which in part reads in my note

* "Frederic Myers, an old hand at the game, hammered out a piece of verse (oddly resembling Cynthia's own fugitive productions) which in part reads in my notes:

What is this-a conjuror's rabbit,

Or a flawy but genuine gleam-

Which can check the perilous habit

And dispel the dolorous dream? "

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