Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0022162, Thu, 10 Nov 2011 13:28:05 -0200

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Re: Echoes of VN's father's death in PF
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Phyllis Roth [to GS Lipon*] You might want to look a bit further, at the motif of the wrong-man-murdered in the novels...........a key plot element that appears quite frequently across the novels and stories.

Jansy Mello: A few days ago Israeli writer Amós Oz delivered a conference in São Paulo in which he observed that there are Tchekhovian and Shakespearean endings in literature. In Shakespeare the characters end up dead, in Tchekhov, they get bitter and depressed but remain alive." ["Na literatura, exitem os finais de Tchekhov e os de Shakespeare. Nos de Shakespeare, as pessoas terminam mortas. Nos de Tchekhov, deprimidas, amarguradas, mas vivas."] It occurred to me that, for that matter, Nabokov's novels have a predominantly "shakespearean" finale, with all kinds of deaths and mistaken identities (such as Felix in "Despair"),.added to the pathos of a desperate hope of re-encountering an absent father.

Brian/Nabokov-L ["to Brian Boyd and other Stratfordian Nabokophiles"]: While I'm no fan of Roland Emmerich's "Anonymous" ...his film is correct in its supposition that "William Shakespeare" was a pen name used by Edward de Vere...I can't express how depressing it is to me that the Stratfordian myth has blinded eyes as keen as yours, and many others' down the centuries [...] [J]udging by his [Nabokov] 1924 poem "Shakespeare" ...I think he knew a fellow noble when he smelled one.
Please read Mark Anderson's "Shakespeare by Another Name", Richard Paul Roe's new 300-page, lavishly illustrated "The Shakespeare Guide to Italy" ...[and] the following links: http://www.shakespearefellowship.org/virtualclassroom/tempest/kositsky-stritmatter%20Tempest%20Table.htm http://www.shakespearefellowship.org/virtualclassroom/chronogate.htm ...More on Nabokov's poem (written 4 years after the Oxford theory was put forward) here: http://www.wjray.net/shakespeare_papers/nabokovs-premonition.htm

Jansy Mello: Ron Rosenbaum in "The Shakespeare Wars" (where he fondly quotes Nabokov's writings), departs from SF's theory of the "family romance" to criticize all anti-Stratfordian dreams of noble ascendancies and the resulting prejudices. In his list of aristocrats, references are made not to De Vere but to the Count of Oxford, to Sir Walter Raleigh and to Sir Francis Bacon. Searching for vaguely recollected links between Nabokov, Shakespeare and Francis Bacon, I reached three articles by Steve Blackwell, but they are unrelated to the heated authorial debates.
SB's texts are mainly devoted to science, as in the book "The Quill and the Scalpel: Nabokov's Art and the Worlds of Science". There's also a 2010 work in progress "Baconian Knowledge and Nabokovian Knowledge" and his article "A new of little-known subtext in Lolita," in "The Nabokovian" 60, Spring 2008, 51-55, where he states that in "Bend Sinister Bacon is evoked primarily as a token of cryptography via alleged acrostics in Shakespeare (and secondarily as a cipher for science),while in Pale Fire he serves, concealed, as an icon for hidden things that may be discovered by the careful and curious. There is no lack of cryptograms in Lolita, either, and Bacon's presence along with the "paper chase" and its Shakespearian overtones brings on a double-edged concern." .



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*- GSL: "Shade's use of his daughter's death as the subject of his literary writing recalls the death of VN's own father.What I'm wondering is whether this theme, or some variation, the death of a writer's loved one, its use as literary subject matter, or something similar, is present in any other works of his."


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