Re: “the
nasty commentator is not an ex-King
of Zembla nor is he professor Kinbote. He
is professor Botkin, or Botkine, a
Russian and a madman.”
In off-list discussion with Jerry I
have come round to a present understanding that the whole bang-shoot, poem and
commentary, is indeed the creation of Botkin the Russian madman. This suggests
to me that Botkin is extremely close to VN, the Russian sane
man.
As my mother used to say: “How can
you tell whether a man is sane? Answer: if he has a sense of humour. How
can you tell if he has a sense of humour? Answer: if he is prepared to laugh at
himself.” It occurs to me that VN
is having jolly fun in his masterpiece; not only laughing at the house of cards
of earnest, solemn scholarship, but also at himself.
In a message dated
16/11/2006 03:53:16 GMT Standard Time, Matthew Ross
writes:
As for VN's assertion
that Botkin is "a Russian and a madman,"
I've always found this assertion to be puzzling at best, at worst
completely misleading. In the index, Botkin is an
"American scholar of
Russian descent." To me, this very plainly
means that Botkin is not a Russian but an American whose ancestors were
Russian.
I’d tended to believe that the fully
committed immigrant to the
In a message dated
11/11/2006 04:44:13 GMT Standard Time, Matt Roth writes:
Responding to a
question about the pronunciation of his name, VN says the following: "Every
author whose name is fairly often mentioned in periodicals develops a
bird-watcher's or caterpillar-picker's knack when scanning an
article. But in my case I always
get caught by the word 'nobody'
when capitalized at the beginning of a sentence."
So VN often
mistook "Nobody" for "Nabokov."
In view of the
possibility that VN identified himself, sometimes, with Nobody, some of the
following has suggested (possibly OT) association with this
self-identification.
In a message dated
13/11/2006 16:29:27 GMT Standard Time, Carolyn writes:
I mean nobody would be
mistaken for Nabokov. It's the same joke - - Polyphemus's and the Looking Glass
king's - - hm. Hadn't thought of it before - - Kinbote is the Looking Glass
king?
The long ancestry of the Nobody
joke, from Homer to PF, via Carroll, can be filled in a little with these two
instances:
Stevens, in his Lectures upon Heads, 1799, by extending
his comments to include Mr Somebody, seems to be saying that important people
are congenitally two-faced, thus anticipating Dr Jekyll and Dorian Grey --- as
well as Shade and Kinbote? Who can tell whether VN ever clapped eyes on these
images? I do think it’s worth
considering if he’d definitely decided to don the jester’s cap, if only for a
while. See “goliart”, n 681.
Other
thoughts:
In a message dated
16/11/2006 21:38:39 GMT Standard Time, Jerry Friedman
writes:
Nabokov's saying in
that interview that Mary McCarthy couldn't find the "pale fire"
quotation.
According to one of the articles in /The Garland Companion to
Nabokov/ (which I got yesterday), the correct identification of the "pale fire"
quotation didn't appear in Mary McCarthy's essay till a revision of 1970, I
think.
The Penguin 1991
edition is obviously seriously misleading. There are other misprints, eg p.126,
“not having to read the required book” which puzzled me for a
long time, until I checked it against another edition, and realized the
“to” was intrusive.
In writing, 17/11/06,
“by no means no worse” I also realize I’d intended “by no means any worse” or
“no worse by any means”; but the solecism still strikes me as
amusing.
In a message dated
17/11/2006 16:25:16 GMT Standard Time, Jim Twiggs writes:
As a follow-up to Don
Johnson's suggestion to consult Zembla, I recommend the discussion of Pale Fire
by William Monroe, especially page 3. Here's the link:
http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/monroe2.htm
This also impresses me as an
excellent analysis of the quality of Shade’s composition, only very faintly
marred by occasional lapses into academe-speak. Shade’s style only resembles
that of Pope by virtue of its rhyming couplets, and quite lacks the antithetical
balance of Pope’s ultra-smooth lines. It is, however, as
Charles