Readers of Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch will find much open engagement of Nabokov--especially Despair, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, and "The Vane Sisters" (and/or the lecture on Proust)  some reverberations of Lolita, perhaps Pale Fire and "La Veneziana," along with a great deal of Dostoevsky (esp. The Idiot and Crime and Punishment), Tolstoy and Pushkin as well, much Proust, and I'm sure many other things I haven't  noticed.   And it grapples with those "cursed questions": truth, reality, loss, memory, the purpose of suffering, love, the significance or essence of art.

One of the novel's more insistent references [NO SPOILER FOLLOWS!] involves two or three repetitions of the phrase "rainbow edge," one-and-a-half of which occur in the last few paragraphs, and this set me thinking and searching.  I had thought this was straight from RLSK, but my checking corrected me--Gennady Barabtarlo's article reminded me that it appears in the lecture on Proust ), and Maurice Couturier's article pointed out that the same phrase was suggested as an alternate title for Conclusive Evidence (Selected Letters, 118-9), while a Google Books search led me to Linda Wagner-Martin's article* quoting the same phrase from "The Vane Sisters," written in 1951 prior to the letter regarding Conclusive Evidence.  In RLSK, "Prismatic Edge" is the closest Sebastian comes to this phrase, as an alternative to his "Prismatic Bezel." (See also Boyd, American Years, 192).

The phrase itself appears to be little-used in the language; it appears in Google Books in a few publications from the late 19th century (but not in Project Gutenberg).  But it also appears in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, Vol. 10 (1894), p. 412, in a "Report on the Census of Hallucinations," Appendix E.   This is the source for Nabokov's invocation of the term in "The Vane Sisters":

"Vane Sisters": "Sybil's personality, she said, had a rainbow edge as if a little out of focus." (Stories, 625)

PSPR: "(2) A man on a velocipede traveling rapidly from left to right; a peculiarity of this man was that he always appeared with a 'rainbow edge,' as if a little out of focus."


Nothing surprising here, though it makes me wonder whether in reading the SPR work Nabokov was reminded of his own "prismatic edge" or, what would be surprising, if he was already reading PSPR before he wrote RLSK, in Paris.  It is possible--I have not checked extensively--that William James quotes this very anecdote in something else Nabokov might have read well before the late '30s.  Nothing turns up on a quick search.

Stephen Blackwell



*Wagner-Martin, Linda, “The Vane Sisters” and Nabokov’s “Subtle and Loving”
Readers, in: Torpid Smoke: The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov, ed. S. G. Kellman
and I. Malin, Amsterdam, 2000, pp. 229—244; also in Value & Vision In American Literature: Essays In Honor Of Ray Lewis White, Joseph Candido (editor), 47-63
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