NABOKV-L discussion

Hello, may I ask something? I'm looking for a translation of the foreword  in the Russian edition of 'The Gift: "От редактора" written by Андрей Бабиков. Can I find this somewhere?

I have been playing with a searchable text of "Lolita".  Searches on a color that's also a plant are sometimes interesting.

In Humbert's poem that he has Quilty read, there's a line "the awfulness of love and violets". Why violets? There are 8 more occurences of "violet":

"nikto b" (no one would) has been often discussed as anagram for Botkin. The first mention in the archives is from 1999 L-serve (https://thenabokovian.org/node/31705), but that indicates that it had been "discussed before." Any consensus on who said it first? 

Here is some more on Masonry in Pale Fire:

In PF Kinbote cites a Shadean variant:

“I am not slave! Let be my critic slave.

I cannot be. And Shakespeare would not want thus.

Let drawing students copy the acanthus

I work with Master on the architrave.”

(p.218)

Hello- I wanted to alert you to an excellent Nabokov-inspired book. Tom Will's new epic poem, 'Pale Townie', uses all of the end rhymes from Pale Fire as its structure. I haven't liked any contemporary poetry like I have his poems, which 'are wet and alive like fish just freed from the hook, and they swim in electric diamantine patterns despite (or because of?) the atrazine in the water.' That's from my review of the book, linked here in case you'd like to learn more: https://www.onlybestprojects.com/pale-townie

Starover Blue:

We are first introduced to Prof. Blue in Shade’s poem as

 “the index, lean and glum/College astronomer Starover Blue." (L 189)

When I first read the poem, I thought, ‘What’s the point of this children’s hand game?’ The point, of course, is that the astronomer “points” to the stars. Stars are a motif in PF.

I have been looking into Masonic/Rosicrucian motifs in Pale Fire.  Both secret societies call themselves "gradual,"  and have systems of "graded" "degrees" of initiation and progression towards spiritual knowledge/perfection.  Rather like the well-known textbook on prosody, Gradus ad Parnassus,   which are "steps" to achieving the heights of poetry. 

Dear list,

Late last year, I was digging around and found this source for much of the Beardsley Star "Column for Teens" that appears in Part 2, Chapter 8 of Lolita. Nabokov borrowed most of the text from a 14 May 1948 column by Elizabeth Woodward. The copy I found was published in the Dayton Herald. I'm including the text below. The capitalized text represents phrases borrowed by VN and the brackets represent VN's slight changes to the column's actual wording.

Matt Roth

This TLS review (https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/humbert-tom-phillips-book-review-gill-partington/) mentions a book by one Humbert Wolfe called Cursory Rhymes (1927) (here: https://archive.org/details/CursoryRhymesDesktop/page/n1/mode/1up). Seems like it might be worth looking into. (A brief lit review reveals that some have identified Wolfe in connection with Lolita's protagonist, but I haven't seen anything yet about the content in Cursory Rhymes in particular.)

Hello.  I am trying to remember where I read Nabokov's joke about the Thief and the Uncle. Goes something like this:

There's a thief in the house. A figure comes out from behind the curtain. The children scream, but it is not the thief, it's Uncle and they laugh. The thief gets caught – it is Uncle.

Thanks, Mary