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Re: Lance - puzzle
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Andrey Vakhrulin: I was puzzled by the choice of years - 2145 AD and 200 AA in Lance - and suddenly yesterday it dawned on me that the logic could be as follows:
1. It's the two alternative names for one and the same year in the future/ 2. Given that, 2145 AD is quite clear, but 200 AA presents a difficulty. If it's one year we then can guess what is year 1 AA is like: 2145 - 200 = 1945! The new epoch seems to start at that year, according to VN./3. What is so important of this year for VN? Obviously, end of WW 2 (Ameica coming to the forefront). But also VN getting Ameican citizenship./4. So AA may mean Anno America - particularly as the narrator in the story is so close to Nabokov himself./5. Another interpretation may be Anno Atomus - when the nuclear bomb was first tried. The text, incidentally, features later the phrase 'comics and atomics'. What do you think?
JM: What an interesting hypothesis! You may find a corroboration in Brian Boyd's delightful Ch.4 (Permanent Impermanence...1944-1946, AY p.78-79), where the biographer mentions Nabokov's Time and Ebb as "a little masterpiece that blends the imediate and the remote, the mundane and the eerily beautiful. A nintety-year old Jewish scientist reflects from his hospital bed in the year of 2024 not on the world around him...but on the strangteness of the world of his childhood, America in the early 1940s. For the first time but not the last, Nabokov brilliantly inverts science fiction..."
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1. It's the two alternative names for one and the same year in the future/ 2. Given that, 2145 AD is quite clear, but 200 AA presents a difficulty. If it's one year we then can guess what is year 1 AA is like: 2145 - 200 = 1945! The new epoch seems to start at that year, according to VN./3. What is so important of this year for VN? Obviously, end of WW 2 (Ameica coming to the forefront). But also VN getting Ameican citizenship./4. So AA may mean Anno America - particularly as the narrator in the story is so close to Nabokov himself./5. Another interpretation may be Anno Atomus - when the nuclear bomb was first tried. The text, incidentally, features later the phrase 'comics and atomics'. What do you think?
JM: What an interesting hypothesis! You may find a corroboration in Brian Boyd's delightful Ch.4 (Permanent Impermanence...1944-1946, AY p.78-79), where the biographer mentions Nabokov's Time and Ebb as "a little masterpiece that blends the imediate and the remote, the mundane and the eerily beautiful. A nintety-year old Jewish scientist reflects from his hospital bed in the year of 2024 not on the world around him...but on the strangteness of the world of his childhood, America in the early 1940s. For the first time but not the last, Nabokov brilliantly inverts science fiction..."
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
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Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/