NABOKV-L post 0020136, Fri, 28 May 2010 21:22:45 -0300

In Strong Opinions (Vintage, pager 106, item 7), during an interview with Herbert Gold, in 1967, Nabokov mentions "les neiges d'antan" ("snows of yesteryear"), in a matter-of-fact way:

Q: What do you think about the contemporary competitive ranking of writers:
A: "Yes, I have noticed that in this respect our professional book reviewers are veritable bookmakers. Who's in, who's out, and where are the snows of yesteryear. All very amusing. I am a little sorry to be left out. Nobody can decide if I am a middle-aged American writer or an old Russian writer - or an ageless international freak."
The link that led me to this quote came from a published translation of the complete interview .Vladimir Nabokov
www.tirodeletra.com.br/.../VladimirNabokov.htm -


There were two interesting references to Rabelais and R.L.Stevenson, in connection to Villon and the "ubi sunt" theme (wiki).
Both authors are mentioned in "Pale Fire" and we get thieves and jewels in both, possibly satire and irony to boot.

(a) In "The Second Book Of Rabelais, Treating On The Heroic Deeds And Sayings Of The Good Pantagruel, Chapter XIV. How Panurge Related The Manner How He Escaped Out Of The Hands Of The Turks" Panurge telling that story is asked by one of his hearers about a said jeweled codpiece promised him if he accurately killed, his now grieving bashaw who had him captured and, he said, on spit, but who now wanted to die, because his house and possessions were burnt in a fire, answered his questioners, "And where are they? (the jewels). ""By St. John!" said Panurge,
"they are a good way hence, if they always keep going: but where is the last year's snow? This is the greatest care that Villon the Parisian poet took..."". Rabelais mentions monsieur Villon several more times throughout his work(s).

(b) Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson was a Scottish novelist, poet, essayist and travel writer. Stevenson was greatly admired by many authors, including Jorge Luis Borges, Ernest Hemingway, Rudyard Kipling, Marcel Schwob, Vladimir Nabokov, J. M. Barrie, and G. K... In his story "A lodging for the night," Francis Villon (anglicized spelling), searching for shelter on a freezing winter night, knocks randomly at the door of an old nobleman. Invited in, they talk long into the night. Villon openly admits to being a thief and a scoundrel, but argues that the chivalric values upheld by the old man are no better. The story appears in the collection New Arabian Nights (1882).


There is a reference to Kinbote in "The Uses of Paranoia" by Alan Wall - also found through the "ubi sunt?" theme search ( which is risking to become a "paranoid theme ...suffocatingly full of intention"! ) Cf. The International Literary Quarterly www.interlitq.org/issue4/alan_wall/job.php -
"Reading itself, the battle between the authorised versus the unauthorised version, is often a key thematic of the paranoid text. In Nabokov's Pale Fire, the strategy of reading itself is paranoid, though paranoid in the manner of many Freudian readings, which is to say refusing to allow for the possibility of the random or gratuitous. Contingency, that which is neither impossible nor forbidden, has no place. There are no grace notes, only symptomatic expressions of the deviously self-revealing subject. All manifest expressions carry within them their own coded esoterica. The paranoid text, like the paranoid world, is claustrophobic with meaning. It is suffocatingly full of intention."

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