Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0010103, Fri, 23 Jul 2004 20:22:31 -0700

Subject
Re: TT Chronology (fwd) (fwd)
Date
Body
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> ---------- Forwarded Message ----------
> Date: Thursday, July 22, 2004 10:15 PM -0700
> From: Keith McMullen <keithsz@concentric.net>
>
> ------------------
> >>> 1965
> HP's 2nd visit to Switzerland. Meets Armande (Aug. 2?) and Mr.R (Aug. 3?).
> Visits Villa Nastia and meets Mme.
> Chamar (Wednesday, Aug 4). Runs across with Armande and Julia (Thursday,
> Aug. 5). First hike to the cable car and failure(Friday, Aug. 6). HP's
> first kiss to Armande and their engagement (3rd week of August). Honeymoon
> in Stresa. Married life in NY.<<<
>
> What was he crying bitterly about in his room? Hiking failures?
> ---------- End Forwarded Message ----------
>
> EDNOTE. I too have wondered about your last item. Do "hiking failures"
> perhaps include failure of their first sexual congress?
>

I imagine the same--hiking failures, Armande's athlete boyfriends he is
jealous of, etc. There must be many things a naive lover like HP cries over.

I do not understand how HP could do his Ph.D. if he graduated from the
university and began working for Atman when he was 22 years old. If we
believe what he writes in the diary, he "posess[es] a doctor's degree in
philosophy, but ha[s] no German." Did he get the degree when he was 22? As
he also writes, "I can levitate one inch high and keep it up for ten
seconds," we should not believe everything he writes? A doctor in philosophy
and levitaion sounds as if talking about Van Veen.

That exhilaration of a newly acquired franchise! A shade of it he seemed to
have kept in his sleep, in that last part of his recent dream in which he
had told Blanche that he had learned to levitate and that his ability to
treat air with magic ease would allow him to break all records for the long
jump by strolling, as it were, a few inches above the ground for a stretch
of say thirty or forty feet (too great a length might be suspicious) while
the stands went wild, and Zambovsky of Zambia stared, arms akimbo, in
consternation and disbelief. (ADA I.20)

Akiko Nakata
---------------------------
EDNOTE. Akiko, a very nice ADA-TT parallel. My guess is that in both cases
the extravagant claims bespeak the ardor of a young man in love rather than
statements intended to be taken at face value, no? I wonder if HP's TT
bedtime diary entry is not, at least in part, a dream--as is clearly the
case with the ADA excerpt. You are quite right. HP is very unlikely to have
gotten a PhD at 22.












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D. Barton Johnson
NABOKV-L