Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0004253, Tue, 13 Jul 1999 19:15:49 -0700

Subject
Lolita Note: The Poes of Peterburg (fwd)
Date
Body
EDITOR's NOTE. Colonel John Rae (Professor Emeritus at the University
of Kentucky) adds yet another enlightening annotation to LOLITA. In
addition to the gold nugget of fact here, there is a moral---to wit, if
you think you have explicated one of VN's chestnuts, there is often yet
another gem at a deeper level.
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From: "John A. Rea" <jarea@uky.campuscwix.net>

One at first is tempted to accuse Nabokov of error (and
Appel in his _Annotated Lolita_and Proffer in _Keys to Lolita_ of not
catching him) when he says on page 43 of _Lolita_, that Edgar Allen Poe
and his child bride Virginia, "spent their honeymoon at Petersburg,
Fla." But our author liked to assemble things from disparate pieces in
ways that created links between them, and showing resonances that might
not have come to our minds -- leaving them strewn about in his web like
objets trouvees. So I feel that this is not, indeed an error, but
actually a complex bit of sleight of hand. The city in Florida is, of
course, not Petersburg, but St. Petersburg; and the Poe newlyweds
actually spent their honeymoon in Petersburg, Virginia. On second look,
then, this is simply the kind of mingling of geographic locations (the
Virginia one and the Florida one) that we expect of Nabokov. But, going a
step further, we should keep in mind that our tricky author likewise grew
up in a St. Petersburg: and that that Russian city had its "St."
sacrificed to the new regime in 1914, becoming more like the Virginia one
(though later in 1924 it was renamed Leningrad, only to resume its
original name in 1991 in the now reformed Russia). So Nabokov can
superimpose not only the two American cities, but two variants of his
native one. And then we may perhaps wonder if there is another cunning
stunt here in having the Poes honeymoon in a city with an apt phallonym,
since in English slang "peter" means penis! At the least, both Appel, who
has a note on this very line, and Proffer, who actually quotes it entire,
completely miss this nice bit of typical Nabokovian word play.

John