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VN Bibliography: Paris, Nov. 1999 Conference; Leona Toker
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"The Private Domain and the Domain of Limited Access in Nabokov's Autobiography"
Leona Toker (Hebrew University, Jerusalem)
The material of any work of memoiristic prose falls into three portions: the private domain, the public domain, and the domain of limited access. The relative dominance of one of these domains--each implying its own verification procedures--largely determines the specifity of an individual work. In the childhood sections of N.'s aurobiography, especially in its Russian version, the domain of limited access is the prevalent one. At point or another the text generalizes some of the most unique features of the remembered experience and thus quite systematically presents them as specific cases of more general phenomena, known, in comparable ways, to different groups of otherwise quite dissimilar people.
It is owing to this emphasis on the priviliged-access testimony and not only to the much-quoted discursive philosophical comments that the childhood sections are among the most philosophically saturated parts of the book. Even strikingly unique images, like that of the butterfly which survivied the night in the closet with mothballs in Vyra (to be captured by Nabokokv near Boulder, forty years later), yield to being read as specific cases of existential predicaments. In the absence of explicit authorial generalizations, the responsibility for their interpretation (as alluding to the human contest with chaos or evoking the superposition of different states of being) is transferred onto the reader, but the reader may feel justified in continuing to play by the rules of extrapolation exemplified in the text.
Leona Toker (Hebrew University, Jerusalem)
The material of any work of memoiristic prose falls into three portions: the private domain, the public domain, and the domain of limited access. The relative dominance of one of these domains--each implying its own verification procedures--largely determines the specifity of an individual work. In the childhood sections of N.'s aurobiography, especially in its Russian version, the domain of limited access is the prevalent one. At point or another the text generalizes some of the most unique features of the remembered experience and thus quite systematically presents them as specific cases of more general phenomena, known, in comparable ways, to different groups of otherwise quite dissimilar people.
It is owing to this emphasis on the priviliged-access testimony and not only to the much-quoted discursive philosophical comments that the childhood sections are among the most philosophically saturated parts of the book. Even strikingly unique images, like that of the butterfly which survivied the night in the closet with mothballs in Vyra (to be captured by Nabokokv near Boulder, forty years later), yield to being read as specific cases of existential predicaments. In the absence of explicit authorial generalizations, the responsibility for their interpretation (as alluding to the human contest with chaos or evoking the superposition of different states of being) is transferred onto the reader, but the reader may feel justified in continuing to play by the rules of extrapolation exemplified in the text.