Taking JF's observation out of its context, I want to mention that here no prophetic gifts might be attributable to Shade ( as some have argued) since the attempts on CK's life, "the hint-glint shadow of regicide" mentioned in CK's notes, were essayed by a kind of Rosencranz and Gildenstern pair of explosive spies and didn't employ knives ( stilettos), whereas Shade's murderer shot him with a gun ( by the way, shouldn't we find subtle hints - I don't mean clear descriptions - about this effective crime tool somewhere else, too? Or if Jack Gray, like Kinbote, was left-handed by the kind of wound he inflicted on Shade? It could be a possible source for a parody...).

In "Pale Fire", the "stilettos of a frozen stillicide" become, in Kinbote's delusional dictionary, "a succession of drops falling from the eaves, eavesdrop, cavesdrop". Cavedrops, as we know, refer to stallactites that grow in the oposite direction from stallagmites inside a cave. Their shape is similar to the "stillicides" - and Kinbote, a few lines later, mentions that he "lives like Timon is his cave", from where he gives shape to the regicidal plot with Russian spies and also remembers about how he "spied" on Shade. We also know that the "eaves/cavesdrop" impulse arises only under the strokes of Kinbote's own stilleto (his pen).

Stallactites and stallagmites sometimes meet inside a cave, either like an hallucinatory CK and mad JS to become as one, or as most Nabokovian images meet, by the association of various distinct oppositions and pairings ( stallactite/stallagmite and stillicide/stallactite). The "snooping" process related to "eavesdropping" reappears in "Ada" where there are at least two references to "leavesdropping" ( one of them associated with Lucette and her green eyes always ready to spy on Van and Ada, the other arises in a poem translated by Ada, if I remember it right).

I suggest we consider JS and CK as belonging to the same abstract structure dealing with reversions and inversions, and not like a kind of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, Quixote and Sancho, Sherlock and Watson pair of contrasts.

Jansy

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