JM: there is a clear link
of Duchamp and Nabokov in Pale Fire(1962): lines
213/214...
AnStad: I take it others
have compared Rimbaud: "Je est un autre".
Emily Dickinson: I'm Nobody! Who are you? / Are you—Nobody—Too?/
Then there's a pair of us!
AlSkl: This is the famous syllogism from Kiesewetter's Logic textbook
(1791): "Caius is a man, men are mortal, therefore Caius is mortal". As Sergey
pointed out, this syllogism is important in Tolstoy's "The Death of Ivan
Il'yich." ... Vl. Khodasevich compares Ivan Ilyich Golovin...to Annensky,
whose penname was "Nik. T-o" (see also Dolinin's earlier post to
Nabokv-L). But "Nikto (b)" is reversed "Botkin"...Does it confirm that "Shade"
(Russian ten' = net, "no") = nikto (b) = Botkin
(e) = Kinbote?
ED:How dreary—to be—Somebody!/ How public—like a Frog—/ To tell
one's name—the livelong June—To an admiring Bog!
RG: Shade reads
everything to Sybil, and Sybil translates poetry from English to French.
Wouldn't she make sure his "Baudelaire" was pronounced
correctly?
JM: Kinbote seems to be careful about the
inclusion of "e". At least, this is what I gathered from his note to line
678:
In her [ Sybil's] version of Donne’s famous Holy
Sonnet X composed in his widowery: Death be not proud, though some
have calléd thee/Mighty and dreadful, for, thou art not
so.. There are other similar
instances.
The merry word "widowery" made me goggle, then google
since, as I'd expected, my everyday dictionaries only offered "widowhood",
not "widowery". The internet did not disappoint me,
though. Robert Louis Stevenson employed it in a letter to C.W. Stoddard (
1886): " My wife is at Bath with my father and mother,
and the interval of widowery explains my writing."
In a selection from his letters I found, among amusing tidbids on keys and
realism, a reference to "Otto" and to his "gnome" ( i.e: his book on
J&H).