After a jump from blue inenubilable Zembla onto a totally
different book, namely, Slavoj Zizek's "The Paralaxe
View" ( Massachussets Institute of Technology,2006), published by
Boitempo Editorial, 2008, I came across, right in its first chapter( "O Materialismo
Dialético Bate ŕ Porta" / "Dialectic Materialism Knocks at the Door", a
reference to Vladimir Nabokov. Does Nabokov's spirit roam everywhere? I feel particularly
haunted...
Unfortunately the quoted preface by VN to the English
translation of King, Queen, Knave is, likewise, is only accessible
to me in my native language ( it is absent from my Collins edition).
There is no entry for Nabokov in Zizek's Indice Remissivo
(Index) but this seems to have been an editorial
oversight.
Nabokov's sentence is the penultimate one in the foreword written in
Montreux, 1967.
In my rather vague rendition (double-sense included):
"Therefore, in a paraphrasis of the famous and corrosive
antifreudian warning by Vladimir Nabokov in his preface the English
edition of "King,Queen,Knave" I'd like to emphasize, as always, that, as
always (and, as always there'll be many sensitive people whom I like who
shall feel offended), the delegation of democracy-to-come has not been invited.
But if an insistent democract-to-come still manages to drop in, I must warn
him that here and there, all over this book, cruel traps have been set
up."