In his biography of
Gogol, Nabokov observes that:
"Gogol, being Gogol and living in a
looking-glass world, had a knack of thoroughly planning his works
after he had written and published them"
[...]
"...This explanation has the same depressing effect as his later
considerations of related subjects have - unless we can believe that he was
pulling his reader's leg - or his own. Viewed as a plain statement we have
here the incredible fact of a writer totally misunderstanding and distorting the
sense of his own work"
[...] "He was a strange sick
creature - and I am not sure that his explanation of The Government Inspector in
not the kind of deceit that is practiced by madmen [...]. he was given to
dreaming things into his books long after they had been
written..."
Although I still believe VN's own prefaces
were not directed at "pulling his reader's leg",
not his forewords and post-scripts I wonder now about one or two
sentences he inserted in some of these later remarks when he called the
reader's attention to a specific detail
- perhaps misleading them from others that were set close by.
But Vivien Darkbloom's index notes (in
Ada), and Pale Fire's Index are peculiar enough not to
be related to VN's opinions on Gogol's "planning a work after
it's been published" ( "living in a
looking glass-world", ie "Semblerland"?), his "leg-pulling" or
"misunderstanding and distorting the sense of his own work", like a
"madman" "dreaming things into his
books..."