SKB: Alexey: working through your
wonderful essays[...]I meet Derzhavin’s death-bed last-gasp [the river of time]
taken [...]to “imply” a crushing human mortality, albeit with some relief for
poets whose choicest words may “live on.” VN’s view of the Life Hereafter is
more complex, of course, and subject to ongoing debate. It’s interesting to
compare Derzhavin’s lament with the Anglican hymn O GOD OUR HELP IN AGES PAST,
by Walter Greatorex (1873-1949)[...] The two stanzas share the same imagery, not
just the cliché of flowing Time, but Time as the rapid, inexorable torrent
sweeping us all away to oblivion[...] As annoying lecturers say: Come back when
you’ve read David Deutsch (MWI, MultiWorld Interpretation of Quantum Theory) and
Leszek Kolakowski ...
JM: Early on, from Priscilla Meyer's
LWTSHH book on Pale Fire, I learned about Nabokov's preoccupation with
linear, historical time. Like the Venerable Bede's sparrow crossing a
lighted room from one dark winter into another. Van's chapter Four in
ADA is Bergsonian, Nabokovian and Vanian, filled with H.G.Well's
parallel worlds, forking time and ghostly presences.
In PF the preoccupation is with linear
time (historical time engenders the idea of the importance of
every individual soul and of personal memory and the dangerous
stepping on the oxygen pipeline). Not so in ADA, as I
see it - Van's idea suggests a miraculous eternity achieved
thru the word ( no longer God's), "dying into the book" like a
pressed dry flower, to be read and thus to arise over and over
again.
TT is a mockery with no redeemer. I have no clue about LATH, nor what we will find in ToOL... My
overall impression is that VN finally got over "historical time" while keeping
his faith in a ghostly, but personal after-life. Unlike impaler Vlad's
recurrence ( as in Bram Stoker's vision), because VN's hereafter
demands compassion, beauty and art. Translation as art,
included.