The next issue of the Nabokov Online Journal will include an article by Tiffany DeRewal and me that lays out our version of a Shade-Kinbote multiple personality theory. We don't talk about TFoE, but I've always been interested in that possible link. At the very least, its popularity in the 50s makes clear that a lot of people were thinking about split personalities at that time. And we know, from notes in the Berg Archive, that Nabokov in the late 1950s was reading DJ West's Psychical Research Today and paid particular attention to several multiple personality case studies therein.

 

That said, I don't think Carolyn's idea of "word links," especially with a word as mundane as "ditch," gets us very far.  There would have to be a whole host of stronger associations between PF and TFoE before I'd be willing to sprinkle that one on top.

 

Matt Roth