The way I got to Three Faces by the way was not through the word "ditch" but through my belief that Nabokov wanted PF to be solvable by anyone who had a tv and would have seen the films that were shown on tv in the fifties. I did myself remember seeing those three films on tv. I further concluded that VN wished his non-scholarly reader to go to the texts and read those three works. Which is what I did and which is when those word clues jumped out at me. In other words, the word clues act as confirmation to the reader that Nabokov intended him to read these particular works.

Hogg is different - - that was clearly a clue for the more scholarly reader. But the more sophisticated clue-words "cresset" and "parahelion" still work as confirmation in the same way. If any other puzzle was ever constructed like this, i.e. with pre--planned confirmations, I'm not aware of it.

On Mar 2, 2009, at 6:30 AM, Matthew Roth wrote:

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

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