I've
brought up the dates of the birthdays in The Gift's being the same, in
conjunction with Pale Fire's use of the same device not too long ago;
not only are Fyodor's and Chernishevski's the same, but also, I
believe, Fyodor's father has that July 12th birthday as well, which is
two days after Proust's (and my own). There is also some neat pathos
hidden between dates in the Gift. I believe in Chapter One we learn
that Fyodor wrote his first love poems in late June of 1916, and in
chapter 2 find out that Fyodor's father went on his final safari from
which he never returned in either late or mid June of 1916, so that
keeping these dates in view we see that one truly poignant loss for
Fyodor is that his father never got to see any of his son's poetry, or
his eventual flowering. This device of scattered dates telling tragic
tales once we have all the information to correlate them, appears in
the way N. deals with the death of his own father in Speak Memory:
we're given the date of an important phone call his mother received,
but the phone call's actual import (informing the woman her husband has
been murdered) is not dramatized; only when we learn the actual date of
N.'s father's death do we in retrospect realize the pathos of the
terrible phone call. Lolita makes a particularly poignant use of this
fascinating device as well. Artistically and emotionally this has
multiple effects. A trick with the reader, a puzzle; a way not to be
restrained, refrain from histrionics; and aesthetically dramatizing
what Boyd has suggested, that only curiosity, imagination and
perceptive empathy can bring the shattering relevance out of what would
seem to be inert facts and data. I'm not sure, though, that there isn't
a slight canceling out that occurs somewhere in Nabokov's ultra
objective sophistication in structuring things in this manner--a sense
that a game with the reader, that he or she is being toyed with,
overwhelms or seems to trivialize the metaphysical implications, or
else those implications themselves become a kind of justification of
what happens. I think in his best work like The Gift, Lolita, and Speak
Memory this works because we sense that the technique is also a way of
indicating and mitigating a rich strain of pain simultaneously, an
effect that enriches and sharpens the stories. In some of the later
stuff and minor early stuff things come across as slightly flattened.