R.Boyle: Is VN's discussion
of Gogol burning the second part of Dead Souls before he died in any way
relevant to DM's decision to publish TOoL despite his father's wish that it be
burned?
(a) Meghan Kiihln: " It is. Here is a
relevant quote: '...no wonder that the artist, in a last
blinding flash of artistic truth, burnt the end of Dead Souls... because he had
finally realized that the completed book was untrue to his genius.' Pages
137-138 of Nikolai Gogol.
(b) Dmitri Nabokov: "A
perceptive question, but no, there's no
connection."
JM: Thanks to Robert Boyle for
the relevant question and, to Meghan Kiihln, for the relevant quote -
but DN sees no connection and Munson's title is equally mysterious (unless
Nabokov is both his sun and moon, while their brilliance emits no
heat).
Julian Connoly (on a sentence with an erasured word, in
TOoL):"The entire phrase displays an iambic rhythm: "he
SAW her [LYRic] BACK, her HIP beTWEEN his HANDS." One wonders what
adjective VN might eventually have come up with to replace "lyric." Presumably
it would have the same metrical rhythm."
JM: Playboy
captured one-half of TOoL in a nutshell: The Original of
Laura ( or Dying is Fun ) introduces "another of Nabokov's mystifying and
mythic heroines, Flora, the subject of a novel within a
novel." If Flora's "exquisite bone
structure immediately slipped into a novel - became in fact the secret structure
of a novel..." in actuality, would the elegant feet (and
Flora's fingers?) help us to discover the
antecipated "secret structure" of the novel? Would this example
of iambic rhythm be an accident, the missing adjective independent
of the expected rythm?
btw: Playboy's so-called "companion piece" to the posthumous
fragments with a photographic essay, by Richard Kern, of crossover
actor Sasha Grey posing as "Lolita", may appeal to those who
merely enjoy a lasting playboyhood... but the photographer might have
envisaged older Flora for his nymphic model (inspite of
Flora's cameo nates and belying belly), never never Lolita!