One
question, following Leland's comments (cf.VN-List, link to Boston
Review) concerning Dmitri's reference in his preface to TOOL:
"Dmitri
Nabokov then writes "that, in putative retrospect, Nabokov would not have
wanted me to become his Person from Porlock or allow little Juanita
Dark-for that was the name, destined for cremation-to burn like a latter-day
Jeanne d'Arc." The reader has to bend these references more than a little to put
them into perspective. The person from Porlock who interrupted Coleridge's
composition of "Kubla Khan" found the poet writing (not deceased) and
interrupted his composition, rendering it thereby a
fragment."
[QUERY] In
"Dear Bunny, dear Volodya" (VN-Wilson's letters) I read, on letter
90, that Nabokov was sending 37 pages of a new novel with the title
"The Person from Porlock" ( VN added that the entire manuscript would have 315
pages and that he developped "an idea which has never
been treated before." I had missed this item while reading V-W
letters to ask myself why did I never hear about this novel (which
known novel did it become or what new title was chosen?) What would this
fantastic idea, the one that has "never before" been treated be?
Pale Fire? In this case, why the original title relating it to a Person from
Porlock, unless we think of Gradus or Kinbote?
I'm
sorry if this subject has already been discussed before, but I was unable to
find other links to it. Dmitri, in a way, would have linked both novels, this is
an interesting conjecture: Laura and Porlock, Wild and
Kinotean/Gradus?