JM: Hello, Ron Rosenbaum, Eric Hyman, List,

A few months ago I realized the similar ending of both names Botkin and Pushkin.

There’s a lot to decompose ( bot=ambassador ; kin=relative; push= shove …aso)

No one would associate a mad Russian to Pushkin but, perhaps, there’s a convoluted inroad towards VN’s most important Russian poet set in connection to John Shade. Eric Hyman just noted: “ Or maybe someone with expertise in Russian verse might elucidate whether Shade’s practice is inherited via VN from Russian precedents, especially Pushkin.” This might be one of the ways to explore that!

It seems strange to me that Nabokov would mention Browning, Pope, Swift, Eliot… and leave out Pushkin, particularly if his competitiveness would urge him towards this kind of model excellence.

 

 

 

 

 

-------- Original Message --------

Subject:	from Ron Rosenbaum re Botkin, Oswald and Hochard
Date:	Thu, 26 Aug 2010 10:24:49 -0700
From:	palefire30 <palefire30@YAHOO.COM>
To:	<NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU>

Dear List Members,

I'd like to thank G S Lipon for understanding the significance of my discovery of a Moscow hopital that housed the insane called Botkin or Botkinskaya in operation long before PF was published. I'm not sure it's a "great find", but I did think it added, as he puts it, to the "richness of the semantic web" of the novel and, to my mind, may indeed have suggested Botkin's (a Russian and a madman) name to VN.

I regret Laurence Hochard's misapprehension that I was making a connection between Lee Harvey Oswald as assassin and the assassin in Nabokov's novel. It was only becaus I was browsing recent conspiracy theory literature on the JFK assasination for a film project that I came upon the name Botkin Hospital where Oswald was taken after a suicide attempt. It didn't occur to me anyone would make Mr. Hochard's imputed link, in fact it didn't occur to me to connect Oswald with the assassination in PF at all (and I certainly am aware that the 1963 JFK killing postdated 1962 PF). But I congratulate Mr. Hochard on the richness of his imagination in turning up an amusing coincidence however irrelevant.

I think I owe the list an explantion for what might seem to be an inordinate interest in Botkin. I just find VN's comments that Kinbote is Botkin one of the most mysterious and unexplored aspects of the novel. Why Botkin, why the regression from Kinbote to Botkin? It seems there is much material for discussion about this question which I'm sure I could learn much from, from some list members, but it has been diverted, alas, by what I regard as the ungrounded theories of the Shadeans and Hazel Shadeans.

So does anyone have a theory about Botkin's significance. An obvious humoroulsy self deprecating VN figure, one could say, but why the need? What dos it say about VN's self image in reltation to Kinbote?

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