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Brian Boyd in “Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years” describes a
fascinating incident when Nabokov gets the news about his lucrative
Lolita film contract:
“When the contract arrived, his reaction was bizarre — and uniquely
Nabokovian. He recalled a curious dream he had the year his Uncle
Vasily Rukavishnikov died in 1916. Uncle Vasya had said to him: “I
shall come back to you as Harry and Kuryrkin.” Within the dream, the
two names had signified a duo of (otherwise nonexistent) circus clowns.
Forty years later, Nabokov still recalled the dream and now saw the
dream-duo as a foreshadowing of Harris and Kubrick in another
theatrical setting. In 1916 he him become a wealthy young man who had
inherited Uncle Varga’s fortune, only to lose it the next year in the
revolution. Now Harris and Kubrick had returned him at one stroke to
the ranks of the wealthy. That kind of combinational replay is the
stuff of his fiction. No wonder he would make Van Veen engage in a
serious study of the “precognitive flavor” of dreams in the hope…of
”catching sight of the lining of time.” (VN:TAY 366-367)
Does such a possible ‘mise-en-abyme’ insertion* of a ‘dreamtime text’
as well as ‘multiple dream-characters’ into this Nabokovian dream
narrative report suggest any possible discourse relationships of the
above incident to Gide’s Les Faux-Monnayeurs narratives or Nabokov’s
The Gift or Nabokov’s later supposedly ‘precognitive’ Ada dream
narratives later on?
Gide defines the mise-en-abyme technique as a transposition of the
work's subject matter on the level of its characters. More precisely,
this procedure consists of placing a discourse within another
discourse, whereby the incorporated text resembles or "mirrors" as Gide
puts it, the incorporating one, emphasizing the formal structure of the
work as a whole and drawing attention to the relationship between the
author and his creation. Is this possibly what Nabokov meant by “The
inner lining of time”?
*“placing a discourse within another discourse”—Leonid Livak, “Vladimir
Nabokov’s Apprenticeship in Andre Gide’s
“Science of Illumination”: From The Counterfeiter to The Gift,
Comparative Literature Summer 2002