You make an interesting point about Pale Fire and VN's translation of Song of Igor's Campaign. The questions of authenticity and authorship without a doubt interested VN and he put them to various fictional uses, most of them humorous or tongue-in-cheek, from Calmbrood's "Night Journey" to Vasily Shishkov to Vivian Darkbloom. But I think we should distinguish these instances from forgery, which is a scholarly and moral problem, rather than an artistic device. Forgery does not want to be detected and is relentlessly manipulative outside the text; VN's fictional play with authorship is neither: the very point of the Shishkov affair, for example, was to reveal the author's true identity in the end. Please note how VN approached the problem of forgery in Igor: he was convinced that it was authentic, even though he acknowledged the need to "cope with certain eerie doubts" (p. 14). VN's decision to accept Igor as authentic had its own logic: in my opinion, he relied on his concept of literary evolution and rejected the very idea that anyone in the neoclassical 18th century could produce a text of such originality and power. He repeatedly compares the original text with what its first editors thought of it, and the discrepancy between the editors's poetic expectations and the actual text was proof for VN that they were dealing with an ancient text. Besides, as you have pointed out, according to VN's aesthetic estimation, the more original work comes first: Igor predates Zadonschina because it's better art (p. 82).

In reference to the two-century-long debates on the authenticity of Igor, I'd like to mention Prof. A.A. Zaliznyak's 2004 (3rd ed. 2008) book, where he analyzes the problem from a linguistic point of view. Zaliznyak is a foremost authority in Russian historical linguistics and, among other things, he disproves Edward Keenan's argument by saying that 1) Dobrovsky, or anyone else in the late 18th century, could not plausibly possess the linguistic expertise for the successful execution of such a forgery; linguists started studying the orthography of 15-16th-century Slavic manuscripts in the 19th c., and Slavic enclitics, in the 20th.; if there was a forger, he was a scholar of genius who on his own, in total oblivion, accomplished the work that took thousands of linguists and over two hundred years to accomplish; 2) no forger could mimic 11th-century Russian by reading extant manuscripts, because there are forms attested only in Igor that have subsequently been supported by the findings of 11-12th-century birch-bark texts from Novgorod. From a linguistic point of view, the hypothesis that Igor is authentic is the most valid one, although my generalizing retelling does not do justice to Z.'s meticulous philological akribeia. (Interestingly, another scholar in a recent article criticizes Zaliznyak's method but is compelled to agree with him with respect to the whole of Igor, even though not the questionable passages which, in the critic's opinion, could be interpolations: http://magazines.russ.ru/novyi_mi/2012/6/r14.html.) Besides, what you refer to as a "suitably noble past" is actually a story of a military catastrophe for the Russians.

On Jul 9, 2012, at 3:20 PM, Elena Danielson wrote:

I'm Elena Danielson, new to the list, and not up to speed. But do let me say that I greatly appreciate the thread about the question of authenticity in general, regardless of the disposition of any specific case. As an archivist concerned with diplomatics, I have long felt that the ambiguity of authenticity was a major theme or subtext of Pale Fire. Probably list members have already noticed that Nabokov worked on both Pale Fire and the controversial Song of Igor's Campaign at the same time that the Russian emigre press in the US was abuzz about the Vles Kniga or Book of Veles, a comically crude, pseudo-medieval forgery that was published in the late 1950s. (BTW Veles appears in line 66 of Igor.) The Book of Veles is still passionately revered by many old emigres. It has recently become an icon of neopagan groups in today's Russia despite the obviously fake language. In contrast, the "Song of Igor" is a great work of art as Nabokov proves in his foreword, notes and commentary, despite the acknowledged whiffs of Ossianism (1960 edition, Foreword, pp.12-13, Commentary p. 88). "Igor" meets most of Anthony Grafton's criteria for the great topos of Western forgery (Grafton, 1990, Forgers and Critics, esp. pp. 9 & 23): there is nothing else like it, the only original is sadly lost, miraculously a copy was preserved, unfortunately all the proof is in a hopelessly obscure language, but trust me it supports a sense of national identity and a suitably noble past. (Shakespeare's noble histories were essential for the emerging sense of English national identity, regardless of authorship, -Aleida Assmann, Cultural Memory, pp. 58-78.).) The polished opening lines of Igor echo the opening stanza of the indisputably authentic ca. 1200 Nibelungenlied, which VN refers to obliquely-- (The Song of Igor as the one masterpiece that "not only lords it over Kievan letters but rivals the greatest European poems of its day" Foreword p. 13.) VN is contemptuous of the crudely nationalistic Soviet veneration of the song, and substitutes an aesthetic veneration. As Edward Keenan details, the erudite Josef Dobrovsky had both the opportunity and the ability to produce a linguistically credible and poetically powerful text, whether he actually wrote it or not. Even John Shade was capable of a masterwork of ambiguous verse, as Brian Boyd and R.S. Gwynn demonstrate.

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