Keith: Does anyone know where Nabokov called biography psycho-plagiarism? It's referred to constantly, but no text that I've encountered so far cites it.

JM: What a pity that you didn't ennumerate some of the references to "psycho-plagiarism."  Here are a few suggestions, in case nobody comes forward with the correct indication.

I searched for VN's considerations about biography ("average reality") and autobiographical fiction ("true reality"), as elaborated upon by G. Green (at Cycnus), until I found one of those "references" with no bibliographical markings*, but one that brings a promising lead, at least into the demonstrations of VN's "jaundiced views" about biography,  as may be found in the exemplary comments written by biographers Goodman (RLSK) and by Kinbote (PF).  These two examples helped me to conjecture that Nabokov's sentence must have been pronounced or written down at the time he was staying in Paris. Or in the late fifties in America?.

I also wonder if they were quoted by B. Boyd in one of his biographies (RY and AY, or published among VN's collected letters to editors. Worth giving it a try.

 

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*. "Very Nasty," an old review by John Sutherland of Andrew Field's "VN: The Life and Art of Vladimir Nabokov," published online by the London Review of Books.  He writes that "Field was the first critic conscientiously to excavate Nabokov’s sizeable corpus of early work in Russian, most of it published obscurely in pre-war Europe. ...Nabokov’s career up to 1967 was not easily brought into single focus...Field’s body-and-soul devotion to the Nabokov cause and his mastery of out-of-the-way works was ingratiating. ...Nabokov acceded to his young disciple’s offer despite a ferocious distaste for and disbelief in literary biography (‘psycho-plagiarism’) as a genre – jaundiced views given full play in the depiction of Sebastian Knight’s Goodman and Pale Fire’s Kinbote. "