Jansy Mello: inspite of innumerous inspired angles and photography, or the play inside the play blending fictional reality and its representation, I disliked enormously the recent production of Anna Karenina, directed by Joe Wright. The real world of a novelist, at least its intelligibility, gains consistency by details (caress them) and I missed them all, inspite of all the luxurious lamps and trinkets.
Jerry Katsell: Perhaps Nabokov, who was capable of uninhibited, uproarious laughter, would have enjoyed some original details in the Joe Wright directed Anna Karenina. My favorite moment was during the race scene when Frou Frou, Vronsky holding on for dear life, crashes into the orchestra pit. J

Jansy Mello: During this episode I kept expecting the farcical race horse scene from "My Fair Lady."  The meaty stumbling Frou Frou filled me with pity.

     
Abdel Bouazza: The recollection of children playing among other games hide and seek on Vladimir’s name-day and forgetting about Peter who was still hiding and therefore missed the picnic he was looking forward to is from VN’s short story “A Bad Day” (Obida, 1931) included in Details of a Sunset & Other Stories.

 

Jansy Mello: One added information: a celebration on Vladimir's name-day was described in his short story "A Bad Day."  And, of course, a precise correction by AB: the scene I had in mind was not included in "Speak,Memory."  

Jerry Friedman: I didn't remember Carolyn Kunin's suggestion "that John Shade is the young miscreant that was judged by Judge whatsisname (next-door neighbor) with the alphabetic daughters, for having offed his parents when he was but a wee bairn."  This runs into problems with the timing.  The more important one, probably, is that Kinbote's statement that the little parricide was seven (n. 47-48) would contradict his statement that Samuel Shade died in 1902 (n. 71), which is when John was three or four.

Jansy Mello: Why do you suppose that "the little parricide" was John Shade? All I got was: "I wish to convey, in making this reference to Wordsmith briefer than the notes on the Goldsworth and Shade houses, the fact that the college was considerably farther from them than they were from one another. It is probably the first time that the dull pain of distance is rendered through an effect of style and that a topographical idea finds its verbal expression in a series of foreshortened sentences."  There are other clues, right? What are they?