NABOKV-L discussion

This post is a continuation of responses to David Potter’s post on the List-Serve 03/03/25, re: Nabokov’s Aunt Preskovia (Pauline Tarkovsky), who was a psychiatrist and wrote a book on “Women Who Kill” (now available in English. Nabokov writes in SM her curious final words:  “That’s interesting. Now I understand. Everything is water, vsyo—voda.”

This makes me wonder if these remarkable words were the impetus ADA’s theme of a world technology based on water, instead of electricity.

I’m sure others here have noticed this because it’s quite obvious and Sebald was famously into Nab, but there’s a direct reference to Chapter 8 of Speak, Memory at about 20% of the way through WG Sebald’s Austerlitz.  
 

I am pulling my hair out because of this. 
DECADES AGO, I read a passage by Nabokov in which he describes the translator's work as assembling diverse elements which he glues and hammers together until the resulting object throws a shadow closely resembling the subject that he is trying to transpose across languages.

AND NOW, I can't find it anywhere.

I can't find it in the Pushkin foreword, The Real Life of SK, Pale Fire, etc.

So... where is it?

Lots of gratitude and praise to anyone who knows.

Cheers,

Trevor

Edit: wrote "Ada's Foreword" instead of "Lolita's"

There are apparently some allusions to Melville and Tolkien in Lolita's foreword, which I hope can be confirmed. Apologies for any sloppiness. Unitalicized, bold mine:

For almost the past week or so I've been reviewing the opening of Ada, as well as the family tree and certain conspicuous passages, and I think I've crashed into the tip of a Melvillean iceberg. If I'm not dreaming, that is. I hope my errata such as typos will be forgiven.

I've taken to applying the vowel shift of 4.29-34 and I've come across some interesting finds.

The primal scene is defined by Laplanche and Pontalis (1967) as follows: “Scene of sexual intercourse between the parents which the child observes, or infers on the basis of certain indications, and phantasises. It is generally interpreted by the child as an act of violence on the part of the father.”

In the opening pages of Tropic of Capricorn (1939):

“I was corrupt, in other words, corrupt from the start. It’s as though my mother fed me a poison, and though I was weaned young the poison never left my system” (p. 10).

And in the opening pages of Lolita (1955):

“We loved each other with a premature love, marked by a fierceness that so often destroys adult lives. I was a strong lad and survived; but the poison was in the wound, and the wound remained ever open” (p. 18).

Both published by the same bloodline...father and son.

In a miraculous survival, I think there is an obvious reference to Milka (the ubiquitous German chocolate brand) in The Eye:

I paused and looked up at a milk chocolate advertisement with lilac alps.  This was my last chance to  renounce penetrating into the secret of Smurov's immortality. What did I care if this letter would indeed travel across a remote mountain pass into the next century, whose very designation - a two and three zeros - is so fantastic as to seem absurd?

In case someone missed it: our own Robert Michael Pyle is featured prominently in a tantalizing Washington Post article about the Xerces butterfly ("This Butterfly Went Extinct. That's Not the End of Story"). Sorry if this link here takes you to a paywall; it should be available in full via the Apple News app even without a subscription ~ St.Sh.