NABOKV-L post 0011582, Sat, 2 Jul 2005 17:19:59 -0700

----- Forwarded message from chaiselongue@earthlink.net -----
Date: Sat, 02 Jul 2005 13:05:29 -0800
From: Carolyn Kunin <chaiselongue@earthlink.net>
Reply-To: Carolyn Kunin <chaiselongue@earthlink.net>
Subject: Re: CFP: Vladimir Nabokov - 1. Open panel 2. Religion, Spirits, and
Spirituality in Nabokov's Work(9/1/2005; TCLC 2/23 - 2/25/06)
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This announcement reminds me that I was upset by something I read in the
current Nabokovian. Alexey Sklyarenko states, as if it were either fact or
obvious, that Aqua (deceased) sends Van (living) a dream. When I enquired of
him how he could justify such a statement he told me that there is no
textual evidence, but that:

there is some indirect evidence that other dreams of Van (the one he has
before his duel, for example) are sent to him by Aqua. We can thus assume
that his sny nayavu (dreams he has in waking life) are also sent to him from
the other world.


Am I alone in finding this disturbing? I realize statements like this may
have become acceptable in the wake of Brian Boyd's solution to Pale Fire.
Although I do not agree with that solution, at least there was an attempt to
explain the thinking behind the interpretation. Have we gone so far in
accepting VN's possible belief in spiritualism, that such a claim does not
need to be supported?

Recently we discussed the image from Nabokov's memoirs of life's brief span
as a cradle rocking over an abyss of nothingness. How can this image be
reconciled to this purported belief in spirits of the deceased acting on the
living?

Carolyn
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EDNOTE. It is true that there many cases of VN's characters having dreams or
being otherwise nudged by the dead. It is also true that he was much interested
in "the other world"--although the two concepts are not necessarily entirely
interdependent. VN's explorations of Dunne and, more precisely, his own
experiments and note books from the sixties strongly suggest that he took such
possibilities seriously enough to undertake his more or less casual experiment.
The results were inconclusive.

----- End forwarded message -----