Subject:

Re: [NABOKV-L] Hunted Enchanters query

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Date:

Wed, 22 Mar 2006 18:34:20 EST

To:

NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU

In a message dated 22/03/2006 22:04:50 GMT Standard Time, as-brown@COMCAST.NET writes:

I always assumed that by the time the film came to be made (a controversial production already vibrating with dollar signs -- at least in the eyes of America's fanzine readers), the film makers realized that there was certainly an "Enchanted Hunters" hotel, motel, lounge or lodge somewhere that would be eager to sue those two swaggering billionaires Kubrick and Nabokov. The trans to "Hunted Enchanters" was an easy fix and kept the book's readers in the know.

That's a good hypothesis. I took it, when I first saw Kubrick's film in 1962, to be of the order of "Hurricane Lolita" in "Pale Fire": a private or not-so-private joke of VN's about his own status as a hunted "enchanter". After all, he insisted that a writer should above all be an enchanter. It is a little unsettling that he uses the same word for the paedophile in his novella.

Anthony Stadlen

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