-------- Original Message --------
We don't seem to be getting anywhere, so I'd better leave it.
However, I thank Stephen Blackwell, this time for the reference
to Nabokov's letter on "The Vane Sisters". "Most of the stories
I am contemplating (and some I have written in the past--you
actually published one with such an "inside"--the one about the
old Jewish couple and their sick boy) will be composed on these
lines, according to this system wherein a second (main) story
is woven into, or placed behind, the superficial,
semitransparent one." I changed "most" to "all", and the
reference to /Glory/ was suggested to me by a man I met in front
of a glass-walled skyscraper on a trip to Onhava many years ago;
he looked a lot like me.
I think I'll be agreeing with you when I say this: The way to
go the farthest wrong is to think you have the key when you
don't.
Jerry Friedman
--- George Shimanovich <gshiman@OPTONLINE.NET> wrote:
>
> To Jerry: There is more then one VN's quote that one can apply to the
> slippery topic of problems and solutions. None of the writers mentioned
> (Orwell, Chernishevsky, Dostoyevsky) sounded as predicable to their
> contemporaries as they appear to us. On the opposite they surprised the
> early readers, which is how they survived the first wave of time. VN
> surprises too. It is the style, the method of surprise that is so
> different.
> Isn't Dar about comparing two methods of art, of life (Chernishevsky vs.
> Godunov)? Anyone is free to look for and find the keys, of course, but
> if we
> are not careful, there is a risk of making VN sound like a musical box,
> which he is not: Here is that Jekyl, here is that Hyde, this sit is
> empty
> who's in for a ride?
>
>
>
> - George