Silence tends to  imply assent, so I feel I should, perforce, reply to JF, who wrote:

 

1. I think CHW credited me with more than I deserved in regard to Botkin.  All I argued in our e-mail exchange was that he was Kinbote.  I've always been immune to the temptation (or insensitive to the suggestions) to see Shade as anyone's invention but Nabokov's.

 

2. CHW also mentioned "nikto b", which the Russian speakers have ruled out.  I think.  But I'd like to clarify this last detail: if someone asks "Who is Botkin?", is "Nikto b" an absolutely unidiomatic answer?  I promise not to ask about this again.  In any case, "Botkin" backwards contains "nikto", and Alexander Dolinin (I apologize for getting your name wrong earlier) has advised us not to dismiss that lightly.

 

3. The "index" poem has come up; it features a rhyme that might seem more strained than any in "Pale Fire".  Does that mean Nabokov intended it to be a bad poem?

  

Re 1 & 2:

 

JF is right to reject my (inadvertent) implication that he thinks Botkin invented Shade. I realized I had wrongly suggested this only after I’d sent the post. What I wrote was:

 

Basic premise: Accept that both halves of PF emanate entirely from the inventive mind of  Botkin, a mad Russian, who is extremely difficult to place within the organisational structure of Wordsmith College. (Jerry Friedman).  Botkin, like VN, is both Kinbote and his Shade. Botkin is also the mirror image of “nikto b”, which might be translated “he would be nobody”. (Carolyn Kunin). VN remarked that when looking for his own name, he would often stumble upon Nobody. Botkin, the Nobody, is thus not a million millimetres away from VN himself. Cf Keats, my, your and VN’s favourite.

 

I realize that VN only said that Kinbote was Botkin. JF convinced me that this is so. But JF also pointed out that Botkin doesn’t seem to be a part of the Wordsmith faculty, ie he is really outside the narrative of the action on that stage. This brings him quite close to VN himself, a supposition reinforced by accepting that Botkin is “nikto b” reversed, an idea I attributed to CK. Like Alexander Dolinin, I believe there is something to this idea.

 

If this is so, then it’s not far from entertaining the idea that Botkin also invented Shade and his verses, since these were indubitably invented by VN. Botkin is the obverse or reverse of VN.

 

Re 3:

 

Nobody will heed my index,
I suppose,
But through it a gentle wind ex
Ponto blows

 

This is not a poem, and therefore not a “bad” poem. It is an itty-bitty bit of witty verse. Although wistful, it is almost “comic and curious verse”, to lift the title of the entertaining anthology put out by J.M.Cohen, 1952. (Which anthology also contains the modern flyting I mentioned many posts ago.)

 

Curious to discover what VN was getting at, I followed the track also taken by Jansy Mello, viz: 

 

VN’s reference to "ex Ponto" led me to "Letters from the Black Sea" ( Ovid's "Epistulae ex Ponto") and to Pushkin who, during his exile in Odessa, wrote a belated "response" to the Latin poet. It was entitled "To Ovid."  In the context of SM, "ex Ponto" seems to indicate a song of exile. (Jansy)

 

which in turn led me to:

 

http://www.case.edu/pubs/cnews/2003/4-24/classics.htm

 

in which I learnt that:

 

According to Helzle, most of the letters to Ovid's wife, friends and political leaders back home have a "plaintive tone". He elaborated that Ovid — known for his light, erotic poetry and his mythical epic Metamorphoses — complains about the isolation of the frontier-like life where it "seemed like it was always winter" and that "wild barbarians from the Russian steppe" were invading the lower Danube River.

 

and also that: Tzanetou said the exile theme raises the question of self-definition.

 

In spite of the insistence of (mostly American) scholars that VN was an American, I firmly continue to believe that VN in America was never more than a European/Russian, living a cultural frontier life. That was his self-definition.

 

The rhyme that might seem more strained than any in "Pale Fire" (JF) reminded me (rather aptly, I felt) of a similar triple  rhyme in Carroll’s “poeta fit non nascitur”, thus:

 

Last, as to the arrangement:

Your reader, you should show him,

Must take what information he

Can get, and look for no im

mature disclosure of the drift

And purpose of your poem.

 

This instruction would apply to Kinbote’s commentary as prose poem. VN's little verse is also reminiscent, less aptly perhaps, of Kipling’s:

 

I've never seen a Jaguar,
    Nor yet an Armadill
O dilloing in his armour,
    And I s'pose I never will

 

Re the puzzles in PF, and their solutions.  Yet again, I return to “Through the Looking-Glass”. Carroll based his narrative on a chess problem. However, Carroll pointed out, as Gardner notes, that “red and white do not alternate moves properly, and some of the ‘moves’ listed by Carroll are not represented by actual movements of the pieces on the board.”  Something of this arbitrariness is surely also present in the movements of Kinbote.

 

Re “Will”. Now that I have Ingram & Redpath (1964) in my hot and stickies, I can find no exemplary evidence (p 312) for the “common cant sense” they refer to. They cite Partridge’s “Dictionary of Slang”, 1938, (my copy is 1951, “much enlarged and revised”) which is wholly unjustified as a source, and also Wright, “Dictionary of Obsolete & Provincial English”, presumably 1852, the arrival of whose tomes I await with interest.

 

Charles