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MR's omnibus:
To my suggestion regarding "empty barrow," Jansy replied: "Trundling
perhaps?"
Jansy, I'm not sure where you are going with that question, but it did
send me to Webster's to see about trundling. I of course knew of the
meaning as it relates to the wheelbarrow, but I was curious about its
relationship to the "trundle bed," which in my New England was usually
a large bed with a drawer beneath that pulled out into a smaller bed.
This bed inside a bed, thus relating to sleep, has a nice resonance
with the empty grave, but I can't do much more with it. What I did
find in Webster's is that trundle is synonym to truckle, which can
mean "to yield or bend obsequiously to the will of another." I don't
see J.S. as obsequious, but I can see him as yielding to Kinbote's
will, as he gives up his abstruse, unfinished poem to the commentary
of Kinbote's life.
Re: butterflies as harbingers of death. In the final chapter of KQK,
a "white butterfly went by, battling the breeze." A paragraph later,
Dreyer is informed by the gardener of Tom's death. We remember, of
course, the "White butterflies" in PF that float under the shagbark
and "The phantom of my little daughter's swing."
A while back, as I recall, Jerry Friedman asked about whether or not
VN could be considered aristocratic. Accepting that his own word on
this is not necessarily accurate, I would still point to the following,
from SO (288): [Responding to an essay by George Steiner] "I never
belonged to the 'haute bourgeoisie' to which he grimly assigns me
(rather like that Marxist reviewer...who classified my father as a
'plutocrat' and 'man of affairs'!). The Nabokovs have been soldiers
and squires since (at least) the fifteenth century."
Matt Roth