Kryptomnesically induced, or not, Virginia Knight
reminded me of Nina in Spring in
Fialta.
After returning to TRLSK, I
re-discovered a Nina in the novel, now SK's dark love. Her names change, though: she is Nina Toorovetz, later
married to Pahl Pahlich Rechnoy. She is Helene von Graun and, perhaps, Mme
Lecerf (deer).
Pahlich informs V. about his ex-wife: "your German friends have sent you upon a wild goose-chase because
you'll never find her[...] She may be here, and she may be in hell[...] As a
matter of fact, I often catch myself thinking that she has never
existed." *
Still in
TRLSK, we read:
"He is said to have been three times to see the same film — a perfectly insipid one
called The Enchanted Garden. A couple of months after his death, and a
few days after I had learnt who Madame
Lecerf really was, I discovered that film in a French cinema where I sat through the performance, with the sole intent of learning why it
had attracted him so. Somewhere in the middle the story shifted to the Riviera,
and there was a glimpse of bathers basking in the sun. Was Nina among them? Was
it her naked shoulder?"
We have then: HH's
"Riviera love", various Ninas and SK, like Van,
trying to catch sight of his beloved on a
flickering screen.
Not only Sebastian's father and mother,
not only Sebastian himself, almost all his lovers move
incessantly from darkness into a lighted scene, to disappear again in
darkness, again and again **.
............................................................................................................
* Following Alexander Drescher's information[ A Reading of Nabokov's "That in Aleppo
Once..."by Alexander N. Drescher] the poet in "Aleppo" andV., in
that story, "in some way share an identity, are
twin-like doubles", as it also happens with SK and his half-brother, also
a V., who writes "I am Sebastian, or Sebastian is I, or
perhaps we both are someone whom neither of us knows".
Sandy links
"That in Aleppo Once" to "Spring in Fialta" and
quotes "three 'poetic' images that point specifically to "Spring
in Fialta," preparing for the confusing disclosure of the poet's
marriage": "Although I can produce documentary
proofs of matrimony, I am positive now that my wife never existed. You may know
her name from some other source, but that does not matter: it is the name of an
illusion."[...] By allusion, the wife also has a shared identity, is an
alternative incarnation of Fialta's Nina, the unavailable, idealized love of
that story's narrator." Now we may tentatively add TRLSK to
these two.
** The image of the bird traversing a
lighted room is a Christian simile for eternity and immortality (Cf. The
Venerable Bede) - it only happens
once.
Nabokov wrote about these sudden appearances and disappearances
quite differently.
In "The Art of Literature and Commonsense" (1951): "human life is but a first instalment of a serial soul and
that one's individual secret is not lost in the process of earthly dissolution,
becomes something more than an optimistic conjecture, and even more than a
matter of religious faith, when we remember that only commonsense rules
immortality
out"