Lucida Grande
Dieter's annotations and indeed his whole oeuvre are prodigious and
inspiring. When I was working on my book on Pale Fire in the
mid-eighties, there was no internet, and either I failed to find, or
there was not, in the catalogue of the British Library, any mention of
Angus MacDiarmid. Splendid that he exists, which contradicts my
hypothesis of Kinbote's coinage. Kinbote does coin other names, and
the echo of Hugh MacDiarmid is in keeping with Nabokov's method of
compilation of related associations.
My book does discuss the Kongs-skugg-sja, Hodinski, Ossian, The Song
of Igor's Campaign and much else as part of a system of Kinbote's
readings, and of their meaning at quite another level for Nabokov
himself; my accumulation of annotations suggests that Nabokov reviews
three intertwined strains of the history of the North for 1000 years
that culminate in his own tragedy.Helvetica0303,0303,0202
Priscilla