Fran Assa: please explain your comment about Gone
with the Wind: what makes you think he specifically was
parodying that book in "Lolita" ?
Your comment:
"Nabokov's
playing with one of the structuring principles of so many melodramatic works:
the principal of oppositional characters: good girl/ bad girl; Kitty and Anna
Karenina; Becky Sharp and Amelia Sedly from Vanity Fair; Scarlett O'hara and
Melanie Wilkes in Margaret Mitchell's Gone With Wind, the movie of which
Nabokov parodied in Lolita. " [EDNOTE. surely Jansy is
referring to the description of Southern plantations in Technicolor, "with the
devoted Negress shaking her head on the upper landing" (as I remember it) that
appears in Humbert's account of the American sights that he and Dolores
see. -- SES.]
JM: I wish the comment had been written by me, but
it's Aisenberg's.
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Inspite of being of the opinion that, in fact, in RLSK "the
composition is shaped around certain painful, undeniable, and at times
humiliating autobiographical experiences," [Dale Peterson,
"Knight's Move: Nabokov, Shklovsky and the Afterlife of Sirin," NS,11
(25-35)], I also agree that "Vs research project is that his book and life
increasingly repeat the patterns and perceptions of Sebastian's books and life"
(31) with "the curiously intechangeable burden of recorded
experience in Sebastian's fiction and V's autobiographical narrative about the
"real life" of his half-brother [...] carrying "coded allusions to
Nabokov's life and Sirin's writings."(34), i.e that "RLSK performs the
trick of side-stepping the end of a Russian literary career by translating Sirin
into a 'laughingly alive' afterlife in the 'otherworld' of English
prose"(xii), as elegantly argued in D.Peterson's article.
The intriguing element for me lies in that "In Nabokov's first
appearance before English readers, those in the know cannot help but
see refracted images of his own life: his much-regretted inattention to his
younger sibling, Sergei..."(28-29). After all, the 1939/40 novel appeared
around the time when Nabokov emigrated to the US and, from the spirit of
VN's letters to Wilson, and N's chapter 14 in "Speak, Memory," I
cannot discern this kind of regret as already operative in
Nabokov.
From the ammount of scholarly references to VN's
guilt-feelings towards Sergei having left their mark in
RLSK, my misgivings must be totally unfounded!*
When D.Peterson described in RLSK the "larger
leitmotif of abandonment"(28), I returned to my impression of
"sibling rivalry" and to VN's hypothetical resentment when, not yet
aged one, his mother "abandoned him" to produce another baby, Sergei,
whom he tried to abandon in his turn.
Judging from VN's autobiography it is hard for me to realize how the
tragedies of WWWII and Nabokov's emigration to America severed his
real-life contacts with all his other siblings**.
*The most convincing argument against my misgivings comes from VN's
lines in SM, about the mere recognition of such a want
can neither replace nor redeem. It seems
that this wording distantly echoes the spirit of a
former sentence in RLSK: "I cannot even copy his manner because the manner of his prose was the
manner of his thinking and that was a dazzling succession of gaps; and you
cannot ape a gap because you are bound to fill it in somehow or other — and blot
it out in the process."
** - Check for example, VN's letter 123 (September,1945): "Of my two European brothers the youngest has [...] traced me
through my story in the New Yorker. My other brother was placed by the
Germans in one of the worst concentration camps (near Hamburg) and perished
there." and also, letter 311 (January 19, 1960),"We
visited Geneva to see my sister (whom I had not seen since
1937)..."