James Twiggs [ to Nick
Greer ..."The baldheaded suntanned professor in a Hawaiian shirt works
particularly well as far as an explicit inclusion."] You
mention the place at the end of the Commentary where Kinbote gives way to "the
old, happy, heterosexual Russian." I've always thought there's a corresponding
point near the end of Shade's poem...lines 923-930...It's worth remembering that
VN did not always describe the poem in the manner quoted in the article that
Matt recently posted. In his letter to Rust Hills dated March 23, 1961, offering
the poem to Esquire, he said: "If you want this poem despite its being rather
racy and tricky, and unpleasant, and bizarre, I must ask you to publish all four
cantos." Those are adjectives that some readers would prefer not to apply to
Shade's poem, though they obviously apply to the Commentary and to many other of
VN's works.
JM: Fascinating news
about Nabokov's letter to Rust Hills (1961) offering the poem to
Esquire. There is an interview, dated 1962, published in SO, where
Nabokov mentions the Montreux landscape in connection to 'Pale Fire,'
and I surmised, wrongly I now see, that the poem itself had
been written in Switzerland. My dates
(and much more) are tottaly muddled now!
I'm not as sure, as your are about, the
baldheaded professor in a Hawaiian shirt as a representative of
Nabokov, instead of Prof.Pnin (a recent posting raised up this issue).
Another authorial intromission, with a professor cum wife holding a butterfly
net, is presented in King,Queen, Knave.* It
would be interesting the compare the original and its translation to check if
this couple is also mentioned in Russian and a description of their
apparel.
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* wiki short-cut: King, Queen,
Knave is a novel written by Vladimir Nabokov (under his pen name V. Sirin),
while living in Berlin and sojourning at resorts in the Baltic in 1928. It was
published as Король, дама, валет (Korol', dama, valet) in Russian in October of
that year; the novel was translated into English by the author's son Dmitri
Nabokov (with significant changes made by the author) in 1968, forty years after
its Russian debut.