While reading E.T.A Hoffmann's "Des Vetters Eckfenster,"
his last work, I was reminded of Nabokov's preamble to
"Laura"*.
Hoffman's story carries strong autobiographical
references, authorial self-quotes and it consists of a dialogue between two
cousins, one of them ailing from digestive complaints, weak and painful feet and
legs. The sick man was occasionaly transported from
his bed to a window so that he could to watch the
Berliner market-place from his vantage point. The story
begins with its narrator comparing his cousin's illness
to one which struck a physically paralised, mentally active Paul
Scarron. Through this French writer (1610-1660) Hoffmann inserts
a reference to one of his novels with the story of a painter
called Berklinger ( from "Der Artushof"), who used
to stand for hours in front of an almost empty canvas on
which only a neutral background had been painted. Delirious Berklinger
would proudly display the canvas to his visitors, instructing
them about the lavish scenes and marvellous details it contained.
Hoffmann also quotes one of his favorite lines
from Hamlet (Act II, scene two): "So as a painted tyrant Pyrrhus
stood,/ And like a neutral to his will and matter/ Did nothing" with
its hint about the distance that distinguishes
an original fancy from reality.
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* - Nabokov mentions his ... “not quite finished manuscript of a novel which I had begun writing
and reworking before my illness and which was completed in my mind.” and informs that he “kept reading it aloud to a small
dream audience in a walled garden. My audience consisted of peacocks, pigeons,
my long dead parents, two cypresses, several young nurses crouching around, and
a family doctor so old as to be almost invisible."