Sandy Klein sends a link
to http://theoutbound.wordpress.com/2010/07/06/nabokovs-private-tragedy-and-a-call-for-suggestions
( Nabokov’s private tragedy and a call for suggestions; July 6, 2010 by
Alina Muller) "I have started to compile a themed reading list for my summer
reading. The theme is ‘works by authors who have spent a relatively big part of
their lives living in a different country’. This would include both authors who
spent only part of their lives abroad, like Julio Cortázar, and those who spent
most of their lives in a different country, like James Joyce. It would also
include authors that lived abroad but wrote in their first language, again like
Julio Cortázar, or that lived abroad and wrote in the language of their new home
country, like Herta Muller, Vladimir Nabokov and Joseph Conrad. The theme of the
books doesn’t have to be the immigrant experience. I am more curious about
finding out if these authors have something in common that could potentially be
attributed to their shared experience as migrants, or if they don’t at
all. I would appreciate your suggestions! "
JM: Limiting the amplitude of
the question (in one way or another everybody is an exile - although only
a few feel, as Nabokov often decribes in his memories of a Russian
childhood, to be an exile from Paradise or from Arcadia), there
is Hana Píchová's "The Art of Memory in Exile:Vladimir Nabokov & Miland
Kundera" (Southern Illinois University Press,
2002).
Sandy Klein also
sent: http://bnreview.barnesandnoble.com/t5/Daybook/Cradling-the-Abyss/ba-p/2822 : July 2, 2010 Cradling the Abyss byby Steve King.
Its opening lines "Vladimir Nabokov died on this day in 1977." and its closing
ones " Nabokov said that his only enduring inheritance was the "unreal estate"
of memory and art " quoting what he considers as a "pre-memory presaging
displacement and exile," from the opening pages of Speak, Memory...related
to chronophobia and the "the sight of a brand-new baby carriage standing there
on the porch, with the smug, encroaching air of a coffin; even that was empty,
as if, in the reverse course of events, his very bones had disintegrated" and,
at first, it gave me a jolt, reaching the List as it did, on July 5, the date in
which Shade, Kinbote and Gradus were born.
This coincidence helped me to notice the extent
of Nabokov's perception of the simultaneity of birth and death
(to be born is to begin to die, everything that has a beginning must have an
end, etc)