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Dear All,
I'm new to this immensely helpful forum, and want to put a question to
all
of you Nabokovians. I'm contemplating writing a master's dissertation on
(what I perceive to be) one of the central themes of Nabokov's
oeuvre--namely, his obsessive preoccupation with death. I want to argue
that Nabokov was John Donne-like in his recurrent meditations on death.
I've found a wealth of examples of VN's intimations of mortality in
Speak,
Memory, Pale Fire, and Bend Sinister. Some of the more famous examples
include:
"The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our
existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of
darkness"
(SM, 19).**
"I have to have all space and all time participate in my emotion, in my
mortal love, so that the edge of its mortality is taken off, thus
helping me
to fight the utter degradation, ridicule, and horror of having
developed an
infinity of sensation and thought within a finite existence" (SM, 297).
Similarly, Adam Krug admits he cannot "accept the inanity of
accumulating
incalculable treasures of thought and sensation, and
thought-behind-thought
and sensation-behind-sensation, to lose them all at once and forever in
a
fit of black nausea followed by infinite nothingness" (BS, 99).
Pale Fire is also teeming with examples of both Shade's and Kinbote's
preoccupation with (and attempted transcendence of) death. Related to
the
opening sentence of Speak, Memory, are Shade's lines: "Infinite
foretime and
/ Infinite aftertime: above your head / They close like giant wings,
and you
are dead" (PF, 37).
I'm hoping you will recommend other works which exhibit this tendency to
shudder in the face of the "absolute nothingness, nichto" of death (BS,
175). Other novels and short stories which depict death as the great
negator of human consciousness. Also, are there any secondary works of
criticism devoted to this theme that I should read? So far, I've only
found
one monograph directly related to this topic (Nina Allan's "Madness,
Death
and Disease in the Fiction of Vladimir Nabokov"). Any and all
suggestions
would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!
All the best,
Brian Bush