If you read German I would suggest: Christopher Hüllen,
Der Tod im Werk Vladimir Nabokovs: Terra Incognita
(Arbeiten und Texte zur Slavistik 48, Herausgegeben von Wolfgang Kasack).
München, Verlag Otto Sagner 1990.
A. Bouazza.
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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
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