In response to Matt Roth, it’s worth pointing out that even in the 1950s, an astronomer who seriously advocated a return to geocentrism would be so out of step with the prevailing views in his field as to seem deluded. The same might (and might not) have been true for the architect mentioned by Robert M. Martin. By contrast, Howard Adelmann’s Marcello Malpighi and the Evolution of Embryology (5 vols.) was, and still is, a distinguished work of scholarship published by Cornell University Press in 1966, two years after I joined the staff. If mutually satisfactory terms could have been reached with Nabokov, the Press would gladly have published the Pushkin volumes as well. Neither Martin nor I intended to lump all these “private ventures” together as being equally off the wall. I thought that was clear from Martin’s sentence about “happy outcomes.”

Incidentally, don’t be misled by the rural setting into thinking the Cornell of Nabokov’s time was a “backwoods” university in any other sense. After all, VN taught there, as did the distinguished critic M.H. Abrams. The philosophy department, in which I studied, boasted Max Black and Norman Malcolm, whose well-known students include William Gass and Thomas Nagel. In 1949, Wittgenstein visited Malcolm and, though in poor health, made himself available for discussions with both faculty and students. The anthropology and Asian-studies programs were very strong as well . . . And so on. 

But the main point I want to make is that although we, as readers of VN’s novel, can see just how mad Botkin/Kinbote is, this would not necessarily have been so clear to his colleagues. As someone suggested a few weeks ago (I think it was Jerry Friedman), the Zembla story may have started out modestly enough--as an obsession shared, at first, only with Shade. The delusion may then have grown progressively worse and may not have bloomed into final form till Botkin started writing the Commentary. 

Turning from the Commentary as a whole to Botkin’s actual behavior on campus and about town--as either he describes it or we infer it by reading between the lines--it is certainly no more outrageous or “crazy” than the antics of many another faculty member that I observed over the years I spent on campuses. Perhaps Matt is unlucky enough to teach at an especially sedate institution.  

By the way, why is it so seldom mentioned that Shade, in his obsession with the afterlife, is a bit on the batty side himself and that Sybil is something of a shrew? 

Jim Twiggs