Stan Kelly-Bootle: My
own idle browsing for ‘orbicle of jasp’ (which always struck me as VN
portraying Shade as the most jarring un-poet!) found Vladimir
Mylnikov’s essay A and Z of Zembla, at http://pmeyer.web.wesleyan.edu/nabokov/alphabet.html.
My apologies to those already familiar with Mylnikov’s thesis, but it
was new to me, and may help resolve Jansy Mello’s queries. Or not, as
they say.*
JM: What a great link and
sophisticated thesis, thanks!
That it was Charles Kinbote who wrote the
Index is almost a shared certainty. Nevertheless it's unsatisfactory,
for me, to take for granted that Shade and Kinbote are one and the same
(the historical debate bt shadeans and kinboteans, or Kunin's and
Roth's thesis about split personalities remains undecided, as far as I
know).
Mylnikov's thesis depends on accepting
that it was only one author ( who is not Véra nor hubby) who wrote
poem, commentary and index.
After I saw the image of several samples of the "leopard-skin jasper" I
was convinced that Shade would be referring to this stone and to one
of its orbicules, even if yacheika yashmy in the
Russian translation matches the English letter "Z."
Zembla is as "far,far away" as any hope concerning a "Hereafter."
Probably Mylnikov's find represents another
hypothesis that serves as a special bonus, with its third solution, for
those who can read it in Russian. Otherwise he'd be also presenting an
interpretation that'd settle, once and for all, the predicaments
related to all the Shade/Kinbote debates and to "Pale Fire's" openness
(undecidability?).