Phyllis Roth [to GS Lipon*]
You might want to look a bit further, at the motif of the
wrong-man-murdered in the novels...........a key plot element that appears quite
frequently across the novels and stories.
Jansy Mello: A few days ago
Israeli writer Amós Oz delivered a conference in São Paulo in which
he observed that there are Tchekhovian and Shakespearean endings
in literature. In Shakespeare the characters end up dead, in Tchekhov, they
get bitter and depressed but remain alive." ["Na
literatura, exitem os finais de Tchekhov e os de Shakespeare. Nos de
Shakespeare, as pessoas terminam mortas. Nos de Tchekhov, deprimidas,
amarguradas, mas vivas."] It occurred to me that, for that
matter, Nabokov's novels have a predominantly "shakespearean" finale, with
all kinds of deaths and mistaken identities (such as Felix in
"Despair"),.added to the pathos of a desperate hope of re-encountering
an absent father.
Brian/Nabokov-L ["to
Brian Boyd and other Stratfordian Nabokophiles"]:
While I'm no fan of Roland Emmerich's "Anonymous" ...his film is correct in its
supposition that "William Shakespeare" was a pen name used by Edward de Vere...I
can't express how depressing it is to me that the Stratfordian myth has blinded
eyes as keen as yours, and many others' down the centuries [...] [J]udging by
his [Nabokov] 1924 poem "Shakespeare" ...I think he knew a fellow
noble when he smelled one.
Jansy Mello: Ron Rosenbaum
in "The Shakespeare Wars" (where he
fondly quotes Nabokov's writings), departs from SF's theory of
the "family romance" to criticize all anti-Stratfordian
dreams of noble ascendancies and the resulting prejudices. In his list
of aristocrats, references are made not to De Vere but to the
Count of Oxford, to Sir Walter Raleigh and to Sir Francis Bacon.
Searching for vaguely
recollected links between Nabokov, Shakespeare and Francis Bacon, I
reached three articles by Steve Blackwell, but they are unrelated to
the heated authorial debates.
SB's texts are mainly devoted to
science, as in the book "The Quill and the Scalpel: Nabokov’s Art and the
Worlds of Science". There's also a 2010 work in progress "Baconian
Knowledge and Nabokovian Knowledge" and his article "A new of little-known
subtext in Lolita," in "The Nabokovian" 60, Spring 2008, 51-55, where he states
that in "Bend Sinister Bacon is evoked primarily as a token of cryptography
via alleged acrostics in Shakespeare (and secondarily as a cipher for
science),while in Pale Fire he serves, concealed, as an icon for hidden things
that may be discovered by the careful and curious. There is no lack of
cryptograms in Lolita, either, and Bacon’s presence along with the "paper chase"
and its Shakespearian overtones brings on a double-edged concern." .
..........................................................................................................................................................................
*- GSL: "Shade's use of his daughter's death as the subject of his literary
writing recalls the death of VN's own father.What I'm wondering is whether this
theme, or some variation, the death of a writer's loved one, its use as literary
subject matter, or something similar, is present in any other works of
his."