"Everything is a cipher and of everything he is the
theme".
(V.Nabokov, Signs and Symbols)
While going through Pale Fire I selected a few lines about Aunt
Maud (90-98), where the poet states that "she lived to
hear the next babe cry" (the baby cannot be Hazel, chronologically
speaking), and that he and Sybil have "kept her room
intact" (Why? Did they also maintain Hazel's trivia in a
"still-lfe" condition, like Aunt Maud's?).Indeed, too much puzzling about
Nabokoviana leads one into fictional "referential mania."
Now. Consider Lolita's married name: Could it represent a veiled
reference to Friedrich Schiller, the German writer? By having HH's Lolita marry
a Richard Schiller, would this serve as an indication of VN's
anger, once we learn that Doestoevsky was an ardent admirer of Schiller's
works? And VN's constant mention of "Moor" (as in Aunt Maud's "verse book open at the Index (Moon, Moonrise, Moor,
Moral)," or like ADA's voluptuous "moorish lips," or in connection to the plot of Sir Walter
Scott's, and of Donizetti's, Lucia di Lammermoor?, etc), could
it relate to Schiller's play "The Robbers" with the fraticidal fights
between two Moor brothers, a play that was particularly quoted,
mimetized and admired by Dostoevsky?*
Charles Kinbote himself is amusingly led astray, like some of his
readers. His commentary on PF's line 98 (On Chapman’s Homer)
implies that he imagines it's not a matter of a curious newspaper
cutting that bears witness to a coincidence (Homer and homer,
both related to a Chapman), but simiply the consequence of "a printer's absent-mindedness...drolly transposed" from the
title of Keat's famous sonnet. Various misprints are recollected
(mountain/fountain; korona/vorona/korova-crown/crow/cow) while he raves about
Zembla's mountainous landscape. This led me into a fresh swamp of
references. Take the substitution of a letter (m/f) or of its
sound, in English and in Russian like the G and the H. What about
that H and G biblical couple, Hoseas and his unfaithful wife Gomer in
the Old Testament? Aunt Maud's "homer" could
express what Kinbote jokingly describes as a coincidence in
the "lexical playfields" that defies computation: Keats, Baseball and an
unfaithful wife who bears an illegitimate child ( Hoseas' and
Gomer's Loruhamah and Lo-ammi).I don't take this assumption very seriously,
of course, inspite of the coincidence about G-H substitutions and a long
forgotten theory about who was the "next crying babe" in the Shade
household. However, it's equally illustrative of how
other people's stories and novels are thickly interwoven inside
everything new a novelist writes. Umberto Eco describes it as
a post-modern loss of innocence. Vladimir Nabokov's resort to parodies
mingled with seriousness confirms his wisdom in relation to his future
readers.
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*At the age of ten, Dostoyevsky was enthusiastic about Die Räuber,
performedin Moscow with the great actor Mochalov in the part of Karl Moor; in
his last novel, The Brothers Karamazov, he pays Schiller a vibrant
homage."..Dmitrit Karamazov recites Schiller and "Old Karamazov blasphemously
says Ivan is 'the very respectable Karl Moor', while he himself is the
'Regienderender Graf von Moor in person'. Dostoyevsky's long journey in the
company of Schiller ended with the tragedy he had admired so much as a
child.//Between these two moments, half a century apart, Dostoyevsky never
stopped mentioning or recallling Schiller..."
Ch. The heritage: literature,
p.39 in "Dostoyevsky and the process of literary creation" Jacques Catteau
(1989)
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