I don't quite know how to put this with due respect to VN, but am I
alone in finding this business of committees of ghosts attending to the
destinies of the quick so idiosyncratic and trivial as to be a real turn-off? I
enjoyed the bit about Tolstoy and the acrostic in The Vane Sisters,
but if it becomes the underlying metaphysics of his oeuvre, so to speak, it
just seems silly. Of course, each man is entitled to his religion, but as
Bertrand Russell said in response to D. H. Lawrence's "Look, we have come
through!", they may have come through but why should we look?
Anthony
Stadlen
"Oakleigh"
2A Alexandra Avenue
GB - London N22
7XE
Tel.: +44 (0) 20 8888 6857
For Existential Psychotherapy and
Inner Circle Seminars see:
http://anthonystadlen.blogspot.com
In a message dated 11/10/2012 15:31:20 GMT Daylight Time,
nabokv-l@HOLYCROSS.EDU writes:
It
could be that the answer to many ghost-related riddles in Nabokov
(including
PF) is in "Pnin":
"He
did not believe in an autocratic God. He did believe, dimly, in a democracy of
ghosts.
The
souls of the dead, perhaps, formed committees, and these, in
continuous
session, attended to the destinies of the quick."
It
is the interaction and struggle between ghosts, each
protecting
his or her own "quick", much like Greek gods, that can
explain
the incosistencies.
As
for the tradition of ghosts in the Russian literature, it's
huge
but it seems that Nabokov's treatment of the theme was
influenced
more by spiritualistic and theosophical
teachings
immensely popular in Russia at the time of Nabokov's youth.
Tatiana
Ponomareva
--
Susan Elizabeth Sweeney
Co„Editor,
NABOKV„L
All private
editorial communications are read by both co-editors.