George-Nabokov-L: "I noticed in my
version of the book ("First Vintage International Edition April 1989") that two
pages have page numbers that are duplicated. That is, on pages 281 and 282, the
page numbers are printed both on the bottom of the page (as every other page has
them), but also on the top of the page in brackets. The content of these pages
involve Gradus glimpsing Kinbote in the library after he had arrived in New Wye.
Had anyone else noticed this? Does the duplicate page numbers appear in your
version as well?."
Jansy Mello: I don't have yo0ur
version with pages 281 and 282 in duplicate. I checked in the collected
works by the Library of America (ed.Brian Boyd) and, if the paragraphs and pages
you indicate are those found in Kinbote's commentaries to line 949 ("and
all the time") there are no duplications to be found on its page 643. In
Everyman's Library (1992), no duplication on page 281.
I also checked various translations (to Brazilian
Portuguese (Jorio Dauster and Sergio Duarte), Portugal's Portuguese (Telma
Costa), French (Raymond Girard and E-M Coindreau) and German(Dieter E.
Zimmer) and no translator echoed the duplicate pages. It's an interesting
observation concerning books inside books (?), but it must be a
real editorial slippage ( not a fictional one).
Simon Rowbery:"I am looking for
examples of Nabokov's works being collected in anthologies or compiled into
Nabokov readers and would be grateful for any further examples. From memory, I
don't believe Michael Juliar's descriptive bibliography has a section for these.
N.B. I am excluding the short stories and poetry collections from this and am
most interested in works that are publisher driven."
Jansy Mello: This practice may be
rather common in foreign editions. There are Nabokov's Russian Lectures
(Chekhov) prefacing a Portuguese collection of the works of Chekhov,
or his essays on "Good Writers, good readers", "On
Translation" in various Brazilian anthologies or magazines. A few
years ago I mentioned a Brazilian collection of stories about duels carryiing
VN's "A Matter of Honor".*.
Beside Page Stegner's (Portable Nabokov), the only
other American anthology I remember is one by Joyce Carol Oates (it begins
with Nabokov's first chapter from Speak,Memory)*
...........................................................................................
**-Here is a link: "In The Best American Essays of the
Century, Joyce Carol Oates and Robert Atwan have put together a diverse
collection of essays from such writers as Mark Twain, Edmund Wilson, Langston
Hughes, Robert Frost, Susan Sontag, Mary McCarthy, N. Scott Momaday, John
McPhee, Tom Wolfe, Vladimir Nabokov, and Saul Bellow. And they have named it
"The Best." Not the best of the year. Nor of the decade. But of the century. Now
that's reaching."http://www.ralphmag.org/BB/oates1.html.
I checked after other anthologies and I noticed
that J.C.Oates's two other anthologies of North American short-stories
didn't indicate Nabokov's name (I didn't get my hands on the
physical books, just some internet references about them). Here is the
list:
Anthologies
.