Jansy Mello: While going over a translation of
Nabokov's Russian lectures I selected certain paragraphs to bring to our forum
and, for once, I failed to check anything else related to VN and
Dostoevsky in the internet.
However, just now I needed a particular Nabokov find (which I
associated to psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion's observation that
the "conscience is the sense organ for the apprehension of psychic
qualities" - and here I quote him from memory only), namely, "the brain, that stomach of the soul." and had a go at
the google. I found an interesting commentary in a blog on "Literature and
poetry, philosophy and politics, melancholy and disquiet" (Dec.,1,2007) -
"Nabokov On Dostoevsky: Biased?"
I fully concur with his observation that VN's three assertions about
art, in that lecture, are "slightly absurd[ ] how can
art remain art if it is make believe? Do we only visit literature for diversion?
Is poetry only an escape from reality? I think that literature, real literature
is just the opposite, it is the affirmation of our hidden lives, the bringing to
lips of songs that we dare not sing usually, or melodies that we yearn to hear,
for these are to us truer than life for they are life, for this literature is
not an escape from reality into make believe but an escape from make believe,
into the reality of so many worlds, through words, through which, to a certain
extent, we are able sometimes to make sense of a melancholic, cruel and sordid
world."
Nevertheless, it's also my opinion that, inspite of what Nabokov
has asserted in this lecture, his vision of Art was not simply one of
"divine games" under the aegis of "Ars gratia artis." He may have created a
fictional poet in John Shade, but was "Pale Fire" just the result of a
"problem the author has set for himself"? Is John Shade he less "real" because
of the poem's autobiographical "make believe" (the real poet is
Nabokov)?