Maurice Couturier: "In response to Matt's question about incest, may I quote a brief passage of my forthcoming "Nabokov's Eros" [  ] "To an interviewer who had asked him if incest was "one of the possible roads to happiness", Nabokov answered: "If I had used incest for the purpose of representing a possible road to happiness or misfortune, I would have been a best-selling didactician dealing in general ideas. Actually I don't give a damn for incest one way or another. I merely like the 'bl' sound in siblings, bloom, blue, bliss, sable."

 

Jansy Mello: Your observation hardly answers the questions posed by Matt Roth and me, linking "the meaning of incest as a symbol for the Romantics in Nabokov's novels," but it certainly opens the way for future debates or for a more precise query.

 

I'm particularly thankful for the quote you offered about the "BL" sounds in "siblings,bloom," aso. I remembered it from one of Don B.Johnson's articles on ADA but I can see now it may also be located among the interviews, probably in SO. Wonderful, becaise now I can locate it on line: Cf. http://lib.ru/NABOKOW/Inter10.txt_with-big-pictures.html  "Nabokov's Interview (10) TIME,.1969..

I'll also check in DB Johnson's "World in Regression" and in other writings to find what he wrote about that (if I locate his article in question, I'll be back with some pertinent quotes).