Well, I 'm not necessarily claiming to be first to notice Haze and Hazel, but years ago--almost certainly pre-1999--I delivered a paper at MLA at a Nabokov session titled "Families and Anti-families." My paper was titled "Hazel and Haze, L.," and compared scenes from Lolita and Pale Fire that both had "father," mother and "daughter" shouting from
different rooms as they read and worked. I no longer have those old programs with me, but maybe somebody else (preferably the session organizer) can verify this.
Thanks from Charles Nicol.
On Wednesday, February 26, 2014 2:07 PM, Jansy Mello <jansy.nabokv-L@AETERN.US> wrote:
Matt Roth: In a forthcoming article, I talk about the Hazel-Haze, L. coincidence, but I was unable to track down who first wrote about it. Does anyone have an earlier reference than the Rosenbaum article?Jansy Mello: In 1999 Ron Rosenbaum publicly vindicated his discovery, if neither Boyd nor anyone else claimed it (“.. one detail I can’t believe someone else hasn’t noticed, but one I’d be delighted to get credit for noticing first: The ghost within the name “Hazel,” the ghost of Lolita.”) He must have taken pride in it, too, because a “pale ghost” is the first thing that haunts our eyes in the title (and the link) to his article: http://observer.com/1999/04/nabokovs-pale-ghost-a-scholar-retracts/#ixzz2uBC21CAjC. Kunin: “I was going to say that Kinbote was probably looking on, but it can't be ... he hasn't made the trip to America yet, so I guess at this point neither is aware of the other. Right?”Jansy Mello: We know that Shade started to write “Pale Fire” in the Summer under Kinbote’s dedicated eavesdropping and this is why I don’t get you when you write that “at this point neither is aware of the other.”I surmise that Shade was then too absorbed in his poetic elaborations to worry about his persistent neighbor during the process of finding himself in a “crystal land” (he wasn’t having one of his fits, either, another instance of his splitting). You must be meaning Gradus, not Kinbote himself (note to lines 1-4): “The poem was begun at the dead center of the year, a few minutes after midnight July 1, while I played chess with a young Iranian enrolled in our summer school; and I do not doubt that our poet would have understood his annotator’s temptation to synchronize a certain fateful fact, the departure from Zembla of the would-be regicide Gradus, with that date. Actually, Gradus left Onhava on the Copenhagen plane on July 5.”Of course! Nice “incorporation”…
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