-------- Original Message --------
J.Aisenberg to L.H: Vassiliy couldn't have foregone the trip,
because he's a character and all characters are as N.
himself said, "galley slaves".
Jansy Mello: This point is not very clear in the beginning
but later on we shall discover that he cannot leave the group and abandon the
planned excursion. The merest hint of subversion transforms
him into a “sacrificial lamb” (interesting observation
about the intended perforation of his hands and feet using a
corkscrew.)
L.H to J.A: I agree that 'ghost' was an illl-chosen
word, since it refers to life after death; ghosts are the
spirits of dead persons.
Jansy Mello: For Nabokov, ghosts also indicate the fuzzy
apprehension of what lies outside our mind: “You can get nearer and nearer, so to speak, to
reality; but you never get near enough because reality is an
infinite succession of steps, levels of perception, false
bottoms, and hence unquenchable, unattainable. You can know
more and more about one thing but you can never know
everything about one thing: it’s hopeless. So that we live
surrounded by more or less ghostly objects…”
This observation is not applicable to Vasiliy, though. A fictional character like him can only be known in the exact measure of VN’s intention. It seems to me that V.Nabokov
created him flat, even shadowy like a truly ghostly representative, to demonstrate that it was Vasiliy’s vision, and dreams and fantastic hopes, that which in the end
mattered.