L.Hochard: A few remarks about § 3&4 of Cloud, Castle, Lake: The trip doesn't start so badly after all. The weather on that morning is not unpleasant [  ]The short description of the weather in Berlin is strongly reminiscent of and reads like an abstract of the atmosphere imbued with sensuality described at length in the opening § of Spring in Fialta [  ] Vasiliy Ivanovitch is a poet of the Lensky kind, I think. "The really good life", he thinks, "must be oriented toward something or someone". Compare it to a variant to Canto 2 stanza VII of Eugene Onégine where Pushkin introduces Lensky: he knew both work and inspiration/ and the refreshment of repose/ and toward something a young life's/ indescribable urge  quoted by VN in his commentary, where, VN writes,  Pushkin describes "the nature of that young and mediocre poet in the idiom Lensky himself uses in his elegies, an idiom [...] blurred by the drift of unfocused words."

Jansy Mello: In a former posting, dated 15 Sep 2013 (“Idle Thoughts”: https://listserv.ucsb.edu/lsv-cgi-bin/wa?A2=nabokv-l;b6aee1e2.1309 ) I wrote something that exactly describes the feeling I have in relation to the static scenery in Cloud, Castle, Lake (its hidden dimension). I had forgotten all about this conclusion but, luckily for me, it popped up today by accident. I hope you Nablers won’t mind my resurrecting those idle thoughts of mine…

'A psychoanalyst (W.R.Bion) once described a sculpture whose structure was built in such a way as to "trap the light." The spectator would have to forget the structure to be able to see the luminous shapes which were the actual object of [this work]. For me, at times, the same thing happens when I read Nabokov. I have to forget the written scaffolding to find what its shadows and lights allow me to see, inspite of all the devilish enjoyment that his verbal exposition and fireworks yield to me [snip].”

But this verbal scaffolding and the devilish enjoyment with hidden allusions, criticism and wit shouldn’t be forgotten, as demonstrated by LH’s commentary.

Why would the narrator suggest that Vasiliy’s sensibility is equivalent to a mediocre poet’s unfocused words? Maybe there are silent poets… (I have in mind: “while the scientist sees everything that happens in one point of space, the poet feels everything that happens in one point of time”- Speak,Memory, Chapter XI).”  Interesting connection to the sensuousness (and, in a way, timelessness) of Spring in Fialta.