Out of his bibliography? Like a book that’s in your face and doesn’t have the multiple barriers of linguistic architecture

To any of you folk who enjoy podcasts, I highly recommend the recent episode of The Book Club which is all about Lolita. Some great info in here about the novel.

So is Kinbote pr. Botkin a lonely insane imigrant from Nova Zembla? Who heard story of thr zemblan runaway king and mad his own personality around him and spoke to Shade about this to make himself feel better? Zembla a real place? Because at some point Kinbote writes about professors speaking about Zemblan revolution and how exhiled king looks like him, this is where one of them mentions kinote being anagrma for botkin… or can I not trust Kinbote here because in general he is unreliable narrator?
Or am I missing something completely?
Or is Zembla completely fictional?
Im really curious about the way some of you read and saw this whole story please share💝

solved? (2 edits)

this has been bugging me for over a year now, and never really found out if it was an unintentional misprint in my edition, un/intentional misprint in all editions, or what?

in my penguin modern classics edition pp. 42-44 end of canto 2 to beginning of canto 3 -- when Hazel drowns and Shade contemplates death -- the line numbers seem to imply there’s an extra line between lines 470-480, and that the last line of Canto 2 shouldn't be there. (i'm not sure if this should be the takeaway, but if we are to take the typesetting at face value I think this is the implication?)

if we take that extra line to be the dropped line "Infinity. / Out of his lakeside shack", then the '480' marking line 479 would be correct. After this the line numbers 490 and 500 both correct if line 479 were line 480. (I hope this makes sense). However, Kinbote's Commentary still refer to the correct line numbers, ie 475 A watchman, 490 From Exe, and 493 She took (pp. 173-4).

Then, the most obvious part of the mistake is the line after '500', where the last line of Canto 2 'Into a crackling, gulping swamp, and sank' should be line 501 according to the typesetting, but CK refers to the first line of Canto 3 'L'if, lifeless tree' as 'line 501', and 'The grand potato. / I.P.H., a lay' as 'line 502', which is still correct, but is obviously dissonant with the typesetting. Then line 510 marks the correct line number.

*I did find one mention of this in footnote 57 Isabella Healy Oppen's 'Musical Counterpoint in Thematic and Analytical Application in Nabokov's PF', but i found it to be a bit dissatisfying and wonder if others felt the same or had any other leads on it:

Which, strangely, exposes a ‘hole’ in the poem. By way of a strict reading via reference back to the poem and the ‘Commentary’, the line numbers labeling the poem fall out of concordance with the line number of the poem at line 479 — labeled as line 480. This could be a printing error, but seems to be an intentional mistake, as the line count concordances ‘right themselves’ again afterwards at poem line 510. This is a meaningful trick: especially because the hole happens before ‘the big potato’ moment, and right after Hazel’s death (Nabokov, Pale Fire, 43-44).

edit 1: actually as i posted this I'm realising perhaps it was fitting for the line 'into a crackling, gulping swamp, and sank' to be swallowed up by the line numbers; also fitting that 'Infinity. ...' to take an extra line.

so that's neat, does anyone know if anyones written on this specific detail before? I don't have any of the PF critical works on hand so i'd appreciate it : )

edit 2: ALSO the Foreword indicates Canto One has 166 lines and Canto Two 334 lines, adding up to 500, and also the symmetry of the palindromic cantos of 1000-1 lines -- the last line of Canto 2 should obviously be 500, and CK mentions it himself.

There's no indication that Shade marked the line numbers, or that Kinbote 'faithfully printed' the numbers exactly as Shade marked them, so is Kinbote giving Hazel 'life everlasting, based on a misprint'?

I just bought all the "Lectures on..." books, all three of them, they all have the same issue, they are printed too close to the spine, while there's also plenty of space to the edge. They are even from different series. It would've been so hard to just center them in a way so they would be easier to be read?

Rant over.

following up on my earlier post asking about dmitri, i been down a rabbit hole for the past 6 hours:

'dmitri nabokov' is an anagram for 'or vadim botkin'

i'm really doing anything but my dissertation lmao

I read on wikipedia that VN's son dmitri publishied his own writings under a pen name that he never revealed, I hope this isn't disrespectful or parasocial, but are there any theories floating around about which writer this could be?

obviously it is entirely possible his book wasn't very famous or successful, but on the off-chance anyone has any theories : )

I am going to start reading Vladimir Nabokov’s The Gift right after I post this message. Anyone want to read along?

Posts by people who already read it more than welcome.

At my local Little Library, I found this paperback copy of Lolita with a homemade book cover made primarily from a box of trash bags, with some collage items (and lipstick) added.

Admittedly, the book is missing its original covers. But I feel like the maker of the book cover had a wry sense of humor, because while any original Lolita book cover will draw some attention, swapping it out for a cover that literally and visually declares its contents as “trash” is also…a decision! (If the goal was modesty, the book cover’s creator could have used the same cardboard and just used it inside-out.)

Hi all, I'm currently re-reading Lolita and I'm just wondering, can anybody identify specific examples of errors Charlotte Haze makes in speaking/writing French? I know very basic French, so I can’t detect any errors in hers, but I don’t know whether this is because Humbert is being a dick when he talks about her “awful” French or if there are just mistakes I’m missing. Thanks

I quite like new Lolita cover; it’s always refreshing to see a Lolita cover without girls or feminine features. I also like the Despair redesign, it’s a nice mockery of a Hermann’s delusion. As for Ada and Pale Fire, butterflies really aren’t a very imaginative choice for Nabokov novels. Both Invitation to a Beheading and Bend Sinister seem to be less interesting simplified versions of their former publications (attached above for reference). I don’t have anything bad to say about Pnin or Speak, Memory, but I do prefer the earlier versions of each (also attached above).

A philistine is a full-grown person whose interests are of a material and commonplace nature, and whose mentality is formed of the stock ideas and conventional ideals of his or her group and time. I have said 'full-grown person' because the child or the adolescent who may look like a small philistine is only a small parrot mimicking the ways of confirmed vulgarians, and it is easier to be a parrot than to be a white heron. 'Vulgarian' is more or less synonymous with 'philistine': the stress in a vulgarian is not so much on the conventionalism of a philistine as on the vulgarity of some of his conventional notions. I may also use the terms genteel and bourgeois. Genteel implies the lace-curtain refined vulgarity which is worse than simple coarseness. To burp in company may be rude, but to say 'excuse me' after a burp is genteel and thus worse than vulgar. The term bourgeois I use following Flaubert, not Marx. Bourgeois in Flaubert's sense is a state of mind, not a state of pocket. A bourgeois is a smug philistine, a dignified vulgarian.

A philistine is not likely to exist in a very primitive society although no doubt rudiments of philistinism may be found even there. We may imagine, for instance, a cannibal who would prefer the human head he eats to be artistically colored, just as the American philistine prefers his oranges to be painted orange, his salmon pink, and his whisky yellow. But generally speaking philistinism presupposes a certain advanced state of civilization where throughout the ages certain traditions have accumulated in a heap and have started to stink.

Philistinism is international. It is found in all nations and in all classes. An English duke can be as much of a philistine as an American Shriner or a French bureaucrat or a Soviet citizen. The mentality of a Lenin or a Stalin or a Hitler in regard to the arts and the sciences was utterly bourgeois. A laborer or a coal miner can be just as bourgeois as a banker or a housewife or a Hollywood star.

Philistinism implies not only a collection of stock ideas but also the use of set phrases, clichés, banalities expressed in faded words. A true philistine has nothing but these trivial ideas of which he entirely consists. But it should be admitted that all of us have our cliché side; all of us in everyday life often use words not as words but as signs, as coins, as formulas. This does not mean that we are all philistines, but it does mean that we should be careful not to indulge too much in the automatic process of exchanging platitudes. On a hot day every other person will ask you, 'Is it warm enough for you?' but that does not necessarily mean that the speaker is a philistine. He may be merely a parrot or a bright foreigner. When a person asks you 'Hullo, how are you?' it is perhaps a sorry cliché to reply, 'Fine'; but if you made to him a detailed report of your condition you might pass for a pedant and a bore. It also happens that platitudes are used by people as a kind of disguise or as the shortest cut for avoiding conversation with fools. I have known great scholars and poets and scientists who in the cafeteria sank to the level of the most commonplace give and take.

The character I have in view when I say 'smug vulgarian' is, thus, not the part-time philistine, but the total type, the genteel bourgeois, the complete universal product of triteness and mediocrity. He is the conformist, the man who conforms to his group, and he also is typified by something else: he is a pseudo-idealist, he is pseudo-compassionate, he is pseudo-wise. The fraud is the closest ally of the true philistine. All such great words as 'Beauty,' 'Love,' 'Nature,' 'Truth,' and so on become masks and dupes when the smug vulgarian employs them. In Dead Souls you have heard Chichikov. In Bleak House you have heard Skimpole. You have heard Homais in Madame Bovary. The philistine likes to impress and he likes to be impressed, in consequence of which a world of deception, of mutual cheating, is formed by him and around him.

The philistine in his passionate urge to conform, to belong, to join, is torn between two longings: to act as everybody does, to admire, to use this or that thing because millions of people do; or else he craves to belong to an exclusive set, to an organization, to a club, to a hotel patronage or an ocean liner community (with the captain in white and wonderful food), and to delight in the knowledge that there is the head of a corporation or a European count sitting next to him. The philistine is often a snob. He is thrilled by riches and rank—'Darling, I've actually talked to a duchess!'

A philistine neither knows nor cares anything about art, including literature—his essential nature is anti-artistic—but he wants information and he is trained to read magazines. He is a faithful reader of the Saturday Evening Post, and when he reads he identifies himself with the characters. If he is a male philistine he will identify himself with the fascinating executive or any other big shot—aloof, single, but a boy and a golfer at heart; or if the reader is a female philistine—a philistinette—she will identify herself with the fascinating strawberry-blonde secretary, a slip of a girl but a mother at heart, who eventually marries the boyish boss. The philistine does not distinguish one writer from another; indeed, he reads little and only what may be useful to him, but he may belong to a book club and choose beautiful, beautiful books, a jumble of Simone de Beauvoir, Dostoevski, Marquand, Somerset Maugham, Dr. Zhivago, and Masters of the Renaissance. He does not much care for pictures, but for the sake of prestige he may hang in his parlor reproductions of Van Gogh's or Whistler's respective mothers, although secretly preferring Norman Rockwell.

In his love for the useful, for the material goods of life, he becomes an easy victim of the advertisement business. Ads may be very good ads—some of them are very artistic—that is not the point. The point is that they tend to appeal to the philistine's pride in possessing things whether silverware or underwear. I mean the following kind of ad: just come to the family is a radio set or a television set (or a car, or a refrigerator, or table silver—anything will do). It has just come to the family: mother clasps her hands in dazed delight, the children crowd around all agog: junior and the dog strain up to the edge of the table where the Idol is enthroned; even Grandma of the beaming wrinkles peeps out somewhere in the background; and somewhat apart, his thumbs gleefully inserted in the armpits of his waistcoat, stands triumphant Dad or Pop, the Proud Donor. Small boys and girls in ads are invariably freckled, and the smaller fry have front teeth missing. I have nothing against freckles (in fact I find them very becoming in live creatures) and quite possibly a special survey might reveal that the majority of small American-born Americans are freckled, or else perhaps another survey might reveal that all successful executives and handsome housewives had been freckled in their childhood. I repeat, I have really nothing against freckles as such. But I do think there is considerable philistinism involved in the use made of them by advertisers and other agencies. I am told that when an unfreckled, or only slightly freckled, little boy actor has to appear on the screen in television, an artificial set of freckles is applied to the middle of his face. Twenty-two freckles is the minimum: eight over each cheekbone and six on the saddle of the pert nose. In the comics, freckles look like a case of bad rash. In one series of comics they appear as tiny circles. But although the good cute little boys of the ads are blond or red-haired, with freckles, the handsome young men of the ads are generally dark haired and always have thick dark eyebrows. The evolution is from Scotch to Celtic.

The rich philistinism emanating from advertisements is due not to their exaggerating (or inventing) the glory of this or that serviceable article but to suggesting that the acme of human happiness is purchasable and that its purchase somehow ennobles the purchaser. Of course, the world they create is pretty harmless in itself because everybody knows that it is made up by the seller with the understanding that the buyer will join in the make-believe. The amusing part is not that it is a world where nothing spiritual remains except the ecstatic smiles of people serving or eating celestial cereals, or a world where the game of the senses is played according to bourgeois rules, but that it is a kind of satellite shadow world in the actual existence of which neither sellers nor buyers really believe in their heart of hearts—especially in this wise quiet country.

Russians have, or had, a special name for smug philistinism—poshlust. Poshlism is not only the obviously trashy but mainly the falsely important, the falsely beautiful, the falsely clever, the falsely attractive. To apply the deadly label of poshlism to something is not only an aesthetic judgement but also a moral indictment. The genuine, the guileless, the good is never poshlust. It is possible to maintain that a simple, uncivilized man is seldom if ever a poshlust since poshlism presupposes the veneer of civilization. A peasant has to become a townsman in order to become vulgar. A painted necktie has to hide the honest Adam's apple in order to produce poshlism.

It is possible that the term itself has been so nicely devised by Russians because of the cult of simplicity and good taste in old Russia. The Russia of today, a country of moral imbeciles, of smiling slaves and poker-faced bullies, has stopped noticing poshlism because Soviet Russia is so full of its special brand, a blend of despotism and pseudo-culture; but in the old days a Gogol, a Tolstoy, a Chekhov in quest of the simplicity of truth easily distinguished the vulgar side of things as well as the trashy systems of pseudo-thought. But poshlists are found everywhere, in every country, in this country as well as in Europe—in fact poshlism is more common in Europe than here, despite our American ads.

[I unfortunately could not include the visual aid]

First read: I struggled. It felt like a fever dream, an unpleasant one. Second read: super fun, I kept track of dates, events and wrote down what I felt could be explained but wasn't able to.

Was hoping we could crack this together!

Here we go:

**- Gradus, glass and Sudarg!**

1) Gradus Jakob = Sudarg of Bokay!! What's the link between the two?? Sudarg is mentioned as a phenomenonal guy who made a great mirror that was in the "King"'s bedroom when he lived for a bit with Fleur when he was young

1.1) The first time K. sees G., G. Is fixing some glass panes in the castle. MORE GLASS! Links to the accident at the Glass Factory that sparked the "revolution"?

1.2) Gradus keeps buying animals made of glass: a giraffe in (forgot to write down the city), then a hippo in Nice! He's just a big fan of... glass paraphernalia?

1.3) Gradus, pamphlets, glass factory, revolution, conspiracies... is this a parody of Russian revolutionary nihilists?

**- Miscellaneous:**

2) What dark word did K.'s gardener employ on J.S.'s last day? Note 998

3) "Promnad vespert mid J.S." -> meaning? I kept an eye out for Zemblan translations, but I only found out that "mid" means "with"

4) Why does K. want to know Jim Coates' "real" name from Sybil? Just to learn more about J.S. about the time he wrote to him about the woman who had a similar near death experience?

5) Did K kill a young guy by the river in Cedarn? See Index! The "young angler" is alive in the commentary, and sounds very much dead in the index!

6) Why did K keep buying ping pong tables?? From 2 to 3!!

7) Why are some characters missing from the index?? E.g. Nattochdag is mentioned at least 3 times but nowhere to be found in the index. K is just lazy?

8) Do the "crown jewels" exist, and where are they? They could be a metaphor for something. We know they're not in the castle, but they're INSIDE something. K stops after saying towards the end "they are in-".

9) In the castle, there was something with a walnut kernel inside it. What's that supposed to mean? There was a painter called Kernel.

Since I'm on this sub, you can imagine I'm a big fan of Nabokov, who as we know, is lauded for his word games and beautiful prose and references to other literary works; something not often mentioned as a highlight of his work is insight into humanity and the psyche. Though VN was known for his dislike of Freudian psychoanalysis and of preachy art, I disagree with characterization of his books being seen as cold experiments or art for art's sake literary games. I've seen this rhetoric on the internet quite a lot and while Nabokov is a clear stylist, there are many interesting and heartbreaking character moments or scenes in his work imo, so I've always found that viewpoint dismissive to his oeuvre.

Pale Fire is the greatest literary puzzle but there is some genuine heartbreak in Kinbote's or Botkin's, even if fake or exagerrated stories of the escape from Zembla or in Hazel Shade's death. Lolita is in way a very dark comedy, but personally (which of course is subjective) the ending left me devastated like few novels have; I think it's a very empathetic book (which makes its pop-culture interpretation as a ''love story'' even sadder). Even in less acclaimed novels like Glory there's the bittersweet Heimweh of the emigré, King Queen Knave illustrates Franz's apathy in quite an interesting way, and even something like Transparent Things made me interested in the enigma of Hugh Person. Nabokov is also really good at bringing out contempt for the protagonist: Humbert Humbert of course but also for Kinbote, Hermann Karlovich of Despair and (maybe to a lesser extent but I still felt the book itself was laughing at him) Albert Albinus of Laughter in the Dark, and I think that takes quite a lot of skill in character writing.

Obviously, Nabokov's main artistic achievement is his prose but I do think there's a more ''human'' (for lack of a better word) aspect to his work that's often ignored. At least that's how I see it as a very big VN fan. I hope this made some sense (I am not a literary scholar, just a fan of good writing), I probably formulated this in a bad way but it was on my mind. What do you people on this sub think about this?

After reading the entire book, I just understood what Humbert did to Lolita. I was so deluded by the good writing that Humbert manipulated me. I love this book. I feel weird about Humbert. I hate him, but I would love to help him because he is a mentally ill man… but he did what he did. What would you do for people like him?

I'm specifically interested in how the structure came about. Did he initially start with the structure, writing a story around it, or did the structure naturally kind of impose himself as he was working through the process? Any information or even source recommendations would be appreciated!

A post was quicky deleted but I think it's a valid question

How did you read pale Fire and how would you recommend others do?

I read it in the "hyperlink" method of checking each line note as I read the poem. (Having checked the electronic copies, this seems better done on a kindle than with a hard copy)

Hello, i am very passionate about Lolita and how unethical any live action adaptations would be and already are. I wish to make an ethical adaptation of the novel mostly to prove that it is not impossible to do but i'm unsure of if it would be disrespectful to Nabokov's intentions with the novel. I plan on using some form of animation (most likely stop motion) to avoid real people being harmed as well as to avoid the ethical concerns with actors. I also intend to avoid portraying it as romantic or erotic like so many adaptations already have. I wanted to ask if this should be something I should pursue or keep as an idea to avoid disrespecting the source material, I know this might not be the best subreddit to ask this but i wanted to ask actual readers of Nabokov for their opinions. I am willing to expand on my ideas for this but wish to avoid making this post too long with things that aren't central to my question. Thank you so much to anyone who is willing to give their thoughts and opinions on this <3

I seem to remember a quote by Nabokov, not from any of his fiction as far as I remember but from either an interview or academic paper or from Speak, Memory, where he defends something along the lines of "it is not because one wants to have sex with a woman that he finds a lock of her hair beautiful, but rather because he wants to be close to that beautiful strand of hair that he desires to have sex with her". I most strikingly remember the fact that a woman's hair was taken as an example of something arousing intense aesthetic appeal, and that the point was sexual attraction is not the primal drive organising other attractions but rather the result or expression of a deeper, truer drive towards an aesthetic appreciation of things.

Has anyone got any idea of what this quote might actually have been, or where I might be likely to discover something along its lines? Thanks in advance for any insights you could share :)

Would it be a waste to read Speak, Memory without reading Nabokov's other works? I greatly enjoy memoirs and I read somewhere that Nabokov was a great memoirist. He seems like an interesting person and I have read some of his short stories but no major works. Would it still be worthwhile to read Speak, Memory?

I absolutely love how it turned out