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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 January 2017
“How ludicrous these efforts to translate Into one's private tongue a public fate!“
Pale Fire, lines 231-232It is becoming apparent as research sets out the points of contact among Vladimir Nabokov's works that Nabokov deliberately designed his total oeuvre as a spiral that finds ever-widening patterns in the weave of the universe. We are beginning to see how Nabokov combines the passion of natural scientific investigation and the cool distance of literary creation in his art; from reading his commentaries to Pushkin's Eugene Oneginand The Song of Igor's Campaign,we understand how he interprets literary texts through the accumulation of precise detail anchored in fact. Just as the evolution of natural species involves tracing migration and patterns of mimicry, a literary work may be investigated through the evolution of its cultural history.
This article should owe even more than it does to the painstaking reading and multiple corrigenda of Gene Barabtarlo, University of Missouri-Columbia.
1. For the raw data, see especially Grayson, Jane, Nabokov Translated (Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, 1977 Google Scholar, and Tammi, Pekka, Problems of Nabokov's Poetics (Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, 1985 Google Scholar.
2. See Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Literature, ed. Fredson Bowers (New York: Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich, 1980), p. 5, “on the artist's passion and scientist's patience. “
3. Eugene Onegin, 4 vols. (New York: Bollingen, 1964); The Song of Igor's Campaign (New York: Random House, 1960).
4. See Priscilla Meyer, “McAdam, McEve and McFate: Nabokov's Lolita and Pushkin'sOnegin,” in The Achievements of Vladimir Nabokov, ed. George Gibian and Stephen Jan Parker (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Institute for Foreign Studies, 1984), pp. 179–211.
5. Speak, Memory (New York: Putnam's, 1966); The Gift (New York: Putnam's, 1963).
6. Lermontov, Mikhail, A Hero of our Time, trans. Nabokov, Vladimir and Nabokov, Dmitri (New York: Doubleday, 1958)Google Scholar. Like Nabokov in his introduction, Kinbote in his commentary to “Pale Fire” mentions Lermontov's frequent use of the eavesdropping device in A Hero of our Time.
7. These ideas owe much to collaboration with Jeff Hush and Joanie Mackowski.
8. Note to line 681, Pale Fire (New York: Putnam's, 1962).
9. Be it said, the scholarly dispute about the authenticity of the Slovo has not yet been (and maynever be) settled, although Nabokov was convinced of the poem's authenticity.
10. The Varangian connection is made in Priscilla Meyer, “Pale Fire as Cultural Astrolabe: TheSagas of the North,” Russian Review, forthcoming
11. James MacPherson, The Poems of Ossian, 2 vols. (London, 1806). The Scottish theme in PaleFire is elaborated further through the work of Thomas Campbell, Shakespeare's MacBeth, and Robert the Bruce (to be discussed elsewhere).
12. Bend Sinister (New York: McGraw Hill, 1974).
13. MacPherson, Ossian, 1: 98, 111, 149.
14. See Priscilla Meyer, “Etymology and Heraldry: Nabokov's Zemblan Translations,” TexasStudies in Literature and Language 29 (Winter 1987): 432–441.
15. Peter Dunn, private communication. I am grateful to Dunn for reading this paper andcontributing his erudition
16. MacDiarmid, Hugh, Lucky Poet: A Self-Study in Literature and Political Ideas, Being the Autobiography of Hugh MacDiarmid (London: Methuen, 1943).Google Scholar
17. As has been discussed by Renaker, David, “Nabokov's Pale Fire ,” The Explicator 36 (Spring 1978): 22–23.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
18. See Priscilla Meyer, “De Consolatione Geographiae Universitatis: Pale Fire and the Works of King Alfred the Great,” forthcoming.
19. Strong Opinions (New York, McGraw Hill, 1973), p. 77.
20. And for that matter to Eugene Onegin.