NPPF: Notes C.1-4 - C.42

[jbor]

>> There is, I think, also a touch of Nabokov the imaginative artist, Nabokov
>> the exile from pre-Revolutionary Russia, in this wistful précis of "a
>> fabulous kingdom" lost.

> From: "Otto" <ottosell@[omitted]> Tue, 26 Aug 2003 17:28:47 +0200

> Yes, but in this he's mocking himself a little bit, knowing that in
> pre-Revolutionary Russia the poor weren't getting a little bit richer
> and the rich weren't getting a little bit poorer like in that fairytale
> he calls Kinbote's Law (Notes to Line 12).

I also thought that an interesting paragraph. Kinbote emphasises how
"peaceful and elegant" the reign of Charles the Beloved was (1936-1958), and
how "[e]verybody, in a word, was content -- even the political
mischiefmakers who were contentedly making mischief paid by a contented
*Sosed* (Zembla's gigantic neighbour)." But we get a rather different
picture of the later years of the reign as his fiction progresses. So it
does read a bit like historical revisionism on Kinbote's part.

I'm given to believe that Nabokov's attitude towards Communism and American
Communist sympathisers was much the same as Shade's (NB the reference to
"Pat Pink" at line 462), ie. that he was ardently anti-Communist. I guess I
agree that he's mocking himself a little in mirroring aspects of his own
experience, career and family history in Kinbote. But it's more gentle than
it could have been, and I find much more pathos in Kinbote's delusional
jottings and musings than I do in Shade's pretentious verses.

In terms of the alternative history of monarchist Russia which Nabokov has
Kinbote fashion in the note, it's worth pointing out that it spans a period
of time in our world when Stalin's tyranny had turned particularly nasty. In
fact, it's reasonable to suggest that the vision of social harmony, and
"Kinbote's Law" which had engendered a more equitable distribution of wealth
in the society, is Nabokov's representation of the the way the trends of
pre-Revolutionary Russia might have played out over time, of what could have
happened had Nicholas II not been overthrown and his family and heirs
murdered so brutally by the Red Guard in 1918. It seems more likely to me
that the irony has been directed against the Stalinist regime, when in fact
in the Soviet Union the poor got poorer and the rich got fewer (as it is
depicted also in Orwell's _1984_), than at Tsarist Russia.

best