NPPF: Nabokov On Foliaged Optics and Zembla

[s~Z]

Alfred Appel, Jr:
    In Pale Fire, Kinbote complains that "The coming
of summer  represented a problem in optics. " The Eye is
well-titled, since you plumb  these  problems  throughout  your
fiction;  the apprehension of "reality" is a miracle of vision,
and consciousness is virtually an optical  instrument  in  your
work.  Have you studied the science of optics at all, and would
you say something about your own visual sense, and bow you feel
it has served your fiction? 

VN:   I am afraid you are quoting this out of  context.  Kinbote
was   simply   annoyed  by  the  spreading  foliage  of  summer
interfering with his Tom-peeping. Otherwise you  are  right  in
suggesting that I have good eyes. Doubting Tom should have worn
spectacles.  It  is  true,  however, that even with the best of
visions one must  touch  things  to  be  quite  sure  of
"reality."

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Alfred Appel, Jr:
Speaking of donnees; At the end o/Pale Fire,
Kinbote says of Shade and bis poem, "I even suggested to him
a good  title--  the title of the book in me whose pages he was
to cut: Solus Rex; instead of which I saw Pale Fire,
which meant to me nothing."' In 1940 Sovremennye Zapiski
published a long section from your  "unfinished"  novel.
Solus Rex, under that title. Does Pale Fire represent
the  "cutting"  of  its pages? What is the relationship between
it, the  other  untranslat!  ed  fragment  from  Solus  Rex
("Ultima  Thule,'"  published  in  Novyy Journal, New
York, 1942) and Pale Fire?

VN:     My Solus Rex might have disappointed  Kinbote  less
than Shade's poem. The two countries, that of the Lone King and
the  Zembla  land,  belong  to  the same biological zone. Their
subarctic bogs have much the same butterflies  and  berries.  A
sad  and  distant  kingdom  seems to have haunted my poetry and
fiction since the  twenties.  It  is  not  associated  with  my
personal  past.  Unlike Northern Russia, both Zembla and Ultima
Thule are mountainous, and  their  languages  are  of  a  phony
Scandinavian  type.  If a cruel prankster kidnapped Kinbote and
placed him,  blindfolded,  in  the  Ultima  Thule  countryside,
Kinbote  would not know-- at least not immediately-- by the sap
smells and bird calls that he was not back in  Zembla,  but  he
would  be  tolerably  sure  that he was not on the banks of the
Neva.
http://lib.ru/NABOKOW/Inter06.txt