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 NOJ / 
 НОЖ 
: Nabokov Online Journal 
, Vol. II / 2008
“'LAURA' IS NOT EVEN THE ORIGINAL’S NAME”
An Interview with Dmitri Nabokov
 __________________________________________________ 
 
Updated on April 22, 2008
SUELLEN STRINGER-HYE
: While you are often very forthcoming on Nabokov-L withcorrections to mistranslations or misstatements of fact, certain puzzles in Nabokov’swritings, such as the identity of Kinbote and Shade and the subsequent authorship of 
 Pale
 
 Fire
, remain unsettled. In the case of Pale Fire, do you think there are inherent textualambiguities without resolution or do you have “inside knowledge” that might help toilluminate these questions? Do you ever feel like you need to “hold back” what you knowfor fear of interjecting a bias into the scholarly discourse?
DMITRI NABOKOV
: I have been accustomed since childhood to reading my father’s books with a flow of receptivity. I might check an occasional stumbling block tocomprehension, but not interrupt with scholastic snags the spinal thrill, the continuity of reading pleasure. As Vladimir Nabokov once said, reading is re-reading: it is insubsequent passes that one can plunge into conjecture regarding the author’s intentions,
 
 D. Nabokov. «'Laura' Is Not Even the Original's Name»
 
the multiplicity of levels and real or apparent textual ambiguities. That much said, one of the more delicate questions regarding
 Pale Fire
has been that of its actual or virtualauthorship, i.e., who, within the context of the novel, invented Kinbote? Who inventedShade? When, early on, this dilemma began to be debated, I popped the question to myfather. As closely as I can remember, his reply was “It does not matter much; let’s justsay that each invented the other.” I shared this “inside knowledge” with Brian Boyd. Itseemed, at the time, to set in motion a certain series of thoughts that Boyd appreciatedand found useful. Simple enough. More profound conjectures, of course, are up to thereader.Online resources can yield precious finds. One can, however, wiki-woogle adinfinitum and find a plethora of coincidences and irrelevancies, all the while missing thegist of Nabokov’s writing. Misquotations, sometimes the result of translational blunders,occasionally do require attention. An egregious case of both resulted when the leftistwriter Alberto Manguel, parroted by his Venezuelan analogue Fernando Báez in a 2005statement to the IPS, parlayed a grotesque (and perhaps politically propitious)mistranslation into the charge that my father had “burned
 Don Quixote
in front of hisstudents,” a crime that qualified him as one of “the worst enemies of books,” moreculpable than the military forces presumably acting as a result of “the U.S.-led invasionof Iraq.” Nabokov had lectured on Cervantes as visiting professor at Harvard in 1951.What he had subsequently said, in a 1967 interview in the
 Paris
 
 Review
, was “…What Iintend to do is publish a number of twenty-page essays on several works …all based onmy Cornell and Harvard lectures. I remember with delight tearing apart [figuratively, of course]
 Don Quixote
, a cruel and crude old book, before six hundred students in
 
 NOJ / 
 НОЖ 
: Nabokov Online Journal 
, Vol. II / 2008
Memorial Hall…” The accusation, in the context of the “biggest cultural disaster since1258”, as Marxist Humberto Marquez had qualified the events in Iraq, was quickly picked up by the less informed, or sometimes more disingenuous, members of the media.I would, however, like to clarify the matter. My father’s scholarly evaluation of what is an iconic novel to many in no way reflects his or my feelings toward Spanishwriters in general, or toward his faithful readers in the Spanish-speaking world, or towardour marvelous Spanish publisher Anagrama. He also said of the novel, which he mostcertainly did not burn, “We are confronted by an interesting phenomenon: a literary herogradually losing contact with the book that bore him; leaving his fatherland, leaving hiscreator’s desk, and roaming space after roaming Spain. In result, Don Quixote is greater today than he was in Cervantes’ womb. He has ridden for three hundred and fifty yearsthrough the jungles and tundras of human thought – and he has gained in vitality andstature.”For my part, some of my most satisfying singing engagements have been in theSpanish-speaking world – Colombia, Venezuela, Puerto Rico, and the Gran Teatro delLiceo in Barcelona. And it was upon ascending the 18,700-foot summit of Mexico’sMount Orizaba that I recalled the famous Petrarchan sonnet of Keats, “On First Lookinginto Chapman’s Homer,” in which he mistakenly has “stout Cortez,” instead of Balboa,gazing down, from a lower elevation, on Vera Cruz.I am not deterred by a fear of skewing scholarly discourse if I believe in the truthof a fact or the validity of an opinion that I express. Besides, an occasional skew can befun. But when a peculiarly obsessed individual seriously threatens me – as, in fact, hashappened – for not confirming his guess with regard to a lucrative “solution” he
 
imagined
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