I n t r o d u c t i o n David H. J. Larmour T E X A S T E C H U N I V E R S I T Y These were images that Franz usually held at bay but that always kept swarming in the background of his life greeting with ahysterical spasm any new impression that was kin to them. After ashock of that sort in those still recent days he would throw himself prone on his bed and try to fight off the fit of nausea. Vladimir Nabokov, King, Queen, Knave In this collection of articles by four eminent scholars who have distinguished themselves in both Nabokovian studies and Russian literature we present read¬ ings of The Defense (1930) by Catharine Nepomnyashchy, of Pnin (1957) by Irene Masing-Delic, of Lolita (1955) by Zsuzsa Het^nyi, and of Pale Fire (1962) in con¬ junction with Nabokov’s translation of Eugene Onegin (1964) by Julia Trubikhina. Anumber of other texts are brought into consideration by these authors, ranging from Freud’s “The Uncanny” {Das Unheimlich), which in turn treats E. T.A. Hoff¬ mann’s “The Sandman,” through Pushkin’s Tsar Saltan and The Tales of Belkin, to Virgil’sAeneid,theHomericHymntoDemeter,andthecorpusofGreekmythol¬ ogy.EacharticleproceedsbydrawingoneofNabokov’smostcelebratednovels into aclose and revealing association with other texts—from elsewhere in this author’s compendious oeuvre and from sources of pointed intertextual rele¬ vance—as well as with the analyses of several well-known Nabokovian critics. In her “King, Queen, Sui-mate: Nabokov’s Defense against Freud’s ‘Uncanny,’” Catharine Nepomnyashchy takes up the long-running controversy surrounding Nabokov’s attitude to Freud. Nabokov himself chose to bring this issue to the fore, by means of his frequent expressions of hostility to “the Viennese Quack” and his followers.QuotingfromthePrefacetoTheDefense,vnthitssymptomatic“words ofencouragementtotheViennesedelegation,”Nepomnyashchymovesbeyond the obvious—that such statements guarantee the “infection of the Nabokovian text by Freud”—to set the author’s attempts to inoculate both himself and his texts inthecontextofthehermeneuticchallengesposedbyFreudandotherstothe authority of the modernist author. She then looks for evidence that Nabokov may have read Freud’s “Das Unheimlich,” published in 1919 and goes on to make the casethatTheDefenseof1929canbereadasa“serious,ifanxiousandambivalent” responsetothatessay.WhenLuzhinexperiencestheUncanny,hehasthedefinite sense that he is repeating apast action, that somehow “this has all happened before”—for example, when he reveals to his father his skill in chess and is taken uptotheattictofindthechessboard.Nepomnyashchyhomesinonthepassagein Intertcxts,Vo\. 12,No. 1-2 2008 ©Texas Tech Univcrsir)'Press I N T E R T E X T S 4 Nabokov’s Preface to the English translation of The Defense, in which the struc¬ tural exploitation of chess designs in the novel is made clear: “The entire sequence of moves in these three central chapters reminds me—or should remind one—of acertain kind of chess problem where the point is not merely the finding of a mate in so many moves, but what is termed ‘retrograde analysis’ [. ..]” This “ret¬ rograde analysis,’’-she argues, is analogous to Freud’s nachtrdglichkeit and suggests that Nabokov’s peach stone—“the stone of the peach Iplucked in my own walled garden” (Preface, 11) which he “gave” to Luzhin and which reappears when he turns out his pockets (252)—is “a metonym for the incarnation of unrepeatable individuahty in the very texture of literature.” This peach kernel, according to Irene Masing-Delic in her “Belkin, Belochkiny, and Belka Chudo-Divo: Pushkin’s ‘The Fairytale of Czar Saltan’ in Nabokov’s Pnin” “would seem to be the ‘object’ that the squirrel holds in its paws on the screen contemplated by the sick boy Pnin” during his bout of influenza (Pnin, 312). As such, it figures as acritical point of entry into the complex web of allusions to squirrels in that novel, while simultaneously recalling The Defense (which was published in English translation, with the added Introduction in 1964) and its walled garden of the author’s secrets. In an echo of the “retrograde analysis” discussed by Nepomnyashchy, Masing-Delic shows how Pnin attempts to unravel the meaning of the pattern of squirrel references in the text, thereby inviting the reader to do the same. Noting the symbolism of the name Mira Belochkina (who perished in...
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