![]() ![]() The transcendence of art-and of mortality through art-is one of Nabokov’s most persistent themes, one found throughout his oeuvre and, aptly, emerging as the central trope of his autobiography. This essay offers a possible solution to the riddle-poem, arguing (spoiler alert) that the rose of the poem refers to Nabokov’s translation of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin and, more abstractly, to the possibility of transcendence through art. Certainly, there has been much commentary on the mysterious riddle-poem over the years, but as a quintessentially Nabokovian riddle-one that makes a fairly direct allusion of some sort, despite possibly first sending the reader off on a “wild goose chase”-it remains unsolved. For fifty years the riddle-poem posed by Nabokov to his readers in the 1966 Foreword of the book has stood as an unsolved mystery. Vladimir Nabokov’s autobiography, Speak, Memory, begins with a riddle. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |