''Vladimir Nabokov's Comic Quest for Reality' - Nottingham eTheses

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denounces mercilessly where he finds them. A. Field
quotes Nabokov as telling one reviewer "that Kinbote's
remarks on matters such as flora and fauna are all
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ludicrously inept" So are a number of his remarks
on literature, in which he misspells and misquotes
titles ("Finnigan's Wake" (76), "The Nymph on the
Death of Her Fawn" [241])
or gets his quotations wrong
(a Seahorse is mentioned in Browning's My Last
Duchess, but it is not an ' Untamed Seahorse' [240]).
At one point Kinbote quotes even "his" author inaccurately,
namely in his note on line 149, where he has
"One foot upon a mountain" (137), which is "mountaintop"
in the poem. He makes nonsense of the explanations
and etymologies of words and names (shootka
[221], Botkin [100], Shakespeare [208]). He cannot
remember the name of a literary review he refers to
(100), he would like to quote a poem but cannot, because
he does not have it "at hand" (258). One of the
most flagrant proofs of his pseudo-scholarship is the
note to line 550 where he admits having made a mistake
in an earlier note but refuses to correct it:
"that would mean reworking the entire note, or at
least a considerable part of it, and I have no time
for such stupidities" (228).
At other times Kinbote resorts to speculation.
Speculation can sometimes not be avoided, in undertakings
of this kind and is a legitimate means of
trying to come to terms with problems concerning a
manuscript or a final text. But it should be used
only when all the sources of knowledge have been