The book fell off his bed into a dream
of souls unnumbered, their new imperium
a ballroom silent, stored with harvest grain,
and libraries torched, fed by a hurricane
of clamant voices raised against his house
to pierce the membranous film of solace —
blind summoners of a windowless vehicle
that breaks the butterfly under its wheel.
Catherine Eisner
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| Detail from cover design: The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov by Andrea Pitzer (published 2013 Pegasus Books) A must-read for Nabokovian scholars and those in awe of this anti-Freudian iconoclast. |
On the evening of 28 March 1922, in Berlin, Vladimir Nabokov records in his diary that, just before the moment the news reached him of the murder of his father by a monarchist assassin, he was reading a verse by Alexander Blok that condemns a city for its naked betrayal (Vsya obnazhilas' bez styda. ‘All naked without shame.’) Nabokov returned to Trinity College, Cambridge, for his final Easter Term four days after his poem, Easter, memorialising his father, was published in Berlin in his father’s Russian émigré newspaper, Rul.
For Nabokov’s anti-Freudian iconoclasm see Stage-Fright and Cage-Fighting:
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Catherine Eisner believes passionately in plot-driven suspense fiction, a devotion to literary craft that draws on studies in psychoanalytical criminology and psychoactive pharmacology to explore the dark side of motivation, and ignite plot twists with unexpected outcomes. Within these disciplines Eisner’s fictions seek to explore variant literary forms derived from psychotherapy and criminology to trace the traumas of characters in extremis. Compulsive recurring sub-themes in her narratives examine sibling rivalry, rivalrous cousinhood, pathological imposture, financial chicanery, and the effects of non-familial male pheromones on pubescence,
see Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)
and Listen Close to Me (2011)
