A Nabokov story with a misprint and something else

Here’s an odd detail from Vladimir Nabokov’s extraordinary story “The Vane Sisters” (1959), as printed in The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov (1997). The narrator is grading final exams — a stack of “ugly copybooks,” or what are usually called blue books or exam booklets. And he begins to read Sybil Vane’s exam:


Elaine and I both wondered: how can a page in an exam booklet have a black verso? It doesn’t seem possible.

In the initial periodical appearances of “The Vane Sisters,” that exam booklet had a “blank verso,” no doubt a play on “blank verse”:

[Hudson Review (Winter 1959).]

[Encounter (March 1959).]

And the “blank verso” was present in the booklet’s first book appearance:

[Nabokov’s Quartet (1966).]

“Black” is undoubtedly a misprint that crept in somewhere along the line. And here’s where things get strange.

“The Vane Sisters” is a story in which misprints are significant. They come into the story by way of a friend of Cynthia Vane named Porlock, who looked in old books for “miraculous misprints.” Cynthia herself is alert to “posthumous auspices and interventions” whenever someone close to her dies, and after Porlock dies, she discovers one such intervention in an appearance of the letter h:



Why is “Alph” important here? Because it’s the name of the sacred river in Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” and it was “a person on business from Porlock” who, according to Coleridge’s prefatory prose, interrupted the dream vision that gave rise to a never-to-be-finished poem. The characterization “another fake dream” lets you know what Nabokov thought about Finnegans Wake. And the river Anna Livia Plurabelle runs around rather than through because the Wake begins with the end of a sentence about her and ends with the beginning of that sentence.

Yes, that’s all quite loopy, and delightful. But the only misprint this story itself yields is a blackened blank, perhaps itself a posthumous intervention by Mr. Nabokov.

*

As far as I can tell, our household’s two readers are the only readers who have noticed and wondered (in print or pixels) about “black verso.” The something else in “The Vane Sisters” though is well known. Here is the last paragraph of the story, as the narrator awakens and sets himself to “reread” a dream he just had that “somehow was full of” the now-dead Cynthia Vane. He is “trying hard to unravel something Cynthia-like in it”:


Related reading
All OCA Nabokov posts (Pinboard)