‘The future is but the obsolete in reverse" - from "Lance" /QUOTE]
This is a striking statement - presumably what he means is that human nature doesn't change, whatever happens technologically. (I think there's something in that - witness the contrast between our amazing technological achievements and the crime, hysteria, irrationality running rampant regardless.) Presumably his experience of the Russian Revolution prejudiced him against all forms of utopianism.
it's a very condensed poetic statement that I'm not sure I fully understand - i think he is saying something like the non-obsolete, the absolutely emergent, is no more interesting or relevant to us in our present moment than the archaic and passe things that are linger on in the world.
But, the archaic and passe things that linger on in the world are fascinating and full of interest and pathos - so why shouldn't speculation about what is to come be equally fascinating? and how can we stop ourselves from trying to peer over the horizon of the present, from hoping and imagining that things will be better, or at least excitingly different?
and he was as you suggest, intensely nostalgic - never got round to reading it, but Speak Memory is supposed to be one of the great exercises in autobiography and an attempt to recover lost time. Pale Fire, my favorite of his novels, contains a sort of displaced version of his longings for Tsarist Russia, in the form of the mad man's delusion that is the exiled king of Zembla, stranded in America and forced to pretend to be a lowly professor.
Actually the same applies to Ada, which is sort of alternate-history - set in a North America that was colonised by Russians, so again you have the recreation of aristocratic Russian life but on the American landscape where Nabokov found himself
off topic, but an odd bird, Vlad
- he hated music, had no feeling for it, and it stirred in him a most disagreeable disequilibrium
- he loathed Freud and psychoanalysis, used to go on about the quack of Vienna. i think as a fiction writer he felt threatened by the idea of the unconscious as well-spring of the imagination.