NABOKOV'S SOLUS REX AND ITS SIBLING CADAVERKINS.

Vladimir Nabokov describes the superficially unrelated pieces "Ultima Thule" and "Solus Rex," published in the early 1940s, as the first two chapters of an "unfinished thing," of which only fragments and "a few notes" remain. Critics have attempted to collate unpublished material from the same period in order to speculate as to this unrealized novel. Persistent themes of miscarriage and this and other contemporary texts, however, suggest that they are intentionally unfinished fragments allegorizing the potential body of Russian-language work that Nabokov's switch to English prevented him from bringing to term. They are akin to evident literary pranks such as the works associated with Nabokov's pseudonym Vasilii Shishkov as well as to Nabokov's efforts to continue Pushkin's unfinished verse drama "Rusalka" and his own The Gift. Interlocking images of unfinishedness populate these texts: a poem that cannot be read because its author has gone to America, leaving behind an indecipherable text in an obscure language, as in "Ultima Thule"; the death of a pregnant woman, which figures in "Ultima Thule" as in Pushkin's "Rusalka"; the general theme of inchoate adolescence and sexual immaturity. Metafictional moments that press upon the reader strategies of reading through juxtaposition further suggest that these texts are, like Romantic fragments, intentionally unfinished. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]