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[NABOKOV-L] The Wood-Sprite
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Dear List,
In Nabokov's "The Wood-Sprite" I enjoyed the Cinderella-like dream-transformation of a clock striking the hour in a distant room and the narrator's hearing twelve knocks at his door before admitting a visitor. Later, when he ( probably) woke up "a wondrously subtle scent in the room, of birch, of humid moss..." lingered on.
A delightful presentation:"...he hopped sidewise out of a rectangle of shadow, hunched, gray, powdered with the pollen of the frosty,starry night." It gave me the sensation that the wood-sprite was sprinkled not only with snow-crystals but little stars.
Another sentence didn't please me as much, in its English translation at least:"There I pined, and could not stop sobbing. I had barely grown used to it, and lo, there was no more pinewood, just blue-tinted cinders." I don't think that the close-proximity of pines and the verb to pine was intentional!
The wood-sprite insistently brings up the same word later on to refer to the sleeping poet's nostalgia and his kinship with fairy-land: "I know you too are pining," his voice shimmered again, "but your pining, compared to mine, my tempestuous, turbulent pining, is but the even breathing of one who is asleep. And think about it: not one of our Tribe is there left in Rus'..." , but here the faint whiff of pine forests and birches enriches the image.
At the time VN wrote this story ( close to "Natasha", circa 1922?) he must have still associated poetry to the Romantics and their shimmering eolic harps. He'd broken up with Svetlana and was translating Tennyson, Byron, Lamb, and Musset. "The Wood-sprite" is not included in his collections: A Russian Beauty, Tyrants Destroyed, Details of a Sunset.
Brian Boyd (RY) comments on "Slovo" ( The Word), written in January 1923: "he wakes up to real life with no recollection of the magic word. Like the earlier "The Sprite," "The Word" sets the human and the transcendent too starkly together. Nabokov would soon learn that trying to follow two intersecting planes of existence simultaneously would only lead him to a blind corner. And yet this new story anticipates something invaluable in the later Nabokov: the all-resolving secret the dying man seems about to utter in "The Real Life of Sebastian Knight"...the treacherous clue "fountain" in Shade's "Pale Fire" "...
It seems that "the transcendent" referred to by Brian Boyd takes place in another "plane of existence" unrelated to any platonic philosophy or Greek mythology, nor to the western-world established religions. It is, perhaps, closer to V's* ( in TRLSK) emotions than to Sebastian's own ( do we hear SK's real dying words in TRLSK?)... or, to VN's mother's?
Jansy
*: What does the V. in Botkin stand for? Veeslav? Victor?
.
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In Nabokov's "The Wood-Sprite" I enjoyed the Cinderella-like dream-transformation of a clock striking the hour in a distant room and the narrator's hearing twelve knocks at his door before admitting a visitor. Later, when he ( probably) woke up "a wondrously subtle scent in the room, of birch, of humid moss..." lingered on.
A delightful presentation:"...he hopped sidewise out of a rectangle of shadow, hunched, gray, powdered with the pollen of the frosty,starry night." It gave me the sensation that the wood-sprite was sprinkled not only with snow-crystals but little stars.
Another sentence didn't please me as much, in its English translation at least:"There I pined, and could not stop sobbing. I had barely grown used to it, and lo, there was no more pinewood, just blue-tinted cinders." I don't think that the close-proximity of pines and the verb to pine was intentional!
The wood-sprite insistently brings up the same word later on to refer to the sleeping poet's nostalgia and his kinship with fairy-land: "I know you too are pining," his voice shimmered again, "but your pining, compared to mine, my tempestuous, turbulent pining, is but the even breathing of one who is asleep. And think about it: not one of our Tribe is there left in Rus'..." , but here the faint whiff of pine forests and birches enriches the image.
At the time VN wrote this story ( close to "Natasha", circa 1922?) he must have still associated poetry to the Romantics and their shimmering eolic harps. He'd broken up with Svetlana and was translating Tennyson, Byron, Lamb, and Musset. "The Wood-sprite" is not included in his collections: A Russian Beauty, Tyrants Destroyed, Details of a Sunset.
Brian Boyd (RY) comments on "Slovo" ( The Word), written in January 1923: "he wakes up to real life with no recollection of the magic word. Like the earlier "The Sprite," "The Word" sets the human and the transcendent too starkly together. Nabokov would soon learn that trying to follow two intersecting planes of existence simultaneously would only lead him to a blind corner. And yet this new story anticipates something invaluable in the later Nabokov: the all-resolving secret the dying man seems about to utter in "The Real Life of Sebastian Knight"...the treacherous clue "fountain" in Shade's "Pale Fire" "...
It seems that "the transcendent" referred to by Brian Boyd takes place in another "plane of existence" unrelated to any platonic philosophy or Greek mythology, nor to the western-world established religions. It is, perhaps, closer to V's* ( in TRLSK) emotions than to Sebastian's own ( do we hear SK's real dying words in TRLSK?)... or, to VN's mother's?
Jansy
*: What does the V. in Botkin stand for? Veeslav? Victor?
.
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/