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Re: [NABOKV-L] Nabokov shares with Chekhov a fanatical eye for detail ...[Sandy Klein from http://evidenceanecdotal.blogspot.com/2008/09/quaintly-circumstantial.html ,in Are You There, Crocodile?: Inventing Anton Chekhov, Michael Pennington lovingly describes his visit to Melikhovo[...]thrilled to have stood on the steps where the dandyish-looking Chekhov was famously photographed holding Quinine, his dachshund [...] Pennington picks up the Chekhov/Nabokov connection.[..]coincidences, however abhorrent in art, are reality's consolation prizes. JM: Dachs must have been favourites among artists. Victor Hugo's grandson had a dachs, called "Lolita" and he once dressed her up to meet Picasso's dachs, "Lump", as a "bride".]
Stan K-B to Sandy/Jansy: I'm both proud and ashamed that I knew the French slang for "lap dog" when I was 10 years old, some years before I discovered the literal meaning of "lecheur con."
JM: Should I be proud or ashamed that I still don't get it? I understand the literal alusion but not how it is employed in ordinary discourse.
In Portuguese we have equivalents (at least three & they may be freely employed, even by kids) but they carry no erotic suggestion. They are offensive slang-words used to describe a despicable flattering attitude. Actually, behavioristically speaking, timid dogs are, really, "lap dogs"!
S. K-B:The "deep" significance of "coincidences" continues to intrigue. [...]The difficult thing for HomSaps to accept is that many of the things that happen have very small, even zero prior probabilities. Don your logic hard-hats and listen up: all impossible events have zero probability, but some zero probability events do happen. We mathematicians have the useful term "vanishingly small." [...] You could argue that in fiction you are free to invent an event (what d'you make of that rhyme?!) of varying probabilities betweeen 0 and 1, but since you have left the realm of actualities, it becomes difficult to estimate or even define "probability." In the real world we can in principle estimate the fraction of real outcomes to potential outcomes. In a novel, we can ditch causal chains, and, as in VN's Invitation to a Beheading or Prospero's Tempest, just make the pageant disappear. That's quite a coincidence, nein?
JM: While I was searching for Nabokov on "coincidence" I discovered another instance in which Nabokov mentions the "Cry Wolf" analogy he used in GRGW and in his Cornell Lecture - and that was mentioned a few days ago here in the List.
In 1962, SO,page11: "Do you know how poetry started? I always think that it started when a cave boy came running back to the cave, through the tall frass, shouting as he ran, "Wolf,wolf," and there was no wolf. His baboon-lie parents, great sticklers for the truth, gave him a hiding, no doubt, but poetry had been born - the tall story had been born in the tall grass." (the question he is answering is about "reality as an intensely subjective matter" and "perverse delight in literary deception").
Later on we read: "poetry represents the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words" (p.44).
See, Stan, both my parents-in-law were born on the same day and, several decades later, so was I. By itself, this would not represent an extraordinary coincidence were it not for a gipsy once (before my husband met me) telling him that he was going to marry a girl whose birthday coincided with both his parents' (nevertheless, since he is a playful guy, he might have invented the gipsy-story after he discovered the three similar dates. He swears he didn't).
Here are somes examples I had underlined in my Vintage "Strong Opinions":
p.67 I:Some critics may find the use of coincidence in a novel arch or contrived. I recall that you yourself at Cornell Called Dostoevski's usage of coincidence crude.
VN: But in "real" life they do happen [...] It is not the coincidence in the story that bothers us so much as the coincidence of coincidences in several stories by different writers, as, for instance, the recurrent eavesdropping device in nineteenth-century Russian fiction.".
p.79: "There is no science without fancy, and no art without facts."
p.147/8: "I go by books, not by authors [...]War and Peace, though a little too long, is a rollicking historical novel[...] In terms of artistic structure it does not satisfy me. I derive no pleasure from its cumbersome message, from the didactic interludes, from the artificial coincidences..."
p.177:"I am subject to the embarassing qualms of superstition: a number, a dream, a coincidence can affect me obsessively - though not in the sense of absurd fears but as fabulous ( and on the whole rather bracing) scientific enigmas incapable of being stated, let alone solved."
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Stan K-B to Sandy/Jansy: I'm both proud and ashamed that I knew the French slang for "lap dog" when I was 10 years old, some years before I discovered the literal meaning of "lecheur con."
JM: Should I be proud or ashamed that I still don't get it? I understand the literal alusion but not how it is employed in ordinary discourse.
In Portuguese we have equivalents (at least three & they may be freely employed, even by kids) but they carry no erotic suggestion. They are offensive slang-words used to describe a despicable flattering attitude. Actually, behavioristically speaking, timid dogs are, really, "lap dogs"!
S. K-B:The "deep" significance of "coincidences" continues to intrigue. [...]The difficult thing for HomSaps to accept is that many of the things that happen have very small, even zero prior probabilities. Don your logic hard-hats and listen up: all impossible events have zero probability, but some zero probability events do happen. We mathematicians have the useful term "vanishingly small." [...] You could argue that in fiction you are free to invent an event (what d'you make of that rhyme?!) of varying probabilities betweeen 0 and 1, but since you have left the realm of actualities, it becomes difficult to estimate or even define "probability." In the real world we can in principle estimate the fraction of real outcomes to potential outcomes. In a novel, we can ditch causal chains, and, as in VN's Invitation to a Beheading or Prospero's Tempest, just make the pageant disappear. That's quite a coincidence, nein?
JM: While I was searching for Nabokov on "coincidence" I discovered another instance in which Nabokov mentions the "Cry Wolf" analogy he used in GRGW and in his Cornell Lecture - and that was mentioned a few days ago here in the List.
In 1962, SO,page11: "Do you know how poetry started? I always think that it started when a cave boy came running back to the cave, through the tall frass, shouting as he ran, "Wolf,wolf," and there was no wolf. His baboon-lie parents, great sticklers for the truth, gave him a hiding, no doubt, but poetry had been born - the tall story had been born in the tall grass." (the question he is answering is about "reality as an intensely subjective matter" and "perverse delight in literary deception").
Later on we read: "poetry represents the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words" (p.44).
See, Stan, both my parents-in-law were born on the same day and, several decades later, so was I. By itself, this would not represent an extraordinary coincidence were it not for a gipsy once (before my husband met me) telling him that he was going to marry a girl whose birthday coincided with both his parents' (nevertheless, since he is a playful guy, he might have invented the gipsy-story after he discovered the three similar dates. He swears he didn't).
Here are somes examples I had underlined in my Vintage "Strong Opinions":
p.67 I:Some critics may find the use of coincidence in a novel arch or contrived. I recall that you yourself at Cornell Called Dostoevski's usage of coincidence crude.
VN: But in "real" life they do happen [...] It is not the coincidence in the story that bothers us so much as the coincidence of coincidences in several stories by different writers, as, for instance, the recurrent eavesdropping device in nineteenth-century Russian fiction.".
p.79: "There is no science without fancy, and no art without facts."
p.147/8: "I go by books, not by authors [...]War and Peace, though a little too long, is a rollicking historical novel[...] In terms of artistic structure it does not satisfy me. I derive no pleasure from its cumbersome message, from the didactic interludes, from the artificial coincidences..."
p.177:"I am subject to the embarassing qualms of superstition: a number, a dream, a coincidence can affect me obsessively - though not in the sense of absurd fears but as fabulous ( and on the whole rather bracing) scientific enigmas incapable of being stated, let alone solved."
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/