Subject
[NABOKOV-LIST] [DOLININ's "Parody in Despair"] Polar moral,
art and science : a potpourri
art and science : a potpourri
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Some time ago I inquired about VN's statement that "nymphets do not occur in polar regions" and Lolita's death in Gray Star. Later our discussions skimmed over VN's "hereafter" - as it is described in "Pale Fire": Will Shade's musings correspond to VN's own conceptions about a hereafter or are they a parody of this belief? Is "everything permitted" in the worlds of fiction? Those two "polar" issues make their appearance in the Nabokovian site "Zembla", together with the Nietzschean "God is Dead" in Russian fiction and "creative dreams projected onto malleable reality" ( mathematician's dreams or scientific reality? Cf. S K-Bottle, J.Aisenberg and J. Freeman - August 2008 exchanges).
Alexander Dolinin( The Caning of Modernist Profaners: Parody in Despair) writes: "Despair can be read as a double-edged lampoon aimed simultaneously at both waves of "dostoevshchina." . Dolinin's comparison proceeds from "Hermann's initial idea of committing a perfect murder that would be aesthetically comparable with the greatest artistic creations parodies the Symbolist philosophy of "zhiznetvorchestvo" (life-creation) and decadent writings based on the concept of the artist as a Nietzschean superman standing "beyond good and evil" and projecting his "creative dreams"onto "malleable reality," and he adds: "one text that is especially worth mentioning, since it seems to have provided Nabokov with a model for both the central character of Despair and parts of its imagery and plot: Leonid Andreev's story "The Thought" ("Mysl'")[...] Striking parallels to Andreev's story can be found on various levels of Despair. Both texts, for example, reproduce the narrative structure and intonations of Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground* --a soliloquy which, in Nabokov's words, "presupposes the presence of a phantom audience" jeering at the narrator who tries "to thwart their mockery and denunciations by the shifts, the doubling back, and various other tricks of his supposedly remarkable intellect." (Lectures on Russian Literature, 115-16) [...]Despair evidently develops a number of themes and motifs originating in "The Thought." Hermann's assertion that "God does not exist, as neither does our hereafter" connected with his recurrent dream of something "unimaginably terrible; to wit, a perfectly empty, newly whitewashed room" correspond to Anton's paraphrase of the famous Nietzschean proclamation that Gott ist tot."
Hop-scotching from artistic creation to 'real-life': "an Israeli guard in a Jerusalem prison gave a copy of ''Lolita" to Adolf Eichmann, who was awaiting trial. An indignant Eichmann returned the book two days later, calling it ''a very unwholesome book." The sulphurous halo of Nabokov's novel was still burning brightly in the popular consciousness of 1960 and it seems that Eichmann's guard gave the book to him as an experiment--a sort of litmus test for radical evil: to see whether the real-life villain, he who impassively organized the transport towards certain death of countless innocents, would coldly, or even gleefully, approve the various and vile machinations of Nabokov's creation."**
He didn't. After all, "moral life has its poles" - and the Third Man is but a shadow of Quilty, a Kinbotean shade - and no Uebermensch/Superman yet has evolved from our base Mankind with the help of either artistic or unimaginative murderers, nor thanks to scientific implementa towards a mechanical perfection.
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* -Another self-indulgent parallel both murderers draw is to contemporary Polar explorers. Anton exclaims, "You would not dare call Nansen, that great man of the past century, mad. Moral life, too, has its poles, and I wanted to reach one of them. You are dismayed by the lack of jealousy, vengefulness, greed, and other truly stupid motives [...] But then, you men of science will condemn Nansen, along with the fools and ignoramuses who regard his enterprise as madness" (ibid., 69). Cf. in Despair: "Somebody told me once that I looked like Amundsen, the Polar explorer. Well, Felix, too, looked like Amundsen. But it is not every person that can recall Amundsen's face. I myself recall it but faintly, nor am I sure whether there had not been some mix-up with Nansen."
**- this information doesn't appear in Dolinin's article and I couldn't locate it, but it appeared in an internet discussion about Kubrick's movie.
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Alexander Dolinin( The Caning of Modernist Profaners: Parody in Despair) writes: "Despair can be read as a double-edged lampoon aimed simultaneously at both waves of "dostoevshchina." . Dolinin's comparison proceeds from "Hermann's initial idea of committing a perfect murder that would be aesthetically comparable with the greatest artistic creations parodies the Symbolist philosophy of "zhiznetvorchestvo" (life-creation) and decadent writings based on the concept of the artist as a Nietzschean superman standing "beyond good and evil" and projecting his "creative dreams"onto "malleable reality," and he adds: "one text that is especially worth mentioning, since it seems to have provided Nabokov with a model for both the central character of Despair and parts of its imagery and plot: Leonid Andreev's story "The Thought" ("Mysl'")[...] Striking parallels to Andreev's story can be found on various levels of Despair. Both texts, for example, reproduce the narrative structure and intonations of Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground* --a soliloquy which, in Nabokov's words, "presupposes the presence of a phantom audience" jeering at the narrator who tries "to thwart their mockery and denunciations by the shifts, the doubling back, and various other tricks of his supposedly remarkable intellect." (Lectures on Russian Literature, 115-16) [...]Despair evidently develops a number of themes and motifs originating in "The Thought." Hermann's assertion that "God does not exist, as neither does our hereafter" connected with his recurrent dream of something "unimaginably terrible; to wit, a perfectly empty, newly whitewashed room" correspond to Anton's paraphrase of the famous Nietzschean proclamation that Gott ist tot."
Hop-scotching from artistic creation to 'real-life': "an Israeli guard in a Jerusalem prison gave a copy of ''Lolita" to Adolf Eichmann, who was awaiting trial. An indignant Eichmann returned the book two days later, calling it ''a very unwholesome book." The sulphurous halo of Nabokov's novel was still burning brightly in the popular consciousness of 1960 and it seems that Eichmann's guard gave the book to him as an experiment--a sort of litmus test for radical evil: to see whether the real-life villain, he who impassively organized the transport towards certain death of countless innocents, would coldly, or even gleefully, approve the various and vile machinations of Nabokov's creation."**
He didn't. After all, "moral life has its poles" - and the Third Man is but a shadow of Quilty, a Kinbotean shade - and no Uebermensch/Superman yet has evolved from our base Mankind with the help of either artistic or unimaginative murderers, nor thanks to scientific implementa towards a mechanical perfection.
......................................................................................................................................
* -Another self-indulgent parallel both murderers draw is to contemporary Polar explorers. Anton exclaims, "You would not dare call Nansen, that great man of the past century, mad. Moral life, too, has its poles, and I wanted to reach one of them. You are dismayed by the lack of jealousy, vengefulness, greed, and other truly stupid motives [...] But then, you men of science will condemn Nansen, along with the fools and ignoramuses who regard his enterprise as madness" (ibid., 69). Cf. in Despair: "Somebody told me once that I looked like Amundsen, the Polar explorer. Well, Felix, too, looked like Amundsen. But it is not every person that can recall Amundsen's face. I myself recall it but faintly, nor am I sure whether there had not been some mix-up with Nansen."
**- this information doesn't appear in Dolinin's article and I couldn't locate it, but it appeared in an internet discussion about Kubrick's movie.
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/