Subject
Re: Two Vladimirs, Mandelshtam, Nobel prize (fwd)
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From: Galya Diment <galya@u.washington.edu>
Peter Kartsev is right, and I should have been more careful about
including Mandelstam in the number of celebrated poets VN did not
particularly care for. I do, however, remember how I formed this opinion
-- by reading some admission by him or Vera that it was really M.'s
political fate and not so much his poetry that earned Nabokov's lasting
admiration. I'll try to locate my source -- unless someone wants to help
me.
In the case of Eliot and the Nobel Prize, I suspect that if N. thought
Eliot a third-rate poet, it probably did not sit well with him that Eliot
was awarded the prize. If anything, it made Eliot more of an
"institution." I did not mean to suggest that VN had anything against the
prize per se.
As to Nabokov's childhood... I guess, mindful of my own relatives of his
generation who lived in the Pale, I tend to play a skeptic when this era
is idealized too much. But Peter Kartsev is again right: at least that
time could produce the Nabokovs -- and even the Babels, the Chagalls, and
and the Mandelstams on "my" side of the social spectrum -- while post
1917 could not.
Galya Diment
Peter Kartsev is right, and I should have been more careful about
including Mandelstam in the number of celebrated poets VN did not
particularly care for. I do, however, remember how I formed this opinion
-- by reading some admission by him or Vera that it was really M.'s
political fate and not so much his poetry that earned Nabokov's lasting
admiration. I'll try to locate my source -- unless someone wants to help
me.
In the case of Eliot and the Nobel Prize, I suspect that if N. thought
Eliot a third-rate poet, it probably did not sit well with him that Eliot
was awarded the prize. If anything, it made Eliot more of an
"institution." I did not mean to suggest that VN had anything against the
prize per se.
As to Nabokov's childhood... I guess, mindful of my own relatives of his
generation who lived in the Pale, I tend to play a skeptic when this era
is idealized too much. But Peter Kartsev is again right: at least that
time could produce the Nabokovs -- and even the Babels, the Chagalls, and
and the Mandelstams on "my" side of the social spectrum -- while post
1917 could not.
Galya Diment