Subject
Re: Victor-L.I.Shigaev (fwd)
Date
Body
From: ValSyl@aol.com
Bennett Lerner wrote on 3/2/97:
>I re-read "Shigaev" and noticed that the narrator was named
>Victor and that his mentor (Shigaev) dies of a weak heart. That's all.
>Perhaps someone else can go deeper? Are there more Victors to be found,
>or more weak hearts?
Um, I'm not sure I can go _deeper_, but I too reread 'Shigaev' and noted that
the title character spends hours brushing out his trousers on the landing.
Didn't Pnin do this while residing in the Clements' house?
Also in 'Shigaev' the narrator Victor mentions in passing the "paterfamilias"
with which his girl has betrayed him: "who, incidentally, was so infernally
meticulous that he would bring his own shoe trees with him." Victor adds
parenthetically, "Shoes trees were destined to pursue me," and LO-lovers will
recognize this shoe tree hangup as also belonging to 'the late Harold Haze'
-- and were not his shoes, as recalled by HH, "curiously small"? Well, you
would expect HH to make a nasty crack like that ...
What strikes me most about 'Shigaev' is the messy alcoholic and hallucinatory
angst undergone by the narrator before he comes under Shigaev's protection.
The descriptions -- "a young, still very young, helpless and lonely person,
with a perpetually inflamed soul (it feared the least contact, it was like
raw flesh" -- sound, well, they sound like Dostoevsky, in particular the
narrator of "Notes from the Underground." Could our favorite Fyodorphobe
have been perpetuating yet another parody? One could, I suppose, posit
Shigaev as the wonderfully sensible antidote to such emotional extremism, and
that could perhaps provide a function for Shigaev's businesslike philistinism
("totally indifferent to art, literature and what is commonly known as
nature").
I find myself thinking not of Pnin and Victor, but of Pnin and his friend
Professor Chateau, whom VN tells us evoked "a rare sense of well-being in his
friends." Certainly this is what Shigaev seems to have done for the Victor
of this story.
Wandering and wondering,
Sylvia
Sylvia Weiser Wendel
Bennett Lerner wrote on 3/2/97:
>I re-read "Shigaev" and noticed that the narrator was named
>Victor and that his mentor (Shigaev) dies of a weak heart. That's all.
>Perhaps someone else can go deeper? Are there more Victors to be found,
>or more weak hearts?
Um, I'm not sure I can go _deeper_, but I too reread 'Shigaev' and noted that
the title character spends hours brushing out his trousers on the landing.
Didn't Pnin do this while residing in the Clements' house?
Also in 'Shigaev' the narrator Victor mentions in passing the "paterfamilias"
with which his girl has betrayed him: "who, incidentally, was so infernally
meticulous that he would bring his own shoe trees with him." Victor adds
parenthetically, "Shoes trees were destined to pursue me," and LO-lovers will
recognize this shoe tree hangup as also belonging to 'the late Harold Haze'
-- and were not his shoes, as recalled by HH, "curiously small"? Well, you
would expect HH to make a nasty crack like that ...
What strikes me most about 'Shigaev' is the messy alcoholic and hallucinatory
angst undergone by the narrator before he comes under Shigaev's protection.
The descriptions -- "a young, still very young, helpless and lonely person,
with a perpetually inflamed soul (it feared the least contact, it was like
raw flesh" -- sound, well, they sound like Dostoevsky, in particular the
narrator of "Notes from the Underground." Could our favorite Fyodorphobe
have been perpetuating yet another parody? One could, I suppose, posit
Shigaev as the wonderfully sensible antidote to such emotional extremism, and
that could perhaps provide a function for Shigaev's businesslike philistinism
("totally indifferent to art, literature and what is commonly known as
nature").
I find myself thinking not of Pnin and Victor, but of Pnin and his friend
Professor Chateau, whom VN tells us evoked "a rare sense of well-being in his
friends." Certainly this is what Shigaev seems to have done for the Victor
of this story.
Wandering and wondering,
Sylvia
Sylvia Weiser Wendel