Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0023632, Mon, 4 Feb 2013 02:49:02 +0300

Subject
The Event & Gogol's Inspector
Date
Body
From VN's Nikolay Gogol (Chapter Two, 2):

Эпиграфом к пьесе поставлена русская пословица: "На зеркало неча пенять, коли рожа крива". Гоголь, конечно, никогда не рисовал портретов, он пользовался зеркалами и как писатель жил в своём зеркальном мире... Даже в худших своих произведениях Гоголь отлично создавал своего читателя, а это дано лишь великим писателям. (The Inspector has a Russian saying for epigraph: "Seeing ugly face, one should not blame the mirror." Gogol never drew portraits, he used mirrors and lived as a writer in his looking-glass world... Even in his worst works Gogol perfectly created his reader, and only great writers can do that. Apologies for my back translation from the Russian)

VN's play The Event (whose main character is a portrait painter Troshcheykin) abounds in allusions to The Inspector. But, unlike Gogol's comedy, The Event has no epigraph. It is we, the readers (whom VN creates, just as Gogol and other great writers create their readers), who should fill in the gap by adding the epigraph (another saying that happens to be the play's solution):

Не так страшен чёрт, как его малюют (the devil is not as terrible as he is painted).*

I wonder if also in The Waltz Invention (the play that remains unsolved) the epigraph was omitted.

*see in Topos my article "Barboshin instead of Barbashin..."

Alexey Sklyarenko

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/







Attachment