Download PDF of Number 2 (Spring 1979) Vladimir Nabokov Research Newsletter
THE VLADIMIR NABOKOV RESEARCH NEWSLETTER
Published semi-annually
at the University of Kansas
by the Vladimir Nabokov Society
Editor: Stephen Jan Parker
Subscriptions: Individuals, $3.00 per year;
institutions, $4.00 per year. For subscriptions outside the
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The Vladimir Nabokov Research Newsletter
serves to report and stimulate Nabokov scholarship and to create
a link between Nabokov scholars, both in the USA and abroad.
Address all inquiries, submission of items, and subscription requests to:
The Vladimir Nabokov Research Newsletter
Slavic Languages & Literatures
The University of Kansas
Lawrence, Kansas 66045
THE VLADIMIR NABOKOV
RESEARCH NEWSLETTER
Number 2 Spring 1979
__________________________________________
CONTENTS
News Items and Work in Progress
by Stephen Jan Parker 3
The 1978 Nabokov MLA Session
by Phyllis A. Roth 9
Abstract: Margaret Byrd Boegeman,
"Invitation to a Metamorphosis" (MLA paper) 11
Abstract: Walter Cohen, "The Ideology
of Nabokov's Fiction" (MLA paper) 14
Abstract: Sherry A. Dranch,
"Nikolai Gogol as a Critical Ur-text" (MLA paper) 16
Abstract: Ellen Pifer, "Consciousness
and Real Life in King, Queen, Knave" (MLA paper) 18
Abstract: Samuel Schuman, "Whatever
Happened to Humbert: The Transformation
of Lolita from Novel to Screenplay" (MLA paper) 20
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Annotations
by Charles Nicol 23
Bibliography
by Stephen Jan Parker
(Contributors: Brian Boyd, Simon Karlinsky) 26
Notice 35
Note on content:
This webpage contains the full content of the print version of Nabokovian Number 2, except for:
- The annual bibliography (because in the near future the secondary Nabokov bibliography will be encompassed, superseded, and made more efficiently searchable in the bibliography of this Nabokovian website, and the primary bibliography has long been superseded by Michael Juliar’s comprehensive online bibliography).
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NEWS ITEMS AND WORK IN PROGRESS
by Stephen Jan Parker
Twenty-six responses to the questionnaire included in the last issue have been received. Near unanimity was expressed in favor of the Newsletter publishing reminiscences and items of Nabokoviana. Opinion on the question of reviews, however, was mixed. Though there were some who favored the inclusion of reviews, a slightly larger number of respondents felt that it would not be in the best interests of a fledgling organization fostering a communality of interests to have its members engaged in criticism of one another. Those who responded to question #4, concerning the directions the Newsletter should take, agreed that the Newsletter should remain a newsletter and not develop into a journal. There was strong feeling that the Newsletter as conceived fills an important and needed function. Based on these responses, the VNRN will accept reminiscences and items of Nabokoviana for publication while for the time being at least it will not publish reviews.
Many thanks to those who sent in names and addresses of persons who might be interested in receiving the Newsletter. The augmentation of our subscription/membership rolls remains our first priority. The Newsletter now has 130 subscribers, of which only twenty are libraries. I would like to ask each of you to please take the trouble now to request of your college and local libraries to subscribe, and to send in the names of per
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sons both in the USA and abroad who might be interested in the VNRN.
Also, please do continue to send in items for the Newsletter. Keep us apprised of your work in Nabokov-related matters. Send in abstracts of books and articles published, papers read, and theses and dissertations completed. Your fullest, continuing cooperation is needed to keep the community of Nabokov scholars fully informed.
In this issue we continue to update the bibliography of Vladimir Nabokov’s works. This will be an ongoing project. Beginning with the fall, 1979 issue we will regularly publish citations of current bibliography: books, articles, essays, book chapters, reviews, theses, dissertations, miscellaneous as per the information that is sent us by Newsletter readers.
As reported elsewhere in this issue, the first meeting of the Vladimir Nabokov Society was convened at the MLA Conference in New York. Proposed by-laws of the Society win appear in the fall 1979 issue of the Newsletter; the second meeting of the Society will take place at this year's MLA Convention in San Francisco.
Please note that the "Annotation" section of the Newsletter is now under the direction of Professor Charles Nicol; items for this section should be sent directly to him at Department of English, Indiana State University, Terre Haute, Indiana 47809.
The editor would like to thank Professor J. Theodore Johnson, Jr., editor of the Proust
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Research Association Newsletter (PRAN), for his advice and many practical suggestions and Mr. Hi Stockwell of the University of Kansas Printing Service for his expert aid.
*****
Mr. Dmitri Nabokov has sent in two items of interest: Collins of London, in collaboration with Weidenfeld, will be publishing an omnibus edition of Vladimir Nabokov's novels; and, Weidenfeld will soon bring out Nabokov's World, a collection of essays edited by Peter Quennell.
Professor Simon Karlinsky (Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of California, Berkeley 94720) has two recent Nabokov projects: the introduction and annotations for The Nabokov-Wilson Letters. Correspondence between Vladimir Nabokov and Edmund Wilson, 1940-1971, to be published this spring by Harper & Row, and the entry on Nabokov for the forthcoming new edition of Columbia Dictionary of Modern European Literature. The Nabokov-Wilson Letters, which have a tentative publication date of June 6, 1979 were previewed on pages 3, 26 of the New York Times Book Review of February 4.
Professor Ellen Pifer (Department of English, University of Delaware, Newark, 19711) has just finished a book on Nabokov entitled Reality in Art: Nabokov as a Novelist. In it, she writes, she examines a representative body of Nabokov's works from King, Queen, Knave to Ada, to demonstrate that Nabokov's interests in character, psychology, moral and metaphysical matters place
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him in the humanistic tradition of novel-writing. It is an argument against the narrow "aesthetic" interpretation of his work which still prevails. Professor Pifer also writes that she win be reading a paper entitled "Nabokov and the Cultivation of Exile" at the Literature and Exile session of the Northeast MLA Conference this spring.
Dr. Samuel Schuman's (Honors Center, University of Maine, Orono, 04473) volume of bibliographies on Nabokov, announced in the last issue of the Newsletter, is now completed. He is currently at work on an essay tentatively entitled "The World According to Vivian Darkbloom: Vladimir Nabokov and John Irving." The piece focuses upon similarities of humor, structure, and artistic self-consciousness in the works of Nabokov and The World According to Garp.
Professor Earl Sampson (Department of Oriental and Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of Colorado, Boulder 80309) is planning a comprehensive study of chess and other games in Nabokov, in collaboration with chess-master Eugene Salome. He writes that he has written a short article as a preliminary approach to the topic.
Mr. Anthony Anemone, Jr. (505 Alcatraz #14, Oakland, CA 94609) will be delivering a paper entitled "Nabokov's Despair: A Modernist Allegory" at the joint conference of the Rocky Mountain and Midwestern Associations for Slavic Study meeting in North Lake Tahoe April 26-29.
The program of the Seventh Annual Conference on Twentieth-Century Literature,
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"Games in Twentieth-Century Literature," at the University of Louisville, February 22-23, announced a session on Nabokov. Chaired by Professor William N. Rogers II, the session entitled "Nabokov: Grand Master of the Game" listed the following participants: Charles E. Bolton (Xavier University), "Stylistics Games: Collacation and Meaning in Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire;" Paul S. Bruss (Eastern Michigan University), "Nabokov's Ada: The Imaginative Game of Sex;" John V. Hagopian (SUNY at Binghampton), "The Crossword Puzzle (With Special Attention to Nabokov)."
Mr. Brian Stonehill (2900 Connecticut Ave., N.W., Washington D.C. 20008) recently completed a dissertation at the University of Chicago under the direction of Wayne Booth and Saul Bellow. The work is entitled Art Displaying Art: Self-Consciousness in Novels of Joyce, Nabokov, Gaddis, and Pynchon.
Dr. J. H. Bodenstein (Hofackerstr. 40, n7012 Fellbach, West Germany) has sent the editor a copy of his two-volume dissertation on Nabokov, written in English and published by Ruprecht-Karl-Universitat, Heidelberg. It is entitled The Excitement of Verbal Adventure: A Study of Vladimir Nabokov's English Prose and includes, in Volume I, separate chapters on Polyglotism, Lexicon and Usage, Word-Formation, Neology, Wordplay, Sound Texture, Parallelism and Rhythm, Senses, Details, Irony, Transcendent Designs . Volume II offers twelve extensive and detailed appendices, notes, and bibliography. The dissertation can be obtained by writing directly to Dr. Bodenstein.
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Professor Richard Pearce (Department of English, Wheaton College, Norton, Mass. 02766) has sent us a copy of his chapter "Nabokov's Black (Hole) Humor: Lolita and Pale Fire" appearing in Comic Relief: Humor in Contemporary American Literature, ed. Sarah Blacher Cohen (U. of Illinois, 1978).
Mr. Gary Wihl (2215 Yale Station, New Haven, CT 06520) has recently completed a Masters thesis at McGill University on Nabokov's Notes on Prosody. He remarks that as far as he knows it is the only critical work that has been done on the Notes. His thesis discusses the background of Russian theory, the Notes’ place in contemporary prosodic theory, and the value of the Notes for English prosodists.
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THE 1978 NABOKOV MLA SESSION
by Phyllis A. Roth
The third MLA Special Session on Vladimir Nabokov was conducted at the New York Hilton on December 29, 1978. Despite the early hour (8:30 am), the session was extremely successful, with over thirty people attending to hear abstracts of papers by Margaret Boegeman (English-Cypress College), Walter Cohen (Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Literature at Berkeley), Sherry A. Dranch (French-Wheaton College), Ellen Pifer (English-University of Delaware), and Samuel Schuman (Director of Honors-University of Maine at Orono).
Following discussion of the papers, Stephen Parker spoke to those attending concerning the Vladimir Nabokov Society and The Vladimir Nabokov Research Newsletter. The first meeting of the Society was convened and the following slate of officers was elected for 1979: President, Charles Nicol (English-Indiana State); Coordinator, Stephen Jan Parker (Slavic Languages & Literatures-University of Kansas); Vice-President, Phyllis Roth (English-Skidmore College). The officers will draft by-laws to submit to the MLA in application for Affiliated Society status, enabling the membership better to insure the perpetuation of the special sessions at MLA. The Newsletter is the official publication of the Vladimir Nabokov Society. Suggestions for activities of the Society included symposia and various special publications.
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Next year's Special Session at the MLA in San Francisco — Nabokov: Current Critical Approaches — will be conducted by Professor Ellen Pifer, Department of English, University of Delaware, Newark, Delaware 19711.
"Invitation to a Metamorphosis"
by Margaret Byrd Boegeman
(Abstract of the paper presented at the Nabokov Session of the MLA Convention, New York City, December 29, 1978.)
Invitation to a Beheading has often been measured against the archetypes of The Trial, as well as against the critical paradigms engendered by Kafka's works. But the novel has a different relation with Kafka than has been assumed, and one which suggests it was pivotal in the Nabokov canon.
Though Invitation is replete with parallels to The Trial, particularly in terms of plot and protagonist, the two authors used the same scaffolding for opposing messages. Both Nabokov and Kafka investigate psychological states, but Kafka shows that one is caught by one's own mind, while Nabokov demonstrates that one is freed by the same instrument. Whatever Nabokov may have borrowed from Kafka, he did not use either Kafka's themes or his teleology.
One gets no closer to the heart of Invitation by reading in it the kind of political parable critics found in The Trial, for Nabokov did not include in Invitation the brutality and terror of real political persecution, which cannot in fact be wished away by the imagination. Reading Invitation through The Trial
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has thus kept the former from being considered on its own terms without some apology.
However, a subtler connection with Kafka has been suggested by Nabokov himself in his parodic autobiography, Look at the Harlequins! (1974). Discussing Invitation to a Beheading (here called The Red Topper) he makes direct reference to Kafka: "During those months of correcting and partly rewriting The Red Topper … I began to experience the pangs of a strange transformation. I did not wake up one Central European morning as a great scarab with more legs than any beetle can have, but certain excruciating tearings of secret tissues did take place in me." (p.120) The allusion is clearly to Kafka's "The Metamorphosis," and the "strange transformation" is, of course, Nabokov's decision to switch from Russian to English as his language of composition. This change of languages, or metamorphosis, was central to Nabokov's artistic career, and that career is the real subject of Harlequins! Given the fact that Nabokov's dominant themes are aesthetic ones, and that his continuous preoccupation has been with quality of language, the switch from Russian to English must be considered an enormous decision, a change more fundamental to his life than any of his many changes in domicile, passport or economic condition. Here he suggests that parallel to Cincinnatus' literal metamorphosis and escape from his cardboard society, another kind of transformation relevant to Nabokov's own artistic development was occurring. Read in this way, Invitation becomes a hortatory fable, a fantasy with a personal
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message to its author, and pivotal in the Nabokov canon.
If Invitation is considered along with two other novels of the same period, The Gift and The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, the three form a running commentary on Nabokov's artistic metamorphosis. All are concerned with making the transition from one language and state of thought to another. Invitation can be seen in this series as the dream vision of Nabokov's initial impulse to make the change, a fable with a triumphant and programmatic outcome. The Gift is an elegiac farewell, a final sorting of literary values, both homage to and parody of that rich literary land he was leaving. Sebastian Knight represents the first, somewhat tentative tryout of the new medium, with the narrator, like Nabokov, unsure of his English, a parody which buffers the metamorphosed talent. Thus, we find a continuity among these very different works emanating from the life of the artist, and revealing a patterning in Nabokov's life work rivaling that of his individual novels.
"The Ideology of Nabokov’s Fiction"
by Walter Cohen
(Abstract of the paper presented at the Nabokov Session of the MLA Convention, New York City, December 29, 1978.)
A critical account of Nabokov must begin by rejecting his official pronouncements, by reinserting him into history. Nabokov's fiction is characterized by a variable interaction between realism and modernism, the former a consequence of Russian liberal ideology, the latter of the Bolshevik Revolution. His plotting and morality recall the nineteenth-century novel; his verbal artifice and denial of history, both of them socially determined and socially significant, link him to other contemporary experimental writers. Nabokov's changing relationship to a missing social center helps account for his artistic development. Czarist Russia is the principal absence of his first European period: most of his novels of the 1920s and 1930s portray a thinned-out reality, though the final two, influenced by the rise of Nazism and Stalinism, grapple with larger issues of European civilization.
After 1940, Nabokov found in the United States a subject dwarfing in scope and complexity anything he had treated in his émigré fiction. Simultaneously an involved citizen and a detached observer of an entire social formation--a conjuncture unique in his ca-
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reer—he harmoniously fused realist and modernist aesthetics in Lolita. The novel's critique of contemporary capitalism implicates not only Lolita in particular and America in general, but also, and even more, Humbert himself, and finally, through structural parody, the reader as well. Yet the book knows nothing of the causes of commodity society, nothing of power. Finally, Nabokov's second European period combines an enlarged, cosmopolitan range with a diminished concreteness due to the absence from America. Thus, Nabokov's mastery of a restricted sphere of experience always depended on the suppression of its material base, a disjunction, however, that is least apparent in his best fiction and most evident in his worst.
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"Nikolai Gogol as a Critical Ur-text"
by Sherry A. Dranch
(Abstract of the paper presented at the Nabokov Session of the MLA Convention, New York City, December 29, 1978.)
This paper shows how Vladimir Nabokov, as a student of Nikolai Gogol's style, admires and emulates certain procreative aspects of Gogol's syntax. Gogol is seen as a pen-wielding Mascodagama: the edges of his subordinate clauses stretch out almost to the ripping point, until the "various metaphors, comparisons and lyrical outbursts" actually engender ''live creatures." An example of this phenomenon, from Dead Souls, illustrates it more clearly: "Even the weather had obligingly accommodated itself to the setting: the day was neither bright nor gloomy but a kind of bluey-grey tint such as is found upon the uniforms of garrison soldiers, for the rest a peaceful class of warriors except for their being somewhat inebriate on Sundays." (This is Nabokov's own translation from Nikolai Gogol, New York: New Directions, 1961, p. 78.) Nabokov's finesse as a critic is evident in his emphasis upon the expression "for the rest," an expression which, acting as a relative pronoun, opens the way for the appearance of no mere subordinate clause, but of all those garrisoned "extras."
In Nabokov's Ada, the otter-fur coat of Marina Durmanov gives rise to twilight char-
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acters: "As if she had just escaped from a burning palace and a perishing kingdom, she [Ada] wore over her rumpled nightdress a deep-brown, hoar-glossed coat of sea-otter fur, the famous kamchatskiy bobr of ancient Estotian traders … 'my natural fur,' as Marina used to say pleasantly of her own cape, inherited from a Zemski granddam, when [and here comes the Gogolian twist], at the dispersal of a winter ball, some lady wearing vison or coypu or a lowly manteau de castor (beaver, nemetskiy bobr) would comment with a rapturous moan on the bobrovaya shuba." (Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1969, p.391.) The transition from Ada in her nightdress to Marina's coat to the anonymous but quite life-like lady at the winter bah is truly Gogolian in technique and subject-matter.
The paper goes on to examine the effects of metamorphosis upon the metaphor, especially upon highly extended metaphors in both Gogol's and Nabokov's works. It is demonstrated that both particularity and multiplicity, revealed simultaneously through rare metamorphoses, underlie ah of Nabokov's creative and scholarly endeavors. The sudden departures from structure to structure via superficial appearances or resemblances are a major feature of Nabokov's work. These movements in Gogol's stories, novels and plays are precisely what fascinate Nabokov, as a Neo-Symbolist (and indeed, even as an entymologist!). For these reasons, Nikolai Gogol remains a valuable text for Nabokov scholarship.
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"Consciousness and Real Life in King, Queen, Knave"
by Ellen Pifer
(Abstract of the paper presented at the Nabokov Session of the MLA Convention, New York City, December 29, 1978.)
Although the characters of King, Queen, Knave are frequently referred to as mere puppets of their author, they lack life for reasons that have nothing to do with authorial manipulation. In this novel, as in all of Nabokov's fiction, artifice is meant to illuminate rather than kill off the specific life of the characters and their claim to reality. All of Nabokov's characters are declared creations of artifice; they do not 'live' as reflections of a social-historical era but as representatives of human consciousness and its laws. According to Nabokov, consciousness alone transforms the received material of existence into real life. Because language is the primary medium of consciousness, literature is in a special position to explore the nature of conscious life. In literature, all representations of matter are distillations of human perception. Here the only 'reality' is that which has been created through acts of imaginative invention. Exploiting this fact of literary life, Nabokov examines the process by which individual consciousness creates the character of the perceived world.
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In King, Queen, Knave, Nabokov deploys artifice to renew the reader's perception of reality by estranging that perception from habitual formulations. He focuses his art at the point where general explanations for reality dissolve. 'Reality' presents itself at the point where the characters' perceptions diverge rather than converge. Thus Nabokov demonstrates how each of his characters particularizes and in a sense 'makes strange' (Shklovsky's well-known term) the general, familiar world men agree on for the sake of ontological comfort and social expediency. In contrast to this general world, true reality is neither given nor assumed; it is something to be sought, discovered and in a sense created by a consciousness actively engaged with phenomena. In King, Queen, Knave, Martha and Franz are only partially real, partially human characters because their degraded sensibilities cannot assign proper priority to human consciousness, which they have relinquished as a source of order, knowledge and transcendence.
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"Whatever Happened to Humbert: The Transformation of Lolita from Novel to Screenplay"
by Samuel Schuman
(Abstract of the paper presented at the Nabokov Session of the MLA Convention, New York City, December 29, 1978.)
Among the more interesting transmutations effected by Vladimir Nabokov as artist conjurer is the recasting of Lolita from novel to screenplay. Ignoring his own injunctions
regarding ’literalism," Nabokov's auto-translations , including the translation of Lolita from one medium to another, involve significant alterations. This essay focuses upon one such major revision, the choice of narrative method.
Whereas the novel is, with the exception of the foreword, narrated entirely by Humbert, the screenplay is not. The scene in which Humbert almost drowns Charlotte Haze illustrates the differences in tone and style which this shift occasions. The filmscript seems to present, but not embody, the hysterical ambivalences of Lolita's protagonist.
This stylistic alteration engenders a marked change in our sense of Humbert's nature. For example, when the novel's Humbert describes the perilous magic of nymphets, he speaks directly to us, and we see his notions through the filter of his consciousness. In
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the screenplay, the same words become dialogue, and thus the concept is presented from the outside. In the screenplay, accordingly, Humbert seems less witty, less intelligent, less self-conscious. He is more of a victim, less a hero—even a parody romance hero, a modern quasi-Tristam. Other characters, such as Quilty and Dolly can be argued to change correspondingly.
Lolita as a novel has often been praised—and damned—for certain imaginative touches which border on the diabolical, for an inventiveness which verges on the fantastic. Virtually all the events which achieve this effect in the novel are eliminated in the filmscript. Gone, for example, are Humbert's experiences with child Whores, his journey to the arctic, the fate of the Maximovichs, and Quilty's appearance in a Dick Tracy mask. With the loss of Humbert as narrator, such scenes lose much of their raison d'etre, namely the illumination of some of the darker corners of Humbert's consciousness. In the process, the novel also loses some of its depth. Humbert's imagination is quirky, but it is also powerful, original, amusing, even at times charming. With the elimination of Humbert as narrator of Lolita, the reader loses the opportunity to function as a kind ofсо-participant in Humbert's imaginative process.
Nabokov's altered narrative tactic in the filmscript of Lolita engages that work's thematic structure. The first person narrative which is the novel Lolita is the creation of Humbert. Because the film is not the creation of its hero, the theme of self-conscious artistry is attenuated. (This theme is em-
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blematized in the masturbatory sexuality of the novel, a motif eliminated entirely in the film-script.) In place of Humbert as protagonist/creator, Nabokov inserts his own presence much more overtly into the screenplay, by means of editorial-authorial stage directions, anagramatic characters, and the actual appearance of a butterfly hunting character named "Vladimir Nabokov." The film substitutes for the artist figure of the protagonist the more obvious and continual presence of the artist figure of the work's creator, Nabokov himself.
Nabokov refers to his published screenplay as a "vivacious variant" of an old novel. Both the alliterating descriptive terms seem accurate. The filmscript of Lolita is "vivacious": It is an interesting and amusing experiment. It is also a "variant" of the novel, an interesting minor variation on a major work of art. The screenplay of Lolita does not rival the stature of the prose narrative from which it was derived.
By eliminating Humbert Humbert's role as narrator of the events of Lolita, Nabokov lessened the meaning and impact of those events. The narrative voice of Humbert is an essential element of the greatness of Nabokov's masterpiece. Without that voice, the work does not say the same things, nor does it speak as fully, as movingly, as beautifully.
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ANNOTATIONS
by Charles Nicol
Material for this section should be sent to Charles Nicol, English Department, Indiana State University, Terre Haute, IN 47809. Unless specifically stated otherwise, all references to Navokov's works will be to the most recent hardcover United States editions.
The Mysterious Dozen Revisited
In Newsletter #1, Brian Boyd asked, "Who are the enigmatic intruders at the 1888 Ardis picnis?" He then listed a number of possible clues.
I propose that they are indeed the twelve disciples, and are indeed from a Renaissance painting—but one so obvious as to be nearly invisible: Leonardo's "Last Supper." By a quirk of Van's memory, works of art are frequently confused with his recollections of his own life; this is as true of the visual arts (the Lautrec poster) as of literature (War and Peace). I have discussed this aspect of Ada elsewhere ("Ada or Disorder," delivered at the MLA seminar in 1976, to be published in Navokov's Fifth Arc).
Van remembers Leonardo's painting in conjunction with the Ardis picnic because that picnic is the "last supper" of the summer of 1888 as well as the end of Ada's girlhood: "It's my last picnic, I guess. Childhood is scrapped" (Ada, p. 279). Leonardo's painting is a fitting emblem for Van's memories
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since it also bristles with anachronisms; Navokov had mentioned elsewhere the "crockery lent by the Dominican monks" (Bend Sinister, p. 23). Depending on how far one
"sinks" into the painting, the language of the twelve men is either renaissance Italian or first-century Hebrew (Aramaic and a spice of Latin thrown in). Eventually the men acquire twentieth-century clothing, the kind of old suits fishermen might wear on an outing.—CN
The Cantrip Review
During Humbert's travels with Rita, he publishes in the Cantrip Review an essay, "Mimir and Memory," that leads to a year in residence at Cantrip College, "from September 1951 to June 1952" (Lolita, p.262). Appel glosses "Mimir" and "Cantrip," demonstrating their appropriateness (Annotated Lolita, p.423). However, "Cantrip" was chosen for more reasons than its definition as "a charm or spell." First, divided into its constituent syllables it tells us that Humbert is allowed to take a vacation from New York. Second, and far more important, it is a careful amalgam of two leading journals of the period, the Kenyon Review and Partisan Review.
"Cantrip" approximates the first syllable of "Kenyon" and duplicates its bisyllabicity. Few prominent reviews are associated with colleges, and the information that Cantrip
College is four hundred miles from New York City probably eliminates any "real" contenders other than Kenyon. Humbert is not particularly disguising his year in Ohio. (Query: did Nabokov consider such a year?)
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However, "Cantrip" is also an only slightly distorted anagram of "Partisan": add an "a" and let the "c" go soft. Why this doubling of Reviews? Of course, Nabokov frequently plays games with merged titles, but here he is calling our attention to an essay similar to "Mimir and Memory" that appeared in Partisan Review for January-February 1951, at the same time as Humbert's: "Exile" by Vladimir Nabokov (Field #1093). It then became Chapter 14 of Speak, Memory.
Oddly enough, Humbert's article resembles that chapter less than the theories of Van Veen in Book Four of Ada: "I suggested among other things ... a theory of perceptual time based on the circulation of the blood and conceptually depending ... on the mind's being conscious not only of matter but also of its own self, thus creating a continuous spanning of two points (the storable future and the stored past)" (Lolita, p.262).—CN
An Inquiry
Presumably everyone knows why there are 18,481 books in the Veen family library, and readers of Bobbie Mason's book [Nabokov's Garden, Ann Arbor, 1974, Ed.] know about the number of chapters in Lolita and Ada. But what about Pale Fire and "Pale Fire"? What's statistically impossible about the lines in the poem, what's the significance of the pedometer measurement from the palace to the theatre, and why does the pedometer measure (absurdly) in yards?
—Professor J. D. O'Hara, Department of English, The University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT 06268.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
We continue to update the bibliography of Vladimir Nabokov's works with the citations provided by Brian Boyd (124 items) and Simon Karlinsky (10 items) which follow. As noted in VNRN, Number 1, we are coordinating these notations with Andrew Field's Nabokov: A Bibliography, the standard bibliographic source.
Short Stories: Separate Appearances and Translations
1051 For "Dieter E. Zimmer" read "Renate Gerhard"
Plays and Scenarios
1065 For "Agaspher" read "Ahasuerus"
Memoirs
1080 For "July 31, 1948" read "June 12, 1948"
1083 For "Chapter 10" read " Chapter 1"
1090 For "Chapter 1" read "Chapter 10"
Essays, Book Reviews, and Criticism
1109 For "Richard Dehmal" read "Richard Dehmel"
1112 For "B. Dukel'sky" read Vladimir Dukel'sky (the composer Vernon Duke)"
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1120 Date impossible, incorrect
1128 For "Chance Poems" read "Poems Written for Special Occasions"
1145 For "pp.137-142" read "pp.137-139"
1147 For "1931" read "May 1, 1931"
1149 Add "pg.4161"
Add 1153 A English: On Khodasevich. Translated by Vladimir Nabokov. Triquarterly. Evanston, Illinois. No. 27. Spring 1973. Pp. 83-87.
Included as On Hodasevich in Strong Opinions. 1197B.
1156 Add "pp.733-734"
1157 Add "pp.808-809"
1158 Add "pg.15"
1161 Add "pg.11"
1163 Delete "and September 22" [this is the letter listed, with incorrect date, as 1312]. After "August 4, 1941" add "pp.160-162"
1164 Add "pg.26"
1165 Add "pp.31-39"
Add 1167A. A Note on Vladislav Hodassevich in New Directions in Prose and Poetry. [No. 6] Ed. James Laughlin. Norfolk, Conn. New Directions. 1941. pg. 596. See 1296.
1169 Add "pg.2"
1170 Add "pg. 212"
Add 1171A Biographical Notes. Pushkin. Lermontov. Tyutchev. In Three Russian Poets: Selections From Pushkin, Lermontov and Tyutchev, pp.37-38; and, separately, in
[28]
Pushkin, Lermontov, Tyutchev: Poems, pp. 7-8 (Pushkin), pg. 39 (Lermontov), pg.49 (Tyutchev). See 1297.
1177 Add "Vol. 29. No. 4 pp. 191-192"
1178 Add "pp. 179-180"
1179 Add at beginning "Sartre's First Try" and at end "included in Strong Opinions. 1197B."
1180 For "Izbrannoe (Selected Works)" read "Povesti (Tales)"
1181 " For "On Translating Pushkin” read "Problems of Translation: 'Onegin' in English" and add "pp.496-512"
Add 1181A Transfer 1314
Add 1181B On a Book Entitled 'Lolita' in Anchor Review. New York. No. 2. June 1957. pp.105-112.
Printed with the first American publication of excerpts from Lolita (see 0793) and included in almost every subsequent edition of the novel.
1185 Add "pp. 97-110"
Add 1186A Pushkin and Gannibal. Encounter. London. July 1962. pp.11-26.
An advance extract from 1188. For a letter related to this article see 1333.
Add 1186B The Art of the Duel. Esquire. Chicago. July 1963. pp.54-55. An advance extract from 1188.
1187 Add at beginning "[On Translating Pushkin] Pounding the
[29]
Clavichord" and at end "Included in Strong Opinions. 1197B."
1193 Add "pp. 80-89" and "Included in Strong Opinions 1197B."
1194 Add "Included in Strong Opinions. 1197B. "
1195 Add "Included in Strong Opinions. 1197B."
Add 1195В Notes to Ada by Vivian Dark-bloom in Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle. Harmondsworth, Middlesex. Penguin. pp.463-477.
1196 Add "Included in Strong Opinions. 1197B."
1197 After "Franz Hellens" add "Edited by Raphael de Smedt" and at end add "pg. 253"
1197A Add "Included in Strong Opinions. 1197B."
Add: to list of forewords: Strong Opinions 1197B; Tyrants Destroyed 0905b; Details Of A Sunset 0905C.
Add 1197B Strong Opinions. New York. McGraw-Hill. 1973: and London. Weidenfeld and Nicolson. 1974. 335pp.
Interviews
Add:
1197B1 Anonymous (1962)
1197B2 BBC Television (1962) 1334
1197B3 Playboy (1964) 1337
1197B4 Life (1964) 1338
1197B5 TV-13 NY (1965) 1344
1197B6 Wisconsin Studies 1360
1197B7 The Paris Review 1357
[30]
1197B8 The New York Times Book Review 1363
1197B9 BBC-2 (1968) 1364
1197В10 Time (1969) 1368
1197В11 The New York Times (1969) 1367
1197В12 The Sunday Times (1969) 1369
1197В13 BBC-2 (1969) 1370
1197В14 Vogue (1969) 1373
1197В15 Novel (1970) 1383A
1197В16 The New York Times (1971) 1383B
1197В17 The New York Times Book Review (1972) 1386
1197В18 Swiss Broadcast (1972?) 1384A
1197В19 Bayerischer Rundfunk (1971-1972) 1384C
1197В 20 Anonymous 1388A
1197В21 Vogue (1972) 1388B
1197В22 Anonymous (1972) 1388C
Letters to Editors
1197В23 Playboy (1961) 1327
1197В24 The London Times (1962) 1328
1197В25 Encounter (1966) 1347
1197В26 The Sunday Times (1967) 1350
1197В27 Encounter (1967) 1352
1197В28 The New Statesman (1967) 1358
1197В29 Esquire (1969) 1369A
1197В30 The New York Times (1969) 1369C
1197В31 Time (1971) 1383
1197В32 The New York Times Book Review (1971) 1385
1197ВЗЗ The New York Times Book Review 1388
[31]
Articles
1197В34 On Hodasevich (1939) 1153
1197B35 Sartre's First Try (1949) 1179
1197B36 Pounding the Clavichord (1963) 1187
1197B37 Reply to My Critics (1966) 1193
1197B38 Lolita and Mr. Girodias (1967) 1194
1197B39 On Adaptation (1969) 1195
1197B40 Anniversary Notes (1970) 1195A
1197B41 Rowe's Symbols (1971) 1196
1197B42 Inspiration (1972) 1197A
1197B43 The Female of Lycaeides Sublivens Nab. (1952) 1213
1197B44 On Some Inaccuracies in Klots' Field Guide (1952) 1214
1197B45 Butterfly Collecting in Wyoming, 1952 (1953) 1215
1197B46 Audubon's Butterflies, Moths and Other Studies (1952) 1212
1197B47 L.C. Higgins and N.D. Riley (1970) 1219
Lepidoptera
1198 Add "pp.29-33”
1199 Add "pp.255-257, 268-271"
1200 For "1941" read "September 1941. pp.221-223"
1201 For "1941" read "September 1941. pp.265-267"
1202 After "Vol. 49" add "Nos. 3-4" and for "1942" read "September-December 1942. pp.61-80"
[32]
1203 For "1943" read "March-June 1943. pg.33"
1204 For "1943" read "September-December 1943. pp.87-89"
1205 For "February 1944" read "September-December 1944. pp.104-138"
1206 For "1945" read "March-June 1945. pp.1-61"
1207 After "Vol. 52" add "No. 3-4" and for "1945" read "September-December 1945. pg.193." Delete "Plates."
1208 For "1948" read "December 1948. pp.273-280"
1209 After "Vol. 101" add "No. 4" and for "1949" read "February 1949. pp.479-541"
1211 For "June ?, 1951" read "June 3, 1951. p.21"
1212 Add "pp. 4, 14" and "Included in Strong Opinions. 1197B."
1213 Delete "Nabokov." After "Vol. 6" add "Nos. 1-3" and add "Included in Strong Opinions. 1197B . "
1214 After "Vol. 6" add "Nos. 1-3" and add "Included in Strong Opinions. 1197B."
1215 After "Vol. 7" add "No. 2" and add "pp.49-51" and "included in Strong Opinions. 1197B."
1216 After "Vol. 7" add "no. 2" and add "pp.51-52"
1217 After "Vol. 7" add "No. 2" and add "pg.54"
1219 After "Europe" add "by L. G. Higgins and N. D. Riley." Add "pg. 19" and "Included in Strong Opinions. 1197B."
[33]
Miscellaneous Collected Reprintings
1240 For "A Rhetorical Reader" read "A Collection of Poetry Suitable for Public Reading"
Translations
1277 Add "227 pp."
Add 1227A Colas Brugnon [sic] in The Rudder (Rul'). Berlin. August 29, 1922. pp.2-3
Add 1227B Colas Brugnon [sic] in The Rudder (Rul'). Berlin. August 30, 1922. pp.2-3
Add 1227C Colas Brugnon [sic] in The Rudder (Rul'). Berlin. September 3, 1922. pp.2-3
Add 1227D Colas Breugnon in The Rudder (Rul').Berlin. September 5, 1922. pp.2-4
Add 1278A Reprinted: New York. Dover. 1976.
Add 1278B Silence. A Fable (Bezmolvie. Skazka) by Edgar Allan Poe in The Rudder (Rul'). Berlin. 1923?
1283 Delete "And La Nuit De Mai." After "Decembre" add "(Dekabr'skyay Noch')" and add "pp.2-3"
1284 After "Ivre" add "(P'yanyj Korabl')" and add "pg. 2"
1294 For "1942" read "1941. pp.559-560, 565"
1285 For "Hanover, New Hampshire" read "New York" and add "pp.31-33"
1286A For "pg. 91" read "pp. 91-92" and after "Anthology" in
[34]
the note add "and Stanzas is another name for Orpheus."
Delete next three lines (see next item).
Add 1296В The Monkey, Poem And Orpheus by Vladislav Khodasevich in Triquarterly. No. 27. Evanston, Illinois. Spring 1973. pp.67-70.
1297 For "Translations of" read "Selections from"; after "1944" add "38 pp"; before "London" add "as Pushkin, Lermontov, Tyutchev: Poems"; after "1947" add "56pp."
1298 For "Poems of" read "Poems (Autumn, Last Love and Silentium) by "and add "pg. 80"
Add 1298A Four Poems by Tyutchev (The Journey, Appeasement, Dusk, Tears) in The Russian Review. New York. Vol. 4. No. 1. Autumn 1944. pp. 45-46
1299 For "Hanover, New Hampshire" read "New York" and add "pp. 38-39"
Add 1299A Four Poems by Mikhail Lermontov ( The Angel, The Sail, The Rock, Imitation of Heine) in The Russian Review. New York. Vol. 5. No. 2. Spring 1946. pp. 50-51
1300 Add "pg. 108"
1301 Add "210 pp."
1302 Add "135 pp."
Add 1303A Eugene Onegin. Revised Edition. Four volumes. Princeton, N. J. Bollingen. 1975.