Download PDF of Number 23 (Fall 1989) The Nabokovian
THE NABOKOVIAN
Number 23 Fall 1989
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CONTENTS
News by Stephen Jan Parker 3
To Véra (1) by Vladimir Nabokov
translation by Dmitri Nabokov 13
...Et Dona Ferentes by Gennadi Barabtarlo 15
VN in the USSR: 1989 (Continuing)
by Stephen Jan Parker 21
Annotation & Queries by Charles Nicol
Contributors: Pekka Tammi, Liza Kozlowski,
Janie McCauley-Myers 24
V.V. Nabokov in the USSR- 1922-1975 by
N. Artemenko-Tolstaia and E. Shikhovtsev 40
Abstract: Pascal Ifri, "The Presence of Proust in Ada" 55
1988 Nabokov Bibliography by Stephen Jan Parker 58
Note on content:
This webpage contains the full content of the print version of Nabokovian Number 23, 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- The annual bibliography (because in the near future the secondary Nabokov bibliography will be encompassed, superseded, and made more efficiently searchable in the bibliography of this Nabokovian website, and the primary bibliography has long been superseded by Michael Juliar’s comprehensive online bibliography).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
by Stephen Jan Parker
Vladimir Nabokov: Selected Letters, 1940-1977, edited by Dmitri Nabokov and Matthew J. Bruccoli (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich) was released in late September to generally enthusiastic reviews. The New York Times first anticipated the publication with an article by Eleanor Blau (August 24), then previewed several of the letters, and followed with two reviews, by Viktor Erofeev (October 1) and Christopher Lehmann-Haupt (October 5). Major newspapers, weeklies, and monthlies have contributed their own reviews, as have the wire services and various radio and television stations. In the words of one Nabokovphile, "[the volume] is bound forever to change the field, humbling some, encouraging others, and launching new efforts."
*
The 1989 Nabokov Society meetings in Washington, D.C.:
(1) Wednesday, 27 December, 7:00-8:15 pm, Washington Sheraton Hotel, in association with the MLA. "Sexuality in Nabokov's Narrative." Brenda Marshall (University of Massachusetts, Amherst) presiding. Papers by Susan Elizabeth Sweeney (College of the Holy Cross), Scott Long (Harvard University), Khani Begum (Youngstown State University). Society business meeting to follow.
(2) Wednesday, 27 December, 9:00-10:15 pm, Washington Sheraton Hotel, in association with the MLA. "Approaches to Teaching Nabokov." Zoran
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Kuzmanovich presiding. Papers by Zoran Kuzmanovlch (Davidson College), Ralph Cianco (Skidmore College), Thomas J. Bontly (University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee), Ellen E. Berry (Bowling Green State University).
(3) Thursday, 28 December, 10:15-12:15 am, Mayflower Hotel, in association with AATSEEL. "Nabokov as Critic." Galya Diment (University of Washington) presiding, Galina de Roeck (Michigan State University) secretary. Papers by Dena Schoen (University of California, Berkeley), Anna Ljunggren (Bryn Mawr), Galina de Roeck, Larissa Rudova (Reed College), Christine Rydel (Grand Valley State University), and Leona Toker (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) as discussant.
Also at the AASEEL meetings on Wednesday, December 27, 8:00-10:00 am in the Mayflower Hotel, at the session, "Russian Emigré Literature" papers on Nabokov topics will be read by Peter Barta (Texas Tech University) and Julian Connolly (University of Virginia).
*
Mrs. Véra Nabokov has provided the following list of VN works received April - September 1989. Works published in the USSR are listed separately elsewhere in this issue.
April — Pale Fire. New York: Vintage International, new printing.
April — Roi, Dame, Valet [King, Queen, Knave], Paris: Gallimard, Folio new edition.
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April — La Defense Loujine [The Defense]. Paris: Gallimard. Folio new edition.
April — Der Zauberer [The Enchanter], tr. Dieter Zimmer. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, Bertelsmann Club edition.
May — Desesperacion [Despair], tr. Enrique Murillo. Barcelona: Anagrama, Spanish language.
May — Lolita, tr. Helen Hessel. Berlin: Rowohlt, Volk und Welt-Ex Libris edition.
May — Bend Sinister. London: Penguin Books, Twentieth Century Classics.
May — A Russian Beauty and Other Stories. London: Penguin Books reprint.
May — Despair. New York: Vintage International, new printing.
May — Lolita, tr. Enrique Tejedor. Barcelona: Anagrama, Biblioteca Nabokov, fourth printing.
May — Dar [The Gift]. Ann Arbor: Ardis, Volume 6, Collected Works of Vladimir Nabokov.
June — Autres Rivages [Speak, Memory], tr. Yvonne Davet. Paris: Gallimard, "Du Monde Entier" new reprint.
June — Eugene Onegin. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, Bollingen Series LXXII, new paperback edition.
June — Drugie Berega [Other Shores, memoir]. Ann Arbor: Ardis, new reprint.
June — Lolita. Paris: Gallimard, Folio, new reprint.
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June — Pnin. New York: Vintage International, new printing.
June — Lezioni sul Don Chisciotte [Lectures on Don Quixote], tr. Edoardo Albinati. Milan: Garzanti.
June — The Song of Igor’s Campaign. Ann Arbor: Ardis, new edition.
July — Gesammelte Werke-Vladimir Nabokov: 'Marginalien', ed. Dieter Zimmer. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt.
July — La Meprise [Despair], tr. Marcel Stora. Paris: Gallimard, Folio reprint.
July — Le Don [The Gift], tr. Raymond Girard. Paris: Gallimard, Edition L'lmaginaire.
July — Lushins Verteidigung [The Defense], tr. from Russian Dietmar Schulte. Reinbeck bei Hamburg: Rowohlt rororo reprint.
July — Vladimir Nabokov-Elena Sikorskaja, Nostalgia (Lettere 1945-1974). Milan: Rosellina Archinto.
July — Invitation au Supplice [Invitation to a Beheading], tr. from Russian Jarl Priel. Paris: Gallimard, Folio reprint.
July — "Carrousel 1923" pieces. In De Tweede Ronde (Netherlands) no. 2: 192-197.
August — Speak, Memory. New York: Vintage International, new printing.
August — King, Queen, Knave. New York: Vintage International, new printing.
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September — Vladimir Nabokov: Selected Letters 1940-1977, ed. Dmitri Nabokov and Matthew J. Bruccoli. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
September — Lolita. Ann Arbor: Ardis, Volume 10, Collected Works.
September — Gesammelte Werke. Vladimir Nabokov. Erzahlungen I 1921-1934, ed. Dieter Zimmer. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowolt.
September — Gesammelte Werke. Vladimir Nabokov. Erzahlungen II 1935-1951, ed. Dieter Zimmer. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt.
September — Gesammelte Werke. Vladimir Nabokov. No. 8: Lolita, ed. Dieter Zimmer. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt.
September — Puhu, Muisti [Speak, Memory], Helsinki: Gummerus.
September — Invitation to a Beheading. New York: Vintage International, new printing.
September — Lolita. London: Penguin reprint.
*
Gene Barabtarlo writes: "The second issue of the Moscow monthly Foreign Literature contains my translation of Pnin (Ardis, 1983). This Soviet version, which was published without my having seen the proof or been consulted in any other way, is fraught with over eighty errors of various sort, some inherited from the American edition but mostly introduced anew. I have compiled a nine-page list of Corrigenda, with reference to the Ardis edition and the Soviet text, and shall mail it, gratis (but kindly send a self-addressed envelope, one .45 stamp for domestic, three for
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overseas post), to anyone requesting it at 451 GCB, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO 65211."
*
Scheduled to appear in spring 1990 is a special number of Russian Literature Triquarterly (No. 24, Ann Arbor: Ardis), edited by D. Barton Johnson, dedicated to the Fiftieth Anniversary of VN's Arrival in the USA. The tentative table of contents:
I. The Nabokovs: Novella, Interviews, and an Article
1. Vladimir Nabokov, Volshebnik
2. Véra Nabokov with Gene Barabtarlo, "A Possible Source for Pushkin's 'Queen of Spades'”
3. Stephen Jan Parker, "Nabokov and the Short Story"
4. Ellendea Proffer and D. Barton Johnson, "Interview with Vera and Dmitri Nabokov"
5. Brian Boyd, "Scenes from Emigré Life. Berlin 1925-1926"
II. Articles on the Prose
1. Julian Connolly, "Madness and Doublings: From Dostoevsky's The Double to Nabokov's The Eye"
2. Jay Edelnant, 'The Yellow Brick Road of Nabokov’s Ada"
3. Bob Grossmith, "Shaking the Kaleidoscope: Physics and Metaphysics in Nabokov's Bend Sinister'’
4. David H.J. Larmour, "The Classical Allusions in Bend Sinister”
5. Charles Nicol, ’"A Ghastly Rich Glass': A Double Essay on 'Spring in Fialta'"
6. Gerard de Vries, "Fanning the Poet's Fire: Some Remarks on Nabokov’s Pale Fire"
7. Samuel Schuman, "Something Rotten in the State of Denmark"
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8. Susan Elizabeth Sweeney, "Purloined Letters: Poe, Doyle, Nabokov"
III. Articles on Poetry
1. Gerald S. Smith, "Nabokov and Russian Verse Form"
2. D. Barton Johnson, "Preliminary Notes on Nabokov’s Russian Poetry: A Chronological and Thematic Sketch"
3. Julian Connoly, "The Otherworldly in Nabokov's Poetry"
4. David Rampton, "The Art of Invocation: The Role of the Apostrophe in Nabokov’s Early Poetry"
5. D. Barton Johnson, "Alphabetic and Chronological Listings of Nabokov's Russian Poetry"
IV. Reviews
1. Rachel Levy, review of Geoffrey Green, Freud and Nabokov
2. Pekka Tammi, review of Priscilla Meyer, Find What the Sailor Has Hidden: Vladimir Nabokov's PALE FIRE
3. David Rampton, review of Leona Toker, Nabokov: The Mystery of Literary Structures
*
Odds and Ends
— Concerning the mistaken attribution of VN as author of the poem "Isakiy" (The Nabokovian no. 22: 7-8), the following retraction was published in Novyi zhumal (no. 170, p. 320): "Correction: we have been advised that the poem 'Isakiy' which appeared under the name of Vladimir Nabokov in our no. 167 issue (p. 44) was written by another author. The editors apologize."
— Replies to the "Banana Query” (no. 22: 23) arrived from West Germany, the USSR, and various locales in
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the USA. VN's reference to the Russian language text which begins "Hello, I am the doctor, and this is a banana" occurs in chapter 14, section 2, fifth paragraph of Speak, Memory.
— An international conference on Nabokov is being planned for the end of May 1990 in Moscow. Preliminary programs will be available after December 15, 1989 from Vladimir E. Alexandrov, Slavic Department, P.O. Box 1504AYale Station, New Haven, CT 06520.
— Recently published:
(1) Phantom of Fact: A Guide to Nabokov's PNIN, by Gennady Barabtarlo. Ann Arbor: Ardis. Not only page-by-page notes, but also publication history, textual difficulties, survey of the critical literature. "In this first comprehensive reading of Nabokov’s Pnin, Mr. Barabtarlo treats virtually all aspects of the novel, including characters, themes, setting, literary and historical allusions and chronology."
(2) Gesammelte Werke. Vladimir Nabokov. Marginalien, edited by Dieter Zimmer (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt). Includes VN writings, the Playboy interview by Alvin Toffler, and articles/essays by John Updike* Brian Boyd, Dieter Zimmer, Andrei Bitov.
(3) Vladimir Nabokov, by Leszek Engelking (Warsaw, Poland: Czytelnik).
— Upcoming publications:
(1) The first volume of Brian Boyd's long awaited two-volume life and works of VN is scheduled for publication in spring 1990 by Princeton University Press.
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(2) Nabokov's Otherworld, by Vladimir E. Alexandrov, will be published by Princeton University Press in fall 1990. It is a study of the interrelations among metaphysics, ethics, and esthetics in selected Russian and English novels by VN.
(3) D. Barton Johnson: "Vladimir Nabokov's 'Terror' and Jean-Paul Sartre," "Vladimir Nabokov's Terror’: Pre-Texts and Post-Text," and "L'Inconnue de la Seine and Nabokov's Naiads."
— A one-hour documentary on VN, for the BBC Omnibus Program, was aired for the first time in Great Britain on December 1. Christopher Sykes, the director, decided to do the documentary to repay the person who "has given me more intellectual pleasure than anyone else in my life." Sykes has previously made documentaries on Wittgenstein, physicist Richard Feynman (twice), and Edward Said. Brian Boyd served as consultant for the program which was shot in Montreux, Paris, London, Boston, New York, Washington, Ithaca, and in the Rockies. Those interviewed were Dmitri Nabokov, Brian Boyd, Martin Amis, Edmund White, novelist Antonia Byatt, and entomologist Charles Remington.
— Christoper Hüllen (Bonner Ring 151, 5042 Erftstadt-Lechenich, West Germany) writes: "Nabokov's 90th birthday did not pass totally unnoticed here in Germany. The radio station WDR, one of the biggest in the whole country, broadcast a 15 minute feature on Nabokov on April 23. In 1984 the same station had broadcast a complete reading of the German translation of Speak, Memory.”
— Susan Elizabeth Sweeney (English Department, College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, MA 01610) wrote the US Post Office about the means for proposing a stamp and received a form reply indicating that thousands of stamp suggestions are received from the public each year. These are then reviewed by the
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Citizens' Stamp Advisory Committee, which recommends those stamp subject suggestions "which have the greatest merit" to the Post Office. The Committee works two to three years in advance of stamp issuance. Prof. Sweeney suggests that the Society submit a detailed proposal for consideration of a Nabokov stamp in 1996, three years before VN's centennial.
— A notice has been received from the editor of The Year's Work in English Studies, published by The English Association, London, asking that we inform our readers that The Nabokovian is regularly noticed by them and that they publish detailed reviews of published work on Nabokov.
— Gene Barabtarlo sends along a photocopy of a strange congruence of texts in the September 13 issue of The Kansas City Times: "Report a crime — Dial 474-Tips to report any information about crimes to the Kansas City Crime Commission. You can remain anonymous" followed by "Thought for today: 'Human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece.' Vladimir Nabokov." Shades of Pale Fire!
*
Our thanks to Ms. Holly Stephens and Ms. Paula Malone for their invaluable aid in the preparation of this issue.
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To Véra (1)
(Montreux, 10 January 74)
by Vladimir Nabokov translated by Dmitri Nabokov
To the steppes, they will drive them, О Harlequins mine,
through ravines, to the realms of strange hetmans!
Their geometry and their Venetian design they will call but eccentric deception.
You alone, you alone, as they passed, were agog
at the black, blue, and orange-hued rhombi....
"An unusual writer, N. — athlete and snob, and endowed with enormous aplomb,
he...."
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Note: Nabokov had just completed Look at the Harlequins!, and the novel would be published (New York, McGraw-Hill) on 27 August, 1974. He speculates here on its fate if it ever reaches Soviet shores. The poem is constructed somewhat jocularly around two key rhymes, particularly rombam - aplombom in the second verse. A little trickery was required to render the imagined Soviet review while preserving the feminine line ending and a semblance of that rhyme, which requires that "rhombi" be pronounced, in one variant of the Latin manner, "rombè," and that "aplomb" conserve at least a soupcon of its B. [D.N.l
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To Véra
Akh, ugoniat ikh v step', Arleklnov moikh,
v bueraki, k chuzhim atamanam!
Geometrliu ikh, Venetsiiu ikh
nazovut shutovstvom i obmanom.
Tol'ko ty, tol'ko ty vse divilas' vosled
chernym, sinim, oranzhevym rombam...
"N pisatel' nediuzhinnyi, snob i atlet,
nadelennyi ogromnym aplombom..."Montreux 1.10.74.
Copyright © 1979 Vladimir Nabokov Estate English version Copyright © 1989 Dmitri Nabokov
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...ET DONA FERENTES
by Gennadi Barabtarlo
Last year the Soviets serialized Dar in the magazine Ural, Sverdlovsk (nos. 3-6, 1988). I was aware that they had censored the novel for publication, but in order to see exactly what was lopped and topped I asked Mr. Robert Bauer, a meticulous student of mine, to check the Soviet version against the Ardis revised (1975) edition [There is no mention of their copytext anywhere, but judging by one uncorrected misprint the Ural people used the first, 1952, edition as their point of departure]. I studied his findings and was so much baffled by the whimsical new shape of the Soviet Procrustian stretcher that I even decided, against all logic, to make certain that some of the oddly bold, but not impossible, variants of the Ural text did not obtain in the initial magazine version. They did not. [*I am grateful to Professor Priscilla Meyer for a quick spotcheck of the Contemporary Annals]. Below is a summary of my analysis.
As usual, there is a prefatory editorial word of caution attached, but in the provinces those encumbered with the task of introducing the author they intensely dislike, do not bother to muffle the growl, as the metropolitan preface writers are apt to do. Mr. Valentin Lukyanin of the Ural castigates them in passing (I translate) "The Gift contains concentrated expression of the very anti-democratic tendencies in Nabokov’s creative output which — let us admit it quite soberly - are very much present, of course, in the 'harmless' works by the same author published in our country earlier, although perhaps in a less obvious form," upon which he, also characteristically, questions the wisdom of publishing the very novel he is supposed to launch: "It would be a sacrilege to present to the Soviet reader the noblest figure of the
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Russian democratic movement [Nikolay Chernyshevski] as a caricature merely to add a realistic note to the understanding of the creative individuality of a writer not very close to us in spirit.” But in the end Mr. Lukyanin finds a surprising and tortuous way to justify the printing of the Chernyshevski chapter in particular and indeed of the novel in general: "The heroes [of the final chapter], Russian émigré literati, claim to be champions of the moral traditions of the Russian intelligentsia, which go back to Chernyshevski, yet they do not care a pellet [paltsem о palets ne udariaiut] to defend the honor of their idol when Godunov-Cherdyntsev’s book, insulting to [Chernyshevski’s] memory, comes out. Their real passions concern the trifling partisan squabbles and blatantly commercial pursuits. Without the Chernyshevski chapter, the unmasking pathos of this [i.e. final] chapter would not have resounded to weightily [razoblachitel'nyi pafos etoi glavy ne prozvuchal by tak vesomo]," and this is the true reason why, according to Mr. Lukyanin, the Contemporary Annals editors refused to publish Chapter Four, and precisely the reason why the editors of the Ural deem fit to publish it.
In the examples of deviations that follow, the first figure of reference denotes the page in the Ardis edition, the second, the issue and page of the Ural. Words capitalized and italicized are cut from, substituted for, or added to, the original text.
Outright Expunctions.
There are only two deletions the purpose of which can be plausibly surmised ("irreverent flippancy of tone when speaking of the noblest figures');
59: 3-98 KOE-KAK SKONCHALSIA LENIN (LENIN MET A SLOPPY END),
and
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311: 6-86: vyzhidaia, CHTOBY CHERNYSHEVSKI VES' VYBOLTALSIA, I NABLIUDAIA, chto iz etogo poluchitsia (waiting FOR CHERYSHEVSKI TO BABBLE HIMSELF OUT AND WATCHING what would come of it).
Why most other cuts have been made admits anyone who enjoys this sort of conjecture to any width of it.
168: 5-66 novoe ocharovanie, POIAVIVSHEESIA V CHERTAKH RUSSKOI POEZII (the new charm THAT HAS APPEARED IN THE FEATURES OF RUSSIAN POETRY);
186: 5-76 proshchaemoi prelestnym, VLAZHNYM glazAM (forgiven for the sake of beautiful, MOIST EYES): proshchaemoi prelestnym glazOM (forgiven BY the beautiful EYE);
203: 5-84 "IA ZNAKOMA ESHCHO PO PETERBURGU S ZHENOI LORENTSA, — ONA MNE KOGDA-TO DAVALA UROKI RISOVANILA." "КАК ЕTО STRANNO", SKAZAL FYODOR KONSTANTINOVICH. (I USED TO KNOW LORENTZ'S WIFE IN ST. PETERSBURG —SHE GAVE ME DRAWING LESSONS. — HOW QUEER, SAID FYODOR) (Why the deuce this innocuous-looking exchange did not merit inclusion, I cannot tell. On the next page, they again drop "How queer, repeated Fyodor", so this queerness seems to have method in't, but it eludes me].
205: 5-85 "CHTO-TO ONI NE IDUT’, PROBORMOTALA ONA, TIKHO POZVIAKIVAIA KLIUCHOM. ("IT DOESN'T LOOK AS IF THEYRE COMING", SHE MUTTERED, SOFTLY CLINKING THE KEYS). (Did they decide to hide the keys, as it were, so as not to give away one of the book's chief clues too early? Not by a long chalk. What then?]
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220: 5-92 ...skazal inzhener KERN. — LA RAZ VIDEL EIO NA ZASEDANII BAL'NOGO КОМГТЕТА. El VSIO BYLO ne po nosu" (...said the engineer KERN. "I ONCE SAW HER AT A MEETING OF THE DANCE COMMITTEE. She looked down her nose AT EVERYTHING);
221: 5-93 Selianka, GALOSHI, sneg... (COLD vegetable soup , GLOSSY RUBBERS, snow...);
361: 6-110: OTDEL’NAIA GRUPPA SKANDALISTOV, SAMOLIUBIVYKH NEUDACHNIKOV (A SEPARATE GROUP OF ROWDIES, CONCEITED FAILURES);
369 : 6-115: No F.K. vzial VLEVO (but F. turned LEFT);
389: 6-124 sledilo S LIUBOPYTSTVOM za dialogom (following the dialogue WITH CURIOSITY).
There are many more omissions of single words, mostly inexplicable.
Substitutions and Additions.
Some examples below may be mere misprints (but of the insidiously plausible brood) but others seem to be definite editorial attempts, maddeningly well-meaning, to improve upon the original [*which seems to have become routine practice. Mr. Bauer has just completed checking the Soviet version of "Ultima Thule" (Aurora, No. 7, 1988) against the original text, and I counted nineteen lexical changes, i.e. besides those of punctuation and spelling. I can't venture an explanation other than they find Nabokov’s style in want of some editing!]:
24: 3-80: "OPTICHESKOGO razvlecheniia (OPTICAL diversion)" is changed to "POETICHESKOGO razvlecheniia (POETICAL diversion)";
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35: 3-86: "PODSKAZHI mne, moe voobrazhenie (Imagination, do prompt me!)" becomes ''PODSKAZHITE mne” etc. [absurdly making Fyodor address his imagination by the formal "vous"];
80: 3-109 "perevesti na NEMETSKII (translate into GERMAN) is "corrected" to "perevesti na NEMETSKII IAZYK' (translate into THE GERMAN LANGUAGE)];
116: 4-93 "so SVOIMI zamechatel'nymi russkimi sovremennikami (with HIS remarkable Russian contemporaries)" becomes "so VSEMI zamechatel'nymi" etc. (with ALL of his remarkable...);
138: 4-104 "v zolotistykh STEPIAKH' (on the golden STEPPES)" is changed to "v zolotistykh STENAKH (on the golden WALLS)"];
155 : 4-112 "i v etu minutu" (and at that moment) is elegantly elaborated, by the wistful editor, to "i v etu PROSHCHAL’NUIU minutu" (and at that FAREWELL moment);
181: 5-73 "NOCHEVAL" (spent a night) is misprinted "KOCHEVAL" (wandered);
182: 5-74 "zelen’ LIP" (the green of the lindens) apparently struck the Ural editor as too plain and he ("or she", as Lance Gobbo used to say) replaced it with "zelen' (ULITS' (the green of the streets);
201: 5-82 "A РОТОМ, sovsem prosnuvshis'..." (and THEN, waking completely...) becomes "A LETOM, sovsem prosnyvshis'...” (and IN THE SUMMER, waking completely) [As if Fyodor were a Kodiak);
252: 5-108 ”Po NOCHAM on dolgo ne mog usnut’" (AT NIGHT he was unable to sleep for a long time) is oddly changed to "Po VECHERAM on dolgo ne mog usnut"' (IN THE EVENING he was unable to sleep for a long time). [Little wonder);
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293: 6-77 "EZHELI (a slightly antiquated "if') gets an editorial frown and is replaced with the regular "ESLI;
378: 6-119 "po DRUGOMU skatu" (ANOTHER slope) acquires an additional detail: "po KRUTOMU (STEEP slope)..
There are, as usual, innumerable changes of the original punctuation and spelling, and many botched translations of foreign phrases (thus, Mallarmé’s "Le sanglot dont j’étais..." is disfigured on 6-117, and "das kommt nicht in Frage", (223 : 5-94) is rendered "Eto prikhodit bez sprosu" (it comes without permission).
And on the terminal page, they have garbled PODAROK OTCHIZNE, to — no, I take this one back.
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VN in the USSR 1989 (Continuing)
by Stephen Jan Parker
Item: In the June 30 edition of the newspaper, Leningradskii universitet, under the heading "Nashi nravstvennye tsennosti: '...I slovo nepostizhimoe: domoi!"', Tat'iana Gagan reports on the poor state of the Nabokov family estate at Rozhdestveno — reciting the items which have been removed from it and the need now to reconstitute the Nabokov home-museum.
Item: On page 3 of Literaturnaia gazeta (8 March) is a homage to the Russian photographer, Karl Karlovich Bulla. Accompanying the item are several photographs. Below left is a photo of the elderly Leo Tolstoy (1908), taken at his estate, Yasnaya Polyana, and opposite him is a photo of the young Vladimir Nabokov (1907), looking at the lens, seated in a cane chair with large opened book (of butterflies?) on his lap.
Item: In the inaugural issue of the glossy magazine, Soviet Woman, which hit Moscow newsstands in September 1989, the first piece — preceding articles on the picking and preparation of mushrooms, the latest modes in Soviet fashion, and cut-out patterns for sewing and knitting — is the complete text of VN's story "Admiralteiskaia igla" [The Admiralty Spire], with an accompanying illustration by A. Baldin.
Item: In late October 1989 the visiting Riga [Latvia] Youth Theatre attempted to stage an unauthorized production of VN's "Waltz Invention" in Munich, West Germany. The plan was to perform the play in Russian while at the same time providing German surtitles for the German audience. The two scheduled performances were held as announced but, because the
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German text did not arrive on time for the performances, there were no audiences.
Continuing the list of 1989 VN publications in the USSR [prior listing in The Nabokovian 22 (spring 1989): 26-27]:
— Otchaianie [Despair], from the 1936 text, afterword by Ivan Tolstoi. Volga no. 1,2.
— Lolita, foreword by Viktor Erofeev. Moscow: Izvestiia; single-volume edition of 100,000 copies.
— Ania v strane chudes [VN's translation of Carroll's Alice in Wonderland]. Moscow: Detskaia literatura; single-volume edition of 100,000 copies.
— "Skazka" [A Nursery Tale, story]. Studencheskii meridian no. 5.
— "Admiralteiskaia igla" and "Vesna v Fial’te" [The Admiralty Spire and Spring in Fialta, stories]. Zvezda no. 5.
— "Admiralteiskaia igla", foreword by Oleg Mikhailov. Smena no. 14.
— VN’s forewords to Invitation to a Beheading, The Gift, and The Defense, tr. A. Gavrilov. Literaturnaia Rossiia no. 24 (16 June).
— Poems, with foreword by Mikhail Shapovalov. Prostor (Alma-Ata) no. 1: 122-128.
— Poems. Neva, no. 4.
— Poems, foreword by Vladimir Soloukhin. Moskva no. 6.
— Poems, foreword by Leonid Novak. Dal'nii vostok (Khabarovsk) no. 6.
Announced for 1989:
— Zashchita Luzhina, Priglashenie na kazn', fragmenty Drugykh beregov [The Defense, Invitation to a Beheading, fragments from Other Shores]. Kishinev: one-volume.
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— Izbrannye proizvedeniia [Selected Works, contents unknown], Moscow: Sovetskaia Rossiia; one volume, 399 pages, to be printed in 200,000 copies.
— Oblako, ozero, bashnia [Cloud, Castle, Lake]. Collection of navels and stories. Moscow: Moskovskii rabochii; one-volume, 703 pages; to be printed in 200,000 copies.
— Mashen'ka. Kатета Obskura [Mary. Laughter in the Dark], Saratov: Saratov State University; one volume, 224 pages; to be printed in 100,000 copies.
Announced for future publication, dates unknown:
—Podvig [Glory] in Oktiabr’.
— Korol’, dama, valet [King, Queen, Knave] in Volga. —Translation of Edward Albee's theatrical version of Lolita in Daugava.
—Blednyi ogon’[Pale Fire] in Iunost’.
— Lolita to be published by various regional publishing houses.
— Stories in Iunost’.
— Fragments from the Commentary to Eugene Onegin in Nashe nasledie.
— Collection of Works; Kniga publishers.
— Collection of Works; Knizhnaia palata publishers.
— Collection of Works; Raduga publishers.
— Collection of Poetry; Sovetskii pisatel’ publishers.
— Collection of Poetry; Sovremennik publishers.
— Collected Works in four volumes. To include almost all of the stories and all of the Russian
novels except Lolita. To be published in association with Ogonek in an edition of 1,700,000 copies.
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ANNOTATIONS & QUERIES
by Charles Nicol
[Material for this section should be sent to Charles Nicol, English Department, Indiana State University, Terre Haute, IN 47809. Deadlines for submission are March 1 for the Spring issue and September 1 for the Fall. Unless specifically stated otherwise, references to Nabokov’s works will be to the most recent hardcover U.S. editions.]
THREE DOUBLE-BOTTOMED ALLUSIONS IN PALE FIRE, ADA, PRIGLASHENIE NA КАZN’
That Nabokov is among the most allusive of novelists is nowadays known to every Russian schoolboy. What is not always noted is that reading Nabokovian allusions progresses in several stages. Having spotted one source the reader should go on to look for other potential subtexts, often tucked under the false bottom of the primary one. Such play with multiple sources constitutes a distinctive device, employed by VN for bringing together otherwise remote cultural contexts. Let us look at three examples that recently came our way.
1. Botkin
Readers of Pale Fire have learned to accept the possibility (since Mary McCarthy's pioneering analysis) that Kinbote may in fact be Botkin transposed. Subsequent critics have elaborated this guess (e.g. D. Barton Johnson in Worlds in Regression [Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1985] 70-72). And in a recent study
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Priscilla Meyer (Find What the Sailor Has Hidden [Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 1988] 115-17) argues that there is a Russian source for the name game: Botkin, V. P. (1811-1869), the art critic, translator, and aficionado of Shakespeare, among other things, whose essay on the origins of Elizabethan drama serves as a possible subtext throughout Pale Fire.
But shouldn't we notice that there exists another "V. Botkin"? It is in keeping with the tendency towards cultural synthesis in Pale Fire that Botkin is entered in Kinbote's Index as an "American Scholar of Russian descent" (306). The American folklorist B. [ = V in the Cyrillic alphabet] Botkin (1901-1975) edited in his lifetime, along with other similar collections, A Treasury of Southern Folklore (New York: Crown, 1949). Opening the Index of this voluminous work we come across a somewhat intriguing mention of "King, Charles" (765)—instantly recalling to all readers of Pale Fire Kinbote's assumed identity as the deposed Zemblan king, "Charles II," "Charles the Beloved," and so forth. On second look, the clue turns out to be a red herring, of course. The reference is rather to one of the many informants interviewed for Botkin's volume, "Charles King" from Cary, NC (Botkin 454).
One may conceive of VN coming across Botkin’s Treasury while assembling the intertextual maze in Pale Fire, but the "real" source of the Active Botkin is not here. Neither is it in Russia. It is precisely the effect of the Nabokovian strategy to subvert our search for authentic sources. In this sense, it may be just as well that Botkin also turns out to be an anagram of nikto ("no one" in Russian).
2. Reader Ride by
In the 1931 story "Usta k ustam" (First published 1956) VN had his hero misapply a Russian phrase: Mimo, chitatel', mimo. — otvetil Il'ia Borisovich (v
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smysle 'pal'tsem v nebo) (Vesna v Fialte 255). In the English version this is made more explicit: "'Mimo, chitatel', mimo — wrong, reader, wrong!’ answered Ilya Borisovich (misinterpreting Turgenev)” ("Lips to Lips," A Russian Beauty 50). And we remember the same phrase from Ada: "'Reader, ride by’ ('mimo, chitatel", as Turgenev wrote)" (43).
In an article on VN’s Russian subtexts (in Scando-Slavica 32 [1986], 57n) I queried the source for this allusion. The best suggestion so far — from Dr. Leszek Engelking, Warsaw — takes us to the conclusion of Turgenev's A Sportsman's Sketches (1847-51) where the reader is indeed said to "ride by": "Mimo beskonechnykh obozov, mimo postoialykh dvorikov s shipiashchim samovarom pod navesom ... edete vy [ = chitatel']" (Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisern, IV [Moscow: Akademiia nauk SSSR 1963]: 387). I.e., "By endless caravans of wagons, by small inns with hissing samovars under their lean-to roofs . . . you [ = the reader] ride."
We might let the matter rest here were it not for the French translation of Ada — revised by VN as the title page says—where this passage is enigmatically changed into ’"Passe, cavalier, passe,' comme disaient Tourgueniev et Yeats” (Ada, ou I'ardeur [Paris: Fayard 1975] 37). This enigma can now be solved. Yeats’ "Under Ben Bulben" (1938) contains the following directions to the cavalier passing the poet's grave: "Cast a cold eye / On life, on death. / Horseman, pass by!" (The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats [New York: Macmillan, 1951] 344). Here, the allusive ploy turns on an interplay between two essentially unrelated sources, in three languages. Whether it will come off depends on rather persistent back-and-forth flipping on the part of the reader, who — it is perhaps suggested — all too easily rides by such carefully planted instances.
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3. There, tam, là-bas
It is interesting to notice that VN pulled a similar trick—doubling an allusion via translation— in the Russian original of Invitation to a Beheading. The English version points towards the well known source from Baudelaire by playing on the refrain-like ("Là, tout n'est qu'ordre et beautè" (”L’Invitation au voyage," 1857, Oeuvres complètes de Charles Baudelaire, I [Paris: L. Conard, 1931]: 86-87):
There, tam, là-bas, the gaze of men glows with inimitable understanding; there the freaks that are tortured here walk unmolested; there time takes shape according to one’s pleasure, like a figured rug whose folds can be gathered in such a way that two designs will meet. (94)
But the Russian text discloses another source:
Tam-nepodrazhaemyi razumnost'iu svetitsia chelovecheskii vzgliad; tam na vole guliayut umuchennye tut chudaki; tam uremia skladyvaetsia po zhelaniyu, kak uzorchatyi kover, skladki kotorogo moshno tak sobrat' chtoby soprikosnulis' liubye dva uzora па nem. (Priglashenie na kazn' [Paris: Dom knigi] 84)
The same emphasis on tam ("there") contra tut ("here") is unexpectedly found in Rupert Brooke's poem "Heaven" (1913), depicting a piscine revery about the other world—but not so much in Brooke's own text as in the very liberal Russian rendering once made by VN. These lines appear in VN's 1922 essay on Brooke:
Tam budet slizistee sliz',
Vlazhnee vlaga, tina gushche...
Tam proplyvaet Vsemogushchii,
s khvostom, s cheshuichatoi dushoi,
blagoi, chudovishchno-bol’shoi,
izvechno tsarstvavshii nad ilom . . .
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. . .
Tam, pod vodoiu, v mukhe zhimoi
kryuchok zloveshchii ne sokryt. . .
Tam tina zolotom gorit,
tam — il prekrasnyi, il prechistyl
. . .
I tam, kuda vse ryb'i grezy
ustremleny skvoz' vlazhnyi svet,
tam, veryat ryby, sushi net...("Rupert Brooke," Grani 1 [1922] 215)
The excerpt from the actual Brooke poem reads: "Not here the appointed End, not here! / But somewhere, beyond Space and Time, / Is wetter water, slimier slime! / And there (they trust) there swimmeth One / Who swam ere rivers were begun, / Immense, of fishy form and mind, / Squamous, omnipotent, and kind: / And under that Almighty Fin, / The littlest fish may enter in. / Oh! never fly conceals a hook, / Fish say, in the Eternal Brook, / But more than mundane weeds are there, / And mud, celestially fair; / Fat caterpillars drift around, / And Paradisal grubs are found; / Unfading moths, immortal flies, / And the worm that never dies. / And in that Heaven of all their wish, / There shall be no more land, say fish" (The Poems of Rupert Brooke: A Centenary Edition [London: Black Swan, 1987] 115-16).
Again, two textual designs are made to meet across cultural and language boundaries. One would suspect that this is a strategy in VN's writing that merits pondering in future analyses devoted to the author.
— Pekka Tammi, Academy of Finland, Helsinki (Santa Barbara)
TRACKING McSWINE’S FIENDISH SPOOR: ROBERT BROWNING'S "SOLILOQUY OF THE SPANISH CLOISTER’ IN LOLITA
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While Humbert Humbert is impatiently waiting at Silver Spur Court for his languidly lolling Lo to be released from the Elphinstone hospital, he ironically alludes to Robert Browning's "Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister." The quote crops up as the ailing Humbert "totters back to bed" to lie "as quiet as a saint" (247):
Saint, forsooth! While brown Dolores
On a patch of sunny green
With Sanchicha reading stories
In a movie magazine—
These lines parody stanza four of Browning's poem:
Saint, forsooth!
While brown Dolores
Squats outside the convent bank
With Sanchicha, telling stories.
Steeping tresses in the tank.
Blue-black, lustrous, thick like horsehairs,
— Can’t I see his dead eye glow.
Bright as 'twere a Barbary corsair’s?
(That is, if he'd let it show!)
(Lionel Trilling and Harold Bloom, eds., Victorian Prose and Poetry [New York: Oxford UP, 19731)
A second allusion to the "Soliloquy" appears when Humbert discovers in a hotel register the "horribly cruel" fake name and address of 'Will Brown, Dolores, Colo." planted there by "Trapp" (i.e. Quilty). Although other critics have identified the source for this parody, they limit their identification to stanza four. While this is clearly the focus, the entire poem shares much in common with Lolita. I intend to show, through a comparison of characterization and imagery in Lolita and the Browning poem, that Nabokov intended much more with his allusion than a mere, parodic interlude. In fact, implicit in this study is a question that should be addressed by Nabokovian readers: How far should
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we go in searching for the significance of a seemingly localized allusion to the work as a whole?
The similarities in characterization between Lolita and the "Soliloquy" are particularly striking. Humbert Humbert, a renamed speaker, and the Spanish monk, an unnamed speaker, both voice their one-sided versions of hatred for a fellow "brother." In the "Soliloquy," this brother is literal, a fellow brother in a monastery, while in Lolita, Quilty Is a figurative brother of Humbert Humbert: they share the precarious hobby of pursuing the "fruit vert" (42); Humbert discloses that the "tone of his brain had affinities with my own" (251); they both are engaged in pseudo-literary works; and we are constantly reminded of the resemblance between the two men (Humbert "is said to resemble some crooner or actor chap on whom Lo has a crush" [45]; Quilty resembles Humbert's uncle [141, 248] or cousin [220, 239] Gustave; and the two men own similar clothing, in particular similar bathrobes).
It is also significant that Quilty is referred to as Humbert's brother in two distinct places, both references occurring after Lolita’s escape from the hospital, and after the allusion to the "Soliloquy." When Humbert is first informed of Lolita's escape with her "uncle, Mr. Gustave" (248), he storms the Elphinstone hospital lobby in an insane fit of rage, but is brought to his senses with the thought that "freedom for the moment is everything" (249), realizing that he must remain "free to trace the fugitive, free to destroy my brother." The second reference to Quilty as Humbert’s brother occurs only a few pages later, when Humber waylays "white-shoed Mary” Lore, a nurse from the hospital, on a "solitary street," and beseeches her to tell him who "Gratiano Forbeson" (one of Quilty's many aliases) is. She whispers, "He is your brother" (251).
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After carefully studying the images in Browning's "Soliloquy" and reading Lolita with them in mind, one may conjecture the following: that the central images found in the Browning poem can be traced throughout the narrative structure of Lolita—though some of them are masked. First, we have the "coincidence" of swine imagery. In the "Soliloquy," the speaker calls Brother Lawrence a "swine" twice: the first time occurs in stanza two, when the speaker thinks to himself, "What's the Greek name for Swine's Snout?"; the second time occurs in the final line of the poem, when the speaker loses what little vocal aplomb he has, and growls out, "G-r-r—you swine!" In Lolita, Humbert uses pig and swine imagery to refer surreptitiously to Clare Quilty, or "Quine the Swine" (34). Long before the reader has guessed the "real" identity of "detective Trapp"— Clare Quilty, the kidnapper of Lolita— Humbert intersperses swinish clues in the narrative. A simple rule of thumb for detective readers is: if in doubt as to the presence of Quilty in a scene, look for the sign of the swine. Thus, when Humbert and Lolita arrive at the Enchanted Hunters, they spot a "row of parked cars, like pigs at a trough" (119). When one of these cars (a "rubious" car, surely Quilty) pulls out, Humbert describes the driver as "broad- shouldered," and thus we realize that this man is indeed Quilty, for ’broad-shouldered" is an adjective frequently used by Humbert to describe Quilty (161, 2120, 230).
Pigs also abound in the lobby scene at the Enchanted Hunters. A "porcine” old man waits on them from behind the desk, and Humbert names him "Mr. Swine" (120). When the two hotel workers insist that Humbert and Lolita take a room with one double bed, Humbert says that "the two pink pigs were now among my best friends." These "pigs" are not narrative coincidences: Quilty is, in fact, present in this scene, although Humbert never explicitly identifies him (he himself is unaware of Quilty's presence at the time). The next morning, when Humbert is preparing to pay the bill, he sees a "lecherous fellow” (141) who resembles a little
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his "Swiss uncle Gustave" staring at Lolita (it is of course Quilty). The very next paragraph opens with another swine image, "pink pig Mr. Swoon."
When Humbert and Lolita take their second road trip, Lolita stealthily meets up with Quilty at a gas station, and Humbert describes him as a "broad and thickish man of my age,” ’’baldish," who resembles a "cousin of my father's in Switzerland . . . Gustave Trapp” (220). Humbert calls the man "Fatface" a few pages later (222). The next time Quilty is actually present in a scene is in chapter 21 (Book Two), when Lolita frolics in an overdone manner with a terrier, as Quilty, whose identity is still unknown to Humbert, looks on lustily. Humbert describes this bloated bather's reactions: "I saw . . . the man close his eyes and bare his small, horribly small and even, teeth" (239). This description of Quilty tallies with that of a pig or hog: similarly, the adjectives listed above— "broad," "thickish," "baldish," and "Fatface”—all conjure up a swine image. When Humbert again mentions the resemblance to "cousin" Trapp, he calls Trapp a "good swine" (240). Later, Humbert describes Quilty as "rather lardy," a "roly-poly Romeo" (245-46).
When Humbert encounters Lolita for the last time, he is finally informed of Quilty's real identity and asks "Where is the hog now?" (278). In the murder scene, Humbert gives Quilty a poem to read—which explains, in an extremely recondite manner, why Quilty is being shot — that includes a pig image: "leaving the hog to roll upon his new discomfort," and this time Humbert is the swine (302). And when "Clare the Impredictable" plays the piano, he is described in pig terms: "his jowls quivering . . . his nostrils emitting the soundtrack snorts which had been absent from our fight" (304). Last, Humbert's imagined mural in chapter 30 (Book One) contains a pig image, an intimation of the swine Quilty: "a choking snake sheathing whole the flayed trunk of a shoat" (136). A shoat is a young pig or hog, and curiously rhymes with
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Choate, from Clarence Choate Clark, Esq., who is mentioned in the Foreword (5).
Thus, Humbert repeatedly describes the object of his hatred, Quilty, as a swine; similarly, the speaker in the "Soliloquy" labels Brother Lawrence a "swine." But an interesting difference is that the speaker in the Browning poem is clearly the real swine, a blasphemous hypocrite who seems to lack redeeming qualities, and whose virulent hatred for Brother Lawrence seems totally unwarranted. On the other hand, Quilty seems a truly loathsome character, a decadent, dissipated artist who coaxes Lo away from Humbert and then disposes of her when she will not participate in his pornographic films.
Stanza four, the focal point of Nabokov’s parody, describes a scene very much like the one in chapter 21 (Book Two): Humbert watches as Quilty "lecherously” stares at Lolita's carnal antics; in the Browning poem, the speaker states that Brother Lawrence is staring with lascivious interest at "brown Dolores," who is washing her hair at the "Convent bank." The significance of the phrase "brown Dolores" is that brown is the color used most by Humbert to describe Lolita (45, 46, 81, 92, 113, 123, 127, 128, 135, 140, 149, 153, 169, 229), who is "Dolores on the dotted line" (11). (And of course, the poet's name is suggested here; Browning.) And as for hair-washing, Humbert remarks that although "I do love that intoxicating brown fragrance of hers, I really think she should wash her hair once in a while" (45). One obvious difference is that Browning's Dolores has black hair while Nabokov's has brown. "Sanchicha" is perhaps reminiscent of Annabel's "mother's Spanish maid" (17). But this Spanish name also reminds us of the Spanish motif that runs throughout Lolita. Besides the two Spanish names of Dolores and Lolita, Humbert frequently refers to his darling as his "Carmen," the name of a Spanish gypsy.
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There are other images that the poem and the novel have in common. When the speaker says with disdain in the "Soliloquy," ’What's the Greek name for Swine's Snout?" (answer: dandelion), we are reminded of the scene in which Humbert, awaiting the fateful return of the Haze woman from Camp Q., plows down the dandelions in the yard in a fit of nervous anticipation (74-75). The line in the poem "Marked with L. for our initial" bears an interesting resemblance to the ”L." that Humbert uses in his secret, damning journal to refer to the object of his lust, Lolita (42-57). And last, the line "He-he! There his lily snaps!" is doubly suggestive. First, the "He-he" suggests our "author's bizarre cognomen" (5), Humbert Humbert. Second, the lily is an important flower in Lolita, suggesting three possibilities when Humbert first sees Lolita, Charlotte Haze is showing him her lilies (42); the Easter lily is also a flower that suggests resurrection, and Lolita represents the "incarnation" of "Annabel Haze, alias Dolores Lee, alias Loleeta" (169); and because the lily is a funeral flower, it foreshadows the fatality of Humbert's love for Lolita (when Lo is in the hospital, H. H. brings her a bouquet, and she says "What gruesome funeral flowers").
An important narrative detail that reinforces the argument for the significance of the Browning allusion occurs when Humbert gives Lolita, recuperating in the Elphinstone hospital, a copy of Browning's Dramatic Works, a volume that would certainly contain the "Soliloquy” (244).
Now that we have examined the similarities and differences between the "Soliloquy" and Lolita in terms of characterization, imagery, and details, it is time to return to the previously posed question: how far should we go in searching for significance in this (or in any, for that matter) Nabokovian allusion? Perhaps this is an unanswerable question, but at the very least, these parallels between the Browning poem and Lolita enhance our appreciation of Nabokov’s
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subtle patterning. As part of the texture of allusion, the juxtaposition of the virulent speaker and Brother Lawrence with Humbert Humbert and Clare Quilty serves to widen the context of Humbert Humbert's solipsism in Lolita.
— Liza M. Kozlowski, Auburn University
SYBIL AND DISA IN PALE FIRE
In her well known essay "A Bolt from the Blue" (The Writing on the Wall [New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1969] 19), Mary McCarthy calls Pale Fire "a book of mirrors." She goes on to examine the reflective nature of the novel and points out several of the characters that in one way or another are reflections of each other. One set of reflecting characters that McCarthy does not deal with in detail is Sybil Shade and her counterpart. Queen Disa. Would-be commentator Kinbote steals John Shade's image of his wife to create a wife of his own. The reflection Kinbote sets up reflects in its own turn on the consequences of self-serving, paranoid madmen commentating on works of art.
There are several ways in which Kinbote creates Disa as a reflection of Sybil Shade. Early in the commentary Kinbote sees Sybil Shade wearing brown slacks that remind him of the "mandolin tights" that Disa used to wear (86). Later, Kinbote points out that the description of Sybil Shade in lines 261-67 is a "plain unretouched likeness" of Queen Disa (207). Not only does Disa look like Sybil, she also behaves like Sybil. Kinbote describes Disa as having "dreadful outbursts of temper" and door-slamming fits (207). This behavior mirrors Sybil's "flouncing out in a fit of temper" that Kinbote observes through the Shades' living- room window (23, 24). And Disa's appearing in Kinbote's dream as "rising from a distant sofa or going in search of the messenger" parallels Sybil's motions
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on the night Kinbote sees John Shade reading his poem to Sybil (209, 90).
Even Kinbote’s correspondence with Disa is a reflection of his unsatisfactory correspondence with Sybil after John's death. One of Disa's letters to Kinbote is grotesquely garbled by the Zemblan Extremists in translating it from English to Zemblan (205). Similarly, Sybil's letter asking Kinbote to allow Professor H. and Professor C. to со-edit the poem is obviously the result of the "misguided" widow's having fallen under the influence of Kinbote's rival Shadeans (18).
And finally, Kinbote gives himself an eternal image of his Queen, just as he says John Shade has an eternal image of Sybil that he has incorporated into the poem. According to Kinbote, the description of Sybil that John Shade includes in the poem is nothing like the Sybil that exists at the time the poem is being written. Rather, the description is of the "ethereal and eternal aspect" that Sybil retains in John's "kind noble heart" (207). And so Kinbote gives himself an image of Disa that "forever remained exactly as she looked on the day he had first told her he did not love her" (209).
Throughout his commentary, along with his game of mirrors, Kinbote also plays a game with names. He trades his real name, Botkin, for Kinbote; he contrasts mediocre glassmaker Jacob Gradus with the skilled mirror artist, Sudarg of Bokay, and he gives Karlist Odon his Extremist opposite, Nodo. Queen Disa's name has also been derived by playing with the name of her counterpart, Sybil. In the novel, Sybil is closely associated with France. Her last name, Irondell, is derived from the French hirondelle, for swallow, and she translates English poetry into French. Disa too is associated with France, living in a villa on the French Riviera. In her essay, McCarthy points out the connection between Sybil and the sibyls of the ancient world (30). A sibyl is also synonymous with a
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fortuneteller. Translated into French. Sybil Shade's other tongue, fortuneteller becomes diseuse de bonne aventure. Kinbote takes diseuse to arrive at Disa as the name for his Zemblan Queen. The Sybil-Diseuse-Disa connection is further solidified by Kinbote's criticism of Sybil's use of the the disent/prise rhyme in her translation of Donne (241).
Disa's complete name yields an even further significance in light of her reflection of Sybil Shade. Disa, Duchess of Payn, in the Zemblan realm of sexual deviants, is naturally a pun on sadism (and here, her name an anagram of it). The pun is played with when the one sentimental sentence in Disa's letter to Kinbote becomes, "I desire you and love when you flog me," in the Zemblan Extremists’ bungled translation (205). The pun is extended to the "Index” where Disa becomes the Duchess of "Great Payn and Mone" (306). But the pain of sadism in Disa's name is a joke that never materializes. Kinbote and Disa do not have a sadistic sexual relationship, or any sexual relationship at all for that matter.
While the pain of sadism is not a part of Kinbote’s relationship with Disa, there is another kind of pain that Kinbote does experience in connection with Disa. Kinbote describes a feeling that he experiences for Disa in his dreams that is a "love like an endless wringing of hands, like a blundering of the soul through an infinite maze of hopelessness and remorse" (210). In his dreams Kinbote is the "groaning dreamer" who recognizes that "an odious, undeserved, humiliating disaster had befallen" Disa (211).
Kinbote, who is tortured in his dreams by pangs of remorse for his unfaithfulness to Disa, also has good reason to suffer in his dreams for what he has done to Sybil Shade. Kinbote is really dreaming about Sybil Shade as her mirror image. Queen Disa. Kinbote unconsciously associates his dreams with Sybil Swallow (as Kinbote calls her elsewhere in the
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commentary) when he compares the recurrence of Disa's troubling image to that of "a bird of wonder in a tale for children" (173, 209). Kinbote is merciless in attacking Sybil at every opportunity in his commentary. He fills his pages with uncomplimentary descriptions of Sybil: "squatting on her hams in front of a flower bed” (86). In the note to line 579 he manages to squeeze in not only a devastating description of Sybil at his dinner table, but also the suggestion that John was having an affair with a coed (228- 30). And finally, in an undisguised effort for revenge, Kinbote maliciously rips into Sybil's translations with his unwarranted criticism (240-42).
In his note to line 549, Kinbote records a discussion that he had with John Shade that illuminates the connection between Kinbote's treatment of Sybil and his dream-pangs of remorse. In this note Kinbote and Shade are discussing death and sin. Kinbote refers to his childhood sins as peccadilloes. Shade responds that all the seven deadly sins are peccadilloes and that the only real sins are "murder, and the deliberate infliction of pain." This prompts Kinbote to ask if a man living in "absolute solitude" could not be a sinner. Shade imagines a few ways in which the solitary man could sin, one of which would be to "denounce an innocent man in a posthumous manifesto" (224, 225). Clearly, hidden away at the motor-lodge in Cedarn, Kinbote, the solitary man, has used his poison pen against Sybil to commit the very sin described by John Shade.
And so Kinbote suffers in his dreams of Disa, Duchess of Payn, for the sins he has committed against her reflection, Sybil Shade. The punishment for the other sin John Shade lists also arises at the end of Kinbote's interview with Disa on the terrace of her villa. There they discuss Odon's latest film and wonder how he will portray the hell where "the souls of murderers were tortured under a constant drizzle of drake venom" (213).
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In Kinbote's discussion with Shade, pity emerges as the "password," the quality that would prevent a man from committing a sin (225). Pity is one of the feelings about Disa that Kinbote says he does not have (209). In fact, any feelings of remorse are only present in Kinbote's dreams. These dream-feelings of remorse return to him in "subsiding undulations” that "flash and disturb him throughout the day, bringing back the pang and the richness-and then only the pang, and then only its glancing reflection—but not affecting at all his attitude towards the real Disa" (209). Kinbote's day-time self is not in the least troubled by dreams of remorse and shudders not at the pain he inflicts on Sybil in his travesty of a commentary on a poem.
— Janie McCauley-Myers, Indiana State University
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V.V. Nabokov in the USSR
(A Bibliography of Sources: 1922-1975)
by N. Artemenko-Tolstaia and E. Shikhovtsev
[The following listing was sent to the editor from the Soviet Union and is presented as received. Citations are transliterated; commentary has been translated from the Russian.]
Not pretending to exhaustive completeness in the scope of sources nor on any basis (the degree of importance of references, their geography, chronology, and so forth), the compilers of this bibliography established as their aim to include in it, as possible, all accessible Soviet publications where mention of the name V.V. Nabokov (1899-1977) is made in one way or another, or allusions to his works is contained (excluding, however, "linguistic" allusions without reference to the name Nabokov: neologisms from Lolita in the Large Russian-English Dictionary, the regular use of the term "krestoslovitsa" [crossword] since 1983 in the newspaper, Soviet Russia, and so forth). Also not included are the 219 references in the INION AN SSSR bibliographical index. New Foreign Literature in the General Sciences: Literary Criticism with 402 descriptions of Nabokov items (1954, 1957-1985). (The analogous index of Soviet literature for all years includes only two references to Nabokov — description #52 and #239 — and reference #138 under the rubric "Gorbunov-Cherdyntsev F. K." [!].) Nabokov publications in the
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magazine Amerika and other Russian language foreign publications officially disseminated in the USSR remain apart from the limits of regular references, such as, for example, the pre-revolutionary reviews of Stikhi [Poems] (1916).
The experience of working on this bibliography left the authors with the belief that further searching could (and should) give newer and newer references. In conclusion, the authors consider it their pleasant duty to express their gratitude to all those who have contributed directly or have published information which helped enrich the list of sources.
Мaу 1986
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________
1922
1. Anonymous. "Russkie izdaniia za granitsei.’' Pechat i revoliutstia, Book 2 (5): 389-390, April-June.
1923
la. Anonymous. "Russkie izdaniia za granitsei." Pechat i revoliutsiia. Book 1: 257, January. [Without reference to Nabokov's name, they mention his translation of Romain Rolland's Nikolka Persik]
2. Anonymous. "Sredi emigrantov." Pechat’ i revoliutsiia. Book 4: 301, June, July. [Without reference to Nabokov’s name they mention his translations of a number of romantics in the almanac Kubok, Berlin]
[42]
1924
3. Smirnov, N. "Solntse mertvykh. Zametki ob emigrantskoi literature." Krasnaia nov' Book 3 (20), April-May: 264-265.
1926
4. Volin, B. "Emigrantskaia poeziia." Na literaturnom postu no. 3 (April): 20; on page 21, caricature by E. Mandel'berga.
4a. Smirnov, N. "Na tom beregu. Zametki ob emigrantskoi literature." Novyi mir. Book 6 (July): 142.
1927
5. Bednyi, D. "Bilet na tot svet" [a parody on Sirin's poem, "A Ticket" in Rul' June 6, 19271. Pravda no. 158 (15 July): 2.
1928
6. Bednyi, D. Poln. sobr. soch., vol 11 (Moscow-Leningrad: Gos. izd.): 180-181.
1934
7. Petrov (Skitalets) S.G. [Speech at the 23rd session of the Congress (August 30) in the evening, under the chairmanship of A. Fadeev], In the book Vsesoiuzniyi s'ezd sovetskikh pisatelei 1934. Stenographic report. Moscow, GIKHL: 609.
[43]
1936
8. Griftsov, В. "R. Rollan v russklkh perevodakh." Lit gaz. no. 6 (569) 29 January; 2. [refers to his translation without reference to the name Nabokov]
1957
9. Liubimov, L. "Na chuzhbine." Novyi mir, no. 3 (March): 164, 166-167. [Abridged reprint; see #26, 30: corresponds to p. 164 in the original publication]
10?. In Triquarterly, Evanston, No. 17, 1970 E. Proffer mentions that around 1956 Lit. gaz. wrote about Lolita. In the complete collection of 1956 no such reference appears. Perhaps she had Orlov's article in mind (see #13).
1958
11. Dinershtein, E.A. "Maiakovskii v fevrale-oktiabre 1917." In Novoe о Maiakovskom (Literaturnoe nasledstvo, vol. 65, book 1) Moscow: Izd. AN SSSR: 544, 624. [Here and in the index Nabokov is mentioned; the index lists his father as V.V. Nabokov]
12. Masanov, I.F. Slovar' psevdonimov russkikh pisatelei, uchenykh i obshchestvennykh deiatelei v 4-x t; vol. 3 (podgotovlen k pechati IU. I. Masanovym) Moscow: Izd. Vsesoiuzn. knizhnoi palati: 114.
1959
13. Orlova, R. "Davaite razberemsia! (Chto nam dorogo v amerikanskoi literature)." Literatura i zhizn', no. 109 (September 11): 3.
[44]
14. Romen Rollan: Bio-bibliograficheskii ukazatel’ [Bibliografiiu sost. A.V. Paevskaia]. Moscow: Izd. Vsesoizn. Knizhhoi palati: 59; index 154, 165.
15?. In The Nabokovian (no. 13, 1984, p. 29) G. Barabtarlo mentions that "at the end of the 50s" in the journal Soviet Russia a response to Drugie berega [Other Shores] appeared, entitled "A Voice from Another Shore" and signed by a certain collective farmgirl. This item is not found in the complete edition of 1957-60.
1960
16?. (Gor'kii, A.M.) [Letter to R. Rolland of October 5, 1922]. In Perepiska A.M. Gor'kogo s zarubezhnym literatorami. Arkhiv A.M. Gor'kogo, Moscow: Izd AN SSSR: 335. [According to the sum total of indirect data, we may suppose that in the letter the conversation is about Nabokov’s translation of Nikolka Persik]
17. Masanov, I.F. Slovar' psevdonimov ... vol. 4: 329.
18. Orlova, R. "Ot Tome Soiera do rybaka Sant'iagoa." Kul’tura I zhizn' no. 6 (June): 43.
19? G. Barabtarlo (see #15) mentions that in 1959 or 1960 in one of the Soviet literary monthly magazines an article by R. Orlova appeared which was entirely devoted to Lolita. According to Letopisi zhurnal'nykh statei and other bibliographic sources such an article did not appear. Checking all the articles by R. Orlova, 1958-1961, no mention of Lolita appears.
1961
20. Erenburg, I.G. Liudi gody, zhizn'. Novyi mir no. 9 (September): 99, 147 [for reprint, see #27, 35).
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1962
21. Genri E. "Kto platit antikommunistam." Problemy mira i sotsializma no. 2 (February): 49, 52. [Henry's speech is about N.D. Nabokov, but in a Soviet bibliography the article was mistakenly noted as written by V.V. Nabokov!]
21a. Kandel', B.L. "Bibliografiia perevodov romana Geroi nashego vremeni na inostrannye iazyki." In M. Iu. Lermontov Geroi nashego vremeni. Ser. "Literatumye pamiatniki", Moscow: Izd. AN SSSR: 205.
22. Nekrasov, V. "Po obe storony okeana.” Novyi mir no. 11 (November): 131.
23. Samarin R. M. "Iskazhenie istorii sovetskoi literatury v literaturovedenii SShA." In Sovremennaia literatura SShA, Moscow: Izd. AN SSSR 214.
24. [omit]
1963
25. Istoriia russkoi literatury kontsa XlX-nachala XX veka. Bibliograficheskii ukazatel'. Ed. K. D. Muratov. Mos-Len; Izd. AN CCCR 48, 407; index 488.
26. Liubimov, L. Na chuzhbine. Mos: Sov. pisatel': 179-180.
27. Erenburg, I. Liudi, gody, zhizn'. Book. Moscow: Sov. pisatel': 43, 44, 169. [reprint of #20]
[46]
1964
28. Anonymous. "Evgenii Onegin v SShA." Za rubezhom no. 38 (19 September):30-31. [Translation of an article from Time magazine (USA), July 31, 1964; 60,62]
29. Anonymous. "Lermontov v zarubezhnykh izdaniiakh’." Inostrannaia literatura no. 10 (October): 273. [Without reference to the name Nabokov, they mention his translation of A Hero of Our Time, published in Canada in 1958]
29a. Sergeev, A. "Dzhon Apdaik. Telegrafnye stolby' i drugie stikhotvoreniia." Sovremennaia khudozhestvennaia literatura za rubezhom. Inf. biulleten’, izd. Vsesoiuzn. gos. biblioteki inostr. lit. [VGBIL], no. 7 (August): 55.
1965
30. Liubimov, L. Na chuzhbtne. Tashkent: 179-180 [reprint of #26]
30a. Orlova, R. "Dzhon Apdaik. Raznorodnaia proza." Sovremennaia khudozhestvennaia literatura za rubezhom. Inf. Biull, izd. VGBIL, no. 10 (December): 60.
31. Tvardovskii, A. "O Bunine." In Bunin, LA. Sobr. soch. v 9-ti t.,(Khud. lit.) vol 1: 29-30 [reprinted in #57, 63, 67, 68, 82, 153]
31a. Usenko, L. "Eshshe о Bunine." Don, Rostovskoe knizhnoe izd., no. 12 (December): 171.
1966
32. [omitted]
[47]
33. Lobovskaia, R. "Pushkin v angliiskoi kritike i perevodakh." In Sbornik studencheskikh rabot. Mosk. gos. instit. kultury. Number 5: 85.
34. Meisner, D.I. Mirazhi i deistvitel’nost'. Zapiski emigranta. Mos: APN: 217, 218, 230. [At the end of the book future publications in foreign languages are indicated; these publications did not appear]
35. Tarasenkov, A. Russkie poety XX veka: 1900-1955.Bibliografiia. Mos: Sov. pisatel': 27, 270; index 462.
36. Erenburg, I.G. Sobr. soch. v 9 t Mos: Khudozh. lit. Vol. 8:418, 496. [Reprint of #20]
1967
37. Braun, K. [symposium speech]. In Aktual'nye problemy teorii khudozhestvennogo perevoda. Materialy Vsesoiuznogo simpoziuma. Moscow. 25 February-2 March, 1966. Vol. 2: 157-164.
38. Levidova, I. "Roman-v tsentre sporov.” (from the pages of American university journals of 1966). Voprosy literatury 5 (May): 197-198.
1968
39. Golysheva, A.I. "Amerikanskaia pushkiniana 60-x godov.” In Pushkinskikh sbornik. Pskov: Izd. Pskovskogo gos. ped. inst. im. S. M. Kirova: 149-152, 163.
40. Golysheva, A.I. "Pushkin v Amerike." (Bibliograficheskaia zametka) (from a conference talk). Uchen. zapiski Pskovskogo gos. pedagogich. inst im. S.M. Kirova. Edition 28 (Lenizdat): 28.
[48]
41. Mikhailov, О. and L. Chertkov. "Nabokov, VI. VI." In Kratkaia literaturnaia entsiklopediia v 9 t. Mos: Sov. entsiklopedia, Vol 5: 60-61. [There is an abridged English translation by E. Proffer in Triquarterly, p. 255; see #101
1969
41a. Andreev, V. "Vozvrashchenie v zhizn'." Zvezda no. 5 (May): 122, 124; no. 6 (June): 99, 118, 132. [reprinted in #70a]
42. Begunov, IU. K. "Slovo о polku Igoreve v zarubezhnom literaturovedenii (kratkii obzor)." In Ot SLOVA О POLKU IGOREVE do TIKHOGO DONA. Sbornik statei k 90-letniiu N.K. Piksanova. Len: Nauka; 237, index 472.
43. (Bunina V. and N. Smirnova). "Pis’ma V.N. Buninoi." Publikatsiia i komentarii N.P. Smirnov. Novyi mir 3: 228-229.
44. Iezuitova, R.V. "Gruppa pushkinovedeniia Instituta russkoi literatury AN SSR (Leningrad) v 1966-1967 gg." In Vremennik Pushkinskoi komissii. 1966. Len: Nauka: 74.
45. Kataev, V.P. Kubik. Novyi mir, no.2 (February): 92, 93. [Reprinted in #61, 102, 223]
46. [omitted]
1970
47. Alekseev, M.P. (In the original, an article signed Editor. The authorship is revealed in #83). Introduction to the article by A.N. Egunov, "Nemetskaia 'Pikovaia dama'." In Vremennik
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Pushkinskoi komissii. 1967-1968. Len: Nauka: 111-112.
48. Demurova, N. "Golos i skripka." [regarding the translation of the eccentric fairy tales of Lewis Carroll]. In Masterstvo perevoda. Sb. 7. Mos: Sov. pisatel': 158-159.
49. Mur'ianov, M.F. "Magicheskii kristall." In Vremennik.... [see #47]: 92, 95.
50. Khaves, V. "Bibliografiia. ...Zarubezhnye strany. 1965-1966." In Masterstvo perevoda. Sb. 6. Mos: Sov. pistael': 522, 564-565.
51. Khaves, V. (with the participation of S. Vysotskii). "Bibliographia 1967. . . . Zarubezhnye strany. 1965-1966." In Masterstvo perevoda... [see #48]: 534.
52. Chernyshev, A. and V. Pronin. "Vladimir Nabokov, bvo-vtorykh i vo-pervykh..." Lit gaz no. 10 (4 March): 13. [There is an English synopsis in Samuel Schuman, VN: A Reference Guide (1979): 109-110]
53. Shor V. "Kola Briun'on na russkom iazke." In Masterstvo perevoda... (see #48]: 220, 225-232, 238-241, 243-244, 246, 248-251, 253-256, 264.
1971
54. Voznesenskii, A. "Fialki" [poems]. Smena 24 (December) 1. [Reprinted in #58, 86, 216a, 217]
55. Vluis, A.Z. "Satira." In Kratkaia literaturnaia entsiklopediia v 9-ti to. Mos: Sov. Entsik. Vol 6: 678.
56. Mashinskii, S. Khudozhestvennyi mir Gogolia. Mos: Prosvezhchenie: 499-501, index 509. [Reprinted in #140]
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56a. Muliarchik, A.S. "Amerikanskaia literatura 60-x godov." Osnovnye napravleniia khudozhestvennoi prozy. CShA- ekonomika, politika, ideologiia. no. 5 (May): 47.
57. Tvardovskii, A. Sob. soch. v 5-ti t. Mos: Khud. lit.:85-86 [see #31]
57a. SHCHerbina, V. "Printsip narodnost' v 'massovaia kul'tura." Lit gaz. no. 45, 4331 (3 November): 5.
1972
58. Voznesenskii, A. Vzgliad. Stikhi i poemy. Mos: Sov. pisatel’: 183. [reprinted in #54 in a new edition]
59. Evtushenko, E. "Ot zhelan'ia do zhelan'iu." In his book, Doroga nomer odin. Mos: Sovremennik: 166-167. [The usage of the name Lolita as a common noun] [Reprinted in #88, 146, 221]
60. Elistratova. A. A. Gogol' i problemy zapadnoevropeiskogo romana. Mos: Nauka: 4-8, 143-145; index 300.
61. Katisev, V.P. Sob. soch. v 9-ti t. Mos: Khud. lit. Vol. 9: 49S-500. [reprint of #45]
62. Mendel'son, M.O. Amerikanskaia satiricheskaia proza XX veka. Mos: Nauka: 353; index 365.
63. Tvardovskii, A. Stat'i i zametki о literature. Mos: Sov. pisatel': 64-65 [reprint of #31]
64. Chernyshev, A. and V. Pronin. "'Chistaia' kritika Endriu Filda." Inostrannata literatura no. 8 (August): 268
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1973
65. (Bunin I A.) "Pis'ma k M.V. Karamzinoi." In Ivan Bunin. (Literaturnoe nasledstavo, vol. 84, book 1) Mos: Nauka: 680.
65a. Zverev, A.M. "Modernistskaia literatura." In Osnovnye tendentsii razvitiia sovremennoi literatura SShA. Mos: Nauka: 75, 76, 82-83; index 394. [reprinted with abridgements in #135]
66. Mikhailov, O.N. "Put’ Bunina-khudozhnika." In Ivan Bunin... [see #65]: 37, 49, 50, 56. [Reprinted in #95, 186]
67. Tvardovskii, A. "O Bunine." In Bunin. I. Izbrannoe (Bib-ka vsemirn. lit., t. 140). Mos: Khud. 111:23-24. [Reprint of #31]
68. Tvardovskii, A. О literature. Mos: Sovremennik: 92-93. [Reprint of #31]
69. Shmidt, V.V. "Vstrechi v Tartu." In Ivan Bunin... [see #65], Book 5: 335; anonymous footnote on p. 338; index 540, 544 (index of names compiled by E.M. L’vov).
70. Hone, A.R. The Pattern of American Literature [in English; a textbook for students]. Tartu: Izd. Tartuskogo gos. un-ta: 75; index 104.
1974
70a. Andreev, V. Istoriia odnogo puteshestviia. Povesti. Mos: Sov. pis.: 249, 254, 270, 303, 329. [Reprint of #4la]
71. Anonymous. "Nabokov, VI. VI." In Bol'shaia Sov. Entsiklopediia. Mos: Sov. entsik. Vol. 17: 186. [Most
[52]
probably there is an English translation in the English edition of the Encyclopedia]
71a. Bitov, A. "Vybor natury. Portrety Otara Ioseliani i Erloma Akhvlediani na fone Tbilisi." Druzhba narodov no. 12 (December): 228. [Without mention of the name Nabokov, high evaluation is given him]
72. Bitov, A. "Vybor natury." In Ne schitaia shagi, putnik!. Mos: Izvestiia: 182. [Reprint of #7la]
73. Bursov, B. "Nechto о vkusakh i mneniiakh.” Lit. gaz. no. 9 (27 February): 5. [Reprinted in #94, 175]
74. Belza, I. (with S. Belza). "Doroga Pushkina na Zapad." In Russkaia literatura i ее zarubezhnye kritiki Sb. Statei. Mos: Khud. lit: 29.
75. Vatsuro, V.E. "Pushkin is Bomarshe. Zametki." In Pushkin. Issledovaniia i materialy. Len: Nauka: 210-211; index 269.
76. Grigor'ev, A.L. "A.S. Pushkin v zarubezhnom literaturovedenii." In Pushkin...[see #75]: 236-237; index 269.
77. Grombakh, S.M. "Premechaniia Pushkina k Evgeniiu Oneginu." Izv. AN SSSR. Ser. lit-ry i iazyka, Vol. 33, no. 3 (May-June): 222.
78. Zaborov, P.R. "Pushkin i Vol'ter." In Pushkin...[see #75]: 91; index 269.
79. Mikhailov, O. "Vemost'." Nash Sovremennik no. 1 (January): 154-156, 161-162. [Reprinted in #95 with changes]
80. Saitanov, VA.. "Pushkin v sovremennoi Anglii." Izv. An SSSR Ser. lit-ry i iazyka, Vol. 33, no. 3 (May June): 279.
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81. Serzhan, L.O. "'Elegiia' M. Debord-Val'mor-odin iz istochnikov pis'ma Tat'iany k Oneginu." Izv. AN SSSR. [see #801, vol. 33, no. 6 (November-December): 540, 548-550.
82. Tvardovskii, A. Proza. Stat'i. Pis'ma. Mos: Izvestiia: 580-581. [Reprint of #31)
83. Sharypkin, D.M. "Vokrug 'Pikovoi damy'." In Vremennik Pushkinskoi komissii 1972. Len: Nauka: 128, 130.
84. Etov, V. "Ideologicheskie pristrastiia i logika faktov (traditsii russkogo realisma v traktovke E. Simmonsa). In Russkaia literatura...[see #74]:294-295.
1975
85. Biblioteka russkoi poezii M.N. Rozanova. Bibliograficheskoe opisanie. Mos: Kniga: 183; Index 436.
86. Voznesenskii, A. Dubovyi list violonchel'nyi. Mos: Khud. lit.: [Reprint of #58]
87. Dodel'tsev, R.F. "Freid." In Kratkaia lit. entsiklopediia v 9-tl t. Mos: Sov. entsik., Vol 8: 140.
88. Evtushenko, E. Izbr. proizv. v 2-kh t. Mos: Khud. lit., Vol. 2: 322. [Reprint of #59]
89. Kushner, A. '"Proshchai, liubov!.,.'" [poems]. In his book Priamaia rech'. Stikhotvoreniia. Len: Lenizdat: 61 [Reprinted in #162]
90. Mendel'son, M. "Amerikanskii roman posle Khemingueia, Folknera, Steinbeka." Novyi mir no. 8 (August): 253. [Reprinted in #104, 206]
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91. Epshtein, M. "Kritika v konflikte s tvorchestvom. (Metodologicheskie tupiki sovremennoi byrzhuaznoi kritiki)." Voprosy literatury. no. 2 (February): 155.
[The bibliography, 1976 - 1985, will continue in the next issue of The Nabokovian.]
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ABSTRACT
THE PRESENCE OF PROUST IN ADA
by Pascal A. Ifri
(Abstract of a paper delivered at the Annual MLA Convention, New Orleans, December 1988)
Although Nabokov has been fascinated by Proust all his life, he has consistently denied having been influenced by him or any other writer. Yet, Proust lurks or appears openly in most of Nabokov's novels. Much has been written, for instance, about the numerous similarities between Lolita and A la Recherche du temps perdu. Likewise, The Gift, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight and Pale Fire contain a number of direct and indirect allusions to the French writer.
Nevertheless, it is in Ada that the largest number of references to Proust can be found. Early in the novel one learns that Van and Ada were avid and precocious Proust readers, which is confirmed by several remarks throughout the story about episodes of La Recherche and about Proust himself.
More importantly, it is possible to find numerous pages of Ada that deal at length with Proustian themes, such as jealousy and time, in a way that is meant to bring Proust immediately to mind. Such is the case of the passage relating Van's encounter with Ada and her friend Cordula de Prey near their school. Even before the meeting. Van, who supposes that Cordula is a lezbianochka, suspects a lesbian relationship between her and Ada, thus reminding the
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reader of the endless conjectures of Marcel, the hero of La Recherche, about the rapport between his lover Albertine and her girlfriend Andrée. Although Van claims that he did not feel "any Proustian pangs", the Proustian reference is there, so much so that in his conversation with the two girls, he cannot help bringing up "the Marcel and Albertine affair."
The same Proustian atmosphere again permeates Ada when Lucette, Ada's sister, pays a visit to Van at Kingston University. Indeed, Lucette then reveals to him in excruciating detail that she and Ada have been playing games in Arizona that sisters are not supposed to play together. This time, however. Van can hardly hide his rabid jealousy. In the course of their conversation, Proust is not mentioned, but he appears indirectly when they discuss Bergson, the French philosopher, who was Proust's cousin and whose theories on time and duration had deeply influenced La Recherche.
As for the passages on time in Ada, particularly Van’s essay on "The Texture of Time" (supposedly written in 1922, the year Proust died) which constitutes Part Four of the novel, they too are definitely influenced by the theories on the subject developed in La Recherche, even though the name of Proust appears only once. However, the narrator does mention three lectures he gave "on Mr Bergson’s time," which is interesting since Bergson heavily shaped Proust's ideas on the question. Van, like Marcel, is concerned with the difficulty of measuring and apprehending time, its subjective nature, and its relation to space. In addition, both protagonists strive, as Marcel puts it, to grasp "a fragment of time in the pure state", Marcel through the phenomenon of involuntary memory—in which past events are brought back by physical sensations —, and Van through what he calls "the Tender interval." Both Marcel and Van think that the recovery of the past or rather the immersion of the past into the present can help isolate "pure time."
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Van's debt to Marcel seems even more obvious when he deals with the past. Like his predecessor's, his story emphasizes and is based on the faculty that allows man to go back and forth in his past and to relive scenes which have happened years before. Van even experiences involuntary memory, as in this passage: "Destroy and forget! But a butterfly in the Park, an orchid in a shop window, would revive everything with a dazzling inward shock of despair." In addition, to say one word about the future, Van, after Marcel, insists that it can only be perceived as a continuation of the past and the present.
On a larger scale, this concern with time and particularly the past explains why Van wrote the chronicle of his relationship with Ada, exactly as it explains why Marcel decided to recount his life story. Through Art, both try to relive their past and to recapture and immortalize the paradise of their childhood and of their younger years. Indeed, Ardis is Van's Combray. This conception of art also leads to redemption for the heroes. As literature redeems and gives meaning to Marcel's life, for a long time idle and filled with grief and pain, Van’s book — which offers the same structure as Marcel's—clearly aims at alleviating his guilt over Lucette's death and maybe also over his relationship with his sister.
Washington University