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[NABOKOV-L] Hilary Corke TNR on "The Gift"
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One more article retrieved by Jim Twiggs, this one available at the Source URL: http://www.tnr.com/article/books-and-arts/nabokov-old-news-ol (July 6,1963)
Hilary Corke "Nabokov: Old News from Old Prospero" writes about the recently translated "The Gift" by Vladimir Nabokov
Nabokov's The Gift "is his last Russian romance... and dates from 1937. Here at last it is, translated by Michael Scammell with the close cooperation of the author.
Its form is pseudo-autobiography. The year is in the mid-1920's. The hero, Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev, is a young aristocratic emigre living in Berlin--just like, at that date, Mr. Nabokov. He writes poems, dreams of Russian literature and of his lost Russian estates, composes chess-problems, is a passionate lepidopterist--just like, at that date, Mr. Nabokov. Furthermore he is referred to, throughout the book, alternatively as he and I, a typical mirror--conjuring trick of this author, which further serves to confuse the writer with the written-of. But we are firmly warned, in a foreword, off any temptation to identify Godunov-Cherdyntsev with his creator."
Corke reacts to the warning against identifying the novel's hero with Nabokov and describes the challenge of writing a pseudo-autobiography since "In "the novel" events are shaped, patterned, bent; and the interest is in the design," and composed from "imagined or imitated reality." She notes that in "autobiography, we do not expect this design...the interest here is not in the pattern of the pieces but in the fact that they happened. The demand upon us is that it is true." In opposition to this kind of aesthetic design in a pseudo-autobiography, its author has "to lend it authenticity...that life-like shapelessness and wealth of odd detail" while these systematic recordings will "lose half of their attractiveness from the simple fact that the reader knows that they haven't happened." and they are a "mere invention." For her, the difficulty "is increased by the fact that Mr. Nabokov has, in Speak Memory, written a real autobiography of himself at this very period - and one of the best of modern autobiographies it is too....The harsh, fantastic, unpredictable light of life itself breaks in upon the mist of romance and disperses it."
Hilary Corke believes that "one of the many resplendent virtues of [Nabokv's] books is that they draw you into a continual debate with the author." and she can imagine, at this point, Nabokov's answer to he criticism: " 'You are mistaken,' he says: 'it has always been my particular concern to show that the distinction between 'novel' and 'life' is a false one" He will inform her that "the incredible leitmotifs of life, the way that something apparently (but only apparently) irrelevant...may crop up again and again at the nodal points of a career." At this point, Corke will retort about the "fascination of Speak Memory" by indicating that there it is "the manner in which the raw material of a lived life has been transformed into something with the exactness and shape of a classical novel." For her, the "weakness of The Gift is that what, being a fiction...,has been deliberately loosened into a pale ghost of a life." She sees more obstacles in that, as an autobiography, "The Gift is an imagined record of thought--the story of the development of an invented mind." because she considers Fyodor "a less fascinating character than his inventor." For her, the novel's hero is "as the author says, not Fyodor but Russian Literature." ie, "Chapter One is concerned with Fyodor's poems, which are liberally quoted. (Who wrote them, Fyodor or Nabokov?) Chapter Two is in the mood of Pushkin, Chapter Three in that of Gogol. Chapter Four is simply ...Chernyshevski, a 19thcentury liberal...And Chapter Five and last ties up the loose ends and discusses the book that Fyodor will 'write some day--which is The Gift itself." Cork believes that "for the English-speaking world. The Gift is Russian in a tremendously private way. It conveys the strongest sense of being written in Russian for Russians, and Outsiders Please Keep Out...it is intensely provincial: its author has as yet scarcely stepped out ...on to the [West]...let alone on to the world, stage." She things that chapter four is "practically unreadable" for the average West-European and that "one has the sense of eavesdropping...but alas! one does not know the language." She is disturbed by the knowledge that half of Chernyshevsky's "life is spoof, describing an old age that Chernyshevski...never had. All this, and then the imaginary notices of the book in, I presume, the imitated styles of various reviewers in the contemporary emigre press, and the total effect is approximately that of, say, a brilliantly witty, deadpan account of Queen Victoria's marriage to Disraeli, upon an intelligent Turk. An 80-percent efficiency-loss, at the most conservative estimate."
On a first impulse she states that "with The Gift the Nabokov honeymoon is over." but she adds:"let us be careful. The point is not the honeymoon, but the possibility of the enduring and happy marriage. We ensure that by making certain that the excellences are never taken for granted. In a sense the comparative weakness of much of the subject matter of The Gift facilitates this duty: it makes it all the easier to perceive the peculiar and permanent qualities of the style (whereas in Lolita. say, we were much busier attending to the thing said)...First, the glittering English, all this author's own... Nabokov has invented a sort of English that never before existed. When we read as snug as a thug in a jug or doom does not jam or that Pnin was ideally bald, we have a sensation, an insight, of what it would be like to be linguistically Russian. One is presented with the illusion that one has at some time learned that desperately unlearned language. Never for one second does the style of Conrad admit one into the experience of thinking Polish..." Corke argues that "we are granted the gift of becoming Nabokov, of whom his Russianness is only a single aspect. Above all he is the conjuror, the literary illusionist. He constructs his novels as though they were chess problems, with unpinning, pawns to knights, and smothered mates" or his "repeated and strongly characteristic trick--the metaphorical animation of the inanimate." ( examples quoted by her: "The rain began coming down faster: someone had suddenly tilted the sky.";"As the light got stronger or died away, all the shadows in the forest breathed and did push-ups"; "The yawn begun by a woman in the lighted windows of the first car [of a moving train] was completed by another woman--in the last one." For the reviewer "there is the splendidly uncompromising nature of his contempt which would be a vice in almost any other writer...because, one feels, his scorn is always a proper reaction to an external and dispassionately observed thing, and not a mere cast of mind. It is simply that he is merciless to all that is stupid and vulgar and wicked--the antithesis of the type who always manages to "understand." Add to this a profound and recherché sense of humor...and we have the savage portrayer par excellence of all that is farcical in the awful and horrible...When we add it all up--the brilliance, the brains, the scorn, the magicianship, the misanthropy (and I would like to add, the profound uncommon-sense) of Nabokov, we see that there is only one thing to do: cast him as Prospero." Corke reminds the reader that the author has rescued, and used again in its original form" the same material encountered "in the superb Speak Memory. And, of the purely fictitious part--the passages about Fyodor's father, which were much the most moving things in The Gift and culminated in perhaps the most memorably hallucinating account of a dream in any literature--have also been extracted recently, and with the addition of some new material been published as a short story. The Lyre, in The New Yorker (April 13)."
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Hilary Corke "Nabokov: Old News from Old Prospero" writes about the recently translated "The Gift" by Vladimir Nabokov
Nabokov's The Gift "is his last Russian romance... and dates from 1937. Here at last it is, translated by Michael Scammell with the close cooperation of the author.
Its form is pseudo-autobiography. The year is in the mid-1920's. The hero, Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev, is a young aristocratic emigre living in Berlin--just like, at that date, Mr. Nabokov. He writes poems, dreams of Russian literature and of his lost Russian estates, composes chess-problems, is a passionate lepidopterist--just like, at that date, Mr. Nabokov. Furthermore he is referred to, throughout the book, alternatively as he and I, a typical mirror--conjuring trick of this author, which further serves to confuse the writer with the written-of. But we are firmly warned, in a foreword, off any temptation to identify Godunov-Cherdyntsev with his creator."
Corke reacts to the warning against identifying the novel's hero with Nabokov and describes the challenge of writing a pseudo-autobiography since "In "the novel" events are shaped, patterned, bent; and the interest is in the design," and composed from "imagined or imitated reality." She notes that in "autobiography, we do not expect this design...the interest here is not in the pattern of the pieces but in the fact that they happened. The demand upon us is that it is true." In opposition to this kind of aesthetic design in a pseudo-autobiography, its author has "to lend it authenticity...that life-like shapelessness and wealth of odd detail" while these systematic recordings will "lose half of their attractiveness from the simple fact that the reader knows that they haven't happened." and they are a "mere invention." For her, the difficulty "is increased by the fact that Mr. Nabokov has, in Speak Memory, written a real autobiography of himself at this very period - and one of the best of modern autobiographies it is too....The harsh, fantastic, unpredictable light of life itself breaks in upon the mist of romance and disperses it."
Hilary Corke believes that "one of the many resplendent virtues of [Nabokv's] books is that they draw you into a continual debate with the author." and she can imagine, at this point, Nabokov's answer to he criticism: " 'You are mistaken,' he says: 'it has always been my particular concern to show that the distinction between 'novel' and 'life' is a false one" He will inform her that "the incredible leitmotifs of life, the way that something apparently (but only apparently) irrelevant...may crop up again and again at the nodal points of a career." At this point, Corke will retort about the "fascination of Speak Memory" by indicating that there it is "the manner in which the raw material of a lived life has been transformed into something with the exactness and shape of a classical novel." For her, the "weakness of The Gift is that what, being a fiction...,has been deliberately loosened into a pale ghost of a life." She sees more obstacles in that, as an autobiography, "The Gift is an imagined record of thought--the story of the development of an invented mind." because she considers Fyodor "a less fascinating character than his inventor." For her, the novel's hero is "as the author says, not Fyodor but Russian Literature." ie, "Chapter One is concerned with Fyodor's poems, which are liberally quoted. (Who wrote them, Fyodor or Nabokov?) Chapter Two is in the mood of Pushkin, Chapter Three in that of Gogol. Chapter Four is simply ...Chernyshevski, a 19thcentury liberal...And Chapter Five and last ties up the loose ends and discusses the book that Fyodor will 'write some day--which is The Gift itself." Cork believes that "for the English-speaking world. The Gift is Russian in a tremendously private way. It conveys the strongest sense of being written in Russian for Russians, and Outsiders Please Keep Out...it is intensely provincial: its author has as yet scarcely stepped out ...on to the [West]...let alone on to the world, stage." She things that chapter four is "practically unreadable" for the average West-European and that "one has the sense of eavesdropping...but alas! one does not know the language." She is disturbed by the knowledge that half of Chernyshevsky's "life is spoof, describing an old age that Chernyshevski...never had. All this, and then the imaginary notices of the book in, I presume, the imitated styles of various reviewers in the contemporary emigre press, and the total effect is approximately that of, say, a brilliantly witty, deadpan account of Queen Victoria's marriage to Disraeli, upon an intelligent Turk. An 80-percent efficiency-loss, at the most conservative estimate."
On a first impulse she states that "with The Gift the Nabokov honeymoon is over." but she adds:"let us be careful. The point is not the honeymoon, but the possibility of the enduring and happy marriage. We ensure that by making certain that the excellences are never taken for granted. In a sense the comparative weakness of much of the subject matter of The Gift facilitates this duty: it makes it all the easier to perceive the peculiar and permanent qualities of the style (whereas in Lolita. say, we were much busier attending to the thing said)...First, the glittering English, all this author's own... Nabokov has invented a sort of English that never before existed. When we read as snug as a thug in a jug or doom does not jam or that Pnin was ideally bald, we have a sensation, an insight, of what it would be like to be linguistically Russian. One is presented with the illusion that one has at some time learned that desperately unlearned language. Never for one second does the style of Conrad admit one into the experience of thinking Polish..." Corke argues that "we are granted the gift of becoming Nabokov, of whom his Russianness is only a single aspect. Above all he is the conjuror, the literary illusionist. He constructs his novels as though they were chess problems, with unpinning, pawns to knights, and smothered mates" or his "repeated and strongly characteristic trick--the metaphorical animation of the inanimate." ( examples quoted by her: "The rain began coming down faster: someone had suddenly tilted the sky.";"As the light got stronger or died away, all the shadows in the forest breathed and did push-ups"; "The yawn begun by a woman in the lighted windows of the first car [of a moving train] was completed by another woman--in the last one." For the reviewer "there is the splendidly uncompromising nature of his contempt which would be a vice in almost any other writer...because, one feels, his scorn is always a proper reaction to an external and dispassionately observed thing, and not a mere cast of mind. It is simply that he is merciless to all that is stupid and vulgar and wicked--the antithesis of the type who always manages to "understand." Add to this a profound and recherché sense of humor...and we have the savage portrayer par excellence of all that is farcical in the awful and horrible...When we add it all up--the brilliance, the brains, the scorn, the magicianship, the misanthropy (and I would like to add, the profound uncommon-sense) of Nabokov, we see that there is only one thing to do: cast him as Prospero." Corke reminds the reader that the author has rescued, and used again in its original form" the same material encountered "in the superb Speak Memory. And, of the purely fictitious part--the passages about Fyodor's father, which were much the most moving things in The Gift and culminated in perhaps the most memorably hallucinating account of a dream in any literature--have also been extracted recently, and with the addition of some new material been published as a short story. The Lyre, in The New Yorker (April 13)."
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/