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Re: Khodasevich and Nabokov
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Hafid Bouazza sends this link: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/fraz1.htm
JM: While I tried to find a short-story where sunset and natural landscape are transposed into a plaster-ceilinged light-bulbed room (a vague recollection from a story, published by Nabokov, in "The New Yorker") my desktop-search led me to an equally surprising, a still unread link, to Kodasevich and to Nabokovian "pranks."
Here it is: Alexander ZHOLKOVSKY. www.usc.edu/dept/las/sll/eng/ess/nabpuzzl.htm - or Russian Links Poem, Problem, Prank By Alexander Zholkovsky from the Nabokovian 47, Fall 2001. www.hunter.cuny.edu/classics/russian/russianlinks/ -
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excerpts:
Chapter Eleven of Nabokov's autobiographical text (Con?lusive Evidence, 1951; Speak, Memory, 1967), narrating the creation of his first poem at age 15, is absent from the 1954 authorial Russian version, Drugie berega [Other shores]. In that chapter, the memoirist portrays the gestation of his maiden verses with condescending/forgiving irony as he launches into a detailed formal analysis (which resulted in the piece's rejection by the New Yorker in 1948; Boyd, II: 686) of their slavish dependence on the 19th-century Russian poetic tradition. The theme of juvenile imitativeness is echoed by several other motifs... The affinities of Nabokov's "first poem" with Khodasevich's "Monkey" ...with the intention "to reconstruct the summer of 1914" ...The setting of Khodasevich's poem is a dacha near Moscow, that of Nabokov's "first poem," one near St. Petersburg. Thus the time and, in a sense, the place coincide, as does the monkey-cum-barrel-organ motif...Further parallels are, however, not traceable, since Nabokov's poem appears to have stayed "unwritten."[...] All that has been netted by Nabokov scholars are some similarities in the early poem "Dozhd' proletel" [The rain had flown], 1917 (Boyd, I: 108, Malikova: 769-70), to which one can add a monkey and a caged animal (tushkanchik [jerboa]) appearing in the poems "Obez'ianu v sarafane." (A monkey in a sarafan.), and "V zverintse" (At the Zoo) respectively, both published already in emigration, in 1923. ...In all likelihood, we are faced not just with a twist of "fictitiousness" in autobiographical writing (much discussed in Nabokov criticism, e. g. in John Burt Foster's book) but with a fully blown mystification: a covert appropriation-aping-of a fellow poet's work, and a "Monkey" at that. Chapter Eleven as a whole would then forfeit its claim to a documentary account of a first creative experience, ending up instead as an archly fictionalized tall tale (somewhat similar to Isaak Babel's Spravka/Moi pervyi gonorar [Answer to inquiry/My first fee], 1928/1937, where "aping" a friendly senior's work-in that case, Maxim Gorky's Childhood-also looms large). In fact, Chapter Eleven was originally published as a short story ("First Poem", Partisan Review, September 1949)." ...
[...] Nabokov not only datelines his "poem" a la Khodasevich, but also walks the talk of Fet.[...] The appropriation pulled on Khodasevich is especially noteworthy in the context of Dar [The Gift], 1936, with its doubles relationship between Fedor Godunov-Cherdyntsev (a fictionalized alter ego of Nabokov-Sirin) and Koncheev (a "Khodasevich")... The author's reference to a common pool of motifs being carefully distributed between Speak, Memory and The Gift explicitly erases the boundary separating his fiction and non-fiction; it echoes Nabokov's other statements to the same effect, e. g. his programmatic decision to write not a pure autobiography but "rather a new hybrid between that and a novel" (Nabokov, Selected Letters, 69; quoted by Foster, 179, and Malikova, 763).[...] Apparently, the parallel existence of two versions of his creative beginnings-autobiographical and novelistic (the authorized English translation of The Gift came out in 1963)-did not bother Nabokov as long as it took place in a foreign idiom or across the language barrier. It was their meeting on Russian linguistic soil that gave him psychological pause and that he had successfully avoided-until his posthumous Russian comeback. As for eluding Khodasevich's notice, the success of the appropriation was as complete as it was prompt. Just two years after his death and one year into Nabokov's American avatar, Nabokov published translations of several poems by Khodasevich, "The Monkey" among them! In other words, almost a decade before implicitly claiming that poem as his own in a fictitious non-fiction, he actually had penned it-in English [...]As stated by Berkeley Professor Robert P. Hughes, who reprinted and prefaced this and two other poetic translations by Nabokov from Khodasevich, along with the writer's 1973 translation of his own 1939 laudatory obituary/essay on Khodasevich (The Bitter Air of Exile: Russian Writers in the West, 1922-1972, ed. by Simon Karlinsky and Alfred Appel, Jr., Berkeley: UC Press, 1977: 52-87 [...] Boyd discusses the fictitiousness of the "first poem" (I, 108-9), lists The Bitter Air of Exile in his Bibliography, and mentions Nabokov's translations from Khodasevich in passing (II: 319), but never connects the three.
[...] Nabokov is known to have liked playing games on unsuspecting readers and later taunting them with their lack of discernment... Be that as it may, on solving a couple more Nabokov charades, one is tempted to ask the otherworldly VN whether he himself has noticed that hiding in the scholarly name of his Eupithecia Nabokovi is a "good monkey", Gr. eu-pithekos (which, to an extent, is also true of the bluntly English label Nabokov Pug, as it is from Gr. simos [flat-nosed, pug-nosed] that Lat. simia [monkey, ape] is derived). He must have, for that particular butterfly, the act of labeling, and the image of aping all converge on the closure of the poem celebrating VN's most cherished lepidopteral catch: "Dark pictures, thrones, the stones that pilgrims kiss,/ poems that take a thousand years to die/ but ape the immortality of this/ red label on a little butterfly ("A Discovery", 1943; in reciting this poem, Nabokov especially stressed the word "ape"). " ... Having joined the ranks of professional crackers of Nabokov's conundrums one also wonders whether a better tack would not have been to play on their arch composer the antithetical game of ignoring the challenge. After all, they are not age-old enigmas wrapped in mysteries of artistic creation, but rather, to continue paraphrasing the Churchillian description of Russia, hoaxes surrounded with riddles inside puzzles. Well-made, but man-made."
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JM: While I tried to find a short-story where sunset and natural landscape are transposed into a plaster-ceilinged light-bulbed room (a vague recollection from a story, published by Nabokov, in "The New Yorker") my desktop-search led me to an equally surprising, a still unread link, to Kodasevich and to Nabokovian "pranks."
Here it is: Alexander ZHOLKOVSKY. www.usc.edu/dept/las/sll/eng/ess/nabpuzzl.htm - or Russian Links Poem, Problem, Prank By Alexander Zholkovsky from the Nabokovian 47, Fall 2001. www.hunter.cuny.edu/classics/russian/russianlinks/ -
...........................................................................................................................................................................
excerpts:
Chapter Eleven of Nabokov's autobiographical text (Con?lusive Evidence, 1951; Speak, Memory, 1967), narrating the creation of his first poem at age 15, is absent from the 1954 authorial Russian version, Drugie berega [Other shores]. In that chapter, the memoirist portrays the gestation of his maiden verses with condescending/forgiving irony as he launches into a detailed formal analysis (which resulted in the piece's rejection by the New Yorker in 1948; Boyd, II: 686) of their slavish dependence on the 19th-century Russian poetic tradition. The theme of juvenile imitativeness is echoed by several other motifs... The affinities of Nabokov's "first poem" with Khodasevich's "Monkey" ...with the intention "to reconstruct the summer of 1914" ...The setting of Khodasevich's poem is a dacha near Moscow, that of Nabokov's "first poem," one near St. Petersburg. Thus the time and, in a sense, the place coincide, as does the monkey-cum-barrel-organ motif...Further parallels are, however, not traceable, since Nabokov's poem appears to have stayed "unwritten."[...] All that has been netted by Nabokov scholars are some similarities in the early poem "Dozhd' proletel" [The rain had flown], 1917 (Boyd, I: 108, Malikova: 769-70), to which one can add a monkey and a caged animal (tushkanchik [jerboa]) appearing in the poems "Obez'ianu v sarafane." (A monkey in a sarafan.), and "V zverintse" (At the Zoo) respectively, both published already in emigration, in 1923. ...In all likelihood, we are faced not just with a twist of "fictitiousness" in autobiographical writing (much discussed in Nabokov criticism, e. g. in John Burt Foster's book) but with a fully blown mystification: a covert appropriation-aping-of a fellow poet's work, and a "Monkey" at that. Chapter Eleven as a whole would then forfeit its claim to a documentary account of a first creative experience, ending up instead as an archly fictionalized tall tale (somewhat similar to Isaak Babel's Spravka/Moi pervyi gonorar [Answer to inquiry/My first fee], 1928/1937, where "aping" a friendly senior's work-in that case, Maxim Gorky's Childhood-also looms large). In fact, Chapter Eleven was originally published as a short story ("First Poem", Partisan Review, September 1949)." ...
[...] Nabokov not only datelines his "poem" a la Khodasevich, but also walks the talk of Fet.[...] The appropriation pulled on Khodasevich is especially noteworthy in the context of Dar [The Gift], 1936, with its doubles relationship between Fedor Godunov-Cherdyntsev (a fictionalized alter ego of Nabokov-Sirin) and Koncheev (a "Khodasevich")... The author's reference to a common pool of motifs being carefully distributed between Speak, Memory and The Gift explicitly erases the boundary separating his fiction and non-fiction; it echoes Nabokov's other statements to the same effect, e. g. his programmatic decision to write not a pure autobiography but "rather a new hybrid between that and a novel" (Nabokov, Selected Letters, 69; quoted by Foster, 179, and Malikova, 763).[...] Apparently, the parallel existence of two versions of his creative beginnings-autobiographical and novelistic (the authorized English translation of The Gift came out in 1963)-did not bother Nabokov as long as it took place in a foreign idiom or across the language barrier. It was their meeting on Russian linguistic soil that gave him psychological pause and that he had successfully avoided-until his posthumous Russian comeback. As for eluding Khodasevich's notice, the success of the appropriation was as complete as it was prompt. Just two years after his death and one year into Nabokov's American avatar, Nabokov published translations of several poems by Khodasevich, "The Monkey" among them! In other words, almost a decade before implicitly claiming that poem as his own in a fictitious non-fiction, he actually had penned it-in English [...]As stated by Berkeley Professor Robert P. Hughes, who reprinted and prefaced this and two other poetic translations by Nabokov from Khodasevich, along with the writer's 1973 translation of his own 1939 laudatory obituary/essay on Khodasevich (The Bitter Air of Exile: Russian Writers in the West, 1922-1972, ed. by Simon Karlinsky and Alfred Appel, Jr., Berkeley: UC Press, 1977: 52-87 [...] Boyd discusses the fictitiousness of the "first poem" (I, 108-9), lists The Bitter Air of Exile in his Bibliography, and mentions Nabokov's translations from Khodasevich in passing (II: 319), but never connects the three.
[...] Nabokov is known to have liked playing games on unsuspecting readers and later taunting them with their lack of discernment... Be that as it may, on solving a couple more Nabokov charades, one is tempted to ask the otherworldly VN whether he himself has noticed that hiding in the scholarly name of his Eupithecia Nabokovi is a "good monkey", Gr. eu-pithekos (which, to an extent, is also true of the bluntly English label Nabokov Pug, as it is from Gr. simos [flat-nosed, pug-nosed] that Lat. simia [monkey, ape] is derived). He must have, for that particular butterfly, the act of labeling, and the image of aping all converge on the closure of the poem celebrating VN's most cherished lepidopteral catch: "Dark pictures, thrones, the stones that pilgrims kiss,/ poems that take a thousand years to die/ but ape the immortality of this/ red label on a little butterfly ("A Discovery", 1943; in reciting this poem, Nabokov especially stressed the word "ape"). " ... Having joined the ranks of professional crackers of Nabokov's conundrums one also wonders whether a better tack would not have been to play on their arch composer the antithetical game of ignoring the challenge. After all, they are not age-old enigmas wrapped in mysteries of artistic creation, but rather, to continue paraphrasing the Churchillian description of Russia, hoaxes surrounded with riddles inside puzzles. Well-made, but man-made."
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/