Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0016824, Mon, 28 Jul 2008 18:04:18 +0100

Subject
Re: MINI VN SIGHTING
Date
Body
> From Sunday Times Culture supplement July 6 2008.
>
> Christopher Hart is reviewing Owen Matthews' STALIN'S CHILDREN: Three
> Generations of Love and War (Bloomsbury Press)
>
> Owen relates the cruel travails of his mother Lyudmila (Mila) Bibikov: born in
> Russia 1934; she survives the standard horrors: father* & mother disappear
> into the gulags when Mila is 3, her sister 11; finally allowed to leave CCCP
> in 1969, marries Russophile Mervyn Matthews and settles in London.
>
> * Wrenching irony: Mila's father was one of those many loyal Commisars,
> "purged for no apparent reason."
>
> Owen writes of Mila:
>
> " ... still Russian to her fingertips ... ferociously witty and intelligent
> ... pronouncing her opinions with unfashionable certainty ... discussing books
> with passion, scorning Nabokov, praising Kharms, utterly at home in the dense
> kasbah of her country's literature ... " [my bold emphasis]
>
> From the little I know of Daniil Kharms (I find only 3 passing mentions on the
> Nabokov-archives) -- his physical sufferings (eventual death by starvation)
> under Stalin matching, or exceeding, those of the Bibikov family -- I think I
> can understand her opinions. I'll await reading Owen's book before passing
> further comment. Mila is clearly wrong if she's "blaming" VN for escaping the
> fates of her parents, Kharms, and the countless artist-victims of Soviet
> Terror. Perhaps her "scorn" for VN is along the oft-debated lines: would a
> more outspoken "didactic/polemical/propagandist" approach have made VN's
> novels more "anti-Sovietically effective?"
>
> What makes the debate so intractable for Brits like me born in the late-1920s:
> the bitter choice between communism and fascism, as it then seemed to us,
> under a German blitz, sharing a life-death struggle with our Red Army allies!
>
> Stan Kelly-Bootle
>
>
>
>
>
>


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