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Re: Agheyev's novel: should it interest the List
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DN:...such a stupefyingly inane canard as the attribution of Levy-Agheyev's Novel with Cocaine to Vladimir Nabokov's pen ... As for my father, he wrote on many themes, and his works are peopled by beings of many kinds, from spies to dwarves to Siamese twins, most of them totally imagined...Poor, pathetic Struve! Perhaps the strangest thing of all is that this obsessed nincompoop, with his churchly fixations and his unacademic methods, should be any kind of professor at all, much less an assistant at the Sorbonne. The only reason to exhume this decomposing canard was the recent re-publication of the book in Russia with a long essay by Struve...But suspicion has sneaked out that some of the neo-capitalists of the ex-Soyuz were more disingenuous than naïve...the profits to be made from whatever use they could improvise for the Nabokov name....
EDNote: In a rare and fleeting spare moment today I attempted to pull up some of the articles demonstrating VN's non-authorship...
JA: "The Enchanter": I seem to recall some of the same stuff about how bad you thought the style of Novel With Cocain was itself precluding the possibility of N.'s authorship, though your critical snipes seem funnier here than in the intro or afterward I recall having read awhile back.
JM: Our ED's "rare and fleeting spare moment" touched my heart. This is why I separated a wealth of spare moments to get snippets from DN's "On a Book Entitled The Enchanter" and follow JA's recollections about the issue:
"The timing of this public debut of The Enchanter is not without an amusing and instructive coincidental sidelight. In 1985, in Paris, there began an energetic one-man campaign to attribute to Vladimir Nabokov a pseudonymous, quite un-Nabokovian book from the mid-thirties entiled Novel with Cocaine.[...]Falling as it does whithin the very limited realm of rediscovered Nabokoviana, The Enchanter is a most appropriate example of the strkingly original prose Nabokov-Sirin produced in his most mature - and final- years as a n ovelist in his mother tongue[...] For anyone who may harbor lingering doubts about the authorship of the other book, a quick comparison of its substance and style with those of The Enchanter should suffice to put the final round of shot into this moribund canard[...] A brief account of this bazarre affair is, nevertheless, perhaps in order[...] To support his thesis, Struve adduced sentences from Novel with Cocaine that, according to him, are "typical of Nabokov." Struve's assertions were taken up in a letter to the (London) Times Literary Supplement, 9 August 1985, from Julian Graffy of the University of London, who referrred to Struve's "detailed analysis of the secondary themes, structural devices, semantic fields[whatever those may be] and metaphors" of N with C, all of which are found, on the basis of repeated quotation and comparison...to be quintessentially Nabokovian"[...]One look at Agheyev's style precules the need to rebut the rest of Struve's arguments[...] In his 1986 book Field ventilates the hypothesis that Novel with Cocaine might have been a deliberate mystification by Nabokov or by someone else. He ends by affirming, nonetheless, that "it can be said with absolute certainty...that there is some link between the work of Agheyev and Sirin," because there happens to be a partial assonance between the names of Agheyev's character Sinat and Nabokov's Cincinnatus[... a...]connection that falls into the same category of scholarship as, say, Field's overblown claptrap[...] But let us leave Field among his ruins [...] to bury the Agheyev matter[...]
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EDNote: In a rare and fleeting spare moment today I attempted to pull up some of the articles demonstrating VN's non-authorship...
JA: "The Enchanter": I seem to recall some of the same stuff about how bad you thought the style of Novel With Cocain was itself precluding the possibility of N.'s authorship, though your critical snipes seem funnier here than in the intro or afterward I recall having read awhile back.
JM: Our ED's "rare and fleeting spare moment" touched my heart. This is why I separated a wealth of spare moments to get snippets from DN's "On a Book Entitled The Enchanter" and follow JA's recollections about the issue:
"The timing of this public debut of The Enchanter is not without an amusing and instructive coincidental sidelight. In 1985, in Paris, there began an energetic one-man campaign to attribute to Vladimir Nabokov a pseudonymous, quite un-Nabokovian book from the mid-thirties entiled Novel with Cocaine.[...]Falling as it does whithin the very limited realm of rediscovered Nabokoviana, The Enchanter is a most appropriate example of the strkingly original prose Nabokov-Sirin produced in his most mature - and final- years as a n ovelist in his mother tongue[...] For anyone who may harbor lingering doubts about the authorship of the other book, a quick comparison of its substance and style with those of The Enchanter should suffice to put the final round of shot into this moribund canard[...] A brief account of this bazarre affair is, nevertheless, perhaps in order[...] To support his thesis, Struve adduced sentences from Novel with Cocaine that, according to him, are "typical of Nabokov." Struve's assertions were taken up in a letter to the (London) Times Literary Supplement, 9 August 1985, from Julian Graffy of the University of London, who referrred to Struve's "detailed analysis of the secondary themes, structural devices, semantic fields[whatever those may be] and metaphors" of N with C, all of which are found, on the basis of repeated quotation and comparison...to be quintessentially Nabokovian"[...]One look at Agheyev's style precules the need to rebut the rest of Struve's arguments[...] In his 1986 book Field ventilates the hypothesis that Novel with Cocaine might have been a deliberate mystification by Nabokov or by someone else. He ends by affirming, nonetheless, that "it can be said with absolute certainty...that there is some link between the work of Agheyev and Sirin," because there happens to be a partial assonance between the names of Agheyev's character Sinat and Nabokov's Cincinnatus[... a...]connection that falls into the same category of scholarship as, say, Field's overblown claptrap[...] But let us leave Field among his ruins [...] to bury the Agheyev matter[...]
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/