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Fw: NABOKOV [ Sighting] On Nabokovian duels,
Armoles and "A Matter of Honor"
Armoles and "A Matter of Honor"
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Dear List,
While roaming through airport book-stores in Rio de Janeiro I came across a book with an enticing cover carrying the title ,"Mestre de Armas": Six Dueling Stories. It depicted a dying Pierrot and a retiring Harlequin holding another broken cointender : Suite d' un bal masqu茅,1857, by Ger么kme J. Le贸n. After hearing the boarding-call I snatched the unexamined copy and discovered, to my delight, that one of the stories was authored by Nabokov. It was not rendered directly from the Russian but from Dmitri's own 1995 translation of VN's 1927 "Podlets" with the title: "An Affair of Honor." ( found in a Berlin diary and set down in Russian.)
I remember someone in our List asking about duels in Nabokov, perhaps these stories are not very difficult to come by in English.
The anthologist, Cl谩udio Figueiredo, subtly led us to understand a little more about the last short-story, Nabokov's. Figueiredo's very informative preface indirectly contrasted smart sturdy Sainte-Beuve, ready to fight a duel with a pistol in one hand and an umbrella in the other, to VN's equally pudgy but fumbling Anton Petr贸vitch, perhaps intentionally guiding the readers from the Li茅rmontov, Tchekov and Turgueniev heroes, into VN's own Petr贸vitch.
In his introduction Figueiredo we learn more about VN's father's planned duel against Alexis Suv贸rin (Tchekhov's editor friend and intricate links with ), VN's words in SM and about dueling mores and practices in different countries. He writes about Voltaire's received slight, Stendhal's hurt foot, Flaubert's and Maupassant's opinions about such practices, dueling statistics, the fight bt. Turgeniev and Tolstoy.
I also found data about Mikahil Li茅rmontov's eery description of his own future death in 1841, presented through his creature Gruchnitski in "A Hero of our Times", and before that, Pushkin's dramatic death in 1837. Dueling deaths were not as common as I initially surmised! One can feel, in VN's story ( who, in "Armoles" observed that no Russian writer of medium fame could keep from describing one or more duels in their novels), hints of his equally pathetic and derelict characters - as those in Despair and Camera Oscura- inserted in a subtle description of expatriate life with its particular kind of mixture of characters from distinct social backgrounds, culture and fortunes and their unheroic "suspended destinies".
The six selected short-stories were: The Duel, by Joseph Conrad; The Witness, by Arthur Schnitzler; A Coward, by Guy de Maupassant ; The Duel, by Heinrich von Kleist; the Duelist by Ivan Turgu锚niev and A Matter of Honor, by V. Nabokov.
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