Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0008854, Mon, 3 Nov 2003 22:02:18 -0800

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Fw: Anatoly Livry & the ghost of Dreyfuss
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Anatoly Livry & the ghost of DreyfussEDNOTE. NABOKV-L thanks Carolyn Kunin for this informative note.

----- Original Message -----
From: Carolyn Kunin
To: Vladimir Nabokov Forum
Sent: Monday, November 03, 2003 9:44 PM
Subject: Anatoly Livry & the ghost of Dreyfuss


To the List,

M. Livry did write, or at least proposed to write a dissertation for the Etudes Slaves at the Sorbonne. I was unable to find when this happened, but here is the abstract:


La mythologie antique dans lÂąoeuvre de Vladimir Nabokov
Dans mes recherches précédentes et actuelles, je souhaite présenter
Vladimir Nabokov, écrivain de langues russe, française et anglaise, non
seulement comme l¹adversaire de la pensée plébéienne et égalitariste de
Socrate et, par conséquent, l¹héritier direct de philosophes et romanciers
aristocrates de l¹Antiquité, mais aussi en tant que disciple de la
philosophie de Friedrich Nietzsche et de la pensée politique de l¹avenir,
celle de Charles Maurras.



And who is this philosopher of the future, Charles Maurras? The Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles has this to say:


MAURRAS, Charles: French nationalist writer and anti-Semitic politician. He believed that the Jews, Freemasons, and Protestants sought to control the entire political life of France. Although passionate about France, he hailed its invasion by Germany was a "divine surprise." He was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1945.


I was surprised to learn that Maurras came from the literary group of writers and artists who formed in Provence around Zola (the greatest pro-Dreyfusard of them all) and Cezanne. However he was extremely pro-German and the philosophical "genius" behind the Vichy government. The following makes rather unpleasant reading, and must be taken with a grain of salt (I don't know anything about the author, Stephan Steinberg, writing about the influence of Nietzsche) but certainly may be true. Cezanne and Zola who were very close in boyhood and youth later severed relations.


So how did the case of a Jewish army captain turn into l¹affaire Dreyfus? And how could leading thinkers rally behind the ignoble standard of an unjust prosecution? For the antidreyfusards were much more than a marginal band of anti-Semites. Their leaders included not only the vicious Edouard Drumont and fervent nationalists such as Maurice Barrès and Charles Maurras, but also painters Paul Cézanne, Edgar Degas, and Auguste Renoir, composer Vincent d¹Indy, novelist Jules Verne, poet Paul Valéry, the Revue des deux mondes, and the Acadèmie Française.


The same author continues:


Charles Maurras was the editor of the French ultra-right-wing newspaper L'Action francaise at the beginning of the twentieth century. Generally speaking his political movement had little time for Germans who, in line with the racist ideology of Action Francaise, were members of the inferior ³Slavic² race and therefore ³barbarians². For Maurras and his followers, however, Nietzsche was a ³great barbarian² whose work, despite its errors, was a useful antidote to the poison of ³revolution² (socialism).


I find it it impossible to accept that anyone would seriously suggest any connection between Maurras and VN and although M. Livry is described as "un ecrivain" a search of several libraries including the Bibliotheque Nationale turned up nothing by this author.

Carolyn

p.s. T.S. Eliot translated one of Maurras's works into English.
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