Subject
Ardis Publishers and Nabokov
From
Date
Body
EDITOR's NOTE. This item recalls a time in Nabokov studies that maybe
unfamiliar to many NABOKV-L subscribers. Carl and Ellendea Proffer
were the founders of Ardis, the publishing house, that brought back
into print all of Nabokov's Russian novels (and a good deal of Nabokov
criticism ) when it was almost entirely unavailable to both Russian
and other readers. Almost all Western readers of VN's Russian work
first read it in the compact Ardis editions. Carl Proffer was also one
of the very first to publish a English-language critical study of VN:
_Keys to Lolita_. VN read the manuscript and later met the young
American scholars. Eventually, he gave Ardis the rights to all of his
Russian work, the appearance of which led to the Nabokov boom in
Russian Departments in the west. Virtually all Russians who read
Nabokov prior to his "rehabilitation" in the late Eighties owe the
experience to Ardis.
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Casa Dana has long been the home of Ardis Publishers ...
Date: Thu, 27 Jun 2002 22:20:22 -0400
From: "Sandy P. Klein" <spklein52@hotmail.com>
Reply-To: SPKlein52@HotMail.com
To: chtodel@gte.net
CC:
[Los Angeles Times - latimes.com] <http://www.latimes.com/>
http://www.latimes.com/features/printedition/books/la-000043831jun23.story
LETTER FROM DANA POINT
By CYNTHIA HAVEN, Cynthia Haven writes for a number of publications,
including The Washington Post and the San Jose Mercury News. A somewhat
different version of her essay appeared in the (London) Times Literary
Supple
Casa Dana, a 1920s Spanish-style dwelling surrounded by a
stucco-and-wrought-iron wall, overlooks a hundred-foot cliff, a
white-sand beach and the limitless Pacific. Nothing could be less
evocative of Moscow's grimy brick apartment blocks or St. Petersburg's
gray crumbling facades.
Yet the connection is an intimate one. Casa Dana has long been the home
of Ardis Publishers. Prior to glasnost, the preeminent publisher of
modern Russian literature was based not in Leningrad or Moscow, but
here, in suburban America. Ardis was the largest publishing house
anywhere devoted exclusively to Russian literature.
The competition was admittedly limited: Soviet publishers were hamstrung
in what they could print; they weren't publishing much that was new, let
alone groundbreaking. The emigre YMCA press in Paris (which published
Solzhenitsyn, among others) and Possev in Germany had a religious or
political bent, a bias that often alienated younger writers. Samizdat
was one alternative: haphazard, handwritten or mimeographed, and highly
perishable. Then there was Ardis. With its related venture, the
innovative Russian Literature Triquarterly, Ardis brought Western
readers to Russian writers. Marina Tsvetaeva, Osip Mandelstam, Paul
Klebnikov, Mikahil Bulgakov, even Anna Akhmatova were relatively little
known in the era before Ardis set up shop; their works were suppressed,
their names and reputations were inevitably jumbled with a plethora of
lesser, officially approved writers. Ardis provided quality translations.
Originally founded in 1971 in Ann Arbor, Mich., Ardis moved to Dana
Point, the land of lush palm trees, oleander, birds of paradise and
ubiquitous jasmine--at the end of El Camino Capistrano--in 1994, and its
acquisition in April by New York's Overlook Press provides a literary
Cold War coda. Overlook hopes to reissue a number of out-of-print Ardis
titles, and perhaps add new ones to address the emerging sensibility of
21st century Russia. Whatever the future, the change of ownership marks
the end of an era for the publishing venture that, according to the late
Russian poet Joseph Brodsky, had an impact on Russian literature second
only to the advent of the printing press.
Ardis' story has been inextricably bound up with the energy and
enthusiasm of its founders. Carl Proffer, then a 32-year-old professor
at the University of Michigan, a specialist in the works of Nikolai
Gogol and Vladimir Nabokov, and his 26-year-old wife, Ellendea, an
assistant professor in Russian and a Mikhail Bulgakov scholar, began the
venture almost as a lark.
The Proffers had visited Russia in 1969 on a Fulbright fellowship, with
a letter of introduction to Nadezhda Mandelstam, widow of the poet Osip.
After that enviable entree, the Proffers hobnobbed with the Russian
intelligentsia. When they received a rare, pre-revolution edition of
Mandelstam's early collection, "Stone"--one of only 50 left, according
to collectors--they had their first book. When Elena Sergeevna Bulgakova
gave them an unpublished 1935 version of Bulgakov's "Zoya's Apartment,"
they had their second.
The Proffers launched Ardis and the journal Russian Literature
Triquarterly in 1971 with $3,000 borrowed from Carl's bewildered
parents. Ardis' first office was the bedroom of their cramped Ann Arbor
townhouse. Not supported by academic or government subsidies, they
quickly piled up a sizable debt and a stack of news clippings.
International fame came within a year.
The Proffers, friends of Brodsky since 1969, were visiting Leningrad in
1972 when the authorities ordered the 32-year-old poet out of the USSR.
Carl offered Brodsky a poet-in-residence position at the University of
Michigan. Brodsky had never taught a class in his life; his poetry was
largely unknown, and his English was garbled and virtually
incomprehensible. Proffer pulled it off.
By 1976, Ardis had achieved a measure of success, enough to relocate the
Proffers to the erstwhile Huron Hills Country Club, a rambling,
ramshackle, 24-room residence, also from the 1920s, which in the winter
was whimsically reminiscent of a dacha. The cream-colored living room
with its large picture windows, a former ballroom, was the scene of
all-night Ardis mailings where translators, friends and graduate
students stuffed envelopes on the beige carpet, paid only with pizza and
Coca-Cola.
The basement, however, was the heart of the Ardis operation, heralded by
a memorable poster, "Russian Literature Is Better Than Sex," and
dominated by a Cyrillic cold-type composing machine. Outspoken, savvy
Ellendea was the perfect foil for the tall, genial, soft-spoken Carl, a
former basketball player. She is Irish American; he was a son of the
American prairies. Their motive was not ethnicity but an exuberant love
of Russian literature.
Ellendea's keen intelligence and keener tongue have not diminished with
the passage of a quarter-century. Her conversation is peppered with
gossip, anecdotes and snippets of Ardis history. In one moment she
recalls smuggling the Hite Report, Bibles and issues of Cosmopolitan to
the 80-year-old Madame Mandelstam, at the widow's request; in another,
how she and Carl competed with each other to read the advance galleys of
Nabokov's "Ada," forwarded from Playboy magazine, via the diplomatic
pouch, to the hotel they were staying at in Leningrad.
While in the Soviet Union, the Proffers were subjected to surveillance,
body searches and press attacks. Their Russian friends were
interrogated. Carl was finally banned from the USSR in 1979; Ellendea in
1980. Carl never returned; he died of cancer in 1984, at 46. Brodsky
said Carl Proffer "was simply an incarnation of all the best things that
humanity and being American represent."
Insiders questioned whether Ellendea, a devastated widow with four
children, would be able to carry on; the business acumen, after all, had
been Carl's. Within a few years, however, Ellendea received a stunning
vote of confidence: She received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1989, Ardis'
first external funding. A few months later, she made a triumphant return
to Russia and the Moscow Book Fair. The Soviet government again tried to
deny her a visa until other publishers at the fair threatened to boycott.
She remarried and moved to Dana Point. During the glasnost years, Ardis
emphasized Russian literature in translation. Ardis' last book in
Russian was Brodsky's final collection of poems, "Landscape With Flood."
Glasnost changed Ardis, but some claim Ardis had a role in triggering
glasnost, by forcing the hand of the Soviet literary powers, who were
put in the humiliating position of watching a couple of eager Yanks
shape and preserve its literary heritage.
Some also claim that Ardis, directly or indirectly, established the
relative reputations of prominent Russian writers for Western readers.
It is hard to recall how few and far between even unreliable
translations were in the early 1970s; Western publishers simply didn't
think such translations were commercially viable. Moreover, scholars and
the public knew only the portion of Russian literature that Soviet
officials chose to dole out, and Ardis served as a sorting table for
determining the relative importance of various names. In many instances,
Ardis may have created the Western audience that mainstream publishers
were certain did not exist.
The scale of the Ardis endeavor demonstrated the density and richness of
Russian culture in the last century. Publishing 40 to 50 titles a year,
it took on tasks that were cumbersome and unprofitable: Ardis was first
to publish the five-volume complete letters of Dostoevsky; it
republished Nabokov's early Russian novels, long out of print, then
published the first Russian translations of his English novels. How much
Ardis was ahead of a wave, and how much it created the wave, will be a
subject for future scholars.
Meanwhile, Ellendea is casting her lot in a different direction. Her new
publishing venture, Casa Dana, will focus on books about the West Coast:
"for my culture about my culture," she says. And as for Russian
publishing: "Now everyone has everything to read, and they read trash.
Just like us. Real national culture included writers until recently. I'm
not sure they're going to withstand the onslaught of TV and movies. Like
us. But there are signs of high culture returning. It's still too early
to say.... My conviction is that it is a great and rich culture, a deep
culture, and it will come back again."
As we walk along Dana Point's Cliff Walk, to the high pergola that
overlooks the Pacific, the height and the ocean breeze provide a
sun-bleached counterpoint to the day, 30 years ago, when the Proffers
conferred with Brodsky on the windy roof of Leningrad's grim Peter and
Paul Fortress, famous as a prison for Russian writers (Dostoevsky and
Gorky among them). That Leningrad is far away, in time, distance and
spirit. Leningrad has already entered the world of myth; the Pacific
Coast lives in another.
We are within a few miles of the legendary old mission of San Juan
Capistrano, where the swallows return, miraculously, on St. Joseph's Day
every spring. Perhaps, in light of Ellendea's cautious hopes and the
proximity of Ardis for nearly a decade, it might not be too frivolous to
construe it as a very un-Russian omen of regeneration, a harbinger of
better times to come, always bearing in mind that optimism comes perhaps
too breezily here, on the other side of the world.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
MSN Photos is the easiest way to share and print your photos: Click Here
<http://g.msn.com/1HM1ENUS/c156??PI=44364>
unfamiliar to many NABOKV-L subscribers. Carl and Ellendea Proffer
were the founders of Ardis, the publishing house, that brought back
into print all of Nabokov's Russian novels (and a good deal of Nabokov
criticism ) when it was almost entirely unavailable to both Russian
and other readers. Almost all Western readers of VN's Russian work
first read it in the compact Ardis editions. Carl Proffer was also one
of the very first to publish a English-language critical study of VN:
_Keys to Lolita_. VN read the manuscript and later met the young
American scholars. Eventually, he gave Ardis the rights to all of his
Russian work, the appearance of which led to the Nabokov boom in
Russian Departments in the west. Virtually all Russians who read
Nabokov prior to his "rehabilitation" in the late Eighties owe the
experience to Ardis.
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Casa Dana has long been the home of Ardis Publishers ...
Date: Thu, 27 Jun 2002 22:20:22 -0400
From: "Sandy P. Klein" <spklein52@hotmail.com>
Reply-To: SPKlein52@HotMail.com
To: chtodel@gte.net
CC:
[Los Angeles Times - latimes.com] <http://www.latimes.com/>
http://www.latimes.com/features/printedition/books/la-000043831jun23.story
LETTER FROM DANA POINT
By CYNTHIA HAVEN, Cynthia Haven writes for a number of publications,
including The Washington Post and the San Jose Mercury News. A somewhat
different version of her essay appeared in the (London) Times Literary
Supple
Casa Dana, a 1920s Spanish-style dwelling surrounded by a
stucco-and-wrought-iron wall, overlooks a hundred-foot cliff, a
white-sand beach and the limitless Pacific. Nothing could be less
evocative of Moscow's grimy brick apartment blocks or St. Petersburg's
gray crumbling facades.
Yet the connection is an intimate one. Casa Dana has long been the home
of Ardis Publishers. Prior to glasnost, the preeminent publisher of
modern Russian literature was based not in Leningrad or Moscow, but
here, in suburban America. Ardis was the largest publishing house
anywhere devoted exclusively to Russian literature.
The competition was admittedly limited: Soviet publishers were hamstrung
in what they could print; they weren't publishing much that was new, let
alone groundbreaking. The emigre YMCA press in Paris (which published
Solzhenitsyn, among others) and Possev in Germany had a religious or
political bent, a bias that often alienated younger writers. Samizdat
was one alternative: haphazard, handwritten or mimeographed, and highly
perishable. Then there was Ardis. With its related venture, the
innovative Russian Literature Triquarterly, Ardis brought Western
readers to Russian writers. Marina Tsvetaeva, Osip Mandelstam, Paul
Klebnikov, Mikahil Bulgakov, even Anna Akhmatova were relatively little
known in the era before Ardis set up shop; their works were suppressed,
their names and reputations were inevitably jumbled with a plethora of
lesser, officially approved writers. Ardis provided quality translations.
Originally founded in 1971 in Ann Arbor, Mich., Ardis moved to Dana
Point, the land of lush palm trees, oleander, birds of paradise and
ubiquitous jasmine--at the end of El Camino Capistrano--in 1994, and its
acquisition in April by New York's Overlook Press provides a literary
Cold War coda. Overlook hopes to reissue a number of out-of-print Ardis
titles, and perhaps add new ones to address the emerging sensibility of
21st century Russia. Whatever the future, the change of ownership marks
the end of an era for the publishing venture that, according to the late
Russian poet Joseph Brodsky, had an impact on Russian literature second
only to the advent of the printing press.
Ardis' story has been inextricably bound up with the energy and
enthusiasm of its founders. Carl Proffer, then a 32-year-old professor
at the University of Michigan, a specialist in the works of Nikolai
Gogol and Vladimir Nabokov, and his 26-year-old wife, Ellendea, an
assistant professor in Russian and a Mikhail Bulgakov scholar, began the
venture almost as a lark.
The Proffers had visited Russia in 1969 on a Fulbright fellowship, with
a letter of introduction to Nadezhda Mandelstam, widow of the poet Osip.
After that enviable entree, the Proffers hobnobbed with the Russian
intelligentsia. When they received a rare, pre-revolution edition of
Mandelstam's early collection, "Stone"--one of only 50 left, according
to collectors--they had their first book. When Elena Sergeevna Bulgakova
gave them an unpublished 1935 version of Bulgakov's "Zoya's Apartment,"
they had their second.
The Proffers launched Ardis and the journal Russian Literature
Triquarterly in 1971 with $3,000 borrowed from Carl's bewildered
parents. Ardis' first office was the bedroom of their cramped Ann Arbor
townhouse. Not supported by academic or government subsidies, they
quickly piled up a sizable debt and a stack of news clippings.
International fame came within a year.
The Proffers, friends of Brodsky since 1969, were visiting Leningrad in
1972 when the authorities ordered the 32-year-old poet out of the USSR.
Carl offered Brodsky a poet-in-residence position at the University of
Michigan. Brodsky had never taught a class in his life; his poetry was
largely unknown, and his English was garbled and virtually
incomprehensible. Proffer pulled it off.
By 1976, Ardis had achieved a measure of success, enough to relocate the
Proffers to the erstwhile Huron Hills Country Club, a rambling,
ramshackle, 24-room residence, also from the 1920s, which in the winter
was whimsically reminiscent of a dacha. The cream-colored living room
with its large picture windows, a former ballroom, was the scene of
all-night Ardis mailings where translators, friends and graduate
students stuffed envelopes on the beige carpet, paid only with pizza and
Coca-Cola.
The basement, however, was the heart of the Ardis operation, heralded by
a memorable poster, "Russian Literature Is Better Than Sex," and
dominated by a Cyrillic cold-type composing machine. Outspoken, savvy
Ellendea was the perfect foil for the tall, genial, soft-spoken Carl, a
former basketball player. She is Irish American; he was a son of the
American prairies. Their motive was not ethnicity but an exuberant love
of Russian literature.
Ellendea's keen intelligence and keener tongue have not diminished with
the passage of a quarter-century. Her conversation is peppered with
gossip, anecdotes and snippets of Ardis history. In one moment she
recalls smuggling the Hite Report, Bibles and issues of Cosmopolitan to
the 80-year-old Madame Mandelstam, at the widow's request; in another,
how she and Carl competed with each other to read the advance galleys of
Nabokov's "Ada," forwarded from Playboy magazine, via the diplomatic
pouch, to the hotel they were staying at in Leningrad.
While in the Soviet Union, the Proffers were subjected to surveillance,
body searches and press attacks. Their Russian friends were
interrogated. Carl was finally banned from the USSR in 1979; Ellendea in
1980. Carl never returned; he died of cancer in 1984, at 46. Brodsky
said Carl Proffer "was simply an incarnation of all the best things that
humanity and being American represent."
Insiders questioned whether Ellendea, a devastated widow with four
children, would be able to carry on; the business acumen, after all, had
been Carl's. Within a few years, however, Ellendea received a stunning
vote of confidence: She received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1989, Ardis'
first external funding. A few months later, she made a triumphant return
to Russia and the Moscow Book Fair. The Soviet government again tried to
deny her a visa until other publishers at the fair threatened to boycott.
She remarried and moved to Dana Point. During the glasnost years, Ardis
emphasized Russian literature in translation. Ardis' last book in
Russian was Brodsky's final collection of poems, "Landscape With Flood."
Glasnost changed Ardis, but some claim Ardis had a role in triggering
glasnost, by forcing the hand of the Soviet literary powers, who were
put in the humiliating position of watching a couple of eager Yanks
shape and preserve its literary heritage.
Some also claim that Ardis, directly or indirectly, established the
relative reputations of prominent Russian writers for Western readers.
It is hard to recall how few and far between even unreliable
translations were in the early 1970s; Western publishers simply didn't
think such translations were commercially viable. Moreover, scholars and
the public knew only the portion of Russian literature that Soviet
officials chose to dole out, and Ardis served as a sorting table for
determining the relative importance of various names. In many instances,
Ardis may have created the Western audience that mainstream publishers
were certain did not exist.
The scale of the Ardis endeavor demonstrated the density and richness of
Russian culture in the last century. Publishing 40 to 50 titles a year,
it took on tasks that were cumbersome and unprofitable: Ardis was first
to publish the five-volume complete letters of Dostoevsky; it
republished Nabokov's early Russian novels, long out of print, then
published the first Russian translations of his English novels. How much
Ardis was ahead of a wave, and how much it created the wave, will be a
subject for future scholars.
Meanwhile, Ellendea is casting her lot in a different direction. Her new
publishing venture, Casa Dana, will focus on books about the West Coast:
"for my culture about my culture," she says. And as for Russian
publishing: "Now everyone has everything to read, and they read trash.
Just like us. Real national culture included writers until recently. I'm
not sure they're going to withstand the onslaught of TV and movies. Like
us. But there are signs of high culture returning. It's still too early
to say.... My conviction is that it is a great and rich culture, a deep
culture, and it will come back again."
As we walk along Dana Point's Cliff Walk, to the high pergola that
overlooks the Pacific, the height and the ocean breeze provide a
sun-bleached counterpoint to the day, 30 years ago, when the Proffers
conferred with Brodsky on the windy roof of Leningrad's grim Peter and
Paul Fortress, famous as a prison for Russian writers (Dostoevsky and
Gorky among them). That Leningrad is far away, in time, distance and
spirit. Leningrad has already entered the world of myth; the Pacific
Coast lives in another.
We are within a few miles of the legendary old mission of San Juan
Capistrano, where the swallows return, miraculously, on St. Joseph's Day
every spring. Perhaps, in light of Ellendea's cautious hopes and the
proximity of Ardis for nearly a decade, it might not be too frivolous to
construe it as a very un-Russian omen of regeneration, a harbinger of
better times to come, always bearing in mind that optimism comes perhaps
too breezily here, on the other side of the world.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
MSN Photos is the easiest way to share and print your photos: Click Here
<http://g.msn.com/1HM1ENUS/c156??PI=44364>