Subject
Nabokov Collation by Suellen Stringer-Hye
From
Date
Body
EDITOR's Preface. Suellen Stringer-Hye (Vanderbilt) has been issuing
aperiodic collations from the media for NABOKV-L for the better part of
a decade. Past issues may be found both on ZEMBLA
<http://www.libraries.psu.edu/iasweb/nabokov/nsintro.htm> and in the
NABOKV-L archives. They offer an instructive and often amusing look at
Nabokov's image in the popular media. Today, April 23, is Nabokov's
102nd birthday. NABOKV-L would like to wish VN a Happy (Otherworldly)
Birthday and to thank SS-H for her continuing contributions to
NABOKV-L and ZEMBLA.
-------------------------------------------
102! 2000/2001-- Nabokov is in the wind. Though he hated pigeonholing,
journalists mercilessly roost him in several--- synaesthete, chess
master, contented spouse, insomniac,vn lepidopterist. Media attention
shifted away from Nabokov, creator of the problematic Lolita towards
Nabokov, scientist/artist able to blur such commonly held distinctions.
For the avid devotee, headlines like "Naba(sic)kov's first teen
temptress: Camera Obscura thrilled Hitchcock" spark little in the way
of new insight or interest. Occasionally, however, an unexpected
remark stimulates further inquiry. On March 22, Rock Critic Ken tucker,
reviewing the new CD "Poisonville" by singer Ronnie Elliott on the
Public Radio Program "Fresh Air" said, "Elliott sprinkles literary
allusions from Jack Keruoac to Vladimir Nabokov". After scouring
publicity information to discover the source of this statement, I
decided to contact Elliott directly.
ELLIOTT: In fact, I AM very interested in Nabokov but I don't know how
anyone at Fresh Air would know that!
The only thing that I can think of is that there's a line in "Burn Burn
Burn" that goes, " I've got a copy of Lolita, just in case I need it."
My interest, really, is just about his writing in general and how he
seemed to totally change with Lolita. I'm just mesmerized with his
rhythms.
Fresh Air Review
Similarly, when Loop, an interactive computer game, introduced by the
quotation "My pleasures are the most intense known to man; writing and
butterfly hunting" appeared on shockwave.com , I was enchanted enough
to contact gameLab, the company responsible for developing "Loop". Eric
Zimmerman, founder and CEO of gameLab and co-creator of the underground
hit SiSSYFiGHT 2000 responded:
Q. My 13 year old son discovered "Loop" on shockwave.com and said
"Look Mom, a game about Nabokov". Most computer/video games
are not so literary. How did you come to create a game based on
Nabokovian themes?
At gameLab, we usually begin with an idea for a game's interactivity and
let the narrative content grow out of our experience of playing the
game.
In the case of LOOP, we began with the looping interactivity first. We
tried a few kinds of objects in the game, including wandering stars and
floating abstract shapes, but when we hit on catching butterflies, it
made such perfect sense that we stayed with it.
The addition of Nabokov to the game came about halfway through
development. We felt that the game was feeling too kidlike and we
wanted
to make it clear that this was a game for adults as well as children.
During a design meeting, Terry O'Gara (who works for Blister Media, the
company that created the sound for the game) mentioned using Nabokov to
help frame the game. We batted several great Nabokov quotes around over
email before settling on the one we have in the game.
Although it was not part of the original game concept, we like the way
that the single quote from Nabokov reframes the game. It and calls
attention to the intertextual quality of the game as "writing" - since
the player is drawing lines to capture the butterflies. And since games
are so much about "pleasure," it is a nice way to start the game
experience.
Q. Is Terry O'Gara a Nabokov fan? Were any of you Nabokov readers
before creating Loop?
A.It turns out that most of the LOOP team WERE Nabokov readers. We
pride
ourselves on being more cultured than the average computer game
developers.
Q. How was Loop received on shockwave.com. How did it
compare with other more traditional games?
LOOP has done very well on Shockwave.com. It was launched at the end of
February and more than 1.1 million games have been played. Shockwave
has
received a huge amount of fan email about the game.
The rest of this year's VNCollation is a collection of Nabokov related
items from 2000/2001. I have eliminated those that have either been
noted on Nabokv-L or do little to illuminate or entertain.
Dmitri
Dmitri Nabokov headlined the eighth annual Rocky Mountain Books Festival
in Denver, Colorado on March 2, presenting a poetry recital and
workshop. He read his translations of some of Nabokov's Russian poems
"some of which had never before been heard in English." (Rocky Mountain
News)
He also participated in a presentation of 'Dear Bunny, Dear Volodya:
The Friendship and the Feud,' the play adapted by Terry Quinn from the
letters of Vladimir Nabokov and Edmund Wilson. Dimitri played his father
and Wilson Scholar Lewis Dabney portrayed Wilson.
In the February 25 ROCKY MOUNTAIN NEWS published this interview with DN
by John C. Ensslin
Long before Lolita - the novel that made him famous - Vladimir Nabokov
came to Colorado in search of something more elusive than literary fame:
rare and beautiful uncataloged butterflies.
He found both.
Traveling the American West with his family in their "good old
frog-green Buick," Vladimir Nabokov tramped the woods by day and wrote
by night.
"He had the precision of the artist and the passion of a scientist," his
son, Dmitri Nabokov, said recently during a phone interview from his
home in Montreax, Switzerland.
Lolita began to take shape during those hikes through Estes Park and,
four summers later, in Telluride, Nabokov said: "Very often, he would
have a book working in his head as he tramped through the woods with a
butterfly net in his hand and index cards in his pocket. The two things
overlapped to a great degree."
Nabokov, translator and executor of his father's literary estate, will
return to Colorado this week to take part in the eighth annual Rocky
Mountain Book Festival, Saturday and March 4. Saturday, he will play the
part of his father in the regional premiere of Dear Bunny, Dear Volodya:
The Friendship and the Feud, a dramatic dialogue based on the letters
between Vladimir Nabokov and literary critic Edmund Wilson.
Returning to Denver will be a sentimental journey for Nabokov, who was
13 years old when his family checked into the Columbine Lodge in Estes
Park in late July 1947.
"There's not an ounce of pedophilia. If one is to look for a message in
the book, it's one of utter morality," he said.
Nabokov often accompanied his father on his butterfly hunts. To this
day, the son is proud of some butterflies on display in the family's
refurbished home in Russia. Beneath the display is the caption "captured
by V. and D. Nabokov."
Those vacations held two other special memories for Nabokov. It was the
first time his father shared one of his books with his son. And it was
Nabokov's introduction to mountain climbing.
Nabokov remembers his father's taking him to meet with a ranger at Rocky
Mountain National Park, who had agreed to shepherd the boy along on a
hike up Longs Peak via the old Cable route.
The Nabokovs' paths eventually diverged, with climbing taking the place
of butterflies for the son.
Vladimir Nabokov was studying a group of butterflies he'd discovered
called "blues." He would drop his son off for progressively more
difficult climbs. One climb in particular stands out in Nabokov's mind.
He was on an unfamiliar route that required him to leap to - and grab
hold of - a ledge, which he did successfully.
Only later in life, while reading through his father's diaries, did he
realize the terror his parents concealed over their son's climbing.
"They didn't make me feel any guilt about it," he said. "They were
conscious of the physical and mental values."
The family spent their last Colorado summer in Telluride in 1951.
Nabokov remembered the town as "a pale copy of a mining town."
But the trips had at least one lasting effect: His courageous climb
later gave Nabokov the nerve required when he made his debut as an opera
singer in Milan, Italy, performing opposite Luciano Pavarotti.
It also helped when he had to address about 2,000 Slavic-studies
scholars on the topic of his father's work.
After his own career in opera and car racing, the son, now 66, moves
comfortably within his late father's legacy.
"Wilson could not stand being eclipsed by a protege," Dmitri Nabokov
said. "My father was too much of a gentleman to say that."
Translations
On March 25, Bill Eichenberger, the Dispatch Book Critic the COLUMBUS
DISPATCH noted an author not sympathetic to Nabokov's theories of
translation
Vladimir Nabokov wrote extensively about one of his professed heroes,
Nikolay Gogol. He also translated Gogol from Russian into English.
But his attitude toward Gogol infuriated writer Dawn Powell, who wrote
in a 1965 letter to Edmund Wilson (who'd had his own falling out with
Nabokov): " (Nabokov) seemed motivated by a compulsion to denigrate his
heroes and thus strut his own superiority, which he may not have been
able to demonstrate in life so must construct these puppets to mortify
and humiliate.
"I disliked his dowdy translations, too -- at least Constance Garrett
(or was it Isabel Hapgood?) loved the whole and didn't want to stop the
horses and the sleighbells just to lecture that a blur of fir trees
shadowing the sky (vaguely) was really four half-grown greenish-brown
specimens of Max Schling's Spruce Seedlings No. 542.''
Alternatively, Victor Swoboda, in the March 3, Montreal Gazette reviewed
the new Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky translation of Anna
Karenin(a)
A husband-and-wife team based in Paris, Richard Pevear and Larissa
Volokhonsky have been steadily translating the Russian classics for
several years. Their superiority can be explained not by their talent
but by their ability to get out of the author's way. Over the last
decade, Andre Markowicz has done the same in translating Dostoevsky into
French, creating an image of that author radically at odds with that
which older translations promoted for years. The process is a bit like
stripping layers of varnish from an Old Master painting.
Vladimir Nabokov enjoyed telling how Victorian modesty prevented one
19th-century translator from having Anna utter the word "pregnant" (the
word was left in transliterated Russian). Another 19th-century
translation, published as part of Tolstoy's complete works, abounded in
errors, as when Vronsky seriously injures his horse during a race:
"'Aah! What have I done?' cried Vronsky, taking her head in his hands."
In Russian, Vronsky clutches his own head.
Nabokov also ridiculed Garnett's translation, his teaching copy filled
with handwritten corrections of her numerous inaccuracies. Edmonds, in
her often fanciful translation, added words of explanation where none
are found in the original. The Maude translation, including the
reprinted 1995 version edited by the literary scholar George Gibian,
often omitted descriptive phrases and put synonyms where Tolstoy
intentionally repeats the same word for artistic effect.
Nabokov and Hypertext
Jimmy Guterman, complains in the April 9 Industry Standard about the
lack of originality in hypertext writing.
The key creative problem I encountered while trying to build a competent
literary hypertext was my difficulty in delivering a satisfactory
reading experience that included tension and closure. Aristotle's rules
in Poetics have worked well for 23 centuries; the advent of the Web
shouldn't be enough to repeal them. (Genius modernists like Jorge Luis
Borges, James Joyce and Vladimir Nabokov aside, most great fiction is
linear; even counting subroutines, computer programs aren't. Even worse,
my work is neither genius nor particularly modernist.) Because
constructing solid literary hypertext is so difficult and because the
field is still so new, all too many hypertexts seem to be about
hypertext: showing off multiple links and lack of linearity without
bothering to use those tools to tell stories. It's as if early TV shows
were often about transistors and vacuum tubes.
Nabokov and Pop Culture
The Independent (London)
October 15, 2000, Sunday
By Nicholas Barber
The reason why Britney Spears is so successful is that she's such
excellent
value for money: you get two separate people for the price of one. In
photo
shoots and in her videos, Spears is a soft-porn star who would make
Madonna
blush. But when she's interviewed, Spears is a fresh- faced small-town
gal who
won't shut up about her virginity and her Christianity. The virgin/whore
dichotomy has never been embodied so neatly by a celebrity before, and
it's
this which makes her fascinating. And, arguably, dangerous. By dividing
herself
into two entities, Spears licenses the most sordid Lolita fantasies.
Moreover,
she puts those fantasies on screen, allowing potential Humbert Humberts
a line
of reasoning: however innocent and prim a schoolgirl might appear, she
can't
appear more innocent and prim than Britney - and she makes videos in
which she
struts around in Emma Peel catsuits and begs her baby to hit her.
The Nabokov icon is used to frame anything from a letter to the editor
to a film review. Below is a selection of the most notable.
Los Angeles Times
March 12, 2001
SUSAN SALTER REYNOLDS
"Fiction," says Julian Barnes, "is as intimate as sex." Certainly his
new novel, "Love, etc.," pushes the relationship between the reader and
the characters to an intimate point. Even authors Milan Kundera and
Vladimir Nabokov, master manipulators, do not leave their readers
talking about their characters as if they were people one knows.
The Economist
January 27, 2001 U.S. Edition
VLADIMIR NABOKOV, who understood Hollywood's appetite for happy endings,
once remarked that there were nevertheless two plot-lines that it would
not tolerate. One was the marriage of an inter-racial couple who live
happily ever after. The other was the story of a confirmed atheist who
dies painlessly in his bed at the age of 102 after a full and fruitful
life, surrounded by children and grandchildren. The great writer could
easily have added a third Hollywood taboo: the gainfully employed drug
taker who does so because he likes to, and isn't either cured of his
habit or punished for it by prison, disgrace or ill-health.
Nabokov, it has to be said, was talking 40 years ago, and there are
signs that Tinseltown is changing, at least in regard to the supply-side
of drugs. A much-talked about new film, "Traffic" (see article),
continues to present users as foolish or doomed
The Toronto Star
March 9, 2001
Self-help books get a bad rap. People make fun of them. They also buy
them.
But you almost feel like you need a fake book cover when you read one on
the subway - a cover that tells the world you're reading Speak, Memory
by Vladimir Nabokov instead of The Forgiving Self: The Road From
Resentment To Connection by Robert Karen, Ph.D.
MONSTRUARY
Rmos, Julian; Trans. by Edith Grossman
Knopf
Another pun-derful literary extravaganza from the brilliant Spaniard
making a name for himself as a contemporary equivalent of Joyce,
Nabokov, and German experimentalist Arno Schmidt.
The American Prospect
January 1, 2001 - January 15, 2001
JENDI REITER, ESQ., New York, NY
TO THE EDITORS:
After reading Wendy Kaminer's "Speaking of 'Man-Boy Love,'" [November
20, 2001], I wondered if she would have written a similar defense of a
group that advocated decriminalizing rape, gay bashing, or wife beating.
The National Man/Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) is not an avant-garde
artist like Vladimir Nabokov or Allen Ginsburg. It is a political
advocacy group that works to normalize and decriminalize sexual
predation.
Kirkus Reviews
November 1, 2000
NOCTURNAL BUTTERFLIES OF THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE
Prieto, Josi Manuel; Trans. by Carol Christensen & Thomas Christensen
Grove $24.00 Nov. 2000
Vladimir Nabokov, wherever he is now, is either chuckling uncontrollably
or purple with indignation over this delightfully tricky first novel by
a young Cuban writer. The narrator, identified only as "J.," is a
resourceful Eastern European smuggler whose commission to hunt down and
bag a rare species of Russian butterfly involves him with "V." (for
Varia-a richly suggestive moniker), a mystery woman whom he meets in
Istanbul, loses in Odessa, and pursues through an enigmatically dippy
correspondence in which he imagines himself another Abelard seeking his
unattainable Hiloise (among other storied predecessors). A charming
original: a comic portrayal of obsession with an edge of harsh
post-Communist realism. It's as if Thomas Pynchon, Graham Greene, and
Milan Kundera had collaborated with Nabokov on a script for Woody Allen.
National Review
September 11, 2000
Carol Iannone
Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms, by Diane Ravitch
(Simon & Schuster, 555 pp., $30)
In Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, the execrable pedophile Humbert
Humbert visits the school his stepdaughter is to attend and learns of
its
educational philosophy: "We are not so much concerned . . . with having
our students become bookworms," the headmistress lectures him
authoritatively, "or be able to reel off all the capitals of Europe
which nobody knows anyway, or learn by heart the dates of forgotten
battles.
What we are concerned with is the adjustment of the child to group life.
This is why we stress the four D's: Dramatics, Dance, Debating, and
Dating." If you thought such outlandish pedagogical notions could only
be the
product of satirical fantasy, you will find Diane Ravitch's invaluable
new book, Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms, most
enlightening.
The following are snippets from various reviews in which Nabokov is
mentioned.
Experienced readers of experimental fiction will find fewer surprises
than
virgin readers since Winterson is a belated fellow traveler in this
postmodern landscape. Coupland, Pynchon, Calvino, even Nabokov
have already marked the trail, redrawn the map.
Indeed, it's happened with almost all his books, for Davies possesses
what Nabokov called shamanstvo, the enchanter- quality essential to
successful storytelling.
>From a readers review on Amazon.com
While Nabokov's literary gymnastics are impressive, the overall
experience
of reading ''Lolita'' is an empty one. You're better off listening to
the audio
version (narrated by Liberace) or watching the Disney cartoon musical
featuring the voices of Val Kilmer, Anna Paquin and Red Auerbach.
Banville is comparable to those other modern masters of the confessional
mode, Nabokov and Beckett.
Pelevin does nothing with the Russian language beyond an enviable
facility for metaphor. Nor does he fascinate us with his personality
and, as Nabokov wrote of Gogol, potter on the brink of a private abyss
Here, Jacobs played Nabokov pleading with Lolita to come out and play.
Nabokov, the son of an aristocrat (albeit a Russian one), said there is
no
finer delicacy in the world than a soft-boiled egg. You couldn't imagine
him
saying that about fried eggs.
It would be easy for Ms. [Dar Williams] to let the poetic cliches she
gravitates toward ease her into epiphanies. Insecurity, the cosmic
rather
than the personal kind, saves her from that. The new song ''It Happens
Every Day,'' for example, skipped along from images of children playing
to
coeds underlining copies of Nabokov novels in a coffee house to Ms.
Williams herself seeing love in the faces of passers-by.
Like Auden and Nabokov, Robert Craft obviously possesses the kind
of magpie mind that can't help picking up and storing away unusual
words.
The lure of escape by automobile has long inspired some of the best
American writing, from the jaunty joyride of Jack Kerouac's "On the
Road" to the taut desert minimalism of Joan Didion's "Play It As It
Lays"
-- and even, one could argue, Nabokov's "Lolita," in which Humbert
Humbert leaves the country's byways "defiled with a sinuous trail of
slime."
Coleridge spent years trying to get away from his wife; Vladimir
Nabokov found in his the perfect literary helpmeet
Long, long ago, the aging Vladimir Nabokov anointed [Edmund White] as
his favorite younger novelist. (No White review is complete without a
mention of this.) So one shouldn't be surprised to find The Married Man
replete with lovely sentences:
News
Soon Brian Boyd's out of print ''Nabokov's Ada: The Place of
Consciousness,' will be available at www.cybereditions.com .
Until We Meet again┘┘.
aperiodic collations from the media for NABOKV-L for the better part of
a decade. Past issues may be found both on ZEMBLA
<http://www.libraries.psu.edu/iasweb/nabokov/nsintro.htm> and in the
NABOKV-L archives. They offer an instructive and often amusing look at
Nabokov's image in the popular media. Today, April 23, is Nabokov's
102nd birthday. NABOKV-L would like to wish VN a Happy (Otherworldly)
Birthday and to thank SS-H for her continuing contributions to
NABOKV-L and ZEMBLA.
-------------------------------------------
102! 2000/2001-- Nabokov is in the wind. Though he hated pigeonholing,
journalists mercilessly roost him in several--- synaesthete, chess
master, contented spouse, insomniac,vn lepidopterist. Media attention
shifted away from Nabokov, creator of the problematic Lolita towards
Nabokov, scientist/artist able to blur such commonly held distinctions.
For the avid devotee, headlines like "Naba(sic)kov's first teen
temptress: Camera Obscura thrilled Hitchcock" spark little in the way
of new insight or interest. Occasionally, however, an unexpected
remark stimulates further inquiry. On March 22, Rock Critic Ken tucker,
reviewing the new CD "Poisonville" by singer Ronnie Elliott on the
Public Radio Program "Fresh Air" said, "Elliott sprinkles literary
allusions from Jack Keruoac to Vladimir Nabokov". After scouring
publicity information to discover the source of this statement, I
decided to contact Elliott directly.
ELLIOTT: In fact, I AM very interested in Nabokov but I don't know how
anyone at Fresh Air would know that!
The only thing that I can think of is that there's a line in "Burn Burn
Burn" that goes, " I've got a copy of Lolita, just in case I need it."
My interest, really, is just about his writing in general and how he
seemed to totally change with Lolita. I'm just mesmerized with his
rhythms.
Fresh Air Review
Similarly, when Loop, an interactive computer game, introduced by the
quotation "My pleasures are the most intense known to man; writing and
butterfly hunting" appeared on shockwave.com , I was enchanted enough
to contact gameLab, the company responsible for developing "Loop". Eric
Zimmerman, founder and CEO of gameLab and co-creator of the underground
hit SiSSYFiGHT 2000 responded:
Q. My 13 year old son discovered "Loop" on shockwave.com and said
"Look Mom, a game about Nabokov". Most computer/video games
are not so literary. How did you come to create a game based on
Nabokovian themes?
At gameLab, we usually begin with an idea for a game's interactivity and
let the narrative content grow out of our experience of playing the
game.
In the case of LOOP, we began with the looping interactivity first. We
tried a few kinds of objects in the game, including wandering stars and
floating abstract shapes, but when we hit on catching butterflies, it
made such perfect sense that we stayed with it.
The addition of Nabokov to the game came about halfway through
development. We felt that the game was feeling too kidlike and we
wanted
to make it clear that this was a game for adults as well as children.
During a design meeting, Terry O'Gara (who works for Blister Media, the
company that created the sound for the game) mentioned using Nabokov to
help frame the game. We batted several great Nabokov quotes around over
email before settling on the one we have in the game.
Although it was not part of the original game concept, we like the way
that the single quote from Nabokov reframes the game. It and calls
attention to the intertextual quality of the game as "writing" - since
the player is drawing lines to capture the butterflies. And since games
are so much about "pleasure," it is a nice way to start the game
experience.
Q. Is Terry O'Gara a Nabokov fan? Were any of you Nabokov readers
before creating Loop?
A.It turns out that most of the LOOP team WERE Nabokov readers. We
pride
ourselves on being more cultured than the average computer game
developers.
Q. How was Loop received on shockwave.com. How did it
compare with other more traditional games?
LOOP has done very well on Shockwave.com. It was launched at the end of
February and more than 1.1 million games have been played. Shockwave
has
received a huge amount of fan email about the game.
The rest of this year's VNCollation is a collection of Nabokov related
items from 2000/2001. I have eliminated those that have either been
noted on Nabokv-L or do little to illuminate or entertain.
Dmitri
Dmitri Nabokov headlined the eighth annual Rocky Mountain Books Festival
in Denver, Colorado on March 2, presenting a poetry recital and
workshop. He read his translations of some of Nabokov's Russian poems
"some of which had never before been heard in English." (Rocky Mountain
News)
He also participated in a presentation of 'Dear Bunny, Dear Volodya:
The Friendship and the Feud,' the play adapted by Terry Quinn from the
letters of Vladimir Nabokov and Edmund Wilson. Dimitri played his father
and Wilson Scholar Lewis Dabney portrayed Wilson.
In the February 25 ROCKY MOUNTAIN NEWS published this interview with DN
by John C. Ensslin
Long before Lolita - the novel that made him famous - Vladimir Nabokov
came to Colorado in search of something more elusive than literary fame:
rare and beautiful uncataloged butterflies.
He found both.
Traveling the American West with his family in their "good old
frog-green Buick," Vladimir Nabokov tramped the woods by day and wrote
by night.
"He had the precision of the artist and the passion of a scientist," his
son, Dmitri Nabokov, said recently during a phone interview from his
home in Montreax, Switzerland.
Lolita began to take shape during those hikes through Estes Park and,
four summers later, in Telluride, Nabokov said: "Very often, he would
have a book working in his head as he tramped through the woods with a
butterfly net in his hand and index cards in his pocket. The two things
overlapped to a great degree."
Nabokov, translator and executor of his father's literary estate, will
return to Colorado this week to take part in the eighth annual Rocky
Mountain Book Festival, Saturday and March 4. Saturday, he will play the
part of his father in the regional premiere of Dear Bunny, Dear Volodya:
The Friendship and the Feud, a dramatic dialogue based on the letters
between Vladimir Nabokov and literary critic Edmund Wilson.
Returning to Denver will be a sentimental journey for Nabokov, who was
13 years old when his family checked into the Columbine Lodge in Estes
Park in late July 1947.
"There's not an ounce of pedophilia. If one is to look for a message in
the book, it's one of utter morality," he said.
Nabokov often accompanied his father on his butterfly hunts. To this
day, the son is proud of some butterflies on display in the family's
refurbished home in Russia. Beneath the display is the caption "captured
by V. and D. Nabokov."
Those vacations held two other special memories for Nabokov. It was the
first time his father shared one of his books with his son. And it was
Nabokov's introduction to mountain climbing.
Nabokov remembers his father's taking him to meet with a ranger at Rocky
Mountain National Park, who had agreed to shepherd the boy along on a
hike up Longs Peak via the old Cable route.
The Nabokovs' paths eventually diverged, with climbing taking the place
of butterflies for the son.
Vladimir Nabokov was studying a group of butterflies he'd discovered
called "blues." He would drop his son off for progressively more
difficult climbs. One climb in particular stands out in Nabokov's mind.
He was on an unfamiliar route that required him to leap to - and grab
hold of - a ledge, which he did successfully.
Only later in life, while reading through his father's diaries, did he
realize the terror his parents concealed over their son's climbing.
"They didn't make me feel any guilt about it," he said. "They were
conscious of the physical and mental values."
The family spent their last Colorado summer in Telluride in 1951.
Nabokov remembered the town as "a pale copy of a mining town."
But the trips had at least one lasting effect: His courageous climb
later gave Nabokov the nerve required when he made his debut as an opera
singer in Milan, Italy, performing opposite Luciano Pavarotti.
It also helped when he had to address about 2,000 Slavic-studies
scholars on the topic of his father's work.
After his own career in opera and car racing, the son, now 66, moves
comfortably within his late father's legacy.
"Wilson could not stand being eclipsed by a protege," Dmitri Nabokov
said. "My father was too much of a gentleman to say that."
Translations
On March 25, Bill Eichenberger, the Dispatch Book Critic the COLUMBUS
DISPATCH noted an author not sympathetic to Nabokov's theories of
translation
Vladimir Nabokov wrote extensively about one of his professed heroes,
Nikolay Gogol. He also translated Gogol from Russian into English.
But his attitude toward Gogol infuriated writer Dawn Powell, who wrote
in a 1965 letter to Edmund Wilson (who'd had his own falling out with
Nabokov): " (Nabokov) seemed motivated by a compulsion to denigrate his
heroes and thus strut his own superiority, which he may not have been
able to demonstrate in life so must construct these puppets to mortify
and humiliate.
"I disliked his dowdy translations, too -- at least Constance Garrett
(or was it Isabel Hapgood?) loved the whole and didn't want to stop the
horses and the sleighbells just to lecture that a blur of fir trees
shadowing the sky (vaguely) was really four half-grown greenish-brown
specimens of Max Schling's Spruce Seedlings No. 542.''
Alternatively, Victor Swoboda, in the March 3, Montreal Gazette reviewed
the new Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky translation of Anna
Karenin(a)
A husband-and-wife team based in Paris, Richard Pevear and Larissa
Volokhonsky have been steadily translating the Russian classics for
several years. Their superiority can be explained not by their talent
but by their ability to get out of the author's way. Over the last
decade, Andre Markowicz has done the same in translating Dostoevsky into
French, creating an image of that author radically at odds with that
which older translations promoted for years. The process is a bit like
stripping layers of varnish from an Old Master painting.
Vladimir Nabokov enjoyed telling how Victorian modesty prevented one
19th-century translator from having Anna utter the word "pregnant" (the
word was left in transliterated Russian). Another 19th-century
translation, published as part of Tolstoy's complete works, abounded in
errors, as when Vronsky seriously injures his horse during a race:
"'Aah! What have I done?' cried Vronsky, taking her head in his hands."
In Russian, Vronsky clutches his own head.
Nabokov also ridiculed Garnett's translation, his teaching copy filled
with handwritten corrections of her numerous inaccuracies. Edmonds, in
her often fanciful translation, added words of explanation where none
are found in the original. The Maude translation, including the
reprinted 1995 version edited by the literary scholar George Gibian,
often omitted descriptive phrases and put synonyms where Tolstoy
intentionally repeats the same word for artistic effect.
Nabokov and Hypertext
Jimmy Guterman, complains in the April 9 Industry Standard about the
lack of originality in hypertext writing.
The key creative problem I encountered while trying to build a competent
literary hypertext was my difficulty in delivering a satisfactory
reading experience that included tension and closure. Aristotle's rules
in Poetics have worked well for 23 centuries; the advent of the Web
shouldn't be enough to repeal them. (Genius modernists like Jorge Luis
Borges, James Joyce and Vladimir Nabokov aside, most great fiction is
linear; even counting subroutines, computer programs aren't. Even worse,
my work is neither genius nor particularly modernist.) Because
constructing solid literary hypertext is so difficult and because the
field is still so new, all too many hypertexts seem to be about
hypertext: showing off multiple links and lack of linearity without
bothering to use those tools to tell stories. It's as if early TV shows
were often about transistors and vacuum tubes.
Nabokov and Pop Culture
The Independent (London)
October 15, 2000, Sunday
By Nicholas Barber
The reason why Britney Spears is so successful is that she's such
excellent
value for money: you get two separate people for the price of one. In
photo
shoots and in her videos, Spears is a soft-porn star who would make
Madonna
blush. But when she's interviewed, Spears is a fresh- faced small-town
gal who
won't shut up about her virginity and her Christianity. The virgin/whore
dichotomy has never been embodied so neatly by a celebrity before, and
it's
this which makes her fascinating. And, arguably, dangerous. By dividing
herself
into two entities, Spears licenses the most sordid Lolita fantasies.
Moreover,
she puts those fantasies on screen, allowing potential Humbert Humberts
a line
of reasoning: however innocent and prim a schoolgirl might appear, she
can't
appear more innocent and prim than Britney - and she makes videos in
which she
struts around in Emma Peel catsuits and begs her baby to hit her.
The Nabokov icon is used to frame anything from a letter to the editor
to a film review. Below is a selection of the most notable.
Los Angeles Times
March 12, 2001
SUSAN SALTER REYNOLDS
"Fiction," says Julian Barnes, "is as intimate as sex." Certainly his
new novel, "Love, etc.," pushes the relationship between the reader and
the characters to an intimate point. Even authors Milan Kundera and
Vladimir Nabokov, master manipulators, do not leave their readers
talking about their characters as if they were people one knows.
The Economist
January 27, 2001 U.S. Edition
VLADIMIR NABOKOV, who understood Hollywood's appetite for happy endings,
once remarked that there were nevertheless two plot-lines that it would
not tolerate. One was the marriage of an inter-racial couple who live
happily ever after. The other was the story of a confirmed atheist who
dies painlessly in his bed at the age of 102 after a full and fruitful
life, surrounded by children and grandchildren. The great writer could
easily have added a third Hollywood taboo: the gainfully employed drug
taker who does so because he likes to, and isn't either cured of his
habit or punished for it by prison, disgrace or ill-health.
Nabokov, it has to be said, was talking 40 years ago, and there are
signs that Tinseltown is changing, at least in regard to the supply-side
of drugs. A much-talked about new film, "Traffic" (see article),
continues to present users as foolish or doomed
The Toronto Star
March 9, 2001
Self-help books get a bad rap. People make fun of them. They also buy
them.
But you almost feel like you need a fake book cover when you read one on
the subway - a cover that tells the world you're reading Speak, Memory
by Vladimir Nabokov instead of The Forgiving Self: The Road From
Resentment To Connection by Robert Karen, Ph.D.
MONSTRUARY
Rmos, Julian; Trans. by Edith Grossman
Knopf
Another pun-derful literary extravaganza from the brilliant Spaniard
making a name for himself as a contemporary equivalent of Joyce,
Nabokov, and German experimentalist Arno Schmidt.
The American Prospect
January 1, 2001 - January 15, 2001
JENDI REITER, ESQ., New York, NY
TO THE EDITORS:
After reading Wendy Kaminer's "Speaking of 'Man-Boy Love,'" [November
20, 2001], I wondered if she would have written a similar defense of a
group that advocated decriminalizing rape, gay bashing, or wife beating.
The National Man/Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) is not an avant-garde
artist like Vladimir Nabokov or Allen Ginsburg. It is a political
advocacy group that works to normalize and decriminalize sexual
predation.
Kirkus Reviews
November 1, 2000
NOCTURNAL BUTTERFLIES OF THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE
Prieto, Josi Manuel; Trans. by Carol Christensen & Thomas Christensen
Grove $24.00 Nov. 2000
Vladimir Nabokov, wherever he is now, is either chuckling uncontrollably
or purple with indignation over this delightfully tricky first novel by
a young Cuban writer. The narrator, identified only as "J.," is a
resourceful Eastern European smuggler whose commission to hunt down and
bag a rare species of Russian butterfly involves him with "V." (for
Varia-a richly suggestive moniker), a mystery woman whom he meets in
Istanbul, loses in Odessa, and pursues through an enigmatically dippy
correspondence in which he imagines himself another Abelard seeking his
unattainable Hiloise (among other storied predecessors). A charming
original: a comic portrayal of obsession with an edge of harsh
post-Communist realism. It's as if Thomas Pynchon, Graham Greene, and
Milan Kundera had collaborated with Nabokov on a script for Woody Allen.
National Review
September 11, 2000
Carol Iannone
Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms, by Diane Ravitch
(Simon & Schuster, 555 pp., $30)
In Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, the execrable pedophile Humbert
Humbert visits the school his stepdaughter is to attend and learns of
its
educational philosophy: "We are not so much concerned . . . with having
our students become bookworms," the headmistress lectures him
authoritatively, "or be able to reel off all the capitals of Europe
which nobody knows anyway, or learn by heart the dates of forgotten
battles.
What we are concerned with is the adjustment of the child to group life.
This is why we stress the four D's: Dramatics, Dance, Debating, and
Dating." If you thought such outlandish pedagogical notions could only
be the
product of satirical fantasy, you will find Diane Ravitch's invaluable
new book, Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms, most
enlightening.
The following are snippets from various reviews in which Nabokov is
mentioned.
Experienced readers of experimental fiction will find fewer surprises
than
virgin readers since Winterson is a belated fellow traveler in this
postmodern landscape. Coupland, Pynchon, Calvino, even Nabokov
have already marked the trail, redrawn the map.
Indeed, it's happened with almost all his books, for Davies possesses
what Nabokov called shamanstvo, the enchanter- quality essential to
successful storytelling.
>From a readers review on Amazon.com
While Nabokov's literary gymnastics are impressive, the overall
experience
of reading ''Lolita'' is an empty one. You're better off listening to
the audio
version (narrated by Liberace) or watching the Disney cartoon musical
featuring the voices of Val Kilmer, Anna Paquin and Red Auerbach.
Banville is comparable to those other modern masters of the confessional
mode, Nabokov and Beckett.
Pelevin does nothing with the Russian language beyond an enviable
facility for metaphor. Nor does he fascinate us with his personality
and, as Nabokov wrote of Gogol, potter on the brink of a private abyss
Here, Jacobs played Nabokov pleading with Lolita to come out and play.
Nabokov, the son of an aristocrat (albeit a Russian one), said there is
no
finer delicacy in the world than a soft-boiled egg. You couldn't imagine
him
saying that about fried eggs.
It would be easy for Ms. [Dar Williams] to let the poetic cliches she
gravitates toward ease her into epiphanies. Insecurity, the cosmic
rather
than the personal kind, saves her from that. The new song ''It Happens
Every Day,'' for example, skipped along from images of children playing
to
coeds underlining copies of Nabokov novels in a coffee house to Ms.
Williams herself seeing love in the faces of passers-by.
Like Auden and Nabokov, Robert Craft obviously possesses the kind
of magpie mind that can't help picking up and storing away unusual
words.
The lure of escape by automobile has long inspired some of the best
American writing, from the jaunty joyride of Jack Kerouac's "On the
Road" to the taut desert minimalism of Joan Didion's "Play It As It
Lays"
-- and even, one could argue, Nabokov's "Lolita," in which Humbert
Humbert leaves the country's byways "defiled with a sinuous trail of
slime."
Coleridge spent years trying to get away from his wife; Vladimir
Nabokov found in his the perfect literary helpmeet
Long, long ago, the aging Vladimir Nabokov anointed [Edmund White] as
his favorite younger novelist. (No White review is complete without a
mention of this.) So one shouldn't be surprised to find The Married Man
replete with lovely sentences:
News
Soon Brian Boyd's out of print ''Nabokov's Ada: The Place of
Consciousness,' will be available at www.cybereditions.com .
Until We Meet again┘┘.