Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0023504, Sat, 8 Dec 2012 14:23:12 +0300

Subject
Tolstoy's Aleksey and Anna in Ada
Date
Body
The somewhat Italianate style of the apartment, its elaborate wall lamps with ornaments of pale caramel glass, its white knobbles that produced indiscriminately light or maids, the slat-eyes, veiled, heavily curtained windows which made the morning as difficult to disrobe as a crinolined prude, the convex sliding doors of the huge white 'Nuremberg Virgin'-like closet in the hallway of their suite, and even the tinted engraving by Randon of a rather stark three-mast ship on the zigzag green waves of Marseilles Harbor - in a word, the alberghian atmosphere of those new trysts added a novelistic touch (Aleksey and Anna may have asterisked here!*) which Ada welcomed as a frame, as a form, something supporting and guarding life, otherwise unprovidenced on Desdemonia, where artists are the only gods. (Ada, 3.8)

*According to Shklovsky ("Zhili-byli," Once There Lived, 1964), Gorky criticized Tolstoy's puritanism contrasting the absence of amorous scenes in Anna Karenin to their abundance in Flaubert's Madame Bovary:

«У Флобера мадам Бовари — жена недоучившегося врача, посмотрите, какую мессу служит она своей любовью, а вот красавица Анна Каренина и красивый Вронский живут в Италии, а Толстой не позволяет им даже пройти лунной ночью по Риму, не позволяет нам увидеть, как им было хорошо. Старик в железных очках все вычёркивал».
Алексей Максимович, низко нагнувшись над столом, так, как нагибаются старые близорукие люди, показывал, как вычёркивал Лев Николаевич Толстой.

Aleksey Sklyarenko

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