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Re: [THOUGHTS] Writers and Readers and a VN sighting
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[Nabokov writes: "Indeed, of all the characters that a great artist creates, his readers are the best" (Nabokov, "Russian Writers, Censors, and Readers").... Lara Delage-Toriel...in her article Disclosures under Seal: Nabokov, Secrecy and the Reader...: "In his famous essay entitled "Kafka's Precursors," Jorge Luis Borges propounds the idea that great readers create their own writers in a retroactive way. We find no such latitude for the reader in Nabokov's own statements"... Perhaps some of Borges's other lines are worth bringing up...emphasizing Delage-Toriel's observation that "the act of invention is closely linked to the discovery of something that is already there, but awaiting disclosure." The best example of this kind of "invention" is found in Borges's second article about Coleridge, when he mentions an ancient story about a prince who decided to build a pleasure dome in Xanadu. He thinks that - should this be a true fact - then the story behind Coleridge's dream antecedes Coleridge by many centuries, without having yet reached its final form...I cannot exclude the hypothesis that some (very few) of his readers are included in the pantheon Nabokov inhabits...This ghostly dimension is one that, perhaps, is admitted by John Shade ... when he writes about man's life as an unfinished poem.]
JM: Adding another confirmation of such an "invention" (discovering something that is already there), related to Borges's vision about Coleridge's unfinished report of his dream, because of Porlock's interruption*, and its legendary precursor and to Shade's lines (939-940) "Man's life as commentary to abstruse/ Unfinished poem. Note for further use," there's another example of a similar vision, now linking Pushkin's Evguiéni Oniéguin to Tolstoy's Anna Karenin. The source is in English but my copy is in Brazilian. It's found in Elif Batuman's introduction to "Os Possessos, Aventuras com os Livros Russos e seus Leitores" (The Possessed, 2010).
The author describes a nightmare she's had the night before she was submitted to an examination. She relates her own nightmare to Tatiana's dream in E.O., a book she'd been reading before she fell asleep. "Tatiana's dream gained shape in real life [in EO's fiction] on the day of the feast of her saint" (when Oniéguin breaks off with Tatiana and the fatal duel with Liénski takes place) Elif Batuman adds: "I read Oniéguin in Nabokov's translation to English and I was very impressed by a note Nabokov added, in which he states that the language of that dream not only contains 'echoes of rythms and subjects' from Tatiana's previous experiences in the story, but it also antecipates the future: 'a certain oneirical quality is transported to the feast of the saint and later on to the duel.' The guests at Tatiana's party and the balls in Moscow, writes Nabokov, 'gain the tonality of a nightmare and they are antecipated by the demons of fairy-tales and the hybrid monsters in her dream'." After her examination, Elif spent the next two weeks reading Tolstoy's Anna Kariénina "which seems to have departed exactly from the same point where Oniéguin has stopped." It was "as if the spectators at the Opera had also become parts of Tatiana's nightmare, in the same atmosphere that had already infiltrated itself in Anna's experiences during the horse races and the train that was snowed down. It was the same world, the same air, only everything seemed larger - as it a doll house with all its minimal details had been transformed into a real house, with long corridors, shining candelabra, a sinuous garden. Elements from Oniéguin reappeared: a dream of snow, a faal ball, a revolver, a bear. It was as ifeverything that took place in Oniéguin had been dreamt by Anna who, in her own life, fulfilled Tatiana's unresolved destiny." Batuman adds in a footnote: "The formalist critic Boris Eikhenbaum expresses this idea in Tolstoy in the Seventies in which he characterizes Anna Kariénina as 'a continuation of Evguiéni Oniéguin,' and Anna as 'a sort of reincarnation of Tatiana'."
nb: once again, the wild translations are mine. I haven't yet tried to locate Nabokov's commentary in EO to be able to quote him correctly.
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* - I wonder if there's another coleridgean dream-connection to life, in Nabokov's "Bend Sinister," since one of its initial titles was projected as "The Person from Porlock" (later, "Solus Rex"), when it's the living author, himself, who interrupts Adam Krug's fictional dream of being a real person, instead of recognizing himself (!) as a character in a novel by Nabokov...
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JM: Adding another confirmation of such an "invention" (discovering something that is already there), related to Borges's vision about Coleridge's unfinished report of his dream, because of Porlock's interruption*, and its legendary precursor and to Shade's lines (939-940) "Man's life as commentary to abstruse/ Unfinished poem. Note for further use," there's another example of a similar vision, now linking Pushkin's Evguiéni Oniéguin to Tolstoy's Anna Karenin. The source is in English but my copy is in Brazilian. It's found in Elif Batuman's introduction to "Os Possessos, Aventuras com os Livros Russos e seus Leitores" (The Possessed, 2010).
The author describes a nightmare she's had the night before she was submitted to an examination. She relates her own nightmare to Tatiana's dream in E.O., a book she'd been reading before she fell asleep. "Tatiana's dream gained shape in real life [in EO's fiction] on the day of the feast of her saint" (when Oniéguin breaks off with Tatiana and the fatal duel with Liénski takes place) Elif Batuman adds: "I read Oniéguin in Nabokov's translation to English and I was very impressed by a note Nabokov added, in which he states that the language of that dream not only contains 'echoes of rythms and subjects' from Tatiana's previous experiences in the story, but it also antecipates the future: 'a certain oneirical quality is transported to the feast of the saint and later on to the duel.' The guests at Tatiana's party and the balls in Moscow, writes Nabokov, 'gain the tonality of a nightmare and they are antecipated by the demons of fairy-tales and the hybrid monsters in her dream'." After her examination, Elif spent the next two weeks reading Tolstoy's Anna Kariénina "which seems to have departed exactly from the same point where Oniéguin has stopped." It was "as if the spectators at the Opera had also become parts of Tatiana's nightmare, in the same atmosphere that had already infiltrated itself in Anna's experiences during the horse races and the train that was snowed down. It was the same world, the same air, only everything seemed larger - as it a doll house with all its minimal details had been transformed into a real house, with long corridors, shining candelabra, a sinuous garden. Elements from Oniéguin reappeared: a dream of snow, a faal ball, a revolver, a bear. It was as ifeverything that took place in Oniéguin had been dreamt by Anna who, in her own life, fulfilled Tatiana's unresolved destiny." Batuman adds in a footnote: "The formalist critic Boris Eikhenbaum expresses this idea in Tolstoy in the Seventies in which he characterizes Anna Kariénina as 'a continuation of Evguiéni Oniéguin,' and Anna as 'a sort of reincarnation of Tatiana'."
nb: once again, the wild translations are mine. I haven't yet tried to locate Nabokov's commentary in EO to be able to quote him correctly.
...............................................................................................................
* - I wonder if there's another coleridgean dream-connection to life, in Nabokov's "Bend Sinister," since one of its initial titles was projected as "The Person from Porlock" (later, "Solus Rex"), when it's the living author, himself, who interrupts Adam Krug's fictional dream of being a real person, instead of recognizing himself (!) as a character in a novel by Nabokov...
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/