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Re: Interview in French]
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Maurice Couturier: The original reads: "Mais je m'imaginais qu'il paraîtrait dans une édition limitée, restreinte, réservée à quelques lettrés." I thought he had said the
contrary:.. I mistranslated the sentence...probably because I thought Nabokov was confident the book would appeal to a large public...
JM: Now I understand the spirit of the "mistranslation." (Couturier was closer to Nabokov's unconfessed wishes than he realized at first).
Sighting: "Great works of art, it can be argued, are not those that take up familiar issues in a powerful and persuasive way but try to give voice to new experiences or name unnamed experiences. Sometimes, the new experience is such a strange one that what a film means cannot even be articulated readily by the critic. There are threads in Yuri's Day which seem contradictory because the film begins as a thriller, incorporates elements of horror but concludes with a strange spiritual affirmation. If one tried to explain every motif in the film one would find the going extremely difficult. The son's disappearance can perhaps be compared to the girl's disappearance in Antonioni's L'Avventura (1960), to which no explanation fits except perhaps a metaphysical one. Andrei's disappearance in Yuri's Day is as difficult to explain as the one in L'Avventura but the museum dedicated to Russia's pre-revolutionary past - Prince Bagration features in Tolstoy's War and Peace - into which Andrei disappears suggests something. In Vladimir Nabokov's story The Visit to the Museum, the narrator, who is an exiled Russian, visits a small museum in France, which swells so mysteriously that he is completely lost in its rooms. When he makes his way out of this labyrinth and emerges into the daylight, he is in his native country - but not of his childhood but of today and he is immediately arrested. There is partly a metaphor here about museums not being merely collections of objects but pathways defying time and space to those deeply involved in the past and Yuri's Day may be working with a similar notion. My own reading of the Bagration museum in Serebrennikov's film is that it is a space closed in on itself - like a 'black hole' - because of contemporary Russia's disconnection with its own past. Andrei, when he walks into the museum - strangely determined to grapple with a past from which is has been excluded - is perhaps swallowed up by this 'black hole' in time, which closes back over
Minority View: Yuri's Day by Kirill Serebrennikov (Russia)
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