[EDNote:
this posting was apparently lost somewhere in transit when it was sent
last week; thanks to Jansy Mello for re-sending. ~SB]
Sent: Tuesday, February 10, 2009
12:58 PM
Subject: Re: [NABOKV-L] SIGHTINGS:
12Feb LRB Diary
David
Haan brought up VN's sentence in SM ("We drift past the show windows of Fabergé whose
mineral monstrosities, jeweled troykas poised on marble ostrich eggs,
and the like, highly appreciated by the imperial family, were emblems
of grotesque garishness to ours." Speak, Memory, 5.5),
followed by a penetrating commentary that envelops A.Hammer and Clancy
Martin with another matryoshka shell. He added: "Clancy Martin suggests
this has more to do with the Romanovs: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n03/mart02_.html"
and links a pargraph to VN's sensibility and his dedication to Vera [
as Martin writes:"The secret of Fabergé’s enormous success as a
salesman was that, unlike the other jewellers serving the royal court,
he understood his work to be primarily the making of gifts[...]
Fabergé, however, wanted to give each egg an individual significance,
with a private (indeed, secret) meaning for the giver and the
receiver."]
JM:
Great sighting! Particularly the contrast bt. VN's comments (SM,5.5)
and VN's other writings. VN's red crystal egg lying in his baby crib
was wrapped in linnen and licked until it glistened, both in eye and
tongue, but it was not Fabergé: it was as Russian as VN's stained-glass
harlequin windows and spiraling marbles. Many of VN's sentences are
Fabergé eggs at their most liquid, personal and mysterious gleam.
In Pnin
there is a moment that functions in a different way. It is like a
broken jewel. I always forget it, but it is at the heart of the novel
as a novel.
And while I
read it suddenlty reappears, as a proustian involuntary memory
being described by who hasn't experienced it to another who is merely a
reader. It is a painful Fabergé egg in all its external splendour: "Madam Shpolyanski [...] had conjured up Mira's image
with unusual force [...].Only in the detachment of an incurable
complaint, in the sanity of near death, could one cope with this for a
moment. In order to exist rationally, Pnin had taught himself, during
the last ten years, never to remember Mira Belochkin [...] because, if
one were quite sincere with oneself, no conscience, and hence no
consciousness, could be expected to subsist in a world where such
things as Mira's death were possible. One had to forget — because one
could not live with the thought that this graceful, fragile, tender
young woman with those eyes, that smile, those gardens and snows in the
background, had been brought in a cattle car to an extermination camp."
btw:
yesterday I heard for the first time, and saw some of the work, of
Joseph Cornell, its caged birds, travelling tags and personal
dedications. No gold nor ruby was needed, but its value was enhanced,
like Fabergé's, by clever marketing, apparently without spoiling it.