Sandy Klein sent excerpts highlighting
Nabokov [Complete article at following
URL: http://www.amherstbulletin.com/story/id/136814/ }in "From
Russia with love: Renowned poet brings her passion for literature to Hampshire
College", By Kristin Palpini:."Russian poet Polina Barskova, who had her first
volume of poetry published at age 15, divides her time now between writing and
imparting her love for literature to her students at Hampshire
College[...] But on that day at Hampshire College in March, as her students
filed out at the end of class, Barskova said what she really wanted to discuss
in an interview with a reporter was those students. 'What I see in a room of 20
young people is a conversation, is a potential for a moment toward each other,"
she said. "An intellectual moment is my pleasure. They are very
important'."
Stan K-B: I thoroughly enjoyed Sárdi’s well-crafted and
persuasive essay. It illustrates the challenge, nay the angst, facing serious,
coherent literary criticism of Nabokov’s extremely diverse works. The latter not
only defy the “trad” genre classifications, but Nabokov himself seems to reject
and discourage, nay mock, most of what passes as “literary theory.” [...]I do
agree with Sárdi that we should avoid an over-preoccupation with VN’s allusional
and word-play exploits[...] But I have reservations about over-shifting our
focus to VN’s “Otherworldliness.” I reject the notion that the observable
physical “reality” revealed by “commonsense” and refined by science is somehow
pathetically drab and boring in contrast to the “other” worlds of unbridled
metaphysical speculation! [...] Before Nag Hammadi, our knowledge of
Gnosticism (by no means a single, uniform creed) was restricted to early
distortions from the Church Fathers [...] in addition to Sárdi’s point about
Gnostic cosmology (a neat solution to the theodicy problem), of equal importance
to VN’s “metaphysics” is the Gnostic concept of “hidden knowledge” (whence the
very name of the movement: Greek gnostos = known). More (or less)
anon.
JM: I didn't search for a sample
of Polina Barskova's poems, but one of her replies suggests that she
might be among the perfect Nabokov enthusiasts and teachers.
On student exchanges during class she noted: "an intellectual moment is my
pleasure." ie, no emphatic academic quotes, extensive
literary-proof searches before expressing an idea, but "intellectual
moment", in its actuality and spontaneity ...
I hope Nabokov's evolved
ghost (with some of his Russian accent) drops in to disturb them at the right
opportunities...
Stan, one of the items
that I appreciated in Sárdi was how he conducted his shift towards VN's
"otherworldliness". If you squeeze his words and examples you'll see that, like
Nabokov, he was secretive and let others do the talking. He didn't seem to
forget Demon's "how incestuously art and science meet
in an insect" (an unchecked quote), ie, that VN not only a
poet, but a scientist using commonsense-logic and imaginative intuition to
deal with "observable physical reality." VN's "otherwordliness" is a state of
being from very private, epifanic doors of perception. I gather that
the resulting insights or revelations were not "effed" by
him and, most often, became the subject of satire, never a
"revelation." VN insitently returned to the theme of "enhancing
conscious awareness of events", not to its explicitation by scientific
generalizations.
btw: In the
early eighties I was acquainted with Gnostic ideas through Susan
Sontag's essays on Artaud (or was it Lautreamont?), emphasizing sexuality
instead of ascetism, etc. A friend informed me that in
certain universities in America ( Harvard, Princeton) there was an
elite of philosophic and scientific "gnostics" ( I read one of
their books, unfortunately a borrowed copy, one which I was not allowed
to reproduce to keep and never checked for its
"hoaxity"). Would VN have been more ( or less) than acquainted with
them? I doubt it.