JM: I checked various
I.P.Pavlov and S.Freud indexes and found no evidence of one having
ever mentioned the other (my mistake!). Freud's views about Dostoievsky,
though, are very hard on him.
Taking the cue as regards Alexey's play
with Gamlet/Hamlet [ MARX
+ ENGELS
= ELSINOR
+ GAMLET
+ EХIT – TOILET
–
I (Gamlet is the Russian spelling of Hamlet; in Ada,
Gamlet is a Russian hamlet near Ardis Hall)], and Sandy Klein's recent
link http://english.ruvr.ru/2010/03/18/5421088.html [The 16th festival, "Literature and
Cinema", will open in Gatchina, which is a St. Petersburg suburb (March
19th to 25th). This year's festival is demonstrating a
large variety of forms, methods and devices to cover the literary plot...]
there's only one small item I'd like to share.
I just read news about Grigory
Kosintsev's versions of Shakespeare's "Hamlet" and "King Lear,"
both available in DVD. I learned that Kosintsev's "Hamlet" (played by
Innokenti Smoktunovsky) is simply marvellous and that Ophelia (Anastasiya
Vertinskaya), "looks like a Boticceli painting." The music by Shostakovitch has
been equally praised. The play was translated into Russian by Boris
Pasternak. "Gamlet" won critical acclaim
in the 1964 Venice Festival.
The raving reviewer rated both movies as
being far superior to Olivier's 1948 interpretation (in which he'd
been guided by psychoanalyst Ernest Jones), Kenneth Bragannah's,
or O.Welle's "Othello" and "Macbeth," Polansky's,
Kurosawa's...
I cannot add my own praise, for I haven't yet
had the chance to view them. However some of the List
participants may be interested in checking those two DVD
under Kosintsev's outstanding direction.
Another cue from A.Sklyarenko's anagrams,
this time with Gogol's name, I was led to wonder about one
sentence in "Ada," namely "two holes in the mask of
life."*
When he wrote about Gogol's "The
Overcoat", in his chapter " The Apotheosis of the Mask," Nabokov noted that
Gogol's work is "a grotesque and grim nightmare
making black holes in the dim pattern of life" for
"...amid the whirling masks, one mask would turn out to be a real face, or at
least the place where that face ought to be."
After having
set those two different quotations side by side, I realized that the
sense I initially thought I'd discerned, both in "Ada" and in "Gogol," seemed to
dissolve. What are mask, pattern of life, one real face, two
holes, eyes? Both sentences will only be
understood, so it seems to me, if we admit there is a reference to an
"otherwordly" eye and a mysterious Designer in them
**.
.........................................................................
*"The eyes. Ada’s dark brown eyes. What (Ada asks) are
eyes anyway? Two holes in the mask of life. What (she asks) would they mean to a
creature from another corpuscle or milk bubble whose organ of sight was (say) an
internal parasite resembling the written word
‘deified’?"
** - For lines 895/899 Kinbote introduces a
Pale Fire variant.
I have a certain liking, I
admit,
For Parody, that last resort of wit:
'In nature’s strife when
fortitude prevails
The victim falters and the victor fails.'
Yes, reader,
Pope"
During an interview, when inquired about
"parody," Nabokov emphasized that the proffered view had
been Kinbote's own. The same kind of complex patterns ( added to what
has been extracted from Pope), takes us to question about "in the eyes of
whom the victim falters, the victor fails?," as we must equally inquire
about where does this "parody" apply and how it is related to
Darwin's 'struggle for
survival.'