Alexey Sklyarenko: "Yesterday
(Jan. 1) was also Van Veen's birthday. Tomorrow (Jan. 3) is Lucette's birthday.
Now it so happened that I was born (41 years ago) "between Van and Lucinda
Veen." Because, in a sense, I too am Nabokov's galley slave, may I suggest
that Janaury 2 is henceforth celebrated as "Skylark's Day"?...I completed today two new versions (Russian & English)
of my latest... "The Red Flower of Evil in Nabokov's Ada." I hope to
make them soon available to fellow Nabokovians...Incidentally, Aikhenvald speaks of the red flower of evil in his
essay on Garshin (included in "The Silhouettes of the Russian
Writers")"
JM: Happy Birthday, Alexey and
congs on the forthcoming article, "The Red Flower of Evil." A
festive bunch of dates with roses and a knackle of nuts right at the start - and
I hope you''ll soon achieve your manumission
from Nabokov...
Someone recently inquired of me if I had
already read the highly praised novel by Biely. No. I'm planning to begin
with Mikhail Bulgakov's Мастер и Маргарита
( "O Mestre e Margarida") and, while checking
around, I came across an amusing editorial review of VN's "Lectures on
English Literature" at the Amazon.com site.
Funny how people still insist on
translating Kafka's little novel as "The Metamorphosis"
while quoting Nabokov, who referred to it as "Transformation".*
For the benefit of those who haven't read this accessment, here it
is:
Editorial Reviews - Review
Not
really essays, not genial and general E. M. Forster-ish talks either, nor
stirring defenses nor rhetorical destructions, these lectures Nabokov prepared
and gave at Cornell in the Fifties are just that: he talks and reads, we listen
(the same general approach - heirophant picking out the mystery from the dross -
that Nabokov used in his own fiction); and literature is taken apart like a
boxful of toys: "impersonal imagination and artistic delight," "the supremacy of
the detail over the general, of the part that is more alive than the whole."
There are diagrams and drawings, quiddities made visual: a map of Sotherton
Court in Jane Austen's Mansfield Park; exactly what kind of beetle Gregor Samsa
turned into in "The Metamorphosis" the facade of 7 Eccles St., Bloom's house in
Ulysses; what Odette's orchid looked like in Swann's Way. The more specific and
crammed the writer, the more specific and crammed Nabokov's lecture: Dickens,
Flaubert, Joyce. He finds Bleak House's tricks delicious, the richness and the
pity; in Ulysses he swats away the Freudian interpretations...in favor of the
devilish intricacy of Joycean synchronicity... Where sheer lush orchestration is
less the thing, Nabokov falls back on thematic layering and transformation;
before Stevenson's "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" and Kafka's "The Metamorphosis" he
is almost brief, enchantedly synopsizing although with microscopic attention
still. In Nabokov a crankiness is always near the surface... and he betrays a
certain anxiety by detailing so much, as though a great work might try and fool
him: there's something at the same time eccentric and regimental to his
appreciation. But finally there is a personal, fussy, high rapture to these
lessons and illustrations, not quite analytical (Nabokov was too defensive and
contentious for analysis - maybe too brilliant, too) - more a delight in
literature-as-camouflage. Distinctive and demanding. (Kirkus Reviews )
www.amazon.com › ... › Literature & Fiction › Essays -
(btw: what does "analytical" mean among the literatti?)
.......................................................................................................
*
We finally get Nabokov’s honors list “in this order: Joyce’s
Ulysses, Kafka’s Transformation [note the affected dismissal
of the customary Metamorphosis], Biely’s Petersburg, and the
first half of Proust’s fairy tale In Search of Lost Time.” This last is
the justified emendation of a misleading English title, but note the belittling
“first half” and “fairy tale,” with the pun on “fairy.” Gratuitous excogitations by John Simon - The New
Criterion www.newcriterion.com/.../Gratuitous-excogitations-4395