Due to the recent success of the movie
"Black Swan"*, and a series of "youtube" ballet presentations of a
dying swan relayed to me, I decided to check for items related to
Nabokov's own version of a dying old swan. I noticed, today,
that Nabokov is unsure if he "had not
kept utterly missing something in her that was far more she than her
chins...something perhaps akin to that last glimpse of her..., or to that swan
whose agony was so much closer to artistic truth than a drooping dancer's pale
arms..."** and his
feelings seemed incongruously to echo those he's described
about lithe graceful young Nina, in Spring in Fialta: "I grew apprehensive because something lovely, delicate, and
unrepeatable was being wasted: something which I abused by snapping
off poor bright bits in gross haste while neglecting the modest but true core which
perhaps it kept offering me in a pitiful
whisper."
During this process I came across a
belated sighting ( October, 2010), related to a new edition of Nabokov's
"Mademoiselle O" in France. It was translated from the English and not
published in Nabokov's French original (or so I understood from the
captions).
.................................................................................
* Wiki on Black Swan, a 2010 American psychological
thriller film directed by Darren Aronofsky and starring Natalie Portman, Vincent
Cassel, and Mila Kunis. Its plot revolves around a production of Tchaikovsky's
Swan Lake ballet...the production requires a ballerina to play both the innocent
White Swan and the sensual Black Swan. One dancer, Nina (Portman), is a perfect
fit for the White Swan, while Lily (Kunis) has a personality that matches the
Black Swan. When the two compete for the parts, Nina finds a dark side to
herself. Aronofsky conceived the premise by connecting his viewings of a
production of Swan Lake with an unrealized screenplay about understudies and the
notion of being haunted by a double, similar to the folklore surrounding
doppelgängers....
** -
Vladimir Nabokov, Mademoiselle O (excerpts):
"Before leaving for Basle and Berlin,
I happened to be walking along the lake in the cold, misty night..."Il plut
toujours en Suisse" was one of those casual comments which, formerly, had made
Mademoiselle weep. Below, a wide ripple, almost a wave, and something vaguely
white attracted my eye. As I came quite close to the lapping water, I saw what
it was—an aged swan, a large, uncouth, dodolike creature, making ridiculous
efforts to hoist himself into a moored boat. He could not do it. The heavy,
impotent flapping of his wings, their slippery sound against the rocking and
plashing boat, the gluey glistening of the dark swell where it caught the
light—all seemed for a moment laden with that strange significance which
sometimes in dreams is attached to a finger pressed to mute lips and then
pointed at something the dreamer has no time to distinguish before waking with a
start. But although I soon forgot that dismal night, it was, oddly enough, that
night, that compound image—shudder and swan and swell—which first came to my
mind when a couple of years later I learned that Mademoiselle had
died.
She had spent all her life in
feeling miserable...What bothers me is that a sense of misery, and nothing else,
is not enough to make a permanent soul. My enormous and morose Mademoiselle is
all right on earth but impossible in eternity. Have I really salvaged her from
fiction?...wondering if...I had not kept utterly missing something in her that
was far more she than her chins...something perhaps akin to that last glimpse of
her..., or to that swan whose agony was so much closer to artistic truth than a
drooping dancer's pale arms; something, in short, that I could appreciate only
after the things and beings that I had most loved in the security of my
childhood had been turned to ashes or shot through the heart."
