EDNote: I'm reposting this message because, coming from a Yahoo account, it is rejected by many spam filters. Those of you who use Yahoo or AOL are encouraged to consider changing your Nabokv-L subscriptions to a different mail provider: UCSB refuses to make the patch that would solve this problem. -SB


-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: David Bowie and Nabokov
Date: Tue, 12 Jan 2016 04:05:45 +0000
From: Joseph Schlegel <josephschlegel@yahoo.com>
Reply-To: Joseph Schlegel <josephschlegel@yahoo.com>
To: Vladimir Nabokov Forum <nabokv-l@listserv.ucsb.edu>


A silly mistake in my previous post [see below, the two posts have been combined--SB]: of course Nabokov wouldn't have known of the specific homage in Bowie's song, which was released after Nabokov's death. I meant to phrase that as whether Nabokov was aware of Bowie at all -- I was hoping to spark some discussion on that point.

Joseph Schlegel
PhD Candidate
Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures
University of Toronto


On Monday, January 11, 2016 8:56 PM, Joseph Schlegel <josephschlegel@yahoo.com> wrote:


With David Bowie's passing, I want to reflect on his reflections of Nabokov for a moment. Bowie's song "I'd Rather Be High" immortalized the 'Naa-bah-kahv' pronunciation in its opening lines:

Nabokov is sun-licked now
Upon the beach at Grunewald
Brilliant and naked just
The way that authors look

In a scene towards the end of Nabokov's novel The Gift, the main character, Fyodor, goes bathing in the nude in a Grunewald forest: “The sun bore down. The sun licked me all over with its big smooth tongue.” Bowie's application of Nabokov's imagery demonstrates an interest in Nabokov that extends beyond a mere reading of Lolita. In fact, the line that emphasizes "the way that authors look" reveals a possible attentive reading of the The Gift, since Nabokov's text implies the nude bather Fyodor's self-authorship.

However, it is more likely, as Chris O'Leary points out, that he never read The Gift, but rather knew the description from Otto Friedrich's Before the Deluge: A Portrait of Berlin in the 1920s. This book, which quotes Nabokov's scene, is included in Bowie's list of "must-read books", which also includes Nabokov's Lolita and other books that show an interest in Russian culture more generally (Orlando Figes's A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1890-1924, Peter Sadecky's Octobriana and the Russian Underground, Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, and Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange)

I'm uncertain whether Nabokov was aware of Bowie's homage or not.

Joseph Schlegel
PhD Candidate
University of Toronto
Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures


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