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Re: Dostoevski and psychoanalysis
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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.'
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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.'
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/