Subject
Re: Cruelty
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Date
Body
Dave Haan: Adam Roberts, author of, most recently, _Yellow Blue Tibia_ (a transparent allusion), on _Glory_:
"The novel as a whole makes a salutary counterexample to those who think Nabakov’s schitck was an ‘aesthetics of cruelty’; for it is a novel about goodness, and beauty, and quite deliberately lacks melodramatic tension, although it is actually brimming with Nabokov’s trademark rapturous gorgeousness. "
http://www.thevalve.org/go/valve/article/podvig/
JM: A salutary counterexample to Nabokov's "aesthetics of cruelty"? Why "salutary"?
Andrewm Field wrote about the relationship between Vladimir and Irina Guadanini :
"Nabokov instructed her to write poste restante addressing the letters to Korf. He said he was living in fear and told Guadinini* that she must remain faithful to him. Then suddenly, in August, a seventh letter asked Irina to return the previous letters "which, anyway, have much writer's exaggeration in them." [...] She went to Cannes but, according to Véra, was rebuffed by Nabokov.[...]When she returned to Paris she lived in near poverty...A mutual acquaintance of Guadinini and Nabokov approached him with a request for some financial help to ease her poverty. He gave money but very little, explaining, "Yes, I've grown miserly in my old age." (Andrew Field: The Life and Art of Vladimir Nabokov,page 178)**.
By tortuous associations I related Nabokov's cruel indifference to the woman he thought he'd been in love with (similar to developments in "Sounds"? Or, rather, in "Benevolence"?), to an event that was described to him by Edmund Wilson, in a letter dated June 3, 1945:
"...Parny hasn't a trace of Pushkin's feeling or humanity or color. There is a wonderful biographical notice about him written not long after his death. It seems that he fell in love and had a brief affair with a young girl who was made to marry some richer or nobler man, and he addressed to her the four books of elegies which caused him to be knowm as "Le Tibulle français." Later the lady's husband died, and she wrote to Parny offering to spend with him "ler derniers jours qui lui seraint comptés sur la terre;" but the poet, though "sensible à ce souvenier de sa maîtressem s'écria, "Ce n'est plus Eléonore!" et ne repondit point (isn't that point perfect?) à la femme tendre et dévouée qui revenait a lui."
Nabokov's life-story is one of his long-lasting loyalty to Véra, but it also includes his verbal mnemonic visitations to adolescent, or even later, loves. These represent a totally different kind of faithfulness - and they should remain under the control of his memory, safely "past," instead of reappearing in real life to shock him into "chronophobia." They would then turn into false "Eléonores"... ( a name that often pops up, related to the stage and fakes, in "Ada").
I was reminded of Nabokov's story-telling talents about such extended long lost loves, as they are recovered by the offices of Mnemosyne, while I watched an Argentinian thriller cum love-story. There's a play in it with a missing letter, a typewriter's broken "Aa," that appears at regular intervals; a dream that induces the word "temo" ("I fear"), which the protagonist, fully awake, slowly realizes to mean "te amo" (the "Aa" in now inserted in it); two obsessed soccer-fans, a criminal who unconsciously leaves clues about his whereabouts by the letters he writes to his mother and forces the investigators into a compressed 'paper-chase,' after they recognize indications about specific soccer games and players by the missivist and his favorite soccer team.( The guy was chased in an awesome plane-sequence, with a swooping-camera descending onto a crowded football-stadium that would thrill Stan Kelly-Bootle and Sklyarenko). Juan Jose Campanella, the director and co-scriptwriter of "The Secret in Their Eyes's," ( El Secreto de Sus Ojos) "is one of Argentina's most communicative storytellers" and his movie won the 2010 Academy award for foreign movies. It took me sometime before I realized the particular kind of "beauty" that made me connect this movie to Nabokov. It has a baudelairian touch: it is a broken beauty. Instead of making the loved woman immortal through "Art," it is her murdered raped body in cruel display, it is her loss and her effacement that which leaves the unforgetful register (the widower cannot recall if, on their last breakfast together, she'd prepared him tea with drops of lemmon or honey, he complains about the superposition of recollections that falsify his remembrance, he despairs about the evanescing of his wife's contours and smile...)
There is something strange, human and true which arises by relating "beauty and cruelty," a damaged beauty, like the destruction of Lolita's childhood by HH's pursuit of a delusional "nymphethood," and spoiled loves. I don't think that I should recommend this movie for its link to Nabokov, though. This association may make sense only to me, groping along the mysteries of everyday "cruelty" in connection to "immortal art." ( HH somewhere recognizes that he has "only words to play with" - but his readers can go a step further than he can by reading his words ...) .
...........................................................................................
* - B.Boyd writes "Guadanini" and A.Field "Guadinini." ( also Korff/Korf). Cp. the same story in Brian Boyd: V.Nabokov The Russian Years version (excerpts):
"In the emigration Irina had been briefly married to a Russian she met in Belgium...An animal lover, she earned a skimpy living as a poodle trimmer. Ten years earlier Nabokov had introduced himself and his wife into King,Queen, Knave as a contrast to the novel's sordid adulterous triangle...in February the nervous tension the affair (VN/Irina Guadanini) caused him brought on a severe attack of psoriasis..." (RY,pg.437) "one cause of both the psoriasis and the shortage of time was still there: Irina Guadanini. Nabokov was never a person who knew how to love lightly..."(RY,pg.438) "In Czechoslovakia Irina Guadanini's image glowed brightly beyond the horizon, while the immediate foreground was darkened by Nabokov's unease and fuilt at the need for deceit... "The inevitable vulgarity of deceit," he wrote to Irina... At the same time he could not stop: he asked her to write poste restante to "V.Korff" in Prague. (RY,440) "Nabokov told her they would soon meet again, but she felt it would not happen. She was right." (RY,443) "A day later Irina Guadanini arrived in Cannes...when he and Dmitri settled on the beach she sat down some distance off...Later, Nabokov told Véra about Irina's vigil. It was the last time he and Irina ever met."
** - The words Field quoted (he was an unreliable biographer) about Nabokov having grown "miserly in old age," stimulated me to search for a notice I read a few weeks ago. It relates to one of Nabokov's translators whom, apparently, Nabokov had underpaid. In the note it was affirmed that, some time later, Nabokov decided to add one more check to round up the total of what he'd considered as a just payment. The second check, though, had very little substance too, and the translator prefered to keep and frame it, to possess Nabokov's autograph. At the time I read this information, I remembered the three checks which were sent to VN, at intervals, to pay for the publication of his poem in the "New Yorker" ("An Evening of Russian Poetry"). Cf. letter 118 (March 12,1945) Edmund Wilson writes: "When I first brought the matter of payment up, both Ross and Mrs.White said that they thought you had not been paid enough, and Ross told me that he would send you sixty some dollars more. Then it turned out that they had sent you only thirty, and an additional check had to be made to you."
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"The novel as a whole makes a salutary counterexample to those who think Nabakov’s schitck was an ‘aesthetics of cruelty’; for it is a novel about goodness, and beauty, and quite deliberately lacks melodramatic tension, although it is actually brimming with Nabokov’s trademark rapturous gorgeousness. "
http://www.thevalve.org/go/valve/article/podvig/
JM: A salutary counterexample to Nabokov's "aesthetics of cruelty"? Why "salutary"?
Andrewm Field wrote about the relationship between Vladimir and Irina Guadanini :
"Nabokov instructed her to write poste restante addressing the letters to Korf. He said he was living in fear and told Guadinini* that she must remain faithful to him. Then suddenly, in August, a seventh letter asked Irina to return the previous letters "which, anyway, have much writer's exaggeration in them." [...] She went to Cannes but, according to Véra, was rebuffed by Nabokov.[...]When she returned to Paris she lived in near poverty...A mutual acquaintance of Guadinini and Nabokov approached him with a request for some financial help to ease her poverty. He gave money but very little, explaining, "Yes, I've grown miserly in my old age." (Andrew Field: The Life and Art of Vladimir Nabokov,page 178)**.
By tortuous associations I related Nabokov's cruel indifference to the woman he thought he'd been in love with (similar to developments in "Sounds"? Or, rather, in "Benevolence"?), to an event that was described to him by Edmund Wilson, in a letter dated June 3, 1945:
"...Parny hasn't a trace of Pushkin's feeling or humanity or color. There is a wonderful biographical notice about him written not long after his death. It seems that he fell in love and had a brief affair with a young girl who was made to marry some richer or nobler man, and he addressed to her the four books of elegies which caused him to be knowm as "Le Tibulle français." Later the lady's husband died, and she wrote to Parny offering to spend with him "ler derniers jours qui lui seraint comptés sur la terre;" but the poet, though "sensible à ce souvenier de sa maîtressem s'écria, "Ce n'est plus Eléonore!" et ne repondit point (isn't that point perfect?) à la femme tendre et dévouée qui revenait a lui."
Nabokov's life-story is one of his long-lasting loyalty to Véra, but it also includes his verbal mnemonic visitations to adolescent, or even later, loves. These represent a totally different kind of faithfulness - and they should remain under the control of his memory, safely "past," instead of reappearing in real life to shock him into "chronophobia." They would then turn into false "Eléonores"... ( a name that often pops up, related to the stage and fakes, in "Ada").
I was reminded of Nabokov's story-telling talents about such extended long lost loves, as they are recovered by the offices of Mnemosyne, while I watched an Argentinian thriller cum love-story. There's a play in it with a missing letter, a typewriter's broken "Aa," that appears at regular intervals; a dream that induces the word "temo" ("I fear"), which the protagonist, fully awake, slowly realizes to mean "te amo" (the "Aa" in now inserted in it); two obsessed soccer-fans, a criminal who unconsciously leaves clues about his whereabouts by the letters he writes to his mother and forces the investigators into a compressed 'paper-chase,' after they recognize indications about specific soccer games and players by the missivist and his favorite soccer team.( The guy was chased in an awesome plane-sequence, with a swooping-camera descending onto a crowded football-stadium that would thrill Stan Kelly-Bootle and Sklyarenko). Juan Jose Campanella, the director and co-scriptwriter of "The Secret in Their Eyes's," ( El Secreto de Sus Ojos) "is one of Argentina's most communicative storytellers" and his movie won the 2010 Academy award for foreign movies. It took me sometime before I realized the particular kind of "beauty" that made me connect this movie to Nabokov. It has a baudelairian touch: it is a broken beauty. Instead of making the loved woman immortal through "Art," it is her murdered raped body in cruel display, it is her loss and her effacement that which leaves the unforgetful register (the widower cannot recall if, on their last breakfast together, she'd prepared him tea with drops of lemmon or honey, he complains about the superposition of recollections that falsify his remembrance, he despairs about the evanescing of his wife's contours and smile...)
There is something strange, human and true which arises by relating "beauty and cruelty," a damaged beauty, like the destruction of Lolita's childhood by HH's pursuit of a delusional "nymphethood," and spoiled loves. I don't think that I should recommend this movie for its link to Nabokov, though. This association may make sense only to me, groping along the mysteries of everyday "cruelty" in connection to "immortal art." ( HH somewhere recognizes that he has "only words to play with" - but his readers can go a step further than he can by reading his words ...) .
...........................................................................................
* - B.Boyd writes "Guadanini" and A.Field "Guadinini." ( also Korff/Korf). Cp. the same story in Brian Boyd: V.Nabokov The Russian Years version (excerpts):
"In the emigration Irina had been briefly married to a Russian she met in Belgium...An animal lover, she earned a skimpy living as a poodle trimmer. Ten years earlier Nabokov had introduced himself and his wife into King,Queen, Knave as a contrast to the novel's sordid adulterous triangle...in February the nervous tension the affair (VN/Irina Guadanini) caused him brought on a severe attack of psoriasis..." (RY,pg.437) "one cause of both the psoriasis and the shortage of time was still there: Irina Guadanini. Nabokov was never a person who knew how to love lightly..."(RY,pg.438) "In Czechoslovakia Irina Guadanini's image glowed brightly beyond the horizon, while the immediate foreground was darkened by Nabokov's unease and fuilt at the need for deceit... "The inevitable vulgarity of deceit," he wrote to Irina... At the same time he could not stop: he asked her to write poste restante to "V.Korff" in Prague. (RY,440) "Nabokov told her they would soon meet again, but she felt it would not happen. She was right." (RY,443) "A day later Irina Guadanini arrived in Cannes...when he and Dmitri settled on the beach she sat down some distance off...Later, Nabokov told Véra about Irina's vigil. It was the last time he and Irina ever met."
** - The words Field quoted (he was an unreliable biographer) about Nabokov having grown "miserly in old age," stimulated me to search for a notice I read a few weeks ago. It relates to one of Nabokov's translators whom, apparently, Nabokov had underpaid. In the note it was affirmed that, some time later, Nabokov decided to add one more check to round up the total of what he'd considered as a just payment. The second check, though, had very little substance too, and the translator prefered to keep and frame it, to possess Nabokov's autograph. At the time I read this information, I remembered the three checks which were sent to VN, at intervals, to pay for the publication of his poem in the "New Yorker" ("An Evening of Russian Poetry"). Cf. letter 118 (March 12,1945) Edmund Wilson writes: "When I first brought the matter of payment up, both Ross and Mrs.White said that they thought you had not been paid enough, and Ross told me that he would send you sixty some dollars more. Then it turned out that they had sent you only thirty, and an additional check had to be made to you."
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/