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Re: [NABOKOV-LIST] [Translation]natasha
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Joseph Aisenberg: I have not yet read the whole story. First, I was struck by that spring-ridden couch Natasha's father is laying around dying on; N. never got over that couch from the opening of Tolstoy's "Death of Ivan Illych" did he? It's very poetically written, but the scene where the man and the girl go out to the country together and both turn out to be pathetic liars who are only more enchanted by their boasting, is cute but not quite convincing. I'll get back when I've finished up.
JM: I enjoyed J.Aisenberg's description of the Baron and Natasha as "pathetic liars" in a "cute", but unconvincing, rendering as I did his promise to "get back when I've finished up".
The mercurial couch is not the father's, but Natasha's, although he seems to have lost something underneath. A bed and a couch...these begin to sound familiar ( I must return to Tolstoy!)
Even in VN's early stories ( and rejects) I find various levels of allusion. The Baron, permanently denying external reality to invent new worlds, serves at the same time to denounce the alienation of "ars gratia artis" and to suggest the connection bt. art and "the other world". Natasha's self-absorption reminds me of a sexist sentence, by the Viennese Freud, who states that men usually fall in love with narcisistic ( ergo infantile) women in order to compensate for their own narcisism, which they had to give up to perform in society. Or else they go for the "anaclitic" maternal kind ( sometimes both?). The old man is a mystery to me, unlike the formerly predatory and successful businessman in S&S. By the inkstained newspapers and abundant cigarette stubs he might have been a printer or newsman in a very small village, not necessarily a "visionary".
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JM: I enjoyed J.Aisenberg's description of the Baron and Natasha as "pathetic liars" in a "cute", but unconvincing, rendering as I did his promise to "get back when I've finished up".
The mercurial couch is not the father's, but Natasha's, although he seems to have lost something underneath. A bed and a couch...these begin to sound familiar ( I must return to Tolstoy!)
Even in VN's early stories ( and rejects) I find various levels of allusion. The Baron, permanently denying external reality to invent new worlds, serves at the same time to denounce the alienation of "ars gratia artis" and to suggest the connection bt. art and "the other world". Natasha's self-absorption reminds me of a sexist sentence, by the Viennese Freud, who states that men usually fall in love with narcisistic ( ergo infantile) women in order to compensate for their own narcisism, which they had to give up to perform in society. Or else they go for the "anaclitic" maternal kind ( sometimes both?). The old man is a mystery to me, unlike the formerly predatory and successful businessman in S&S. By the inkstained newspapers and abundant cigarette stubs he might have been a printer or newsman in a very small village, not necessarily a "visionary".
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/