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QUERY: VN on time in Tolstoy
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Dear Nabokovians,
I was reading Lectures on Russian Literatures and the passage in which
Nabokov discussess the use of time by Tolstoy made me wonder.
"He discovered - and certainly never realized his discovery - he discovered
a method of picturing life which most pleasingly and exactly corresponds to
our idea of time. He is the only writer I know of whose watch keeps time
with the numberless watches of his readers... What readlly seduces the
average reader is the gift Tolstoy had of endowing his fiction with such
time-values as correspond exactly to our sense of time." (LRL: 141).
He goes on with the issue for quite a while, but I somehow don't feel I
understand quite what he means. Is this the question of discource time/story
time (dis)proportion? Or is there some other idea behind? He does compare
Tolstoy with Proust and Joyce... but it seems to be something different...
Has this point been discussed in literature? And does any one have any
thoughts on that?
Thanks and all the best,
Irena
[EDNOTE. May I add another question: And how do these comments illuminate Nabokov's own representation of time in fiction? -- SES]
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I was reading Lectures on Russian Literatures and the passage in which
Nabokov discussess the use of time by Tolstoy made me wonder.
"He discovered - and certainly never realized his discovery - he discovered
a method of picturing life which most pleasingly and exactly corresponds to
our idea of time. He is the only writer I know of whose watch keeps time
with the numberless watches of his readers... What readlly seduces the
average reader is the gift Tolstoy had of endowing his fiction with such
time-values as correspond exactly to our sense of time." (LRL: 141).
He goes on with the issue for quite a while, but I somehow don't feel I
understand quite what he means. Is this the question of discource time/story
time (dis)proportion? Or is there some other idea behind? He does compare
Tolstoy with Proust and Joyce... but it seems to be something different...
Has this point been discussed in literature? And does any one have any
thoughts on that?
Thanks and all the best,
Irena
[EDNOTE. May I add another question: And how do these comments illuminate Nabokov's own representation of time in fiction? -- SES]
Search the archive: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/archives/nabokv-l.html
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