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Fw: Fw: VN & The Germans
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----- Original Message -----
From: Sergey Karpukhin
To: Vladimir Nabokov Forum
Sent: Monday, May 17, 2004 3:31 AM
Subject: Re: Fw: VN & The Germans
Notwithstanding his possible PR strategies, I do believe that VN was perfectly sincere when he talked to Dieter E. Zimmer - it was in 1966, more than 20 years after the Gogol book and the quoted letter. In 1962, in Zermatt, Horst Tappe took a few memorable pictures of Nabokov (one of them "the best ever taken of me" in VN's own words). The photographer later wrote: "Il m'a fait confiance, malgr? mon handicap: j'?tais allemand. Et lui, qui n'aimait pas les Allemands m'a confi? plus tard: 'J'ai trois amis allemands'. Son ?diteur Rowohlt, son traducteur Zimmer, et moi." [He trusted me, despite my handicap: I was German. And he, who didn't like the Germans, told me later: "I have three German friends". His editor Rowohlt, his translator Zimmer, and me. - Magazine Litt?raire, Septembre 1999, p.45]
I would like to add that VN's comment on "the amo et odi emotions with which Russia as a nation viewed Germany as a nation" seems very exact. Herzen, in spite of the fact that his mother was born in Stuttgart, showed much the same emotions, even with a little bias towards the odi. One can also remember that VN's father was educated in Germany, so presumably did not share some of the views of his favourite writer.
Sergey
----- Original Message -----
From: "D. Barton Johnson" <chtodel@cox.net>
To: <NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU>
Sent: Monday, May 17, 2004 12:57 AM
Subject: Fw: VN & The Germans
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "yuri leving" <leving@usc.edu>
> >
> > ----------------- Message requiring your approval (5
> lines) -------------------
> > Whether Nabokov’s words to his German interviewer were said as a matter of
> courtesy or were a nice PR move having in mind those “post-war era German
> critics [who] have understood and appreciated my books,” the writer in fact
> was far more consistent, as one may suggest, in his private life. In a
> letter to his best school friend, living in Palestine, Nabokov states most
> boldly: “Whole Germany must be burnt to ashes several times in a row in
> order to quench my hatred to it at least slightly, when I am thinking of
> those perished in Poland” (from the unpublished letter of X.24.1945 to S.
> Rozov, Russian original in private collection).
> >
> > Yuri Leving
> >
> >
>