Subject
Tallinn-Tartu Nabokov Conference Abstracts (fwd)
Date
Body
EDITOR's NOTE. Grigori Utgof <utgof@tpu.ee>, organizer of the
International Nabokov Seminar at the January 1999 Tallin
(Estonia)Conference "The Culture of the Russian Diaspora," sends
NABOKV-L all of the available Nabokov abstracts. NABOKV-L thanks Grigori
Utgof.
-------------------------------------
Irina Belobrovtseva (Tallinn)
DISCOURSE ON THE SHADES IN VLADIMIR NABOKOV'S WORKS
The paper "Discourse on the Shades in Vladimir Nabokov's Works" has been
based on the principle of motif analysis of the text. The important and to
a considerable extent representative motif of shadow in Vladimir Nabokov's
works has its own complicated philosophy.
In the paper significance of the motif has been shown on the example of
"Invitation to a Beheading". Interpretation of Cincinnatus as a real
person and the other figures as illusions, ghosts often occurs being
already a stereotype. Here traditional binary opposition real - illusory
is used, where 'real' is positive and 'illusory' or 'shade' is nagative.
On the contrary Nabokov in this novel considers 'real' (with synonyms
hidden, single, profound) is a mark of really complicated, differently
orientated hero.
In his representations of the motif of shadow Vladimir Nabokov bases on
three mythologemma well-known in human culture. They are:
- Plato's cave where all people life is only reflection, only shadow of
real existence
- H.H. Andersen's fairy-tale "Shadow", which regards the opportunity of
mutual convertibility of a man and his shade and
- Chamisso novel about a man lost hai shadow.
Vladimir Nabokov uses in the "Invitation to a Beheading" all the three
antedents.
----------------------------------------------
Anna Brodsky (Lexington)
NABOKOV'S LOLITA AND THE POST-WAR EMIGRE CONSCIOUSNESS
The author shows that the Second World War and the holocaust form an
important background to Nabokov's "Lolita". Nabokov's masterpiece is
animated by a post-war emigre counsciousness like that expressed in the
works of other emigres, for example, Theodore Adorno and Hanna Arendt.
These writers were haunted by the evil they have witnessed in Europe, and
made the disturbing claim that confidence, conformity, cheerfulness -
qualities they found abundantly in America - lay very close to the springs
of evil from which totalitarism had sprung.
Humbert Humbert is, among other things, a brilliant invention for focusing
on the banality of evil. The pervert's point of view turns out to be an
uncannily perfect way of satirizing not only the cheery commercialism of
American life, but is lurking antisemitism and smug racism. The concern
with evil in "Lolita" poses the question of the possibility of art after
holocaust.
-------------------------------------------------
Elda Garetto (Milan)
VLADIMIR NABOKOV AND ITALO CALVINO IN SEARCH OF THE "IDEAL" READER
The subject of this paper has been suggested by Italo Calvino's novel "In
on a Winter's Night a Traveler", whose hero is an "ideal" reader, that is
a virtual one. The theoretical support is provided by works on Aesthetics
and Semiotics about the Reader and the act of reading, in particular by
U.Eco's "The Role of the Reader". The main purpose of the paper is to
examine the complex Author-Reader relation in Nabokov's prose. The
analysis is based on statements by Nabokov himself about the qualities a
good reader must possess and examines the narrational strategies in use,
in particular the strategy of game.
If we concider that in Aesthetics game is often compared to the act of
creation itself, we can therefore consider all the tricks and traps
Nabokov disseminates in his texts not as the result of a supposedly
haughty attitude of the Author towards his readers (as some critics
mantain), but as a sort of a complicated training he uses to select them
and to introduce them into the world of artistic creation.
The Reader, on his side, can easier find his way in the labyrinth of the
text only if he proves to be very sensitive to details, able to catch
intertextual references and to concider interpretations and
systematisations just as temporary steps to be overcome thanks to
subsequent hints and insights. These conditions can create right
atmosphere for the game of art. The concept of game involves the notion of
interaction among literary work, reader, and uthor and trasforms the
literary pact between them.
--------------------------------------------
Jane Grayson (London)
NABOKOV'S BALANCING ACT
In this paper I am looking at how Nabokov handles the project of being a
novelist, and how that project evolves.
I see Nabokov as developing the idea of creating a coherent interlocking
oeuvre, a self-sufficient 'Nabokovian world'. And I suggest that the
writing of autobiography and self-translation involve an analogous
process. They require the author stepping outside his own work and his own
plot, and obserwing himself from the outside.
Nabokov first engages in autobiography and self-translation at a point
in his career when he was caught badly off-balance, when he had
temporarily lost his direction as a writer. He recovered balance, I
suggest, through autobiography with the perception of pattern, and through
translation with the discovery of code. Autobiography and translation
serve as a kind of Alice-in-Wonderland tunnel linking his Russian past
with his American/English future. Although they have their own disciplines
and impose their own constraints I see them as a perfoming for Nabokov an
essentially liberating function.
Moreover, once material from Nabokov's experience is presented as
autobiography this affects reading his earlier and later fictional
presentation on the same material. It interacts and interconnects with
what has gone before and what will come after. The English and Russian
versions of the autobiography come to serve as an unrealized 'reality'
against which the fiction came bounce off and play.
A schematic view of Nabokov's development distinguishes an early period
dominated by plot, a middle period dominated by pattern, and a later
period dominated by play.
As illustration I cite the development of the motif of the picture of the
forest which a child imagines climbing into from his bed, from its first
appearance in 'Podvig' through the successive versions of autobiography,
to 'Lolita'.
I conclude with a 'caveat' and the important Nabokovian truth that
patterns in nature are there waiting to be perceived. There are no
waterlight compartments in Nabokov's work. The prefiguration of Nabokov's
later development is all there in the earlier work.
-------------------------------------------------
Yuichi Isahaya (Kyoto)
LIGHT AND DARKNESS IN NABOKOV'S _GLORY_
In "Glory" we find many lights in the background of darkness. And Martin's
youth was full of such lights. But after entering into Cambridge and
falling in love with Sonia, he lost lights, and darkness covered his
world. It was not until he stopped loving Sonia that ha found lights once
again on his way to the Southern France.
Lights are obviously related to Martin's romantic character. And critics
often regarded darkness as an image of death. But we must pay attention to
the fact that Sonia is closely related to the darkness in the novel. On
the one hand, she is a cruel lady, but, on the other hand, she is a
commonplace, vulgar woman. So we maintain that in this novel darkness,
first of all, signifies vulgarity, poshlust. As a whole, this novel is
conctructed on the contrast between lights, which suggest usual romantic
nature, and darkness, which signifies the commonplace, poshlust.
--------------------------------------
Maria Malikova (St. Petersburg)
FROM WHAT YASHA CHERNYSHEVSKY IS MADE
The title of the paper by Maria Malikova (St. Petersburg, Pushkinskii Dom)
"From What Yasha Chernyshesky is Made" is based on the seminal article by
I. Paperno ("How Nabokov's Dar Is Made" with its all Eichenbaumic
implications) and concentrates on exploring subtexts used in the creation
of a minor charecter of Nabokov's Dar - Yasha Chernyshevsky.
Starting with the general overview of a traditional concept of a writer as
a Creator and one of its textual manifestations - the importance of
metaliterary (mostly automatapoetic) subtexts in text structure) M.
Malikova bares subtexts underlying Yasha's image. This metonimic key to
Yasha's image is given by the author himself, when he describes the
spectre of a young poet: "the shadow of two volumes, standing on the
table, represented a cuff and the corner of a lapel while the shadow of
the third volume could pass for a tie" (translations form Russian here and
elsewhere are mine as unfortunately I don't have English edition of "The
Gift" at hand - M.M.), and further when he dots Yasha's poetic genealogy:
"in the verses full of fasionable trivialities he sang "the bitterest"
love to Russia, Esenin autumn. the blue of Block's bogs, the snow on
acmeistic wooden pavement-blocks and Neva granit on which the print of
Pushkin's elbow has become barely tranceable". This at the first glance
cliche images invite "careful reader" for close reading which shows tense
accoustic pattering on Block's verse (golubizna blokovskih bolot: based on
g-l-b), while the "snow on acmeistic wooden pavement-blocks" ("snezhok na
tortsah akmeizma") can be taken for metapoetic descriptions flourishes in
acmeistic verse). "That Nava granit on which the print of Pushkin's elbow
has become barely tranceable might refer to "Evgeny Onegin" stanza XLVIII.
Ch/ 1 and, ironically, to Pushkin's epigrams on Notbek's drawnings ("Vot
pereshed chrez most Kokushkin..." discussed at length in Nabokov's
commentary to "Evgeny Onegin").
Following the metonymic authorial key Malikova bares the following
subtexts in Yasha's image:
- poetic, rooted in Nabokov's essays and reviews of the 1920-30-ies
(passages of which are duplicated verbatim in Nabokov's characteristics of
Yasha's poetry), and
- cultural, based on "art-creation-life" ("zhiznetvorchestvo") of
B.Poplavsky and L.Kannegisser (mentioned as Yasha's prototype in the first
version of "Dar", printed in "Sovremennye Zapiski"). M.Malikova
demonstrates how Nabokov divulges "hidden polemic" with the preface
written by G.Adamovich to the posthumous collection of Kannegisser verse,
and sides in his negative attitude to these late manifestations of
symbolism with Vl. Khodasevich, who at the time devoted a seriesof
articles to N. Petrovskaya, L.Kannegisser and B.Poplavsky.
The figure of Kannegisser neatly leads to a "centennial" prototype of
Yasha Chernyshevsky - Vladimir Lensky from Pushkin's "Evgeny Onegin".
The theme of "young poet's death" is further analysed in a broader
cultural context of the poet's death which developed in 1921 into a
metatheme through Pushkin's death anniversary. Al.Block's own death
(recepted by contemporaries as symbolic) followed by Gumilev, Khlebnikov,
Esenin and Mayakovsky. M.Malikova shows on the textual basis that Nabokov
traditionally links Block's image and images of his poetry with the motif
of death (cf. reading Blok's Florence cycle on the day of V.D.Nabokov's
death in "Speak, Memory") and thus contrasts him in the context of "Dar"
with Pushkin (cf., for example, "The moon, the ground, the viola of a lost
sex" ("Mesyats, poligon, viola zabludivshegosia pola") as somebody
tranclated "...and steppe, and night, and in the moon" ("i step', i noch',
i pri lune") may be read as "blokization" of Pushkin's verse ("Dont sing,
the beauty for me" ("Ne poi, krasavitsa pri mne...")) as in his "Cabbage
Soup and Caviar" (The New Republic. 17. January 1944. P.92-93) Nabokov
refers to Blok's verse as a "mixture of violas and vulgarity"). Thus
"contemporary" and "centennial" as well as "poetic" and "cultural"
subtexts of Yasha's image are united through Blok and form the first stage
of literary evolution a la Nabokov pointing from poetry (on the break of
the century) to prose (Pushkin's and Nabokov's).
------------------------------------------
Vera Polichtchouk (St. Petersburg)
POETICS OF OBJECTS IN NABOKOV'S PROSE (KEYS TO "KING, QUEEN, KNAVE")
Our analysis is based on the original Russian version of the novel
("Korol', dama, valet") which, in my opinion, is much closer to the
traditions of Russian Symbolism being written during the period when
Nabokov was far more influenced by Silver Century. The aim of our "close
reading" is to trace some features of Nabokov's poetics especially those
connected with creating through motifs.
In KQK, as well as in his other novels, Nabokov uses the contrast between
an artist as a person gifted with true vision and philistine as
metaphysically blind. The model was created in Romantism and lately
inherited and developed by Russian Symbolists. The two key oppositions of
the novel are "blindless-true vision" and "dead-alive".
All the main characters of the novel are described through th multiple
images of physical and metaphysical blindness. Franz is literally blind
(myopic) and the only glimpse of true artistic vision of the world the
author lends him for a while when Franz breaks his glasses scares the
character nearly to death. Marta is totally blind spiritually and so is
the inventor: Nabokov the author punishes both for manipulating people as
puppets and for mechanical perception of the world. Dreyer is not unlike
the others, but because of his creative potential and true love for Marta
Naabokov the creator sends him his own emblem, Vanessa admirable butterfly
and later saves his life. All of them also provide blind and unable to
distinguish the system of "signs and symbols" send by the author in order
to let them know about the dangerous turn of the plot. These hints, "signs
and symbols" are built mainly on the usage of symbolic meaning of glass
(broken glasses, mirror reflections), non-functioning mannequins, dolls,
etc, repeated in KQK again and again and forming interweaven patterns
hidden in the text. They are futctioning as the athor's signals as well as
different stilistic devices comparing the characters with mannequins,
"live" wit "dead" in order to emphasize their dependence of the author's
will their desire to manipulate each other.
Analysing all the patterns of glass and puppet/mannequinn imagery in KQK
finally leads us to a conclusion that Nabokov follows and develops certain
models and thematic lines inherited from his predecessors. We can state
that the genesis of his fantastic imagery goes back to romantic/fairy-tale
Hofmannesque tradition and its variants as reread and rewritten by Russian
Symbolists. Series of straight quotations, travestied reminiscences and
hidden allusions to such texts as poems by Alexander Blok ("Poems on Fair
Dame". "Knight Commander's Steps") and "Sand Man" by E.T.Hofmann (also
based on the same key oppositions "blidness-true vision" and "dead-alive")
may serve an extra evidence of our idea. Besides, the very model of
twoesome world, "dvoemirie" - a real one and the world created by madness
and artists imagination, (later widely used by Nabokov in "The Defence",
"Invitaion to a Beheading" etc.) is easily to be found in Romantism and
Symbolism.
-------------------------------------
Maxim D. Shrayer (Boston)
SEKSOGRAFIIA NABOKOVA
Na protiazhenii russkogo perioda Nabokov izbegal opisaniia intimnogo
seksual'nogo opyta v tekh proizvedeniiakh, gde deistvuiut russkie
personazhi, ot Ganina v "Mashen'ke" do Godunova-Cherdyntseva v "Dare".
Pereidia na angliiskii iazyk i voidia v amerikanskuiu kul'turu, Nabokov
dostig v "Lolite" i "Ade" togo, chego on v veshchah russkogo perioda ne
mog osushchestvit' s lingvisticheskoi tochki zreniia, i eshcho ne do
kontsa osoznal s metaesteticheskoi i metafizicheskoi storon. I tem ne
menee, dazhe s uchetom peremeny iazyka i okruzheniia, a takzhe obshchei
liberalizatsii tsenzurnyh norm ot 1920kh do 1970kh godov, dazhe v
amerikanskih veshchah geroi Nabokova ne polnost'iu razreshaiut vopros o
seksual'noi garmonii. Do kontsa neponiatno, kakov seksual'nyi mir inoi
Nabokova: adskii, raiskii, ili ado-raiskii.
-----------------------------------
Svetlana Turovskaia (Tallinn)
"HVAT" V.NABOKOVA: K VOPROSU O POETICHESKOI TEHNIKE RASSKAZA
V doklade podrobno rassmatrivaiutsia razlichnye sredstva poeticheskoi
tehniki rasskaza. Analiziruiutsia tekstovyie mekanizmy, blagodaria kotorym
takaia tehnika stala vozmohnoi. Krome togo, chastichno rekonstruiruetsia
istoricheskii i literaturnyi kontekst etogo proizvedeniia.
International Nabokov Seminar at the January 1999 Tallin
(Estonia)Conference "The Culture of the Russian Diaspora," sends
NABOKV-L all of the available Nabokov abstracts. NABOKV-L thanks Grigori
Utgof.
-------------------------------------
Irina Belobrovtseva (Tallinn)
DISCOURSE ON THE SHADES IN VLADIMIR NABOKOV'S WORKS
The paper "Discourse on the Shades in Vladimir Nabokov's Works" has been
based on the principle of motif analysis of the text. The important and to
a considerable extent representative motif of shadow in Vladimir Nabokov's
works has its own complicated philosophy.
In the paper significance of the motif has been shown on the example of
"Invitation to a Beheading". Interpretation of Cincinnatus as a real
person and the other figures as illusions, ghosts often occurs being
already a stereotype. Here traditional binary opposition real - illusory
is used, where 'real' is positive and 'illusory' or 'shade' is nagative.
On the contrary Nabokov in this novel considers 'real' (with synonyms
hidden, single, profound) is a mark of really complicated, differently
orientated hero.
In his representations of the motif of shadow Vladimir Nabokov bases on
three mythologemma well-known in human culture. They are:
- Plato's cave where all people life is only reflection, only shadow of
real existence
- H.H. Andersen's fairy-tale "Shadow", which regards the opportunity of
mutual convertibility of a man and his shade and
- Chamisso novel about a man lost hai shadow.
Vladimir Nabokov uses in the "Invitation to a Beheading" all the three
antedents.
----------------------------------------------
Anna Brodsky (Lexington)
NABOKOV'S LOLITA AND THE POST-WAR EMIGRE CONSCIOUSNESS
The author shows that the Second World War and the holocaust form an
important background to Nabokov's "Lolita". Nabokov's masterpiece is
animated by a post-war emigre counsciousness like that expressed in the
works of other emigres, for example, Theodore Adorno and Hanna Arendt.
These writers were haunted by the evil they have witnessed in Europe, and
made the disturbing claim that confidence, conformity, cheerfulness -
qualities they found abundantly in America - lay very close to the springs
of evil from which totalitarism had sprung.
Humbert Humbert is, among other things, a brilliant invention for focusing
on the banality of evil. The pervert's point of view turns out to be an
uncannily perfect way of satirizing not only the cheery commercialism of
American life, but is lurking antisemitism and smug racism. The concern
with evil in "Lolita" poses the question of the possibility of art after
holocaust.
-------------------------------------------------
Elda Garetto (Milan)
VLADIMIR NABOKOV AND ITALO CALVINO IN SEARCH OF THE "IDEAL" READER
The subject of this paper has been suggested by Italo Calvino's novel "In
on a Winter's Night a Traveler", whose hero is an "ideal" reader, that is
a virtual one. The theoretical support is provided by works on Aesthetics
and Semiotics about the Reader and the act of reading, in particular by
U.Eco's "The Role of the Reader". The main purpose of the paper is to
examine the complex Author-Reader relation in Nabokov's prose. The
analysis is based on statements by Nabokov himself about the qualities a
good reader must possess and examines the narrational strategies in use,
in particular the strategy of game.
If we concider that in Aesthetics game is often compared to the act of
creation itself, we can therefore consider all the tricks and traps
Nabokov disseminates in his texts not as the result of a supposedly
haughty attitude of the Author towards his readers (as some critics
mantain), but as a sort of a complicated training he uses to select them
and to introduce them into the world of artistic creation.
The Reader, on his side, can easier find his way in the labyrinth of the
text only if he proves to be very sensitive to details, able to catch
intertextual references and to concider interpretations and
systematisations just as temporary steps to be overcome thanks to
subsequent hints and insights. These conditions can create right
atmosphere for the game of art. The concept of game involves the notion of
interaction among literary work, reader, and uthor and trasforms the
literary pact between them.
--------------------------------------------
Jane Grayson (London)
NABOKOV'S BALANCING ACT
In this paper I am looking at how Nabokov handles the project of being a
novelist, and how that project evolves.
I see Nabokov as developing the idea of creating a coherent interlocking
oeuvre, a self-sufficient 'Nabokovian world'. And I suggest that the
writing of autobiography and self-translation involve an analogous
process. They require the author stepping outside his own work and his own
plot, and obserwing himself from the outside.
Nabokov first engages in autobiography and self-translation at a point
in his career when he was caught badly off-balance, when he had
temporarily lost his direction as a writer. He recovered balance, I
suggest, through autobiography with the perception of pattern, and through
translation with the discovery of code. Autobiography and translation
serve as a kind of Alice-in-Wonderland tunnel linking his Russian past
with his American/English future. Although they have their own disciplines
and impose their own constraints I see them as a perfoming for Nabokov an
essentially liberating function.
Moreover, once material from Nabokov's experience is presented as
autobiography this affects reading his earlier and later fictional
presentation on the same material. It interacts and interconnects with
what has gone before and what will come after. The English and Russian
versions of the autobiography come to serve as an unrealized 'reality'
against which the fiction came bounce off and play.
A schematic view of Nabokov's development distinguishes an early period
dominated by plot, a middle period dominated by pattern, and a later
period dominated by play.
As illustration I cite the development of the motif of the picture of the
forest which a child imagines climbing into from his bed, from its first
appearance in 'Podvig' through the successive versions of autobiography,
to 'Lolita'.
I conclude with a 'caveat' and the important Nabokovian truth that
patterns in nature are there waiting to be perceived. There are no
waterlight compartments in Nabokov's work. The prefiguration of Nabokov's
later development is all there in the earlier work.
-------------------------------------------------
Yuichi Isahaya (Kyoto)
LIGHT AND DARKNESS IN NABOKOV'S _GLORY_
In "Glory" we find many lights in the background of darkness. And Martin's
youth was full of such lights. But after entering into Cambridge and
falling in love with Sonia, he lost lights, and darkness covered his
world. It was not until he stopped loving Sonia that ha found lights once
again on his way to the Southern France.
Lights are obviously related to Martin's romantic character. And critics
often regarded darkness as an image of death. But we must pay attention to
the fact that Sonia is closely related to the darkness in the novel. On
the one hand, she is a cruel lady, but, on the other hand, she is a
commonplace, vulgar woman. So we maintain that in this novel darkness,
first of all, signifies vulgarity, poshlust. As a whole, this novel is
conctructed on the contrast between lights, which suggest usual romantic
nature, and darkness, which signifies the commonplace, poshlust.
--------------------------------------
Maria Malikova (St. Petersburg)
FROM WHAT YASHA CHERNYSHEVSKY IS MADE
The title of the paper by Maria Malikova (St. Petersburg, Pushkinskii Dom)
"From What Yasha Chernyshesky is Made" is based on the seminal article by
I. Paperno ("How Nabokov's Dar Is Made" with its all Eichenbaumic
implications) and concentrates on exploring subtexts used in the creation
of a minor charecter of Nabokov's Dar - Yasha Chernyshevsky.
Starting with the general overview of a traditional concept of a writer as
a Creator and one of its textual manifestations - the importance of
metaliterary (mostly automatapoetic) subtexts in text structure) M.
Malikova bares subtexts underlying Yasha's image. This metonimic key to
Yasha's image is given by the author himself, when he describes the
spectre of a young poet: "the shadow of two volumes, standing on the
table, represented a cuff and the corner of a lapel while the shadow of
the third volume could pass for a tie" (translations form Russian here and
elsewhere are mine as unfortunately I don't have English edition of "The
Gift" at hand - M.M.), and further when he dots Yasha's poetic genealogy:
"in the verses full of fasionable trivialities he sang "the bitterest"
love to Russia, Esenin autumn. the blue of Block's bogs, the snow on
acmeistic wooden pavement-blocks and Neva granit on which the print of
Pushkin's elbow has become barely tranceable". This at the first glance
cliche images invite "careful reader" for close reading which shows tense
accoustic pattering on Block's verse (golubizna blokovskih bolot: based on
g-l-b), while the "snow on acmeistic wooden pavement-blocks" ("snezhok na
tortsah akmeizma") can be taken for metapoetic descriptions flourishes in
acmeistic verse). "That Nava granit on which the print of Pushkin's elbow
has become barely tranceable might refer to "Evgeny Onegin" stanza XLVIII.
Ch/ 1 and, ironically, to Pushkin's epigrams on Notbek's drawnings ("Vot
pereshed chrez most Kokushkin..." discussed at length in Nabokov's
commentary to "Evgeny Onegin").
Following the metonymic authorial key Malikova bares the following
subtexts in Yasha's image:
- poetic, rooted in Nabokov's essays and reviews of the 1920-30-ies
(passages of which are duplicated verbatim in Nabokov's characteristics of
Yasha's poetry), and
- cultural, based on "art-creation-life" ("zhiznetvorchestvo") of
B.Poplavsky and L.Kannegisser (mentioned as Yasha's prototype in the first
version of "Dar", printed in "Sovremennye Zapiski"). M.Malikova
demonstrates how Nabokov divulges "hidden polemic" with the preface
written by G.Adamovich to the posthumous collection of Kannegisser verse,
and sides in his negative attitude to these late manifestations of
symbolism with Vl. Khodasevich, who at the time devoted a seriesof
articles to N. Petrovskaya, L.Kannegisser and B.Poplavsky.
The figure of Kannegisser neatly leads to a "centennial" prototype of
Yasha Chernyshevsky - Vladimir Lensky from Pushkin's "Evgeny Onegin".
The theme of "young poet's death" is further analysed in a broader
cultural context of the poet's death which developed in 1921 into a
metatheme through Pushkin's death anniversary. Al.Block's own death
(recepted by contemporaries as symbolic) followed by Gumilev, Khlebnikov,
Esenin and Mayakovsky. M.Malikova shows on the textual basis that Nabokov
traditionally links Block's image and images of his poetry with the motif
of death (cf. reading Blok's Florence cycle on the day of V.D.Nabokov's
death in "Speak, Memory") and thus contrasts him in the context of "Dar"
with Pushkin (cf., for example, "The moon, the ground, the viola of a lost
sex" ("Mesyats, poligon, viola zabludivshegosia pola") as somebody
tranclated "...and steppe, and night, and in the moon" ("i step', i noch',
i pri lune") may be read as "blokization" of Pushkin's verse ("Dont sing,
the beauty for me" ("Ne poi, krasavitsa pri mne...")) as in his "Cabbage
Soup and Caviar" (The New Republic. 17. January 1944. P.92-93) Nabokov
refers to Blok's verse as a "mixture of violas and vulgarity"). Thus
"contemporary" and "centennial" as well as "poetic" and "cultural"
subtexts of Yasha's image are united through Blok and form the first stage
of literary evolution a la Nabokov pointing from poetry (on the break of
the century) to prose (Pushkin's and Nabokov's).
------------------------------------------
Vera Polichtchouk (St. Petersburg)
POETICS OF OBJECTS IN NABOKOV'S PROSE (KEYS TO "KING, QUEEN, KNAVE")
Our analysis is based on the original Russian version of the novel
("Korol', dama, valet") which, in my opinion, is much closer to the
traditions of Russian Symbolism being written during the period when
Nabokov was far more influenced by Silver Century. The aim of our "close
reading" is to trace some features of Nabokov's poetics especially those
connected with creating through motifs.
In KQK, as well as in his other novels, Nabokov uses the contrast between
an artist as a person gifted with true vision and philistine as
metaphysically blind. The model was created in Romantism and lately
inherited and developed by Russian Symbolists. The two key oppositions of
the novel are "blindless-true vision" and "dead-alive".
All the main characters of the novel are described through th multiple
images of physical and metaphysical blindness. Franz is literally blind
(myopic) and the only glimpse of true artistic vision of the world the
author lends him for a while when Franz breaks his glasses scares the
character nearly to death. Marta is totally blind spiritually and so is
the inventor: Nabokov the author punishes both for manipulating people as
puppets and for mechanical perception of the world. Dreyer is not unlike
the others, but because of his creative potential and true love for Marta
Naabokov the creator sends him his own emblem, Vanessa admirable butterfly
and later saves his life. All of them also provide blind and unable to
distinguish the system of "signs and symbols" send by the author in order
to let them know about the dangerous turn of the plot. These hints, "signs
and symbols" are built mainly on the usage of symbolic meaning of glass
(broken glasses, mirror reflections), non-functioning mannequins, dolls,
etc, repeated in KQK again and again and forming interweaven patterns
hidden in the text. They are futctioning as the athor's signals as well as
different stilistic devices comparing the characters with mannequins,
"live" wit "dead" in order to emphasize their dependence of the author's
will their desire to manipulate each other.
Analysing all the patterns of glass and puppet/mannequinn imagery in KQK
finally leads us to a conclusion that Nabokov follows and develops certain
models and thematic lines inherited from his predecessors. We can state
that the genesis of his fantastic imagery goes back to romantic/fairy-tale
Hofmannesque tradition and its variants as reread and rewritten by Russian
Symbolists. Series of straight quotations, travestied reminiscences and
hidden allusions to such texts as poems by Alexander Blok ("Poems on Fair
Dame". "Knight Commander's Steps") and "Sand Man" by E.T.Hofmann (also
based on the same key oppositions "blidness-true vision" and "dead-alive")
may serve an extra evidence of our idea. Besides, the very model of
twoesome world, "dvoemirie" - a real one and the world created by madness
and artists imagination, (later widely used by Nabokov in "The Defence",
"Invitaion to a Beheading" etc.) is easily to be found in Romantism and
Symbolism.
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Maxim D. Shrayer (Boston)
SEKSOGRAFIIA NABOKOVA
Na protiazhenii russkogo perioda Nabokov izbegal opisaniia intimnogo
seksual'nogo opyta v tekh proizvedeniiakh, gde deistvuiut russkie
personazhi, ot Ganina v "Mashen'ke" do Godunova-Cherdyntseva v "Dare".
Pereidia na angliiskii iazyk i voidia v amerikanskuiu kul'turu, Nabokov
dostig v "Lolite" i "Ade" togo, chego on v veshchah russkogo perioda ne
mog osushchestvit' s lingvisticheskoi tochki zreniia, i eshcho ne do
kontsa osoznal s metaesteticheskoi i metafizicheskoi storon. I tem ne
menee, dazhe s uchetom peremeny iazyka i okruzheniia, a takzhe obshchei
liberalizatsii tsenzurnyh norm ot 1920kh do 1970kh godov, dazhe v
amerikanskih veshchah geroi Nabokova ne polnost'iu razreshaiut vopros o
seksual'noi garmonii. Do kontsa neponiatno, kakov seksual'nyi mir inoi
Nabokova: adskii, raiskii, ili ado-raiskii.
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Svetlana Turovskaia (Tallinn)
"HVAT" V.NABOKOVA: K VOPROSU O POETICHESKOI TEHNIKE RASSKAZA
V doklade podrobno rassmatrivaiutsia razlichnye sredstva poeticheskoi
tehniki rasskaza. Analiziruiutsia tekstovyie mekanizmy, blagodaria kotorym
takaia tehnika stala vozmohnoi. Krome togo, chastichno rekonstruiruetsia
istoricheskii i literaturnyi kontekst etogo proizvedeniia.