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***From today's NYTimes -- and their web site where they also have audio
and video. GD*****
April 21, 1999
Nabokov as Mounted Specimen: Centennial
Celebration Encases Writer's Life
Related Link
Celebrating Nabokov's Centenary with collected reviews,
articles, writing
samples and audio
Audio
Vladimir Nabokov at the 92nd St. Y (April 5, 1964)
Slide Show
A Life Reflected in Memorabilia (9 photos)
By SARAH BOXER
he novelist, lepidopterist, translator and teacher known
as V N, V. Sirin,
Vasily Shishkov, Vivian Darkbloom and Vladimir Nabokov
would have
turned 100 on Friday, April 23. The birthday party has
begun without him. If
he had scripted it himself, he could not have produced a better
nightmare.
In his memoir, "Speak, Memory," Nabokov writes
about "a young chronophobiac who experienced
something like panic" when he watched a home
movie taken weeks before he was born. "He saw a
world that was practically unchanged -- the same
house, the same people -- and then realized that
he did not exist there at all and that nobody
mourned his absence. He caught a glimpse of his
mother waving from an upstairs window, and that
unfamiliar gesture disturbed him, as if it were
some mysterious farewell. But what particularly
frightened him was the sight of a brand-new baby
carriage standing there on the porch, with the
smug, encroaching air of a coffin."
If a prenatal home movie could cause such panic,
think what a post-mortem birthday party could do.
Nabokov-the-ghost would see that everything had
changed. His mother would not be waving, but his
son, Dmitri, would be there, a large and tragic
version of himself. Then Nabokov would see his
biographer, his wife's biographer, his English
translator, the lawyer for his estate, the merchant selling off
his library piece by
piece. This time it would not be a mysterious farewell but an
uncanny hello from
the appreciative ghouls holding the bits of his life.
Vladimir (rhymes with redeemer) Nabokov (rhymes with the gawk
of) was born
on April 23, 1899, in St. Petersburg, Russia. Last week the
Nabokov centennial
celebration began in New York with a Town Hall symposium
sponsored by PEN
American Center, The New Yorker and Vintage Books. Martin Amis
(novelist),
Alfred Appel (friend and interpreter), Brian Boyd (biographer),
Richard Ford
(novelist), Elizabeth Hardwick (critic), Dmitri Nabokov (son),
Joyce Carol Oates
(novelist), David Remnick (journalist), Michael Scammell
(translator) and Stacy
Schiff (biographer) all came to pay their respects.
This week the celebration continues. The New York Public
Library is exhibiting
Nabokov's manuscripts alongside his black-rimmed glasses,
butterfly net and
worn-down pencils. Glenn Horowitz Bookseller Inc. in Manhattan
is showing off
and selling off Nabokov's library, including the dedication
copies he inscribed to
Vera, his wife, with fanciful, colorful hand-drawn butterflies.
Ms. Schiff's biography
"Vera" is coming out, with the details of a Nabokov affair with
a poodle groomer.
And Nabokov's memoir, which he originally wrote in English as
"Conclusive
Evidence," then translated into Russian, then retranslated into
English as
"Speak, Memory," is being issued yet again, with Nabokov's
review of it installed
as a 16th chapter.
Maybe V N would recognize the world he left in 1977, maybe not.
Dmitri Nabokov,
once a fast-living opera singer and race-car driver, now
chastened by a
near-death experience after a fiery crash and the death of his
mother in 1991,
has decided to devote himself to literature. He is revising his
own novel about
parallel lives, which has a love scene told in mathematical
formulas. With his
lawyer, he is fighting the American and British publication of
"Lo's Diary," a new
novel by an Italian writer, Pia Pera, about Humbert and Lolita
told from Lolita's
perspective. And he is thinking of finishing his father's
half-done novel, "The
Original of Laura," which Nabokov asked his family to destroy.
At Glenn Horowitz Bookseller, Nabokov could make a last
visit to his old books. He would see the first editions he
inscribed to Vera -- including "Speak, Memory," "The Gift,"
"Ada, or Ardor," "Pnin," "Pale Fire," "The Real Life of
Sebastian Knight," "Transparent Things" and his
translation of Pushkin's "Eugene Onegin" -- splayed like
butterflies in glass boxes, with tiny labels pinned next to
them, referring collectors to a catalog and price list.
Finally, he would discover that his hated, tattered,
green-covered copy of the Olympia Press edition of
"Lolita," which he aggressively marked up in preparation
for its American publication, had become the harlot of the
birthday bash. The book would be selling -- no, sold -- for
$125,000. And he would see that its cover, author's
scribbles and all, had been used as the prototype for a
green rug designed by the artist Barbara Bloom. He
would learn that the rug was now in great demand and
that Ms. Bloom was considering publishing some more
of them.
Maybe Nabokov would recognize himself better at the public
library, the home of
the Berg Collection's newly acquired Nabokov Archive. There he
could see his
worldly possessions flash before him: his first published poems
(1916), a
chess problem he solved as a teen-ager (1919), his drawing of
an owl (or "sirin"
in Russian, which was one of Nabokov's Russian noms de plume), a
long-forgotten haiku decorated with a drawing of a butterfly
(1923) and the diary
entry from 1922, when his father was shot: " 'Father is no
more.' Those four
words hammered in my brain."
V N could watch himself aging in pictures: a young boy with his
family and
dachshund, Trainy (1908), a rower at Cambridge University
(1922, labeled "Moi"),
a forlorn face in a derby (1925), an egotistical butterfly
hunter (1929-30, inscribed
by Nabokov, "He is undeservingly handsome"), a Wellesley
College professor
looking at a butterfly collection with young women under a tree
(1945-46), a bald
Pnin-like figure reading "Pnin" with a cat on his lap (1958), a
man playing chess
with his wife (1966).
He would see his victories and
disappointments laid out before
him: the kindly rejection that "Lolita"
got from Katharine White at The New
Yorker ("I don't suppose anyone like
me, with five potential nymphets in
the family ... would not find the book
uncomfortable"), and the cruel
review his friend Edmund Wilson
gave his lovingly literal translation of
"Eugene Onegin."
But he would see his revenges too.
He could read his handwritten
sarcasm dripping onto his copy of
Wilson's review ("How many rare
and unfamiliar words!") and the tiny
newspaper item he clipped
announcing Wilson's tax problems. He could read his
line-by-line thrashings of
translations that he hated and his harsh grades for the writers
of the day, entered
unmercifully in his copies of short-story collections (A-pluses
only for himself
and J.D. Salinger, C-plus for William Maxwell, D for Roger
Angell, E for Ms.
Hardwick).
But his best revenge would be in the "Lolita" section. Although
the manuscript
note cards would not be there (they were destroyed, said Rodney
Phillips, the
curator of the library's exhibition), Nabokov could gawk at the
"Lolita"
paraphernalia that had been saved, including the brochure from
Grand Teton
National Park and the white, heart-shaped glasses that his
Hollywood agent,
Swifty Lazar, gave him.
Then there would be those stern pronouncements about the
monuments of
literature: his dismissal of Jane Austen ("a collection of
eggshells in cotton
wool") and his chilly calculation of the number of words in
Austen's "Mansfield
Park," Dickens' "Bleak House" and Flaubert's "Madame Bovary."
Nabokov would
see again how he reduced Kafka, Tolstoy and Joyce to diagrams
of beetles, train
cars and maps of Dublin respectively, and how he ranked Russian
writers (first
Tolstoy, then Gogol, Chekhov, Turgenev). And he would see his
comically bad
rewording of the opening words in his copy of "Ulysses": not
"Stately, plump Buck
Mulligan came from the stairhead," but "Buck Mulligan, who is a
robust vulgarian,
came from the stairhead."
If that were not enough to convince him of his everlasting
greatness, he would
see the inconsequential objects snatched from oblivion: his
magnetic chess set,
his deadpan assessments of American motels ("Boxwood Manor --
Restricted.
Delightful for long stays"), his list of things to take on a
1944 trip to Cape Cod
(one pair of dungarees, four pillow slips, one flashlight, one
ration card), his
worn-down pencils and his elaborate recipe for "Eggs a la
Nabocoque," boiled
eggs.
What would the chronophobiac think? He might love it. He might
hate it. He
would certainly try to fix it. If there is one constant in the
exhibitions, it is not
Nabokov's humor, not his grasp of American "poshlost" (Russian
for vulgarity),
not his amorous, ludic style, not his love of masks, mirrors,
mimicry, memory,
butterflies, doubles. The one constant is Nabokov's endless
fixing.
Whenever he opened a book, whether it was by him or someone
else, he
reworked it, retranslated it, graded it, counted its words,
sketched its scenes,
penciled in changes for the next incarnation. After spending
four years translating
"Eugene Onegin" and then seeing it trashed by Wilson as
hideously literal, he
announced that "it was not close enough and not ugly enough,"
and vowed to
redo it.
In his copy of the Olympia Press "Lolita," Nabokov not only
gleefully crossed out
the name of the press every chance he got (the publisher
Maurice Girodias had
been slow to pay and quick to take away Nabokov's rights), but
he also edited it
to make the language more specific and more colloquial. "Take
the linen in"
became "take in the wash," the "stipple" of down on Lolita's
arm became
"tracery." V N also plumped up Lo to conform with a study of
healthy school-age
girls published by the U.S. Health Department. The first time
around, he had her
"hip diameter, from crest to crest, barely 8 inches, probably
even less" and her
"thigh circumference, 14." In the American edition, it was "hip
girth, 29 inches,
thigh girth (just below the gluteal sulcus) 17."
He was crazy about details. As Stephen Jay Gould noted in an
essay in "Vera's
Butterflies," a book on Nabokov's inscribed first editions
compiled by Sarah
Funke, there was a connection between his writing and his
lepidoptery: "the
almost obsessive attention to meticulous and accurate details."
No wonder
lepidopterists named butterflies in his honor: Humbert, Lolita,
Kinbote, Shade,
Pnin and Eugene Onegin.
The only reason Nabokov ever needed an English translator, said
Scammell, his
English translator and PEN's president, was to spare himself
the temptation to
rewrite his novel while translating it. He loved to annotate,
correct, label, collect
and recollect. And when others tried to do it for him, he often
balked.
So what would he think of the lines of his life laid out before
him, some straight,
some twisted, all out of reach and uneditable? As Dmitri
Nabokov noted at the
end of the Town Hall symposium, Vladimir Nabokov believed "the
sorrow of
interrupted life is nothing compared to the sorrow of
interrupted study." He once
wrote, "I cannot forgive the censorship of death. ... In this
eerie, alien world, the
letters of life, whole lines, have been transposed by the
typesetters."
and video. GD*****
April 21, 1999
Nabokov as Mounted Specimen: Centennial
Celebration Encases Writer's Life
Related Link
Celebrating Nabokov's Centenary with collected reviews,
articles, writing
samples and audio
Audio
Vladimir Nabokov at the 92nd St. Y (April 5, 1964)
Slide Show
A Life Reflected in Memorabilia (9 photos)
By SARAH BOXER
he novelist, lepidopterist, translator and teacher known
as V N, V. Sirin,
Vasily Shishkov, Vivian Darkbloom and Vladimir Nabokov
would have
turned 100 on Friday, April 23. The birthday party has
begun without him. If
he had scripted it himself, he could not have produced a better
nightmare.
In his memoir, "Speak, Memory," Nabokov writes
about "a young chronophobiac who experienced
something like panic" when he watched a home
movie taken weeks before he was born. "He saw a
world that was practically unchanged -- the same
house, the same people -- and then realized that
he did not exist there at all and that nobody
mourned his absence. He caught a glimpse of his
mother waving from an upstairs window, and that
unfamiliar gesture disturbed him, as if it were
some mysterious farewell. But what particularly
frightened him was the sight of a brand-new baby
carriage standing there on the porch, with the
smug, encroaching air of a coffin."
If a prenatal home movie could cause such panic,
think what a post-mortem birthday party could do.
Nabokov-the-ghost would see that everything had
changed. His mother would not be waving, but his
son, Dmitri, would be there, a large and tragic
version of himself. Then Nabokov would see his
biographer, his wife's biographer, his English
translator, the lawyer for his estate, the merchant selling off
his library piece by
piece. This time it would not be a mysterious farewell but an
uncanny hello from
the appreciative ghouls holding the bits of his life.
Vladimir (rhymes with redeemer) Nabokov (rhymes with the gawk
of) was born
on April 23, 1899, in St. Petersburg, Russia. Last week the
Nabokov centennial
celebration began in New York with a Town Hall symposium
sponsored by PEN
American Center, The New Yorker and Vintage Books. Martin Amis
(novelist),
Alfred Appel (friend and interpreter), Brian Boyd (biographer),
Richard Ford
(novelist), Elizabeth Hardwick (critic), Dmitri Nabokov (son),
Joyce Carol Oates
(novelist), David Remnick (journalist), Michael Scammell
(translator) and Stacy
Schiff (biographer) all came to pay their respects.
This week the celebration continues. The New York Public
Library is exhibiting
Nabokov's manuscripts alongside his black-rimmed glasses,
butterfly net and
worn-down pencils. Glenn Horowitz Bookseller Inc. in Manhattan
is showing off
and selling off Nabokov's library, including the dedication
copies he inscribed to
Vera, his wife, with fanciful, colorful hand-drawn butterflies.
Ms. Schiff's biography
"Vera" is coming out, with the details of a Nabokov affair with
a poodle groomer.
And Nabokov's memoir, which he originally wrote in English as
"Conclusive
Evidence," then translated into Russian, then retranslated into
English as
"Speak, Memory," is being issued yet again, with Nabokov's
review of it installed
as a 16th chapter.
Maybe V N would recognize the world he left in 1977, maybe not.
Dmitri Nabokov,
once a fast-living opera singer and race-car driver, now
chastened by a
near-death experience after a fiery crash and the death of his
mother in 1991,
has decided to devote himself to literature. He is revising his
own novel about
parallel lives, which has a love scene told in mathematical
formulas. With his
lawyer, he is fighting the American and British publication of
"Lo's Diary," a new
novel by an Italian writer, Pia Pera, about Humbert and Lolita
told from Lolita's
perspective. And he is thinking of finishing his father's
half-done novel, "The
Original of Laura," which Nabokov asked his family to destroy.
At Glenn Horowitz Bookseller, Nabokov could make a last
visit to his old books. He would see the first editions he
inscribed to Vera -- including "Speak, Memory," "The Gift,"
"Ada, or Ardor," "Pnin," "Pale Fire," "The Real Life of
Sebastian Knight," "Transparent Things" and his
translation of Pushkin's "Eugene Onegin" -- splayed like
butterflies in glass boxes, with tiny labels pinned next to
them, referring collectors to a catalog and price list.
Finally, he would discover that his hated, tattered,
green-covered copy of the Olympia Press edition of
"Lolita," which he aggressively marked up in preparation
for its American publication, had become the harlot of the
birthday bash. The book would be selling -- no, sold -- for
$125,000. And he would see that its cover, author's
scribbles and all, had been used as the prototype for a
green rug designed by the artist Barbara Bloom. He
would learn that the rug was now in great demand and
that Ms. Bloom was considering publishing some more
of them.
Maybe Nabokov would recognize himself better at the public
library, the home of
the Berg Collection's newly acquired Nabokov Archive. There he
could see his
worldly possessions flash before him: his first published poems
(1916), a
chess problem he solved as a teen-ager (1919), his drawing of
an owl (or "sirin"
in Russian, which was one of Nabokov's Russian noms de plume), a
long-forgotten haiku decorated with a drawing of a butterfly
(1923) and the diary
entry from 1922, when his father was shot: " 'Father is no
more.' Those four
words hammered in my brain."
V N could watch himself aging in pictures: a young boy with his
family and
dachshund, Trainy (1908), a rower at Cambridge University
(1922, labeled "Moi"),
a forlorn face in a derby (1925), an egotistical butterfly
hunter (1929-30, inscribed
by Nabokov, "He is undeservingly handsome"), a Wellesley
College professor
looking at a butterfly collection with young women under a tree
(1945-46), a bald
Pnin-like figure reading "Pnin" with a cat on his lap (1958), a
man playing chess
with his wife (1966).
He would see his victories and
disappointments laid out before
him: the kindly rejection that "Lolita"
got from Katharine White at The New
Yorker ("I don't suppose anyone like
me, with five potential nymphets in
the family ... would not find the book
uncomfortable"), and the cruel
review his friend Edmund Wilson
gave his lovingly literal translation of
"Eugene Onegin."
But he would see his revenges too.
He could read his handwritten
sarcasm dripping onto his copy of
Wilson's review ("How many rare
and unfamiliar words!") and the tiny
newspaper item he clipped
announcing Wilson's tax problems. He could read his
line-by-line thrashings of
translations that he hated and his harsh grades for the writers
of the day, entered
unmercifully in his copies of short-story collections (A-pluses
only for himself
and J.D. Salinger, C-plus for William Maxwell, D for Roger
Angell, E for Ms.
Hardwick).
But his best revenge would be in the "Lolita" section. Although
the manuscript
note cards would not be there (they were destroyed, said Rodney
Phillips, the
curator of the library's exhibition), Nabokov could gawk at the
"Lolita"
paraphernalia that had been saved, including the brochure from
Grand Teton
National Park and the white, heart-shaped glasses that his
Hollywood agent,
Swifty Lazar, gave him.
Then there would be those stern pronouncements about the
monuments of
literature: his dismissal of Jane Austen ("a collection of
eggshells in cotton
wool") and his chilly calculation of the number of words in
Austen's "Mansfield
Park," Dickens' "Bleak House" and Flaubert's "Madame Bovary."
Nabokov would
see again how he reduced Kafka, Tolstoy and Joyce to diagrams
of beetles, train
cars and maps of Dublin respectively, and how he ranked Russian
writers (first
Tolstoy, then Gogol, Chekhov, Turgenev). And he would see his
comically bad
rewording of the opening words in his copy of "Ulysses": not
"Stately, plump Buck
Mulligan came from the stairhead," but "Buck Mulligan, who is a
robust vulgarian,
came from the stairhead."
If that were not enough to convince him of his everlasting
greatness, he would
see the inconsequential objects snatched from oblivion: his
magnetic chess set,
his deadpan assessments of American motels ("Boxwood Manor --
Restricted.
Delightful for long stays"), his list of things to take on a
1944 trip to Cape Cod
(one pair of dungarees, four pillow slips, one flashlight, one
ration card), his
worn-down pencils and his elaborate recipe for "Eggs a la
Nabocoque," boiled
eggs.
What would the chronophobiac think? He might love it. He might
hate it. He
would certainly try to fix it. If there is one constant in the
exhibitions, it is not
Nabokov's humor, not his grasp of American "poshlost" (Russian
for vulgarity),
not his amorous, ludic style, not his love of masks, mirrors,
mimicry, memory,
butterflies, doubles. The one constant is Nabokov's endless
fixing.
Whenever he opened a book, whether it was by him or someone
else, he
reworked it, retranslated it, graded it, counted its words,
sketched its scenes,
penciled in changes for the next incarnation. After spending
four years translating
"Eugene Onegin" and then seeing it trashed by Wilson as
hideously literal, he
announced that "it was not close enough and not ugly enough,"
and vowed to
redo it.
In his copy of the Olympia Press "Lolita," Nabokov not only
gleefully crossed out
the name of the press every chance he got (the publisher
Maurice Girodias had
been slow to pay and quick to take away Nabokov's rights), but
he also edited it
to make the language more specific and more colloquial. "Take
the linen in"
became "take in the wash," the "stipple" of down on Lolita's
arm became
"tracery." V N also plumped up Lo to conform with a study of
healthy school-age
girls published by the U.S. Health Department. The first time
around, he had her
"hip diameter, from crest to crest, barely 8 inches, probably
even less" and her
"thigh circumference, 14." In the American edition, it was "hip
girth, 29 inches,
thigh girth (just below the gluteal sulcus) 17."
He was crazy about details. As Stephen Jay Gould noted in an
essay in "Vera's
Butterflies," a book on Nabokov's inscribed first editions
compiled by Sarah
Funke, there was a connection between his writing and his
lepidoptery: "the
almost obsessive attention to meticulous and accurate details."
No wonder
lepidopterists named butterflies in his honor: Humbert, Lolita,
Kinbote, Shade,
Pnin and Eugene Onegin.
The only reason Nabokov ever needed an English translator, said
Scammell, his
English translator and PEN's president, was to spare himself
the temptation to
rewrite his novel while translating it. He loved to annotate,
correct, label, collect
and recollect. And when others tried to do it for him, he often
balked.
So what would he think of the lines of his life laid out before
him, some straight,
some twisted, all out of reach and uneditable? As Dmitri
Nabokov noted at the
end of the Town Hall symposium, Vladimir Nabokov believed "the
sorrow of
interrupted life is nothing compared to the sorrow of
interrupted study." He once
wrote, "I cannot forgive the censorship of death. ... In this
eerie, alien world, the
letters of life, whole lines, have been transposed by the
typesetters."