Subject
Nabokov & Freud (fwd)
Date
Body
From: Thomas Seifrid <seifrid@mizar.usc.edu>
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Regarding Nabokov's professed antipathy toward Freud, I have always thought
that the dislike was generated by Freud's having trespassed on what for VN
was sacred terrain--childhood--with a tawdry theory, so different from the
estheticist ones advanced in *Speak, Memory*, about the forces shaping our
identity. This is more or less what VN says in that marvelous opening to the
filmed interview of him in Montreux (his quip about not wanting some
"Viennese" with his "umbrella" invading his dreams). Plus in the fifties,
when VN was writing many of the prefaces to English translations of his works
that contain his anti-Fruedian jibes, Freud was enjoying the kind of shallow
intellectual popularity of a sort VN deplored.
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Galya Diment's apt remarks on the vulgar film *Gigi* remind me of a paper I
once heard by a well-known and, at least on this occasion, very
self-important member of our profession. The paper was on Tolstoy, but
whenever the author turned to *Anna Karenina* he would mistakenly refer to
Vronsky's horse not as Frou-Frou but as "Gigi." As they say in Russian, "Na
vore shapka gorit."
Thomas Seifrid
University of Southern California
Thomas Seifrid
University of Southern California
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Regarding Nabokov's professed antipathy toward Freud, I have always thought
that the dislike was generated by Freud's having trespassed on what for VN
was sacred terrain--childhood--with a tawdry theory, so different from the
estheticist ones advanced in *Speak, Memory*, about the forces shaping our
identity. This is more or less what VN says in that marvelous opening to the
filmed interview of him in Montreux (his quip about not wanting some
"Viennese" with his "umbrella" invading his dreams). Plus in the fifties,
when VN was writing many of the prefaces to English translations of his works
that contain his anti-Fruedian jibes, Freud was enjoying the kind of shallow
intellectual popularity of a sort VN deplored.
---------------------------------------------------------
Galya Diment's apt remarks on the vulgar film *Gigi* remind me of a paper I
once heard by a well-known and, at least on this occasion, very
self-important member of our profession. The paper was on Tolstoy, but
whenever the author turned to *Anna Karenina* he would mistakenly refer to
Vronsky's horse not as Frou-Frou but as "Gigi." As they say in Russian, "Na
vore shapka gorit."
Thomas Seifrid
University of Southern California
Thomas Seifrid
University of Southern California