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Fw: [NABOKV-L] Skylark's Day
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Alexey Sklyarenko: "Yesterday (Jan. 1) was also Van Veen's birthday. Tomorrow (Jan. 3) is Lucette's birthday. Now it so happened that I was born (41 years ago) "between Van and Lucinda Veen." Because, in a sense, I too am Nabokov's galley slave, may I suggest that Janaury 2 is henceforth celebrated as "Skylark's Day"?...I completed today two new versions (Russian & English) of my latest... "The Red Flower of Evil in Nabokov's Ada." I hope to make them soon available to fellow Nabokovians...Incidentally, Aikhenvald speaks of the red flower of evil in his essay on Garshin (included in "The Silhouettes of the Russian Writers")"
JM: Happy Birthday, Alexey and congs on the forthcoming article, "The Red Flower of Evil." A festive bunch of dates with roses and a knackle of nuts right at the start - and I hope you''ll soon achieve your manumission from Nabokov...
Someone recently inquired of me if I had already read the highly praised novel by Biely. No. I'm planning to begin with Mikhail Bulgakov's Мастер и Маргарита ( "O Mestre e Margarida") and, while checking around, I came across an amusing editorial review of VN's "Lectures on English Literature" at the Amazon.com site.
Funny how people still insist on translating Kafka's little novel as "The Metamorphosis" while quoting Nabokov, who referred to it as "Transformation".*
For the benefit of those who haven't read this accessment, here it is:
Editorial Reviews - Review
Not really essays, not genial and general E. M. Forster-ish talks either, nor stirring defenses nor rhetorical destructions, these lectures Nabokov prepared and gave at Cornell in the Fifties are just that: he talks and reads, we listen (the same general approach - heirophant picking out the mystery from the dross - that Nabokov used in his own fiction); and literature is taken apart like a boxful of toys: "impersonal imagination and artistic delight," "the supremacy of the detail over the general, of the part that is more alive than the whole." There are diagrams and drawings, quiddities made visual: a map of Sotherton Court in Jane Austen's Mansfield Park; exactly what kind of beetle Gregor Samsa turned into in "The Metamorphosis" the facade of 7 Eccles St., Bloom's house in Ulysses; what Odette's orchid looked like in Swann's Way. The more specific and crammed the writer, the more specific and crammed Nabokov's lecture: Dickens, Flaubert, Joyce. He finds Bleak House's tricks delicious, the richness and the pity; in Ulysses he swats away the Freudian interpretations...in favor of the devilish intricacy of Joycean synchronicity... Where sheer lush orchestration is less the thing, Nabokov falls back on thematic layering and transformation; before Stevenson's "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" and Kafka's "The Metamorphosis" he is almost brief, enchantedly synopsizing although with microscopic attention still. In Nabokov a crankiness is always near the surface... and he betrays a certain anxiety by detailing so much, as though a great work might try and fool him: there's something at the same time eccentric and regimental to his appreciation. But finally there is a personal, fussy, high rapture to these lessons and illustrations, not quite analytical (Nabokov was too defensive and contentious for analysis - maybe too brilliant, too) - more a delight in literature-as-camouflage. Distinctive and demanding. (Kirkus Reviews )
www.amazon.com > ... > Literature & Fiction > Essays -
(btw: what does "analytical" mean among the literatti?)
.......................................................................................................
* We finally get Nabokov's honors list "in this order: Joyce's Ulysses, Kafka's Transformation [note the affected dismissal of the customary Metamorphosis], Biely's Petersburg, and the first half of Proust's fairy tale In Search of Lost Time." This last is the justified emendation of a misleading English title, but note the belittling "first half" and "fairy tale," with the pun on "fairy." Gratuitous excogitations by John Simon - The New Criterion www.newcriterion.com/.../Gratuitous-excogitations-4395
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JM: Happy Birthday, Alexey and congs on the forthcoming article, "The Red Flower of Evil." A festive bunch of dates with roses and a knackle of nuts right at the start - and I hope you''ll soon achieve your manumission from Nabokov...
Someone recently inquired of me if I had already read the highly praised novel by Biely. No. I'm planning to begin with Mikhail Bulgakov's Мастер и Маргарита ( "O Mestre e Margarida") and, while checking around, I came across an amusing editorial review of VN's "Lectures on English Literature" at the Amazon.com site.
Funny how people still insist on translating Kafka's little novel as "The Metamorphosis" while quoting Nabokov, who referred to it as "Transformation".*
For the benefit of those who haven't read this accessment, here it is:
Editorial Reviews - Review
Not really essays, not genial and general E. M. Forster-ish talks either, nor stirring defenses nor rhetorical destructions, these lectures Nabokov prepared and gave at Cornell in the Fifties are just that: he talks and reads, we listen (the same general approach - heirophant picking out the mystery from the dross - that Nabokov used in his own fiction); and literature is taken apart like a boxful of toys: "impersonal imagination and artistic delight," "the supremacy of the detail over the general, of the part that is more alive than the whole." There are diagrams and drawings, quiddities made visual: a map of Sotherton Court in Jane Austen's Mansfield Park; exactly what kind of beetle Gregor Samsa turned into in "The Metamorphosis" the facade of 7 Eccles St., Bloom's house in Ulysses; what Odette's orchid looked like in Swann's Way. The more specific and crammed the writer, the more specific and crammed Nabokov's lecture: Dickens, Flaubert, Joyce. He finds Bleak House's tricks delicious, the richness and the pity; in Ulysses he swats away the Freudian interpretations...in favor of the devilish intricacy of Joycean synchronicity... Where sheer lush orchestration is less the thing, Nabokov falls back on thematic layering and transformation; before Stevenson's "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" and Kafka's "The Metamorphosis" he is almost brief, enchantedly synopsizing although with microscopic attention still. In Nabokov a crankiness is always near the surface... and he betrays a certain anxiety by detailing so much, as though a great work might try and fool him: there's something at the same time eccentric and regimental to his appreciation. But finally there is a personal, fussy, high rapture to these lessons and illustrations, not quite analytical (Nabokov was too defensive and contentious for analysis - maybe too brilliant, too) - more a delight in literature-as-camouflage. Distinctive and demanding. (Kirkus Reviews )
www.amazon.com > ... > Literature & Fiction > Essays -
(btw: what does "analytical" mean among the literatti?)
.......................................................................................................
* We finally get Nabokov's honors list "in this order: Joyce's Ulysses, Kafka's Transformation [note the affected dismissal of the customary Metamorphosis], Biely's Petersburg, and the first half of Proust's fairy tale In Search of Lost Time." This last is the justified emendation of a misleading English title, but note the belittling "first half" and "fairy tale," with the pun on "fairy." Gratuitous excogitations by John Simon - The New Criterion www.newcriterion.com/.../Gratuitous-excogitations-4395
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
Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/