NABOKV-L will be running the
available abstracts from Nora Buhks' Nabokov conference at the Sorbonne last
November. The conference proceedings will be published. Most of the papers are
in Russian, although I give the abstracts in English.
"The First 'Mademoiselle': The Forgotten Story
'Easter Rain'"
The recently
discovered Nabokov story "Easter Rain" was published in the spring of
1925 and written almost a year earlier. The heroinne, Josephine Lvovna,
foreshadows "Mademoiselle O" in may ways but in the 1924 tale
the retrospective viewpoint connecting the image of the governess with the theme
of creative memory is completely absent. The old Swiss woman's sterile nostalgia
is here associated with the un-Nabokovian motif of Russian Easter which is met
only in his early verse. One of these poems, ("Molitva" [A
Prayer]), devoted to the resurrection of the Russian language and
written simultaneously with "Easter Rain", sheds some light on the
sense of the story. At first addressing the image of his former governess,
Nabokov creates an ironic text blending poetic prose with grotesque elements
even creating a sort of literary manifesto that lends the story a certain
narrative ambivalence. This may explain why Nabokov "forgot" this
first incarnation of "Mademoiselle."