UCL School of Slavonic and
East European Studies
In 1969, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. published his time-travelling, anti-war,
semi-autobiographical novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, or The
Children’s Crusade: A Duty Dance with Death. In the same year,
Vladimir Nabokov published Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle,
and began work on what was to be one of his two last novels, Transparent
Things. As Lolita had done for Nabokov, the success of Slaughterhouse-Five
was to secure Vonnegut’s status as a cult figure in post-war American
literature. At first glance, and most overtly in style and approach,
there seems little to connect the work of these two men, nor is there
any evidence that they knew each other’s writing. On closer scrutiny,
however, their work displays intriguing affinities and parallels, most
specifically in their treatment of and preoccupation with questions of
time, mortality and ‘other’ parallel worlds.
Beginning with a brief overview of Vonnegut’s life and
work, the focus turns to the protagonists of Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five
and Nabokov’s Transparent Things, Billy Pilgrim and Hugh
Person respectively, and their experiences of other, parallel
dimensions, examining to what extent these distinctive universes, as
elucidated by the metaphysical R. and the extraterrestrial
Tralfamadorians, both offer a resolution to the dilemma of mortality as
Nabokov and Vonnegut perceive it, and also communicate the essence of a
shared vision. Manipulation of comparable modes and means of transition
(e.g. reflective surfaces — glass, mirrors, puddles, pools — or ‘leaks’
as Vonnegut called them) particularly in The Gift, Ada,
Bend Sinister, Invitation to a Beheading, Galápagos,
Breakfast of Champions and The Sirens of Titan
demonstrates further points of convergence in both
writers’ perspectives on space and time and, ultimately, their
depiction of an afterlife, which seems to be motivated equally by a
refusal to accept that earthly life is merely a ‘brief crack of light
between two eternities of darkness’ beyond which the human spirit is
reduced to nothing more than ‘a wisp of undifferentiated nothingness’.
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Duncan
White
Dyeing
Dolores: Lolita in the paratext
What colour is Lolita’s hair? This is the
question that opens this paper’s investigation into the way Lolita, the
character, has been received and the role that paratextual material has
played
in that reception. Nabokov was, more than any writer before him,
invested in
how his books were designed and would even help design the covers of
his
novels. After all, paratexts play a crucial role in defining a reader’s
expectations. Nabokov initially insisted that “no girls” should be
placed on
the covers of Lolita and his publishers in the US
and the United
Kingdom
followed this edict. However, with the Kubrick film and the paperback
editions,
Nabokov began to lose control of the Lolita phenomenon. As we are
confronted by
ever more graphically sexualised cover art for Lolita,
I argue that it was an essential component of the novel that
Dolores can only be filtered through Humbert’s consciousness and that
her
representation in the cover art undermines the novel’s structure.
_________________________________________________________________________________________
Dale
E. Peterson (Amherst)
KNIGHT’S MOVE: NABOKOV, SHKLOVSKY
AND THE AFTERLIFE OF SIRIN
Nabokov’s first attempt at English-language
fiction, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, was written at the height
of its
Russian author’s experimental prowess and in anticipation of the death
of his
fictive alter ego, Sirin. Nabokov faced the considerable challenge of
transferring a distinctive literary identity by means of partial hints
transcribed in a foreign tongue. How appropriate, then, that Nabokov’s
self-introduction to a new audience took the form of an obituary memoir
written
by a surviving sibling in quest of the “real life” of a prematurely
deceased
writer of genius. Everything in Nabokov’s debut English novel is about
transference, translation, and sudden transition from one state of
existence to
another.
The birth of Sirin more or less coincided
with the appearance in Berlin of Viktor Skhlovsky’s artistic treatise
for
Russians abroad, Knight’s Move (1923). Alluding to that shared moment
of
origin, Sebastian Knight’s fictional remains, as reconstituted by his
bereaved
half-brother, show him to be of a decidedly Formalist cast of mind.
Sebastian’s
texts move with cunning indirection like Shklovsky’s metaphor for
artistic
composition, the chess knight who “moves laterally (xoдит в бок) because the straight
road is forbidden.” In Nabokov’s elegantly patterned novel, as numerous
critics
have noted, Sebastian’s fictions and V’s quest uncannily appear to
replicate
one another; more than that, the fictive and autobiographical
narratives strike
the informed reader as coded allusions to Nabokov’s life and Sirin’s
works.
Read as a metatextual reflection, or
prismatic refraction, of Nabokov’s labile position between languages
and
cultures in 1940, Sebastian Knight performs the trick of sidestepping
the death
of Sirin by transferring into English Nabokov’s characteristic
narrative
signature – his evocation of two non-coinciding worlds (Levin’s
“bispatiality”)
that appear to intersect in the multidimensional realm of imaginative
artifice.
In The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, it is V. Sirin who is translated
into a
“laughingly alive” afterlife in the “otherworld” of English prose.
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Abstract:
‘Stages and
Transitions: Theatricality
in
Nabokov’s Fiction of the 1930s and 1940s’
Siggy Frank
University of Nottingham
Nabokov
was the
first to admit that he was ‘by nature […] no dramatist’. His dramas
have done
little to contribute to his reputation as a writer. Yet theatricality
is at the
heart of Nabokov’s own practice as both dramatist and novelist. His
plays –
into which theatrical performance is deeply inscribed – interrogate the
theatrical realities of the stage on which they are to be realized.
This
performance-oriented approach informs also the incorporation of
theatrical
structures into his narrative fiction. In his novels and short stories,
Nabokov
employs characteristics of theatrical performance – the dualistic world
of the
stage where reality and fiction overlap as well as the split of the
theatrical
process into a dramatic written text and a theatrical performance – in
order to
challenge assumptions about the clear distinction between fiction and
reality
and to dispute borders between textual property and appropriation, and
literary
origin and derivation.
During the 1930s
and 1940s Nabokov
experiences changes on a geographical, linguistic and artistic level.
It is
during this period that theatrical themes, imagery and models clearly
emerge in
Nabokov’s work. This paper examines the role of theatre as a place of
transition in Nabokov’s work of the 1930s and 1940s. It identifies the
two main
functions which theatre is given in Nabokov’s work: first, as a space
where
different realities coincide; and second, as a place where the
different
entities of the written drama and its actual performance compete for
supremacy.
Theatre becomes in Nabokov’s work a metaphor for border-crossing and
the exilic
condition. As well as emphasizing the importance of theatrical
performance to
our reading of Nabokov’s texts, this paper also argues that the theme
of
theatricality is central to an understanding of the transformation of
the
writer himself: the transition from Sirin to VN.