EDNote: Our list's founder and former editor Don Johnson admonishes us
all to keep up the flow of information about recently published VN
scholarship. Subscribers are encouraged to submit summaries/abstracts
of their own publications, or of other important recent works to which
they would like to draw attention (as Don does below). ~SB
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Hi,
Some bibliography info for NABOKV-L. It would be nice to see more info
of this sort on the list.
Best, Don
Rough Notes on
Vyacheslav Desyatov’s survey article “Russian
Post Modernism: A Half Century with Nabokov,”in Imperiya
N: Nabokov & his Descendants: Sbornik stat’ei, edited
& compiled by Yurii Leving, Evgenii Soshkin, M. Novoe Literaturnoe
Obozrenie, pp. 210-256.
D. Barton Johnson
This Russian-language collection by 20-odd scholars from
eight countries examines VN in relation to popular culture (theater,
film &
graphic) and attempts to sum up a stormy
decade of Russian Nabokov studies and, as well, to evaluate Nabokov’s
influence
on Russian literature of the late 80s
and early 90s. My remarks below deal it only
with the single essay named above since I
thought it in particular might be useful as a somewhat belated
synthesis of
Russian work on VN subtextx. Like almost all of the articles in the
collection
Desyatov’s contribution falls in the category of para-Nabokoviana,
i.e., materials about the
state of Russian Nabokov studies rather
than textual interpretation, i.e., it is
sociological, rather than
“literary.” The article is an excerpt selection from his short book
published
by Altaiski Universitet in 100 copies.
My comments
below are offered as informational rather than critical. The current
volume
of Russian Nabokov scholarship is
substantial and not easy to keep up. I
would urge other readers of Russian
Nabokov scholarship to avail themselves of
NABOKV-L to assist other Nabokov scholars in following recent
Russian
work. Such notes may help to fill the gap.
The article,
drawn from a larger project called “Russian Post Modernists and
Nabokov:
Intertextual Connections,” systematically surveys the impact that N’s
work has
had on Russian Post Modernism. The project is apparently being
undertaken at Altaiskii State
University in Barnaul
(Siberia) by Vyacheslav Desyatov. The heart of the article is found in close
examinations of VN’s impact on three major writers: Tertz-Sinyavsky,
Tatyana
Tolstaya, and Boris Akunin selected from a constellation consisting of those names and Bitov, Aksyonov, Sasha
Sokolov, Viktor Yerofeev, Aleksandr Zholkovsky, D. Galkovsky, L. Petrushevskaya. Pelevin, T. Kibirov, and Vladimir Sorokin. An
introductory section surveys the history
of VN allusions into late Soviet literature and then turns to a
detailed and
carefully documented examination of the three authors chosen
for detailed examination. Considerable
thought and great industry have been devoted to setting parameters for
defining
rules for inclusion as subtexts of various levels. This is a slippery
slope but
on the whole the author has been judicious in his choices. Presumably,
Desyatin’s full text offer the same
detailed accounts of VN’s impact on all thirteen writers whose work
form its
corpus.
The first of
the detailed sections is aptly subtitled
“A. Sinyavsky-Tertz (‘At the Circus’): Death as a Trick.”
Evidence is presented that S-T’s 1955
samizdat tale draws on VN’s 1924 “The
Potato Elf.” There are indeed echoes in “Circus” that seem to evoke the
sister-acrobats in “Elf,” and weaker reverberations echo the theme
“death as a
magician’s trick.” Desyatin’s arguments
are plausible but perhaps over-ingenious at times. But still…. A second
section
argues Invitation to a Beheading
as a possible subtext. The critic also
notes that VN’s early novel is a forerunner of post modernism as is
S-T’s 1955
“Circus.”
“Tatyana
Tolstaya: Retrospectives of Fate and History” stands on firmer ground.
Tolstaya
acknowledges her debt to VN both in public statements and in overt
subtexts in
her fiction. The early stories “Sonya”
and “A Star over Pulkovo” contains evocative
echoes of VN’s “The Gift,” particularly in Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev’s
long
poem. Tolstaya’s story “Siuzhet” (The
Plot?) with its “alternative history” of Pushkin provides
other alternative plot lines for Pushkin just as do VN’s alternative
lives of
the narrator of Look at the Harlequins.
“Boris Akunin: The Reduction to Popular Genres” looks at VN’s
“detective”
fiction as subtexts in Akunin’s popular historical detective fiction.
The
fundamental Nabokov sources are The
Defense, “The Passenger,” Despair,
and Other Shores. Here Akunin’s The
Turkish Gambit is highlighted.
In his
“Conclusion” Desyatov offers syntheses
drawn from the (often tedious) juxtapositions of texts and their
(sometimes putative) subtexts. These fall under several headings. The
first is
a rapid run-through of the growth of VN allusions in Russian literature
from
the mid-fifties, the sixties, seventies, and eighties and so on into
the
nineties. Surprisingly, Invitation to a
Beheading has been the most
frequently cited (among the authors
studied) followed by Lolita (16),
then The Gift, and Other Shores
(1l), followed by Luzhin, Ada, Glory, &
Despair. Among the
English novels , Lolita & Ada are surprisingly
followed by Look at the Harlequins!
which was (Desyatov asserts) has been misunderstood by its English
audience. Among the stories, those most
cited are in the in the late collection Spring
in Fialta; poems -- “Lilith,” “Glory,” etc.. Desyatov
ends his survey with 17 Nabokovian
themes taken up by the post-modernist writers with particular attention
to the “death/not
death” theme in its many (enumerated) incarnations. Also catalogued
(along with
references to the post-modernist works that echo them) are citations
(with
their near-infinite degrees of
accuracy). The article concludes
that Tertz-Sinyavsky, Tolstaya, Akunin, & Pelevin represent
a
spectrum of degrees in the growing stature of VN as “the father of
Russian Post
Modernism.”
The substantial
article is a useful attempt to gauge the role of VN in recent Russian
literature vis-à-vis Post Modernism. VN with his dislike of literary “schools”
would have probably raised an eyebrow at being seen as a progenitor of
Post
Modernism. Whether or not one finds this approach meaningful the reader
can
only be impressed by the diligence that has gone into this project.
Whatever
the merits of the theoretical framework, the study offers and documents the course of Nabokov’s impact
on Russian literature. The reader will find many curious and useful
nuggets in
the article (and doubtless more in the full text). One
is bemused pondering a parallel study of
VN’s impact on American Post-Modernist writers.
Postscript: After
writing the above I noticed that the following article by Yurii Leving
(“Nabokov-7: Russian Modernism in search of
National Uniqueness”.), pp. 257-284” neatly supplements and
complements
Desyatov’s piece. Desyatov’s useful
contribution
is essentially an extended catalogue and
classification of VN subtexts whereas Leving examines Voinovich,
Dovlatov,
Pelevin, Vl. Sorokin, Sergei Bolmat &
Yurii Buida, providing more extended
accounts of the widely varying ways these writers have drawn VN
into
their literary attitudes and works.