EDNote: Two thoughtful replies are already in, and deserve speedy
posting. Further replies will probably wait till tomorrow, due to my
schedule.
Victor Fet's correction of my comment is well taken. ~SB
If
one wants to hear VN’s own voice, see his wartime (1944)
anti-Stalinist poem in Russian “Kakim by polotnom batal'nym ni
yavlyalas'
sovetskaya susal'nejshaya’ Rus’....”, in English version:
No
matter how the Soviet tinsel glitters
upon
the canvas of a battle piece,
no
matter how the soul dissolves in pity,
I
will not bend.
(Poems
& Problems)
Very
relevant in VN attitude to tyrants past and present are not
only the short classic “Tyrants destroyed” and the entire “Invitation
to Beheading” and “Bend Sinister” (both published BEFORE Orwell’s
“1984”!) but also “The Walz Invention” and many, many places
in “Ada” ’s twisted world. A very recognizable is Extremist coup
in Zembla supported by its big eastern neighbor (whatever our opinion
of decadent
Zemblan monarchy).
I
do not agree with SB that today “Bolsheviks”
are not involved at all.
It
is the current
Russian government (as opposed
to German by the way) that never went through de-Communization, or any
kind of
even symbolic, let alone legal, repentance process, and de-facto
continues to
consider itself as a heir to Bolshevik/Communist/Soviet/Ekwilist
regime, with
all the trimmings and territorial ambitions; the current PM called the
demise
of the USSR “a great geopolitical tragedy of 20th century”,
and is proud of his direct connection with Cheka/GPU/NKVD/KGB unending
lineage
of “people with cold heads and clean hands”.
A
careful student of Russian literature and, therefore, history
would recall Prague in 1968, Budapest in 1956, Berlin in 1953, the bulk
of
Eastern Europe so easily dismissed by FDR in Yalta-1945, half of
Poland, part
of Romania, and all of the Baltics in 1939-1940, Georgia in 1921 [on
February 25, 1921,
units of the Red Army entered Tbilisi. In Moscow, Lenin received the
telegram "The
red banner blows over Tbilisi."]…and,
after all, all
of Russia in 1917-1923.
Victor
Fet
------
James Studdard: "would any of you
venture to suggest what VN's opinions would be in the Russo/Georgian
incursion."
EDNote: James Studdard's question seems to offer a
chance to reflect on Nabokov's attitudes toward nationalism, power, and
different forms of aggression in various contexts (SB).
JM: Sandy Klein
sent links to Melissa Fall's "Light of my Life" where, after
reading Amis's preface to her copy of "Lolita", Falls writes that
according "to Amis, Paris-born Humbert Humbert [sic] paints Lolita into a corner sketched out
by Norman Rockwell and the Hudson River School. Though he acknowledges
that Nabokov disagreed with this interpretation, Amis still contends
that "the descent of Humbert Humbert on the fruit vert of America
is in some sense a pedophilic visitation. Like Lolita, America is above
all young." Then she concludes that: "Humbert Humbert may or may not have created Lolita in
the image of America-but Amis creates America in the image of Lolita."
(Cf.The Daily
Californian,Wednesday, August 13, 2008.)
When you read VN's novels through the eyes of, say, America's Founding
Fathers, or British scholar Amis' eyes, the sexual impact of
invasive pedophilia often obfuscates different indications related to
power and aggression. Melissa Fall questions Amis' vision of Lolita as
young America, but she doesn't question the ideology of America as a
"little girl", a young defenceless prey to the corrupting forces
of European interests.
Would VN have been as naive?
Before exploring what Nabokov might have
thought about present-day politics, or has expressed on nationalism and
tyrannies either directly, as in SO, or by his stories and novels (
like Bend Sinister, Tyrants Destroyed, Invitation to a Beheading,
aso), we may profit from what,
independently from any VN direct prompting, has already arisen as a
social consequence of his work.
For example, as in the SK's quote I
brought up yesterday from a review by Steven G. Kellman (Vickers's Chasing
Lolita: How Popular Culture Corrupted Nabokov's Little Girl All Over
Again ):"Reading Lolita in Tehran,
clandestinely, Azar Nafisi defied a repressive régime[...] the book
helped beleaguered Iranian women understand the ways others take
control of our voices and ourselves.Two decades earlier[...] I was
reading Lolita in Tbilisi, the capital of Soviet Georgia. Nabokov's
book was banned, but the students [...]devoured the Russian American's
brilliant fiction of coercion."
ED-SB's words invite us to discuss "different forms of
aggression in various contexts" and his statement offers us
a wider perspective about the effect of VN's "fiction of coercion", ie,
one by which we may focus on VN's experience when we understand that,
more than a "Russian American" writer, Nabokov was a man who could
distinguish what is unique in a particular geography and culture, and
what these details reveal about a bigger, non-geographical, wide-world
net that may overpower individual specimens and, simultaneously, be
constituted by them (or, simultaneously, "transcendentally" dominate
them all ).