Dear List,
In Nabokov's "The Wood-Sprite" I enjoyed the
Cinderella-like dream-transformation of a clock striking the hour in a distant
room and the narrator's hearing twelve knocks at his door
before admitting a visitor. Later, when he ( probably) woke up
"a wondrously subtle scent in the room, of birch, of humid
moss..." lingered on.
A delightful presentation:"...he
hopped sidewise out of a rectangle of shadow, hunched, gray, powdered with the
pollen of the frosty,starry night." It gave me
the sensation that the wood-sprite was sprinkled not only with snow-crystals but
little stars.
Another sentence didn't please me as much, in its
English translation at least:"There I pined, and could
not stop sobbing. I had barely grown used to it, and lo, there was no more
pinewood, just blue-tinted cinders." I don't
think that the close-proximity of pines and the verb to pine was
intentional!
The wood-sprite insistently brings up the same word
later on to refer to the sleeping poet's nostalgia and his kinship with
fairy-land: "I know you too are pining," his voice shimmered
again, "but your pining, compared to mine, my tempestuous, turbulent pining, is
but the even breathing of one who is asleep. And think about it: not one of our
Tribe is there left in Rus'..." , but here the faint whiff of pine
forests and birches enriches the image.
At the time VN wrote this story ( close to "Natasha",
circa 1922?) he must have still associated poetry to
the Romantics and their shimmering eolic harps. He'd broken up with
Svetlana and was translating Tennyson, Byron, Lamb, and Musset.
"The Wood-sprite" is not included in his
collections: A Russian Beauty, Tyrants Destroyed, Details of a
Sunset.
Brian Boyd (RY) comments on "Slovo" (
The Word), written in January 1923: "he wakes up to real life with no
recollection of the magic word. Like the earlier "The Sprite,"
"The Word" sets the human and the transcendent too starkly
together. Nabokov would soon learn that trying to follow two intersecting planes
of existence simultaneously would only lead him to a blind corner. And yet this
new story anticipates something invaluable in the later Nabokov: the
all-resolving secret the dying man seems about to utter in "The Real Life of
Sebastian Knight"...the treacherous clue "fountain" in Shade's "Pale Fire"
"...
It seems that "the transcendent" referred to by Brian
Boyd takes place in another "plane of existence" unrelated to any
platonic philosophy or Greek mythology, nor to the western-world
established religions. It is, perhaps, closer to V's* ( in TRLSK) emotions
than to Sebastian's own ( do we hear SK's real dying words in TRLSK?)... or, to
VN's mother's?
Jansy
*: What does the V. in Botkin
stand for? Veeslav? Victor?
.