Vladimir Mylnikov:Great!
There are some intelligent people in Russia. but again, thank you, Dimitry
Vladimirovich, to expose that.
Robert H.
Boyle: Despite his father's wish that the The Original of
Laura be consigned to flames, DN's exultant email reporting the extraordinarily
successful sales in Russia proves yet again that he was right in deciding The
Lady's Not for Burning.
Piers Smith: How does that
follow? Also, if I may, the gloss of production—design, detachable cards,
heft, etc—seems to have subtended the product. Indeed, what is The Original of
Laura? Only a product? And what has happened to the rest of the work, as a
result? (The Vintage re-issues underscore this plaint.) Am I now to read VN as
artist or artificer? As a literary version of Warhol or Madonna. Or something
else?
JM: I think I can see Piers'
point. Are VN's fragments "only a product...what has happened to the rest of
the work...read VN as artist or artificer?" After all, the material reality
of TOoL is a bunch of note-cards - which I still hesitate to
disembowel.*
I confess I was disappointed when I realized
that the back of the cards doesn't exactly correspond to the front. Why not
take the pains all
the way and produce an exact copy of each?
I must report a fascinating coincidence
(off-List). From America, James Twiggs sent me an old
TLS review about a book on Russia and occultism with a Nabokov sighting and
a reference to Crowley. A few minutes later, from Europe, Stan
Kelly-Bootle inquired about the occult, Crowley and Nabokov in
connection to a messianic "Sebastianist", the poet Fernando Pessoa and
his heteronyms ( In "Ada" we find VN's neologism for a "thespyionim"
related to another Portuguese, Vasco da Gama).
Excerpts from the TLS review sent by J.
Twiggs and SKB's message:
1. TLS Sighting: "Fedorov may have influenced
Andrei Bely's thinking on the magical powers of words, as Irina Gutkin points
out in "The Magic of Words: Symbolism, Futurism, Socialist Realism." Kaluga is
occasionally referred to. Kaluga, a town to the south-west of Moscow, is,
together with Toledo, Prague and Glastonbury, one of the world's magical places
[...] Gutkin, when she comes to discuss the nature of the Russian Futurists'
links with the occult in her chapter on the magical power of words, notes their
passion for cryptograms and palindromes[...] In an earlier essay, "Magic and
Divination: Old Russian sources", Will Ryan pauses to remark on the strange
difficulty there is in distinguishing medieval texts devoted to divination from
those about games and other popular pastimes [...]
The pioneers of
cryptography and cryptoanalysis, Cornelius Agrippa, Johannes Trithemius and John
Dee, were occultists to a man. Those addicted to cryptic crosswords will know
how often their solution depends on something which seems intriguingly close to
telepathy or divination. Occultism and novel-writing are competing crafts based
on the manipulation of the power of words. Russian occultism in particular
was a thoroughly literary affair, and one which cannot be discussed without
reference to Vladimir Soloviev, Daniil Andreev, Aleksandr Blok, Fedor Sologub,
Dmitri Merezhkovsky, Andrei Bely, Mikhail Bulgakov, Maxim Gorky and other
lesser figures. (Some of the poetry and fiction devoted to occultist themes was
diabolically bad.) [...] It was not just a matter of writers being inspired by
occult themes. Writers were not passive consumers. Symbolists, Decadents and
Futurists played the major role in shaping Russian occultism. Gorky is referred
to almost as frequently as Fedorov by Rosenthal's team of contributors[...] a
bizarrely apocalyptic figure who interested himself in the propagandistic
potential of telepathy and who believed that fictional characters could escape
from their authors and acquire an independent existence as psycho-physical
emanations. (Daniil Andreev similarly believed that Ivan Karamazov and Andrei
Bolkonsky lived on in a part of the cosmos identified by him as the "Middle
Layers of Shadanakar".)[...] Yet the real sources of modern Russian
occultism were in Western libraries. As Ryan's chapter demonstrates, traditional
Russian magical beliefs were inexorably replaced by Western esoteric ideas [...]
Russian esotericism was successively shaped by imported texts on Jewish
Kabbalism, Byzantine mysticism, Renaissance Neoplatonism, Rosicrucianism and so
on, right up to the Russian Revolution. (It is a little-known fact that the
English Satanist Aleister Crowley took a dance troupe, the Ragged Ragtime Girls,
to Moscow in 1913. Not much came of his venture into the world of theatre,
but while there he was inspired to write the most famous of his poems, or
incantations, "Io Pan". Show business's loss was Satanism's gain.) Taken as a
whole, The Occult in Russian and Soviet Culture is stronger on ideological
imports from the West than it is on Russian exports. It would have been
interesting to have read an account of the potential Russian sources for the
teachings of the mystagogues George Gurdjieff and Peter Ouspensky. It might
also have been interesting to explore the presence of spiritualist and occult
themes and their links with word-play in the novels of Vladimir
Nabokov. It is surely significant that Nabokov rated the writings of
Bely, which were saturated with the occult, extremely highly."
The Times
Literary Supplement (Oct.24,1997) Mystics and madmen,by
Robert Irwin
review of: THE OCCULT IN RUSSIAN AND SOVIET CULTURE. Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal,
editor. 468pp. Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press; distributed in the UK by Plymbridge. Pounds 47
(paperback, Pounds 19.50). - 0 8014 3258 8.
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/Subscriber_Archive/History_Archive/article6769620.ece
2. S K-B's comments: "Pessoa translated into
English a number of Portuguese books and from English the poems "The Raven",
"Annabel Lee" and "Ulalume"[10] by Edgar Allan Poe which, along with Walt
Whitman, strongly influenced him. He also translated into Portuguese a number of
esoteric books by leading Theosophists such as C. W. Leadbeater and Annie Besant
[11]. His interest in occultism led Pessoa to correspond with Aleister
Crowley. He later helped Crowley plan an elaborate fake suicide [skb’s
astonished emphasis] when he visited Portugal in 1930 [12]. Pessoa translated
Crowley's poem "Hymn To Pan" into Portuguese, and the catalogue of Pessoa's
library shows that he possessed copies of Crowley's Magick in Theory and
Practice and Confessions. Pessoa also wrote on Crowley's doctrine of Thelema in
several fragments, including Moral [13]. --wiki
Browsing wiki, I found a link to Nabokov via Poe
(and also Crowley, whom VN read & who, I think, gets a mention or hint in
Pale Fire?)."
JM: There is a captain
Cowley (not Crowley) in "Ada" (linked to Lucette's suicide). Inspite of various
poltergeistlich and spiritualist seances both in New Wye and in Zembla, I cannot
remember Crowley in PF.
Like SK-B I seem to recollect reading his
name in one of Nabokov's texts. Priscilla Meyer mentions Torfaeus and Wallace,
but a quick
perusal didn't lead me to Crowley. Nor did
I find him in B.Boyd's index in "The Magic of Artistic
Discovery."
In RLSK we find a "futurist poet Alexis Pan and his wife
Larissa" with whom "seventeen-year-old Sebastian disappeared, leaving my mother a
short note [...] Pan's idea of a Marcopolian journey consisted in gently working
eastwards...renting a hall (or a shed if no hall was available) [ and he
]generally appeared on the stage dressed in a morning coat, perfectly correct
but for its being embroidered with huge lotus flowers. A constellation (the
Greater Dog) was painted on his bald brow...Now and then, between two poems, Pan
would perform a slow dance — a mixture of Javanese wrist-play and his own
rhythmic
inventions."
..................................................................................................................................................................
* VN:"It's
far too easy to talk of a dead author behind the backs of his books"
(RLSK) "Where is the third party? Rotting peacefully in the cemetery of
St Damier. Laughingly alive in five volumes[...]. In The Doubtful
Asphodel, his (SK's) method has attained perfection[...].There seems to
be a method, too, in the author's way of expressing the physical process of
dying[...].First the brain follows up a certain hierarchy of ideas[...] But the
dying man knew that these were not real ideas; that only one half of the notion
of death can be said really to exist: this side of the question[...] the quay of
life gently moving away aflutter with handkerchiefs: as if he was already on the
other side, if he could see the beach receding; no, not quite - if he was still
thinking."