Alexey Sklyarenko:" 'A demon, I felt, was forcing me to impersonate that other man, that
other writer who was and would always be incomparably greater, healthier, and
crueler than your obedient servant.' (LATH...) A literary genius, VN
was so original that no one dared (was good enough) to ape him in his lifetime;
so he probably decided to do it himself and invented Vadim Vadimovich, the
writer whom a demon is forcing to impersonate the author of LATH."
JM: "... Derivative writers seem versatile because they imitate many
others, past and present. Artistic originality has only its own self to
copy." (Strong Opinions, interview with H.Gould).
Following Vladimir Nabokov's views, mimetism in
nature is always artistically creative. It's possible to
admit that, unlike "copycat apes," there are original asd
valuable "artistic mimetists" who are able to assimilate their
heritage and process it in novel ways. At
present, many authors who were influenced
by Vladimir Nabokov's novels have become part of a second generation of
writers, those who Samuel Schuman, in the paper he read this year
at the "Nabokov Upside Down" conference in New Zealand considered as "Nabokov's
Grandchildren".[https://custom.cvent.com/F171CE82AA5645B8BA021387DB23D170/files/d0ef422e8c6642ce956c587060d284fd.pdf ]
Samuel Schuman began his article affirming that
" It would not be
unreasonable to expect that a right-side-up Nabokov conference would feature
papers and presentations focusing upon writers who had influenced VN –
Shakespeare, for example. In
keeping with the topsy-turvy theme of this gathering, this paper focuses instead
upon a small group of popular contemporary English-language novelists who have
been deeply influenced by our author. Before we turn to the
grandchildren, a word about Nabokov’s first generation literary progeny [...]
for example, W. G. Sebald, or Salmon Rushdie... Thomas Pynchon [who] attended
several of Nabokov’s famed lectures as a student at Cornell in the
1950s"
Schuman decided to
limit his presentation to "three writers born in the ‘60s...None of the three would have been
an adult reader at the time of Nabokov’s death in 1977. They are Michael Chabon (b. 1963), David
Mitchell (1969) and Arthur Phillips (1969)." He makes "a few general observations about the Nabokovianess
of these three" before he looks more closely at one
particular novel of each: The Yiddish
Policemen’s Union, Cloud Atlas and The Egyptologist. He adds that Benjamin Hale (1983) might be also
included among Nabokov's "grandchildren" with The Evolution of Bruno
Littlemore, whose flamboyant prose style and its protagonist, offers
a " most Lolitaesque work. The title character and narrator
oscillates between a sense of his own intellectual and artistic superiority to
the common run of humanity, and the recognition that he is a beast …
literally: Bruno is a
chimpanzee." So here we
are, back to humans and another kind of "artistic
apes."
In his closing
lines, S.Schuman argues "that one underlying theme of both Pale Fire and The
Egyptologist is that if we can come to understand our common humanity even
with a Kinbote or a Trilipush, or for that matter, a Humbert or a Hermann, then
we cannot fail to grasp our connection to all that is human. As we all know, Nabokov has sometimes
been misunderstood to be a cruel puppet master, manipulating his flawed
characters with irony and even malice.
I believe, and I think most Nabokovians have come to think, that the
opposite is true: his fictions can
teach us about our brotherhood and sisterhood with even the most misshapen of
our fellows..."