Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0000835, Sat, 25 Nov 1995 15:31:30 -0800

Subject
VNCOLLATION (fwd)
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---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sat, 25 Nov 1995 16:10:30 -0600 (CST)
From: Suellen Stringer-Hye <STRINGERS@library.vanderbilt.edu>
To: nabokv-l@UCSBVM.UCSB.EDU
Subject: VNCOLLATION

It is now impossible to keep track of every time Nabokov
is mentioned in a newspaper or magazine article. Although
I have not conducted scientific experimentation, from my
perspective the number of quotes, allusions and
references to Nabokov has expanded exponentially making
what used to be a pleasant use of idle time now the
grounds for intense scholarship. In this collation I
have grouped the citations into categories of type; first
to help control the amount of data and second to set off
the commonplace from the unusual. Nabokov is one of the
better vehicles for use in Cyberspace. In the world of
exploding information, one can always count on a good ride
while aboard his name.

PNIN

In this collation the bumbling character of Timofey Pnin is
employed in two dissimilar contexts:

>From the September 9 London _Times_ , Nigella Lawson
uses Pnin in an article about traveling in Ireland to
enhance her description of insomnia :

ONE OF THE best things that happened to me in Ireland
was that I slept. I've been insomniac since I was
about eight, although I was briefly cured when the
baby was very small as I got so little chance to sleep
that there wasn't any time in which not to be able
to. Now I'm back to those long, chest-constricting
hours lying awake, desperate, like Pnin, for a cool,
fresh, soothing third side of the pillow.


''Jazz, jazz; they always must have their jazz, those
youngsters,'' observed Timofey Pnin in 1953.


Tonight's show demonstrates the melancholy falsity of
that statement. Jazz has always suffered neglect in
the land of its birth.

The quote is from the September 1st _Columbus Dispatch_
review of a series aired on Bravo called " Masters of
American Music: The Story of Jazz."


NOBEL PRIZE

September and October were months in which discussion of
the Nobel Prize for Literature were common. Last year the
same phenomenon occurred--articles discussing the value and
relevancy of the Nobel prize. Nabokov is often mentioned
as one of the undeserving losers.

>From the The Arts & Media section of the October 16
_Times_, Paul Gray, discussing Irish poet Seamus Heaneys'
possible win for the Nobel Prize says:

... Heaney would one day win the Nobel Prize for
Literature. Of course, people said the same thing
about Vladimir Nabokov, Jorge Luis Borges and
Graham Greene, illustrious authors and notorious
nonwinners.

An article in the October 5 _Guardian_ struck a similar
note:

The Nobel Prize for Literature is famous for its
extraordinary ability to avoid recognising the
greatest writers of its...

Another writer comments on the political nature of the
Academy's selection:

(were these writers, unknown outside Sweden, really
more deserving than Borges or Nabokov? ),

But it's not just the fallibility of their choices that
has diminished the reputation of the Nobel Prize for
Literature. But the Academy's choices have frequently
been compromised by non-literary considerations.


The Nobel Prize for Literature has generally been
something of a joke in English literary journalism.

Comments from the October 1 _New York Times_ under the
headline:

SO YOU WANT TO WIN A NOBEL PRIZE

included:

And then, aside from the alleged intrusion of
extra-literary considerations, there's the matter of
literary discrimination, or the lack of it...

Question 2: What do Tolstoy, Ibsen, Strindberg, Zola,
Hardy, Gorky, Freud, Mandelstam, Akhmatova, Joyce,
Conrad, D. H. Lawrence, Garcia Lorca, Rilke,
Stevens, Brecht, Nabokov, Lowell and Calvino have in
common? Answer: They all failed to win.

CONTEMPORARY AUTHORS

As noted in previous collations, comparison with Nabokov
for new novels and novelists or contemporary authors is
widespread. Below are selected excerpts that either cite
the comparison and if meaningful provide essential quotes
from the review. I have also included the note from Edward
Albee because it didn't fit neatly into any other
category.

>From _The Boston Globe_, October 15 interview with Edward
Albee--Albee says that :

Only once... has he seen producers savage his work,
and that was with his 1981 version of Vladimir
Nabokov's "Lolita." "It was a shambles of a shame,"


Michael Didbin writing in the September 17, _Independent_
negatively reviews _Enigma_ by Robert Harris comparing
Harris's inability to weave a detective story unfavorably
to Nabokov's.


In the October 10 _Village Voice_ review of Kazuo Ishiguro's
new novel Ishiguro is compared with
Nabokov and Mann.

A review of_Signals of Distress_ , by Jim Crace. Farrar,
Straus & Giroux, comments:

And there's more to this character: Smith is 42 and a
virgin. He's an emancipationist. He's a
religious skeptic. Aymer Smith is part Shakespearean
buffoon, part batty Nabokovian intellectual, a
Professor Pnin caught in the land of the pragmatic,
but also well-meaning to the point of sainthood. And
somehow, he's likeable as hell.


Rachel Cusk of the_ New York Times_ reviews "The Chess
Garden" on September 24:

Comparisons to Nabokov and Calvino are doubtless in
order -- those sunny fabulists and dreamers of perfect
dreams. But "The Chess Garden" stands by itself, a
marvel of attention to the things of this world, and
worlds beyond.

In the review appearing in the October 6, _Independent_, of
Umberto Eco's new novel,_The Island of the Day Before_ Eco
is compared unfavorably to Nabokov:

The problem with all this is that, encyclopaedic as
Eco's knowledge of literature is, there is something
he doesn't quite get. Sure, the writer is remote,
sure, art lets you down, but there is a poignancy in
those truths that you simply never get from reading
his novels. Nabokov or Beckett can make hot tears
spurt with their explorations of the limits of art.
But in Eco there is no pressure, it's all smartly put
together to tell you nothing. The result is not a
higher consciousness but complacency. That's the
trouble with Post-Modernism, you can't really get
involved. It's not done. The Island of the Day Before
is clearly not worth reading by page 50. He wears his
learning too heavily, he lacks wit.


But never mind, the Humbert Echo show rolls on. The
interviews come and go. Much work is to be done at the
department of semiotics at Bologna. Eco rolls out
of his chair, shakes my hand and ambles off to consult
his publicist. It is all such a wonderful, effortless,
Post-Modern whiz. Italian without tears.


NABOKOV THE CHARACTER

Related to works in which an author is compared to Nabokov
are articles or books in which Nabokov the character is
employed to lend atmosphere to the composition.


Milan Kundera's new book is reviewed in the Memphis
Tennessee, _ Commercial Appeal_ :


In his concern with the evolution of the novel,
Kundera returns time and again to his prime
examples of artistic invention: Nabokov, Gombrowicz,
Stravinsky, Hemingway, Musil, Janacek and
especially Kafka.



_The Blue Suit_ by Richard Rayner and published by Houghton
Mifflin is reviewed in the October 8,_ Washington Post_ .
Nabokov features structurally if not prominently in this
book:


It is the mid-'70s, and Richard is a student at
Cambridge. Soon after he, too, begins stealing -
books. He likes first editions, and Nabokov, and
Raymond Chandler. Not long before graduation the
university sends him a little reminder: He owes
L652.75, and if he doesn't pay he will not get his
degree. He's broke.

Mr. Rayner wrote absolutely the best reportage about
the 1992 Los Angeles riots - in the acclaimed literary
magazine Granta - and it is an event during the
second day of that upheaval that frames the narrative
of "The Blue Suit." He is outside a convenience store
with another girlfriend. (he went directly to L.A.
after nipping out for that pint of milk) and they see a
white couple dressed in matching track suits
stealing cans of soup and toilet paper. "This is
extraordinary," Mr. Rayner tells her. "They don't
need the stuff."



"Yes, Richard," she replies. "But what if the store
were filled with Nabokov first editions?"


NABOKOV AS AUTHOR


Reviewing _The Faber Book of Science_ by John Carey Faber
Anthony Gottlieb in the September 23 _ Independent_ says:

It is not by any means all by professional scientists.
The contributors include Mark Twain (a killingly
funny attack on the idea that the earth was made for
man), Nabokov (on butterflies), Orwell (on toads) and
Thoreau (unforgettably on ants). !



In the 40 Years Ago This Week section of the September 24
_Sunday Times_ a letter by Vladimir Nabokov to Pascal Covici, his editor at Viking Press, written on September 29, 1955 is quoted::

One more consideration. You seem to regret that the
book ( PNIN) is, as you put it, ''not a novel''. I do
not know if it is or not. According to popular
definitions, the main thing it seems to lack is length.
What is a novel? Is Sterne's Sentimental Journey
Through France a novel? Is Proust's Sentimental
Journey Through Time a novel? I do not know. All I know
is that PNIN is not a collection of
sketches. I do not write sketches. But must we
pigeonhole him into any kind of category? I would
like to have your reaction to this letter.


NABOKOV REVIEWED

In the October 8, issue of _ Newsday_ _The Stories of
Vladimir Nabokov and Michael Wood's _ The Magician's
Doubts: Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction_ are reviewed
simultaneously. I have included characteristic and
potentially controversial excerpts from the review below.
Both books were given favorable reviews.

Like all great novelists, Nabokov was a monomaniac
and he persistently worked-over one big,
complicated theme: fate's cruel capriciousness.


he also worked as an extra in German films, which
might account for the shallow cinematic quality that
occasionally mars his early fiction.

Since Nabokov's memory was in Russian, English
liberated him into an imaginative niche outside
memory, making it all the easier to play deft games
with time.


Written for a cultured, harried, embittered,
frequently-impoverished emigre audience, they
travel an unnervingly thin line between hatred of
cruelty and pleasure in capturing it.
Yet that emotional rawness makes them more potent than
the cool mandarin puzzles devised in English, which
often disdainfully gesture toward life through the
steel haze of a concept about life.


An aging emigre "beauty" marries out of loneliness
and desperation and dies the next summer in childbirth
(in general, Nabokov cannot imagine women characters
without a sneer or a sob)



Nabokov's lifelong effort to have his revenge on fate
by outdoing it in all its wild brutality. And then he
slays the tyrant in himself and exalts the artist.
That is why art-making itself becomes more and more his
subject as he grows older. Unfortunately, in the
English stories, Nabokov identifies himself with both
art and fate, and readers making their way through
these claustrophobic masterpieces might find
themselves gasping for emotional air.


As for the portrayal of cruelty, however, the harsh
complexities of ancient Greek tragedy, Shakespeare's
tragedies, Dante, Cervantes and, in their lesser
way, Nabokov's Russian stories make a stronger case
for human kindness than does "The Bridges of Madison
County."

NABOKOV AND POPULAR CULTURE


Below are excepts from a wide range of articles
representing popular mediums which in some way feature
Nabokov or his works as a part of the mix.


A new television series was credited with having...

... some surprisingly sophisticated moments (including
a Vladimir Nabokov reference that allows one of
Danza's precinct mates to crack a string of venial sex
crimes).


in _People Magazine_ October 9, 1995.

Other reviews of the show also thought the Nabokov
reference made this show a hopeful "pick".

THE GOOD NEWS: Hudson Street (ABC) stars Tony Danza as
a divorced father and police detective. And, yes, his
ex-wife, young son and colleagues all encourage him to
start dating again. He does. His date is Lori
Loughlin, a genuinely pert newspaper reporter who has a
brain (!) and a tart tongue. While it may not be
Tracy and Hepburn, the dialogue on this show is
sassy--a sitcom with references to Nabokov and a
Rastafarian pool hall can't be all bad. And it isn't.
This one is promising.

A third review again mentions the Nabokov joke:


She and Tony's colleagues down at the station house
urge him to date again. The cops love to quip, but a
joke about Vladimir Nabokov stops the show cold.
Danza has a tender relationship with Frankie J.
Galasso, the young actor who plays his son, Mickey,
10.


Many, many articles have been written about the remake of
the film "Lolita" , now in production and directed by
Adrian Lynne. Most of them simply report on the casting and
production of the film. Another, discussing Kubrick's
collaboration with Nabokov had this line:


The script, largely different from the novel, but
Nabokov's own, is a translation, not a version, and if
the details differ, the mood (however you define it:
slyly comic, darkly skittish; you know, "Nabokovian")
certainly does not...


The director of the Folger Shakespeare Library, Werner
Gundersheimer, is profiled in the October 3 Washington
Times. The profile is of the variety which asks questions
in shorthand such as IDEAL DINNER PARTNER (the answer was
Wallace Shawn) and of course FAVORITE BOOKS . To this
question Mr. Gundersheimer replied , The "Essays,"
Michel de Montaigne; "Pale Fire," Vladimir Nabokov.

The obituary for Phillipe Thomas artist: born 7 July 1951;
died Paris 2 September 1995, in the September 30
_Independent_ describes the artist's career and comments:


Thomas's most impressive exhibition took place at
Bordeaux in 1990. Called "Feux pales" (after
Nabokov's detective story told through footnotes) it
included 16th-century wunderkammern and 17th-
century portraits of collectors with their walls full
of paintings, as well as Thomas's own (or rather not
his own) creations. His name appeared only once in the
exhaustive catalogue, as a tiny footnote.

Discussing the state of fashion journalism on the
internet, Sally Brampton comments in the September 22
_Guardian_:

Me, I'm a fashion professional. Yes, yes, I know it
sounds like an oxymoron but that's what I do. I look at
frocks. I've been doing it for years. . . But, and it's
a big but, for the most part they're not written by
trained journalists - so most of them make Hello! look
like literature. 'Skirts are anywhere from thigh
-length to knee-length; hems have been dropped by about
six inches. Hurrah! Now you can walk down the street
without wondering if you're showing anything you
shouldn't.' We are not talking Nabokov.



Suellen Stringer-Hye
Special Collections
Jean and Alexander Heard Library
Vanderbilt University
stringers@library.vanderbilt.edu