Subject
[NABOKOV-L] TNR Criticism: Berndard Guilbert Guerney (1944) on
Nabokov's biography of Gogol
Nabokov's biography of Gogol
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Date
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James Twiggs sent me a new bunch of articles, retrieved from the THE NEW REPUBLIC archives, after strenuously correcting electronic transpositions (OCR and such), to make them readable and shareable by internet distribution. Care to protect copy-rights forces me to present only an abbreviated report, as usual. (JM)
American critic Bernard Guilbert Guerney's 1944 comments Nabokov's biography of Gogol, in a text titled "Great Grotesque"
( Nikolai Gogol, by Vladimir Nabokov. Norfolk, Conn:New Directions.)
To retain the mood of Nabokov's opinions about Soviet artists and Art, now coloring our Nab-List, I'll start by quoting him in relation to this subject, when he plans to award Nabokov "...a cluster of Distinguished Literary Service Medals," by his having introduced "poshlust (in the sense of vulgarity, Philistinism) into English" or "his excoriation of Garnettian, Thousand-Pieces-Execution translations". Guerney finds that Nabokov "takes only a neat phrase or two to annihilate Gogol's very own Tsar, pulls no punches about Gogol's evil daemon...and shows quite objectively that when a good writer gets religion the result is inevitably bad writing." However, as Guerney adds, it is "all the more regrettable to come upon a sour note or two. Nabokov creates every opportunity (coherent or otherwise) to flick out at the Soviets," but his "anti-Sovietism has nothing to do with his book-which is precisely what makes it so very irritating. And such arbitrary pronunciamentos as that the written word has been dead in Russia for the last twenty-five years are (since Soviet literature is by no means a closed, even though a smudged, book in English) likely to prejudice the intelligent reader against better reasoned contentions where the author is fully able to maintain his ground." He joins other critics in relation to a few peculiarities found in Nabokov's translations from Russian into English, noting that "certain translations strike one irresistibly as an attempt to salvage exercises in that curious dead language, Anglo-English (wigging, waggish, bigwigs; little beggar, conjuror; old chap, old boy, old fellow). Everywhere else, where Mr. Nabokov has made something very like an anthology of next-to-impossible-to-English Gogolian passages, he has turned them into living Amer-English and acquitted himself nobly."
Guerney begins his essay contrasting how many columns in the Britannica (fourteenth edition) are dedicated to Gogol, and how many to Golf: "GOGOL, NIKOLAI VASSILIEVICH, rates one column and a grudging third, a bibliography of four lines listing as many items (only one in English), and not even a cut of the man. GOLF, however, earns 18 columns ..." Also the "never-to-be-praised-enough Slavonic Division of the New York Public Library lists, among hundreds of entries, in ever so many languages, under Gogol, Works About, five additional items written in English-all scholastic scrapiana." He concludes that "Gogol, in English criticism, has long since degenerated into a quintain for the professors and a whippingboy for ex-Russians..."
For Guerney it might "sound invidious to say that Nabokov's thoroughly mannered critical and biographical study of Gogol is the best in English-although it is precisely that. Nabokov is a particularly rare orchid of the aerophyte Russian-literature-in-exile." He adds that now, when "biography and even criticism are, for some reason, considered creative, Nabokov may be said to have created his own Gogol, adding one more to his phantasmal gallery of "strange creatures" where, in crepuscule, hang his Potato Elf, his chess-mad genius Luzhin. And one can't help feeling that he would have done as excellently with Hoffmann, with Poe, with Baudelaire, with De Quincey, with St. John of the Apocalypse-save that, by choice, he would have made them all as realistic as bunion plasters." Although he concedes that it's possible to judge Gogol as not being a realist, our TNR critic believes that " 'The Government Inspector,' at least, would play Broadway to SRO merely by transposing the dialogue into American idiom, transferring the scene to any one of the hellholes in our own camellia-drenched, magnolia-stenchy South, and without changing the characters in any way save putting them in modern dress...What was Huey Long save Skvoznik-Dmuhanovski, the amoral and immortal Mayor of the play?"
Guerney considers that, apparently, Nabokov's main thesis is that Gogol was no realist because "he had an unreal, a lookingglass world of his own, that his catoptrics were not those of a mirror merely crooked but a mirror...". He admits to the possibility that Nabokov's description of "The Government Inspector" as a "dream play," "poetry-in-action,"rather than a comedy, is a superbly argued point whereas Nabokov's description of "Dead Souls" as a "tremendous epic poem" " results from having simply added "an adjective to Gogol's own tag" using an approach that "will hardly create the uproar that Briussov's 'He Who Has Burned Utterly into Ashes' ("Ispepelennyi") did three and a half decades ago." and that "Rozanov also, even before Briussov, had shown that Gogol had created his own world and his own people, and to Merejkovsky Gogol was a phantast and a mystic-but then, Merejkovsky could make a Blakian tiger out of a tabbycat." Nabokov's brilliant causerie is concerned chiefly with "The Government Inspector" "Dead Souls" and "The Overcoat,", states Guerney, while he also notes that, for Nabokov, Gogol is a "false humorist" and that such an attitude "is very much to be feared, belongs to that dubious sophistication which in the United States expresses itself in a superior air toward the great arts of variety and the circus and poor old Longfellow, and which (at least in old Russia) was manifested in a let's-be-indulgent- about-the-humor-of-that-quaint-beggar-Chekhov."
According to Guerney, Nabokov's book on Gogol is "in the main, creative criticism"..."The author's perceptiveness is not only as keen but as bright and chill as a razor....Biography is by no means scamped...He is most fastidious in his use of anything smacking of the apocryphal or anecdotal, but there is no niggardliness as to fascinating and (occasionally) illuminating sidelights. (It is amusing to learn that Gogol was as great a facial contortionist as Morimoto.) He dismisses (quite correctly) Gogol's sex-life in a single sentence; but it is a pity that he has not devoted more than a sentence each to Gogol the actor (no one but a born actor could have written "The Inspector General"), to Gogol the draughtsman, and to that minor Ukrainian playwright but true theatromane, Gogol's father. There is one English biography of Gogol, stoutly enough built but a slow-coach, available to the plodding student. But the creative reader (and student) who wishes to soar on Gogol's own winged-steed troika will choose Nabokov as his exhilarating courier."
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American critic Bernard Guilbert Guerney's 1944 comments Nabokov's biography of Gogol, in a text titled "Great Grotesque"
( Nikolai Gogol, by Vladimir Nabokov. Norfolk, Conn:New Directions.)
To retain the mood of Nabokov's opinions about Soviet artists and Art, now coloring our Nab-List, I'll start by quoting him in relation to this subject, when he plans to award Nabokov "...a cluster of Distinguished Literary Service Medals," by his having introduced "poshlust (in the sense of vulgarity, Philistinism) into English" or "his excoriation of Garnettian, Thousand-Pieces-Execution translations". Guerney finds that Nabokov "takes only a neat phrase or two to annihilate Gogol's very own Tsar, pulls no punches about Gogol's evil daemon...and shows quite objectively that when a good writer gets religion the result is inevitably bad writing." However, as Guerney adds, it is "all the more regrettable to come upon a sour note or two. Nabokov creates every opportunity (coherent or otherwise) to flick out at the Soviets," but his "anti-Sovietism has nothing to do with his book-which is precisely what makes it so very irritating. And such arbitrary pronunciamentos as that the written word has been dead in Russia for the last twenty-five years are (since Soviet literature is by no means a closed, even though a smudged, book in English) likely to prejudice the intelligent reader against better reasoned contentions where the author is fully able to maintain his ground." He joins other critics in relation to a few peculiarities found in Nabokov's translations from Russian into English, noting that "certain translations strike one irresistibly as an attempt to salvage exercises in that curious dead language, Anglo-English (wigging, waggish, bigwigs; little beggar, conjuror; old chap, old boy, old fellow). Everywhere else, where Mr. Nabokov has made something very like an anthology of next-to-impossible-to-English Gogolian passages, he has turned them into living Amer-English and acquitted himself nobly."
Guerney begins his essay contrasting how many columns in the Britannica (fourteenth edition) are dedicated to Gogol, and how many to Golf: "GOGOL, NIKOLAI VASSILIEVICH, rates one column and a grudging third, a bibliography of four lines listing as many items (only one in English), and not even a cut of the man. GOLF, however, earns 18 columns ..." Also the "never-to-be-praised-enough Slavonic Division of the New York Public Library lists, among hundreds of entries, in ever so many languages, under Gogol, Works About, five additional items written in English-all scholastic scrapiana." He concludes that "Gogol, in English criticism, has long since degenerated into a quintain for the professors and a whippingboy for ex-Russians..."
For Guerney it might "sound invidious to say that Nabokov's thoroughly mannered critical and biographical study of Gogol is the best in English-although it is precisely that. Nabokov is a particularly rare orchid of the aerophyte Russian-literature-in-exile." He adds that now, when "biography and even criticism are, for some reason, considered creative, Nabokov may be said to have created his own Gogol, adding one more to his phantasmal gallery of "strange creatures" where, in crepuscule, hang his Potato Elf, his chess-mad genius Luzhin. And one can't help feeling that he would have done as excellently with Hoffmann, with Poe, with Baudelaire, with De Quincey, with St. John of the Apocalypse-save that, by choice, he would have made them all as realistic as bunion plasters." Although he concedes that it's possible to judge Gogol as not being a realist, our TNR critic believes that " 'The Government Inspector,' at least, would play Broadway to SRO merely by transposing the dialogue into American idiom, transferring the scene to any one of the hellholes in our own camellia-drenched, magnolia-stenchy South, and without changing the characters in any way save putting them in modern dress...What was Huey Long save Skvoznik-Dmuhanovski, the amoral and immortal Mayor of the play?"
Guerney considers that, apparently, Nabokov's main thesis is that Gogol was no realist because "he had an unreal, a lookingglass world of his own, that his catoptrics were not those of a mirror merely crooked but a mirror...". He admits to the possibility that Nabokov's description of "The Government Inspector" as a "dream play," "poetry-in-action,"rather than a comedy, is a superbly argued point whereas Nabokov's description of "Dead Souls" as a "tremendous epic poem" " results from having simply added "an adjective to Gogol's own tag" using an approach that "will hardly create the uproar that Briussov's 'He Who Has Burned Utterly into Ashes' ("Ispepelennyi") did three and a half decades ago." and that "Rozanov also, even before Briussov, had shown that Gogol had created his own world and his own people, and to Merejkovsky Gogol was a phantast and a mystic-but then, Merejkovsky could make a Blakian tiger out of a tabbycat." Nabokov's brilliant causerie is concerned chiefly with "The Government Inspector" "Dead Souls" and "The Overcoat,", states Guerney, while he also notes that, for Nabokov, Gogol is a "false humorist" and that such an attitude "is very much to be feared, belongs to that dubious sophistication which in the United States expresses itself in a superior air toward the great arts of variety and the circus and poor old Longfellow, and which (at least in old Russia) was manifested in a let's-be-indulgent- about-the-humor-of-that-quaint-beggar-Chekhov."
According to Guerney, Nabokov's book on Gogol is "in the main, creative criticism"..."The author's perceptiveness is not only as keen but as bright and chill as a razor....Biography is by no means scamped...He is most fastidious in his use of anything smacking of the apocryphal or anecdotal, but there is no niggardliness as to fascinating and (occasionally) illuminating sidelights. (It is amusing to learn that Gogol was as great a facial contortionist as Morimoto.) He dismisses (quite correctly) Gogol's sex-life in a single sentence; but it is a pity that he has not devoted more than a sentence each to Gogol the actor (no one but a born actor could have written "The Inspector General"), to Gogol the draughtsman, and to that minor Ukrainian playwright but true theatromane, Gogol's father. There is one English biography of Gogol, stoutly enough built but a slow-coach, available to the plodding student. But the creative reader (and student) who wishes to soar on Gogol's own winged-steed troika will choose Nabokov as his exhilarating courier."
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/