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Jay Livingston: Five Books asked Maxim Shrayer to be their expert on VN. His selections and an interview are here: http://fivebooks.com/interviews/maxim-d-shrayer-on-nabokov
JM: Very enjoyable link to Maxim D Shrayer (13 June 2010), in an interview with Anna Blundy about his five favorite books about or by Nabokov.
Shrayer begins with Nabokov's collected short stories:
excerpts: "About 60 of them were written in Russian, ten in English. They cover four decades of Nabokov's literary life and are representative of his dynamic as a writer both in Russian and in English, and as both a European and an American émigré. If you want to see his various predilections, the aesthetics and politics of Nabokov's work, then the stories are a great place to go [...] he oversaw the enterprise of Englishing his Russian works, and the stories are done very well [...] he worked closely with his son Dmitri Nabokov, who is a dedicated son and a gifted translator. Vladimir Nabokov would say that, unless a translator was working directly from the Russian, they should work from an existing English translation - not necessarily a kosher procedure, strictly speaking, but a valid one in Nabokov's case. If you were to compare some of the Russian originals with the English versions line by line, they would not be identical. But Nabokov got to have a second go at the stories, in a way, and he made changes [...] they tell a more complete story - in English - of his literary career.Nabokov's stories go back to Chekhov and Bunin and the great Russian love story, in which desire and memories interact, mostly in unhappy ways for the characters, but happily for the reader[...] the stories, art and artistry notwithstanding, do address politics and ideology, too. It amazes me to this day that some readers think of Nabokov as this ivory tower artist, a vertiginous craftsman above all, without knowing or acknowledging that at key points he was capable of expressing his strong ethical and historical views in no uncertain terms. He might have been the first American writer, for example, to write about the falsification of the Holocaust, in a story published in the New Yorker in June 1945. So there is a lot there in the stories...
The second choice is "Glory," in his words:"I love Glory and am in a minority group among Nabokov fans in that. Andrei Bitov, a prominent Russian author who had first read Nabokov in Soviet samizdat, once declared that you were either a Gift-ist or a Glory-ist. If I had to choose I would say I am a Glory-ist. In some ways, it is the most purely Nabokovian novel [...] In the aftermath of the Russian revolution, Martin (in Russian, Martyn) Edelweiss, a part-Swiss Russian émigré, finds himself at Cambridge, where Nabokov himself went. Estranged from his surroundings, Martin contemplates crossing the border from Latvia into the Soviet Union where he plans to do something, perhaps political subterfuge. But really it is not essentially about politics or ideology but about the character's disappearance into the realm of pure art.[...] There is a path winding through the woods. The end. Nabokov hinted at wanting to take all the people out of fiction so that it should be more like a landscape painting, a pure realm, a path winding into perfect art[...] Nabokov was still a young writer, it was his fourth novel, and in a sense his vision here is so complete...
The third choice is Pnin. " There is Lolita in the back of everybody's mind, of course[...] Lolita looms so large that I don't have to choose it[...] Pnin is the immigrant of Nabokov's American novels. The main character is a Russian professor at an American college, and the novel is to a large extent about Russian culture misunderstood by Westerners. But it is also a truncated love story with a moral dilemma. Pnin himself is not Jewish but Mira, once Pnin's beloved, is Jewish, and she died in Buchenwald. The story is punctuated by the tension of his trying to forget and being incapable of unremembering. Nabokov was one of the very first American writers to write extensively about the Shoah in a work of fiction. Nabokov wrote Pnin in the 1950s and parts of it were published in the New Yorker, so it is astounding how far ahead of his literary contemporaries Nabokov was in his thinking about the Shoah and how it might be remembered and memorialised[...]Nabokov is mulling over themes he mulled over throughout his life - here he does not reference his life so much as his thinking. Pnin is a novel about Holocaust memory and the kinds of things that other European émigré intellectuals - Adorno, Arendt - were thinking about at the time. Yet Nabokov creates a perfect work of art, a work that succeeds on aesthetic grounds but does not distract the reader from the various political, intellectual and philosophical battles of his novel.Pnin has survivor's guilt, though he is not guilty[...]Pnin doesn't get the tenure he was after, at which point Nabokov pulls a trick that he pulls again and again - putting himself into the story. A great Russian émigré called 'Vladimir Vladimirovich' arrives to take over, in the way he may well have done at Cornell in reality, and he offers Pnin the chance to stay on. Pnin doesn't want to exist in a world where the authorial presence is so close and so in charge, so Nabokov releases Pnin. Pnin departs, but his legend lives on. Nabokov ends his novel with Pnin's disappearance and also with a joke that takes us back to the beginning."
The fourth choice is Brian Boyd's biography of Nabokov. Excerpts: "There are a number of wonderful books by other Nabokov scholars[...] Boyd's biography. It's huge. Two enormous volumes. Monumental. It still remains the single most important book on Nabokov, having eclipsed a lot of things when it was published. It is reliable and readable. Boyd had access to Nabokov family materials[...]If I'm asked which biography is the best, I'd say the Boyd, even though I do have some reservations about it. I think in a way it's almost too perfect, and in places it perfects and corrects Nabokov himself [...]sometimes you wonder if the story isn't told almost exclusively through the Nabokovian lens. But we could not have done without Boyd's work in the field[...] It's hard to write a biography in English of a person who is equally important to Russian, European and American cultures without getting bogged down in various cultural or ideological contexts.For example, Nabokov's great personal tragedy was that he wasn't a great Russian poet. It had always been his ambition and it continued to be his ambition, but by the early-1930s he was writing less poetry, and when he resumed, off and on, he seemed to sense his limitations[...] This was a huge source of dissatisfaction to him as an artist, and in the story of his life it deserves more attention.I suppose it would probably be a cavil to say that in Boyd's biography the map of 20th-century Russian literature has one principal edifice. Some of the Russian works and authors, both Soviet and émigré, who had influenced Nabokov in profound and various ways, appear as hillocks and mounds, not literary mountains. It's a bit like a map Nabokov himself might have drawn.Another underappreciated matter would be the importance to Nabokov of his marriage to a Jewish woman and the effect that had on his life and career[...]
The fifth is Jane Grayson's short life of Nabokov [...] It's short and beautifully illustrated, and you can read it in one sitting [...] a slender book for the general public, and it does not shy away from the hard questions [...] The year is 1937, and Nabokov is in the grip of a passionate love affair in Paris, all the while sending tender letters full of affection that a person couldn't fake back to Véra, who is in Berlin with their son. And yet he is . he is with another woman. Soon after his reunion with his family in Czechoslovakia in May 1937, Nabokov wrote the story 'Cloud, Castle, Lake', in which he talks about addressing a real person, the only woman he has ever loved but cannot be with. And there is an otherworldly feminine presence there, too, present in the lives of both the main character and his fictional creator. This incredible story about a Russian émigré is set in Nazi Germany. So, what is one to make of all that? Grayson address Nabokov's affair soberly and with clinical precision and artful brevity."
In conclusion: " I would predict that there is going to be a revisionist Nabokov biography [...] as regards Nabokov's life, my Pnin, my Glory and my stories are enough for me.
What I particularly enjoyed while reading the interview with Maxim is how aptly he summarizes the novels and stories, highlighting important links and background history. Once again I was struck with one item, often mentioned in relation to "solipsism" or "mysticism". I repeat Maxim's words: "Nabokov hinted at wanting to take all the people out of fiction so that it should be more like a landscape painting, a pure realm, a path winding into perfect art." In my opinion, Nabokov didn't reach his aim (of doing away with 'people as fetishes' - fortunately! Without people, how would there be personal memories to render through art, thereby linking fiction and life and back again to art?
I prefer Maxim's simple, precise and matter-of-fact way of presenting Nabokov, without worrying (as Banville and Maar seem to worry) about solvind philosophical questions related to unearthly wisdom and a hidden absolute truth the master would have glimpsed to leave non-dangerous clues to his (religious) followers.
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JM: Very enjoyable link to Maxim D Shrayer (13 June 2010), in an interview with Anna Blundy about his five favorite books about or by Nabokov.
Shrayer begins with Nabokov's collected short stories:
excerpts: "About 60 of them were written in Russian, ten in English. They cover four decades of Nabokov's literary life and are representative of his dynamic as a writer both in Russian and in English, and as both a European and an American émigré. If you want to see his various predilections, the aesthetics and politics of Nabokov's work, then the stories are a great place to go [...] he oversaw the enterprise of Englishing his Russian works, and the stories are done very well [...] he worked closely with his son Dmitri Nabokov, who is a dedicated son and a gifted translator. Vladimir Nabokov would say that, unless a translator was working directly from the Russian, they should work from an existing English translation - not necessarily a kosher procedure, strictly speaking, but a valid one in Nabokov's case. If you were to compare some of the Russian originals with the English versions line by line, they would not be identical. But Nabokov got to have a second go at the stories, in a way, and he made changes [...] they tell a more complete story - in English - of his literary career.Nabokov's stories go back to Chekhov and Bunin and the great Russian love story, in which desire and memories interact, mostly in unhappy ways for the characters, but happily for the reader[...] the stories, art and artistry notwithstanding, do address politics and ideology, too. It amazes me to this day that some readers think of Nabokov as this ivory tower artist, a vertiginous craftsman above all, without knowing or acknowledging that at key points he was capable of expressing his strong ethical and historical views in no uncertain terms. He might have been the first American writer, for example, to write about the falsification of the Holocaust, in a story published in the New Yorker in June 1945. So there is a lot there in the stories...
The second choice is "Glory," in his words:"I love Glory and am in a minority group among Nabokov fans in that. Andrei Bitov, a prominent Russian author who had first read Nabokov in Soviet samizdat, once declared that you were either a Gift-ist or a Glory-ist. If I had to choose I would say I am a Glory-ist. In some ways, it is the most purely Nabokovian novel [...] In the aftermath of the Russian revolution, Martin (in Russian, Martyn) Edelweiss, a part-Swiss Russian émigré, finds himself at Cambridge, where Nabokov himself went. Estranged from his surroundings, Martin contemplates crossing the border from Latvia into the Soviet Union where he plans to do something, perhaps political subterfuge. But really it is not essentially about politics or ideology but about the character's disappearance into the realm of pure art.[...] There is a path winding through the woods. The end. Nabokov hinted at wanting to take all the people out of fiction so that it should be more like a landscape painting, a pure realm, a path winding into perfect art[...] Nabokov was still a young writer, it was his fourth novel, and in a sense his vision here is so complete...
The third choice is Pnin. " There is Lolita in the back of everybody's mind, of course[...] Lolita looms so large that I don't have to choose it[...] Pnin is the immigrant of Nabokov's American novels. The main character is a Russian professor at an American college, and the novel is to a large extent about Russian culture misunderstood by Westerners. But it is also a truncated love story with a moral dilemma. Pnin himself is not Jewish but Mira, once Pnin's beloved, is Jewish, and she died in Buchenwald. The story is punctuated by the tension of his trying to forget and being incapable of unremembering. Nabokov was one of the very first American writers to write extensively about the Shoah in a work of fiction. Nabokov wrote Pnin in the 1950s and parts of it were published in the New Yorker, so it is astounding how far ahead of his literary contemporaries Nabokov was in his thinking about the Shoah and how it might be remembered and memorialised[...]Nabokov is mulling over themes he mulled over throughout his life - here he does not reference his life so much as his thinking. Pnin is a novel about Holocaust memory and the kinds of things that other European émigré intellectuals - Adorno, Arendt - were thinking about at the time. Yet Nabokov creates a perfect work of art, a work that succeeds on aesthetic grounds but does not distract the reader from the various political, intellectual and philosophical battles of his novel.Pnin has survivor's guilt, though he is not guilty[...]Pnin doesn't get the tenure he was after, at which point Nabokov pulls a trick that he pulls again and again - putting himself into the story. A great Russian émigré called 'Vladimir Vladimirovich' arrives to take over, in the way he may well have done at Cornell in reality, and he offers Pnin the chance to stay on. Pnin doesn't want to exist in a world where the authorial presence is so close and so in charge, so Nabokov releases Pnin. Pnin departs, but his legend lives on. Nabokov ends his novel with Pnin's disappearance and also with a joke that takes us back to the beginning."
The fourth choice is Brian Boyd's biography of Nabokov. Excerpts: "There are a number of wonderful books by other Nabokov scholars[...] Boyd's biography. It's huge. Two enormous volumes. Monumental. It still remains the single most important book on Nabokov, having eclipsed a lot of things when it was published. It is reliable and readable. Boyd had access to Nabokov family materials[...]If I'm asked which biography is the best, I'd say the Boyd, even though I do have some reservations about it. I think in a way it's almost too perfect, and in places it perfects and corrects Nabokov himself [...]sometimes you wonder if the story isn't told almost exclusively through the Nabokovian lens. But we could not have done without Boyd's work in the field[...] It's hard to write a biography in English of a person who is equally important to Russian, European and American cultures without getting bogged down in various cultural or ideological contexts.For example, Nabokov's great personal tragedy was that he wasn't a great Russian poet. It had always been his ambition and it continued to be his ambition, but by the early-1930s he was writing less poetry, and when he resumed, off and on, he seemed to sense his limitations[...] This was a huge source of dissatisfaction to him as an artist, and in the story of his life it deserves more attention.I suppose it would probably be a cavil to say that in Boyd's biography the map of 20th-century Russian literature has one principal edifice. Some of the Russian works and authors, both Soviet and émigré, who had influenced Nabokov in profound and various ways, appear as hillocks and mounds, not literary mountains. It's a bit like a map Nabokov himself might have drawn.Another underappreciated matter would be the importance to Nabokov of his marriage to a Jewish woman and the effect that had on his life and career[...]
The fifth is Jane Grayson's short life of Nabokov [...] It's short and beautifully illustrated, and you can read it in one sitting [...] a slender book for the general public, and it does not shy away from the hard questions [...] The year is 1937, and Nabokov is in the grip of a passionate love affair in Paris, all the while sending tender letters full of affection that a person couldn't fake back to Véra, who is in Berlin with their son. And yet he is . he is with another woman. Soon after his reunion with his family in Czechoslovakia in May 1937, Nabokov wrote the story 'Cloud, Castle, Lake', in which he talks about addressing a real person, the only woman he has ever loved but cannot be with. And there is an otherworldly feminine presence there, too, present in the lives of both the main character and his fictional creator. This incredible story about a Russian émigré is set in Nazi Germany. So, what is one to make of all that? Grayson address Nabokov's affair soberly and with clinical precision and artful brevity."
In conclusion: " I would predict that there is going to be a revisionist Nabokov biography [...] as regards Nabokov's life, my Pnin, my Glory and my stories are enough for me.
What I particularly enjoyed while reading the interview with Maxim is how aptly he summarizes the novels and stories, highlighting important links and background history. Once again I was struck with one item, often mentioned in relation to "solipsism" or "mysticism". I repeat Maxim's words: "Nabokov hinted at wanting to take all the people out of fiction so that it should be more like a landscape painting, a pure realm, a path winding into perfect art." In my opinion, Nabokov didn't reach his aim (of doing away with 'people as fetishes' - fortunately! Without people, how would there be personal memories to render through art, thereby linking fiction and life and back again to art?
I prefer Maxim's simple, precise and matter-of-fact way of presenting Nabokov, without worrying (as Banville and Maar seem to worry) about solvind philosophical questions related to unearthly wisdom and a hidden absolute truth the master would have glimpsed to leave non-dangerous clues to his (religious) followers.
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/