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[Nabokov-l] [Passing Thoughts] Clouded and Luminous Short-stories
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The sequence of quotations from Nabokov's short-stories quoted below was motivated by a movie, "The Life of Others", in which we hear a poem by Bertolt Brecht [ "Remembrances of Marie A.," in Die Hauspostille (1927), Gesammelte Werke in acht Bänden, vol. 4, p. 232. Translated by S.Horton and published in "Harper's Bazar",2007.] Even in Brecht recollected vanished clouds are all that remain of a particular youthful embrace...: "On a certain day ...I held her there, my quiet, pale beloved...over us in the beautiful summer sky/ there was a cloud on which my gaze rested[...]...that kiss too I would have long forgotten/had not the cloud been present there[...]but that cloud blossomed just a few minutes/ and when I looked up, it had disappeared in the wind."
"Sounds": "On that happy day [...] came the resolution of the nebulous something that had imperceptibly arisen between us after our first weeks of love. I realized that you had no power over me, that it was not you alone who were my lover but the entire earth. It was as if my soul had extended countless sensitive feelers, and I lived within everything, perceiving simultaneously Niagara Falls thundering far beyond the ocean..[...] And suddenly it was supremely clear to me that, for centuries, the world had been blooming, withering, spinning, changing solely in order that now, at this instant, it might combine and fuse into a vertical chord the voice that had resounded downstairs, the motion of your silken shoulder blades, and the scent of pine boards...
"Beneficence":
"Here I became aware of the world's tenderness, the profound beneficence of all that surrounded me, the blissful bond between me and all of creation, and I realized that the joy I had sought in you was not only secreted within you, but breathed around me everywhere [...]I realized that the world does not represent a struggle at all, or a predaceous sequence of chance events, but shimmering bliss, beneficent trepidation, a gift bestowed on us and unappreciated."
In "Beneficence" there's a hint about scientist Nabokov's rejection of Darwin's struggling "survival of the fittest", expressed in a nutshell:
"the world does not represent a struggle at all, or a predaceous sequence of chance events..."
In "Sounds" ( "as if my soul had extended countless sensitive feelers, and I lived within everything, perceiving simultaneously") there is a hint of Humbert Humbert as a spider that expands threads and feelers to follow Lolita...
Until Nabokov started to write in English ( what might have provided him with the distance he needed to transform the innaccessible objects of experience into foreign words and to shape a very material "Lolita"), in his Russian short-stories, the register of love, the loved "object" always disappears in the landscape. It is in the landscape, its clouds, flowers and animals, that VN's characters identify their state of love.
"A Letter that Never Reached Russia" (1925): "I had sworn[...]not to mention the past, especially the trifles in our shared past; for we authors in exile are supposed to posses a lofty pudicity of expression [...] Not of the past, my love, do I with to speak to you [...]"Everything will pass but my happiness, dear, my happiness will remain, in the moist reflection of a streelamp...in everything with which God so generously surrounds human loneliness."
In "The Fight" (1924) we find "Spring in Fialta" (1936) shimmering by:
"Or perhaps what matters is not the human pain or joy at all but,rather, the play of shadow and light on a live body, the harmony of trifles assembled on this particular day, at this particular moment, in a unique and inimitable way"
In Nabokov's 1937 short-story Cloud,Castle,Lake the scene becomes immutable, like the delusions stimulated by a mnemic photograph and the imprint of pain. A sharp contrast to "everything will pass but my happiness"...
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"Sounds": "On that happy day [...] came the resolution of the nebulous something that had imperceptibly arisen between us after our first weeks of love. I realized that you had no power over me, that it was not you alone who were my lover but the entire earth. It was as if my soul had extended countless sensitive feelers, and I lived within everything, perceiving simultaneously Niagara Falls thundering far beyond the ocean..[...] And suddenly it was supremely clear to me that, for centuries, the world had been blooming, withering, spinning, changing solely in order that now, at this instant, it might combine and fuse into a vertical chord the voice that had resounded downstairs, the motion of your silken shoulder blades, and the scent of pine boards...
"Beneficence":
"Here I became aware of the world's tenderness, the profound beneficence of all that surrounded me, the blissful bond between me and all of creation, and I realized that the joy I had sought in you was not only secreted within you, but breathed around me everywhere [...]I realized that the world does not represent a struggle at all, or a predaceous sequence of chance events, but shimmering bliss, beneficent trepidation, a gift bestowed on us and unappreciated."
In "Beneficence" there's a hint about scientist Nabokov's rejection of Darwin's struggling "survival of the fittest", expressed in a nutshell:
"the world does not represent a struggle at all, or a predaceous sequence of chance events..."
In "Sounds" ( "as if my soul had extended countless sensitive feelers, and I lived within everything, perceiving simultaneously") there is a hint of Humbert Humbert as a spider that expands threads and feelers to follow Lolita...
Until Nabokov started to write in English ( what might have provided him with the distance he needed to transform the innaccessible objects of experience into foreign words and to shape a very material "Lolita"), in his Russian short-stories, the register of love, the loved "object" always disappears in the landscape. It is in the landscape, its clouds, flowers and animals, that VN's characters identify their state of love.
"A Letter that Never Reached Russia" (1925): "I had sworn[...]not to mention the past, especially the trifles in our shared past; for we authors in exile are supposed to posses a lofty pudicity of expression [...] Not of the past, my love, do I with to speak to you [...]"Everything will pass but my happiness, dear, my happiness will remain, in the moist reflection of a streelamp...in everything with which God so generously surrounds human loneliness."
In "The Fight" (1924) we find "Spring in Fialta" (1936) shimmering by:
"Or perhaps what matters is not the human pain or joy at all but,rather, the play of shadow and light on a live body, the harmony of trifles assembled on this particular day, at this particular moment, in a unique and inimitable way"
In Nabokov's 1937 short-story Cloud,Castle,Lake the scene becomes immutable, like the delusions stimulated by a mnemic photograph and the imprint of pain. A sharp contrast to "everything will pass but my happiness"...
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/