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Fw: The Chronology in Transparent Things
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EDNOTE. I was deleting some old NABOKV-L files when I ran across this 2002 note
from Alexey Sklyarenko. Seem it is relevant to the TT discussion, I pass it on.
BTW, ALL NABOKV-l postings (going back over ten years) are archived and machine
searchable.
----- Original Message -----
From: alex
To: Vladimir Nabokov Forum
Sent: Sunday, November 17, 2002 10:36 AM
Subject: The Chronology in Transparent Things
Liebe Freunde
und hochgeeherte Nabokovwissenschaftler!
I'm always fascinated by the free and unconstrained way in which certain critics
explain those VN novels that sometimes seem obscure and not quite "durchsichtig"
to an ordinary reader.
If I'm not mistaken, not a single definite date is mentioned in TRANSPARENT
THINGS, but one feels the presense of a strong calendar in the story. The
information given by the narrator (allegedly the ghost of Mr. R., who is at
home in the past and seems omniscient, being a kind of "spectral observer")
about Hugh Person's four visits to Switzerland prompts the reader to establish
the precise chronology of events in the novel. And the german critic, who
reviews german translations of TT and LATH, rashly proposes such a chronology
that turns out to be rather absurd. He dates the first visit as happening in
1950 and the last - in 1972. But from the Chapter 4 of the novel we know that
between the first and the last visits 18 (achtzehn) years have elapsed, so one
of the dates suggested by the critic, or both, must be wrong. We also learn
from that chapter that Hugh Person is twenty two at the time of the first visit
and forty when he dies, in his last visit. But I think that the clue to the
novel's chronology should be looked for in the Chapter 6, when the narrative
suddenly switches to the Swiss of the nineteenth century and there appears a
Russian traveler, a young novelist ("a minor Dostoevski", as Nabokov calls him
in one of the "interviews", SO, p. 195): "She [a prostitute] took him [Hugh
Person] to one of the better beds in a hideous old roominghouse - to the
precise "number," in fact, where ninety-one, ninty-two, nearly ninety-three
years ago a Russian novelist had sojourned on his way to Italy." We see then
this writer sitting at the deal table and pondering over a rudimentary novel
under the provisional title Faust in Moscow while he is waiting for his friend
Kandidatov, the painter. Alas, that painter turns out to be (most probably)
invented, but can perhaps the writer be identified? I think, he can and suggest
that it is Konstantin Sluchevski (1837-1904) and that the novel he writes has
metamorphosed eventually into the tale Professor Bessmertiya ("Professor of
Immortality") to be published under that title only in 1894 (it contains an
inserted treatise of an invented amateur philosopher in which he tries to prove
scientifically the immortality of the human soul). The name Kandidatov might be
derived from the academic degree (kandidat - a degree roughly equivalent to
Master) of another character (not the author of the treatise) in the Sluchevski
tale. I think, Nabokov has here in mind Sluchevski's first visit to Switzerland
(he stayed in Geneva, where he put up at the famous "Russian house," a kind of
boarding-house), that took place in the August of 1860 (see my VN Symposium
2002 paper soon to appear on the VN Museum Web site). Thus, we can tentatively
attribute Hue Person's first visit to the so-called Switzerland to 1953. Then
he would revisit it in 1963, again in 1964 (in February) and, finally, fatally
for him, in 1971.
A shift in one year is not excluded (1954... 1964, 1965... 1972), because
Sluchevski spent some sommer weeks in Geneva (he was a student of the
Heidelberg University) also in 1861 (and in 1862, 1863, 1864).
The question is complicated and deserves a closer study than I have conducted. I
must confess that I haven't seen Brian Boyd's notes to TT or any article/paper
devoted to the novel. Several events are mentioned in it (a distant war, a
construction work around Witt, etc.) that could have helped to establish the
precise chronology. Unfortunately, or, perhaps, fortunately, I am too much
occupied with my translation of ADA and must now return to it. In the end, I
would like to note, that it is not so much the outlines of Nabokov's late
novels, but rather those of the critics' belated articles that are "fading
away" (see the subtitle of the article). In the preamble to the reviewer's
article Nabokov's novel is called "Unsichtbare Dinge" (Invisible things)!
Elusive Nabokov indeed!
viele Gruesse,
Alexey Sklyarenko aus Sankt-Petersburg
----- End forwarded message -----