Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0002714, Mon, 12 Jan 1998 10:39:38 -0800

Subject
VN Harvard recordings (fwd)
Date
Body
EDITOR's NOTE. Ryan Asmussen <rra@bu.edu>, whose band "Fathouse" recently
made a CD "a pin,a cork, and a card" featuring a sheet of Nabokov 'blues'
(lepidopteral) on the cover (and disk). The VN tapes he describes below
are excellent, although of varying technical quality.
-----------------------------------------

A most excellent series of
Nabokov recordings is available through the Lamont Poetry Room at Harvard
University, and is entitled, "Vladimir Nabokov At Harvard". I hope it's
still available, in any case -- I purchased my copy for $24.00, a little
under three years ago. I believe I first learned of their existence
through Brian Boyd's "VN: The American Years", if I'm not mistaken, and
then inquired at the Poetry Room in person. Below is the "Table of
Contents", and here is a brief snippet from the liner notes:

"In 1952 Nabokov was invited to Harvard by Professor Harry T. Levin and
others as a visiting professor. He taught an undergraduate lecture course
in the novel and did research on Pushkin in Widener Library. It was during
this period that his son Dmitri was an undergraduate at Harvard, and that
the Poetry Room recorded both public and studio readings by Nabokov."

"... in 1964, he read his work before a capacity audience in Sanders
Theater, where he had lectured in 1952. This reading is also included in
these cassettes, complete with its eloquent introduction by Harry Levin."

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Side 1: Recorded April 10, 1964
Duration 40:10

1. Introduction by Harry Levin
2. The Ballad of Longwood Glen
3. Prose excerpt from Pale Fire

Side 2: Recorded April 10, 1964
Duration 28:35

4. Verse excerpt from Pale Fire
5. Rain
6. A Lecture on Russian Poetry
7. Poem from Lolita

Side 3: Recorded March 20, 1952
Duration 31:30

8. Exile
9. A Literary Dinner
10. The Refrigerator Awakes
11. A Discovery
12. The Room
13. The Pleasures of Touch
14. Restoration
15. The Poem

Recorded March 19, 1952

(Read in English and Russian)
16. To My Youth

Recorded March 20, 1952

17. The Poplar
18. The Translator

(Read in English)
19. House of Exile, by Aleksandr Pushkin

Side 4: Recorded March 20, 1952
Duration 22:50

(Read in English)
20. Tears, by Fyodor Tyutchev
21. The Shattered Oak Tree, by Fyodor Tyutchev
22. The Deaf-Mute Demons, by Fyodor Tyutchev
23. A Heavy Cross, by Nikolay Nekrasov

Recorded April 14, 1946

(Read in English and Russian)
24. Silentium, by Fyodor Tyutchev
25. Last Love, by Fyodor Tyutchev
26. The Journey, by Fyodor Tyutchev
27. Tears, by Fyodor Tyutchev
28. The Upas Tree, by Aleksandr Pushkin
29. Exegi Monumentum, by Aleksandr Pushkin

Copyright, 1988 AR 3B Trust Under Will of Vladimir Nabokov.
Copyright, 1988 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.




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Ryan Asmussen
Administrative Assistant, Faculty Services
Boston University School of Law
765 Commonwealth Avenue, Room 1040
Boston, MA 02215
email: rra@acs.bu.edu

"There should always be something gratuitous about art, just as there seems
to be, according to the new-wave cosmologists, something gratuitous about
the universe."

-- John Updike, from "A Few Words in Defense of the Amateur Reader" (1984)



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