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Re: Nabokov on Tolstoy's timing in "Anna Karenina"
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Nabokov insists in both Pnin and Lectures that “The action of the book starts in February, 1872, and goes on to July, 1876: in all, four years and a half” (Lectures, 148). A careful examinations of the novel makes, however, it possible to argue that the action starts in ‘mid-winter’, either in December 1873 or in January 1874, and goes on till the unquestionable (the Crimean war) end in July 1876, which reduces Nabokov’s timing by at least two years. As can be argued, not only the year of the beginning, which is 1874 rather than 1872, and not only the month, which is December rather than February, but even the day, which might be Thursday rather than Friday, could be disputed.
Sorry for self-reference: Ljuba Tarvi, 2010. «В поисках замкового камня: загадки времени в «Анне Карениной» Толстого» [In Search of the Key Stone: Time Riddles in Tolstoy's «Anna Karenina»]. Helsinki: Literarus (3) 2011, 93-96.
Ljuba Tarvi
Helsinki
On 23.3.2012, at 17.29, Jansy wrote:
> Stan Kelly-Bootle: "One person’s love of precision is another’s pedantry. As my favourite T-shirts asks, ‘Is there a hyphen in anal retentive?’ We mathematicians treat interval-counting with numbing intensity, far beyond the grasp of lay Nabokovians, or indeed of Nabokov himself! ..."
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> JM: I found one of the quotes, related to love of precision and chronologies. I'd surmised that the dates related to "Anna Karenina" were to be found only in VN's Lectures. One may encounter them in "Pnin":
> "'We had some mutual friends forty years ago,'* remarked that lady, peering at Pnin with curiosity.
> 'Oh, let us not mention such astronomical figures,' said Bolotov... 'You know,' ...'I am rereading Anna Karenina for the seventh time and I derive as much rapture as I did, not forty, but sixty, years ago...And, every time, one discovers new things — for instance, I notice now that Lyov Nikolaich does not know on what day his novel starts: it seems to be Friday because that is the day the clockman comes to wind up the clocks in the Oblonski house, but it is also Thursday as mentioned in the conversation at the skating rink between Lyovin and Kitty's mother.'/ 'What on earth does it matter,' cried Varvara. 'Who on earth wants to know the exact day?' / 'I can tell you the exact day,' said Pnin...'The action of the novel starts in the beginning of 1872, namely on Friday, February the twenty-third by the New Style. In his morning paper Oblonski reads that Beust is rumoured to have proceeded to Wiesbaden....who had just been appointed Austrian Ambassador to the Court of St James's....where, according to his own memoirs in two volumes, preparations were under way for the thanksgiving service to be held in St Paul's on February the twenty-seventh..." (The Library of America, Novels 1955-l962; p.384-85)
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> * - A poignant introduction to another, real/unreal kind of "time,"by an aborted reference to Pnin's beloved Mira, resumed a few pages later: "Roza Shpolyanski, noticing Pnin sitting alone, and taking advantage of this, walked over to him .../'In 1916 or 1917,' she said, 'you may have had occasion to hear my maiden name — Geller — from some great friends of yours.'/ 'No, I don't recollect,' said Pnin./... you knew well my cousins, Grisha and Mira Belochkin... — and, of course, you have heard of his poor sister's terrible end....'
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