Elegy

In his autobiography Speak, Memory, Nabokov recalls the Russian emigre writers he met in Europe.

But the author that interested me the most was naturally Sirin. He belonged to my generation. Among the young writers produced in exile he was the loneliest and most arrogant one. Beginning with the appearance of his first novel in 1925 and throughout the next fifteen years, until he vanished as strangely as he had come, his work kept provoking an acute and rather morbid interest on the part of critics. Just as Marxist publicists of the eighties in old Russia would have denounced his lack of concern with the economic structure of society, so the mystagogues of emigre letters deplored his lack of religious insight and of moral preoccupation. Everything about him was bound to offend Russian conventions and especially that Russian sense of decorum which, for example, an American offends so dangerously today, when the presence of Soviet military men of distinction he happens to lounge with both hands in his trouser pockets. Conversely, Sirin’s admirers made much, perhaps too much, of his unusual style, brilliant precision, functional imagery and that sort of thing. Russian readers who had been raised on the sturdy straightforwardness of Russian realism and had called the bluff of decadent cheats, were impressed by the mirror-like angle of his clear but weirdly misleading sentences and by the fact that the real life of his books flowered in his figures of speech, which one critic as compared to ‘windows giving upon a contiguous world…a rolling corollary, the shadow of a train of thought.’ Across the dark sky of exile, Sirin passed, to use a simile of a more conservative nature, like a meteor, and disappeared, leaving nothing much else behind him than a vague sense of uneasiness.

While living in Berlin, Nabokov launched his literary career, writing under the pen name V. Sirin.

Russia in a Time of Literature

Two recently featured people on this tumblr have something to say about the inconsistencies of time in Russian literature. Oy, coincidences! Nabokov in Pnin:

“You know,” Bolotov continued, shaking Pnin’s hand, “I am rereading Anna Kareninfor the seventh time and I derive as much rapture as I did, not forty, but sixty, years ago,when I was a lad of seven. 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.”

And Pnin himself this time:

“You will notice,” he said, “that there is a significant difference between Lyovin’s spiritual time Vronski’s physical one. In mid-book, Lyovin and Kitty lag behind Vronski and Anna by a whole year.When, on a Sunday evening in May 1876,Anna throws herself under that freight traim, she as existed more than four years since the beginning of the novel, but in the case of the Lyovins, during the same period, 1872 to 1876, hardly three years have elapsed. It is the beats example of relativity in literature that is know to me.”

Relativity! Ah well we have a Paul Dirac, a physicist, jump in too.

Once Peter Kapitza, the Russian physicist, gave Dirac an English translation of Dostoevski’s Crime and Punishment. Well, how do you like it?” asked Kapitza when Dirac returned the book. “It is nice,” said Dirac, “but in one of the chapters the author made a mistake. He describes the Sun rising twice on the same day.” This was his one and only comment on Dostoevski’s novel.

During the academic year he existed mainly on a motuweth frisas basis.

Bravo to anyone who recognizes and understands that sentence!

Reading Pnin, I couldn’t help but keep tripping over small genius phrases (“microscopic needs,” “ideally bald”). Professor Wood said that Nabokov, despite his eloquence, wrote English like a foreigner. His distinctive voice is a foreign voice, with a freakish attention to idioms, colloquialisms, and puns. His prose is “ecstatic” (to quote Updike) because it is slightly odd to our ears, containing cadences and phrases that would not have occured to our native English-speaking minds. By punching the lights out of our linguistic brain circuits, these phrases almost force you to think laterally.

“Motuweth frisas” is some bizarre abbreviation of the days of the week based on an academic calendar. It seems to be the kind of thing that Nabokov would have delighted in picking up, much like a student of English when mastering some obscure American idiom.

Death of the Author*

I finally (thanks Instapaper!) got around to reading the thoroughly excellent profile of Ian McEwan in The New Yorker. Things of note:

1.
McEwan tells a story of his son writing a paper on Enduring Love. Totally awkward situation, I wonder if the teacher knew.

“Poor Greg had to study ‘Enduring Love’ in school. He had a female teacher. And he had to write an essay: Who was the moral center of the book? And I said to Greg, ‘Well, I think Clarissa’s got everything wrong.’ He got a D. The teacher didn’t care what I thought. She thought that Joe was too ‘male’ in his thinking. Well. I mean, I only wrote the damn thing.”

2.
It gives away the ending of Atonement! Though I guess anyone reading a 13,000 word profile on McEwan will have already read his most famous work.

3.
Mad props to McEwan and his respect of science.

All novelists are scholars of human behavior, but Ian McEwan pursues the matter with more scientific rigor than the job strictly requires. On a recent hike through the woods surrounding his new country house—a renovated seventeenth-century brick-and-flint cottage, in Buckinghamshire—he regularly punctuated his observations about Homo sapiens with the citation of a peer-reviewed experiment.

*Cf. Roland Barthes, who interestingly enough, died after being hit by a laundry van on the way back from a party held by François Mitterand.