VN COLLATION #10
by Suellen Stringer-Hye
Jean and Alexander Heard Library
Vanderbilt University
stringers@library.vanderbilt.edu

This month, unrelated bits of Nabokoviana abound. Making no attempt to thread them together, I simply present them as a random sampling.

Christopher Plummer, who you will remember played Nabokov in the PBS production based on Nabokov's lecture on Kafka as recorded in Lectures on Literature, recently performed a one man "tour de-force" to an "adoring" crowd at the Centennial Theatre of Bishop's University of Lennoxville in Montreal. Entitled "A Word or Two Before You Go" the production displays Plummer,

"using a few simple props and occasionallly resorting to a director's chair ... he led a wayward, epigrammatic path through children's rhymes, Lewis Carroll, Nabokov, Stephen Leacock, Shaw and Shakespeare to name a few.... Although A Word or Two is vaguely autobiographical, its principal purpose is to convey a lifelong love of literature."

Rumors about the remake of the Movie "Lolita" continue to ripple across the pages of the press ever since "Swifty" Lazar resold "Lolita" to Carolco for 1 million dollars. Before the sale, a studio executive was considering a remake of Lolita,

"arguing that the 1962 Stanley Kubrick adaptation did not fully explore the obsessive pedophilia in Vladimir Nabokov's novel. But in tackling the material more honestly, 'we would have made a movie that could be seen as morally repugnant, so we passed."

Candia McWilliam, a critic at the Independent lists Michael Wood's "elegant" The Magician's Doubts: Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction as one of her favorite books of the year, saying,

"[it] is a triumph of imaginative reading over received criticism; I was sad to finish it, not often the case with works of criticism."

"...just made a textual error in a new edition for the Everyman Library resulting in the abandonment of its first run. Such a disaster was the last thing the firm had in mind when it commissioned Martin Amis ... to write a fresh introduction to the novel.

So delighted was the publisher, David Campbell, with Amis's 19 pages that he substituted them for the book's foreward, written by John Ray Jr, PhD."

A new book from David Jouris entitled All Over the Map takes map readers on,

"a journey into the peculiar, poetic and downright puzzling world of city and town names across the United States ..."

"...was named in 1910 for a local resident, Lolita Reese. The name was almost changed in the 1950's, when the notoriety of Vladimir Nabokov's satirical novel, Lolita, scandalized the town."

Jonathan Schell, writing a poignant piece about the place of books, slow travelers in an information age, describes their importance in the Radio and Television Correspondents Room of today.

"As it happens, there ARE books in the Radio and Television Correspondents Room. They are on a shelf behind the podium, adding a dignifying touch, like the books behind a supposed doctor in an ad for over-the-counter medicine. After a recent press conference, I took some down from the shelf. They had been neatly sawed in half, length wise, slicing every page down the center, the better to fit them into the 3-inch-deep shelves. I saw, among other volumes the Yearbook of the UN, 1946-47, Once an Eagle by Anton Myrer, Diseases of the Stomach, by JohnC. Emmeter, The Christ We Forget, by P. Whitewell Wilson, and--the unkindest cut--King, Queen, Knave, by the immortal Vladimir Nabokov. Here were the jumbled ruins of a literate age, now serving as wallpaper for the electronic age.... I opened Nabokov and read: 'hand might notice something and the c/ silky sparks coursing through her body/...' Even chopped in half, Nabokov shines."

It has been roughly a year since I began this investigation and I would say that the above sentiment is that expressed with the most frequency-- "Not since Nabokov...." "Traditional librarians" are the ones who still discuss Nabokov, "new age" mumbo jumbo pales next to Nabokovian metaphysics, a new book is good if it captures even a single element of Nabokov's artistic wizardry. Rare is the snipe, rare, even in a world of endless criticism, the rebuke. A speech given by Reed Hundt, chairman of the US Federal Communications Commision, speaking on the subject of "Personal Freedom and Telecommunications", to the Moscow Chamber of Commerce in July of 1994, discusses the "future" of Russia and the importance of the "information highway" to that future. He conveys this generalized affection and admiration with particular eloquence,

"...Now, Russians all know that for many centuries in this great country's long history, the spirit of liberalism and the dreams of individual freedom were nurtured chiefly by the great communicators of what we now call the Newtonburg(sp) Age. I refer to the great writers of Russia, particularly to the immortal Alexander Pushkin. Pushkin, the artist is identified with Russian history and for many decades an example of the primary way to discuss the idea of liberty through art. Pushkin died as I'm sure every Russian knows, and I recently looked up, in 1837 in a duel fought a month after the publication of his great poem Eugene Onegin...

At approximately the same time in North America, Samuel Morse was inventing the telegraph. And this is one of the coincidences of history that seems to form a pattern. The telegraph intiated the communications revolution that is now reaching full crest, and that communications revolution is now everywhere, making individual freedom and self-expression inalienable rights not deniable by government. That was Pushkin's dream. The many coincidences and parallels between the United States and Russia find perhaps their most magical incarnation in the life and work of the person who is perhaps the greatest writer of both Russia and the United States in this century, Vladimir Nabokov. Nabokov's grandfather was intimately involved in the reforms of 1862 when Russia ended serfdom at, coincidentally, the same time that Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves in the United States. And Nabokov's father was minister of justice at the turn of the century and a valiant fighter for individual rights. Nabokov himself expressed the possibilities of freedom of imagination in all his writings, first in Russia while he lived in Russia and while he lived in the emigre community in Berlin. And when he was forced to leave by Hitler, he astonishingly continued his writing in English. The single English work on which he spent the most effort was his magnificent translation of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin. And in this book and in many others, Nabokov seemed to be able to fuse the two great countries and cultures of Russia and the United States. It is the pursuit of that fusion of our cultures, of our two countries, each in search of community, each prizing the imaginative spirit, it is in the pursuit of that fusion that I have come to Russia."

Whether you agree with Mr. Hundt that Pushkin's dream has been realized through the wonders of telecommunications, it is nevertheless clear that Nabokov's influence, which is evident in both the expression and the content of the above excerpt, is far-reaching, penetrating to unlikely and unpredictable corners of the culture. It has been a fascinating year of study; a year in which it appears that Nabokov is, above all, sorely missed.