VN COLLATION #18
by Suellen Stringer-Hye
Jean and Alexander Heard Library
Vanderbilt University
stringers@library.vanderbilt.edu

Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, September 28, 1996, Saturday
"Home and Garden" Section

Q. In September, I received a dozen gorgeous roses for my birthday. The florist said the rose was osiana. It was pink with a yellowish tinge, like the inside of a conch shell.

A. I cannot find the variety you have mentioned, but others with similar-color flowers include Alpine Sunset, Lolita or Solitaire.

When one takes as long as I have to compile the Fall 1996 VNCollation, the incidence of unmentioned yet still newsworthy Nabokov stories declines in proportion to the ability of our eagle-eyed editor and list-serve readers to pick them out. I therefore begin this season's selection with three stories already reported on by DBJ and others but include a bit more text and context to fill out the citation. An additional and charming account of a meeting with Professor Pnin is also noted. Sections on Lolita and Popular Culture, Nabokov and the Web, and Books provide coverage that is representative if not exhaustive. I thank all those who have contributed and especially Marianne Cotugno for her assistance in putting the Collation together.

As has been previously noted in this forum, US News and World Report ran an article on October 14, 1996 entitled, "Lolita, a girl for the '90s" written by John Marks. The headline reads "Nabokov's infamous book takes another drubbing. But is he to blame?" The first two paragraphs indicating the general tone of the article are reprinted below:

Four decades ago, a fictional account of sexual relations between a 12-year-old girl and her stepfather scandalized a generation unused to such graphic depictions of family life gone awry. The book was banned in Britain, confiscated by police in France and lambasted as immoral when first published in the United States in 1958. Its author was a 20th-century giant, prolific in both English and his native Russian. But for many Americans, Vladimir Nabokov became known simply as the man who wrote Lolita, his reputation reduced, as his son Dmitri puts it, to that of "a person who wrote a very dirty book put out by a very dirty publisher."

This week, scholars from around the globe gather in New York City to celebrate Nabokov's literary legacy. They do so at a time when Lolita is generating a new controversy, this time over a filmed version, scheduled for release in a few months. And this latest uproar gives the scholars something to ponder: In an era vastly more sophisticated and inured to sex of all sorts than the sheltered 1950s, how is it that Nabokov's opus is still capable of triggering such a fuss?

The article goes on to note the "concerns" of Nabokov scholars, and quotes "one academic" "saying I suspect that I am not the only teacher of the novel who feels something at stake in the ongoing history of its misreading and misuse." NABOKV-L readers may remember that this comment was made by Brian Walter during the NABOKV-L debate between himself and screenwriter Stephen Schiff, regarding the validity and veracity of an influential article that had appeared in Entertainment Weekly.

Below is the excerpted paragraph from the US News and World Report article containing Walter's comment whose intent, I may add, has been slighty skewed to better conform to the journalist's slant.

And this may be the heart of the Lolita problem, as Nabokov scholars on the Internet have worried in recent weeks. One academic attacked director Lyne's attempt to make the film at all: "I suspect that I am not the only teacher of the novel who feels something at stake in the ongoing history of its misreading and misuse." In a culture where the vast majority of people do not read serious literature, in which the key form of entertainment is electronic and unconducive to reflection, what sticks out in popular retellings of Nabokov's story is disembodied sex, divorced from literary content. The novel's depth and complexity get lost in translation, and Lolita the cultural icon prevails. In the end, the author's defenders say, responsibility for this other Lolita lies not with Nabokov, not even with Adrian Lyne, but with Madison Avenue, Hollywood and Wall Street.

THE EMIGRANTS. By W.G. Sebald . Translated from the German by Michael Hulse (New Directions: $22.95, 256 pp.)

Previously noted on NABOKV-L, one story from Eric Sebald's The Emigrants, utilizes images of Nabokov in several locales, with butterfly net in hand . In the October 27, Los Angeles Times the reviewer questions the textual purpose of Nabokov's presence and offers this solution:

Sebald weaves recurring images through these stories, so convergent in theme and so ingeniously varied in method.The Swiss Alps appear in three of them, with their lofty inhumanview of the world below and their country's cold isolation from the horrors around it. All four contain fleeting glimpses of Vladimir Nabokov with his butterfly net: in the Alps, on a meadow near Cornell, where he taught, and as a little boy at a German spa.

Why Nabokov? I am not sure. Some of the images in Sebald's brilliant and somber book work inexplicably. This one is arbitrary, on the face of it, but it doesn't feel that way. Its playfulness both lightens and illuminates. Nabokov, whose liberal father was assassinated by Russian émigré extremists, steps out of another dark history, portly and pursuing butterflies. Sebald has fashioned a net of his own.

Publication of the Library of America Series of Nabokov's works is beggining to generate a lot of press. While most of it is favorable, Michael Dirda in the October 20, "Book World" section of the Washington Post wondered:

Nabokov's "American" works have recently been published in three thin-paper volumes. Am I alone in liking the idea of the Library of America, but finding many of the actual volumes uninviting, when not positively dispiriting? To think of those bright butterflies, Lolita and Ada, trapped in those gray, official pages!

In the August 10, Daily Telegraph the headline, "Brief Encounter SHENA MACKAY chooses the fictional character with whom she would most like to spend an evening" prompts me to wonder who Shena Mackay and what Brief Encounter is. Perhaps British Nabokovians could inform us better on the source of the following quotation:

... Or be measured for shirts in the dim twilight world of Jermyn Street with Radclyffe Hall's Stephen Gordon. Or dine on lichen and brackish water with Stevenson's Alan Breck. Spoiled for choice, and therefore indecisive, I have chosen as my ideal companion none other than the ideally bald and suntanned Professor Timofey Pnin. If we should manage to coincide, for Professor Pnin's railway timetable is five years old and in part obsolete, he will be wearing his sloppy socks of scarlet wool with lilac lozenges, and I shall be in a 1957 frock, in the style of the year when Nabokov's Pnin was published. Perhaps we shall have cocktails on some Midwestern university campus, or, transported to Pnin's pre-exile St Petersburg, we will drink red tea poured from a samovar into glass cups. I have loved Professor Pnin for almost 30 years, and now, coincidentally, we are exactly the same age. Polite, pedantic Professor Pnin; perhaps we should meet on the night he is fired from the faculty of the ghastly Waindell College at the party he gives for his colleagues. What should we talk about? I could hardly tell him that he was one of the most poignant characters in literature, or advise him to leave his killing bottle at home when he went lepidopterising. Our eyes, meeting over his precious aquamarine punchbowl, would have to say it all.

LOLITA AND POPULAR CULTURE

Alas, the proliferation of child pornography sites on the web is not without a concomitant link to Lolita. The Humberts of the world still love their little Lo and she can be found at addresses like www.lolita.com for a $10.00 subscription fee. Lolita sex, amature (sic) Lolita videos--these and much much more can be "accessed" (to use some popular Information Age jargon) with startling ease. The enticing "Click here for little girl sex"; at one site is challenged only by the promise at another that it is ..."The only hardcore site worth getting your knob out for." Amy Fisher, and yes she is still appearing in the newspapers, this time suing her jailor and other prison staff for sexual abuse, is still and always appended "The Long Island Lolita." These and other facts are making the release of Adrian Lyne's film a complicated affair. Excerpted from the files of the newsgroup alt.movies.kubrick, the item below has not been confirmed but I suspect that events in Belgium and elsewhere make at least some of its likelihood incontrovertable.

Subject: Re: Lolita Remake Date: Fri, 8 Nov 1996 08:10:57 -0800 Newsgroups: alt.movies.kubrick. The delay in the release of Lyne's Lolita is due quite simply to the MPAA's continuing hangups about any provocative treatment of sexuality that can't be codified in traditional Hollywood terms. While many Americans seem to delight in seeing people blown up in any number of imaginative ways, whether it is ID4 or PULP FICTION, the idea of sex still gets them into a whole complex of hot and bothered pseudo-moral quandries. Since Lyne's film is a graphic remake/adaptation of Nabokov's novel, the MPAA, echoing the new moralism of the great American middle (or is it muddle) class feels compelled to protect our precious bodily fluids by insisting on a ...

What is interesting, in this context, is that Nabokov's book wasn't graphic at all. Rather PG-13 material, actually :). I'd be the FIRST to argue against this masterpiece being turned into some soft-kiddie-porn/ready-for-home-video release. It's not a matter of prudery, it's a matter of sophistication. You wanna see 12-year-old ass, then cruise the binary newsgroups. Leave real literature out of it. Lyne naturally is trying to fight this. Milos Forman has had the same difficulties with his forthcoming The People Vs. Larry Flynt. What they are fighting is an NC-17 designation which would cut their profits by an estimated 30%. It's not censorship, it's money, that's the issue. I'm the last person to defend true-blue prudes, and of course I'm not when I say that the knee-jerk reaction you posted in defense of carnal liberties (or at least those depicted cinematically) is really...

Also, popular singer/songwriter Suzanne Vega's recent album entitled "Nine Objects Of Desire" and produced by Vega's husband, Mitchell Froom, features a song on it called "Lolita."

NABOKOV RELATED WEBSITES

http://www.altculture.com/site/entries/lolitaxbag.html

Description, definintion and history of an item of fashion, already outdated, dubbed the "lolita bag."

This Website is called Parody on Demand and has a form that one can fill out to vote for the parody you would like to see written. One may select from three choices Wired Magazine, a John Grisham Novel or Self Help Manual written in the syle of John Irving, Hunter S. Thompson or Vladimir Nabokov.

A poem called "For Nabokov" by Christopher P. Jennings.

Thomas Bolt reviews The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov online in the Boston Review.

Titled, "Losing a Country, Finding a Home" From Five College Ink Volume 7, Number 2, The article discusses Amherst college's recent acquisition of materials relating to Russian émigré culture. Some Nabokov materials can be found in the collection.

"Names What do they mean?" by Chris Hall from the zine, Spike. Nabokov discussed.

Ken Lopez, a Bookseller from Hadley Mass. specializes in First Editions or American First Editions of Modern Literature. Item 288, was recently featured on the cover of the bookseller's Catalog 86.

288. NABOKOV, Vladimir. Conclusive Evidence, NY: Harper & Bros. (1951). The first volume of memoirs by one of the most inventive, and admired, prose stylists of the 20th century. This memoir was later published in a revised form as Speak Memory. This copy is fine in a very close to fine dust jacket and is signed by the author and dated in the year of publication. Books signed by Nabokov are extremely scarce: this copy was brought to him by a student when he was teaching at Cornell, who had hoped to get the book inscribed; as Nabokov virtually never inscribed his books, this one came back the next day signed and dated but not inscribed. A very attractive copy of an uncommon book, and exceedingly scarce signed. $8500

Thirteen other Nabokov first editions, ranging from $50 to $150 dollars are also available.

Another book of potential interest to Nabokovian's is:

Lodge, David The Practice of Writing Viking (352 pp.) $24.95 Jan. 1997.

An essay on Nabokov is a part of this well reviewed collection.

...the 15th-century figure that Dracula is based on--Vlad Tepes, nicknamed Vlad the Impaler, a prince who started out protecting his empire from Turkish invaders but got carried away with brutality.

The previous day, The Columbus Dispatch had featured an article about the new Library of America Edition of Nabokov's works and said:

These books are classic keepers, and New York, at least, is celebrating. ''The Lolita legacy: Life with Nabokov's Art'' is a talk by Vlad the Language Impaler's son, Dmitri, that the Mercantile Library will host at 6 p.m.

But to return to the cradle rocking, I think
Nabokov had it wrong. This is the abyss.
That's why babies howl at birth,
and why the dying so often reach
for something only they can comprehend.

from The Best American Poetry 1996 edited by Adrienne Rich.