VN COLLATION #22
by Suellen Stringer-Hye
Jean and Alexander Heard Library
Vanderbilt University
stringers@library.vanderbilt.edu

Happy Birthday VN!

Just a single rose atop the every growing bouquet, this edition of the VN Collation is dedicated to Vladimir Nabokov on the centennial of his birth.

Nabokov's friendship with William F. Buckley has always seemed to me paradoxical. Buckley, a leading figure in conservative American politics and thought, represents for many the antithesis of Nabokovian perspectives, and yet the self-proclaimed liberal Nabokov's politics, to the extent that he entertained them, often appear "conservative" in the American context. On February 1, Buckley, during an interview in which he was asked to discuss the Clinton-Lewinsky affair, recalls a dinner discussion with Nabokov:

TWENTY years ago I dined with Vladimir Nabokov, who told me that the smile on his face traced to his having executed his "OSS" in his writing session that afternoon. Of course I asked, What is an OSS? "The obligatory sex scene," he explained patiently.

From the February 3, New York Times obituary for Mellon:

He was curious about mysticism, so he studied with Carl Jung. He liked deep, expansive books, so he began to publish the best he could discover. Bollingen Series, his book venture, eventually put out 275 well-made volumes, among them the I Ching, André Malraux's Museum Without Walls, Ibn Khaldun's The Muqadimah, Vladimir Nabokov's translations from Pushkin, and Kenneth Clark's The Nude.

The Bollingen Foundation, which he established, not only created the nation's top poetry prize but also published an idiosyncratic array of elegantly designed books in a series that has no parallel in this country. The series included the complete works of Jung and Coleridge; a four-volume edition of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, translated into English and annotated by Vladimir Nabokov; the I Ching; Joseph Campbell's Hero With a Thousand Faces, and scores of other studies in esthetics, cultural and art history, mythology and religion.

Excerpts from Interviews

In the Winter 1999 issue of the Wilson Quarterly, a publication of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the Lewis M. Dabney interview with Isiah Berlin is published. Conducted shortly before his death in 1997, Berlin discusses his friendship with Edmund Wilson whom he found to be "a greatly gifted and morally impressive man." Throughout the 1950s and 60s the two saw each other frequently. During the interview Dabney asked Berlin about Nabokov, Wilson, and Russian literature.

D: What do you think of Wilson's criticism of Russian literature?

Berlin: He had some inner feeling, some extraordinary understanding of what the Russians meant. Sometimes he talked nonsense. For example, the two pieces on Zhivago. The first article

D: Was wonderful. The second was lousy.

Berlin: Yes, all that philological stuff, he got from those two ladies, those two White Russian ladies, whoever they were, egged him on by saying "Ham-let," "Little Ham." He didn't really know the language well. In the famous row with Nabokov he was wrong.

D: Yes, he was wrong about words. But did you think he was wrong about Nabokov's translation? I thought the translation of Eugene Onegin was "perversepedantic-impossible," as Edmund said.

Berlin: Absolutely right about it. It was an absolute monstrosity. He was a moral being, Edmund was, whose approach to life was indelibly moral, as is that of the Russian writers. Ultimately, the Russian approach is the moral approach. Nabokov was purely aesthetic-Edmund admired him, liked him, was amused by him. Don't think he meant much to him. Still, anybody Russian was of interest to Edmund. He had this terrific sense of the greatness of Russian literature. Wonderful people, wonderful literature, he used to say.

JE: Charlotte seems to style herself after big-screen stars and on what she sees in her favorite movie magazines. And as the film begins, her little girl is becoming fascinated by those same images.

MG: Charlotte was one of those women who realized that Lolita, her daughter, looks like she used to look, and she, Charlotte, is no longer that. And I can almost see it - not that it's the same--with my mother [actress Tippi Hedren] and me, and with my daughter, Dakota, who's eight, who looks exactly like I did at that age, except she's much more beautiful. And it's tough. Well, not tough--it's just a little bit weird. For Charlotte, it was tough.

JE: Charlotte and Lolita bicker and snipe at each other like sisters, like rivals.

MG: Well, Charlotte was very selfish. She would much rather have had Humbert to herself. Sending her daughter off to boarding school was a bit harsh. But at the same time, when she finds out what the reality is, that Humbert was just using her to get close to her daughter, it's really sad.

JE: I always thought that in the Kubrick film, as in the book, Charlotte was depicted too unkindly. She was seen entirely through Humbert's eyes, and he was disgusted by her.

MG: Well, this movie is pretty cruel, too. It's so sad she's such a dupe. Charlotte's trying so hard to please Humbert.

JE: Did you feel, then, that you needed to do right by Charlotte, to humanize her? Was Lyne willing to support you on this?

MG: Yeah, I did feel that. But Adrian can shoot forever, and so when I had to do the scene with Charlotte telling Humbert she knows what's going on, just before she is killed, I said, "Adrian, look, I'll do it eight different ways for you. Please don't cut the camera, just start all over again. But I can't do it forty times, because I won't have that much in me to give." And he let me do it that way.

JE: As an actress, is it your job to judge a character like Humbert?

MG: No, I don't think you can do that. You have to see him from within the story. I just did my job. I tried my best to give Charlotte dimensions. It was weird enough being offered the role at age thirty-seven, because all of a sudden I felt like "Oh, my God, is this it? I'm now a matron?"

Laughter in the Dark

"It's a pleasure to be working with the bold and innovative Larry Meistrich and his company," said Mosher. "Their enthusiasm for Nabokov's astonishing novel and their expertise in New York filmmaking, where this film is set, is everything anyone could ask for."

Poetry

Robin Pemantles, a mathematics professor at the University of Wisconsin--Madison, whose area of research is "Probability and Stochastic Processes," publishes song parodies, family photos, and light verse in the Higgledy Piggeldy verse collection on his personal website. Here is one entitled Nabokov:

Higgeldy-Piggeldy
Vladimir Nabokov
twentieth-century
master of wit
Altered forever the
face of American
heterosexual
pedophile lit.
-RP (1994)

Links

Ken Lopez, a bookseller who specializes in 20th century literature often carries Nabokov first editions as well a other collectible works by Nabokov.

http://www.lopezbooks.com/94/94-7.html

Butterflies

Nabokov's fame as a lepidopterist carries on as if in a parallel universe. The Karner Blue, named by Nabokov after the now banished hamlet in the Adirondack foothills just north of Saratoga Springs, New York, was officially placed on the endangered species list in 1992. In the January 14, New York Times, Joseph Berger reports on one town's efforts to save this now endangered butterfly. Because of the butterfly's mystique, the town was able to gain support for preservation of the butterfly's habitat and thus preserve some of its own in the process.

The Karner blue, with characteristic iridescent blue wings, was named after a now-vanished nearby hamlet by Vladimir Nabokov, a lepidopterist as well as the author of Lolita. Like 11-year-olds who will dine only on chicken nuggets and plain pasta, the Karner blue is a picky eater. Its caterpillar savors only the leaf of the wild blue lupine, a wildflower with violet-blue blossoms that thrives in sunny meadows. The adult female, which has all of a one-inch wingspan, lays its eggs on the blue lupine's leaves before it dies.

Ms. LaMontagne, who is executive director of the Wilton Wildlife Preserve and Park, estimates that $1.4 million has come in from New York State, the conservancy and private donors for land purchases. Five hundred acres have already been acquired; an additional 615 acres are under negotiation.

An investment banker, using the plight of the butterlflies to help establish a Nature Conservancy for the town said,

''If I didn't have the butterfly, I would have to invent something like it.''

Now in Zembla

An interview with Stacy Schiff, author of the newly published biography of Vera Nabokov.