VN COLLATION #24
by Suellen Stringer-Hye
Jean and Alexander Heard Library
Vanderbilt University
stringers@library.vanderbilt.edu

102! 2000/2001-- Nabokov is in the wind. Though he hated pigeonholing, journalists mercilessly roost him in several--- synaesthete, chess master, contented spouse, insomniac,vn lepidopterist. Media attention shifted away from Nabokov, creator of the problematic Lolita towards Nabokov, scientist/artist able to blur such commonly held distinctions. For the avid devotee, headlines like "Naba(sic)kov's first teen temptress: Camera Obscura thrilled Hitchcock" spark little in the way of new insight or interest. Occasionally, however, an unexpected remark stimulates further inquiry. On March 22, Rock Critic Ken tucker, reviewing the new CD "Poisonville" by singer Ronnie Elliott on the Public Radio Program "Fresh Air" said, "Elliott sprinkles literary allusions from Jack Keruoac to Vladimir Nabokov". After scouring publicity information to discover the source of this statement, I decided to contact Elliott directly.

ELLIOTT: In fact, I am very interested in Nabokov but I don't know how anyone at Fresh Air would know that!

The only thing that I can think of is that there's a line in "Burn Burn Burn" that goes, " I've got a copy of Lolita, just in case I need it."

My interest, really, is just about his writing in general and how he seemed to totally change with Lolita. I'm just mesmerized with his rhythms.

Fresh Air Review

Similarly, when Loop, an interactive computer game, introduced by the quotation "My pleasures are the most intense known to man; writing and butterfly hunting" appeared on shockwave.com, I was enchanted enough to contact gameLab, the company responsible for developing "Loop." Eric Zimmerman, founder and CEO of gameLab and co-creator of the underground hit SiSSYFiGHT 2000 responded:

Q. My 13 year old son discovered "Loop" on shockwave.com and said "Look Mom, a game about Nabokov." Most computer/video games are not so literary. How did you come to create a game based on Nabokovian themes?

At gameLab, we usually begin with an idea for a game's interactivity and let the narrative content grow out of our experience of playing the game. In the case of LOOP, we began with the looping interactivity first. We tried a few kinds of objects in the game, including wandering stars and floating abstract shapes, but when we hit on catching butterflies, it made such perfect sense that we stayed with it.

The addition of Nabokov to the game came about halfway through development. We felt that the game was feeling too kidlike and we wanted to make it clear that this was a game for adults as well as children. During a design meeting, Terry O'Gara (who works for Blister Media, the company that created the sound for the game) mentioned using Nabokov to help frame the game. We batted several great Nabokov quotes around over email before settling on the one we have in the game.

Although it was not part of the original game concept, we like the way that the single quote from Nabokov reframes the game. It and calls attention to the intertextual quality of the game as "writing" - since the player is drawing lines to capture the butterflies. And since games are so much about "pleasure," it is a nice way to start the game experience.

Q. Is Terry O'Gara a Nabokov fan? Were any of you Nabokov readers before creating LOOP?

It turns out that most of the LOOP team were Nabokov readers. We pride ourselves on being more cultured than the average computer game developers.

Q. How was LOOP received on shockwave.com? How did it compare with other more traditional games?

LOOP has done very well on Shockwave.com. It was launched at the end of February and more than 1.1 million games have been played. Shockwave has received a huge amount of fan email about the game.

The rest of this year's VNCollation is a collection of Nabokov related items from 2000/2001. I have eliminated those that have either been noted on NABOKV-L or do little to illuminate or entertain.

DMITRI

Dmitri Nabokov headlined the eighth annual Rocky Mountain Books Festival in Denver, Colorado on March 2, presenting a poetry recital and workshop. He read his translations of some of Nabokov's Russian poems "some of which had never before been heard in English" (Rocky Mountain News). He also participated in a presentation of "Dear Bunny, Dear Volodya: The Friendship and the Feud," the play adapted by Terry Quinn from the letters of Vladimir Nabokov and Edmund Wilson. Dimitri played his father and Wilson Scholar Lewis Dabney portrayed Wilson.

In the February 25 issue, Rocky Mountain News published this interview with DN by John C. Ensslin

Long before Lolita--the novel that made him famous--Vladimir Nabokov came to Colorado in search of something more elusive than literary fame: rare and beautiful uncataloged butterflies.

He found both.

Traveling the American West with his family in their "good old frog-green Buick," Vladimir Nabokov tramped the woods by day and wrote by night.

"He had the precision of the artist and the passion of a scientist," his son, Dmitri Nabokov, said recently during a phone interview from his home in Montreax, Switzerland.

Lolita began to take shape during those hikes through Estes Park and, four summers later, in Telluride, Nabokov said: "Very often, he would have a book working in his head as he tramped through the woods with a butterfly net in his hand and index cards in his pocket. The two things overlapped to a great degree."

Nabokov, translator and executor of his father's literary estate, will return to Colorado this week to take part in the eighth annual Rocky Mountain Book Festival, Saturday and March 4. Saturday, he will play the part of his father in the regional premiere of "Dear Bunny, Dear Volodya: The Friendship and the Feud," a dramatic dialogue based on the letters between Vladimir Nabokov and literary critic Edmund Wilson.

Returning to Denver will be a sentimental journey for Nabokov, who was 13 years old when his family checked into the Columbine Lodge in Estes Park in late July 1947.

"There's not an ounce of pedophilia. If one is to look for a message in the book, it's one of utter morality," he said.

Nabokov often accompanied his father on his butterfly hunts. To this day, the son is proud of some butterflies on display in the family's refurbished home in Russia. Beneath the display is the caption "captured by V. and D. Nabokov."

Those vacations held two other special memories for Nabokov. It was the first time his father shared one of his books with his son. And it was Nabokov's introduction to mountain climbing.

Nabokov remembers his father's taking him to meet with a ranger at Rocky Mountain National Park, who had agreed to shepherd the boy along on a hike up Longs Peak via the old Cable route.

The Nabokovs' paths eventually diverged, with climbing taking the place of butterflies for the son.

Vladimir Nabokov was studying a group of butterflies he'd discovered called "blues." He would drop his son off for progressively more difficult climbs. One climb in particular stands out in Nabokov's mind. He was on an unfamiliar route that required him to leap to - and grab hold of - a ledge, which he did successfully.

Only later in life, while reading through his father's diaries, did he realize the terror his parents concealed over their son's climbing.

"They didn't make me feel any guilt about it," he said. "They were conscious of the physical and mental values."

The family spent their last Colorado summer in Telluride in 1951. Nabokov remembered the town as "a pale copy of a mining town."

But the trips had at least one lasting effect: His courageous climb later gave Nabokov the nerve required when he made his debut as an opera singer in Milan, Italy, performing opposite Luciano Pavarotti.

It also helped when he had to address about 2,000 Slavic-studies scholars on the topic of his father's work.

After his own career in opera and car racing, the son, now 66, moves comfortably within his late father's legacy.

"Wilson could not stand being eclipsed by a protege," Dmitri Nabokov said. "My father was too much of a gentleman to say that."

TRANSLATIONS

On March 25, Bill Eichenberger, the Dispatch Book Critic the Columbus Dispatch noted an author not sympathetic to Nabokov's theories of translation

Vladimir Nabokov wrote extensively about one of his professed heroes, Nikolay Gogol. He also translated Gogol from Russian into English.

But his attitude toward Gogol infuriated writer Dawn Powell, who wrote in a 1965 letter to Edmund Wilson (who'd had his own falling out with Nabokov): "(Nabokov) seemed motivated by a compulsion to denigrate his heroes and thus strut his own superiority, which he may not have been able to demonstrate in life so must construct these puppets to mortify and humiliate.

"I disliked his dowdy translations, too--at least Constance Garrett (or was it Isabel Hapgood?) loved the whole and didn't want to stop the horses and the sleighbells just to lecture that a blur of fir trees shadowing the sky (vaguely) was really four half-grown greenish-brown specimens of Max Schling's Spruce Seedlings No. 542.''

Alternatively, Victor Swoboda, in the March 3 Montreal Gazette reviewed the new Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky translation of Anna Karenin(a)

A husband-and-wife team based in Paris, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky have been steadily translating the Russian classics for several years. Their superiority can be explained not by their talent but by their ability to get out of the author's way. Over the last decade, Andre Markowicz has done the same in translating Dostoevsky into French, creating an image of that author radically at odds with that which older translations promoted for years. The process is a bit like stripping layers of varnish from an Old Master painting.

Vladimir Nabokov enjoyed telling how Victorian modesty prevented one 19th-century translator from having Anna utter the word "pregnant" (the word was left in transliterated Russian). Another 19th-century translation, published as part of Tolstoy's complete works, abounded in errors, as when Vronsky seriously injures his horse during a race: "'Aah! What have I done?' cried Vronsky, taking her head in his hands." In Russian, Vronsky clutches his own head.

Nabokov also ridiculed Garnett's translation, his teaching copy filled with handwritten corrections of her numerous inaccuracies. Edmonds, in her often fanciful translation, added words of explanation where none are found in the original. The Maude translation, including the reprinted 1995 version edited by the literary scholar George Gibian, often omitted descriptive phrases and put synonyms where Tolstoy intentionally repeats the same word for artistic effect.

NABOKOV AND HYPERTEXT

Jimmy Guterman, complains in the April 9 Industry Standard about the lack of originality in hypertext writing.

The key creative problem I encountered while trying to build a competent literary hypertext was my difficulty in delivering a satisfactory reading experience that included tension and closure. Aristotle's rules in Poetics have worked well for 23 centuries; the advent of the Web shouldn't be enough to repeal them. (Genius modernists like Jorge Luis Borges, James Joyce and Vladimir Nabokov aside, most great fiction is linear; even counting subroutines, computer programs aren't. Even worse, my work is neither genius nor particularly modernist.) Because constructing solid literary hypertext is so difficult and because the field is still so new, all too many hypertexts seem to be about hypertext: showing off multiple links and lack of linearity without bothering to use those tools to tell stories. It's as if early TV shows were often about transistors and vacuum tubes.

NABOKOV AND POP CULTURE

From the Independent (London) October 15, 2000, by Nicholas Barber

The reason why Britney Spears is so successful is that she's such excellent value for money: you get two separate people for the price of one. In photo shoots and in her videos, Spears is a soft-porn star who would make Madonna blush. But when she's interviewed, Spears is a fresh- faced small-town gal who won't shut up about her virginity and her Christianity. The virgin/whore dichotomy has never been embodied so neatly by a celebrity before, and it's this which makes her fascinating. And, arguably, dangerous. By dividing herself into two entities, Spears licenses the most sordid Lolita fantasies. Moreover, she puts those fantasies on screen, allowing potential Humbert Humberts a line of reasoning: however innocent and prim a schoolgirl might appear, she can't appear more innocent and prim than Britney - and she makes videos in which she struts around in Emma Peel catsuits and begs her baby to hit her.

The Nabokov icon is used to frame anything from a letter to the editor to a film review. Below is a selection of the most notable.

Los Angeles Times, March 12, 2001, Susan Salter Reynolds:

"Fiction," says Julian Barnes, "is as intimate as sex." Certainly his new novel, Love, etc., pushes the relationship between the reader and the characters to an intimate point. Even authors Milan Kundera and Vladimir Nabokov, master manipulators, do not leave their readers talking about their characters as if they were people one knows.

The Economist, January 27, 2001, U.S. Edition:

Vladimir Nabokov, who understood Hollywood's appetite for happy endings, once remarked that there were nevertheless two plot-lines that it would not tolerate. One was the marriage of an inter-racial couple who live happily ever after. The other was the story of a confirmed atheist who dies painlessly in his bed at the age of 102 after a full and fruitful life, surrounded by children and grandchildren. The great writer could easily have added a third Hollywood taboo: the gainfully employed drug taker who does so because he likes to, and isn't either cured of his habit or punished for it by prison, disgrace or ill-health.

Nabokov, it has to be said, was talking 40 years ago, and there are signs that Tinseltown is changing, at least in regard to the supply-side of drugs. A much-talked about new film, "Traffic" (see article), continues to present users as foolish or doomed

The Toronto Star, March 9, 2001:

Self-help books get a bad rap. People make fun of them. They also buy them.

But you almost feel like you need a fake book cover when you read one on the subway--a cover that tells the world you're reading Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov instead of The Forgiving Self: The Road From Resentment To Connection by Robert Karen, Ph.D.

Monstruary, Rmos, Julian; Trans. by Edith Grossman, Knopf:

Another pun-derful literary extravaganza from the brilliant Spaniard making a name for himself as a contemporary equivalent of Joyce, Nabokov, and German experimentalist Arno Schmidt.

The American Prospect January 1, 2001-January 15, 2001, Jendi Reiter, Esq., New York, NY

To the editors:

After reading Wendy Kaminer's "Speaking of 'Man-Boy Love,'" [November 20, 2001], I wondered if she would have written a similar defense of a group that advocated decriminalizing rape, gay bashing, or wife beating. The National Man/Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) is not an avant-garde artist like Vladimir Nabokov or Allen Ginsburg. It is a political advocacy group that works to normalize and decriminalize sexual predation.

Kirkus Reviews, November 1, 2000:

Nocturnal Butterflies of the Russian Empire, Prieto, Josi Manuel; Trans. by Carol Christensen & Thomas Christensen, Grove, $24.00, Nov. 2000

Vladimir Nabokov, wherever he is now, is either chuckling uncontrollably or purple with indignation over this delightfully tricky first novel by a young Cuban writer. The narrator, identified only as "J.," is a resourceful Eastern European smuggler whose commission to hunt down and bag a rare species of Russian butterfly involves him with "V." (for Varia--a richly suggestive moniker), a mystery woman whom he meets in Istanbul, loses in Odessa, and pursues through an enigmatically dippy correspondence in which he imagines himself another Abelard seeking his unattainable Hiloise (among other storied predecessors). A charming original: a comic portrayal of obsession with an edge of harsh post-Communist realism. It's as if Thomas Pynchon, Graham Greene, and Milan Kundera had collaborated with Nabokov on a script for Woody Allen.

National Review, September 11, 2000, Carol Iannone:

Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms, by Diane Ravitch (Simon & Schuster, 555 pp., $30)

In Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, the execrable pedophile Humbert Humbert visits the school his stepdaughter is to attend and learns of its educational philosophy: "We are not so much concerned . . . with having our students become bookworms," the headmistress lectures him authoritatively, "or be able to reel off all the capitals of Europe which nobody knows anyway, or learn by heart the dates of forgotten battles. What we are concerned with is the adjustment of the child to group life.

This is why we stress the four D's: Dramatics, Dance, Debating, and Dating." If you thought such outlandish pedagogical notions could only be the product of satirical fantasy, you will find Diane Ravitch's invaluable new book, Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms, most enlightening.

The following are snippets from various reviews in which Nabokov is mentioned.

Experienced readers of experimental fiction will find fewer surprises than virgin readers since Winterson is a belated fellow traveler in this postmodern landscape. Coupland, Pynchon, Calvino, even Nabokov have already marked the trail, redrawn the map. Indeed, it's happened with almost all his books, for Davies possesses what Nabokov called shamanstvo, the enchanter-quality essential to successful storytelling.

From a readers' reviews on Amazon.com

While Nabokov's literary gymnastics are impressive, the overall experience of reading ''Lolita'' is an empty one. You're better off listening to the audio version (narrated by Liberace) or watching the Disney cartoon musical featuring the voices of Val Kilmer, Anna Paquin and Red Auerbach.

Banville is comparable to those other modern masters of the confessional mode, Nabokov and Beckett.

Pelevin does nothing with the Russian language beyond an enviable facility for metaphor. Nor does he fascinate us with his personality and, as Nabokov wrote of Gogol, potter on the brink of a private abyss

Here, Jacobs played Nabokov pleading with Lolita to come out and play.

Nabokov, the son of an aristocrat (albeit a Russian one), said there is no finer delicacy in the world than a soft-boiled egg. You couldn't imagine him saying that about fried eggs.

It would be easy for Ms. [Dar Williams] to let the poetic clichés she gravitates toward ease her into epiphanies. Insecurity, the cosmic rather than the personal kind, saves her from that. The new song ''It Happens Every Day,'' for example, skipped along from images of children playing to coeds underlining copies of Nabokov novels in a coffee house to Ms. Williams herself seeing love in the faces of passers-by.

Like Auden and Nabokov, Robert Craft obviously possesses the kind of magpie mind that can't help picking up and storing away unusual words.

The lure of escape by automobile has long inspired some of the best American writing, from the jaunty joyride of Jack Kerouac's On the Road to the taut desert minimalism of Joan Didion's Play It As It Lays-- and even, one could argue, Nabokov's Lolita, in which Humbert Humbert leaves the country's byways "defiled with a sinuous trail of slime."

Coleridge spent years trying to get away from his wife; Vladimir Nabokov found in his the perfect literary helpmeet.

Long, long ago, the aging Vladimir Nabokov anointed [Edmund White] as his favorite younger novelist. (No White review is complete without a mention of this.) So one shouldn't be surprised to find The Married Man replete with lovely sentences:

News

Soon Brian Boyd's out of print Nabokov's Ada: The Place of Consciousness, will be available at www.cybereditions.com .