Vladimir Nabokov: Mary

Mary, Nabokov's first novel, was first published in the early 20s when he was living in exile in Berlin and writing under the pseudonym of "V. Sirin". It was published as Mashenka and in the forward Nabokov says that he thought of using the diminutive of English equivalent for his title of the English translation which would have been Mariette but decided to use Mary instead. (The book is translated by Michael Glenny, "in collaboration with the author" as the book jacket says.) I actually wish they had used the original Russian which sounds really wonderful. He also says that it contains elements from his autobiography in a direct manner, unlike his other later works - something which he is very defensive about: "The beginner's well-known propensity for obtruding uopn his own privacy, by introducing himself, into his first novel, owes less to the attraction of a ready theme than to the relief of getting rid of oneself, before going on to better things." In fact most of the book will remind the readers of his autobiography Speak, Memory (a masterpiece and a huge personal favourite), specially the masterful and unforgettable chapter 12 of the book in which he writes about "Tamara" (Valentina Shulgin in real life), his adolescent love. He in fact says that "headier extract of personal reality" is contained in romanticisation (that is, this book) as compared to his autobiography which is more distanced. He then claims that this apparent paradox has a simple explanation: "in terms of years, Ganin was three times closer to his past than I was to mine in Speak, Memory"

Mary is set in the Russian emigre colony of Berlin. Our hero Ganin lives in a residential apartment which houses other immigrants who fled Russia after the revolution and the civil war. The story starts when Ganin sees the photograph of one of his co-resident's wife who is about to arrive in Berlin from Russia and recognises in her his adolescent love Mary. This event sparks off a chain of reveries about the time he spent with Mary in Russia, which fills up most of the rest of the book. This is of course vintage Nabokov territory and it is nice to see that he had already found his unique voice and style (mostly the extreme sensuousness of his prose) in his first book. His reminiscences are interspliced with characters and events in his current life in Berlin, which a little disappointingly, never really come fully alive. It is never dull but it is also not Nabokov. To get a real portrait of emigre literary circle in Berlin one has to again go back to Speak, Memory. I don't know the reason why Nabokov chose not to make Ganin a full-fledged writer or artist and set the story in a more typical artistic circle, the kind he was used to. The characters here are artists too, and Ganin himself is a man of obvious artistic temperament but it is still a pretty humdrum environment. Most of them are extras in films, ballet and struggling and forgotten poets.

Ganin in the end is able to convice himself that Mary might still be in love with him and it might still be possible to continue from where they lost each other. Thinking this, he plans to whisk her away when she arrives in Berlin after incapacitating her husband through inebriation. But at the last moment the sudden realization of the unalterable finality of the break with the past dawns on him and he leaves off for a different place on his own and alone:

As Ganin looked up at the skeletal roof in the ethereal sky he realized with merciless clarity that his affair with Mary was ended forever. It had lasted no more than four days - four days which were perhaps the happiest days of his life. But now he had exhausted his memories, was sated by them, and the image of Mary, together with that of the old dying poet, now remained in the house of ghosts, which itself was already a memory.
Other than that image no Mary existed, nor could exist.

This is one of the recurrent motifs in Nabokov's fiction - the interplay between the idea created in one's imagination by memory and its counterpart physical reality. Like Ganin, Nabokov also chose to live with the idea of home and idea of Russia. In one of his interviews he said that even if the Russian government would allow him to return he wouldn't go there because his Russia didn't exist anymore, not in the physical reality. He also refused to make a home for himself anywhere else. He spent his entire life, after he gained financial independence, living in a hotel! It was as if making a new home for oneself was betraying or repudiating the idea of home one had in one's imagination and that idea was so "real" to him that he didn't feel the need for a real, replacement home. The character of Mary in this sense also represents the idea of home and idea of Russia itself. This correspondence is again much clearer and explicit in Speak, Memory than it is here but it is definitely present in this book too.

Overall it is definitely one of Nabokov's minor works, somewhat dispensable if one has read Speak, Memory but it is still great to see how it all began. It is also immensely interesting to identify themes, images and metaphors that would reappear again and again in his later work. For example this description about an advertising sign reminded me of Nabokov's short story Signs and Symbols about a paranoiac young man in a mental asylum who thinks that everything in nature (clouds, wind etc.) is trying to tell something to him, only it is encoded and indecipherable. But then who can tell what it really is that flickers up there in the dark above the houses - the luminous name of a product or the glow of human thought; a sign, a summons, a question hurled into the sky and suddenly getting a jewel-bright, enraptured answer?

Or elsewhere the comparison of letters with butterflies which is there in the "Tamara" chapter of Speak, Memory too: There was something touching and wonderful about the way letters managed to pass across the terrible Russia of that time - like a cabbage white butterfly flying over the trenches.

The book has fewer Nabokovian touches - the language tricks, the word games, self-conscious cleverness - which actually puts off many readers but which I really like. There is for example this description of shaving: Softened by flakes of lather, the bristles on his taut skin steadily crepitated as they fell to the little steel ploughshare of his safety razor. Ploughshare of a safety razor! I am going to remember this image the next time I shave!!

The final words on the book to Nabokov himself who anticipated criticule (nice word!) of his book:

Because of the unusual remoteness of Russia, and because of nostalgia's remaining throughout one's life an insane companion, with whose heartrending oddities one is accustomed to put up in public, I feel no embarrassment in confessing to the sentimental stab of my attachment to my first book. Its flaws, the artifacts of innocence and inexperience, which any criticule could tabulate with jocose ease, are compensated for me (the sole judge in this case and court) by the presence of several scenes (convalescence, barn concert, boat ride) which, had I thought of it, should have been transported virtually intact into the later work.

Four Nabokovs

An extract from The Magician's Doubts: Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction by Michael Wood. Even more interesting in the context of all the recent commentary and moral outrage about V.S. Naipaul's biography: (An excellent book by the way. Serious and challenging but entirely free of the clique-ish mentality which mars most academic books. Thanks to Steve for nudging me to pick it up. I have only read the first chapter so far called "The Deaths of the Author". More when I am done with it.)

***********

What does it mean to separate, for whatever reason, the person and the writer, or as Eliot lugubriously puts it, "the man who suffers and the mind which creates"? Who is Nabokov, and how many Nabokovs do we need? [...] I also think we have to be prepared for the ghosts, for the unruliness of the mystery. No lively self will stay buried merely for our critical or conceptual comfort, and there will be times when even the most divided or hypothetical of writers will look undeniably solid and whole.
So how many Nabokovs? Four or five, perhaps, but that's being economical. The man in several persons, and the writer perhaps even more...


1) the historical person whose life has been impeccably told by his biographer Brian Boyd, and whom I glance at occasionally here, but who is not my principal subject.

2) a set (also historical) of attitudes, prejudices, habits, remarks, performances which is highly visible, highly stylized, and which I find dull and narrow, and having almost nothing to do with the writing I admire: Nabokov the mandarin.

3)a (real) person I guess at but who keeps himself pretty well hidden: he is not only tender and observant but also diffident, even scared worried about almost everything the mandarin so airily dismisses. I would think this person was a sentimental invention of my own if Nabokov's texts were not demonstrably so full of him, and if I had any reason to invent him. Given the choice I would prefer another Nabokov in his place - someone less predictably the obverse of the haughty public presence. This diffident, doubting person is the one I think of most often as the author in Barthes' later sense: the textual revenant rather than the face on the dustjacket..

4) identifiable habits of writing and narrating: mannered, intricate, alliterative, allusive, perverse, hilarious, lyrical, sombre, nostalgic, kindly, frivolous, passionate, cruel, cold, stupid, magical, precise, philosophical and unforgettable. Particular clusters of these characteristics are what we identify as Nabokov the author in Swift's sense: the performance on the sheets of paper.

Nabokov Interview

Nabokov and Lionel Trilling discuss Lolita and other assorted stuff in this TV interview - in two parts here and here.

Some of his interviews collected in the very entertaining Strong Opinions are also available online. You have scroll down to the text in English.

Pale Fire or Silvery Light?

Excuse: Kubla Khan's post about Pale Fire.

Isn't this cover amazing? It is one of the most beautiful looking books ever.

Some extracts, just to clear some mysteries about the title of the novel. In case you don't know about the novel the wikipedia link is here. Yes that's where the title of the blog comes from.

***

Excerpted Poem by John Shade and the Commentary by Charles Kinbote.

And while this lasted all I had to do
Was close my eyes to reproduce the leaves,
Or indoor scene, or trophies of the eaves.

Lines 39-40: Was close my eyes, etc.

These lines are represented in the drafts by a variant reading:

39 .............and home would haste my thieves,
40 The sun with stolen ice, the moon with leaves

One cannot help recalling a passage in Timon of Athens (Act IV, Scene 3) where the misanthrope talks to the three marauders. Having no library in the desolate log cabin where I live like Timon in his cave, I am compelled for the purpose of quick citation to retranslate this passage into English prose from a Zemblan poetical version of Timon which, I hope, sufficiently approximates the text, or is at least faithful to its spirit*:

The sun is a thief: she lures the sea
and robs it. The moon is a thief:
he steals his silvery light from the sun.
The sea is a thief: it dissolves the moon.

For a prudent appraisal of Conmal’s translations of Shakespeare’s works, see note to line 962.

Dim Gulf was my first book (free verse);
Night Rote Came next;
then Hebe’s Cup, my final float
In that damp carnival, for now I term
Everything "Poems," and no longer squirm.
(But this transparent thingum does require
Some moondrop title. Help me, Will! Pale Fire.)

Line 962: Help me, Will. Pale Fire.

Paraphrased, this evidently means: Let me look in Shakespeare for something I might use for a title. And the find is "pale fire." But in which of the Bard’s works did our poet cull it? My readers must make their own research. All I have with me is a tiny vest pocket edition of Timon of Athens — in Zemblan! It certainly contains nothing that could be regarded as an equivalent of "pale fire" (if it had, my luck would have been a statistical monster).

*Original Shakespeare has the following:

The sun's a thief, and with his great attraction
Robs the vast sea; the moon's an arrant thief,
And her pale fire she snatches from the sun;
The sea's a thief, whose liquid surges resolves
The moon into salt tears;

Note how the Zemblan translator changes the gender of the Sun and the Moon. Such fun at the cost of a poor translator!

Philistines and Philistinism

This also appears in Nabokov's Lectures on Russian Literature. In the book an advertisement used as illustration accompanies the text. Published here without permission.

Philistines and Philistinism
Vladimir Nabokov

A philistine is a full-grown person whose interests are of a material and commonplace nature, and whose mentality is formed of the stock ideas and conventional ideals of his or her group and time. I have said "full-grown person" because the child or the adolescent who may look like a small philistine is only a small parrot mimicking the ways of confirmed vulgarians, and it is easier to be a parrot than to be a white heron. "Vulgarian" is more or less synonymous with "philistine": the stress in a vulgarian is not so much on the conventionalism of a philistine as on the vulgarity of some of his conventional notions. I may also use the terms genteel and bourgeois. Genteel implies the lace-curtain refined vulgarity which is worse than simple coarseness. To burp in company may be rude, but to say "excuse me" after a burp is genteel and thus worse than vulgar. The term bourgeois I use following Flaubert, not Marx. Bourgeois in Flaubert's sense is a state of mind, not a state of pocket. A bourgeois is a smug philistine, a dignified vulgarian.

A philistine is not likely to exist in a very primitive society although no doubt rudiments of philistinism may be found even there. We may imagine, for instance, a cannibal who would prefer the human head he eats to be artistically colored, just as the American philistine prefers his oranges to be painted orange, his salmon pink, and his whiskey yellow. But generally speaking philistinism presupposes a certain advanced state of civilization where throughout the ages certain traditions have accumulated in a heap and have started to stink.

Philistinism is international. It is found in all nations and in all classes. An English duke can be as much of a philistine as an American Shriner or a French bureaucrat or a Soviet citizen. The mentality of a Lenin or a Stalin or a Hitler in regard to the arts and the sciences was utterly bourgeois. A laborer or a coal miner can be just as bourgeois as a banker or a housewife or a Hollywood star.

Philistinism implies not only a collection of stock ideas but also the use of set phrases, clichés, banalities expressed in faded words. A true philistine has nothing but these trivial ideas of which he entirely consists. But it should be admitted that all of us have our cliché side; all of us in everyday life often use words not as words but as signs, as coins, as formulas. This does not mean that we are all philistines, but it does mean that we should be careful not to indulge too much in the automatic process of exchanging platitudes. On a hot day every other person will ask you, "Is it warm enough for you?" but that does not necessarily mean that the speaker is a philistine. He may be merely a parrot or a bright foreigner. When a person asks you, "Hullo, how are you?" it is perhaps a sorry cliché to reply, "Fine"; but if you made to him a detailed report of your condition you might pass for a pedant and a bore. It also happens that platitudes are used by people as a kind of disguise or as the shortest cut for avoiding conversation with fools. I have known great scholars and poets and scientists who in the cafeteria sank to the level of the most commonplace give and take.

The character I have in view when I say "smug vulgarian" is, thus, not the part-time philistine, but the total type, the genteel bourgeois, the complete universal product of triteness and mediocrity. He is the conformist, the man who conforms to his group, and he also is typified by something else: he is a pseudo-idealist, he is pseudo-compassionate, he is pseudo-wise. The fraud is the closest ally of the true philistine. All such great words as "Beauty," "Love," "Nature," "Truth," and so on become masks and dupes when the smug vulgarian employs them. In Dead Souls you have heard Chichikov. In Bleak House you have heard Skimpole. You have heard Homais in Madame Bovary. The philistine likes to impress and he likes to be impressed, in consequence of which a world of deception, of mutual cheating, is formed by him and around him.

The philistine, in his passionate urge to conform, to belong, to join, is torn between two longings: to act as everybody does, to admire, to use this or that thing because millions of people do; or else he craves to belong to an exclusive set, to an organization, to a club, to a hotel patronage or an ocean liner community (with the captain in white and wonderful food), and to delight in the knowledge that there is the head of a corporation or a European count sitting next to him. The philistine is often a snob. He is thrilled by riches and rank—"Darling, I've actually talked to a duchess!"

A philistine neither knows nor cares anything about art, including literature—his essential nature is anti-artistic—but he wants information and he is trained to read magazines. He is a faithful reader of the Saturday Evening Post, and when he reads he identifies himself with the characters. If he is a male philistine he will identify himself with the fascinating executive or any other big shot—aloof, single, but a boy and a golfer at heart; or if the reader is a female philistine—a philistinette—she will identify herself with the fascinating strawberry-blonde secretary, a slip of a girl but a mother at heart, who eventually marries the boyish boss. The philistine does not distinguish one writer from another; indeed, he reads little and only what may be useful to him, but he may belong to a book club and choose beautiful, beautiful books, a jumble of Simone de Beauvoir, Dostoevski, Marquand, Somerset Maugham, Dr. Zhivago, and Masters of the Renaissance. He does not much care for pictures, but for the sake of prestige he may hang in his parlor reproductions of Van Gogh's or Whistler's respective mothers, although secretly preferring Norman Rockwell.

In his love for the useful, for the material goods of life, he becomes an easy victim of the advertisement business. Ads may be very good ads—some of them are very artistic—that is not the point. The point is that they tend to appeal to the philistine's pride in possessing things whether silverware or underwear. I mean the following kind of ad: just come to the family is a radio set or a television set (or a car, or a refrigerator, or table silver—anything will do). It has just come to the family: Mother clasps her hands in dazed delight, the children crowd around all agog; Junior and the dog strain up to the edge of the table where the Idol is enthroned; even Grandma of the beaming wrinkles peeps out somewhere in the background; and somewhat apart, his thumbs gleefully inserted in the armpits of his waistcoat, stands triumphant Dad or Pop, the Proud Donor.

Small boys and girls in ads are invariably freckled, and the smaller fry have front teeth missing. I have nothing against freckles (in fact I find them very becoming in live creatures) and quite possibly a special survey might reveal that the majority of small American-born Americans are freckled, or else perhaps another survey might reveal that all successful executives and handsome housewives had been freckled in their childhood. I repeat, I have really nothing against freckles as such. But I do think there is considerable philistinism involved in the use made of them by advertisers and other agencies. I am told that when an unfreckled, or only slightly freckled, little boy actor has to appear on the screen in television, an artificial set of freckles is applied to the middle of his face. Twenty-two freckles is the minimum: eight freckles over each cheekbone and six on the saddle of the pert nose. In the comics, freckles look like a case of bad rash. In one series of comics they appear as tiny circles. But although the good cute little boys of the ads are blond or redhaired, with freckles, the handsome young men of the ads are generally dark haired and always have thick dark eyebrows. The evolution is from Scotch to Celtic.

The rich philistinism emanating from advertisements is due not to their exaggerating (or inventing) the glory of this or that serviceable article but to suggesting that the acme of human happiness is purchasable and that its purchase somehow ennobles the purchaser. Of course, the world they create is pretty harmless in itself because everybody knows that it is made up by the seller with the understanding that the buyer will join in the make-believe. The amusing part is not that it is a world where nothing spiritual remains except the ecstatic smiles of people serving or eating celestial cereals, or a world where the game of the senses is played according to bourgeois rules, but that it is a kind of satellite shadow world in the actual existence of which neither sellers nor buyers really believe in their heart of hearts—especially in this wise quiet country.

Russians have, or had, a special name for smug philistinism—poshlust. Poshlism is not only the obviously trashy but mainly the falsely important, the falsely beautiful, the falsely clever, the falsely attractive. To apply the deadly label of poshlism to something is not only an aesthetic judgment but also a moral indictment. The genuine, the guileless, the good is never poshlust. It is possible to maintain that a simple, uncivilized man is seldom if ever a poshlust since poshlism presupposes the veneer of civilization. A peasant has to become a townsman in order to become vulgar. A painted necktie has to hide the honest Adam's apple in order to produce poshlism.

It is possible that the term itself has been so nicely devised by Russians because of the cult of simplicity and good taste in old Russia. The Russia of today, a country of moral imbeciles, of smiling slaves and poker-faced bullies, has stopped noticing poshlism because Soviet Russia is so full of its special brand, a blend of despotism and pseudo-culture; but in the old days a Gogol, a Tolstoy, a Chekhov in quest of the simplicity of truth easily distinguished the vulgar side of things as well as the trashy systems of pseudo-thought. But poshlists are found everywhere, in every country, in this country as well as in Europe—in fact poshlism is more common in Europe than here, despite our American ads.

On Russian Literature

I have been reading this remarkable and useful anthology of writings excerpted from the Nineteenth Century Russian Literature. The short introduction to the volume is very nice too. The editor in the introduction makes this interesting point:

Literature in Russia played a far broader role than in other societies. While Winston Churchill's History of the English-Speaking Peoples does not even list Shakespeare in its index, it would be unimaginable for a history of the Russian people not to give lion's share of attention to the country's great writers. They were an artistic, spiritual, and social force. Russian readers (and censors and opponents) looked to the great novelists, poets and playwrights for plots, characters and ideas expressive of the chief issues of their age.

And this is exactly what I love about the Russian literature. They are so deeply rooted in a specific time and place, and yet they paradoxically remain timeless and manage to address universal concerns and questions.

Of course Nabokov would scoff at this idea -- reading books of fiction to learn about culture, history or philosophy! He says, in his essay on Dead Souls, that only a fool would want to read the novel to learn about Russian countryside or life in nineteenth century provincial Russia. (I remember being very impressed with the chracter portraits (or caricatures) and the way Gogol captured life and the landscapes in the countryside and the provinces. It is one of my favourite novels ever. It is certainly one of the funniest books I have ever read.) Similarly Nabokov says that only a lazy and a philistine reader would read Gogol's story The Overcoat as a denunciation of the horrors of Russian bureaucracy.

But neither the person who wants a good laugh, nor the person who craves for books "that make one think" will understand what The Overcoat is really about. Give me the creative reader; this is the tale for him.

To Nabokov literature is all about experimenting with the langauge, inventing new ways of saying things, playing with words, metaphors and images. And this is what he expects from a "creative reader" of Gogol. Needless to say, it is a very narrow view of what literature is about, although certainly a valid one in its own right. I find this formalistic or narrowly aestheticised readings very boring. I am happy to be a philistine. Thank you, Mr. Nabokov. I will continue to read novels to learn about history, culture and philosophy! There is also a funny essay on Philistines and Philistinism in the Nabokov volume. Will write about it later.

From Nabokov's Lectures on Russian Literature

From Nabokov's Lectures on Russian Literature...

On "The Good Reader":

[...]It is he--the good, the excellent reader--who has saved the artist again and again from being destroyed by emperors, dictators, priests, puritans, philistines, political moralists, policemen, postmasters, and prigs. Let me define this admirable reader. He does not belong to any specific nation or class. No director of conscience and no book club can manage his soul. His approach to a work of fiction is not governed by those juvenile emotions that make the mediocre reader identify himself with this or that character and "skip descriptions." The good, the admirable reader identifies himself not with the boy or the girl in the book, but with the mind that conceived and composed the book. [...]The admirable reader is not concerned with general ideas: he is interested in the particular vision

On Russian Literature under communism:

It is difficult to refrain from the relief of irony, from the luxury of contempt, when surveying the mess that meek hands, obedient tentacles guided by the bloated octopus of the state, have managed to make out of that fiery, fanciful free thing--literature. Even more: I have learned to treasure my disgust, because I know that by feeling so strongly about it I am saving what I can of the spirit of Russian literature. Next to the right to create, the right to criticise is the richest gift that liberty of thought and speech can offer. Living as you do in freedom, in that spirital open where you were born and bred, you may be apt to regard stories of prison life coming from remote lands as exagerrated accounts spread by panting fugitives. That a country exists where for almost a quarter of century literature has been limited to illustrating the advertisements of a firm of slave-traders is hardly credible to people for whom writing and reading books is synonymous with having and voicing individual opinions. But if you do not believe in the existence of such conditions, you may at least imagine them, and once you have imagined them you will realize with new purity and pride the value of real books written by free men for free men to read.

On Gogol's Dead Souls:

I repeat however for the benefit of those who like books to provide them with "real people" and "real crime" and a "message" (that horror of horrors borrowed from the jargon of quack reformers) that Dead Souls will get them nowhere.

On Gogol's The Overcoat

The Russian who thinks Turgenev was a great writer, and bases his notion of Pushkin upon Chaykovski's [Tchaikovsky] vile libretti, will merely paddle into the gentlest wavelets of Gogol's mysterious sea and limit his reaction to an enjoyment of what he takes to be whimsical humour and colourful quips. But the diver, the seeker for black pearls, the man who prefers the monsters of the deep to the sunshades on the beach, will find in The Overcoat shadows linking our state of existence to those other states and modes which we dimly apprehend in our rare moments of irrational perception.

***

At this superhigh level of art, literature is of course not concerned with pitying the underdog or cursing the upperdog. It appeals to that secret depth of the human soul where the shadows of other worlds pass like the shadows of nameless and soundless ships.

Best Books of Fiction I Read This Year

I was trying to compile a top 10 list of films that I saw this year but then balked at the idea, after I realised what a huge enterprise that would be. I saw films beginning from January at a rate that would drive any normal person nuts. Most of them were old classics, mostly from Europe. I didn't see many "new" films released in the year although I have tried to make up for it in the last two months. What I didn't do this year was to read a lot of books. But whatever I read was all invariably brilliant. Here's a list of those books:

1. Hunger by Knut Hamsun: By turns funny and harrowing, this portrait of a young struggling writer slowly losing grips on his mind and reality is unlike anything I have read in a long while. Its like an experimental, avant-garde version of Crime and Punishment, only that there is no crime and no punishment in it but in its feverish evocation of the inner life a tormented character it surpasses even Dostoevsky.
2. Youth by J M Coetzee: Although far more clinical and objective in its approach, this is no less harrowing than Hunger in its depiction of the portrait of an artist as a young man. In this largely autobiographical tale, Coetzee tells the story of a young computer programmer working to make his ends meet in harsh winters of London. Our hero reads Rilke and Pound, watches the movies of Antonioni and Bergman and in the nights, longs painfully for a female muse who will spark off the artistic fire in him. Nothing like that ever happens of course and the novel ends without any catharsis or closure or any kind of hope in future. This may sound bleak and indeed it is but in its enthralling depiction of the life of the mind, Youth also is remarkably uplifting by showing that art indeed always triumphs over the misery of life.
3. The Red and the Black by Stendhal: This story of a young and scheming yet romantic and naive social climber who would do anything to get ahead in a society filled with hypocrites, was the biggest literary entertainment of the year for me. There are a few dull pages towards the end, which would be of interest only to students of French history and society in the eighteenth century but overall it is a gripping tale full of romance and intrigue, all served with a most vicious irony and dark humour. I was reading the reviews of Woody Allen's latest film Match Point and the story looks remarkably similar to this book although I suspect the film ends differently.
   
4. The Rings of Saturn by W G Sebald: I didn't know whether to put this book under fiction or non-fiction but since the effects it produced in me are generally associated with imaginative fiction--all very mysterious, very difficult to put in words--a mixture of sadness, loneliness and the feeling of being transported to a different time-space realm, I call it a work of fiction even though it is, at least on surface, a book of facts. I had written about the book earlier here. In fact it was my first post on this blog.
   
5. Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov: I had just finished reading the book when I started this blog in May this year, that's where the 'Zembla' in the title comes from. This story of a mad literary critic, who thinks he is the exiled king of Zembla, the distant northern land, writing 200 page annotation on the 999 line eponymous poem by his friend John Shade, is often hilarious, frequently inscrutable (because of its obscure literary allusions, at least for literary newbies like me) but is always insightful about how literature works. And that poem...brilliant, dark and very funny!
   

There were few other books too. Immortality by Milan Kundera, Some plays by Ibsen including the classic A Doll's House, Sebald's Vertigo, a few short stories by Nabokov including the brilliant Admiralty Spire, Mario Vargas Llosa's Who Killed Palomino Molero?. Everything was uniformally brilliant. Great entertainment and great education from each single one of them.

That's pretty much all that I read this year in fiction. I wrote about the non-fiction books here.

Cloud, Castle, Lake

Okay, another obligatory post on Nabokov (obligatory because of the title of the blog). I have recently finished reading five stories by Nabokov collected under the title of one of them, Cloud, Castle, Lake. Actually the book is published by Penguin as a part of its seventieth anniversary which falls this year.

As is typical of any Nabokov writing, there is lot of "showing off" in each of the stories (which I mean totally as a compliment), in terms of word games, striking imageries, metaphors and literary allusions. One story that really struck me in particular was the first one called "The Admiralty Spire". The narrator of the story, who remains unnamed, is writing a letter to the author of a sentimental, romantic novel (called "The Admiralty Spire") to protest, as he claims, against the fictional use of his own love affair, that he once was involved in, in his youth. In process he indulges in literary criticism which is sometimes very curious and at other times very enlightening. For example he claims that he can identify the correct gender (behind the male pseudonym) with the way the sentences in the novel always "button to the left"! At other places he expounds further on Russian and French authors and poets and questions her uses of images and symbols which he claims are derivative and cliched. He then explains his own love story (which he does wonderfully) to correct the "misrepresentations". In the end the narrator reveals or at least claims that the writer of the novel is no one else but Katya herself, the girl he loved, which only mystifies the story further. Very nicely done overall. I totally forgot the dreariness of the two-hour Bangalore-Calcutta flight journey because of the story. Yes, it took me two hours to read the six-seven pages. But then which other writer will use words like "chatoyant" in a casual description of an evening in a garden!

Nabokov's Strong Opinions

Nabokov, just as he is famous for the great books he wrote, is equally known for his arrogant, olympian disdain and aristocratic dismissal of some of the greatest names in literature, many his contemporaries but also the writers of the past and well entrenched in the canon (he called Cervantes a cruel sadist). What is specially delightful about reading his interviews and comments is the way in which he goes about doing the demolition job. He obviously relishes it and somehow as a reader I always find something very charming in his arrogance, even when he is speaking about some of my favourite writers. For example, here is Nabokov on Dostoevsky:

Dostoevski, who dealt with themes accepted by most readers as universal in both scope and significance, is considered one of the world's great authors. Yet you have described him as "a cheap sensationalist, clumsy and vulgar." Why?

Non-Russian readers do not realize two things: that not all Russians love Dostoevski as much as Americans do, and that most of those Russians who do, venerate him as a mystic and not as an artist. He was a prophet, a claptrap journalist and a slapdash comedian. I admit that some of his scenes, some of his tremendous, farcical rows are extraordinarily amusing. But his sensitive murderers and soulful prostitutes are not to be endured for one moment-- by this reader anyway.

And another outburst on Dostoevsky:

Dostoevski the publicist is one of those megaphones of elephantine platitudes (still heard today), the roar of which so ridiculously demotes Shakespeare and Pushkin to the vague level of all the plaster idols of academic tradition, from Cervantes to George Eliot (not to speak of the crumbling Manns and Faulkners of our times).

Here is another example, where he dismisses one writer after the other (including our own Tagore--"a person called Tagore", sigh!). He obviously never found any value in having a literary circle of his own. Good for him.

Because of your mastery of our language, you are frequently compared with Joseph Conrad.

Well, I'll put it this way. When a boy, I was a voracious reader, as all boy writers seem to be, and between 8 and 14 I used to enjoy tremendously the romantic productions-- romantic in the large sense-- of such people as Conan Doyle, Kipling, Joseph Conrad, Chesterton, Oscar Wilde, and other authors who are essentially writers for very young people. But as I have well said somewhere before, I differ from Joseph Conradically. First of ail, he had not been writing in his native tongue before he became an English writer, and secondly, I cannot stand today his polished cliches and primitive clashes. He once wrote that he preferred Mrs. Garnett's translation of Anna Karenin to the original! This makes one dream-- "ca fait rever" as Flaubert used to say when faced with some abysmal stupidity. Ever since the days when such formidable mediocrities as Galsworthy, Dreiser, a person called Tagore, another called Maxim Gorky, a third called Romain Rolland, used to be accepted as geniuses, I have been perplexed and amused by fabricated notions about so-called "great books". That, for instance, Mann's asinine Death in Venice or Pasternak's melodramatic and vilely written Zhivago or Faulkner's corncobby chronicles can be considered "masterpieces," or at least what journalists call "great books," is to me an absurd delusion, as when a hypnotized person makes love to a chair. My greatest masterpieces of twentieth century prose are, in this order: Joyce's Ulysses,Kafka's Transformation, Biely's Petersburg, and the first half of Proust's fairy tale In Search of Lost Time.

Nabokov defining Poshlost is the most hilarious of all but I will save that for another post.