Happy Birthday, VN!

Posted on by

By the Old Style I was born on April 10, at daybreak, in the last year of the last century, and that was (if I could have been whisked across the border at once) April 22 in, say, Germany; but since all my birthdays were celebrated, with diminishing pomp, in the twentieth century, everybody, including myself, upon being shifted by revolution and expatriation from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian, used to add thirteen, instead of twelve days to the 10th of April. The error is serious. What is to be done? I find “April 23” under “birth date” in my most recent passport, which is also the birth date of Shakespeare, my nephew Vladimir Sikorski, Shirley Temple and Hazel Brown (who, moreover, shares my passport). This, then, is the problem. Calculatory ineptitude prevents me from trying to solve it.

 - Conclusive Evidence (1951) / Speak, Memory (1951) / Drugie Berega (1954) / Speak, Memory – An Autobiography Revisited (1966)

An aside…

Posted on by

I’ve been rereading VNs novels in chronological order of original release on the Kindle; as I expected the integrated dictionary, Wikipedia, and Google search have proven invaluable to the process of streamlining the Nabokov reading experience. I never take my eyes off the glowing rectangle my similarly immobile hands hold before my gaze. Starting with Mary (in English translation… I’m not hardcore enough to know Russian) I’ve now worked my way up to Laughter in the Dark, which I am about to finish and will then move on to Despair; probably sometime this weekend. One thing I was reminded of when I got to Laughter in the Dark was its lack of a foreword. It’s the only one of Nabokov’s translated novels that lacks a foreword because it was translated by Nabokov himself into English in 1938 following a translation by a second party he was unsatisfied with. Despair was translated by Nabokov himself the year before making it the actual first fiction Nabokov wrote in the English language; however, Nabokov rewrote the novel to a large extent in a second translation in 1965–the edition almost all English readers are familiar with. This makes Laughter in the Dark for all intents and purposes the oldest English-language Nabokov work your Nabokov fan off the street will be able to read, coming as it does a full three years before The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, the first novel composed in English.

Two especially key features for rereading Nabokov on the Kindle is the ability to highlight specific passages, and the ability to make notes within the text. An interesting thing I noticed is that Glory has the largest number of highlights; that is to say I’ve highlighted the largest number of individual passages in Glory compared to the other novels before Mary, as well as Pale Fire and Speak, Memory which I read out of order because I like them a lot. I don’t have a way to easily know the volume of highlights in, say, word count as opposed to number of highlights, so I am left to assume that Glory would likely be ahead in this measurement as well. What to make of this? Glory, an early-middle Russian-language novel steeped in 1930s Berlin emigre apocrypha with a sweet enough disposition, if an ultimately minor work in the scheme of things, has somehow managed to outstrip both Pale Fire (a work I freely acknowledge as VN’s masterpiece, if not my personal favorite) and Speak, Memory (the work I recommend to new readers over the rote Lolita owning to S,M‘s accessibility and familiar, relatively easy-to-digest conceit and structure) in the number of phrases highlighted. I wonder if it’s due at all to Glory being the last of Nabokov’s Russian-language novels translated into English, making it the novel to benefit the most experience gathered from Nabokov’s thirty years of translating his own work into English, and given his puritanical views on fidelity to the original text, the closest any English readers will get to experiencing what it’s like to read Nabokov in his native Russian?

That night neither mother nor son could sleep…

Posted on by

…and both thought about death. Sofia tried to think in an undertone, that is, without sobbing or sighing (the door to her son’s room was ajar). She recalled again, punctiliously and in detail, everything that had led up to her separation from Edelweiss. Going over every instant, she saw clearly that in this circumstance and in that she could not have acted otherwise. But still a mistake lurked hidden somewhere; still, if they had not parted, he would not have died like that, alone in an empty room, suffocating, helpless, perhaps recalling their last year of happiness.

She firmly believed in a certain power that bore the same resemblance to God as the house of a man one has never seen, his belongings, his greenhouse and beehives, his distant voice, heard by chance in an open field, bear to their owner. It would have embarrassed her to call that power “God,” just as there are Peters and Ivans who cannot pronounce “Pete” or “Vanya” without a sensation of falsity. This power had no connection with the Church, and neither absolved nor chastised any sins. It was just that she sometimes felt ashamed in the presence of a tree, of a cloud, of a dog, or of the air itself that bore an ill word just as religiously as a kind one. And now Sofia, as she thought about her unpleasant, unloved husband and about his death, even though she repeated the words of prayers natural to her ever since childhood, actually strained her whole being so that—fortified by two or three happy memories, through the mist, through great extensions of space, through all that would always remain incomprehensible—she might give her husband a kiss on the forehead.

 - Podvig (1932) / Glory (1971)