Stalking Nabokov

by Brian Boyd

  16. Nabokov, Lolita, trans. into French by Eric Kahane (Paris: Gallimard, 1959).

  17. Nabokov, Lolita, trans. Vladimir Nabokov (New York: Phaedra, 1967), p. 245.

  18. Gennady Barabtarlo, Aerial View: Essays on Nabokov’s Art and Metaphysics (New York: Peter Lang, 1993), 135–38. The dates become more specific for several reasons: Nabokov’s style evolved consistently towards greater chronological detail; he felt he needed to identify for Russian readers in the late 1960s a period that was more self-evident to the Americans for whom he was writing in the early 1950s; and to correct inconsistencies he had noticed.

  19. Dolinin, “Dvoinoe vremia u Nabokova,” 39.

  20. Tekiner, “Time in Lolita,” 468. Nabokov’s reason for having Ray not mention murder, of course, is to avoid spoiling the sublime surprise of Humbert’s first page: “You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style” (11).

  21. Connolly, “ ‘Nature’s Reality,’ ” 45.

  22. Toker, Nabokov: The Mystery, 210, realizes the awkwardness of the screenplay to her case, but rules it out as “a totally new work. . . . The screenplay, therefore, cannot be used to settle moot points in the novel.” It is indeed, as Nabokov says, “a vivacious variant” (LAS xiii) on the novel, not a bland transposition, but as the examples will make clear, the screenplay strives even in its changes to be true to the novel.

  23. Toker is particularly confused. According to her version, Humbert does not plan ahead; his slightly reformed feelings for Lolita develop only as he suddenly begins to fantasize, from the point he writes about receiving Lolita’s letter to the end of his composing the narrative (Nabokov: The Mystery, 211, 217, 218). But in that case Humbert does not discover who Quilty is until he writes the Coalmont scene, yet at the very moment she tells him who her abductor was, he comments: “Quietly the fusion took place, and everything fell into order, into the pattern of branches that I have woven throughout this memoir with the express purpose of having the ripe fruit fall at the right moment” (Lolita 274). In other words, he has planned Quilty’s peek-a-boo presence from the first.

  24. Tekiner, “Time in Lolita,” 466 (followed by Connolly, “ ‘Nature’s Reality,’ ” 51–52), suggests that Humbert identifies Quilty from Who’s Who in the Limelight in the psychiatric institution where—according to her—Humbert writes up his manuscript. (Rejecting the murder, Tekiner, “Time in Lolita,” 468, rules out prison but does not explain why Humbert suddenly finds himself in a psychiatric institution, when his life with Rita seems perfectly stable; Dolinin is convinced that Humbert is happily sitting in his study, hoodwinking the reader.) Why Humbert should have read through the thousands of entries in Who’s Who in the Limelight and realized the relevance of the brief Quilty entry, when he has for years come nowhere near to suspecting Quilty, seems anything but clear. True, Lolita did lie that “Quilty” was the “gal author” (Lolita 223), but why would Humbert persist in reading through a fat biographical tome until he found this one clue when he had never made any connection between Lolita’s disappearance and the playwright of the play in which she was to star?

  25. Dolinin, “Dvoinoe vremia u Nabokova,” 37.

  26. Quilty, of course, has posed as Lolita’s uncle in taking her from the Elphinstone hospital.

  27. He has: and that description on p. 243 confirms the equation between Elphinstone and the vista of the moral apotheosis.

  23. LITERATURE, PATTERN, LOLITA; OR, ART, LITERATURE, SCIENCE

  1. William Deresiewicz, “Professing Literature in 2008,” The Nation, March 24, 2008, http://www.thenation.com/article/professing-literature-2008; also see Critical Inquiry Symposium Special Issue, Critical Inquiry 30 (2004); Louis Menand, “Dangers Within and Without,” Profession (2005): 10–17.

  2. See, for instance, Patrick Colm Hogan, The Mind and Its Stories: Narrative Universals and Human Emotion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Joseph Carroll, Literary Darwinism: Evolution, Human Nature, and Literature (New York: Routledge, 2004); Jonathan Gottschall and David Sloan Wilson, eds., The Literary Animal: Evolution and the Nature of Narrative (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2005); Marcus Nordlund, Shakespeare and the Nature of Love: Literature, Culture, and Evolution (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2007); David Bordwell, Poetics of Cinema (New York: Routledge, 2008); Jonathan Gottschall, The Rape of Troy: Evolution, Violence, and the World of Homer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Gottschall, Literature, Science, and a New Humanities (New York: Palgrave, 2008); Edward Slingerland, What Science Has to Offer the Humanities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Denis Dutton, The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Evolution (New York: Bloomsbury, 2009); Brian Boyd, On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009); Harold Fromm, The Nature of Being Human: From Environmentalism to Consciousness (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009); Blakey Vermeule, Why Do We Care About Literary Characters? (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009); Brian Boyd, Joseph Carroll, and Jonathan Gottschall, eds., Evolution, Literature, and Film: A Reader (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010).

  3. The term was coined by John Tooby and Irwin DeVore, “The Reconstruction of Hominid Behavioral Evolution Through Strategic Modelling,” in The Evolution of Human Behavior: Primate Models, ed. W. G. Kinzey (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987), 183–237.

  4. Daniel Goleman, Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships (New York: Bantam, 2006), 361; Ellen Dissanayake, Art and Intimacy: How the Arts Began (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000), 29.

  5. Stephen Jay Gould, The Flamingo’s Smile: Reflections in Natural History (New York: Norton, 1985), 199; Gould, Bully for Brontosaurus: Further Reflections in Natural History (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992), 268, also supplies the Purcell quotation.

  6. Robert Solso, Cognition and the Visual Arts (Cambridge, Mass.: Bradford/MIT, 1994), 52.

  7. John Sloboda, “Power of Music,” New Scientist, November 29, 2003, 38.

  8. Brian Sutton-Smith, The Folk-Stories of Children (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981), 53–54.

  9. Sutton-Smith, The Folk-Stories of Children, 110–11.

  10. See, for instance, Lisa Aziz-Zadeh et al., “Congruent Embodied Representations for Visually Presented Actions and Linguistic Phrases Describing Actions,” Current Biology 16 (2006): 1818–23.

  11. See Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “The Marriage of Geraint” (1857), ll. 184–86: “And while they listened for the distant hunt, / And chiefly for the baying of Cavall, / King Arthur’s hound of deepest mouth” (The Poems of Tennyson, ed. Christopher Ricks, 2nd ed. [London: Longman, 1987], 3:330). Although the detail derives ultimately from the tale of “Geraint the Son of Erbin” in the Mabinogion, Nabokov may have encountered it in Thomas Bulfinch, The Age of Chivalry and The Legends of Charlemagne, or Romance of the Middle Ages (1858; New York: New American Library, 1962), 229: “Now this is how Arthur hunted the stag. The men and the dogs were divided into hunting-parties, and the dogs were let loose upon the stag. And the last dog that was let loose was the favorite dog of Arthur; Cavall was his name. And he left all the other dogs behind him and turned the stag.”

  12. Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Frank Justus Miller (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1921), 3.206–8.

  13. James R. Flynn, What Is Intelligence? Beyond the Flynn Effect (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

  24. “PALE FIRE”: POEM AND PATTERN

  1. Ron Rosenbaum to Mo Cohen, June 7, 2010.

  2. Alvin Kernan, “Reading Zemblan: The Audience Disappears in Nabokov’s Pale Fire” (1982), in Vladimir Nabokov: Modern Critical Views, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1987), 106. Shade’s image strikingly recalls an even more extended image that the narrator Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev paraphrases from a Discourse on Shades by the invented French thinker Pierre Delalande, in Nabokov’s last Russian novel, T
he Gift: “I know that death in itself is in no way connected with the topography of the hereafter, for a door is merely the exit from the house and not a part of its surroundings, like a tree or a hill. One has to get out somehow, ‘but I refuse to see in a door more than a hole, and a carpenter’s job’ (Delalande, Discours sur les ombres, p. 45). And then again: the unfortunate image of a ‘road’ to which the human mind has become accustomed (life as a kind of journey) is a stupid illusion: we are not going anywhere, we are sitting at home. The other world surrounds us always and is not at all at the end of some pilgrimage. In our earthly house, windows are replaced by mirrors; the door, until a given time, is closed; but air comes in through the cracks” (Gift, 321–22).

  3. Ángel Gurría-Quintana, “Orhan Pamuk: The Art of Fiction Interview No. 187,” Paris Review 175 (Fall–Winter 2005): 139–40.

  4. Peter Atkins, Galileo’s Finger: The Ten Great Ideas of Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 139.

  5. Helen Vendler, The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1997), 29, xvii, 12, 28, 31.

  6. See D. Barton Johnson, “A Field Guide to Nabokov’s Pale Fire: Waxwings and the Red Admiral,” in The Real Life of Pierre Delalande: Studies in Russian and Comparative Literature to Honor Alexander Dolinin, 2 vols., ed. David M. Bethea, Lazar Fleishman, and Alexander Ospovat (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 2:652–73.

  7. The words Hazel asks her parents to gloss, “grimpen,” “chthonic,” and “sempiternal,” identify what Shade dismisses as “some phony modern poem that was said / In English Lit to be a document ‘Engahzay and compelling’—what this meant / Nobody cared” (PF 46). For more on Shade’s polemical engagement with Eliot, see NPFMAD. For Nabokov’s, see his chapter “First Poem” (written in July–August 1948), which in the first version of his autobiography contains this passage: “For I did not know [as a poet in his mid-teens] that beyond the archipelago there was the continent; that beyond mere verse, rime-bangled or blank, fettered or free, falsely clear or falsely recondite (concealing triteness beneath ashen obscurities—the waste product of some recognized religion) there existed a Russian prose which borrowed its romantic sweep from science and its terse precision from poetry” (CE 158; italics added); see also the parodies of “Gerontion” and “Ash Wednesday” in Lolita, and more jabs in Ada. Interestingly, although Shade singles out three rare words as a means of referring obliquely but unequivocally to Eliot, his diction in “Pale Fire” is actually more diverse than Eliot’s in Four Quartets: 369 unique words per 1,000, versus 287 unique words per 1,000 for Four Quartets (2,821 types [different words] in the 7,632 tokens [occurrences of any word] of Shade’s poem, 1,937 types in the 6,732 tokens of Eliot’s), and despite the apparent homeliness of Shade’s poem and the foregrounded exoticism and stylistic innovation in Eliot’s.

  8. Kathleen Raine, The Collected Poems of Kathleen Raine (Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 2001).

  9. “Transformation . . . Transformation is a marvelous thing,” Nabokov used to tell his students: see N’sBs 472.

  10. As first noted by Johnson, “A Field Guide to Nabokov’s Pale Fire,” 2:652–73.

  11. http://www.birds.cornell.edu/AllAboutBirds/BirdGuide/Wood_Duck_dtl.html.

  12. Nabokov, Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revised, ed. Brian Boyd (New York: Knopf, 1999), 248.

  13. Nabokov, Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revised, 250.

  14. Robert Michael Pyle (personal communication).

  15. Better known as the West Virginia White, Pieris virginiensis; see NPFMAD 135–37.

  16. Note the species names: the Toothwort White is Pieris virginiensis (Hazel, like Lucette in Ada, drowns herself because she feels doomed to remain a virgin); the wood duck is Aix sponsa, sponsa meaning “bride.”

  25. ADA: THE BOG AND THE GARDEN; OR, STRAW, FLUFF, AND PEAT: SOURCES AND PLACES IN ADA

  1. Paul H. Fry, “Moving Van: The Neverland Veens of Nabokov’s Ada,” Contemporary Literature 26, no. 2 (1985): 123–39; Wilma Siccama and Jack Vander Weide, “Een sleutel in Meppel: Nederlandse aantekeningen bij Vladimir Nabokovs Ada,” Maatstaf 6 (1995): 17–27.

  2. Nicolas Freeling, Double-Barrel (London: Victor Gollancz, 1964). Citations will be from the Penguin edition (Harmondsworth: 1967), hereafter DB. Nabokov “rediscovered” the surname because “there was a Cornell professor van Veen whose name was painted on the letterbox of a home in Highland Road, Cayuga Heights, Ithaca, when Nabokov was living further along Highland Road in 1957” (BB, “Annotations to Ada 1: Part 1 Chapter 1,” The Nabokovian 30 [Spring 1993]: 26); also see AdaOnline.

  3. Time, August 4, 2003, 12.

  4. The Nabokov summer estates of Vyra, Rozhdestveno, and Batovo were surrounded by bogs and by places whose names reflected that terrain, like Gryazno (“Muddy,” a village just to the north of Vyra: see Nabokov’s not-always-reliable map in SM), Chornaya Rechka (“Black Brook,” after its peaty water), Gryaznaya (“Muddy,” again: the sluggish short river running past the Rozhdestveno manor). See Dmitri Ryabov, Toponimiya Verkhnego Pooredezh’ya: Slovar’-spravochnik (St. Petersburg: Muzey-usad’ba “Rozhdestveno,” 1995).

  5. Which makes him sound exactly like the background characters in Double-Barrel.

  6. Further confirmation of how closely Nabokov consulted the area of Drenthe in a detailed map of the Netherlands can be seen in the name Valthermond, a town lying between three veen towns to the north (Eexterveen, Gieterveen, and Gasselternijeveen) and three to the south (Emmer-Erfscheidenveen, Klazienaveen, and Barger-Oosterveen). To anyone who knows Ada the town’s name suggests both Walter (Demon) Veen and Van’s nom de plume in Letters from Terra, Voltemand. And since Voltemand is a courtier in Hamlet, and the most Hamlet-saturated chapter of Ada takes place while Van is at Voltemand Hall, we should note in Ada book 1, chapter 5, the doubling of Gamlet (a village in the boggy area near Ardis but also the Russian transcription of “Hamlet”) and Torfyanka (or Tourbière), whose name means “peaty”: in other words, a veen-Hamlet conjunction from Van’s first arrival at Ardis. Also see note 21 and text.

  7. “All the hundred floramors opened simultaneously on September 20, 1875 (and by a delicious coincidence the old Russian word for September, ‘ryuen,’ which might have spelled ‘ruin,’ also echoed the name of the ecstatic Neverlander’s hometown)” (Ada 350). Van notes that Ruinen is “somewhere near Zwolle, I’m told” (350): Zwolle is indeed the nearest city, and a Nabokovian hint that we really should consult a map. An additional significance may be that the family of the great art dealer Joseph Duveen, certainly in Nabokov’s mind while composing Ada, hailed from Meppel, between Ruinen and Zwolle; for the Duveen theme, see Siccama and Vander Weide, “Een sleutel in Meppel,” 23–25.

  8. From Lucius Annaeus Seneca’s Omnius tempus edax depascitur, omnia carpit; translated by Nabokov in his Vivian Darkbloom notes as “mountains subside and heights deteriorate.” See J. E. Rivers and William Walker, “Notes to Vivian Darkbloom’s Notes to Ada,” 289–90.

  9. Discussed in a Nabokv-L posting, August 25, 1998. Available at http://listserv.ucsb.edu/lsv-cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind9808&L=nabokv-l&P=R4027.

  10. Mario Bussagli, Bosch (Florence: Sadea, 1966), 3; trans. Claire Pace (London:Thames and Hudson, 1967). The source was first identified by Julia Bader, Crystal Land: Artifice in Nabokov’s English Novels (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 147.

  11. Siccama and Vander Weide, “Een sleutel in Meppel,” 25, notes the theme of multiple intermarriage also present in the Duveen clan.

  12. In various places outside Ada, Nabokov discusses eavesdropping in other writers, including in Lermontov (translator’s foreword, A Hero of Our Time, trans. Vladimir Nabokov with Dmitri Nabokov [Garden City, N.Y.: Double-day, 1958], x–xii), in Proust (PF 87 and LL 230), and in Pasternak (Gilliat interview, 279).

  13. It is also a brief minor theme in Nabokov’s autobiography, where he reports that a tutor spied on his dalliances with “Tamara” (Valentina Shulg
ina) and a gardener reported to his mother on the snooping. Nabokov added more details on this matter in each version of the autobiography, the last between November 1965 and January 1966, as he made final revisions to SM, at the time Ada was beginning to take shape in his mind: see VNAY 506.

  14. See also BB, “Annotations to Ada, 7: Part 1 Chapter 7,” The Nabokovian 37 (Fall 1996): 63–64; also see AdaOnline.

  15. See NAPC 51–57, 291–97; BB, “Annotations to Ada, 10: Part 1 Chapter 10,” The Nabokovian 39 (Fall 1997): 43–63; AdaOnline.

  16. BB, “Annotations to Ada, 10,” 50; AdaOnline.

  17. NAPC 51–57, 150–51, 154–55, 215–16, 294–95; “Annotations to Ada, 10,” 57–60; AdaOnline.

  18. For discussion, and a black-and-white reproduction, see NAPC 129–31; that book’s cover reproduces in color the photograph of models and poster.

  19. See BB, “Annotations to Ada, 16: Part 1 Chapter 16,” 54–76, and Liana Marie Arangi Ashenden, “Mimicry, Mimesis, and Desire in Nabokov’s Ada,” M.A. thesis, University of Auckland, 2000.

  20. Nabokov twice associates Eric Veen’s Villa Venuses with Cypros: “Cyprian party” (Ada 399), “Cyprian dreams” (419). Ashenden, “Mimicry, Mimesis, and Desire,” 89.

  21. See note 6.

  22. See BB, “Annotations to Ada, 5: Part 1 Chapter 5,” The Nabokovian 35 (Fall 1995): 56–57; also see AdaOnline.

  23. In a bitter moment, when Ada decides to stay with the dying Andrey Vinelander, Van will explode in scorn: “Helen of Troy, Ada of Ardis!” (Ada 530).