https://padlet.com/jeffreyemartinek/2x8enff2rycyfxgf en-us 2023-04-25 15:21:06 UTC 2023-06-26 17:10:34 UTC hello@padlet.com jeffreyemartinek https://padlet.com/jeffreyemartinek/2x8enff2rycyfxgf/wish/2567432179 2023-04-25 15:27:26 UTC https://padlet.com/jeffreyemartinek/2x8enff2rycyfxgf/wish/2567432179 jeffreyemartinek https://padlet.com/jeffreyemartinek/2x8enff2rycyfxgf/wish/2567438301 2023-04-25 15:31:32 UTC https://padlet.com/jeffreyemartinek/2x8enff2rycyfxgf/wish/2567438301 jeffreyemartinek https://padlet.com/jeffreyemartinek/2x8enff2rycyfxgf/wish/2567439477 2023-04-25 15:32:21 UTC https://padlet.com/jeffreyemartinek/2x8enff2rycyfxgf/wish/2567439477 jeffreyemartinek https://padlet.com/jeffreyemartinek/2x8enff2rycyfxgf/wish/2567442423 2023-04-25 15:34:21 UTC https://padlet.com/jeffreyemartinek/2x8enff2rycyfxgf/wish/2567442423 jeffreyemartinek https://padlet.com/jeffreyemartinek/2x8enff2rycyfxgf/wish/2567444229 2023-04-25 15:35:35 UTC https://padlet.com/jeffreyemartinek/2x8enff2rycyfxgf/wish/2567444229 jeffreyemartinek https://padlet.com/jeffreyemartinek/2x8enff2rycyfxgf/wish/2567445970 2023-04-25 15:36:46 UTC https://padlet.com/jeffreyemartinek/2x8enff2rycyfxgf/wish/2567445970 jeffreyemartinek https://padlet.com/jeffreyemartinek/2x8enff2rycyfxgf/wish/2567453223 Vladimir Nabokov : Novels and Memoirs 1941-1951 : The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Bend Sinister, Speak, Memory (Library of America) Hardcover – October 1, 1996]]> 2023-04-25 15:41:26 UTC https://padlet.com/jeffreyemartinek/2x8enff2rycyfxgf/wish/2567453223 jeffreyemartinek https://padlet.com/jeffreyemartinek/2x8enff2rycyfxgf/wish/2577617640 "This re-Englishing of a Russian re-version of what had been an English re-telling of Russian memories in the first place, proved to be a diabolical task, but some consolation was given me by the thought that such multiple metamorphosis, familiar to butterflies, had not been tried by any human before" (364)]]> 2023-05-04 02:59:53 UTC https://padlet.com/jeffreyemartinek/2x8enff2rycyfxgf/wish/2577617640 jeffreyemartinek https://padlet.com/jeffreyemartinek/2x8enff2rycyfxgf/wish/2577627407 I did not realize that versions of almost every chapter had been published in American magazines in the late 40's/early 50's, primarily The New Yorker, but also The Atlantic  and Harpers.]]> 2023-05-04 03:09:15 UTC https://padlet.com/jeffreyemartinek/2x8enff2rycyfxgf/wish/2577627407 jeffreyemartinek https://padlet.com/jeffreyemartinek/2x8enff2rycyfxgf/wish/2577657121 The first paragraph of chapter one is one of the greatest ever written in English --- prose that is as rich, compressed, modulated, and moving as any work of poetry.  It is both a masterful statement of the themes of the book and a bid for immortality.  He is showing that he can out-Proust Proust in his profound engagement the problems of time, memory, the past, and death.  

The image of the not-yet-occupied baby carriage as having the "smug encroaching air of a coffin" (369) is as bizarre and chilling as anything from the metaphysical poets.  And it contracts in one image his entire point about the "two eternities of darkness" that make birth and death mirror images of each other --- in the imagination at least --- the only place where time is fully reversible. ]]> 2023-05-04 03:40:35 UTC https://padlet.com/jeffreyemartinek/2x8enff2rycyfxgf/wish/2577657121 jeffreyemartinek https://padlet.com/jeffreyemartinek/2x8enff2rycyfxgf/wish/2578797125 2023-05-04 20:18:53 UTC https://padlet.com/jeffreyemartinek/2x8enff2rycyfxgf/wish/2578797125 jeffreyemartinek https://padlet.com/jeffreyemartinek/2x8enff2rycyfxgf/wish/2578803055 2023-05-04 20:26:04 UTC https://padlet.com/jeffreyemartinek/2x8enff2rycyfxgf/wish/2578803055 jeffreyemartinek https://padlet.com/jeffreyemartinek/2x8enff2rycyfxgf/wish/2578814915 This is another example of Nabokov in a self-consciously proustian mode --- another all time masterpiece of a paragraph, bookending the famous first one.

The image of his father being tossed aloft and caught by the peasants in celebration of his magnanimous gesture as "the good barin" is rendered in poetic and spiritual terms, but also shadowed by premonitions of history and politics.  The "primly pessimistic" governess comments pointedly "Un jour ils vont le laisser tomber"  [one day they will let him fall] -- which of course they will, once the Russian Revolution gets underway.  The tradition of tossing the "good barin" in the air against his own will takes on ominous overtones --- it's an expression of appreciation and acceptance of the class system and the ancien regime, while at the same time implying the power of the people to "let them fall."  The paragraph too falls, from the lofty heights of the father "reclining, as if for good, against the cobalt blue of the summer noon" to the final image of the "open coffin."  Note:  Nabokov's father, a liberal reformist politicians, would be murdered in Berlin in 1922 by Tsarist assassins.]]> 2023-05-04 20:42:06 UTC https://padlet.com/jeffreyemartinek/2x8enff2rycyfxgf/wish/2578814915 jeffreyemartinek https://padlet.com/jeffreyemartinek/2x8enff2rycyfxgf/wish/2580119550 From the Wikipedia article on "Speak, Memory":

The book's opening line, "The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness," is arguably a paraphrase of Thomas Carlyle's "One Life; a little gleam of Time between two Eternities," found in Carlyle's 1840 lecture "The Hero as Man of Letters," published in On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and The Heroic in History in 1841. There is also a similar concept expressed in On the nature of things by the Roman Poet Lucretius.^{[citation needed]} The line is parodied at the start of Little Wilson and Big God, the autobiography of the English writer Anthony Burgess. "If you require a sententious opening, here it is. Wedged as we are between two eternities of idleness, there is no excuse for being idle now."]]> 2023-05-06 03:51:20 UTC https://padlet.com/jeffreyemartinek/2x8enff2rycyfxgf/wish/2580119550 jeffreyemartinek https://padlet.com/jeffreyemartinek/2x8enff2rycyfxgf/wish/2586028417 You all know me, but I thought I'd invite each participant to say a few words about themselves to the others.]]> 2023-05-10 19:50:38 UTC https://padlet.com/jeffreyemartinek/2x8enff2rycyfxgf/wish/2586028417 jeffreyemartinek https://padlet.com/jeffreyemartinek/2x8enff2rycyfxgf/wish/2586120248 2023-05-10 22:00:43 UTC https://padlet.com/jeffreyemartinek/2x8enff2rycyfxgf/wish/2586120248 jeffreyemartinek https://padlet.com/jeffreyemartinek/2x8enff2rycyfxgf/wish/2590090190 Nabokov begins Chapter two again in high Proustian mode --- with a kind of poetic phenomenology of the contents and operations of his own mind.  Given his enormous ego and pretentions to absolute mastery as a writer, there is a touching vulnerability in what he reveals here about the burdens and terrors of his own hyperactive imagination.  The "hallucinations" are both auditory and visual.  The auditory:  "a kind of one-sided conversation going on in an adjacent section of my mind, quite independently from the actual trend of my thoughts" (380).  As for the visual ones, David Lynch please note:  "They are often grotesque. I am pestered by roguish profiles, by some coarse-featured and florid dwarf with a swelling nostril or ear" (380).  

We can still hear his pride in self-possession, however, in his insistence that he looks upon his own "mild hallucinations" "with interest, with amusement, seldom with admiration or disgust" (380).  He calls them "silly" and that even while experiencing them, Nabokov insists, "he [meaning himself] is still master of his senses" (380).  

And while Nabokov's jihad against Freud is not specifically referenced here, I believe it is in the subtext:  this production of the imagination is no "royal road" to personal enlightenment,  no cause for alarm, panic, or recourse to analysis.  It holds no master key to the subject's innermost truth -- it is simply an amusing spectacle to be taken in, described in the most vivid and precise language possible, and appreciated an epiphenomenon of an exquisitely active, sensitive, and well-stocked mind.


]]> 2023-05-14 15:08:15 UTC https://padlet.com/jeffreyemartinek/2x8enff2rycyfxgf/wish/2590090190 jeffreyemartinek https://padlet.com/jeffreyemartinek/2x8enff2rycyfxgf/wish/2590211625 Another spectacular passage from a section that focuses on young Vladimir's relationship with his mother.  She is credited throughout as his inspiration and guide in an aesthetic existence.  We learn on p. 382 that she was a fellow "synesthete" when it came the earlier described phenomenon of "colored hearing."

Here the action is narrated from an impossible position -- the young boy in the throes of fevered delirium is somehow able to perceive every detail of his mother's journey to Treumann's stationary shop --- down to the clacking scrotum of the horse pulling her sleigh.  And of course the paragraph ending in the middle of page 384 is clearly an homage to Proust:  ". . . and as I write this, the touch of reticulated tenderness that my lips use to feel when I kissed her veiled cheek comes back to me --- flies back to me with a shout of joy out of the snow-blue, blue-windowed (the curtains are not yet drawn) past."

I would also posit that the war against Freud continues sub rosa in his revelation that the gift was a giant pencil "four feet long and correspondingly thick" (384). The master of diabolical chess problems is trying to flush out the Freudians from their hiding places --- DARING them to call this giant pencil "a phallic symbol" and to reduce his gorgeously-embroidered descriptions of his intimate relationship with his mother as the "desire for the mother, " etc.]]> 2023-05-14 18:33:15 UTC https://padlet.com/jeffreyemartinek/2x8enff2rycyfxgf/wish/2590211625 jeffreyemartinek https://padlet.com/jeffreyemartinek/2x8enff2rycyfxgf/wish/2591963136 Another lovely and nearly self-contained set piece on "the Russian sport of hodit' po gribi (looking for mushrooms) continues the reflections on the narrator's mother.  Much of this section illustrates the principles of literary composition laid out in Nabokov's Lectures on Literature --- especially the idea that the writer and ideal reader should have the imagination of the artist combined with the precise observational skills of the trained scientist. Nabokov's background in biology comes through here in perhaps pedantically specific discussion of the different types of mushrooms to be found on the Vyrna estate.  Still it's in service of a celebration of the lost and magical Russian landscape of his childhood:  "Its shady recesses would then harbor the special boletic ree, which makes a Russian's nostrils diate -- a dark, dank, satisfying blend of damp moss, rich earth, rotting leaves" (390).

The final passage on his mother's mushroom-hunting treasure is curiously studded, again, with ominous premonitions of the future disaster and exile. The mushrooms themselves are "bundled away by a servant to a place she knew nothing about, to a doom that did not interest her" (391). Still bearing bits and pieces of the Russian soil they've been ripped from, the prefigure the soon-to-be-exiled family. Even more so the final image: "And a tiny caterpillar would be there, too, measuring, like a child's finger and thumb, the rim oft he table, and every now and then stretching upward to grope, in vain, for the shrub from which it had been dislodged" (391).]]> 2023-05-15 22:28:10 UTC https://padlet.com/jeffreyemartinek/2x8enff2rycyfxgf/wish/2591963136 jeffreyemartinek https://padlet.com/jeffreyemartinek/2x8enff2rycyfxgf/wish/2591967946 A brilliant character sketch in miniature of the "bleary, incredibly wrinkled old woman (born a slave around 1830) with the small face of a melancholy tortoise and big shuffling feet" (391).   This senile old servant, who is allowed to believe that she has the real keys to the larder, reminded me of Felicite in Flaubert's short story "Un Couer Simple" -- the old lady who clings to her moldy stuffed parrot as her sole connection to the world. Nabokov's old woman is described as "Sole mistress of her moldy and remote little kingdom, which she thought was the real one (we would have starved had it been so), she was followed by the mocking glances of lackeys and maids as she steadily plodded through long corridors to store away half an apple of a couple of broken Petit-Beurre biscuits she had found on a plate" (392). Like Flaubert's Felicite, there is something sublime and pathetic in her --- one of the many exiled monarchs living in a kingdom of their imagination, and doing the artists work of hoarding the smallest crumbs of the true and lost kingdom of memory.]]> 2023-05-15 22:38:27 UTC https://padlet.com/jeffreyemartinek/2x8enff2rycyfxgf/wish/2591967946 jeffreyemartinek https://padlet.com/jeffreyemartinek/2x8enff2rycyfxgf/wish/2595271264 Nabokov introduces a curious elliptical cut towards the end of chapter two when recounting the story of his and his brother's disobedience to his mother on a Christmas morning.  They were told not to open their Christmas stockings until they were in her presence, but examined the stocking nevertheless, opened the gifts, then crudely re-wrapped them and pretended to be surprised when they opened the stockings in from of their mother (393).  Here is what follows:

"after observing us for a moment, our audience [his mother] burst into tears.  A decade passed.  World War One started.  A crowd of patriots and my uncle Ruka stoned the German Embassy.  St. Petersburg was sunk to Petrograd against all rules of nomenclatorial priority.  Beethoven turned out to be Dutch.  The newsreels showed photogenic explosions, the spasm of a cannon, Poincare in his leathern leggings, bleak puddles, the poor little Tsarevich in Circassian uniform with dagger and cartridges, his tall sisters so dowdily dressed, long railway trains crammed with troops (393).

"A decade passed.  World War One started."

Probably two of the shortest sentences Nabokov ever wrote!  What a quick cut! there--- but why?

What does World War One have to do with this painfully personal memory of his mother crying upon learning that her little sons had deceived her over opening a Christmas stocking?

The connection between lying and the war --- in terms of wartime propaganda --- is stressed when he offhandedly remarks that [according to wartime Russian propagand, one assumes] "Beethoven turned out to be Dutch."  And St. Petersburg is crudely rewrapped by patriot Russian propagandists as "Petrograd" -- "against all rules of nomenclatorial priority" (393).

Still, I think the most important effect achieved here is balance between a happy and secure domestic life (where boyish naughtiness is the worst crime known) and the tragic history that stands just outside the blissful family circle, waiting to destroy everything.  The war intrudes into the domestic narrative suddenly, violently, relentlessly, and without warning.  For this memoir it is the "expulsion from Paradise" moment, with exile and personal and national tragedy dominating the future.

By connecting the two incidents is he imitating the thought process of a child, who somehow in the depths of his mind connects the minor sin of lying to mama and her unexpectedly intense reaction with the end of their domestic paradise?



]]> 2023-05-17 21:15:32 UTC https://padlet.com/jeffreyemartinek/2x8enff2rycyfxgf/wish/2595271264 jeffreyemartinek https://padlet.com/jeffreyemartinek/2x8enff2rycyfxgf/wish/2595284843 Bottom of page 394:

With the story now shifted into high speed, we are suddenly past World War One and the entire family, having lost their estate and everything in the Russian Revolution, is in exile --- the parents in Berlin and Nabokov and his brother at Cambridge.

We get a brief description of the parents' "eminently bourgeois" Berlin apartment as the boys visit their parents from the UK.  Then this:  "On the night of March 28, 1922, around ten o'clock, in the living room where as usual my mother was reclining on the red-plush corner couch, I happened to be reading to her Blok's verse on Italy----had just got to the end of the little poem about Florence, which Blok compares to the delicate, smoky bloom of an iris, and she was saying over her knitting, "Yes, yes, Florence does look like a dimniy iris, how true!  I remember---"  when the telephone rang."

"After 1923, when she moved to Prague. . ."  (394)

What is going on here?  What is the phone call?  And why is the exact moment of the phone call remembered with such precise detail?  If the phone call is so important, why is not discussed in the text? And why the new jump cut -- a year now-- to 1923 with his mother in Prague?

March 28, 1922 was the day Nabokov's father was assassinated in Berlin by Tsarist terrorists while attending a conference:

Wikpedia's entry describes V.D. Nabokov's murder as follows:

"Nabokov attended a CD [Russian Constitutional Democrat Party] political conference in Berlin on 28 March 1922. During the proceedings, Pyotr Shabelsky-Bork and Sergey Taboritsky approached the stage singing the Tsarist national anthem and then opened fire on liberal politician and publisher Pavel Milyukov. In response, Nabokov jumped off the stage and wrestled the gunman down to the floor. Taboritsky then shot Nabokov twice, killing him instantly. The assailants failed even to wound their intended target Milyukov."

So Nabokov leads us to perhaps the most important single moment in his life --- the moment his family learns of his father's murder---and leaves a massive gap.  We get the serenity of the emigre apartment, the dutiful visiting sons, one reading Blok's poem on Venice to his mother, the shared appreciation for Blok's apt simile comparing Venice to the "smoky bloom of an iris"; we get all this, with the description of the moment before the cataclysm drawn out to the limit.  It's a pattern in this memoir ---as the author dwells on the sweet and precise details of intimate and familial pleasure as a way of holding off---through imagination at least --- the brutalities of history.

What is left out tells us a great deal about Nabokov's attitude towards personal tragedy.  We got the mother's tears after the Christmas stocking incident, but not after the father's murder.  No intimate family details of how the news was received, what happened next, etc.  Just another discrete quick cut to 1923, with his mother a widow who spends final emigre days playing cards with lady companions: "on her finger is two marriage rings---her own and my father's, which being too large for her, is fastened to hers by a bit of black thread" (395).  

]]> 2023-05-17 21:37:15 UTC https://padlet.com/jeffreyemartinek/2x8enff2rycyfxgf/wish/2595284843 emitflestifugit https://padlet.com/jeffreyemartinek/2x8enff2rycyfxgf/wish/2596798981 Pg. 399: "After divorcing her first husband, Justizrat Graun, the composer's son, in 1795, [Elisabeth Fischer] married the minor poet Christian August von Stägemann, and was the 'motherly friend,' as my German source puts it, of a much better-known writer, Heinrich von Kleist (1777-1811), who, at thirty-three, had fallen passionately in love with her twelve-year-old daughter Hedwig Marie (later von Olfers)."

Was this an inspiration for Lolita?  ]]> 2023-05-18 22:42:30 UTC https://padlet.com/jeffreyemartinek/2x8enff2rycyfxgf/wish/2596798981 jeffreyemartinek https://padlet.com/jeffreyemartinek/2x8enff2rycyfxgf/wish/2608065538 I had a lot of distractions recently, so it took me a while to get through chapter 3.  Although it has some amusing anecdotes, it's definitely not one of my favorites so far.  Their are fewer proustian rhapsodies and sumptuous descriptive passages.  Nabokov here is mostly in what I will call "Gore Vidal" mode ---- filling us in on the various branches of his aristocratic family tree with lots of gossip and name dropping.   He piles on names and dates with pedantic precision that make it an overwhelming and confusing experience for the non-genealogically-obsessed.  But that seems to be part of the point:  When you are a member of his class, part of your charge is to remember and honor ancestors as well as ancestral estates and holdings and to continually burnish the honor and reputation of the family name, demonstrating its centuries of importance to European politics and culture.

The Nabokovs, the von Korffs, etc. are members of the European elite going back centuries and Nabokov is eager to demonstrate the depth and detail of his genealogical knowledge.  Of course they are always crossing paths with history and or the most famous and important people in European politics and culture. 

We learn, for example,  that Heinrich von Kleist was turned away by one of his great-grandmothers  from saying adieu before heading off to complete a suicide pact because it was "laundry day" (399). We also get the story of young Pushkin arranging and then calling off one of his many duels on the family's Batavo estate (408).  You can read the complete scorecard of Pushkin's duel's here:  https://rinatim.com/2016/12/03/alexander-pushkins-duels/ .  Spoiler -- most end in cancellation -- until French officer George d'Anthes mortally wounds Pushkin in 1837.

There is also a full discussion of "Le Chemin de Pendu"  ("path of the hanged one") near the Batavo estate (see map on p. 368).  The "hanged one" is  Kondraty Ryleyev  (or Rileev, as Nabokov styles it) - Russian romantic poet, intellectual, dissident and leader of the Decembrist coup attempt or 1825.

We also get a fairly throwaway claim that a baroness in his family tree "in 1791, lent her passport and her brand-new custom-made traveling coach. . . . to the [French] royal family for their [unsuccessful] escape to Varennes" --- a key turning point in the French Revolution (401).

]]> 2023-05-29 17:15:51 UTC https://padlet.com/jeffreyemartinek/2x8enff2rycyfxgf/wish/2608065538 jeffreyemartinek https://padlet.com/jeffreyemartinek/2x8enff2rycyfxgf/wish/2632641544 2023-06-26 16:02:08 UTC https://padlet.com/jeffreyemartinek/2x8enff2rycyfxgf/wish/2632641544 jeffreyemartinek https://padlet.com/jeffreyemartinek/2x8enff2rycyfxgf/wish/2632652397 2023-06-26 16:22:53 UTC https://padlet.com/jeffreyemartinek/2x8enff2rycyfxgf/wish/2632652397 jeffreyemartinek https://padlet.com/jeffreyemartinek/2x8enff2rycyfxgf/wish/2632659119 2023-06-26 16:35:24 UTC https://padlet.com/jeffreyemartinek/2x8enff2rycyfxgf/wish/2632659119 jeffreyemartinek https://padlet.com/jeffreyemartinek/2x8enff2rycyfxgf/wish/2632666591 2023-06-26 16:51:27 UTC https://padlet.com/jeffreyemartinek/2x8enff2rycyfxgf/wish/2632666591 jeffreyemartinek https://padlet.com/jeffreyemartinek/2x8enff2rycyfxgf/wish/2632670980 2023-06-26 16:59:18 UTC https://padlet.com/jeffreyemartinek/2x8enff2rycyfxgf/wish/2632670980 jeffreyemartinek https://padlet.com/jeffreyemartinek/2x8enff2rycyfxgf/wish/2632675504 2023-06-26 17:08:08 UTC https://padlet.com/jeffreyemartinek/2x8enff2rycyfxgf/wish/2632675504