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VN's LATH and Zoshchenko
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Speaking of Zoshchenko, the hero of his Vozvrashchyonnaya molodost' ("Retrieved Youthfulness", 1933) is ageing professor who marries a young woman only to be struck down by paralysis soon afterwards. This reminded me of Vadim, the hero of VN's LATH, who gets paralyzed soon after marrying his last love (forty-three years younger than her husband).
Nearly all his life Vadim Vadimovich suffered from a mysterious mental illness. Mikhail Mikhailovich Zoshchenko (1895-1958), the writer famous for his humorous stories (who is mentioned in Chapter Four of The Gift), was, at the beginning of his career, a neurotic. In his "Before the Sunrise" (1944, 1972) he tells how he once spent 24 hours lying supine on the floor of his hotel room in Tuapse (a spa on the Caucasian Black sea coast). Tuapse is mentioned in LATH when the hero nearly drowns during a moonlight swim: "I was too upset in all senses to tell whether I was heading for Yalta or Tuapse" (Part One, 7). Cf. Nochnaya panika plovtsa (a swimmer's panic in the night), a line from Vadim's poem Vlyublyonnost'.
Alexey Sklyarenko
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Nearly all his life Vadim Vadimovich suffered from a mysterious mental illness. Mikhail Mikhailovich Zoshchenko (1895-1958), the writer famous for his humorous stories (who is mentioned in Chapter Four of The Gift), was, at the beginning of his career, a neurotic. In his "Before the Sunrise" (1944, 1972) he tells how he once spent 24 hours lying supine on the floor of his hotel room in Tuapse (a spa on the Caucasian Black sea coast). Tuapse is mentioned in LATH when the hero nearly drowns during a moonlight swim: "I was too upset in all senses to tell whether I was heading for Yalta or Tuapse" (Part One, 7). Cf. Nochnaya panika plovtsa (a swimmer's panic in the night), a line from Vadim's poem Vlyublyonnost'.
Alexey Sklyarenko
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/