Subject
Pushkin's African ancestor, VN,
& Dwight McDonald:An Obscure Nabokov Article and Comic Aftermath
(fwd)
& Dwight McDonald:An Obscure Nabokov Article and Comic Aftermath
(fwd)
Date
Body
From: Phillip Iannarelli <Iann88@aol.com>, Cleveland, Ohio
After I recently read "Pale Fire" for the first time, I wanted to read Mary
Mccarthy's famous " Encounter" article on the book. I found the l962, volume
nineteen of "Encounter" at my library, but before I turned to McCarthy's
article in the October issue, I was curious to find out what else was going
on in l962, and so started flipping through earlier issues when lo and
behold I found in the July issue, pp. ll-26, the following, "Pushkin and
Gannibal" by Vladimir Nabokov, "a sketch which deals mainly with the
mysterious origin of Pushkin's African ancestor" his great-grandfather, Abram
Petrovich Annibal. The article was a complex, detailed, and scholarly study
which I was not in the mood to tackle.
I flipped forward to the subsequent issues to see if there were any reactions
to the article and found one in the September issue in the "Letters" section.
It was written by Dwight MacDonald of New York City.
"Having slogged, stumbled, staggered, slipped (and skipped) through the dense
fifteen-page thicket of Vladimir Nabokov's 'Pushkin and Gannibal,' an
inchoate accumulation of scholarly trivia in the worst tradition of American
academic research, I think I'm entitled to ask some questions.
"What is Mr. Nabokov up to, exactly, since 'Lolita'? Is he, from some
Puritanical scruple, punishing the admirers of that exhilarating jeu
d'esprit, among whom I myself, by now subjecting us to such pedantic
mystifications as 'Pale Fire' and such midden-heaps of undigested facts as
'Pushkin and Gannibal' (which actually succeeds in making something connected
with Pushkin extremely boring)? Or is he perhaps trying to prove that despite
the popular success of 'Lolita' (and of the movie, whose screenplay he
wrote) he is still a respectable member of the intellectual establishment?
If so, may I assure him that many of us prefer his livelier, more
disreputably literary side -- as displayed in 'Lolita,' 'Pnin,' and his
superbly unacademic little volume on Gogol -- to these recent manifestations,
which seem to me to be controlled by the spirit of that Dr. Kinbote whom he
thinks he is satirising in 'Pale Fire' but who seems to have taken demonic
possession of his creator, so that the book and the present article are in
the Kinbotean rather than the Nabokovian mode?
"Finally, would the editors of ENCOUNTER have printed Mr. Nabokov's fifteen
pages had they been submitted by an unknown graduate student at say, Cornell
University?"
The Editors of Encounter responded to Mr. MacDonald with:
"But then would we have published Mr. MacDonald's letter had it been
submitted by some unknown humorless reader from say, Greenwich Village? --
Ed. Note
And then Mr. Nabokov's response followed:
"Criticism is valid only when illustrated with examples. Mr. Dwight MacDonald
offers none. Hence his criticism can apply only to a delusion (especially
since he conjures up an 'unknown graduate student' -- who would have been the
redemption and glory of my years of professorship, had that student ever
existed).
Vladimir Nabokov
Zermatt
(Note: Dwight MacDonald, l906-l982, began as a far-left political writer who
eventually became a writer for "The New Yorker.")
After I recently read "Pale Fire" for the first time, I wanted to read Mary
Mccarthy's famous " Encounter" article on the book. I found the l962, volume
nineteen of "Encounter" at my library, but before I turned to McCarthy's
article in the October issue, I was curious to find out what else was going
on in l962, and so started flipping through earlier issues when lo and
behold I found in the July issue, pp. ll-26, the following, "Pushkin and
Gannibal" by Vladimir Nabokov, "a sketch which deals mainly with the
mysterious origin of Pushkin's African ancestor" his great-grandfather, Abram
Petrovich Annibal. The article was a complex, detailed, and scholarly study
which I was not in the mood to tackle.
I flipped forward to the subsequent issues to see if there were any reactions
to the article and found one in the September issue in the "Letters" section.
It was written by Dwight MacDonald of New York City.
"Having slogged, stumbled, staggered, slipped (and skipped) through the dense
fifteen-page thicket of Vladimir Nabokov's 'Pushkin and Gannibal,' an
inchoate accumulation of scholarly trivia in the worst tradition of American
academic research, I think I'm entitled to ask some questions.
"What is Mr. Nabokov up to, exactly, since 'Lolita'? Is he, from some
Puritanical scruple, punishing the admirers of that exhilarating jeu
d'esprit, among whom I myself, by now subjecting us to such pedantic
mystifications as 'Pale Fire' and such midden-heaps of undigested facts as
'Pushkin and Gannibal' (which actually succeeds in making something connected
with Pushkin extremely boring)? Or is he perhaps trying to prove that despite
the popular success of 'Lolita' (and of the movie, whose screenplay he
wrote) he is still a respectable member of the intellectual establishment?
If so, may I assure him that many of us prefer his livelier, more
disreputably literary side -- as displayed in 'Lolita,' 'Pnin,' and his
superbly unacademic little volume on Gogol -- to these recent manifestations,
which seem to me to be controlled by the spirit of that Dr. Kinbote whom he
thinks he is satirising in 'Pale Fire' but who seems to have taken demonic
possession of his creator, so that the book and the present article are in
the Kinbotean rather than the Nabokovian mode?
"Finally, would the editors of ENCOUNTER have printed Mr. Nabokov's fifteen
pages had they been submitted by an unknown graduate student at say, Cornell
University?"
The Editors of Encounter responded to Mr. MacDonald with:
"But then would we have published Mr. MacDonald's letter had it been
submitted by some unknown humorless reader from say, Greenwich Village? --
Ed. Note
And then Mr. Nabokov's response followed:
"Criticism is valid only when illustrated with examples. Mr. Dwight MacDonald
offers none. Hence his criticism can apply only to a delusion (especially
since he conjures up an 'unknown graduate student' -- who would have been the
redemption and glory of my years of professorship, had that student ever
existed).
Vladimir Nabokov
Zermatt
(Note: Dwight MacDonald, l906-l982, began as a far-left political writer who
eventually became a writer for "The New Yorker.")