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VN Bibliography: Laure Trubetskaya (Paris, Sorbonne) "Easter Rain"
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NABOKV-L will be running the available abstracts from Nora Buhks' Nabokov conference at the Sorbonne last November. The conference proceedings will be published. Most of the papers are in Russian, although I give the abstracts in English.
"The First 'Mademoiselle': The Forgotten Story 'Easter Rain'"
The recently discovered Nabokov story "Easter Rain" was published in the spring of 1925 and written almost a year earlier. The heroinne, Josephine Lvovna, foreshadows "Mademoiselle O" in may ways but in the 1924 tale the retrospective viewpoint connecting the image of the governess with the theme of creative memory is completely absent. The old Swiss woman's sterile nostalgia is here associated with the un-Nabokovian motif of Russian Easter which is met only in his early verse. One of these poems, ("Molitva" [A Prayer]), devoted to the resurrection of the Russian language and written simultaneously with "Easter Rain", sheds some light on the sense of the story. At first addressing the image of his former governess, Nabokov creates an ironic text blending poetic prose with grotesque elements even creating a sort of literary manifesto that lends the story a certain narrative ambivalence. This may explain why Nabokov "forgot" this first incarnation of "Mademoiselle."
"The First 'Mademoiselle': The Forgotten Story 'Easter Rain'"
The recently discovered Nabokov story "Easter Rain" was published in the spring of 1925 and written almost a year earlier. The heroinne, Josephine Lvovna, foreshadows "Mademoiselle O" in may ways but in the 1924 tale the retrospective viewpoint connecting the image of the governess with the theme of creative memory is completely absent. The old Swiss woman's sterile nostalgia is here associated with the un-Nabokovian motif of Russian Easter which is met only in his early verse. One of these poems, ("Molitva" [A Prayer]), devoted to the resurrection of the Russian language and written simultaneously with "Easter Rain", sheds some light on the sense of the story. At first addressing the image of his former governess, Nabokov creates an ironic text blending poetic prose with grotesque elements even creating a sort of literary manifesto that lends the story a certain narrative ambivalence. This may explain why Nabokov "forgot" this first incarnation of "Mademoiselle."