Subject
"Gregor von Rezzori & the Nabokovs"
Date
Body
EDITOR/Author's NOTE. The causal note below is offered in the hope that
someone out there can add to or subtract from it. Or comment.
D. Barton Johnson
Department of Germanic, Slavic and Semitic Studies
Phelps Hall
University of California at Santa Barbara
Santa Barbara, CA 93106
Phone and Fax: (805) 687-1825
Home Phone: (805) 682-4618
---------------------------------------------------
Gregor von Rezzori & the Nabokovs
by
D. Barton Johnson
The Austrian writer, Gregor von Rezzori (1914-1998), is best known for his
novels, Memoirs of an Anti-Semite (Ger. 1979 / Eng. 1981), and The Death
of My Brother Abel (Ger. 1976 / Eng. 1985). A portion (reportedly written
in English) of the former appeared in The New Yorker. Rezzori's father
was a minor aristocrat, a provincial administrator in the Bukovina, then a
part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. After 1919, it was part of Rumania,
and then, in 1940, the Ukraine (Moldavia). Rezzori's own early years are
recounted in a memoir, The Snows of Yesteryear: Portraits for an
Autobiography, which describes his family life in what is now Chernovtsy
a colorful provincial capital of unparalleled ethnic diversity. Chernovtsy
(or Czernowitz) is also the hometown of poet Paul Celan (1920-1970) and of
Israeli novelist Aharon Appelfeld, whose newest novel The Conversion is
set in this town.
The longest section of Rezzori's memoir is devoted to his father, an
avid, nay obsessive, gentleman-hunter. After the Soviet take-over in 1940,
Rezzori's father wrote to him in Vienna that he would remain there. The
memoirist continues; "He still hunted occasionally and cultivated a
special friendship with a Princess Sayn-Wittgenstein, born a
Nabokova---member of a family with whom I was linked by many independently
formed friendships" (189). Princess Elizaveta Dmitrievna (Nabokova)
Sayn-Wittgenstein (1877-1944) was seven years younger than her brother
Dmitri Nabokov, Vladimirs father. In 1900 she married Prince Henri
(Heinrich) Sayn-Wittgenstein-Berleburg whose family owned the large estate
of Druzhnosel'e not far from the Nabokov estates on the Orodezh River.
They also owned a second estate, Kamenka, near, Nabokov says, Popelyukha
in Podolsk province, S.W. Russia. In August 1911 Nabokovs mother took her
children on a visit to her sister-in-law at Kamenka. It was Vladimir's
only visit to a (then) part of Russia (excepting, of course, the
Petersburg area) until his hasty journey to the Crimea in 1917. A
photograph of the Rumanian Sayn-Wittgenstein residence, "Kamenka," may be
seen in the pictures following page 76 of Nabokovskii vestnik (#2)
"Nabokov v rodstvennom okruzhenii" (Petersburg: Dorn, 1998). Nabokov's
aunt, Elizaveta Dmitrievna, and Prince Sayn-Wittgenstein are also
portrayed. The Sayn-Wittgenstein branch of the family is the subject of an
article by A.V.Krasko in the same volume.
Following WW I and the revolution, the surviving Sayn-Wittgensteins fled
from Kiev to their estate in the new nation of Rumania, settling first in
Chernovtsy (Czernowitz, Cernauti) (The Prince had been arrested and shot
when the Bolsheviks took the Kiev, but Nabokovs aunt and the children
were subquently able to reclaim their estate in the newly independent
Rumania.) It is not clear when Rezzori senior first became friendly with
the widowed Princess (who eventually married Roman Leikman, an engineer,
who had formerly been tutor to her children), but they were still friendly
in the late 1930s. At least one other Nabokov settled in his sisters
adopted country. Nabokov's uncle Sergei owned a car dealership in
Bucharest.
Gregor von Rezzori's life did indeed have later intersections with
Nabokovs. These are recounted in his long essay, "A Stranger in
Lolitaland" which initially appeared in Vanity Fair. Rezzori gives an
account of his role in the first German translation of Lolita which was
more or less of a committee project. By the time it came to Von Rezzori
and his colleague, the first draft had already been through the hands of
"a crew of venerable literati so numerous that in a group photograph they
would have resembled the Don Cossack Choir." Rezzori's work inevitably
entailed discussions of interpretations of the Lolita. There were the
usual proposals: old Europe debauching a young America and its
counterpart, young America debauching old Europe; Lolita "as a
delightfully frivolous story on the verge of pornography"; Lolita as "a
literary masterpiece, the only convincing love story of the century," or,
Lolita as "one of the great stories of passion in literature, a deeply
touching story of unfulfillable longing." Rezzori volunteers a variant of
this last. Since "every passionate love can find its image in Humbert's
boundless love for Lolita" "why should it not also reflect the longing
of us Europeans for the fulfillment of our childhood dreams about
America?" The latter half of the novel with Lolita and Humbert's
crisscrossing of the United States leads Rezzori to vow that "humble,
humble me would follow in their tracks." He reviews his childhood images
of America: the colors on his playroom globe, the vast open spaces;
buffalo and skyscrapers, redskins on mustangs, gangsters and molls, black
men playing jazz on saxophones. For post-WW I Europeans, America was the
prospect of a bright future.
"A Stranger in Lolitaland" recounts Rezorri's partial duplication of the
travels of Humbert and Lo. Some thirty years after his fictive
predecessors, Rezzori, accompanied by different aquaintances at different
times (ranging from a phlegmatic, male grad student to a 29-year-old
virgin female), the Austrian writer covered some 13,400 miles by car in
about three months. The trip starts auspiciously with an overnight at
Climax in the Catskills, an area boasting such toponyms as Sodom Road,
Surprise Road, and Coxsackie. After Ithaca, things go downhill, although
occasionally brightened by sightings of a potential Lolita (2 only) and
the sign in the mens room "We aim to please. You aim too, please?" The
obligatory tourist sights are taken in, although "Graceland" happens to be
closed on their day in Memphis. (Were Elvis not "post-Lolita," it would
certainly been a must-see for Hum & Lo.) Rezorri admires only nature and
the vast open spaces, but is mostly struck by the tacky, neon-lit strips
with their fast-food places ("vomitive victuals") and car dealerships that
mark each transition from country to town and town to country. His journey
finds its apotheosis in Las Vegas: "Here I had in its essence, the new
world of the terrible poetic children; Lolitaland in Disneylandish
perfection. The Promised Lands New Jerusalem. Finally I had caught
it,'my' butterfly."
Rezorri's sense of identification with Nabokov is strong. He remarks that
he has been told that he and Nabokov have "certain similarities as
writers, though I am not so conceited as not to see all our differences in
genus as well as in quantity, yet every now and then my vanity seduces me
into thinking there may be some truth in the remark." And some truth there
is in background, attitude, and style. Both were cultured Europea
aristocrats torn from their roots by war and revolution. Rezzori, like
Nabokov, had a procession of governesses (including one who had worked for
Mark Twain's family). Like Nabokov, Rezzori wrote in three languages;
German, English, and Italian. Both men wrote a dense, ornate prose
reflecting centuries of European culture. Both had a keen eye for
descriptive detail. While the Austrian did not have Nabokov's command
of English, he too wrote with a somewhat eccentric flair. After first
appearing in Vanity Fair, his "A Stranger in Lolitaland" was selected for
the Best American Essays volume of 1986 which also contained pieces by
John Barth, John Gregory Dunne, Tom Wolfe, Robert Stone, and Calvin
Trillin.
In Lolita and "A Stranger in Lolitaland " Nabokov and Rezzori seek to
match their childhood images of America with a far different "reality."
Nabokov wrote of America in a spirit of generosity, although not without a
keen eye for poshlost. Rezzori, neither in his Lolitaland nor his novels,
could move beyond a vision of the past. Nabokovs elegant style served
Rezzori as a reminder of a former, more gracious world, when his father
was a frequent guest of Princess Sayn-Wittgenstein at the Kamenka estate
where the twelve-year-old Nabokov visited his aunt three years before the
birth of Rezzori.
I close with two very vagrant thoughts. Might it not be that the Kamenka
estate served as the prototype for the "Marevo" of Nabokovs LATH!; and
his aunt Elizaveta Dmitrievna for the fictive aunt (Baroness Bredow) who
firsts instructs LATHs narrator to "look at the harlequins"? And as an
even more far-fetched thought perhaps Von Rezzori caught a glimpse of
himself in Transparent Things "Baron R."?
someone out there can add to or subtract from it. Or comment.
D. Barton Johnson
Department of Germanic, Slavic and Semitic Studies
Phelps Hall
University of California at Santa Barbara
Santa Barbara, CA 93106
Phone and Fax: (805) 687-1825
Home Phone: (805) 682-4618
---------------------------------------------------
Gregor von Rezzori & the Nabokovs
by
D. Barton Johnson
The Austrian writer, Gregor von Rezzori (1914-1998), is best known for his
novels, Memoirs of an Anti-Semite (Ger. 1979 / Eng. 1981), and The Death
of My Brother Abel (Ger. 1976 / Eng. 1985). A portion (reportedly written
in English) of the former appeared in The New Yorker. Rezzori's father
was a minor aristocrat, a provincial administrator in the Bukovina, then a
part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. After 1919, it was part of Rumania,
and then, in 1940, the Ukraine (Moldavia). Rezzori's own early years are
recounted in a memoir, The Snows of Yesteryear: Portraits for an
Autobiography, which describes his family life in what is now Chernovtsy
a colorful provincial capital of unparalleled ethnic diversity. Chernovtsy
(or Czernowitz) is also the hometown of poet Paul Celan (1920-1970) and of
Israeli novelist Aharon Appelfeld, whose newest novel The Conversion is
set in this town.
The longest section of Rezzori's memoir is devoted to his father, an
avid, nay obsessive, gentleman-hunter. After the Soviet take-over in 1940,
Rezzori's father wrote to him in Vienna that he would remain there. The
memoirist continues; "He still hunted occasionally and cultivated a
special friendship with a Princess Sayn-Wittgenstein, born a
Nabokova---member of a family with whom I was linked by many independently
formed friendships" (189). Princess Elizaveta Dmitrievna (Nabokova)
Sayn-Wittgenstein (1877-1944) was seven years younger than her brother
Dmitri Nabokov, Vladimirs father. In 1900 she married Prince Henri
(Heinrich) Sayn-Wittgenstein-Berleburg whose family owned the large estate
of Druzhnosel'e not far from the Nabokov estates on the Orodezh River.
They also owned a second estate, Kamenka, near, Nabokov says, Popelyukha
in Podolsk province, S.W. Russia. In August 1911 Nabokovs mother took her
children on a visit to her sister-in-law at Kamenka. It was Vladimir's
only visit to a (then) part of Russia (excepting, of course, the
Petersburg area) until his hasty journey to the Crimea in 1917. A
photograph of the Rumanian Sayn-Wittgenstein residence, "Kamenka," may be
seen in the pictures following page 76 of Nabokovskii vestnik (#2)
"Nabokov v rodstvennom okruzhenii" (Petersburg: Dorn, 1998). Nabokov's
aunt, Elizaveta Dmitrievna, and Prince Sayn-Wittgenstein are also
portrayed. The Sayn-Wittgenstein branch of the family is the subject of an
article by A.V.Krasko in the same volume.
Following WW I and the revolution, the surviving Sayn-Wittgensteins fled
from Kiev to their estate in the new nation of Rumania, settling first in
Chernovtsy (Czernowitz, Cernauti) (The Prince had been arrested and shot
when the Bolsheviks took the Kiev, but Nabokovs aunt and the children
were subquently able to reclaim their estate in the newly independent
Rumania.) It is not clear when Rezzori senior first became friendly with
the widowed Princess (who eventually married Roman Leikman, an engineer,
who had formerly been tutor to her children), but they were still friendly
in the late 1930s. At least one other Nabokov settled in his sisters
adopted country. Nabokov's uncle Sergei owned a car dealership in
Bucharest.
Gregor von Rezzori's life did indeed have later intersections with
Nabokovs. These are recounted in his long essay, "A Stranger in
Lolitaland" which initially appeared in Vanity Fair. Rezzori gives an
account of his role in the first German translation of Lolita which was
more or less of a committee project. By the time it came to Von Rezzori
and his colleague, the first draft had already been through the hands of
"a crew of venerable literati so numerous that in a group photograph they
would have resembled the Don Cossack Choir." Rezzori's work inevitably
entailed discussions of interpretations of the Lolita. There were the
usual proposals: old Europe debauching a young America and its
counterpart, young America debauching old Europe; Lolita "as a
delightfully frivolous story on the verge of pornography"; Lolita as "a
literary masterpiece, the only convincing love story of the century," or,
Lolita as "one of the great stories of passion in literature, a deeply
touching story of unfulfillable longing." Rezzori volunteers a variant of
this last. Since "every passionate love can find its image in Humbert's
boundless love for Lolita" "why should it not also reflect the longing
of us Europeans for the fulfillment of our childhood dreams about
America?" The latter half of the novel with Lolita and Humbert's
crisscrossing of the United States leads Rezzori to vow that "humble,
humble me would follow in their tracks." He reviews his childhood images
of America: the colors on his playroom globe, the vast open spaces;
buffalo and skyscrapers, redskins on mustangs, gangsters and molls, black
men playing jazz on saxophones. For post-WW I Europeans, America was the
prospect of a bright future.
"A Stranger in Lolitaland" recounts Rezorri's partial duplication of the
travels of Humbert and Lo. Some thirty years after his fictive
predecessors, Rezzori, accompanied by different aquaintances at different
times (ranging from a phlegmatic, male grad student to a 29-year-old
virgin female), the Austrian writer covered some 13,400 miles by car in
about three months. The trip starts auspiciously with an overnight at
Climax in the Catskills, an area boasting such toponyms as Sodom Road,
Surprise Road, and Coxsackie. After Ithaca, things go downhill, although
occasionally brightened by sightings of a potential Lolita (2 only) and
the sign in the mens room "We aim to please. You aim too, please?" The
obligatory tourist sights are taken in, although "Graceland" happens to be
closed on their day in Memphis. (Were Elvis not "post-Lolita," it would
certainly been a must-see for Hum & Lo.) Rezorri admires only nature and
the vast open spaces, but is mostly struck by the tacky, neon-lit strips
with their fast-food places ("vomitive victuals") and car dealerships that
mark each transition from country to town and town to country. His journey
finds its apotheosis in Las Vegas: "Here I had in its essence, the new
world of the terrible poetic children; Lolitaland in Disneylandish
perfection. The Promised Lands New Jerusalem. Finally I had caught
it,'my' butterfly."
Rezorri's sense of identification with Nabokov is strong. He remarks that
he has been told that he and Nabokov have "certain similarities as
writers, though I am not so conceited as not to see all our differences in
genus as well as in quantity, yet every now and then my vanity seduces me
into thinking there may be some truth in the remark." And some truth there
is in background, attitude, and style. Both were cultured Europea
aristocrats torn from their roots by war and revolution. Rezzori, like
Nabokov, had a procession of governesses (including one who had worked for
Mark Twain's family). Like Nabokov, Rezzori wrote in three languages;
German, English, and Italian. Both men wrote a dense, ornate prose
reflecting centuries of European culture. Both had a keen eye for
descriptive detail. While the Austrian did not have Nabokov's command
of English, he too wrote with a somewhat eccentric flair. After first
appearing in Vanity Fair, his "A Stranger in Lolitaland" was selected for
the Best American Essays volume of 1986 which also contained pieces by
John Barth, John Gregory Dunne, Tom Wolfe, Robert Stone, and Calvin
Trillin.
In Lolita and "A Stranger in Lolitaland " Nabokov and Rezzori seek to
match their childhood images of America with a far different "reality."
Nabokov wrote of America in a spirit of generosity, although not without a
keen eye for poshlost. Rezzori, neither in his Lolitaland nor his novels,
could move beyond a vision of the past. Nabokovs elegant style served
Rezzori as a reminder of a former, more gracious world, when his father
was a frequent guest of Princess Sayn-Wittgenstein at the Kamenka estate
where the twelve-year-old Nabokov visited his aunt three years before the
birth of Rezzori.
I close with two very vagrant thoughts. Might it not be that the Kamenka
estate served as the prototype for the "Marevo" of Nabokovs LATH!; and
his aunt Elizaveta Dmitrievna for the fictive aunt (Baroness Bredow) who
firsts instructs LATHs narrator to "look at the harlequins"? And as an
even more far-fetched thought perhaps Von Rezzori caught a glimpse of
himself in Transparent Things "Baron R."?