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Don asked about some items from the Winter 1995 Paris Review, by
Jeffrey Eugenides and Bradford Morrow. These are one-page meditations
on some childhood photographs of Nabokov, photographs which are billed
as being "recently discovered" or something along those lines (though
they seemed kind of familiar to me). These meditations are part of a
longer feature in which various writers comment at similar length on
other Russian photographs of the same period, many of them of writers
(Tolstoy, Chekhov, Kharms, etc.).
I can't say that the thoughts of Eugenides or Morrow made much of an
impression on me; they seem to draw a great deal on the standard
associations (butterflies, etc.). The feature as a whole is of
interest, though, since in riffling through it I didn't notice much
comment on the revolutions of the era. For most of this century it
would have been much more difficult to collect the free associations
of this many writers (mostly people with no great knowledge of Russia,
after all) without getting a lot of thoughts along those lines
(decadent aristocrats... the cherry orchard... etc.).
The same issue contains at least two other mentions of our man: the
interviews in this issue are with Susan Sontag and George Steiner, and
they both talk a little bit about Nabokov.
John Lavagnino
Women Writers Project, Brown University
Jeffrey Eugenides and Bradford Morrow. These are one-page meditations
on some childhood photographs of Nabokov, photographs which are billed
as being "recently discovered" or something along those lines (though
they seemed kind of familiar to me). These meditations are part of a
longer feature in which various writers comment at similar length on
other Russian photographs of the same period, many of them of writers
(Tolstoy, Chekhov, Kharms, etc.).
I can't say that the thoughts of Eugenides or Morrow made much of an
impression on me; they seem to draw a great deal on the standard
associations (butterflies, etc.). The feature as a whole is of
interest, though, since in riffling through it I didn't notice much
comment on the revolutions of the era. For most of this century it
would have been much more difficult to collect the free associations
of this many writers (mostly people with no great knowledge of Russia,
after all) without getting a lot of thoughts along those lines
(decadent aristocrats... the cherry orchard... etc.).
The same issue contains at least two other mentions of our man: the
interviews in this issue are with Susan Sontag and George Steiner, and
they both talk a little bit about Nabokov.
John Lavagnino
Women Writers Project, Brown University