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Re: A Note on Sources & "Vasily Shishov"
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I welcome the contributions to the list made by Robert Cook.
A point made in his recent comments on VASILY SHISHKOV leads
me to offer the following confession. Robert said:
> (By the way,
> according to that note [in the new edition of the STORIES]
> the Shishkov poem which VN invented was NOT
> published in the same newspaper to which Adamov contributed a weekly column
> - as Roy Johnson claims. But VN was confessedly uncertain about the
> bibliographical details.)
I began writing my commentaries in the days when the only
available scholarship on the provenance [and the dates] of the stories
was that provided by Andrew Field, and by VN himself in his
prefatory remarks to them. Much more information has been unearthed
since then, and one hopes that there is much more to come.
Comparisons of information on the dates of first publication [for
instance] will reveal many discrepancies - and even VN himself
did not always get it right. I have not yet seen the new edition
of the STORIES, but look forward to the scholarly apparatus almost
as much as to the fictions themselves.
This is not to excuse any errors in my own readings, but to remind
us that the relation between Art and Real Life is as murky as ever -
even when it is as recent as the last half-century.
--
Dr Roy Johnson | Roy@mantex.demon.co.uk
PO Box 100 | Tel +44 0161 432 5811
Manchester UK | Fax +44 0161 443 2766
A point made in his recent comments on VASILY SHISHKOV leads
me to offer the following confession. Robert said:
> (By the way,
> according to that note [in the new edition of the STORIES]
> the Shishkov poem which VN invented was NOT
> published in the same newspaper to which Adamov contributed a weekly column
> - as Roy Johnson claims. But VN was confessedly uncertain about the
> bibliographical details.)
I began writing my commentaries in the days when the only
available scholarship on the provenance [and the dates] of the stories
was that provided by Andrew Field, and by VN himself in his
prefatory remarks to them. Much more information has been unearthed
since then, and one hopes that there is much more to come.
Comparisons of information on the dates of first publication [for
instance] will reveal many discrepancies - and even VN himself
did not always get it right. I have not yet seen the new edition
of the STORIES, but look forward to the scholarly apparatus almost
as much as to the fictions themselves.
This is not to excuse any errors in my own readings, but to remind
us that the relation between Art and Real Life is as murky as ever -
even when it is as recent as the last half-century.
--
Dr Roy Johnson | Roy@mantex.demon.co.uk
PO Box 100 | Tel +44 0161 432 5811
Manchester UK | Fax +44 0161 443 2766