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Re: QUERY: S. A. Vengerov in ADA
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Thanks Alex (and Victor Fet, too, offline). Very useful.
Brian Boyd
On 5/11/2013, at 10:22 pm, Alex Bews <alex@BEWS.INFO<mailto:alex@BEWS.INFO>> wrote:
Brian,
perhaps this could be of some help:
http://search.rsl.ru/ru/catalog/record/6587867
It's the online digital copy of the mentioned volume IV of "Pushkinist", btw. seemingly edited in 1922, not in 1923. Note the date on the cover is 1923 (maybe a typographical error), too, but hand-corrected to 1922, later on 1922. The volume starts with an essay about Vengerov written by A.Fomin and you'll find some oblique details about his death and funeral on the page XXIX:
"Я знал Семена Афанасьевича много лет, последние тяжелые годы материальных забот, недоедания, холода очень сказались на нем, он постарел телом, но не душою. Она до последних минут его жизни оставалась молодой, способной откликаться на все свежее, новое, до последнего вздоха его не покинула чуткость, жизненность и восторженность."
and on the page XXXIII:
"В день похорон Семена Афанасьевича 17-го сентября 1920 г. после долгого ненастья вдруг неожиданно засветило солнце; проводить его прах собралась масса молодежи - его учеников; их молодые лица придавали какой-то особый тон большой толпе, собравшейся на похороны."
I does sound quite like Vengerov died more or less due to natural causes (disease, weakness after years of undernourishment etc.) Also, the fact that his funeral had been a public event does affirm that indirectly. Of course, this concusion rests purely on circumstantial evidence. Hope this helps.
________________________________
Brian Boyd writes:
A quick question:
Does anyone know how the literary scholar Semyon Afanasievich Vengerov died? In Ada, I.38 (p. 259 in the first, Vintage and AdaOnline editions), Nabokov writes:
Van remembered that his tutor’s great friend, the learned but prudish Semyon Afanasievich Vengerov, then a young associate professor but already a celebrated Pushkinist (1855-1954), used to say that the only vulgar passage in his author’s work was the cannibal joy of young gourmets tearing “plump and live” oysters out of their “cloisters” in an unfinished canto of Eugene Onegin.
Vengerov was real, but died not in 1954 but in 1920. Note Vengerov as “a celebrated Pushkinist.” I currently plan to gloss this thus (though there is much more that could be said, for instance about his famous Pushkin seminar):
“Pushkinist”: Vengerov edited the first three volumes of the journal Pushkinist, published in Petrograd from 1914; its final volume, edited in 1923 by Nikolay Vasilievich Yakovlev (a friend of VN’s in the mid and late 1920s), was dedicated to Vengerov’s memory.
I suspect a pointed irony in the Antiterran extension of his life, beyond his 65 years on Earth, to a year short of a century and a year after Stalin’s death. I suspect this especially as the only sentence mentioning him comes between two sentences referring first to mass persecution (linking the persecution of the Old Believers with, as I read it, the tens of thousands who died in Stalin’s White Sea-Baltic Canal project in 1931-33, “on the banks of the Great Lake of Slaves”) and then to Stalin as the “Crimean Khan” praised by Churchill as “A Great and Good Man.” I suspect also that Nabokov heard from Yakovlev—who certainly supplied Nabokov with other information the writer cherished and used, and who as an émigré founded an anti-Bolshevik organization Nabokov joined—something about Vengerov’s death that made Nabokov give him that almost improbably long life, outliving Stalin. Of course Stalin himself was not in power at the time of Vengerov’s death.
--
Susan Elizabeth Sweeney
Co-Editor, NABOKV-L
"NABOKV-L, English" <nabokv-l@HOLYCROSS.EDU<mailto:nabokv-l@HOLYCROSS.EDU>> hat am 5. November 2013 um 00:54 geschrieben:
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All private editorial communications are read by both co-editors.
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Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
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Brian Boyd
On 5/11/2013, at 10:22 pm, Alex Bews <alex@BEWS.INFO<mailto:alex@BEWS.INFO>> wrote:
Brian,
perhaps this could be of some help:
http://search.rsl.ru/ru/catalog/record/6587867
It's the online digital copy of the mentioned volume IV of "Pushkinist", btw. seemingly edited in 1922, not in 1923. Note the date on the cover is 1923 (maybe a typographical error), too, but hand-corrected to 1922, later on 1922. The volume starts with an essay about Vengerov written by A.Fomin and you'll find some oblique details about his death and funeral on the page XXIX:
"Я знал Семена Афанасьевича много лет, последние тяжелые годы материальных забот, недоедания, холода очень сказались на нем, он постарел телом, но не душою. Она до последних минут его жизни оставалась молодой, способной откликаться на все свежее, новое, до последнего вздоха его не покинула чуткость, жизненность и восторженность."
and on the page XXXIII:
"В день похорон Семена Афанасьевича 17-го сентября 1920 г. после долгого ненастья вдруг неожиданно засветило солнце; проводить его прах собралась масса молодежи - его учеников; их молодые лица придавали какой-то особый тон большой толпе, собравшейся на похороны."
I does sound quite like Vengerov died more or less due to natural causes (disease, weakness after years of undernourishment etc.) Also, the fact that his funeral had been a public event does affirm that indirectly. Of course, this concusion rests purely on circumstantial evidence. Hope this helps.
________________________________
Brian Boyd writes:
A quick question:
Does anyone know how the literary scholar Semyon Afanasievich Vengerov died? In Ada, I.38 (p. 259 in the first, Vintage and AdaOnline editions), Nabokov writes:
Van remembered that his tutor’s great friend, the learned but prudish Semyon Afanasievich Vengerov, then a young associate professor but already a celebrated Pushkinist (1855-1954), used to say that the only vulgar passage in his author’s work was the cannibal joy of young gourmets tearing “plump and live” oysters out of their “cloisters” in an unfinished canto of Eugene Onegin.
Vengerov was real, but died not in 1954 but in 1920. Note Vengerov as “a celebrated Pushkinist.” I currently plan to gloss this thus (though there is much more that could be said, for instance about his famous Pushkin seminar):
“Pushkinist”: Vengerov edited the first three volumes of the journal Pushkinist, published in Petrograd from 1914; its final volume, edited in 1923 by Nikolay Vasilievich Yakovlev (a friend of VN’s in the mid and late 1920s), was dedicated to Vengerov’s memory.
I suspect a pointed irony in the Antiterran extension of his life, beyond his 65 years on Earth, to a year short of a century and a year after Stalin’s death. I suspect this especially as the only sentence mentioning him comes between two sentences referring first to mass persecution (linking the persecution of the Old Believers with, as I read it, the tens of thousands who died in Stalin’s White Sea-Baltic Canal project in 1931-33, “on the banks of the Great Lake of Slaves”) and then to Stalin as the “Crimean Khan” praised by Churchill as “A Great and Good Man.” I suspect also that Nabokov heard from Yakovlev—who certainly supplied Nabokov with other information the writer cherished and used, and who as an émigré founded an anti-Bolshevik organization Nabokov joined—something about Vengerov’s death that made Nabokov give him that almost improbably long life, outliving Stalin. Of course Stalin himself was not in power at the time of Vengerov’s death.
--
Susan Elizabeth Sweeney
Co-Editor, NABOKV-L
"NABOKV-L, English" <nabokv-l@HOLYCROSS.EDU<mailto:nabokv-l@HOLYCROSS.EDU>> hat am 5. November 2013 um 00:54 geschrieben:
Google Search the archive<http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en> Contact the Editors<mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu> Visit "Nabokov Online Journal"<http://www.nabokovonline.com/> Visit Zembla<http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm> View Nabokv-L Policies<http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm> Manage subscription options<http://listserv.ucsb.edu/> Visit AdaOnline<http://www.ada.auckland.ac.nz/> View NSJ Ada Annotations<http://vnjapan.org/main/ada/index.html> Temporary L-Soft Search the archive<https://listserv.ucsb.edu/lsv-cgi-bin/wa?A0=NABOKV-L&X=58B9943B29972AFF64&Y=nabokv-l%40utk.edu>
All private editorial communications are read by both co-editors.
Google Search the archive<http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en> Contact the Editors<mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu> Visit "Nabokov Online Journal"<http://www.nabokovonline.com/> Visit Zembla<http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm> View Nabokv-L Policies<http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm> Manage subscription options<http://listserv.ucsb.edu/> Visit AdaOnline<http://www.ada.auckland.ac.nz/> View NSJ Ada Annotations<http://vnjapan.org/main/ada/index.html> Temporary L-Soft Search the archive<https://listserv.ucsb.edu/lsv-cgi-bin/wa?A0=NABOKV-L&X=58B9943B29972AFF64&Y=nabokv-l%40utk.edu>
All private editorial communications are read by both co-editors.
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/