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[Query] Bely and Nabokov
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While reading a collection of Russian poems translated to the Portuguese by Boris Schneider, Haroldo de Campos and others, I came across a few that were written by Andrei Bely, one of them published at the same time of Blok's "The Twelve.." The chosen poems brought many references to the Scriptures and to the numbing effect of words in ordinary language.
I tried to find poems by Bely in Nabokov's "Verses and Versions" but I couldn't find anything about him.
Wikipedia mentions three clear references to Bely by Nabokov. One of them in LEL (one of the four greatest novels of the 20th century), the other in "The Gift" and, at last, VN's essay "Notes on Prosody"*
There are many entries in the VN-L archives with lively exchanges in the nineties.** I wish that those in the know could bring up more informations relating Nabokov and Bely, or offer available articles?
.
I read that Bely lived in Switzerland for a few years in his youth and there he became acquainted with Soloviev and, later, with Rudolf Steiner. Does Nabokov's choice of moving to Switzerland have any relation to these two mystics?
Does the reference to Dr. Solov in "Signs and Symbols" indicate Soloviev?
..............................................................................
*Andrei Bely: From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Boris Nikolaevich Bugaev (Russian), better known by the pen name Andrei Bely - October 26 [O.S. October 14] 1880 - January 8, 1934), was a Russian novelist, poet, theorist, and literary critic. His novel Petersburg was regarded by Vladimir Nabokov as one of the four greatest novels of the 20th century. As a young man, Bely was strongly influenced by his acquaintance with the family of philosopher Vladimir Solovyov, especially Vladimir's younger brother Mikhail, described in his long autobiographical poem The First Encounter (1921); the title is a reflection of Vladimir Solovyov's Three Encounters.[ ]In his later years Bely was influenced by Rudolf Steiner's anthroposophy...Bely's essay "Rhythm as Dialectic in The Bronze Horseman" is cited in Nabokov's novel "The Gift," where it is mentioned as "a monumental research on rhythm".[ Nabokov (1938) The Gift, chapter 3, p. 141.] Fyodor, poet and main character, praises the system Bely created for graphically marking off and calculating the 'half-stresses' in the iambs. Bely found that the diagrams plotted over the compositions of the great poets frequently had the shapes of rectangles and trapeziums. Fyodor, after discovering Bely's work, re-read all his old iambic tetrameters from the new point of view, and was terribly pained to find out that the diagrams for his poems were instead plain and gappy.[4] Nabokov's essay Notes on Prosody follows for the large part Bely's essay Description of the Russian
iambic tetrameter (published in the collection of essays Symbolism, Moscow, 1910).
** a small sample:
Date:Sun, 28 Feb 1999 10:34:23 -0800: If Bad Translations Did Not Exist, Would VN Have Had to Invent Them?
"I've been working on an article about Nabokov's use of geometric imagery and am being driven crazy by the following remark from his 1966 "Reply to
My Critics" (i.e. Wilson), reproduced in Strong Opinions (p.243). Nabokov is talking about "the amount of unwillful deceit going on in the translation trade." "I recall once opening a copy of Bely's Petersburg in English, and lighting upon a monumental howler in a famous passage about a blue coupe which had been hopelessly discolored by the translator's understanding kubovyy (which means "Blue") as "cubic"! This has remained a model and a symbol."// A model and a symbol of what? This mistake struck me as one that would have been, obviously, fitting to Bely's own wordplay, perhaps even a wordplay that Nabokov might have pocketed for his own use." Eric Naiman
...................
I think I have a plausible solution of Eric Naiman's riddle. Bely does use the adjective "kubovyi" (dark blue) in Chapter Five of his
*Petersburg* ("kubovyi vozdukh, nastoiannyi na zvezde"). However, it has no connections either to a cube or to Ableukhov's coupe. As the word is
very rare, Nabokov probably learned it from the novel when he was reading it in his youth. Many years later, in 1934, under the influence of Bely's
death and Khodasevich's necrological memoir, he tried to "rememorate" the novel but his memory failed him and he actually invented a Belyesque
phrase, telescoping "kubovyi" and "kub karety" (the cube of the carriage). Then, in the fifties, he came across "the dark cube of his carriage" in
Cournos's translation and, relying solely on his memory, took it for a howler. To borrow from Brian Boyd's title, "Even Homais nods." Alexander Dolinin
.........................
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I tried to find poems by Bely in Nabokov's "Verses and Versions" but I couldn't find anything about him.
Wikipedia mentions three clear references to Bely by Nabokov. One of them in LEL (one of the four greatest novels of the 20th century), the other in "The Gift" and, at last, VN's essay "Notes on Prosody"*
There are many entries in the VN-L archives with lively exchanges in the nineties.** I wish that those in the know could bring up more informations relating Nabokov and Bely, or offer available articles?
.
I read that Bely lived in Switzerland for a few years in his youth and there he became acquainted with Soloviev and, later, with Rudolf Steiner. Does Nabokov's choice of moving to Switzerland have any relation to these two mystics?
Does the reference to Dr. Solov in "Signs and Symbols" indicate Soloviev?
..............................................................................
*Andrei Bely: From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Boris Nikolaevich Bugaev (Russian), better known by the pen name Andrei Bely - October 26 [O.S. October 14] 1880 - January 8, 1934), was a Russian novelist, poet, theorist, and literary critic. His novel Petersburg was regarded by Vladimir Nabokov as one of the four greatest novels of the 20th century. As a young man, Bely was strongly influenced by his acquaintance with the family of philosopher Vladimir Solovyov, especially Vladimir's younger brother Mikhail, described in his long autobiographical poem The First Encounter (1921); the title is a reflection of Vladimir Solovyov's Three Encounters.[ ]In his later years Bely was influenced by Rudolf Steiner's anthroposophy...Bely's essay "Rhythm as Dialectic in The Bronze Horseman" is cited in Nabokov's novel "The Gift," where it is mentioned as "a monumental research on rhythm".[ Nabokov (1938) The Gift, chapter 3, p. 141.] Fyodor, poet and main character, praises the system Bely created for graphically marking off and calculating the 'half-stresses' in the iambs. Bely found that the diagrams plotted over the compositions of the great poets frequently had the shapes of rectangles and trapeziums. Fyodor, after discovering Bely's work, re-read all his old iambic tetrameters from the new point of view, and was terribly pained to find out that the diagrams for his poems were instead plain and gappy.[4] Nabokov's essay Notes on Prosody follows for the large part Bely's essay Description of the Russian
iambic tetrameter (published in the collection of essays Symbolism, Moscow, 1910).
** a small sample:
Date:Sun, 28 Feb 1999 10:34:23 -0800: If Bad Translations Did Not Exist, Would VN Have Had to Invent Them?
"I've been working on an article about Nabokov's use of geometric imagery and am being driven crazy by the following remark from his 1966 "Reply to
My Critics" (i.e. Wilson), reproduced in Strong Opinions (p.243). Nabokov is talking about "the amount of unwillful deceit going on in the translation trade." "I recall once opening a copy of Bely's Petersburg in English, and lighting upon a monumental howler in a famous passage about a blue coupe which had been hopelessly discolored by the translator's understanding kubovyy (which means "Blue") as "cubic"! This has remained a model and a symbol."// A model and a symbol of what? This mistake struck me as one that would have been, obviously, fitting to Bely's own wordplay, perhaps even a wordplay that Nabokov might have pocketed for his own use." Eric Naiman
...................
I think I have a plausible solution of Eric Naiman's riddle. Bely does use the adjective "kubovyi" (dark blue) in Chapter Five of his
*Petersburg* ("kubovyi vozdukh, nastoiannyi na zvezde"). However, it has no connections either to a cube or to Ableukhov's coupe. As the word is
very rare, Nabokov probably learned it from the novel when he was reading it in his youth. Many years later, in 1934, under the influence of Bely's
death and Khodasevich's necrological memoir, he tried to "rememorate" the novel but his memory failed him and he actually invented a Belyesque
phrase, telescoping "kubovyi" and "kub karety" (the cube of the carriage). Then, in the fifties, he came across "the dark cube of his carriage" in
Cournos's translation and, relying solely on his memory, took it for a howler. To borrow from Brian Boyd's title, "Even Homais nods." Alexander Dolinin
.........................
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/