-------- Original Message --------

Subject:	Gerschenkron vs. Nabokov
Date:	Sun, 9 Jun 2002 16:46:53 -0700
From:	"Neal McCabe" <nealmccabe@earthlink.net>
To:	"D. Barton Johnson" <chtodel@gte.net>

On pages 196-201 of (the un-indexed) "The Fly Swatter," Nicholas Dawidoff's interesting memoir of his grandfather, Harvard economist Alexander Gerschenkron, there is a discussion of the Wilson/Nabokov Onegin controversy, during which Gerschenkron wrote a 20-page review of the Nabokov's Onegin translation  for "Modern Philology entitled "A Manufactured Monument?" Dawidoff writes: "[It] is no simple polemic.  Nabokov is praised for the great pains he took to maintain precise etymological fidelity to every berry, tree, and animal in the poem.  And yet for all of those strenuous efforst toward literal fidelity, [Gerschenkron]'s intimate knowledge of the Gallicisms, the peasant dialects, the esoteric lexicon, and the folksy turns of phrase that are such dominant features of Pushkin's Russian led him to conclude that Nabokov had created a most inaccurate translation." Dawidoff points out that "Nabokov had made a point of answering and rebutting ever last critic of the translation that had taken so many years of his life, but in [Gerschenkron]'s case he did not reply."  He then quotes the supportive testimony of Alexander Dolinin: "What I noticed is that all the objections and notions of Gerschenkron were so correct that Nabokov quietly made all of Gerschenkron's corrections when he put out his second edition of 'Eugene Onegin'." In a fascinating postscript, Dawidoff points out that in "Ada" there is a "snide reference to the 'reverent' and 'chippy' lexicographer Dr. Gerschizhevsky.  Gerschizhevsky was a Joycean portmanteau melding  Gerschenkron and Dmitry Cizevsky, another Russian-born Harvard Slavic scholar who had once written a commentary on 'Onegin' that Nabokov despised.  The New York Times asked [Gerschenkron] how he felt about this lampoon, and the response was brief: 'A small man's revenge'." Ouch.