I don’t know if this has already been brought to the list’s attention…

I am reading (skimming?) an increasingly irritating book (hardcover 2003) by the British actor Michael Pennington on his almost life-long obsession with Chekhov called ‘Are You There, Crocodile?’. Irritating because Pennington commits an increasing number of silly errors which all the eminent people he thanks in his Author’s Note (he also refers here to an edition by Simon Karmolinsky [sic]) ought surely to have caught prior to publication and because, as a Russian speaker, one has to doubt his legitimacy and suspect varying doses of arrogance. Can one imagine a Russian coming west, professing to be an ‘expert’ on the language of Jane Austen (or whoever) without being able to read the author in the original and expecting to be taken seriously?

Anyway:

“Quinine had a brother called Bromide. It happens that a grandson of his, named for some reason Box II, became the pet of another Russian writer, Vladimir Nabokov, and ended his days in Prague with Nabokov’s widowed mother, waddling furiously along in a wire muzzle, ‘an émigré dog in a patched and ill-fitting coat’ [Speak Memory]. In a way the two writers represent extremes in Russian sensibility – Nabokov, the privileged intellectual from western-looking Petersburg (he never once visited Moscow) and Chekhov, who rather disliked Petersburg, from the peasant stock to which intellectuals owed an obligation. Nabokov shares with Chekhov a fanatical eye for detail and a gift for letting it bloom on the page, but he is a far more self-conscious, more Proustian writer, working in complex English, while Chekhov perfects native understatement. My guess is that Chekhov would have appreciated Nabokov’s ability to find comedy in the cruellest situation (Lolita), but would not have approved of his capture and impalement of butterflies on a board as a hobby (Speak Memory). Most connections between the two great stylists are as quaintly circumstantial as the matter of the dog: as a boy of five Nabokov records a meeting between his great-aunt Praskovia, one of the earliest women doctors in Russia, and Chekhov, at which the latter was surprisingly uncouth: Praskovia, a pioneer of psychiatry and women’s education, was later dismissed by him as not only ‘a non-doctor’ but ‘a lump of meat – if you stripped her and painted her green she’d look like a frog’. However, this was in a letter to his sister, to whom Chekhov said a number of things he might have preferred to keep off the record.”

VN is of course listed in the index as: Nabakov, Vladimir.

TA Colquhoun