EDNote: Very shortly, we will be running abstracts and inviting questions to panelists from those who attended the Oxford conference. Stay tuned and read on! ~Stephen Blackwell, Co-Editor

From:
"jansymello" <jansy@aetern.us> <mailto:jansy@aetern.us>
Date:
Sun, 29 Jul 2007 21:04:06 -0300
To:
<nabokv-L@listserv.ucsb.edu> <mailto:nabokv-L@listserv.ucsb.edu>
Dear List,
 
//snip.
 
One of the participants, Jane Grayson was once or twice included in the debate between Shasha Dolinin and B. Boyd,  but although I remember her smiling assent, I don't know if she added comments of her own.  I'd like to remind the List that Grayson wrote "Nabokov Translated: A Comparison of Nabokov's Russian and English Prose" ( 1977) and in her book she observed that the Russian émigré press frequently described the difficult conditions under which younger émigré writers laboured. In their opinion these writers could lose their links with their literary tradition or cease to write in Russian..
 

JM: the hero of Alan Furst’s spy novel “Blood of Victory” (Phoenix 2002) is an I. A. Serebin who edits a Russian Literary émigré journal “Harvest” for the IRU (International Russian Union) in Paris during the early 1940s before & during the German occupation. He also spies for Britain and blows up barges on the side! We see Serebin bemoaning (pp 81-83) the low quality of submissions to “Harvest”:

“But then, what the hell, this wasn’t ‘The Resounding Shell,’ or any of the powerful Russian quartierlies. This was the ‘Harvest,’ it had no Blok, no Nabokov. It had Kacherin and his sugar bun for mama.”

Forgive me if this reference has already been spotted on our list. Furst certainly provides a graphic account of the chaotic and “difficult conditions under which younger émigré writers laboured.” I recommend “Blood of Victory” as diverting beach-reading — sortof advanced Ian Flemming spiced with serious European literary & linguistic allusions.

PS: One wonders if “Serbin” echoes VN’s émigré pen-name “Sirin?”

May I add two sad NON-VN spottings? That is, articles where I fully expected a reference to VN but was disappointed.


1. “Well spent — What Henry James took from his time in France: and what he rejected.”
Matthew Peters’s TLS [Jul 13 2007] review of “Henry James Goes to Paris,” by Peter Brooks (Princeton UP)

This covers James’s well-known contretemps with the Flaubertians and their divergent views on narrative techniques in the novel. One might have expected mention of VN’s support of Flaubert contra Balzac & James, but nonesuch, at least not in the review. We do meet, adding to my chagrin, a ref. to Edmund Wilson’s (pre-VN!) views on James in “The Triple Thinkers” (1938) which I plan to pursue. I also plan to read Peter Brooks’s book, hoping that VN’s ‘absence’ is a fault in the reviewer.

2. “No rosy veil,” Justin Beplate’s TLS [Juk 20 2007] review of “The Curtain,” by Milan Kunders (Faber).

Here again, the subject of literary ‘artifice’ (self-reference, self-repudiation*, and the ‘gap between words & deeds’), so close to all Nabokovian hearts, is discussed by the reviewer with examples from Cervantes, Flaubert, Sterne, Kafka, Musil, Brosch, Gambrowicz, et al., and, of course Kundera soi-meme. Yet no VN! Again, I’ll suspend judgement until I’ve read “The Curtain.”

* “Repudiation of artifice is, in other words, an artful ploy, and one that throws up the apparent paradox that the novel’s ambition of ‘getting into the soul of things’ very often proceeds by way of increased contrivance.”

Why do I get a whiff of PALE FIRE’s smoke reading this?

Stan Kelly-Bootle
‘Curmudgeon’ column, ACM Queue Magazine

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