At the beginning of the most
recent novel of the Franco-Russian writer Andreï Makine there is a several pages long passage about Nabokov. I was wondering if anyone could tell for sure whether the anecdote he writes
about is true or not:
Makine writes that when leaving
Yalta on a ferry, Nabokov was playing chess on deck and instead of
watching the last piece of land fade out in the distance his eyes were
riveted to the chessboard, a fact he later was to regret. It is
possible of course Makine just used his artistic freedom and invented
this. The short critique of Lolita that follows it makes me think so: "That aesthete Nabokov cared more about a pretty metaphor than about his fatherland! And Lolita was his punishment. A sickening book which caresses the basest instincts of the Western bourgeoisie..." Nabokov did, after all, yearn for his home country.
And finally a short passage where Makine likens entomology to writing: "Nabokov wrote: 'There was a diction, rough as a wet sugarcube...' This is genious! [...] -Well, I can see our good Vladimir suck on his sugar cube there, but it's not "genious", Léa. It's ingenious;
there's a nuance there. On top of this, your Nabo doesn't care about
knowing whom this accent belonged to. If it was a tortured prisonner it
doesn't change a thing. He writes like a collector of butterflies: he
catches a pretty insect, knocks it out with formalin, impales it on a
needle. He proceeds the same with words..."
I also wonder whether anyone could place the quote about the
sugar quote? (my translation of this sentence may be very clumsy here)
I
wonder if Makine is translated into Russian. When looking more closely
at his writing it is interesting to detect that under this excellent
and seemingly perfectly mastered French language a subtle but steady
Russian rhythm flows.
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