Dear Fran and List,
You inquired more about "Krug", after Alexey's
new link [ I notice that one of the
characters in Zamyatin's story Detskaya ("The Nursery",
1920) is captain Krug.)
With time in my hands ( and "repetition"), I set myself the task of
recovering items about Nabokov's story "The Circle" ( Krug) and data,
linking BS's Adam Krug, the image of the Ouroborus (the snake or
dragon biting its own tail), to all sorts of exciting themes, by Nina
Kressova.*
Nabokov's short-story THE CIRCLE (Krug) starts
with: "IN THE second place, because he was possessed by
a sudden mad hankering after Russia. In the third place, finally, because he
regretted those years of youth and everything associated with
it..."
Its last lines are: "Suddenly Innokentiy grasped a wonderful fact: nothing is lost,
nothing whatever; memory accumulates treasures, stored-up secrets grow in
darkness and dust, and one day a transient visitor at a lending library wants a
book that has not once been asked for in twenty-two years. He-got up from his
seat, made his adieux...What a dreadful feeling of uneasiness. He felt that way
for several reasons. In the first place, because Tanya had remained as
enchanting and as invulnerable as she had been in the
past...."#
Information THE CIRCLE (page
371) written by Vladimir Nabokov (Cf. The
Stories of Vladimir Nabokov, Knopf, 1995)
"By the middle of 1936, not
long before leaving Berlin forever and finishing Dar (The Gift) in France, I
must have completed at least four-fifths of its last chapter when at some point
a small satellite separated itself from the main body of the novel and started
to revolve around it. Psychologically, the separation may have been sparked
either by the mention of Tanya's baby in her brother's letter or by his
recalling the village schoolmaster in a doomful dream. Technically, the
circle which the present corollary describes (its last sentence existing
implicitly before its first one) belongs to the same serpent-biting-its-tail
type as the circular structure of the fourth chapter in Dar (or, for that
matter, Finnegans Wake, which it preceded). A knowledge of the novel is
not required for the enjoyment of the corollary which has its own orbit and
colored fire, but some practical help may be derived from the reader's knowing
that the action of The Gift starts on April 1, 1926, and ends on June 29, 1929[
...] It may be added that the story will produce upon readers who are familiar
with the novel a delightful effect of oblique recognition, of shifting shades
enriched with new sense, owing to the world's being seen not through the eyes of
Fyodor, but through those of an outsider less close to him than to old Russia's
idealistic radicals ..." Krug was published in 1936, in Paris,
but the exact date and periodical ( presumably, Poslednie Novosti) have
not yet been established in bibliographic retrospect. It was reprintes twenty
years later in the collection of my short stories Vesna v Fialte,
Chekhov Publishing House, New York, 1956.
About the character "Adam Krug" in Bend
Sinister, I direct those interested to the thesis written by Nina
Kressova :"Bajo El Signo de Proteo: Estudio Comparado de
Temas e Motivos en las Obras de Jorge Luis Borges y Vladimir
Nabokov," where she examines in both authors the concepts of
"repetition"**, "singularity", the "eternal return,", "mirrors"***
..............................................................
* - The bibliography
about Bend Sinister is enormous. My choice to recommend
Nina Kressova's thesis ( in Spanish) obeys a special whim: the
present associations, in the Nab-List, of Nabokov and Borges through VN's
parody of Borges' "soulful stance" and Freud's article (FortDa in
"Beyond the Pleasure Principle"), which deals with trauma, the compulsion
to repeat and introduces for the first time Freud's controversial "Death Drive"
(Todestrieb). The circularity of "time" (Vico,
Joyce, Krug) and the image of the "ourobouros" (snake or dragon) have been
recurrent in the List, too.
** Lo refiere en algunas ocasiones, como, por
ejemplo, en el diálogo del Profesor de Historia Moderna con el de Economía en
Barra siniestra, donde el primero replica: “Mi cliente nunca se repite. Al menos
cuando mi gente espera ansiosamente que se produzca una repetición. En realidad,
Clío sólo puede repetirse inconscientemente. Porque tiene muy mala memoria. Como
ocurre con tantos fenómenos de tiempo, las combinaciones recurrentes sólo son
perceptibles como tales cuando ya no pueden afectarnos, cuando están
aprisionados, por decirlo así, en el pasado que es el pasado precisamente porque
está desinfectado”. Esta reflexión del Profesor de Historia Moderna su
interlocutor, totalmente contrario a la opinión expresada, tacha de “puro
krugismo” (Barra Siniestra, 56-57) El eco de la teoría platónica observamos en
el estudio del padre de Fiodor Godunov-Cherdyncev en el segundo anexo a Dadiva,
donde el autor de Mariposas del Imperio Ruso define “la especie” como “el
original del ser”, “inexistente en nuestra realidad, pero único y determinado en
la idea, <…> que repitiéndose sin cesar en el espejo de la naturaleza,
genera infinitos reflejos”. “Cada uno de ellos, - prosigue el famoso entomólogo,
- nuestra mente, reflejada en el mismo cristal y solamente allí hallada su
realidad, percibe como un ejemplar vivo”.
*** En la obra de Borges
el principio del espejo organiza la historia del universo, es el mecanismo del
progreso que se desarrolla bajo el signo de “eterno regreso”. El hombre que cae
en la trampa del speculum ludens identificando a si mismo con todos sus
reflejos, no logra entender que en este mundo el concepto de singularidad es
sólo una ilusión creada para las mentes condicionadas por el tiempo y el
espacio. “Entre los Inmortales, en cambio, cada acto (y cada pensamiento) es el
eco de otros que en el pasado lo antecedieron, sin principio visible, o el fiel
presagio de otros que en el futuro lo repetirán hasta el vértigo. No hay otra
cosa que no esté como perdida entre infatigables espejos” (B: El Inmortal; I;
542). Ideas similares podemos encontrar en los textos de Nabókov. Así, el
filosofo Adam Krug ofrece a sus lectores sacudir el “calidoscopio telescópico”,
- “porque qué otra cosa es su universo que un aparato que contiene los pedacitos
de cristal multicolores, que dependiendo de la configuración de los espejos se
nos presentan en multitudes de formas simétricas”, - y lanzar esta “cosa
estúpida” lo más lejos posible. (“La barra siniestra”).
(A través de los
espejos y que es lo que vieron allí Borges y Nabókov.)
#other excerpts:
[...]on the threshold of
this century, at a time when Godunov-Cherdyntsev had returned from his fifth
expedition to central Asia and was spending the summer at Leshino, his estate in
the Government of St. Petersburg, with his young wife (at forty he was twice as
old as she)....
[...]Tanya used to say that they had relatives not only in
the animal kingdom but also among plants and minerals. And, indeed, Russian and
foreign naturalists had described under the specific name of "godunovi" a new
pheasant, a new antelope, a new rhododendron, and there was even a whole Godunov
Range (he himself described only insects)...[...] Innokentiy slept
...sometimes, however, a dream image would take an erotic turn, the force of its
thrill would carry him out of the sleep circle, and for several moments he would
remain lying as he was...
[...] Tanya came home, all her features fixed
more clearly now by the etching needle of years...and without the least
embarrassment recalling that distant summer, while he kept marveling that
neither Tanya nor her mother mentioned the dead explorer and spoke so simply
about the past, instead of bursting into the awful sobs...