Subject:
CORRECTION: Cat among pigeons - Sebald-Nabokov
From:
Jansy <jansy@aetern.us>
Date:
Fri, 18 Mar 2011 09:51:34 -0300
To:
<NABOKV-L@listserv.ucsb.edu>

 
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JM [ G.Sebald's "The Emigrants", with its four distinct narratives united by recurring images, among which we find four Nabokov ghostly apparitions.]
There are two portentous insertions related to Nabokov which I failed to mention before, both in the part devoted to Max Ferber, now obtained from his mother's diary entrusted by him to the narrator. In her notes she mentions that, while she was being courted by a Viennese trompetist named Fritz Waldhof, in the fields close to Bodenlaube, they came across two Russians and a ten year-old boy, who was running about with a butterfly net. One of the strolling Russians was later recognized as Muromzev - a few days before he died. Fritz and Ferber's mother were engaged several months later when, in her rapture, she rememebers the little Russian boy, "a messenger of the happiness that came back from that remote Saturday, when he opened his box of specimens and let loose the most beautiful admirals, peacock royals, citrines and sphyngids as a symbol of my final redeption." (also Fritz died before their wedding took place, struck by a cerebral hemorrage while he was playing the "Freischütz"**).
 
Sebald's collection of documented memoirs are recounted by another memorialist, engaged in an almost religious search for the traces, pictures, letters, and graves of those individuals who were killed by the nazis.  A reference to R.J.A Kilbourn's book in the internet allowed me a glimpse of his opening lines.*** from where I hope to learn more about the "redemptive" role attached to Nabokov by Sebald, and the way this author explores various kinds of mnemic registers. The only thing that I got clear, right now, is the importance Sebald attributes to Nabokov's creative vision of life and of a look back into the past, in contrast his tormented collection of recollected disasters and gradual decay of Western civilization. 
    
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* -Sergei Andrejewitsch Muromzew (23. Septemberjul./ 5. Oktober 1850 greg. in Sankt Petersburg; † 4. Oktoberjul./ 17. Oktober 1910greg. in Moskau) war ein russischer Rechtswissenschaftler und Hochschullehrer. Er war Vorsitzender der ersten Staatsduma im zarischen Russland (1906).  Er war befreundet mit dem Juristen und später ebenfalls politisch tätigen Vladimir Dmitrijewitsch Nabokov, Vater des späteren Schriftstellers Vladimir Nabokov. Dieser war ebenfalls Mitglied der Partei „Konstitutionelle Demokraten“. Noch kurz vor seinem Tod hielt sich Muromzew im Herbst 1910 gemeinsam mit der Familie Nabokov in Bad Kissingen auf. Nur wenige Tage später starb er. [Wapedia - Wiki: Sergei Andrejewitsch Muromzew]
 
** - There are temporal imprecisions which I'm unable to identify satisfactorily. According to wikipedia, The "Freischütz" (an opera in three acts by Carl Maria von Weber with a theme related to national identity and stark emotionality, inspired on German folk legend and that quickly became an international success) was first performed in Berlin, on 18 June 1821, eleven years after Fritz started to court Federn's mother.
 
***  - Kafka,Nabokov...Sebald: Intertextuality and Narratives of Redemption in Vertigo and the Emigrants by R.J.A.Kilbourn
"This study begins from an acknowledgement of the highly intertextual nature of the prose fiction of W.G.Sebald, and from the understanding that Sebald's fictional world, to use that language, is an irreducibly literary structure, within which the mediated experience of subjectivity is the primary "object" or representation. More specifically, I will consider here Sebald's bricolagic appropriation and "translation" in Vertigo of Franz Kafka's "Jäger Gracchus" (...) and in The Emigrants Sebald's manipulation of a recurring motif from Vladimir Nabokov's autobiography Speak, Memory, as well as Nabokov's post-emigration life in America and Switzerland..."
 www.reference-global.com/doi/abs/10.../9783110201949.1.33 -
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