While reading a collection of Russian poems translated to the Portuguese by
Boris Schneider, Haroldo de Campos and others, I came across a few that were
written by Andrei Bely, one of them published at the same time of Blok's
"The Twelve.." The chosen poems brought many references to the Scriptures
and to the numbing effect of words in ordinary language.
I tried to find poems by Bely in Nabokov's "Verses and Versions"
but I couldn't find anything about him.
Wikipedia mentions three clear references to Bely by Nabokov. One
of them in LEL (one of the four greatest novels of the 20th century), the
other in "The Gift" and, at last, VN's essay "Notes on Prosody"*
There are many entries in the VN-L archives with lively
exchanges in the nineties.** I wish that those in the know could bring up
more informations relating Nabokov and Bely, or offer available
articles?
.
I read that Bely lived in Switzerland for a few years in his youth and
there he became acquainted with Soloviev and, later, with Rudolf
Steiner. Does Nabokov's choice of moving to Switzerland have any relation
to these two mystics?
Does the reference to Dr. Solov in "Signs and Symbols" indicate
Soloviev?
..............................................................................
*Andrei Bely: From Wikipedia, the free
encyclopedia
Boris Nikolaevich Bugaev (Russian), better known by the pen name
Andrei Bely - October 26 [O.S. October 14] 1880 - January 8, 1934), was a
Russian novelist, poet, theorist, and literary critic. His novel Petersburg was
regarded by Vladimir Nabokov as one of the four greatest novels of the 20th
century. As a young man, Bely was strongly influenced by his acquaintance with
the family of philosopher Vladimir Solovyov, especially Vladimir's younger
brother Mikhail, described in his long autobiographical poem The First Encounter
(1921); the title is a reflection of Vladimir Solovyov's Three
Encounters.[ ]In his later years Bely was influenced by Rudolf
Steiner's anthroposophy...Bely's essay "Rhythm as Dialectic in The Bronze
Horseman" is cited in Nabokov's novel "The Gift," where it is mentioned as
"a
monumental research on rhythm".[
Nabokov
(1938) The
Gift,
chapter 3, p. 141.] Fyodor, poet and main character, praises the
system Bely created for graphically marking off and calculating the
'half-stresses' in the iambs. Bely found that the diagrams plotted over the
compositions of the great poets frequently had the shapes of rectangles and
trapeziums. Fyodor, after discovering Bely's work, re-read all his old iambic
tetrameters from the new point of view, and was terribly pained to find out that
the diagrams for his poems were instead plain and gappy.[4] Nabokov's essay
Notes on Prosody follows for the large part Bely's essay Description of
the Russian
iambic tetrameter (published in the collection of essays
Symbolism, Moscow, 1910).
** a small sample:
Date:Sun, 28 Feb 1999 10:34:23 -0800: If Bad Translations Did Not Exist,
Would VN Have Had to Invent Them?
"I've been working on an article about
Nabokov's use of geometric imagery and am being driven crazy by the following
remark from his 1966 "Reply to
My Critics" (i.e. Wilson), reproduced in
Strong Opinions (p.243). Nabokov is talking about "the amount of unwillful
deceit going on in the translation trade." "I recall once opening a copy
of Bely's Petersburg in English, and lighting upon a monumental howler in a
famous passage about a blue coupe which had been hopelessly discolored by the
translator's understanding kubovyy (which means "Blue") as "cubic"! This
has remained a model and a symbol."// A model and a symbol of what? This
mistake struck me as one that would have been, obviously, fitting to Bely's own
wordplay, perhaps even a wordplay that Nabokov might have pocketed for his own
use." Eric Naiman
...................
I think I have a plausible solution of Eric Naiman's riddle. Bely does use
the adjective "kubovyi" (dark blue) in Chapter Five of his
*Petersburg*
("kubovyi vozdukh, nastoiannyi na zvezde"). However, it has no connections
either to a cube or to Ableukhov's coupe. As the word is
very rare, Nabokov
probably learned it from the novel when he was reading it in his youth. Many
years later, in 1934, under the influence of Bely's
death and Khodasevich's
necrological memoir, he tried to "rememorate" the novel but his memory failed
him and he actually invented a Belyesque
phrase, telescoping "kubovyi" and
"kub karety" (the cube of the carriage). Then, in the fifties, he came across
"the dark cube of his carriage" in
Cournos's translation and, relying
solely on his memory, took it for a howler. To borrow from Brian
Boyd's title, "Even Homais nods." Alexander Dolinin
.........................