Without Lifting A Finger

 I do remember, however, with heartbreaking vividness, a certain evening in the summer of 1917 when, after a winter of incomprehensible separation, I chanced to meet Tamara on a suburban train. For a few minutes between two stops, in the vestibule of a rocking and rasping car, we stood next to each other, I in a state of intense embarrassment, of crushing regret, she consuming a bar of chocolate, methodically breaking off small, hard bits of the stuff, and talking of the office where she worked. On one side of the tracks, above bluish bogs, the dark smoke of burning peat was mingling with the smoldering wreck of a huge, amber sunset. It can be proved, I think, by published records that Alexander Blok was even then noting in his diary the very peat smoke I saw, and the wrecked sky. There was later a period in my life when I might have found this relevant to my last glimpse of Tamara as she turned on the steps to look back at me before descending into the jasmin-scented, cricket-mad ...

Re Nabokov's boyhood (then manhood) wonder with butterflies and nature in general: When a butterfly has to look like a leaf, not only are all the details of a leaf beautifully rendered but markings mimicking grub-bored holes are generously thrown in. “Natural selection,” in the Darwinian sense, could not explain the miraculous coincidence of imitative aspect and imitative behavior, nor could one appeal to the theory of “the struggle for life” when a protective device was carried to a point of mimetic subtlety, exuberance, and luxury far in excess of a predator’s power of appreciation. I discovered in nature the nonutilitarian delights that I sought in art. Both were a form of magic, both were a game of intricate enchantment and deception.

Reading Nabokov's "Speak, Memory" for the third time: “Oh, yes,” she would say as I mentioned this or that unusual sensation. “Yes, I know all that,” and with a somewhat eerie ingenuousness she would discuss such things as double sight, and little raps in the woodwork of tripod tables, and premonitions, and the feeling of the déjà vu. A streak of sectarianism ran through her direct ancestry. She went to church only at Lent and Easter. The schismatic mood revealed itself in her healthy distaste for the ritual of the Greek Catholic Church and for its priests. She found a deep appeal in the moral and poetical side of the Gospels, but felt no need in the support of any dogma. The appalling insecurity of an afterlife and its lack of privacy did not enter her thoughts. Her intense and pure religiousness took the form of her having equal faith in the existence of another world and in the impossibility of comprehending it in terms of earthly life. All one could do was to glimpse,...

Nabokov appears in Austerlitz at least once: his butterfly man photo is certainly there. So: he also shows up in The Emigrants . * But instead of strolling around Montreux, or going over to Lausanne, I set off to climb Grammont a second time, regardless of my condition, which by now was quite frail. The day was as bright as it had been the first time, and when I had reached the top, utterly exhausted, there below me was the country around Lake Geneva once again, seemingly completely unchanged, and with no trace of movement but for the one or two tiny boats that left their white wakes on the deep blue water as they proceeded, unbelievably slowly, and the trains that went to and fro at intervals on the far bank. That world, at once near and unattainably far, said Ferber, exerted so powerful an attraction on him that he was afraid he might leap down into it, and might really have done so had not a man of about sixty suddenly appeared before him – like someone who’s popped out of ...

Also reading: Khodasevich (a real live book!). Bilingual edition. Translated from the Russian by Peter Daniels. (Maybe I'll put up Daniels' version of "The Monkey" alongside Nabokov's someday. Maybe I'll have some time -- far down the road -- to dabble in the Russian myself.) Will certainly look more at Nabokov's Pale Fire in relation to Khodasevich's "Ballada." * Khodasevich's "Petersburg": They gave themselves to sad monotonous tasks, until their strength was spent. Half-dead among them, only I distracted their predicament. They looked at me and they forgot their bubbling kettles boiling dry, the boots of felt that scorched on stoves -- all listening to my poetry Then in sepulchral Russian dark a flowery herald-girl took my hand; and music's concord was revealed to me, knocked sideways in the wind. Mad with visions, over the sheet-ice on the canal, I'd reach the bank and slither up the crumbli...



Excerpt from King, Queen, Knave : The other day as they were having ice chocolate there, Martha counted at least three foreigners among the crowd. One, judging by his newspaper, was a Dane. The other two were a less easily determinable pair: the girl was trying in vain to attract the attention of the café cat, a small black animal sitting on a chair and licking one hind paw rigidly raised like a shouldered club. Her companion, a suntanned fellow, smoked and smiled. What language were they speaking? Polish? Esthonian? Leaning near them against the wall was some kind of net: a bag of pale-bluish gauze on a ring fixed to a rod of light metal.      "Shrimp catchers," said Martha. "I want shrimps for dinner tonight." (She clicked her front teeth."      "No," said Franz. "That's not a fisherman's net. That's for catching mosquitoes."      "Butterflies," said Dreyer, lifting an index finger.      "W...

Maybe I've been a little hasty. The last 2/3 of the text (IMHO) is closer to vintage Nabokov. Could that be the part of the text that got reworked the most (would perhaps be an interesting study)? Anyway, I'm enjoying the master enough to have downloaded The Eye  (another text I've overlooked? saved for later? all these years). * Excerpt from King, Queen, Knave : All right -- she should never have accepted to marry that clown with the foul-smelling monkey in his arms; all right -- she should not have been impressed by his money, she should not have hoped in her youthful naivete to make an ordinary, dignified, obedient husband out of that joker. But at least she had arranged her life the way she wished. Almost eight years of grim struggle. He wanted to take her to Ceylon or Florida, if you please, instead of buying this elegant villa. She needed a sedentary husband. A subdued and grave husband. She needed a dead husband.

Don't know very much at all about Martin Amis (a friend has read him and praises him -- I've been looking but still haven't tested the waters). But apparently we can agree on one thing: Nabokov was a great writer. Ranking Nabokov's texts, admittedly a subjective thing, is another matter: We'll have to agree to disagree (Thus far -- I'm not even halfway through it -- I'd put King Queen Knave towards the tail).  Here's Martin's 100th birthday salute to Nabokov and  his personal Nabokov  playlist :  * Anyway, another lick that tickled me from  King, Queen, Knave : Piffke was burly, dignified, and smartly dressed. He had blond eyelashes, baby-colored skin, a profile that had prudently stopped halfway between man and teapot, and a second-rate diamond on his plump auricular.

Certainly a nascent Nabokov. He's starting to flex his verbal muscles, but he's not there yet. Thus far the text doesn't jump out and grab me. (And of course it could all be ME.) Still, per usual, there are Vlad-is-tickling-me bits: E.g., There were lots of well dusted but uncaressed porcelain animals with glossy rumps, as well as varicolored cushions, against which no human cheek had ever nestled; and albums -- huge arty things with photographs of Copenhagen porcelain and Hagenkopp furniture -- which were opened only by the dullest or shyest guest. Everything in the house, including the jars labelled sugar, cloves, chicory, on the shelves of the idyllic kitchen, had been chosen by Martha, to whom, seven years previously, her husband had presented on its green-turfed tray the freshly built little villa, still empty and ready to please. She had acquired paintings and distributed them throughout the rooms under the supervision of an artist who had been very much in fas...

Tiring of De Quincey (for now), waiting for a new Coetzee, so I picked up (e-picked) one of the few Nabokov texts I've yet to read. * King, Queen, Knave is a novel written by Vladimir Nabokov (under his pen name V. Sirin ), while living in Berlin and sojourning at resorts in the Baltic in 1928. It was published as Король, дама, валеT (Korol', dama, valet) in Russian in October of that year; the novel was translated into English by the author's son Dmitri Nabokov (with significant changes made by the author) in 1968, forty years after its Russian debut. [From Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King,_Queen,_Knave ]

Got stuck in the ER last night (luckily, a false alarm for a young relation). Got a lot of reading done. Pnin has so many great "licks," and reads like a walk (a cakewalk)  in the park. * A few fave excerpts: Genius is non-conformity. At two, Victor did not make little spiral scribbles to express buttons or portholes, as a million tots do, why not you? Lovingly he made his circles perfectly round and perfectly closed. A three-year-old child, when asked to copy a square, shapes one recognizable corner and then is content to render the rest of the outline as wavy or circular; but Victor at three not only copied the researcher's (Dr. Liza Wind's) far from ideal square with contemptuous accuracy but added a smaller one beside the copy. There is, for instance, the Kent-Rosanoff Absolutely Free Association Test, in which little Joe or Jane is asked to respond to a Stimulus Word, such as table, duck, music, sickness, thickness, low, deep, long, happiness, fruit, m...

Something from Speak :      During the beginning of that summer and all through the previous one, Tamara's name had kept cropping up (with the feigned naivete so typical of Fate, when meaning business) here and there on our estate (Entry Forbidden) and on my uncle's land (Entry Strictly Forbidden) on the opposite bank of Oredezh. I would find it written with a stick on the reddish sand of a park avenue, or penciled on a whitewashed wicket, or freshly carved (but not completed) in the wood of some ancient bench, as if Mother Nature were giving me mysterious advance notices of Tamara's existence. That hushed July afternoon, when I discovered her standing still (only her eyes were moving) in a birch grove, she seemed to have been spontaneously generated there, among watchful trees, with the silent completeness of a mythological manifestation.

Finished Cosmos , sparingly dipping into Dziennik (kind of saving it for my trip to Germany/Poland this summer), and am re-reading Nabokov's Speak, Memory  (third time, first time via Kindle). * From Speak : My old (since 1917) quarrel with the Soviet dictatorship is wholly unrelated to any question of property. My contempt for the émigré who "hates the Reds" because they "stole" his money and land is complete. The nostalgia I have been cherishing all these years is a hypertrophied sense of lost childhood, not sorrow for lost banknotes.      And finally: I reserve for myself the right to yearn after an ecological niche:           ... Beneath the sky           Of my America to sigh                  For one locality in           ...

These quotes are from Strong Opinions .  From an interview with Alvin Toffler (think I met/saw him once long long ago) which appeared in Playboy (January, 1964). *** You have also written that poetry represents "the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words." But many feel that the "irrational" has little place in an age when the exact knowledge of science has begun to plumb the most profound mysteries of existence. Do you agree?      This appearance is very deceptive. It is a journalistic illusion. In point of fact, the greater one's science, the deeper the sense of mystery. Moreover, I don't believe that any science today has perceived any mystery. We, as newspaper readers, are inclined to call "science" the cleverness of an electrician or a psychiatrist's mumbo jumbo. This, at best, is applied science, and one of the characteristics of applied science is that yesterday's neutron or today's truth dies tomorrow...

Sure there were lots of other "biggies" (and big things), but I guess it was nice to see that Nabokov was a letter in the Cyrillic alphabet. Would he have been OK with that -- or shouted POSHLOST???? No idea. Maybe if I reread "The Vane Sisters" I'll get a hint.

Probably not too far off the mark: Next, they switched to the usual shop talk of European teachers abroad, sighing and shaking heads over the "typical American college student" who does not know geography, is immune to noise, and thinks education is but a means to get eventually a remunerative job.

Eureka! It was an easy find because the passage is near the beginning. Here goes:      In his search for a commode to store his belongings Hugh Person, a tidy man, noticed that the middle drawer of an old desk relegated to a dark corner of the room, and supporting there a bulbless and shadeless lamp resembling the carcass of a broken umbrella, had not been reinserted properly by the lodger or servant (actually neither) who had been the last to check if it was empty (nobody had). My good Hugh tried to woggle it in; at first it refused to budge; then, in response to the antagony of a chance tug (which could not help profiting from the cumulative energy of several jogs) it shot out and spilled a pencil. This he briefly considered before putting it back.      It was not a hexagonal beauty of Virginia juniper or African cedar, with the maker's name imprinted in silver foil, but a very plain, round, technically faceless old pencil of cheap pine, ...

Pninism: "I search, John, for the viscous and sawdust" = I search, Joan, for the whiskey(s) and soda" * The pencil figures hugely in Invitation to a Beheading and, though foggy from distance, there's a wonderfully magic passage in Transparent Things re this writing implement (I believe, along with the index card, it was Nabokov's weapon of choice). Anyway, here's a third paean to the pencil in Pnin: With the help of the janitor he screwed onto the side of the desk a pencil sharpener -- that highly satisfying, highly philosophical implement that goes ticonderoga-ticon-deroga, feeding on the yellow finish and sweet wood, and ends up in a kind of soundlessly spinning ethereal void as we all must.

          Started re-reading Nabokov's Pnin .     A few early underscores:   languid Eileen Lane, whom somebody had told that by the time one had mastered the Russian alphabet one could practically read "Anna Karamazov" in the original A race was run between the doctor's fat golden watch and Timofey's pulse (an easy winner) his greatest course (with an enrollment of twelve, none even remotely apostolic) The evolution of sense is, in a sense, the evolution of nonsense "I must warn: will have all my teeth pulled out. It is a repulsive operation" Pninizing his new quarters It surprised him to realize how fond he had been of his teeth. His tongue, a fat sleek seal, used to flop and slide so happily among the familiar rocks