Hetényi, Zsuzsa Nabokov regényösvényein (review)

Abstract

SEER, 95, 2, APRIL 2017 350 (for Drews’s overview of Heine’s interactions with and reactions to the Slavs, see pp. 9–24 and also 346). What is important is the fact that Slavonic responses to Heine frequently set in motion mysterious mechanisms of literary progress, in some cases contributing to the processes of cultural self-determination. Having secured for himself a lasting afterlife far from the homeland he left but not abandoned, Heine continues to be interpreted and reinterpreted to fit the needs of cultural and often frankly political agendas, which account for so much of the energy ensuring the existence of a Slavonic semiosphere as a discrete entity. Drews should be complimented for describing one such power source in nearly exhaustive depth, yet his advances are not restricted to the level of Weltliteratur. As a student of a singular, if highly representative, case of Heine’s enduring popularity in Russia — namely Heine’s significance for Vladimir Nabokov — I have found Drews’s book to be extremely useful. Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages & Literatures S. Shvabrin The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Hetényi, Zsuzsa. Nabokov regényösvényein. Kalligram, Budapest, 2015. 926 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Appendix. Index. HUF 3,990. Aiming to integrate the author’s plentiful original insights with every major development in Hungarian and international Nabokov scholarship of the past four decades or so, On the Paths of Nabokov’s Novels (as it would be in English) is an awe-inspiring enterprise in its sheer dimensions. With its wealth of biographical, exegetical and theoretical lore densely filling every last paragraph of its 900-odd pages, Zsuzsa Hetényi’s huge undertaking reminds one of Lewis Carroll’s fictional map envisaged by its would-be makers to have the scale of a mile to the mile. And yet the first monograph written in Hungarian on the Russian-American novelist does not aspire to become the Nabokov-book to end all Nabokov-books — and not only because of its language. More important than the linguistic limits on its accessibility is the welcome fact that Hetényi’s huge guide is clearly intended to suggest just as many untrodden paths as it meticulously charts. Hetényi deliberately spares the reader all biographical narrative beyond an explanatory minimum, and she also forgoes any methodical discussion of Nabokov’s copious output in genres other than the novelistic. What is offered insteadisarichlycontextualizedreadingofeveryNabokovnovel(twentyofthem by Hetényi’s count, including the key novellas The Eye and The Enchanter, and the mock autobiography Look at the Harlequins!) as well as the posthumously published torso, The Original of Laura. That task is performed in two large REVIEWS 351 sections separately treating the Russian and the English novels. These two parts are connected to each other by a chapter addressing the implications of the symmetrical relationship of non-superimposable counterparts called chirality, which is seen to relate Nabokov’s first major creative phase to the second. This is then capped with a concluding chapter surveying the scholarly and popular reception of Nabokov’s oeuvre in Hungary. Finally, a set of appendices full of carefully categorized biographical and bibliographic information, together with multiple indexes directing the reader to the looked-for name or concept, turn Hetényi’s work into a serviceable handbook for both the ‘general’ and the expert reader — the Hungarian reader, that is. But what is it that may recommend Nabokov regényösvényein to non-speakers of Hungarian, the vast majority of Nabokov’s international following? Why would Hetényi’s fellow-Nabokovian in Helsinki, St Petersburg or London want an English translation? Comprehensive and up to date as it may be, the philologicalinformationcontainedbetweenitssturdycoverswouldnot,initself, render an English version of Hetényi’s book an indispensable replacement of a Garland or a Cambridge Companion. No doubt, her credentials as Professor of Russian Literature at Hungary’s foremost university guarantee that Zsuzsa Hetényi’s comments on just about every figure in Nabokov’s Russian pantheon are always reliable and very often truly original. Whether pertaining to Zamiatin’s likely influence on the use of the ‘time-spiral’ as a key motif and an organizing principle in Invitation...