Nabokov at Cornell by Gavriel s> Shapiro (review)

Abstract

330 SEER, 83, 2, 2005 Shapiro, Gavriel(ed.).Nabokov at Cornell. Cornell University Press,Ithaca, NY and London, 2003. xiv + 288 pp. Illustrations.Notes. $39.95: J26.95. NABOKOV AT CORNELL belongs to the numerous publications still being generated by Vladimir Nabokov's centenary in I999. The Cornell Nabokov Centenary Festival in September I998 celebrated the golden jubilee of the writer'sarrivalat the universityand was also the inauguralevent for the long line of festivals,conferencesand symposiathatwere to followin the centennial year. Gavriel Shapiro who organized the festival has now edited the proceedings in a collection which lists an impressive display of leading Nabokov specialists. In the preface, Shapiro remarksthat Nabokov might have been 'the last Renaissance man' a very apt description of the man who was a writer, lepidopterist,translatorandliterarycritic,whosepursuitsencompassedamong many others both classicalprosody and popular culture, the Dutch school of painting aswell as comic strips,the metaphysicaland the metafictional,and to whom a borderline between artand sciencewas utterlyforeign.It isone of the achievements of this collection to cover a wide range of Nabokov's interestsas well asuncoveringnew sourcesof inspirationforthewriter. The first two parts examine several of Nabokov's works in chronological order, using Brian Boyd's division of Nabokov's life into 'The Russian Years' and 'The American Years'. Vladimir Alexandrov follows up a fruitful argument which he has already advanced in his earlier Nabokov's Othenworld (Princeton,NJ, I99 I), examiningthepossibleinfluenceofthe Russianoccultist Petr Uspenskii on the development of Nabokov's metaphysics. D. Barton Johnson has very appropriatelytaken on the role of sleuth and reopened the files on Hermann Karlovich, tracking down striking parallels between sensationaltrialsof murdersand insurancefraudstersin I930s Berlinand the protagonist'scrimesin Otchaianie (Despair), which provesonce more Nabokov's talent of transforminglow-brow culturefor his own artisticpurposes.Marina Kanevskaya chooses a more theoretical approach and exposes Hermann's misapprehension of the mirror as a semiotic sign. Susan Sweeney finds an unexpected angle on Nabokov's stories of child abuse, analysingthe integration into the narrativeand the inversion of the fairy tale motif of enchanted slumberin Volshebnik (TheEnchanter) and Lolita. Sweeney's piece also preparesthe topic of the firstessay in the next section, the sufferingof children in Nabokov's fiction. In characteristicallyengaged fashion, Zoran Kuzmanovich does not shy away from sharing his personal reading experience of what must be the cruellest scene in the whole of Nabokov's oeuvre, the murder of David in Bend Sinister.It is the utter senselessness of David's violent death combined with the horrendously detailed depiction of his torture which removes any distance between the reader and the text or, in Kuzmanovich's words, which lets 'the story really [enter] us while denying us its sense' (p. 53). Dissatisfied with both metafictional and ethical readings of this passage, Kuzmanovich concludes that '[the torturein BendSinister] cannot [make sense], because it must not' (p. 57). Joanna Trzeciak looks at the related theme of parental pain in 'Signs and Symbols', examining the sharedsilence between the parentsas a theme which REVIEWS 331 is continued in the silence of the story'sopen ending, which thus, accordingto Trzeciak,rejectsstructuralistinterpretations. Ellen Pifer'sarticle on the film adaptationsof Lolitais a good illustrationof the collection's open-minded approach to Nabokov, which seeks to leave space for investigations that shift the focus away from Nabokov's texts on to wider related issues. Pifer offers a detailed and balanced comparison of Stanley Kubrick'sand Adrian Lyne's attempts to transposeNabokov's most famous novel on to the screen. While she uses this as a springboardto gain valuable insights into the more general relationship between literature and cinema, her conclusion that both versionsfail to renderNabokov's subtleand ambiguous masterpiece is somewhat problematic in its implication that the sole function of filmadaptationsis to serveas a tool forfaithfultranslation. Due to the gap of several years between the Cornell conference and the publication of its proceedings, Brian Boyd's contributionwhich identifiesthe otherworldlypresence of Shade'sdead daughterHazel in PaleFire,willby now be familiarto most Nabokovians as part of the thought-provokingargument fromhisNabokov's 'Pale Fire'.7heMagicofArtistic Discovegy (Princeton,NJ, I999). This section closes with CharlesNicol's interestingessaywhich examines the function of the telephone as the linkbetween Nabokov's initialprojectswhich were then merged into Adaand finds the importance of...