Nabokov's Canon: From ‘Onegin’ to ‘Ada’ by Marijeta Bozovic (review)

Abstract

SEER, 95, 4, OCTOBER 2017 740 letter he describes revisiting Cambridge, a disappointing trip that failed to live up to his memories, but which also reveals that, even as late as 1937, he had not lost all hope of going home: ‘This visit was a good lesson — the lesson of the return — and a warning: we also need not expect life, heat, a wild awakening of the past — from our other return — to Russia. As a toy sold with a key, everything is already wrapped up in memory — and without it nothing moves’ (p. 312). There are even variants, here, of letters about the same events sent to other people. For example, in June 1944 Nabokov suffered a serious bout of food poisoning which hospitalized him for a few days. He wrote about it in graphic and hilarious detail to Edmund Wilson, but in his account to Véra he omits much of this detail (including vomiting into the telephone) so as not to alarm her, and so much so that he tries to deflate its importance by alluding to the D-Day landings, with which it coincided: ‘In short, the bacilli had taken me for the invasion beach’ (p. 489). These letters serve as a form of alternative autobiography, offering a uniquely spontaneous and unguarded insight into Nabokov’s universe, and together with Shapiro’s portrait of V. D. Nabokov, present both scholars and the general reader with two new, tremendously rich and infinitely rewarding resources to mine. UCL SSEES Barbara Wyllie Bozovic, Marijeta. Nabokov’s Canon: From ‘Onegin’ to ‘Ada’. Studies in Russian Literature and Theory. Northwestern University Press, Evanston, IL, 2016. x + 230 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $39.95 (paperback). Vladimir Nabokov has embarrassed many a librarian seeking just the right place for his novels on the bookshelves. The author of Ada, or Ardor is not exactly an émigré Russian writer, nor the Great American Novelist, in spite of Lolita’s top-rated place in anthologies of American literature. His position in the literary landscape has been the source of many debates: is Vladimir Nabokov the last of the European modernists or the first American postmodern writer? Marijeta Bozovic sees it in different terms. In her original and fascinating study, Nabokov’s Canon: From ‘Onegin’ to ‘Ada’, she relies on Nabokov’s most challenging works — his monumental commentary of Eugene Onegin and his novel Ada — to argue that Nabokov has reshaped the dominant literary landscape by reinventing a transnational and cross-cultural canon in the second half the twentieth century. Progressing methodologically through her corpus, Bozovic opens her first chapter, entitled ‘Pushkin’s Evgenii Onegin: The Breguet Keeps Time’ REVIEWS 741 (pp. 15–43), with an exclusive focus on Evgenii Onegin’s exploration of time, timeliness and use of literary traditions. Relying on the notion of ‘cultural capital’ as developed by French philosophers such as Pierre Bourdieu and Pascale Casanova, Bozovic reads Evgenii Onegin as a meta-literary exploration of canon formation that both betrays and attempts to transcend its obsessional anxieties about the marginal place of Russian literature on the international literary scene. This anxiety will only be magnified later by Nabokov’s own ‘translation’ and commentary of Onegin, which are the focus of the second chapter, ‘Nabokov’s Eugene Onegin: The Chateaubyronic Genre’ (pp. 44–70). Bozovic argues that Nabokov’s lengthy commentary may also be read as an autonomous text that consciously borrows Onegin’s methods of literary appropriation of European masterpieces and constitutes Nabokov’s initial attempt to annex ‘Russian culture to a transnational canon’ (p. 99). With a 150-year leap, Bozovic introduces Ada in the third chapter of her study, ‘Nabokov’s Ada, or Ardor: Translating the Russian Novel’ (pp. 71–96). The possibilities and freedom offered by fiction take Nabokov many steps further in this ongoing redefinition of a transcultural canon. First, Bozovic suggests, the creation of Antiterra reads as Nabokov’s best opportunity to create his own ‘republic of letters,’ to use Casanova’s phrase. The author of Ada said about Lolita that he had carefully ‘kept the Russians out of it’ (V. Nabokov, The Annotated Lolita, New York, 1991, p. 440), yet they reappear more forcefully in Ada...