Pale Fire Research Articles

Translation’s Pale, Life-Giving Fire: Observations on Navigating the Complexities of Literary Translation

This reflective essay aims to explore the intricacies, pitfalls and limitations of literary translation, specifically concerning the rendering of great English works of literature into Mandarin Chinese. For this purpose, extracts from Nabokov’s Pale Fire, Shakespeare’s Love’s Labor’s Lost and Hamlet, as well as Joyce’s Ulysses, will be compared alongside their respective published Mandarin translations, to demonstrate just what an unforgiving task fictional rendering can be.

The Mirror and the Icon: A Theological Perspective on Nabokov’s Pale Fire

Abstract: The search for the author(s) of Nabokov’s Pale Fire arises from a fundamental misunderstanding of the problem of repetition and its relation to the question of origins, temporal and timeless. For insofar as an origin is a thing ( res ) that is not always already in the movement of repetition (identical or otherwise), however distantly removed from its source (finite or otherwise), there can be no finite or immanent origin in the book or in the world. There is only its sign, which incorporates and refracts within its generative gaze all the temporalities and identities as non-identical repetition. In Pale Fire such as sign is represented by St. Sudarg of Bokay’s triptych of bottomless light.

Reading Like A Replicant: Blade Runner 2049, Pale Fire, and the Archival Embodiment of Literature

If androids dream of electric sheep, do replicants read analog novels? In the dystopian sci-fi world of Blade Runner 2049 (2017), literature plays a complex role. In particular, the film engages in a multi-leveled way with Vladimir Nabokov's novel Pale Fire (1962). A hardcover copy of the book appears in one scene, and it is quoted and covertly referenced in others. These appearances are like metafictive keys to a pattern of possible meanings, through which the film both embodies and reflects upon its method of archival replication. Translating between codex, screen, and holographic media, the film reanimates its source materials, dramatises the affinity between literary texts and embodied life, and suggests that literature may be a vector of resistance to techno-capitalist archival control.

Introduction: "House Rules"—Reading with Authorial Instructions

Introduction:"House Rules"—Reading with Authorial Instructions Tatyana Gershkovich (bio) "The novels we know best have an architecture," writes Zadie Smith in an essay on reading (43). "Not only a door going in and another leading out, but rooms, hallways, stairs, little gardens front and back, trapdoors, hidden passageways, etcetera. It's a fortunate rereader who knows half a dozen novels this way in their lifetime" (42). Despite having their "own ideas of the floor plan," however, Smith reminds readers that they are only tenants, not landlords, let alone architects. Readers fashion a "wonderful way of living in" a novel, but they must still abide by "the house rules […] the author's peculiar terms" (Smith 43, 57). This was not always Smith's view; she describes her way of reading as evolving over time. Like many modern readers, Smith has tried to navigate two contradictory impulses. The first is to embrace linguistic skepticism and to accept—even to revel in—the multiple meanings it is possible to find in texts when they are unmoored from an authorial anchor. The second is to grieve that loss of a shared textual center and to search for ways to restore it. For Smith, the first impulse is personified by Roland Barthes, the second by Vladimir Nabokov. As a college student she thrilled to Barthes' brash disregard for the supposedly dubious project of pinning down the meaning of a text. Barthes declared that the "unity of the text is not in its origin, but its destination"—not in the writer, but in the reader (Barthes 129). And Smith relished her readerly prerogative to "inscribe dusty old novels into [her] own interests and [End Page 111] concerns" (Smith 51). In hindsight, though, she realizes that reading this way made her "feel lonely," for it meant abandoning one's faith in writing "as an intentional, directional act, an expression of an individual consciousness" (57, 44). This faith is something she feels the need to retain. Barthes's suspicion of the text—of its monopoly on its own meaning—was intended to enrich our reading. But it took something away, too: it robbed us of the pleasurable sense that in reading we come to know the mind of another person. Perhaps it stands to reason that as Smith became a writer herself, she turned from Barthes to Nabokov. Few authors have felt as keenly as Nabokov the pathos of our shattered faith in the communicative function of language; fewer still have tried so hard to restore that faith for readers. Charles Kinbote, the mad commentator of Nabokov's Pale Fire, wonders with horror: "What if we awake one day, all of us, and find ourselves utterly unable to read?" (289). In a way, that is just what happens to him: he loses faith in a writer's capacity to make himself known to a reader. But Nabokov himself never loses that faith, nor does he relegate his readers to a world without it. By haunting his texts, never letting the reader forget his presence, he insists on the communicative capacity of literature—and on his ownership rights to the meaning of his work. He is always reminding us (as Smith puts it) that "the only perfect tenant of the house that Nabokov built is Nabokov" (Smith 53). Barthes pronounced the death of the author, but "Nabokov refused to lie down and die" (46). Many readers experience his authorial presence as overbearing, even tyrannical. But Smith delights in it, in trying to replicate Nabokov's way of dwelling in his works. Though the modern reader knows she can never truly grasp the mind of the author, Nabokov's fictions convince her that if she reads according to his rules, she can approximate this knowledge "by degrees" (48). Nabokov's authorial instructions enable Smith to "make a connection with a consciousness other than my own" (57). Of course, not all authors are intent on dictating the rules of the house. Some are long-absent proprietors, happy to give us the run of the place. Others are tyrants and despots, meddlers and micromanagers, who like Kinbote's landlord have "taken stupendous pains to write out on slips of paper recommendations...

Vladimir Nabokov et la traduction ed. by Julie Loison-Charles and Stanislav Shvabrin

Reviewed by: Vladimir Nabokov et la traduction ed. by Julie Loison-Charles and Stanislav Shvabrin Suzanne Eade Roberts Vladimir Nabokov et la traduction. Ed. by Julie Loison-Charles and Stanislav Shvabrin. Arras: Artois Presses Université. 2021. 306 pp. €19. ISBN 978–2–84832–517–0. This stimulating collection of articles, edited by Julie Loison-Charles and Stanislav Shvabrin, encourages a re-evaluation of Nabokov as a translator, translation scholar, and object of translation. Moving beyond what tends to be known about his self-translations and the high proportion of footnotes to text in his version of Pushkin's Evgenii Onegin, it includes a new appraisal of Nabokov's literalist approach to translation, analysis of his collaborative translations, and discussion of the challenges of translating Nabokov. The volume, which contains slightly more articles in French than in English, is the latest to appear in the 'Traductologie' series of Artois Presses Université, which regularly publishes Francophone scholarship in Translation Studies, as well as translations into French. Thus, a major benefit of this book is how it presents both Anglophone and Francophone scholarly writing. The Nabokov researchers represented here are based primarily in the USA, the UK, France, and Canada. Moreover, the contributors encompass the disciplines of Translation Studies, Linguistics, English and Slavic Literature, as well as Comparative Literature. The Introduction fascinatingly reveals the hazards of this eclectic approach: in Nabokov's œuvre, it is not always easy to distinguish between a translation, an original, a self-translation, or a collaborative translation, or to harmonize the dates of first publication. Stanislav Shvabrin's enjoyable article begins by reminding us that 'the backlash against [Nabokov's] translation theory and praxis rivals the endurance of Lolita's [End Page 274] grip on its readers' (p. 87). He offers a more nuanced picture of Nabokov's literalism, drawing on Bakhtin to reassess Nabokov's translations, even youthful ones, as 'dialogic encounters' in which he can try out different approaches to literary translation. These experiments vary 'from wilful adaptation to most exacting literalism and everything else in between' (p. 96). Christine Raquet's essay draws attention to the numerous ways both of reading a text and of translating it, even though 'le tempérament littéraire autocratique de Nabokov avait souvent du mal à accepter [les choix d'un autre traducteur]' (p. 23). His collaborations became power struggles in which any other translator was expected to capitulate. In contrast, Susan Elizabeth Sweeney identifies recurrent ideas of ineffability and untranslatability in Nabokov's work, relating them to his synaesthesia. Julie Loison-Charles's contribution examines the treatment of the many foreign words used by Nabokov in Ada and the varying ways in which this multilingualism is conveyed by the novel's French and Russian translations. Similarly, Marta Arnal Gas focuses on how Nabokov's jeux linguistiques are translated into Spanish and Catalan. Russianists, meanwhile, will be interested in Lyudmila Razumova's comparison of the reception of samizdat (Soviet-era), perestroika-era, and post-perestroika translations into Russian of Pale Fire and her conclusions about the changing market for translation in Russophone nations. In terms of comparing Francophone and Anglophone Translation Studies, it may be a coincidence that two French scholars, Isabelle Paulin and Stanislas Gauthier, draw productively on the work of French translation theorist Antoine Berman in their respective analyses of the nature of Nabokov's translations or the reception of translations of Nabokov. The final section of this volume focuses on intersemiotic translation. It includes Yannicke Chupin's enlightening interview with Émilie Moreau, exploring the latter's choice to incorporate shadow play and masks into her theatre adaptation of Lolita. The appendix includes a convenient index of Nabokov's original work and his translations. This volume constitutes both a significant contribution to the different facets of Nabokov's work and an accessible examination of the challenges of translating Nabokov into several European languages. There is much to interest both Translation Studies scholars and Nabokov specialists. Suzanne Eade Roberts University of Bristol Copyright © 2023 Modern Humanities Research Association

The Year’s Work in American Humor Studies, 2021

The Year’s Work in American Humor Studies, 2021

A Tale of Two Theories

A Tale of Two Theories

Disclosing Structures: Scenes of Confession in Pale Fire

Abstract: The role that confession plays in Nabokov's fiction remains poorly understood, though the same can be said for confessional fiction in general. Part of the problem lies in the slipperiness of the word "confession" itself, which is why this essay begins by defining confession as a performative speech act through which the speaking or writing subject seeks to form, reform, and transform herself, addressing herself to another who is called to act as a witness to this creative act of self(trans)formation—a process akin to Nabokov's own description of a poet (not a "loony") who "peels off a drab past and replaces it with a brilliant invention" ( Pale Fire 188). Based on this capacious definition, the paper proposes reading Pale Fire , arguably the most elusive of Nabokov's confessional fictions, as the confession of the fictional editor, Charles Kinbote. Examining Kinbote's note to line 550 of the poem, where Kinbote confesses having been "tarrying on the brink of falsification" from the very beginning, I argue that Kinbote's commentary begins to act as his confession, allowing Kinbote to accumulate the kind of moral self-distance that serves as the basis for his reform. This reading is foregrounded by an analysis of two other interpretive strategies that are common in Pale Fire criticism: the "dialectic" reading that seeks to discover the truth of the text and the "paranoid" reading that promises to uncover a secret, a hidden truth. Whereas both of these strategies position the critic as the one who must disclose a truth that is not confessed in the novel, reading Pale Fire as Kinbote's confession in a deconstructive manner, as I propose doing, allows the novel to be endlessly "unfolded," to use Gilles Deleuze's metaphor, bringing to the fore the materiality of the text itself and the interpretive choices it imposes on its readers.

The Hidden Nabokov

Abstract: Not simple autobiography or mere camouflage, the relationship of Nabokov's fiction to his life shows his conscious process of misdirection. We can identify some autobiographical material that Nabokov hid, and why. Jane Grayson concluded that "in his later production Nabokov's personal experience appears in a less recognizable form. There it is digested, sometimes even parodied." She finds increasing self-consciousness, irony and detachment, and "a developing preoccupation with pattern and artifice" in the later work. The Gift, Invitation to a Beheading, Speak, Memory and Pale Fire conceal some of Nabokov's off-stage concerns—physical distress, terror of possible imprisonment and death, grief at abandoning Russia forever, fear that if he were to lose his Russian literary tradition and his literary identity, it would be tantamount to death—as well as the distressing might-have-beens found in Pnin . Nabokov's 1945 poem, "An Evening of Russian Poetry," is emblematic of the way he conceals the pain of emigration in his novels: the poem's narrator is stylized, arch, comical, composed, but his agony slips through the surface of his presentation to American undergraduates in untranslated Russian, hidden from his anglophone audience.

Vladimir Nabokov and the Art of Moral Acts by Dana Dragunoiu

Reviewed by: Vladimir Nabokov and the Art of Moral Acts by Dana Dragunoiu Anna Maslenova Vladimir Nabokov and the Art of Moral Acts. By Dana Dragunoiu. (Studies in Russian Literature and Theory) Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. 2021. xxi+264 pp. £73. ISBN 978–0–8101–4399–9. Dana Dragunoiu’s book is a valuable contribution to the study of Vladimir Nabokov’s ethics, reaffirming his Kantian view that the courteous treatment of others is a moral act. This book examines what its author terms ‘Nabokov’s faith in freedom’ (p. 4): the fact that Nabokov’s fictional characters are free to decide whether to conform to social standards or indulge their own passions. Dragunoiu argues that courteous gestures pertain to an anti-consequentialist moral paradigm, since they do not entail self-interest or personal gain. Her study thus shows how a critical focus on courtesy unites the ethical and aesthetic aspects of Nabokov’s texts. Taking literally Nabokov’s well-known dictum that ‘style is matter’, Dragunoiu claims that ‘Nabokov’s ethics is, startingly, an aesthetics’ and that his characters perform, or refuse to perform, ‘the art of moral acts’ (p. 12, emphasis original). Her monograph is arranged in six chapters and an Epilogue, offering a broad survey of Nabokov’s intertextual exchanges with Pushkin, Shakespeare, Tolstoi, and Proust on the subject of courtesy. Dragunoiu successively examines Nabokovian courtesy as performed by Mrs Luzhin (The Luzhin Defence), Helen Grinstein (The Real Life of Sebastian Knight), Disa (Pale Fire), and Lucette (Ada). She analyses Mrs Luzhin’s attempt to comfort an unnamed Soviet lady, Helen Grinstein’s welcoming response to V’s visit in the middle of a funeral ceremony for her brother-in-law, Disa’s adherence to etiquette despite her grief over her husband Charles Xavier’s infidelities, and Lucette’s parting words to the Robinsons immediately before her suicide. In these cases, a heroine’s courteous behaviour serves to illustrate her virtue. Conversely, Dragunoiu also shows how discourteous behaviour indicates the moral limitations of more boorish characters such as Ganin (in Nabokov’s debut novel Mary), Pete Dean and John Shade who refuse to recognize Hazel’s individuality (Pale Fire), and Van from Ada, who falls short of the narrator’s gentlemanly and aesthetic standards. The sixth chapter is the most interesting but also the most problematic. It explores courtesy in Lolita and Pnin, considered by Dragunoiu Nabokov’s darkest novels because they reveal his loss of faith in the moral dimension of courtesy and even of art in general. Pnin does not perform his moral duty of remembering Mira Belochkin, murdered in a concentration camp. He suppresses his memories of her because his own existence is untenable in any world where crimes such as her murder can happen. In Lolita, courtesy serves to normalize the unthinkable: rape and child abuse. Humbert’s narratorial eloquence ‘underscores the functional equivalence between art and courtesy’ (p. 157). Both texts contain a ‘Holocaust subtext’ (p. 158) and resonate with Adorno’s celebrated statement that writing poetry after Auschwitz is ‘barbaric’ (cited on p. 178). Dragunoiu suggests, however, that in subsequent years ‘the memory of children burned in ovens receded from Nabokov’s imagination’ (p. 193). Thus, in Ada he reverts to his former conception of courteous gestures as moral, evident from that novel’s references to the medieval romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. One might well wonder how and whether Nabokov succeeded [End Page 736] in forgetting these terrible images. Perhaps, like Pnin, he learnt to suppress the recollection of tragedy. Dragunoiu does not offer any explanation. This study provides an extensive collection of the various expressions of courtesy in Nabokov’s novels. It would have been still more interesting if it had offered more detailed analysis of how courtesy works in a single Nabokov text, at different levels. For instance, scholars could explore whether Luzhin’s lack of courtesy—before Mrs Luzhin teaches him to kiss women’s hands—might be an expression of his moral deficiency. There are many more instances of potential interrelation between courtesy and morality in Nabokov’s fiction. [End Page 737] Anna Maslenova University of Exeter Copyright © 2022 The Modern...

Nabokov in Motion: Modernity and Movement by Yuri Leving

Reviewed by: Nabokov in Motion: Modernity and Movement by Yuri Leving Tim Harte Leving, Yuri. Nabokov in Motion: Modernity and Movement. Translated from the Russian by Keith Blasing in collaboration with the author. Bloomsbury Academic, London, New York and Dublin, 2022. xvi + 335 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. £90.00; £23.99; £21.59 (e-book). 'The streetcar will vanish in twenty years or so, just as the horse-drawn tram has vanished. Already I feel it has an air of antiquity, a kind of old-fashioned charm', Vladimir Nabokov submits in his 1925 short story, 'A Guide to Berlin' (The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov, New York, 2008, p. 156). For Nabokov, [End Page 751] nothing could ever be static. Possessing an acute sense of modernity's fleeting essence, the Russian-American writer had a knack for grabbing onto the various trappings of modernity and probing them while they lasted. It is Nabokov's profound appreciation of modern modes of transportation that lies at the centre of Yuri Leving's Nabokov in Motion: Modernity and Movement. An excellent translation of his 2004 monograph, Vokzal – garazh – angar: Vladimir Nabokov i poetika russkogo urbanizma, this wide-ranging study of Nabokov's predilection for mechanized movement through the modern world takes to heart the dynamism of the era and transports the reader through an abundance of works and motion-filled motifs. Drawing upon an impressive command of Nabokoviana and modernist culture in general, Leving makes a compelling case for why Nabokov's fiction, poetry and non-fiction merits analysis through the prism of the modern, urban innovations encountered by the writer throughout his lifetime and storied career. Rather than provide a lengthy reading of just several works by Nabokov, Leving opts to take an expansive overview of the urbanism pulsating through virtually all of Nabokov's work. The result is a highly original, captivating study that comes as close as any literary study can to conveying the excitement and enticing thrills of the modern era. The critical insight and associations come fast and furious, yet that is what makes Leving's study so enthralling and unique. Not surprisingly, trains — along with those soon-to-be obsolete trams — take up the bulk of Leving's critical attention, as he explores the 'myth creation' of the train in not only Nabokov's work, but also contemporaneous literature and art of the era. Chekhov, Belyi, Bulgakov, Kafka and so many others make noteworthy cameos here to enrich the cultural tapestry woven by Leving as he delves into the modern milieu in which Nabokov emerged as a writer, first in Russia and then in Western Europe and the United States. As Leving argues, for Nabokov the train 'is not so much a means of conveyance for the characters, as much as it is a means for transporting references based on the rules of stylistics, grammar, and the game of literature' (p. 113). Engaging with Nabokov in this game, Leving probes the ethos and essence of train travel, even the crashes and resounding significance of love and fate on the rails. Although the bulk of Leving's study focuses on the railroad, cars and aeroplanes also figure in the exhilarating discussion. As Leving notes, the car did not inspire Nabokov to the extent that the train did, but anyone familiar with Lolita will know that the automobile represented no minor motif in Nabokov's work. From his automobile ride to school (see Speak, Memory) to descriptions of love-making in automobiles (see Mary) to meandering drives amidst the towering trees of Vermont (see Pnin), the automobile would work its way into Nabokov's celebrated oeuvre. The same goes for the aeroplane; [End Page 752] Nabokov may have been reluctant until late in life to travel by air, but reminiscences of early aviation (see 'Time and Ebb') and transatlantic flights (see Pale Fire) figure in Nabokov's work. Here Leving channels the poetry and non-fiction of Aleksandr Blok, among other notable cultural figures of the early twentieth century, in establishing the prominence of aeronautics for the pre-Revolutionary Russia in which Nabokov came to maturation. Well-illustrated and featuring a number of relatively rare auto-related photos...

« Je t’aime moi non plus »

“JE T’AIME MOI NON PLUS”: THE CORRESPONDENCE BETWEEN VLADIMIR NABOKOV AND HIS FRENCH TRANSLATORS
 The structure of the letters which Vladimir Nabokov sent to his French translators shows how ambivalent his relation to them was: generally, Nabokov starts by praising the beauty of the translation, and then he makes a long list of all the blunders and howlers made by the translator. This article studies three cases. First, the translation of Pale Fire is analysed as a confrontation of two very proud men, in which the famous translator Maurice Edgar Coindreau refuses to be bossed around by the novelist. Then the article presents the translation of Ada or Ardor (entrusted to Gilles Chahine) as the collaboration of “men on the verge of a nervous breakdown”. Finally, it shows the very friendly relationship which Nabokov had with Jarl Priel, the translator of Invitation to a Beheading, whom Nabokov always fiercely defended. Thanks to the correspondence between Nabokov, his translators and publishers, it will become clear that these collaborative translations were in fact “mediated self-translations”. For Nabokov, it was not just about translating his novels: he wanted to remain the full master of his creations.

Dark Words: Blackness in Pale Fire

Dark Words: Blackness in Pale Fire

‘The Name of God Has Priority’: ‘God’ and The Apophatic Element in Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire

Abstract However one might interpret Vladimir Nabokov’s self-styled ‘utter indifference’ to religion, mysticism, and theology, his 1962 metafictional masterpiece, Pale Fire, betrays a measured though nonetheless peculiar engagement with theological ideas and sources. Focusing on the novel’s theological centre—Charles Kinbote’s note to line 549 of John Shade’s poem (‘While snubbing gods, including the big G’), which records Kinbote’s conversation with Shade on 23 June 1959 about religion and God—this article uncovers Pale Fire’s direct engagement with core tenets of the apophatic theologies of St Augustine and St Thomas Aquinas, and argues, moreover, that this works to highlight the analogy which the novel seeks to express between theological and literary discourse.

Fictional Worlds Theory Problematized: Global Logical Impossibilities in Vladimir Nabokov’s Novels

ABSTRACT Confronting fictional worlds theory with three novels by Vladimir Nabokov (The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Pale Fire, and Look at the Harlequins!), the author argues that the theory is problematized by Nabokov’s employment of global logical impossibilities. All three novels elicit fluid, fragmentary imaginations of “fictional worlds”; however, by requiring readers to juggle between several logically incompatible interpretations of characters and plots without reaching any synthesis, Nabokov refuses to let these imaginations of “worlds” solidify into fictional worlds in the theoretical sense. This obstruction of world-creation challenges the analytical power of fictional worlds theory and questions some of its basic assumptions. A further examination of three solutions that the theory proposes for logical impossibility shows that they fail to account for cases like Nabokov’s without undermining the soundness or status of the theory itself. This problematization ultimately points to an alternative perception of fiction as a means of real-world communication.

Hazel Shade's Russian Sisterhood, or Is Pale Fire a Feminist Novel? In memory of Gennady Barabtarlo

Abstract: The essay traces Nabokov's representation of women from the Russian-language works in which he shows a sustained interest in women's lives to the English-language works whose plots often double as whodunnits, driven as they are by questions such as "who is she?" and "what has she done?" I argue that The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, "The Vane Sisters," Lolita, Pale Fire, and Ada dramatize what feminist commentators have identified as properties of patriarchal literary representation: the primacy of women coupled by their absence (De Lauretis), under-description (Heldt), and action delimited by the Love Story plot (Russ). Though some of Nabokov's works perpetuate these conventions, his most enduringly mysterious fiction forces readers to care and wonder about women characters who are under-described and overlooked. The essay also uses the insights of feminist scholars who have written on Lolita (Kauffman, Patnoe, Herbold) to argue that Pale Fire extends the achievements of Lolita by staging a different kind of entrapment: readers are seduced into colluding with Shade's obliteration of his daughter Hazel by focusing too much on her body and disregarding her mind. In one of Pale Fire's subtlest ironies, Shade treats his grief at his daughter's loss by foregrounding his own spiritual quest but continuing to ignore hers. I argue further that the importance of Hazel's spiritual strivings become most clear if seen through the lens of Russia's literary tradition. The second half of the essay traces important bonds of kinship that connect Hazel to Tatyana Larin, the female protagonist of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, and Cecily von Lindenborn, the protagonist of Karolina Pavlova's only novel A Double Life (1848). Pavlova's novel, combining as it does prose and verse, offers more than a formal precedent for Pale Fire: the plot rescues Hazel from the captivity of the Love Story plot and places her in a context that is more relevant to her own concerns. The essay ends with a tribute to Gennady Barabtarlo, for whom Hazel's predicament anticipated the predicament of another beloved but disregarded daughter: Martyshka of Tarkovsky's Stalker.

FEATURES OF THE FORMATION OF KINOPOETICS IN THE FICTION DISCOURSE OF VLADIMIR NABOKOV

The article considers the manifestation of cinematography in V. Nabokov's fiction discourse. The analysis of the peculiarities of the origin and functioning of cinematography in the fiction discourse of V. Nabokov is important for understanding the place and role of cinema in the author's novel work and, in particular, for understanding some semantic, ideological and plot aspects. The analysis is based on the analysis of the author's English-language novels: «Laughter in the Dark», «Lolita», «Pale Fire» and «The Original of Laura». The article also aims to continue the research of cinema poetics in the novel work of V. Nabokov in general. The article examines the influence of cinematography on the life and work of the writer V. Nabokov. We update the essential role of cinematography in the Berlin period of the writer's work. We trace the implementation of cinematography through the author's dramaturgical work. In English-language novels, we note cinematic elements and trace their place and meaning. We turn to the script of the film adaptation of «Lolita» and the writer's epistolary with directors S. Kubrick and A. Hitchcock. We trace the reflection of technical, semantic, and aesthetic elements in the artistic discourse of V. Nabokov.

On the Dual “Defamiliarization” Method and Its Source in Pale Fire

On the Dual “Defamiliarization” Method and Its Source in Pale Fire

Seriously, Jane

Seriously, Jane Toon Staes (bio) Sansei and Sensibility Karen Tei Yamashita Coffee House Press https://coffeehousepress.org/products/sansei-and-sensibility 232 Pages; Print, $16.95 Writing about "serious" literature reminds me of Matthew Arnold, that eminent Victorian, part-time poet and full-time educator, whose literary criticism inspired the F. R. Leavises and Harold Blooms of this world. In "The Study of Poetry" (1880), perhaps his most famous essay, Arnold concerned himself with setting the high standards by which we are to judge what counts as "classic" literature—the poetry that could stand alongside Homer's or Dante Alighieri's. Style and content mattered to Arnold, of course, and so did "superiority of diction and movement," but the two criteria that truly separated the best from the rest were these: "a higher truth and a higher seriousness." Arnold never went into much detail about what passes for truth or seriousness in literature, but no matter: here we might have a yardstick to measure which texts belong to the canon, a benchmark proposed by a prominent scholar who would shape the tastes of English and American critics for years to come. It stood to reason that, within the space of the same essay, Arnold coursed through the history "of our English poetry" with his own criteria in mind. William Shakespeare or John Milton? Yes, please. Geoffrey Chaucer, John Dryden, or Alexander Pope? Brilliant poets, sure, and influential to boot, but not serious enough. "The Study of Poetry" stands as a testament to the importance of scholarship among the Victorians, who touted the Western canon as part of a well-rounded education—much as Leavis, Bloom, and other defenders of the Great Tradition would do later. It also speaks to how vague or even frustrating scholars can get when they want to prescribe what makes "serious" literature function. "Literature is an act of invention," another highpowered writer-turned-scholar, Vladimir Nabokov, would counter, "a great writer is always a great enchanter." But for functionalists, literature seems not just an act of artistic imagination—it's a vehicle that adheres to one, often ill-defined, moral standard. Of course there is nothing wrong with the assumption, say, that poetry or prose can serve as an abstract space in which we come to terms with the complexities of life. They can, and as empirical research on children's literature and theory-of-mind skills suggests, for instance, they often do. But the reading brain is much wider than the classics alone, and rankings of literary models (authors, styles, genres) on the basis of their "seriousness" rarely boil down to more than personal opinions about how literature should behave. When John Gardner or Gore Vidal railed against the "Po-Mo" writers of the sixties and seventies, they simply measured them against the values of the Victorians. Even today, the influence of Arnold and his band of serious readers lingers. How different are "truth" and "high seriousness," really, from more recent buzzwords applied to serious literature? "Relatability" comes to mind. "Sincerity." More questions inevitably follow. Relatable, for whom? Sincere, compared to what? How would the literature of alienation score on the relatability scale? Hasn't irony taught us much about the difference between appearance and reality? Here, too, we might turn to Nabokov—or to Nabokov's own poet, Pale Fire's John Shade, in conversation with his exegete, Charles Kinbote: "when I hear a critic speaking of an author's sincerity I know that either the critic or the author is a fool." Jane Austen doesn't appear on Arnold's list of classics, but she is, of course, as classic as they come. (Arnold was always a bit belated as a critic, not having noticed that by his day, some fifty years after Austen's, the novel had already caught up with the poem in terms of literary cachet.) Here we have one writer whose innovative tricks with narration and perspective have kept literature professors occupied for long. Perhaps, for too long. (I once overheard an established narrative theorist propose a twenty year ban on studies of Austen's use of free indirect discourse. Austen might have appreciated his irony.) At...

Cartesian Shades: Gide's Les Caves du Vatican and Nabokov's Pale Fire

Abstract The novels of André Gide and Vladimir Nabokov consistently represent the world as a subjective (and sometimes solipsist) experience, relayed by imperfect senses and biased readings. Because perception cannot be separated from interpretation, the characters (and, implicitly, the readers) of these novels are either highly aware, or tragically unaware, of living not so much in the world as in their own representations of it. This would appear to sustain theories of literature as self-referential and self-contained. And yet, while Gide and Nabokov are clearly skeptical about the possibility of knowing the world as such, they do not simply retreat into a sphere of pure autonomous representation. However elusive physical reality may prove, they do not abandon what might be termed metaphysical enquiry. In their novels, especially in Gide's Les Caves du Vatican (The Vatican Cellars) and Nabokov's Pale Fire, this enquiry is bolstered by many allusions to Renaissance thinkers, painters, and playwrights who also highlight the uncertainty of knowledge, the elusiveness of reality and the artifice of representation. Such allusions, while they discourage characters and readers are alike from thinking that they might attain anything like truth, nonetheless encourage them to scrutinize their beliefs and actions in accordance with some form of philosophical, more specifically ethical, tenet.