How to Leave the Theater without Getting Beheaded (original) (raw)
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his essay focuses on the problems encountered by the theatre when staging Nabokov's novels and short stories in Russia and Eastern Europe after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The staging of any text is an autonomous interpretation of that text. But at the same time, the script of the theatrical performance, which is an independent work of art in and of itself, is only one of the elements of the whole mise en scene. The process of interpreting a text for the stage begins with the preparation of the adaptation; however, all of the performative elements contribute to its completion: the mise en scene, style of acting, audio-visual layer of the performance, spatial structure, use of other genres, language of scenic stylization, scenery (costumes, stage design, props), plasticity of the performance, sound and lighting effects.
Invited to a Beheading: A Real Individual in Search of Freedom
Among the most prominent political novels of the twentieth century, Invitation to a Beheading is the acme of Nabokov's art in that it was embellished by the finest Nabokovian techniques, and was enriched by thought-provoking ideas. This study is aimed to offer a narratological reading of this novel in search of what its implied author has pictured as the meaning of genuine freedom intended by Nabokov. By analyzing the story and discourse levels of this narrative, we are going to discuss, first, the concepts of 'reality' and 'individuality' in Invitation to a Beheading as the pillars on which the author constructed the ultimate concept of freedom. After discussing the contribution of these two notions, in the last section of this article, dedicated to the questions of ideology and rhetoric, we place the ultimate concept of freedom in the period in which the novel was composed. We discuss how the final picture is in accordance with the peculiarities of the modern world that went through two World Wars and witnessed the outcome of totalitarian systems.
Between us and Artistic Appreciation: Nabokov and the Problem of Distortion
Vladimir Nabokov's view of art and life is confounded by a problem of "distortion," wherein meaning and aesthetic value are obscured when information from a complex form of experience is presented in an inadequate medium (a situation that is analogous to the projection of a three-dimensional globe as a two-dimensional map). For example, Nabokov claims that a work of literature originates in a state of mind in which the author can appreciate all parts of the work and their interconnections simultaneously; but when it is written out as a linear text, the relationships among the parts are rendered indistinct. This dissertation focuses on Nabokov's preoccupation with distortion and his interest in the possibility of glimpsing what is beyond it. Chapter one describes in detail the attributes of distortion and its use in Nabokov's work as a literary device. The second chapter conceptualizes the source of distortion as situations in which a less-circumscribed "outer" level of experience is viewed from a more circumscribed "inner" one. The remainder of the dissertation deals with Nabokov's fascination with ways of looking at things so that aesthetic value can be apprehended in spite of distortion.
THE NABOKOVIAN HEREAFTER OF FRENCH EXILE (Translated by Sarah-Louise Raillard)
Marijeta Bozovic and Yuri Leving, eds, INTERNATIONAL NABOKOV STUDIES IN TRANSLATION, Special Issue, Nabokov Online Journal, Vol. VIII (2014)
In 1966 the American writer of Russian origin Vladimir Nabokov declared, “I am a very non-typical émigré who doubts that a typical émigré exists.” This unique stance was confirmed by the contentious reception of his Russian novels between 1930 and 1940, when Russian émigrés in Paris faulted Nabokov for his lack of “Russianness,” while Soviet writers reproached his uselessness and Sartre condemned his lack of roots. In the French press, Nabokov’s defenders emphasized his Western nature and linked his style with French art and Pushkin “the Frenchman.” In 1936, Nabokov wrote in French an autobiographical narrative entitled “Mademoiselle O,” which inverts the problematic figure of the Russian émigré in order to probe its universality, and inaugurates the author’s new conception of the power of art. By enacting a new “distribution of the perceptible” (Jacques Rancière), Nabokov experiences the full force of resurrection, transfiguration and transformation that can be brought about by art, the only shared space, or common world, where the traces of the émigré’s survival cannot be erased, and where the boundaries of space, time and death are abolished.
A NOTE ON NABOKOV'S «INVITATION TO A BEHEADING»: THE REICHSTAG FIRE AND THE EXECUTION OF MARINUS VAN DER LUBBE Readers familiar with Nabokov the magician's drollery in the forewords to his novels have learned to take his self-referential comments cum grano salis. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the 1959 foreword to «Invitation to a Beheading» (orig. «Приглашение на казнь»; wr. 1934, ser. 1935-36, pub. 1938), a work triumphantly described there as a «violin in a void» [Nabokov 1959: 7]. To begin with, for a creative personality who had already suffered significant personal loss at the hands of very real ideologues and ideologies (exile, impoverishment, the assassination of his father) and who was now a family man living with a Jewish-Russian wife and young child in Nazi Berlin, the idea that this novel did not emerge out of, and at some level engage with, a specific historical context strains credulity. Nabokov wrote to his friend Khodasevich in July 1934, as he was immersed in composing «Priglashenie»: «I am writing my novel. I do not read the papers». 1 Even if this statement is largely true and sincere, it does not follow that all of «дура-история» («history the fool») has been successfully banished from the artificial world of «Priglashenie». The purpose of the present brief essay (zametka) is to identify a possible subtext that served as a prod to the artist's thinking as he set about writing «Priglashenie» in the midst of his work on the longer novel «Дар» («The Gift», wr. 1935-37, partially ser. 1938, pub. 1952). Let us begin by revisiting Nabokov's English-language foreword to «Invitation». The second paragraph and opening sentences of the third paragraph read:
"Disturbing the Sleep of Substance": Nabokov's and Millhauser's Infinite Museums
Gothic Peregrinations: The Unexplored and Re-explored Territories (Ed. Katarzyna Małecka and Agnieszka Łowczanin), 2018
The article is an attempt at comparing two short stories published fifty years apart: Vladimir Nabokov’s “The Visit to the Museum” (1939) and Steven Millhauser’s “The Barnum Museum” (1990). An atypical venture into gothicity to dramatize an imaginary return to Soviet Russia is juxtaposed with a more characteristic engagement with the fantastic in praise of the imagination and popular culture. Blurring the boundary between exhibition space and ‘the real world’ through the figure of an infinite museum, the two texts variously mobilize the gothic tradition, with its crucial tensions between the animate and the inanimate, the real and the illusory, the internal and the external, the past and the present, the dream and the nightmare. Entering into complex relationships with historicity, the two short stories position themselves very differently with regard to the notions of the individual and the communal.