ASSOCIATION : Manifestations – Colloque 2013 – SHVABRIN

Colloque International : « Vladimir Nabokov et la France »

Les Chercheurs enchantés : Société Française Vladimir Nabokov

Paris, 30 mai-1er juin 2013


 
SHVABRIN, Stanislas – Princeton University, USA
“Quand le chagrin, l’exil et les années auront flétri ce cœur désespéré…”: Alfred de Musset, Vladimir Nabokov and the Invention of Exile

    In “Mademoiselle O” V. Nabokoff-Sirine (1936) famously contrasts the tastes of an average Russian lover of French literature, an unimaginative admirer of Sully Prudhomme and de Musset, with the decidedly finer predilections that distinguished his younger self, a “barbare, ami de Rabelais et de Shakespeare,” over whose adolescence presided not Copée or Lamartine, but Verlaine and Mallarmé.
In reality that same exuberant savage felt compelled to tone down – or suppress altogether – a number of frivolous images in his adaptation of Romain Rolland’s Colas Breugnon, and it has long been established that V. Nabokoff-Sirine’s repudiation of de Musset’s “lyrisme sanglotant” in “Mademoiselle O” conceals a far more complex and intriguing relationship inextricably connecting Vladimir Nabokov with the author of the “Nuits.” Nabokov, who published a highly personalized Russian version of de Musset’s “La Nuit de décembre” in 1916 only to retranslate it for a 1928 publication (a Russian version of “La Nuit de mai” had been published a year earlier) not simply continued to nourish a peculiarly strong attachment to the French poet whose brand of Romanticism had been ridiculed as derivative and outmoded by his Russian critics as early as 1863, but persisted in incorporating references to “La Nuit de mai” into such diverse mature principle texts as his eulogy of Vladislav Khodasevich (1939) and Ada (1969).
    Without the slightest inclination to underestimate the groundbreaking research and excellent interpretative work by Jane Grayson (see her “French Connection: Nabokov and Alfred de Musset. Ideas and Practices of Translation,” 1995), I am nonetheless prepared to argue that our knowledge of Nabokov’s association with de Musset is far from complete. Nabokov’s attachment to de Musset may have all the appearance of a hopelessly pathetic liaison with an infatuation of one’s early days; surprisingly or not, the role played by de Musset in Nabokov’s evolution places him on the same pedestal where we find such true beacons of his literary tastes as Byron, Keats and Heinrich Heine. It is to the task of highlighting such lesser-known aspects of Nabokov’s alliance with de Musset that I hope to be able to apply myself should my abstract be deemed worthy of inclusion in the program of the Parisian forum.

Stanislas Shvabrin : In addition to his scholarly and editorial work on Vladimir Nabokov, Mikhail Kuzmin, Georgy Ivanov and Martina Tsvetaeva, Stanislas Shvabrin has done research in the areas of Russian diaspora studies from Andrey Kurbsky to interbellum Parisian literature. Apart from a number of academic miscellanies, his articles and reviews have appeared in Nabokovskii vestnik, Zvezda, The Nabokovian, Comparative Literature, Slavic and East European Journal, Canadian Slavonic Papers, Slavic Review and Russian Literature.

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ASSOCIATION : Manifestations – Colloque 2013 – SCHUMAN

Colloque International : « Vladimir Nabokov et la France »

Les Chercheurs enchantés : Société Française Vladimir Nabokov

Paris, 30 mai-1er juin 2013


SCHUMAN, Samuel – University of Minnesota, USA
The Riddle of Genre in ‘Mademoiselle O’

    The short story “Mademoiselle O” was, according to its author Vladimir Nabokov, first written in French, in France, and published in Paris in 1939.  It reappeared, in an English translation by Nabokov and Hilda Ward, in The Atlantic Monthly, then in Nine Stories. It re-reappeared, in a “final, slightly different version, with stricter adherence to autobiographical truth” as Chapter 5 in Conclusive Evidence/Speak Memory.  Brian Boyd discusses the real-life Cecile Miauton, the model for Mademoiselle O in Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years, and French echoes and influences in the story have been described and analyzed by Jacqueline Hamrit.
  My interest is in the “meta questions” raised by this work. Can essentially the same utterance be understood to be a fictional short story and a non-fiction autobiographical essay? To what extent does the publication context of a work determine its genre (that is, if it is published in an autobiography is it “fact” and if the same words appear as a short story, does it become “fiction”)? What does this tell us about how VN sees the relationship between fiction and fact? Is the border between fact and fiction one of those transparent things, through which it is easy to fall? What does all this tell us about how VN sees the relationship between his imagination and his life? To what extent is it relevant that this work grew in part from the French cultural context and did that cultural context influence these generic issues?

 

Dr. Samuel Schuman served as President of the Vladimir Nabokov Society in 1980-82.  He is the author of Vladimir Nabokov:  A Reference Guide, and has published over 25 articles on VN.  He has presented papers on Nabokov at the MLA and AATSEEL Conferences, at the Nabokov Museum in St. Petersburg, and at the international Nabokov meetings in Kyoto and Auckland.

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ASSOCIATION : Manifestations – Colloque 2013 – ROWBERRY

Colloque International : « Vladimir Nabokov et la France »

Les Chercheurs enchantés : Société Française Vladimir Nabokov

Paris, 30 mai-1er juin 2013


ROWBERRY, Simon – University of Winchester, United Kingdom
Reading Queneau Reading Nabokov

   As Jane Grayson has previously discussed in “Nabokov and Perec,” there is little overlap between the Oulipo and Nabokov biographically, although both parties appeared to have appreciated some of the other’s work. It is from a formal perspective that Nabokov and Oulipo authors have the greatest crossover, since both are known for their love and use of word games in their fiction.  Rather than suggesting a comparative reading of Oulipian and Nabokovian texts, this paper will explore the possibilities of applying the interpretative possibilities of Oulipo, including Jean Lescure’s “n+7” method to Nabokov’s corpus, to perform what  Jerome McGann and Johanna Drucker call a deformative reading. This paper will consider the fruitfulness of such a methodology for reading Nabokov’s texts, acknowledging that such an approach can often lead to creative misreadings rather than strict and rigorous interpretation. This can be off-set, however, by the use of equivalent misreadings in Nabokov’s works, such as Shade’s pivotal misreading in his poem, “Pale Fire.” Through careful negotiation of these tricky issues, I hope to reveal a potential reading of Vladimir Nabokov’s works.

 

Simon Rowberry is a PhD candidate at the University of Winchester. His dissertation, “Social Reading and Social Texts on the Literary Web,” argues for the continuity between print and electronic literature and how the digitization of books and social networking is changing how we read and interpret authors including Vladimir Nabokov.

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ASSOCIATION : Manifestations – Colloque 2013 – RAMPTON

Colloque International : « Vladimir Nabokov et la France »

Les Chercheurs enchantés : Société Française Vladimir Nabokov

Paris, 30 mai-1er juin 2013


RAMPTON, David – Faculty of Arts, University of Ottawa, Canada
Mediocrity, Platitudes, and Arch Criminals: French Literature in Nabokov’s Eugene Onegin

    Nabokov’s Eugene Onegin has quite rightly come to be seen as a dramatic encounter between Russian and English, an attempt to work out a new understanding of how the “to” language in a translation can be related to the “from”. It is also a four-volume magnum opus, organized around one grand idea, the dream of absolute fidelity, and occasioned by a desire to mitigate the difficulties of aesthetic access, even as it acknowledges the necessity of resigning oneself to them. In this way Pushkin’s great narrative poem becomes Nabokov’s extraordinarily useful crib and a monumental exercise in the exigencies of exhaustive annotation and creative commentary. But French figures prominently in every aspect of this edition. As we work through the massive number of notes, Nabokov’s third language and its literature create their own set of reference points and apposite allusions, their matrix of sources, their conventions and their admonitions. In the end, the relevance of what a multitude of French writers – poets, translators, novelists, philosophers, literary critics – did in the hundred years preceding the poem’s publication arguably makes French as important a language for this version of Eugene Onegin as Pushkin’s inimitable Russian and Nabokov’s fiendishly precise and provocative English.
    Scholars have made substantial efforts to annotate Nabokov’s annotations, and now that French Slavists and French critics interested in his work are seeing so much of each other, we shall no doubt learn more about the multiple roles that French literature played in the creation of Pushkin’s masterpiece. Yet despite the considerable work devoted to discussing this translation in the almost 50 years since its appearance, it seems fair to say that the tone of Nabokov’s commentary has militated against instant, enthusiastic, and universal recognition of his achievement on the part of French critics. True, Nabokov heaps extravagant praise on Chateaubriand, speaks highly of Constant’s Adolphe, compliments Parny on his erotic poems, describes Musset as colourful and witty, greatly admires Senancour’s Oberman, and writes sympathetically about figures like Bichat, but dozens of figures from 18th– and 19th-century French literature are banished from the ranks of serious literature and consigned to the scrap heap of the mediocre. Its poets are hopelessly conventional, its translations (from languages ancient and modern) appalling, its conventions outdated, its insights mere commonplaces, its studies superficial, its ultimate irrelevance utterly assured. Virulent black humour is the order of the day: one of the worst offenders, Paul Bitaubé, who had the audacity to publish a well received prose abridgement of Homer’s epics in the 1780s is called an “arch criminal”.
    My purpose here is not so much to explain the reasons for or debate the cogency of such sweeping and passionate dismissals but rather to muse about their consequences. By concentrating on four major figures singled out for special opprobrium – Madame de Stael, Voltaire, Sainte-Beuve and Rousseau – I want to show how such judgments can deflect the attention of those interested in the links between Pushkin and French literature, and how his insistence on their vapidity orchestrates the inexorable return of what Nabokov seeks to repress. Far from being negligible figures in the complex story of Onegin’s genesis and execution, what these writers thought and wrote links them in important ways to the many issues Pushkin’s great poem raises, and to the concerns that Nabokov revisits in his commentary on it.
    In this paper, I shall confine myself to a few examples. Nabokov quotes Mme de Stael on how interesting it would be to compare Schiller’s views on lost youth (in his poem “Ideals”) with Voltaire’s. Nabokov goes on to say that he performed such a comparison and found nothing of note. In fact, the links between Schiller’s poem and Voltaire’s nostalgic meanderings turn out to be quite illuminating, and set up a veritable matrix of suggestive echoes. Voltaire’s verse may be as “abominably pedestrian” as Nabokov says it is, but it relates in interesting ways to the discussion of Gallicisms, platitudes, and general ideas raised by Pushkin’s poem. Where Pushkin finds “dry precision” in Sainte-Beuve’s comments on Delorme Nabokov can see only florid generalities. As the context of Pushkin’s observation and the thrust of Sainte-Beuve’s commentary make clear, the eminent French critic’s insights take us far beyond Delorme, to the very heart of the debate about melancholy and ennui in Europe at this time. Nabokov insists that the trashy quality of Rousseau’s work obviates the need for musing about parallels between his novel Julie and Onegin. Again, his claim is as misleading as the connections are suggestive. 
    Of course Nabokov’s loathing for what he calls in his commentary “elephantine platitudes” and their purveyors goes far beyond 18th– and 19th-century French literature. In the Onegin commentary he mentions Cervantes, George Eliot, Mann and Faulkner as examples of the same phenomenon, mediocre writers whose reputations have been inexplicably puffed up by academics incapable of recognizing genuine art. Such comments certainly generated a great deal of heat when Nabokov was alive. I want to see what kind of light they have to shed on the questions that continue to interest both Pushkin’s commentators and those of his magisterial and iconoclastic translator.

 

David Rampton, Professor of English at the University of Ottawa, is the author of Vladimir Nabokov: A Critical Study of the Novels (1984), Vladimir Nabokov (1993), William Faulkner: A Literary Life (2007), and Vladimir Nabokov: A Literary Life (2012). He has published numerous articles on 19th and 20th-century American Literature, and co-edited four anthologies of essays and short fiction.

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ASSOCIATION : Manifestations – Colloque 2013 – POULIN

Colloque International : « Vladimir Nabokov et la France »

Les Chercheurs enchantés : Société Française Vladimir Nabokov

Paris, 30 mai-1er juin 2013


POULIN, Isabelle – Université Michel de Montaigne Bordeaux III
« Le vol de la mémoire : Nabokov lecteur de Rimbaud et Mallarmé »

Dans le prolongement d’études consacrées à l’intertexte français de l’œuvre de Nabokov (v. Isabelle Poulin, Vladimir Nabokov lecteur de l’autre, PUB, 2005), il s’agira de montrer comment Vladimir Nabokov s’approprie certains aspects de l’univers poétique de Rimbaud et Mallarmé pour construire le récit de la mémoire, bien avant de lui donner la parole (dans Speak, Memory !). Deux poèmes en particulier, « Mémoire » de Rimbaud (que Nabokov a traduit en russe) et « Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd’hui… » de Mallarmé (hypotexte de « Mademoiselle O »),  participent à la construction du motif du « coup d’aile » qui sert à dire l’exil et la douleur de la langue perdue.

 

Isabelle Poulin : Ancienne élève de l’ENS de Fontenay / Saint-Cloud, professeur de Littérature comparée à l’université de Bordeaux 3, Isabelle Poulin a consacré sa thèse à l’œuvre de Vladimir Nabokov (sur les liens entre plurilinguisme et critique littéraire) et a notamment cherché à mettre en évidence la part déterminante de la littérature française dans l’œuvre de l’écrivain polyglotte. Elle est l’auteur d’une étude sur les Écritures de la douleur : Dostoïevski, Sarraute, Nabokov (Le Manuscrit, 2007) et a coordonné un numéro de la Revue de Littérature Comparée, composé de contributions venues d’horizons (linguistiques et disciplinaires) multiples, dont l’enjeu était de mettre en évidence la spécificité et la richesse d’une œuvre plurilingue (« Vladimir Nabokov ou le vrai et le vraisemblable », Paris, Klincksieck, RLC n°342, avril-Juin 2012).

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ASSOCIATION : Manifestations – Colloque 2013 – PONOMAREVA

Colloque International : « Vladimir Nabokov et la France »

Les Chercheurs enchantés : Société Française Vladimir Nabokov

Paris, 30 mai-1er juin 2013


PONOMAREVA, Tatiana – Directrice du Musée Nabokov à Saint-Pétersbourg, Russie
Nabokov’s French Childhood

    The talk will focus on the various French cultural influences that Vladimir Nabokov experienced in his formative years, growing up in the early 20th century St. Petersburg.  To the contemporary readers of Nabokov the immense wealth of his French cultural heritage was not fully  revealed until the publication of his work on “Eugene Onegin” but the roots of this heritage can be traced not only to his university education but, primarily, to his family upbringing.
    In Nabokov’s own words, he was raised as a “perfectly normal trilingual child”. However, the importance of each of all the three languages varied at different times. Though his very first teachers were English, French remained the everyday household language and there were years when Nabokov didn’t use much English at home. Along with reading French books from the vast family library and classes with his French governess, Nabokov was immersed into a Francophone environment at home, at school and even on the way to school. In my talk I will try to follow the young Vladimir Nabokov on his typical day in St. Petersburg, in the midst of that unique culture that nourished the future writer.

Tatiana Ponomareva is Director of the Vladimir Nabokov Museum (since 2008 the St.Petersburg State University Vladimir Nabokov Museum). She is also a lecturer at the St.Petersburg University Philology Faculty. Tatiana Ponomareva organized many Nabokov conferences and academic events and edited several academic publications on Nabokov studies.

 

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ASSOCIATION : Manifestations – Colloque 2013 – OLSEN

Colloque International : « Vladimir Nabokov et la France »

Les Chercheurs enchantés : Société Française Vladimir Nabokov

Paris, 30 mai-1er juin 2013


OLSEN, Lance – University of Utah, USA
Not-Knowings: Debord’s Influence on Nabokov’s The Real Life of Sebastian Knight.

« Every writer creates his own precursors, » Jorge-Luis Borges once reminded us.  « His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future. »  In the spirit of Borges’s mischievous and productive observation, my presentation will listen for the not-knowings present in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight and its resonances with Debord’s politics of the spectacle, especially in terms of Nabokov’s novel’s (his first in English, written between 1938 and 1939 in Paris) disruptive onto-epistemology and its strategies for derailing capitalist notions of temporality, where time is money, and so is quantified, mechanized, stabilized, made to run in a beeline that disavows mystery, complexity, and subjectivity. 

Lance Olsen is author of more than 20 books of and about experimental writing practices, including, most recently, the novel Calendar of Regrets and the anti-textbook Architectures of Possibility: After Innovative Writing.  He is a 2012 Guggenheim Fellow, and spent this past spring as a Berlin Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin.  Olsen serves as chair of the Board of Directors at Fiction Collective Two and teaches experimental narrative theory and practice at the University of Utah.

 

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ASSOCIATION : Manifestations – Colloque 2013 – NORMAN

Colloque International : « Vladimir Nabokov et la France »

Les Chercheurs enchantés : Société Française Vladimir Nabokov

Paris, 30 mai-1er juin 2013


NORMAN, Will – University of Kent, UK
A Taste for Freedom: Lolita and the Existentialist Road-Trip

    This paper reads Nabokov’s Lolita alongside a lesser-known road-trip, undertaken by the French writer and philosopher Simone de Beauvoir. Through the 1940s and early 1950s Nabokov undertook almost annual summer tours of the United States, travelling west first in search of butterflies and later taking notes for and eventually composing Lolita. De Beauvoir travelled to the United States in 1947, visiting her friend Richard Wright in New York before touring the West and South by car and Greyhound. Her journey is described in the extraordinary travelogue L’Amérique au jour le jour, a phenomenology of the intellectual road-trip which shares many of the concerns of Lolita, including questions about freedom, authenticity and responsibility, against the backdrop of the rise of domestic mass tourism in the United States. My interest here will be first in the way both Humbert Humbert and Beauvoir use their position as European aliens to subvert and interrogate the ideological assumptions behind the American road narrative and the discourses of freedom associated with it, but I will also address intriguing moments in their work when American mass culture and the commodified landscape they pass through fall into strange harmony with the French cultural traditions they have come from. Comparing their treatment of tourist attractions, neon lights and Hollywood movies, I will argue that Lolita and L’Amérique au jour le jour emerge as unexpected companions, offering an estranged and ambivalent transatlantic vision of the US at the high point of its culture industry.

Will Norman is a lecturer in American literature at the University of Kent, with research interests in modernist and transatlantic studies. He completed his doctorate, on Nabokov and time, at the University of Oxford in 2008 and has recently published a monograph, Nabokov, History and the Texture of Time with Routledge. His current research project examines émigré responses to American mass culture in the mid-twentieth century in literature, art and cultural criticism. An article evolving from this project, on the crime writer Raymond Chandler, will be published in Modernism/modernity in January 2013.

 

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ASSOCIATION : Manifestations – Colloque 2013 – LOISON

Colloque International : « Vladimir Nabokov et la France »

Les Chercheurs enchantés : Société Française Vladimir Nabokov

Paris, 30 mai-1er juin 2013


LOISON-CHARLES, Julie –  Université Paris-Ouest Nanterre La Défense, France
French xenisms  in Look at the Harlequins! : Are these French words symptomatic?   

    This paper will focus on Nabokov’s last complete novel, Look at the Harlequins!, from the perspective of its self-referential and metaliterary dimension with the hope that our conclusions could be broadened to apply to Nabokov’s other works. We will try and see whether the use of French words is merely a consequence of Nabokov’s multilingualism and if it serves a diegetic purpose. In Look at the Harlequins!, three general trends can be found in the use of French words and references to France.
   First of all, many are circumstantial and illustrative; they reflect the narrator’s francophilia but also Nabokov’s cosmopolitan world: France was an unavoidable place of transition and exile for Russian émigré writers, and French was widely spoken by the Russian aristocracy to which Nabokov belonged.
   Secondly, French often enables Nabokov a great deal of linguistic play, as ornamentation, but also with the aim of arresting and drawing the reader’s attention to specific humoristic or verbal prowess.
The third, and probably more interesting, use of French is the revelation of the plot to the reader. French is often used to point either to the problematic relationships the narrator has with his wives, or to his madness; French can therefore be seen as “symptomatic” of the narrator’s schizophrenia. 
    The link between madness and multilingualism has often been made by psycholinguists or by critics such as Todorov, and in the novel under study, it is hinted at by the use of italics. We will question why French specifically, and not Russian, is the privileged language to indicate the polyglot’s schizophrenia. We’ll end with a reflection on whether this symptomatic aspect of French is an involuntary aspect of Nabokov’s writing or whether it is one of his numerous literary strategies.

 

Julie Loison-Charles est ATER à l’Université de Paris Ouest La Défense Nanterre. Elle écrit son doctorat en littérature américaine sur l’utilisation des mots étrangers russes et français dans l’œuvre de Nabokov. Elle incorpore à son étude littéraire des approches traductologiques (comparaison des traductions russes et françaises), linguistiques (emprunts et xénismes), psycholinguistiques (le bilinguisme et la perception de soi) et philosophiques (Bakhtine, Deleuze, Glissant).

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ASSOCIATION : Manifestations – Colloque 2013 – LEVING

Colloque International : « Vladimir Nabokov et la France »

Les Chercheurs enchantés : Société Française Vladimir Nabokov

Paris, 30 mai-1er juin 2013


LEVING, Yuri – Faculty of Art and Social Sciences, Dalhousie University, Canada
French Theory, Russian Legacy: Reading Nabokov with Pierre Bourdieu

    In this paper I will provide a critical context for understanding issues that dominate Nabokov’s art and social discussions of literary fame, politics of bestselling, prize distribution, and posthumous legacies in literature – an activity which Pierre Bourdieu defines as “enterprises with a long production cycle, founded on the acceptance of the risk inherent in cultural investments and above all on submission to the specific laws of the art trade.” Relying on the critical theory of P. Bourdieu, the leading French sociologist, anthropologist, and philosopher, I am going to examine the creation and maintenance of Nabokov’s literary reputation within the Russian literary tradition from the perspective of the economics of culture.
    Literature is not only about aesthetics, but almost equally about economics. The successful marketing of an author and his literary works is more dependent on the activities of cultural merchants than on the particular words and phrases found in the author’s prose. While alive, the author must work with these cultural merchants in order to sustain his place within the literary market. Once the author is dead, the real work of maintaining a posthumous legacy begins for friends, family, scholars and publishers, in order to continue to profit from the deceased’s creative works, becoming a literary industry of its own.
    Bourdieu’s critical theory and his French academic adepts put forth an argument that cultural interactions are understood as transactions of tangible and intangible products within an economic framework of markets, exchange value, price and other such concepts. These economic exchanges of culture result in what Pierre Bourdieu calls symbolic capital, bestowing individual artist’s with the reputation for competence and an image of respectability. Nabokov’s symbolic capital is transmitted to writers by agents and institutions possessing the economic and cultural capital necessary to confer relative value for the creative gesture. Economics, therefore, play an underlying role in this mutually advantageous relationship.

 

Yuri Leving is Professor and Chair in the Department of Russian Studies, Dalhousie University, Canada. He is the author of three monographs: Keys to The Gift. A Guide to V. Nabokov’s Novel (2011), Upbringing by Optics: Book Illustration, Animation, and Text (2010), Train Station – Garage – Hangar. Vladimir Nabokov and the Poetics of Russian Urbanism (2004, Short-listed for Andrey Bely Prize), and has also edited and co-edited five volumes of articles: Shades of Laura. Vladimir Nabokov’s Last Novel The Original of Laura (forthcoming), Anatomy of a Short Story (New York: Continuum, 2012, with an afterword by John Banville), The Goalkeeper: The Nabokov Almanac (2010), Eglantine: A Collection of Philological Essays to Honour the Sixtieth Anniversary of Roman Timenchik (2005), and Empire N. Nabokov and His Heirs (2006). Leving has published over 70 scholarly articles on various aspects of Russian and comparative literature. He served as a commentator on the first authorized Russian edition of The Collected Works of Vladimir Nabokov in five volumes (1999-2001), and was the curator for the exhibition “Nabokov’s Lolita: 1955-2005” in Washington, D.C., which celebrated the 50th anniversary of the publication of Lolita. Leving is the founding editor of the Nabokov Online Journal (since 2007).

 

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