Nabokov. ............

Gin and tonic?

Lectures on Russian Literature

Nabokov.

moral e ética

Tolstoi é claro, as suas ideias sólidas e limpas, o bem e o mal definidos, o corpo e a mente, a simplicidade e a empatia, a terra e a honra, a alegria de celebrar a vida. em Guerra e Paz, muitos são os episódios memoráveis e que vibrarão pelo futuro, vivos para sempre em obras alheias e nos arquétipos da cultura comum. Andrei olhando para as nuvens, Anatol caindo do cavalo, Denisov roubando víveres para o seu pelotão, a alcoviteira. há também a shakespeariana varanda de Natasha. e Anna Karenina está lá no corpo de Ellen, Lévin e Kitty em Andrei e Natasha. das mais impressionantes 'cenas': Andrei atravessando o hospital militar. esta cena então perde-se na contagem de réplicas. aqui, este movimento que acompanha o andar do personagem é mais frequente, ou o olhar de quem está de lado a ver. em Karenina, o olhar começa no meio do grupo de pessoas e depois eleva-se para uma vista panorâmica de toda a sala, outro lugar entretanto comum do cinema.

não me admira que Nabokov tenha dedicado a vida à literatura russa: entre Gogol, Tolstoi, Dostoiesvky e Chekhov está na verdade quase tudo.  (não esquecendo o pai, Turgenev e ele próprio, Nabokov, o último ? nesse breve período genial) --que século glorioso ("One century, the nineteenth, had been sufficient for a country with practically no literary tradition of its own to create a literature which in artistic worth, in wide-spread influence, in everything except bulk, equals the glorious output of England or France, although their production of permanent masterpieces had begun so much earlier. This miraculous flow of esthetic values in so young a civilization could not have taken place unless in all other ramifications of spiritual growth nineteenth-century Russia had not attained with the same abnormal speed a degree of culture which again matched that of the oldest Western countries. I am aware that the recognition of this past culture of Russia is not an integral part of a foreigner's notion of Russian history. The question of the evolution of liberal thought in Russia before the Revolution has been completely obscured and distorted abroad by astute Communist propaganda in the twenties and thirties of this century. They usurped the honor of having civilized Russia.", diz o mestre.)

e continua:

"For an artist one consolation is that in a free country he is not actually forced to produce guidebooks. Now, from this limited point of view, nineteenth-century Russia was oddly enough a free country: books and writers might be banned and banished, censors might be rogues and fools, be-whiskered Tsars might stamp and storm; but that wonderful discovery of Soviet times, the method of making the entire literary corporation write what the state deems fit — this method was unknown in old Russia, although no doubt many a reactionary statesman hoped to find such a tool. A staunch determinist might argue that between a magazine in a democratic country applying financial pressure to its contributors to make them exude what is required by the so-called reading public — between this and the more direct pressure which a police state brings to bear in order to make the author round out his novel with a suitable political message, it may be argued that between the two pressures there is only a difference of degree; but this is not so for the simple reason that there are many different periodicals and philosophies in a free country but only one government in a dictatorship. It is a difference in quality. If I, an American writer, decide to write an unconventional novel about, say, a happy atheist, an independent Bostonian, who marries a beautiful Negro girl, also an atheist, has lots of children, cute little agnostics, and lives a happy, good, and gentle life to the age of 106, when he blissfully dies in his sleep — it is quite possible that despite your brilliant talent, Mr. Nabokov, we feel [in such cases we don't think, we feel] that no American publisher could risk bringing out such a book simply because no bookseller would want to handle it. This is a publisher's opinion, and everybody has the right to have an opinion. Nobody would exile me to the wilds of Alaska for having my happy atheist published after all by some shady experimental firm; and on the other hand, authors in America are never ordered by the government to produce magnificent novels about the joys of free enterprise and of morning prayers."

sem dúvida, mr. nabokov. poucas coisas foram tão assassinas como o comunismo russo.

thomas struth ('as easy to find in that crowd as a wild rose among nettles', similes and metaphor)

and more here. Parkview Apartments, Seongnam, Gyeonggi Do. na Coreia do Sul, em 2007 por Thomas Struth, um dos meus fotógrafos favoritos depois de S. Paulo que me demorei a ver em Bruxelas no museu que fica ao lado do novíssimo (então) museu Magritte. lembro-me da sala, em que tínhamos de descer alguns degraus, e da guarda, em pé a um canto provavelmente a pensar porque ficaria eu a olhar uma avenida degradada e alguns candeeiros de iluminação pública durante uns quinze minutos. a cada um, neste caso uma, as suas donzelas.

o milagre capitalista. se antes de morrer tivesse de escolher um livro para ler, provavelmente escolheria Anna Karénina. também, e como uma espécie de bónus adicional, vejo que o livro da memória é filho dela e que os traços do seu rosto se lhe assemelham tanto que negar a maternidade seria loucura. o fim de ambas é semelhante, o princípio é que não. cada 'cena' vale por si e são tantas. espero nunca ver um filme com esta história: os placards, as revistas e os trailers são já ameaçadores. consegui um certo silêncio de ruídos, o controlo do eflúvio sonoro. sinto-me tentada a fazer o mesmo no mar visual e deixar as exteriores no exterior durante algum tempo.

a diferença está nos objectos.

a cena do comboio é vertiginosa: entra-se com Vronski e é a sua sensação que nos invade. mas saímos da estação já do lado de fora, pairando sobre a cena. como se se entrasse na pessoa e se saísse com a facilidade de um espírito. reparei na vida que um carácter obscuro tem um momento de glória vingativa quando um fio de luz o ilumina, e esse seria um momento de crime e castigo. não misturemos autores, ou antes, misturemos mais ainda:

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IMAGERY

Imagery may be defined as the evocation, by means of words, of something that is meant to appeal to the reader's sense of color, or sense of outline, or sense of sound, or sense of movement, or any other sense of perception, in such a way as to impress upon his mind a picture of fictitious life that becomes to him as living as any personal recollection. For producing these vivid images the writer has a wide range of devices from the brief expressive epithet to elaborate word pictures and complex metaphors.

1) Epithets. Among these to be noted and admired are the "limply plopping" and "scabrous" as applied so magnificently to the slippery insides and rough outsides of the choice oysters Oblonski enjoys during his restaurant meal with Lyovin. Mrs. Garnett omitted to translate these beautiful shlyupayushchie and  bershavye; we must restore them. Adjectives used in the scene of the ball to express Kitty's adolescent loveliness and Anna's dangerous charm should also be collected by the reader. Of special interest is the fantastic compound adjective, literally meaning "gauzily-ribbonly-lacily-iridescent" (tyulevo-lento-kruzhevno-tsvetnoy), used to describe the feminine throng at the ball. The old Prince Shcherbatski calls a flabby type of elderly clubman, shlyupik, pulpy thing, a child's word for a hard boiled egg that has become quite pulpy and
spongy from too much rolling in a Russian Easter game where eggs are rolled and knocked at each other.

2) Gestures. Oblonski, while his upper lip is being shaved, answering his valet's question (Is Anna coming with her husband or alone) by lifting one finger; or Anna, in her talk with Dolly, illustrating Steve's spells of moral oblivion by making a charming blurred gesture of obliteration before her brow.

3) Details Of Irrational Perception. Many examples in the account of Anna's half dream on the train.

4) Colorful Comedy Traits. As when the old Prince thinks he is mimicking his wife as he grotesquely simpers and curtseys when speaking of matchmaking.

5) Word Pictures. These are innumerable: Dolly miserably sitting at her dressing table and the rapid deep-chested voice in which, disguising her distress, she asks her husband what he wants; Grinevich's convexedly-tipped fingernails; the old sleepy blissful hound's sticky lips — are all delightful and unforgettable images.

6) Poetical Comparisons. Seldom used by Tolstoy, appealing to the senses, such as the charming allusions to diffuse sunlight and a butterfly, when Kitty is described on the skating rink and at the ball.

7) Utilitarian Comparisons. Appealing to the mind rather than to the eye, to the ethical sense rather than to the esthetical one. When Kitty's feelings before the ball are compared to those of a young man before a battle, it would be ridiculous to visualize Kitty in a lieutenant's uniform; but as a rational black-and-white verbal scheme the comparison works nicely and has the parable note that Tolstoy cultivates so assiduously in certain later chapters.

Not all is direct imagery in Tolstoy's text. The parable comparison grades insensibly into the didactic intonations with their meaningful repetitions that characterize Tolstoy's accounts of situations and states of mind. In this respect, the direct statements of chapter openings should be especially marked: "Oblonski had learned easily at school" or "Vronski had never had any real home life."


8) Similes And Metaphors.

The old curly birches of the gardens, with all their branches weighed down by snow, seemed decked in new festive vestments (Part one, chapter 9).

But for Lyovin she was as easy to find in that crowd as a wild rose among nettles. Everything was made bright by her. She was the smile that shed light on all around her. The place where she stood seemed to him a holy shrine He walked down, for a long while avoiding looking at her as at the sun, but seeing her, as one does the sun, without looking.

Nabokov, who else, daqui.

'HAPPY families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.' ('a worn-out woman no longer young or good-looking')

frase usada para gáudio dos deprimentes deprimidos que julgam a sua unhappiness diferente de todas as outras, desprezando a felicidade. o desprezo da felicidade esteve muito em voga e continua a ser praticado por aves tardias. o desprezo da infelicidade é também, infelizmente, muito comum.

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"He could not at this date repent of the fact that he, a handsome, susceptible man of thirty-four, was not in love with his wife, the mother of five living and two dead children, and only a year younger than himself. All he repented of was that he had not succeeded better in hiding it from his wife. But he felt all the difficulty of his position and was sorry for his wife, his children, and himself. Possibly he might have managed to conceal his sins better from his wife is he had anticipated that the knowledge of them would have had such an effect on her. He had never clearly thought out the subject, but he had vaguely conceived that his wife must long ago have suspected him of being unfaithful to her, and shut her eyes to the fact. He had even supposed that she, a worn-out woman no longer young or good-looking, and in no way remarkable or interesting, merely a good mother, ought from a sense of fairness to take an indulgent view."

tens de ler a Anna Karenina. sou boa filha. emprestou-me o livro, mas também o estou a ler na net, em parte porque o livro é muito grande, em parte porque desconfio das traduções portuguesas. esta edição tem tradução de António Pescada - do russo - e um posfácio de Nabokov, que começa- Tolstoi é o maior escritor russo de ficção em prosa, deixando de lado os seus precursores Púchkin e Lermontov, talvez se possam ordenar os grandes artistas russos da prosa da seguinte forma: em primeiro Tolstoi; em segundo Gogol; em terceiro Tchékhov; e em quarto Turgueniev. É como dar notas aos trabalhos dos alunos, e não há dúvida de que Dostoievski e Saltykov estão lá fora à porta do meu gabinete para discutir a má nota que tiveram. -O veneno ideológico, a mensagem - começou a afectar o romance russo a meio do século passado e matou-o em meados deste século. (...) digo eu que talvez Gorki também quisesse discutir a nota, mas isso são devaneios de Nabokov com os quais concordo em parte, quem sou eu. ele próprio se pode incluir neste rol de chamada.

a mulher enganada, de trinta e três anos, cinco filhos vivos e dois mortos, já não era nem nova nem bonita.
não há bebés por causa da crise? não era bem isso......

'literature was born' ('a shimmering go-between'), Pedro e o Lobo

"Literature was born not the day when a boy crying wolf, wolf came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels: literature was born on the day when a boy came crying wolf, wolf and there was no wolf behind him. That the poor little fellow because he lied too often was finally eaten up by a real beast is quite incidental. But here is what is important. Between the wolf in the tall grass and the wolf in the tall story there is a shimmering go-between. That go-between, that prism, is the art of literature."
Nabokov, who else.

(também woolf disse porque ler e como, twain disse os vários tipos de leitor, h. miller como ler, para não mencionar os canónicos manguel e bloom)

tangerine

(meandros da maldade)

"If he became bored with a subject he would carefully count the segments in a tangerine he had peeled, and silently share the fruit with Kazu, giving her precisely half the segments. But the size varied, and Kazu’s share was actually less than half of the tangerine."
Mishima em Depois do Banquete.

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a review I did like. the perverse intricacies are so Nabokov like. a delicate roadtrip to human sins (in my newfound meaning of deviation, the at-last-encountered original sin), total control.

o mundo, a vida e as estrelas

já em pensamentos alucinados, que devem fazer parte do verão. fui afastada da matemática depois do 9º ano, devia ter uns 13 anos, por imposição do sistema educativo da altura que me obrigava a "escolher" e que me permitia opções como religião e moral, antropologia ou sociologia e me obrigava a jornalismo mas que me impedia de ter matemática ou qualquer outra disciplina de uma área não humanista. penso que as qualidades desse sistema estão à vista, finalmente, nos dias de hoje (e a carrada de advogados em posições financeiras?).

qualquer disciplina que obrigue ao pensamento abstracto, como a matemática não aplicada ou a filosofia ou ainda a música ensinam a pensar, a elaborar sistemas mais ou menos complexos, conforme a capacidade de quem pensa, de reconhecer elementos, combinações, evoluções, perspectivas no tempo como no espaço e no intervalo que abrange os dois e ainda outros como a memória, a sensação, a percepção. a evolução e os sistemas (se nascesse de novo gostaria de acrescentar engenharia de sistemas ao que sei) vieram, pasmando, da formação seguradora; riscos, cadeias causais, investigação de ocorrências 'aleatórias' e etc. e assim encho-me de felicidade encontrando a matemática em autores-mestres da combinação (e este?) e da manipulação de cadeias de significado ou de acontecimentos, consequências, linhas lógicas, paralelismos, choques e desvios de rumo, influências e modos de interactividade entre pessoas, objectos, grupos de pessoas, cidades ou geografia, crenças e fábulas; a história enfim.

o que entendemos por conhecimento nasce dessa semente de desassossego que é a curiosidade e a vontade de saber como funciona isto, porquê, que os profetas bíblicos colocaram para sempre na mão de uma mulher. um orgulho.

(e obrigada ao Armando pela inspiração)

'a personal list'

"After The Wild Palms was translated into Spanish by Borges, it influenced an entire generation of Latin American writers. A series of brilliant, semi-Dadaist novels followed in the footsteps of The Wild Palms, and transformed the pleasure of reading into the quest for a center. Here is a personal list: Vladinir Nabokov's Pale Fire (1962), Julio Cortázar's Hopscotch (1963), Guillermo Cabrera Infante's  Three Trapped Tigers (1967), V. S. Naipul's In a Free State (1971), Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities (1973) and If on a Winter's Night a Traveler (1979), Mario Vargas-Llosa's Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (1977), George Perec's Life: A User's Manual (1978), Milan Kundera's Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), and Julian Barnes's History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters (1989). These novels, all of which were received with great interest and immediately translated into many languages, reminded readers worlwide and budding novelists like me of something that had been known since Rabelais and Sterne - namely, that anything and everything could be included in a novel (...)"
Pamuk em The Naïve and Sentimental Novelist.

(o diabo para 'tagar')

alguns na minha lista pessoal também 

os russos nunca gostaram dos polacos

e vice-versa. “I cannot abide Conrad’s souvenir shop style and bottled ships and shell necklaces of romanticist clichés.”, disse Nabokov de Conrad.

Pamuk on Nabokov

Cruelty, Beauty, and Time:
On Nabokov's Ada and Lolita
Orhan Pamuk


There are, as I've said, writers who-though they teach us many things about life, writing, and literature, and though we read them with love and ardor-remain in our past. If we return to them in later years, it is not because they still speak to us but out of nostalgia, the pleasure of being taken back to the time when we first read them. Hemingway, Sartre, Camus, and even Faulkner belong to this camp. Today, when I take them up, I do not expect to be overwhelmed with new insights, all I wish is to remember how they once influenced me, how they shaped my soul. They are writers I may from time to time crave, but not writers I still need.

On the other hand, every time I pick up Proust, it is because I wish to remind myself how boundlessly attentive he is to his heroes' passions. When I read Dostoyevsky, it is because I need to be reminded that, whatever other anxieties and designs he might have, the novelist's main concern is depth. It is almost as if the greatness of such writers stems in part from our profound longing for them. Nabokov is another writer whom I read over and over, and I doubt I will ever be able to give him up.

When I am going on a trip, preparing my suitcase for a summer holiday, or setting off for a hotel to write the last pages of my latest novel, when I pack my dog-eared copies of Lolita, Pale Fire, and Speak, Memory (which in my view shows Nabokov's prose at its finest), why do I feel as if I am packing a box of my medicines?

It is the beauty of Nabokovian prose. But what I call beauty cannot explain this. For lurking beneath the beauty in Nabokov's books there is always something sinister (he used this word in one of his titles), a whiff of tyranny. If the "timelessness" of beauty is an illusion, this is itself a reflection of Nabokov's life and times. So how have I been affected by this beauty, underwritten as it is by a Faustian pact with cruelty and evil?

When we read his famous scenes-Lolita playing tennis; Charlotte's slow descent into Hourglass Lake; Humbert, after he has lost Lolita, standing on the roadside at the top of a little hill, listening to children playing in a small town (a snowless Breughel) and then meeting with someone he loved as a youth in the woods; the afterword for Lolita (which he says took him a month to write, though it is only ten lines); Humbert's visit to the barber in the city of Kasbeam; or the crowded family scenes in Ada-my first response is that life is just like this; the writer is telling us things I already know, but with a shocking and resolute honesty that brings tears to my eyes at just the right moment. Nabokov-a proud and confident writer with an exact knowledge of his gifts-once noted that he was good at putting "the right word in the right place." His flair for le mot juste, Flaubert's term for this brilliant selectivity, gives his prose a dizzying, almost supernatural quality. But there is cruelty lurking behind the pristine words that his genius and imagination have given him.

To better understand what I call Nabokov's cruelty, let us look at the passage in which Humbert pays a visit to the barber in the city of Kasbeam-just to kill some time, shortly before Lolita so cruelly (and rightfully) leaves him. This is an old provincial barber with the gift of gab, and as he shaves Humbert he prattles on about his baseball-player son. He wipes his glasses on the apron over Humbert and puts down his scissors to read clippings about the son. Nabokov brings this barber to life in a few miraculous sentences. To us in Turkey he is as familiar as if he lived here. But at the last moment, Nabokov plays his last and most shocking card. Humbert takes so little interest in the barber that not until the last minute does he realize that the son in the newspaper cuttings died thirty years earlier. 

In two sentences-sentences that took two months to perfect Nabokov evokes a provincial barbershop and the garrulous barber's boasts about his son with an élan and an attention to detail worthy of Chekhov (a writer whom Nabokov explicitly admired); then, having drawn the willing reader into the melodrama of the "dead son," he immediately drops it and we return to Humbert's world. We understand from this cruel and satirical rupture that our narrator has not the least interest in the barber's woes. What's more, he is assured that, because we too are caught up in Humbert's amorous panic, we will dwell on the barber's son, who has been dead for thirty years, no more than he does. And so we share the guilt for the cruelty that is beauty's price. In my twenties I always read Nabokov with a strange sense of guilt and with a Nabokovvian pride at developing a shield against that guilt. This was the price I paid for the beauty of the novels and also for the pleasure I took from them.

To understand Nabokov's cruelty and its beauty, we must first remember how cruelly life treated Nabokov. Born into an aristocratic Russian family, he was dispossessed of his estates and all his wealth after the Bolshevik revolution. (Later he would proudly claim indifference.) Leaving Russia for Istanbul (where he stayed one day in a Sirkeci hotel) he went first to live in exile in Berlin; from there he went to Paris, emigrating to America after the Germans invaded France. Though he perfected a literary Russian in Berlin, once in America he lost his mother tongue. His father, a liberal politician, was destroyed by a botched murder like the one described with such satirical heartlessness in Pale Fire. Coming to America in his forties, he lost not just his mother tongue but his father, his patrimony, and his family, whose members were spread across the world. If we do not wish to judge him too harshly for his curious brand of malice-what Edmund Wilson called "kicking the underdog"-or the pride with which he eschewed all interest in politics, or the way he ridiculed and even degraded ordinary people for their coarse manners and kitsch tastes, we must bear in mind the losses that Nabokov suffered in real life, particularly in relation to the great compassion he showed his heroes and heroines, like Lolita, Sebastian Knight, and John Shade.

As is clear from his description of the Kasbeam barber, Nabokov's cruelty emerges in finely detailed expositions which show that nothing in life-in nature, in other people, in our surroundings, our streets, our cities-answers to our pains, to our troubles. This awareness reminds us of Lolita's remark about death ("you are completely on your own"), which her stepfather also admired. The deep joy in reading Nabokov comes from our seeing the cruel truth: Our lives do not fit at all into the logic of the world. Having come to terms with this truth, we can begin to appreciate beauty for its own sake. Only when we have discovered the deep logic governing the world-the world we can appreciate only through great literature-can we be consoled by the beauty in our hands; in the end, our only defense against life's cruelties is Nabokov's fine symmetries, his self-referential jokes and mirror games, his celebration of light (to which this always exceedingly self-aware writer referred to as a "prismatic Babel"), and his prose, as beautiful as the fluttering wings

of a butterfly: After losing Lolita, Humbert tells the reader that all he has left is words and, in a half-mocking way, talks airily of "love as the last refuge."

The price of admittance to this refuge is cruelty, which gives rise to such feelings of guilt as I've described. Because Nabokov's prose owes its beauty to cruelty, it is crippled with the same guilt, and so too is Humbert as he searches for timeless beauty with all the innocence of a small child. We sense that the author-the narrator, the speaker of this wondrous prose-is forever trying to conquer this guilt, which quest only fuels his fearless cynicism, his brilliant diatribes, and his frequent returns to the past, to his memories of childhood.

As we can see in his memoirs, Nabokov looked back on his childhood as a golden age. Though writing with the example of Tolstoy's Childhood, Boyhood, Youth in mind, Nabokov shows no interest in the sort of guilt that Tolstoy derived from Rousseau. It is clear that for him guilt is a pain that came after childhood, after the Bolsheviks forced him from his Russian idyll, a pain he was suffering at the time he was honing his style. "If all Russian writers write about their lost childhoods," Pushkin once said, "who will speak of Russia itself?" Though Nabokov is a modem instance of the tradition of which Pushkin was complaining-the literature of the landowning aristocrat-there is a great deal more to him than that.

Nabokov's quarrels with Freud, and the pleasure he took in needling him, suggest that he was trying to defend himself against the terrible guilt he felt about the golden age of his childhood. To put it differently, he was trying to protect himself from prohibitions and pronouncements of guilt and not from Freud's idiocies (as Nabokov himself described them). For when he began to write about time, memory, and eternity and his pages on these themes are among his most brilliant-Nabokov was also attempting sorcery of a Freudian sort.

Nabokov's concept of time offers an escape from the cruelty that attends beauty and engenders guilt. As he elaborates the concept at length in Ada, Nabokov reminds us that our memories allow us to carry our childhood with us, and with it the golden age we thought we had left behind. Nabokov brings this simple, self-evident idea into being with a fine lyricism, showing how the past and the present can coexist in a single sentence. The encounters with belongings evoke the past at the most unexpected moments; the images are laden with wondrous memories, opening our eyes to the golden age that is always with us, even in the and unhappy character) becomes the victim of Nabokovian cruelty, excluded from the major scenes in the book and from the great love that many readers feel for it.

This is the point at which the author's greatness depends on the reader's. As Nabokov struggles to bring his paradise into our own times-to create for himself a refuge from reality-his will to indulge his private jokes and puns, his secret pleasures and games, and to elaborate his awe at the boundlessness of the imagination-this impulse produces moments in Ada when he loses the impatient reader. This is the point at which Proust, Kafka, and Joyce also refuse their readers, but unlike these other writers, Nabokov, father of the post-modem joke, has foreseen the reader's response and so embroils him in a game: He speaks of the difficulty of Van's philosophical novel, of how "in the drawing groom prattle among fan-wafting ladies" he is viewed as conceited for his indifference to literary fame.

In my youth, when everyone around me expected novelists to engage in social and moral analysis, I used this proud Nabokovian stance as my shield. Seen from Turkey, the characters in Ada and in Nabokov's other novels from the 1970s looked like fantasies of a nonexistent world "cut off from the present." Fearing I might be smothered by the cruel and ugly demands of the social milieu in which I planned to set my novels, I felt a moral imperative to embrace not just Lolita but also the books like Ada, in which Nabokov took to the outer limit his puns, sexual fantasies, erudition, literary games, self-referential jokes, and taste for satire. This is why for me great literature lives in a nearby place, cooled by the alienating wind of guilt. Ada is a great writer's attempt to eradicate that guilt, to use the power and will of literature to bring paradise into the present. This is why, once you lose your faith, in this book and in the incestuous union of Van and Ada, the book is drowned in a sin that is the opposite of what Nabokov intended.

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em Other Colors. ou: leitura matinal.
mudei a cor porque gostei. é um gosto a vermelho.

amor

ontem falávamos do que era o amor que é, parece-me, uma coisa simples de se saber o que é, embora seja tantas vezes confundido ou misturado com outras coisas que lhe são alheias e estranhas. um dos mais estranhos livros (literatura e não 'fiction' que, de certo modo, confesso, desprezo) escrito não para relatar uma história de amor (aquilo que seria talvez se fosse ficção) mas para misturar da forma mais radical e sangrenta (não tem nada de sangue nem de violência física mas não posso deixar de pensar que ataca violentamente e com arma cortante aquilo que é a escrita tal como foi vista até agora) a realidade e a escrita.

Elif Batuman refere um ponto curioso: enquanto as personagens só podem ser imaginadas, bem como as suas histórias, os móveis e os bibelots literários são descrições exactas de objectos existentes. o ponto é curioso se bem que não verdadeiro: muitas personagens são cópias exactas de pessoas verdadeiras, enquanto muito objectos literários são criações refinadas de objectos que nunca existiram. Perec cria mesmo uma colecção de arte, com nomes e referências.

Füsun foi criada a partir de grupo socio-cultural, de uma casa e de objectos. o livro cresceu à medida que crescia a colecção dos objectos. Istanbul surgiu no meio deste projecto de dez anos. o museu desenha-se ao mesmo tempo que o livro é construído. inaugurado o museu é escrito o catálogo. a minha maior curiosidade é saber o que pode vir depois de tão grande obsessão. --julgo que no verão de 2013 é publicado na Turquia o próximo livro.

regressando: a mulher desaparecida, uma verdadeira mulher-objecto pois apenas vive através dos objectos que hipoteticamente tocou ao longo da sua vida (cada pessoa uma colecção de objectos). isto não é amor mas uma obsessão doentia que o autor carrega desde quando não sei pois apenas o conheci em Kara Kitap. aliás, o livro preto vem de Nabokov, mestre de obsessões várias.

"The museum logo is a butterfly and, in the scene with the butterfly earring, Füsun is 18 and the narrator is 30. I don’t usually care for Nabokov references and I’m not crazy about butterflies, but I found The Museum of Innocence to be one of the few books I’ve read that alludes to Lolita successfully. It made me realise why Lolita is a novel about paedophilia. Lolita has to be impossibly young, because the brevity of youth is a metonym for the brevity of life, and the monstrousness of Humbert’s passion is the monstrousness of facelifts, or of Lenin’s tomb, or of the wedding cake in Great Expectations. ‘Exhibit number two,’ Humbert says early in Lolita, ‘is a pocket diary bound in black imitation leather, with a golden year, 1947, en escalier, in its upper left-hand corner.’ Although Lolita is narrated from a prison and not a museum, the profusion of birdcages in the Museum of Innocence tips you off to a figurative equivalence. Humbert, Kemal and the last Ottoman prince share a family resemblance to the ape credited by Nabokov with inspiring Lolita: the one ‘in the Jardin des Plantes who, after months of coaxing by a scientist, produced the first drawing ever charcoaled by an animal’, showing the bars of its cage." (também do artido de Batuman)

porque não me canso de ler

este excelente artigo: "As Nabokov himself once established with entomological diagrams, Kafka had no clear picture of what his insect looked like."

fala ainda Elif Batuman: "The world of letters: does such a thing still exist? Even within the seemingly homogeneous sphere of the university English department, a schism has opened up between literary scholarship and creative writing: disciplines which differ in their points of reference (Samuel Richardson v. Jhumpa Lahiri), the graduate degrees they award (Doctor of Philosophy v. Master of Fine Arts) and their perceived objects of study (‘literature’ v. ‘fiction’)." (daqui)

sistema para analisar borboletas

"Nabokov's system developed to map patterns on butterfly wings.", via pinterest e sem mais verificação de factos.

Ahab

no Mundo do Fim do Mundo de Sepúlveda, Ahab aparece como Achab na página 14. achei que era erro tipográfico. mas não, na página 27 volta a surgir Achab, herói de Moby Dick. o que não me vai sair da cabeça nos próximos dias é porquê.

vi o 'novo' de Sebald: primeiro livro 'inédito' em Portugal, que não sei se estava publicado elsewhere antes da morte do escritor. uma espécie de Clarabóia estrangeira, milking the dead cow. o mesmo com Nabokov de Laura.

o diabo

enquanto lia A Ilustre Casa de Ramires tentava lembrar que tinha dito que pessoas surgiam das palavras, como do nada, e logo voltavam a desaparecer mais logo na linha. assim faz Eça, convocando uma multidão viva nesta obra maior da língua e da história. (e era Nabokov sobre Gogol).

 ao ler Gogol, tenho sempre a impressão de uma coisa extraordinária, comovedora, para além do habitual. o que pode ser criado do ar com palavras.

- -

 Pela frente ainda podia enganar, mas 

pelas costas era o Diabo escrito e escarrado.

(Dum conto popular)

– Ouviste, Vlass? – dizia, erguendo-se na escuridão, um dos muitos visitantes da feira que pernoitava ao clarão das estrelas, – alguém falou no diabo, aqui ao pé de nós?
– E daí, que me importa isso a mim? – rosnou, espreguiçando-se, um cigano que estava deitado ao seu lado: – como se pode impedir alguém de falar da parentela?!
– Mas gritou como se o estivessem a estrangular!
– Quando um homem acorda bruscamente é capaz de imaginar todos os disparates!
– Seja o que quiseres, mas vamos ver o que se passa. Petisca lume!
O outro cigano pôs-se de pé, resmungando, iluminou-se duas vezes com as faíscas da pederneira que deram o clarão rápido de pequenos relâmpagos, puxou fogo à isca assoprando-a e acendeu o kaganetz – a lâmpada usada na Pequena-Rússia, que consiste num simples caco de barro cheio de sebo de carneiro, – e pôs-se em marcha alumiando o caminho.
– Alto! está aqui qualquer coisa caída. Ilumina por aqui!
Neste momento, já outros curiosos se lhes tinham juntado.
– O que vem a ser isto, Vlass?
– Palavra, que me parecem duas pessoas uma por cima da outra; mas não distingo qual delas é o Diabo!
–  Qual é a que está por cima?
– Uma mulher!
– Então, não há dúvida, é essa o Diabo!
Uma gargalhada geral ressoou por toda a rua.
– Uma mulher que cavalgou um homem com certeza que sabe bem como há-de dirigir a sua montada! – dizia um dos recém-chegados.
– Olhai, rapazes! – disse outro pegando num bocado dum pote de que apenas uma metade se conservava ainda na cabeça de Tcherevik, – vede de que fazenda é o boné deste desgraçado!
Os risos e o barulho sempre crescentes fizeram despertar as duas criaturas inertes, que não eram senão Solopi e a sua mulher. Ainda sob a influência do terror recente, contemplavam abismados os rostos trigueiros dos ciganos. Iluminados pela luz escassa e oscilante das lâmpadas, estes, pareciam uma selvagem reunião de gnomos, que, envolvidos numa neve opaca e subterrânea, viessem saindo das trevas de uma profunda noite.

Gogol no conto "A Feira de Sorotchinetz", nos Contos.
Foi em Sorotchinetz que nasceu Gogol.
também chamado Evenings in Little Russia, ou Evenings in a Village near Vikanka.
to read online here.


Sorochintsy.
Sorochintsy Fair, também uma ópera cómica de Mussorgsky baseada no conto de Gogol.
a feira no youtube.

'live creatures'

"We are faced by the remarkable phenomenon of mere forms of speech directly giving rise to live creatures."
Nabokov sobre Dead Souls em Lectures on Russian Literature.

('life-generating syntax")

província

eu na lenga-lenga da literatura e da cultura, tal e tal, espírito da nação, e Nabokov a dizer que Gogol não passou mais de uma semana e oito horas na província. genial!
(como disse Feijó, Pessoa inventou Portugal mais do que o contrário. um pouco equivalente ao realismo imposto como obrigação nas artes visuais)

Plyushkin's garden

"An old, far-flung garden, which stretched beyond the house, emerged beyond the estate and then lost itself in the fields, was all that seemed to impact a freshness, overgrown and overrun as it was, to this far-flung estate, and all that was perfectly picturesque in its picture-like desolation. In green clouds and in irregular quivering-leafed cupolas, the conjoined summits of trees which had burst into full and free growth lay against the horizon. The colossal white trunk of a birch, deprived of a top which had been broken off by a storm or a tempest, rose out of this green thicket rounded like an erect and gleaming marble column in the air; the angled, sharp-ended fracture, in which it terminated instead of a capital, showed dark against the snowy whiteness, like a hat or a black bird. The wild hop that choked the elder, rowan-berry and hazel bushes below, and then ran over the top of the entire palisade, at last ran upwards to twine round the broken birch tree. Having reached the middle, it was dangling and already beginning to clutch at the tops of other trees or hung in the air, twining its delicate, clinging ringlets into tendrils gently swayed by the wind. In places green, sun struck thickets parted to reveal a hollow between them, untouched by light and gaping like a dark maw, it was cast all in shadow, and its black depths afforded but the faintest glimpse of a coursing narrow path, the ruins of a railing, a tumbledown gazebo, a hollow, decayed trunk of a willow, and from behind the willow a gray thicket which thrust out a dense bristly of leaves and twigs, entangled and enmeshed, withered by the fearsome wild, and finally the young branch of a maple that had stretched from one side its green paw – leaves beneath one of which the sun had made its way. Lord knows how, and was turning it suddenly transparent and fiery, a wondrously shining thing in this thick darkness. Off to one side, at the very edge of the garden, several high-reaching aspen, taller than the others, raised enormous crows’ nest on their tremulous crowns. From some of these, branches, broken but not fully detached, hung down with their withered leaves. In a word, all was somehow desolate and splendid, as it is given to neither nature nor art to devise, but as it happens only when they join together, when across the often senselessly accumulated toil of man, nature passes a finishing touch of the chisel, lightens the heavy masses, eliminates the crudely palpable symmetry and the beggarly rips through which peers the unconcealed, bare plan, and confers a wondrous warmth on everything that has been created in the chill of calculated purity and tidiness."
Gogol, em Dead Souls, daqui.

(A page from Nabokov's lecture on Dead Souls describing the landowners.)

"The difference between human vision and the image perceived by the faceted eye of an insect may be compared with the difference between a half-tone block made with the very finest screen and the corresponding picture as represented by the very coarse screening used in common newspaper pictorial reproduction. The same comparison holds good between the way Gogol saw things and the way average readers and average writers see things. Before his and Pushkin's advent Russian literature was purblind. What form it perceived was an outline directed by reason: it did not see color for itself but merely used the hackneyed combinations of blind noun and dog-like adjective that Europe had inherited from the ancients. The sky was blue, the dawn red, the foliage green, the eyes of beauty black, the clouds grey, and so on. It was Gogol (and after him Lermontov and Tolstoy) who first saw yellow and violet at all. That the sky could be pale green at sunrise, or the snow a rich blue on a cloudless day, would have sounded like heretical nonsense to your so-called "classical" writer, accustomed as he was to the rigid conventional color-schemes of the Eighteenth Century French school of literature. Thus the development of the art of description throughout the centuries may be profitably treated in terms of vision, the faceted eye becoming a unified and prodigiously complex organ and the dead dim "accepted colors" (in the sense of "idées reçues") yielding gradually their subtle shades and allowing new wonders of application. I doubt whether any writer, and certainly not in Russia, had ever noticed before, to give the most striking instance, the moving pattern of light and shade on the ground under trees or the tricks of color played by sunlight with leaves. The following description of Plyushkin's garden in Dead Souls shocked Russian readers in much the same way as Manet did the bewhiskered philistines of his day."

Nabokov em Lectures on Russian Literature, todo em .pdf aqui.

estética da apropriação

finalmente acabo Dublinesca com a ressureição do autor que afinal nunca tinha estado mesmo morto (um cristo). uma construção em torno do claro "Dublinesque" de Philip Larkin (que assim fica para sempre ligado -e sem querer- a outra coisa. a ele, sim, ficava bem o funeral de uma prostituta, all love, all beauty), o cortejo funerário de uma prostituta que Vila-Matas quer tornar na puta literatura. -nem penso que a literatura seja uma mulher, se tanto uns quinze por cento do seu sangue literário, e muito menos puta (os editores sim, os entertainers queriam-ser-literários, os tops e tais).

Dublinesque
Philip Larkin

Down stucco sidestreets,
Where light is pewter
And afternoon mist
Brings lights on in shops
Above race-guides and rosaries,
A funeral passes.

The hearse is ahead,
But after there follows
A troop of streetwalkers
In wide flowered hats,
Leg-of-mutton sleeves,
And ankle-length dresses.

There is an air of great friendliness,
As if they were honouring
One they were fond of;
Some caper a few steps,
Skirts held skilfully
(Someone claps time),

And of great sadness also.
As they wend away
A voice is heard singing
Of Kitty, or Katy,
As if the name meant once
All love, all beauty.

- -
é uma estética da apropriação e do esforço que se desenrola pós-modernisticamente a partir de fichas de leitura à maneira da Tese de Eco que tivemos todos de engolir no início dos estudos literários, e as únicas fichas de que gosto, para além das insanas miniaturas de Walser, são as de Nabokov.

para os críticos literários é um sonho, há para dar e vender, para os escritores criativos um pesadelo pois copiar aquilo deve dar uma trabalheira.

aqui, umas linhas do primeiro Canto de Pale Fire, uma das mais belas obras.

(vs. o coração da estética)