Despair: Introduction & Background

[Katy, Quarterly Long Reads]

Information about Despair or Vladmir Nabokov

[Miriam]

Vladimir Nabokov [vlah-DEE-mir nah-BOA-kov], 1899-1977; novelist, poet, scholar, translator, and lepidopterist. A cosmopolitan Russian-born �migr� whose linguistic facility, erudite style, and eloquent prose helped to establish him as one of the most brilliant and respected literary figures of the 20th century, Nabokov produced literature and scholarship of beauty, complexity, and inventiveness in both Russian and English.
Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov was born on (or about) April 23rd, 1899, into a wealthy and aristocratic family in St. Petersburg, Russia. His father, Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov, was a prominent and respected liberal politician; his mother, Elena Ivanovna, was a noble and wealthy Russian with an artistic heritage. From his father, VN seems to have inherited a strong work ethic and a love for butterflies; from his mother, a creative sensibility and innate spirituality. The oldest of five children, VN spent his childhood in St. Petersburg and the family estate of Vyra, some 50 miles to the south. (For more on the Nabokov family, see Dieter E. Zimmer's Nabokov Family Web.)

Describing himself as "a perfectly normal trilingual child in a family with a large library," VN first learned English and then French from various governesses; his father, upon realizing that his son could read and write English but not Russian, employed an instructor from a local school to teach VN and his brother Sergei their native tongue. The Nabokov family habitually spoke a melange of French, English, and Russian in their household, and this linguistic diversity would play a prominent role in VN's development as an artist.

A slender but active youth, VN bicycled, played tennis and soccer, and, most especially, spent hours in and around the Vyra estate collecting butterflies. "My pleasures are the most intense known to man: writing and butterfly hunting," he would later say, and his pursuit of butterflies was not merely a pleasure, but a passion that would influence his life and art, both overtly and stylistically.

A series of tutors helped to provide a diverse education. In particular, the study of drawing and painting sharpened his powers of observation and imagination. A description of his colored pencils from the memoir, Speak, Memory, is evocative: "The white one alone, that lanky albino among pencils, kept its original length, or at least did so until I discovered that, far from being a fraud leaving no mark on the page, it was the ideal implement since I could imagine whatever I wished while I scrawled."

VN entered the Tenishev School in St. Petersburg in 1910. The Tenishev School was the most advanced and expensive school in Russia, but even among its elite student body, VN was aloof, iconoclastic, even haughty, to students and faculty alike. That he was driven to school each day in the family Benz or Wolseley increased the sense of imperious individualism; only his soccer skill won him the social acceptance of his classmates. On the soccer field, VN habitually played goalie, so that, even in a team environment, he functioned alone.

In 1916, his uncle "Ruka" bequeathed VN approximately two million dollars and a large estate. Such personal wealth reinforced his noble bearing and independence, and enabled him to privately publish a 500-printing run of a book of poems.

Nabokovs' childhood was full and rewarding. He was adored by his parents, and through his family had experienced stability, love, and wealth; his position, heritage, and developing literary gifts suggested a bright future. Remarkably, his childhood seems even to have prepared him for the severe manner in which he passed from it; the Russian Revolution deprived VN of his birthright, but inscribed upon his memory his inheritance of Russian culture.

In November 1917, the Nabokov family left St. Petersburg for a friend's estate near Yalta, in the Crimea, in the wake of revolutionary rioting and the March 15 abdication of Tsar Nicholas II. His father accepted a position in the provisional government, but, after being imprisoned by Bolshevik forces, left St. Petersburg to join his family in the Crimea. The Nabokovs remained there for 18 months; VN undertook several butterfly safaris, capturing some 77 species of butterfly and more than 100 species of moth, which later formed the basis for his first scholarly publication, in the English journal The Entomologist in 1923.

Fleeing the advance of the Red Army in April 1919, the Nabokovs traveled through Constantinople to England, where VN and his brother Sergei enrolled in Cambridge. VN originally studied ichthyology, but, fatigued by academia, he switched to French and Russian literature. Well served by his own heritage and courses from the Tenishev School, he coasted to graduation in 1922 despite disaffection with University life. VN spent little time in the Library, and seems to have easily passed exams aided by his literary extraction and meticulous lecture notes. He continued to play soccer, and had an active social life. He composed poetry in English, and completed a Russian translation of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland ("Not the first translation," he maintained, "but the best.") Carroll's precise, scientific background and zealous, sprightly paronomasia provide an interesting counterpart to VN's oeuvre. Indeed, Alice's signature elements of chess, playing cards, and a young girl in curious circumstances are themes that would occur and reoccur in VN's work.

The Nabokov family had settled in Berlin, where VN's father became editor of the �migr� newspaper Rul' ("The Rudder.") In 1922, V.D. Nabokov was murdered by two right-wing assassins who were attempting to kill the politician Pavel Miliukov. The elder Nabokov leapt off of the stage in an effort to disarm one of the gunmen, was shot twice, and died instantly. His wife resettled in Prague, where she was offerred a government pension, and remained there until her death in 1939.

VN received his degree from Cambridge in 1922, and moved to Berlin, which had a large Russian population (the circulation of "The Rudder" was 40,000) He earned a tenuous living by publishing short fiction and poetry, using the pseudonym Vl. Sirin to avoid confusion with his father. He supplemented his income in a variety of ways: by giving lessons in English and tennis; translating; appearing as an extra in films; acting in theatrical productions; and by composing chess problems and the first Russian crossword puzzles.

A lifelong insomniac with a dedication to his art, VN wrote mostly at night, which enabled him to lead an aloof but active social life in Berlin. He continued to play soccer, participated in several literary groups, and gave numerous readings of his works. On April 15th, 1925, he married fellow �migr� Véra Slonim. Their son Dmitri was born on May 10th, 1934.

VN and Véra continued to eke out a living in Berlin; a steady stream of novels written in Russian appeared, from Mashen'ka (Mary) in 1925 to Dar (The Gift) in 1938. His body of work during this time was well-received by the �migr� audience and critics, but generated little income, and was largely unknown outside of the Russian-speaking population of Berlin and Paris. One consistent criticism of his fiction was its lack of "Russianness," that is, a lack of direct concern with Russia's issues and difficulties. VN would maintain, "I have never been interested in what is called the literature of social comment."

In 1937, VN and his family left Berlin for Paris due to their disgust with the Nazi regime and Mrs. Nabokov's Jewish heritage. In Paris, VN continued to write in Russian, composed a few works in French, and also wrote his first novel in English, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight. He had determined that his most harmonious future lay in the English language; since England was not prepared to supply him with an academic appointment, the Nabokovs prepared to immigrate to America.

In 1940, VN, Véra, and Dmitri, fled Paris for New York, narrowly escaping the invading Germans. In America, VN initially worked for the Museum of Natural History in New York, classifying butterflies. He published two papers, and was also paid by the Museum for his entomological drawings. During the summer of 1941, he taught creative writing at Stanford University, before securing an appointment as resident lecturer in comparative literature and instructor in Russian at Wellesley College. Later he would work at Harvard, first in an entomological capacity and later as visiting lecturer, and at Cornell, as professor of Russian and European literature, from 1948-1959.
During the 1940s, VN embarked upon a fruitful association with the New Yorker; in addition to his entomological work, he spent quite a bit of time preparing his lectures, and published a scholarly work on Gogol. It may be that his comparatively small output of fiction during this time was an adjustment to writing in English; VN would maintain that the Wellesley years were the happiest, and his scholarly pursuits were satisfying. In 1945, the Nabokov family became American citizens. He also compiled a memoir, published in 1951 as Conclusive Evidence (later revised and published as Speak, Memory.)

VN continued to pursue butterflies during his summer vacations, often in the Rocky Mountains. It was during these trips in the early 1950s that he composed the novel that would engrave his name in the American popular culture - Lolita. Initially, even the American publishing houses that admitted Lolita's literary virtues were unwilling to discover the legal ramifications of publishing a novel about a man's affair with his twelve-year old stepdaughter. Lolita was first published in France by Olympia Press in 1955, and generated a storm of moral outrage, as well as staunch and significant support for its artistic merit. Eventually published in American in 1958 (and in England the following year,) the Sturm und Drang over Lolita contributed to a remarkable popular success; it spent six months as the number one bestseller in America (displaced by Boris Pasternak's Dr. Zhivago.)

Although he glibly suggested about his Lolita that "she is the famous one, not I," profits from the sale of the novel, combined with the sale of the movie rights and a screenplay deal, enabled VN to retire from Cornell in 1959 and devote himself to writing.



In 1961, VN and Véra moved to Montreux, Switzerland, at least in part to be near Dmitri, who was studying for a career in opera in Milan. At first considered a temporary move, they settled in at the Montreux-Palace Hotel and remained for the duration of their lives. Living reclusively, VN continued to produce original novels, including the singular Pale Fire, and directed the translation of his earlier work from Russian into English.

The publication of Glory in 1971 completed the process of translating his Russian novels into English. Often collaborating with his son Dmitri, VN occasionally (but not always) revised and augmented his earlier works during the translation process. VN's magisterial linguistic finesse had long enabled him to compose literature and scholarly translations in Russian, English, and French. George Steiner admiringly summarized VN's philology thus: ". . . whereas so many other language exiles clung desperately to the artifice of their native tongue or fell silent, Nabokov moved into successive languages like a traveling potentate."

Vladimir Nabokov died on July 2, 1977, in Montreux, of a mysterious lung ailment. His legacy of challenging yet playful fiction, dense with creative exuberance and innovative use of language, continues to reward and dazzle scholars and casual readers alike. "The true conflict is not between the characters in a novel, but between author and reader," he asserted. "In the long run, however, it is only the author's private satisfaction that counts."

Source http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/...

[Miriam]

Biographies on Nabokov

[Miriam]

Numerous critics have noted that Despair is the first major work by Nabokov in which the author resorts to intertextual strategies and stratagems--to literary parody, disguised polemic, cunning play with several superimposed subtexts, and so on. "Behind Despair stands a nexus of allusions so dense, so rich, that progressing through their labyrinth would require another Holmes," wrote William C. Carroll1 in a pioneering article that tracks some very important routes inside this labyrinth leading to Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Oscar Wilde, and Conan Doyle.

Though Hermann Karlovich, the well-read hero-narrator of Despair, either names or quotes all the above mentioned authors, in the consensus of critical opinion the most important among them is Dostoevsky or, in the narrator's spiteful parlance, Dusty-and-Dusky, "our national expert in soul ague and the aberrations of human self-respect."2 Much has been written about Dostoevsky as a main parodic target of Despair, a book which does indeed abound in echoes from The Double, Crime and Punishment and Notes from the Underground.3

Such intertextual readings centered on Dostoevsky accord fairly well with Nabokov's 1964 English version of Despair, which differs drastically from the original in several aspects,4 including its elaborate system of subtexts and parodic allusions. In this version Dostoevsky looms significantly larger than in its Russian counterpart, and the vicious attacks upon him become too prominent to be ascribed exclusively to the narrator's idiosyncrasy. The derogatory paronomasia semanticizing the very name of Dostoevsky as connected with "dust" and "dusk"5 (which has no analog in the Russian original) not only injects more venom into Hermann's iconoclastic stingers but also becomes a part of the deeper semantic layers of the text controlled by the auctor rather than the narrator. Thus when Hermann in the English translation complains of being unable to free his "dusty, dusky soul" through a "refined self-torture" of writing (118), this addition to the original ex post facto becomes a defamatory authorial allusion to the soul-searching of Dostoevsky's heroes and, by implication, to the popular Western concept of the Russian (or Slavic) Soul associated with Dostoevsky's writings.6 Similarly, the "vortex of dust" that Hermann imagines in the yard of the Tarnitz hotel together with a Tartar, "the Caspian wind" and "the pale sky sick of looking on fisheries" (77) can be decoded either as truncated "text of Dusty" or as a part of the anagram VOrtEx Of DuST + SKY = DOSTOEVSKY and thereby offers a clue to the hidden literary subtexts of this pivotal scene. These anagrams, puns and paronomastic echoes place the concealed allusions to Dostoevsky on the same level as the "author's watermarks" which, to quote Julian W. Connolly, now and then "shine through Hermann's words."7

The reorientation of the English Despair toward Dostoevsky was undoubtedly prompted by the Western cultural context of the 1960's in which (and for which) Nabokov was rewriting his thirty-year-old novel. By this time Nabokov had severed his ties to contemporary Russian literature, whether written by émigrés or Soviet nationals. In an interview he explained:

The era of expatriation can be said to have ended during World War II. Old writers died, Russian publishers also vanished, and worst of all, the general atmosphere of exile culture, with its splendor, and vigor, and purity, and reverberative force, dwindled to a sprinkle of Russian language periodicals, anemic in talent and provincial in tone (Strong Opinions, 37) .
As for the Soviet Union, the Communist "jackbooted baboons have gradually exterminated the really talented authors, the special individual, the fragile genius," (Strong Opinions, 58) and because of this its current literature manifests only "provincial banality." In America Nabokov wanted to play the role of the last survivor and representative of the great Russian literary tradition, the ambassador plenipotentiary of the mutilated Russian culture and language, the sole peer and interlocutor of Pushkin, Tolstoy and Chekhov rather than Pasternak (as the author of Doctor Zhivago) or Solzhenitsyn. This is why he was so enraged when in the 1950's and 1960's the American intellectual elite, under the influence of French existentialists, began to venerate Dostoevsky, whom they proclaimed the father of existentialism and the only Russian writer of genius.8 The main aim of Nabokov's individual crusade against Dostoevsky was not so much to dethrone the mighty predecessor as to undermine his uncritical cult in America, which tended to reduce all Russian cultural heritage to the soul-searching of Notes from the Underground, Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov. As he put it in an interview:
Non-Russian readers do not realize two things: that not all Russians love Dostoevski as much as Americans do, and that most of those Russians who do, venerate him as a mystic and not as an artist (Strong Opinions, 42).
For Nabokov in the 1960s, Dostoevsky was a clear and present peril, an immediate enemy, as well as a very strong irritant, and he used the English translation of Despair as a weapon in his fight; with the book he meant to lampoon the darling of the existentialist crowd and thereby to overbear the artistic authority of his inflated compatriot.
However, in the context of 1920s and 1930s both the position of Nabokov in respect to Dostoevsky and the priorities of his polemical battles were quite different. With the demise of Russian Symbolism and the end of the Silver Age, the era of ardent critical debate, philosophizing and essayistic preaching about "the visionary of the spirit" came to a close, sealing Dostoevsky's reputation as an indisputable classic. He became a well established, integral part of the Russian cultural canon--an object of extensive research and scholarly study, annotating, and theorizing rather than the subject of passionate harangues and grand philosophical concepts in the vein of Merezhkovsky, Viacheslav Ivanov or Berdiaev. True, one could argue that Dostoevsky had been a crude, clumsy artist and disagree with his moral or religious ideas, but such a critique would be a legitimate part of the discourse rooted in a tradition and based on a number of well-known precedents.

For such influential émigré writers as Bunin, Osorgin or Aldanov, Dostoevsky was the epitome of "bad writing," and in the 1930's many younger literati took up their views. The growing opposition to Dostoevsky disturbed Adamovich, the literary dictator of Russian Paris. Though himself not a great admirer of Dostoevsky,9 he regarded it as a victory for the "Pushkin party" fighting for the values of the objective, well-wrought "Apollonian" art, and rushed to the defense of the "Dionesian" icon. In his article "The Twilight of Dostoevsky" Adamovich cunningly embraces all the main points made by Bunin, Aldanov and other iconoclasts, repeating their objections to Dostoevsky's "artificial, false atmosphere," the "distorted," nightmarish, vindictive depiction of the external world, and the lack of artistic precision but then, in a volte-face, claims these deficiencies are irrelevant and are overshadowed by a deeper spiritual vision:

In our literary "circles" here [...] there is a stubborn antagonism to Dostoevsky, the aesthetic, ridiculous antagonism that is bursting into view more and more frequently. [...] They allege Dostoevsky "is not an artist" and "writes badly": this and nothing else. [...] Of course, a major writer always has strong likes and dislikes. It is only natural, for example, that Bunin "does not accept" Dostoevsky. [...] Yet if we are told: "Dostoevsky is not an artist," let us ask then what an artist is supposed to be? What does it mean "to write well"? An artist--using the word in its genuine rather than childish meaning--is not a craftsman who knows how to evenly distribute "lively images," "telling details of everyday life," "colorful landscapes," and other trifles in his books; an artist is the one who finds a rhythm unknown before, and enlivens and permeates the world he has created by this rhythm. "Writes badly"? Yes, it is true, Dostoevsky wrote carelessly: he used to dictate, to choke, to hurry. [...] But what does it really matter? Do you want to say that the creative art is trimming and polishing while the incessant glow of the story from within, the irrepressible light breaking through the murky, helter-skelter shell is not "that important"?10
Adamovich�s metaphors, as it were, absolve Dostoevsky from any aesthetic judgment: it is only the inner "irrepressible light" of Dostoevsky's insights, he argued, that matters because it redeems and outweighs the outward "darkness" of his style.11 Contrasting the visionary art of Dostoevsky to that of unnamed authors engrossed in "trimming and polishing," Adamovich targeted his opponents from the "Pushkin party," foremost among them Nabokov, whose writings he had persistently belittled as "too polished."12
Nabokov's response was swift and biting. In the last chapter of The Gift Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev makes fun of the average Russian literati's "blissful incapacity for observation (and hence complete uninformedness about the surrounding world--and a complete inability to put a name to anything) [...] as if a beneficent fate were at work refusing the blessing of sensory cognition to the untalented so that they will not wantonly mess up the material" (Gift, 315), and adds:

It happens, of course, that such a benighted person has some little lamp of his own glimmering inside him--not to speak of those known instances in which, through the caprice of resourceful nature that loves startling adjustments and substitutions, such an inner light is astonishingly bright--enough to make the envy of the ruddiest talent But even Dostoevski always brings to mind somehow a room in which a lamp burns during the day (Gift, 315-16).



University of Wisconsin-Madison

For the rest of the article see original source. It is a very good essay on the book.

Source http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/...

[Miriam]

More books by Vladimir Nabokov
Vladimir Nabokov

[Miriam]

Despair (Russian: Отчаяние, or Otchayanie) is a novel by Vladimir Nabokov originally published as a serial in the politicized literary journal Sovremennye zapiski during 1934. It was then published as a book in 1936, and translated to English by the author in 1937. Most copies of the 1937 English edition were destroyed by German bombs during World War II; only a few copies remain. Nabokov published a second English translation in 1965; this is now the only English translation in print.

Extensively revised by Nabokov in 1965--thirty years after its original publication--Despair is the wickedly inventive and richly derisive story of Hermann, a man who undertakes the perfect crime--his own murder.

Source http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Despair_... and http://www.amazon.com/Despair-Vladimi...

[Miriam]

Vladimir Nabokon had an obsession with butterflies. Here are verious articles and links to websites about his obsession. P.S. I will add more later!

http://life.time.com/culture/vladimir...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/sc...

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/01/sci...

[Katy, Quarterly Long Reads]

Wow. Thanks Miriam. It may take me a bit to get all this read, but looks great.

[Miriam]

Kathy wrote: "Wow. Thanks Miriam. It may take me a bit to get all this read, but looks great."



Thank you! I tried to be as throw as possible I am a bit obsessed with Vladimir Nabokov and I am even reading Brian Boyd's biographies on him. Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years

Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years