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Sitaram · Site Admin Joined: 14 Sep 2005 Posts: 1079

Nabokov Tutorials

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http://www.mantex.co.uk/ou/a319/nab-000.htm

Nabokov tutorials

50 studies of The Collected Stories

I think I shall read through these...

Some excerpts:

Nabokov always stays within the unwritten conventions of what is
permissible in misleading the reader this way. The attentive reader is
given just sufficient clues to avoid being taken in.

The participant's senses seem unusually heightened in such a way as to
create a sense of spiritual euphoria.

Nabokov went on to develop certain notions - especially the frisson of the
largely aesthetic moment

frisson \free-SOHN\, noun:
An emotional thrill; a shudder of excitement, pleasure, or fear.

When we think a story hasn't been invented, there's an extra frisson in
reading it.

Frisson comes from the French, from Old French friçon, a trembling.

A propos of Nabokov's interest in different levels of reality, he was 'still
searching for ways to fit a world beyond into the world of the human, but
he had not found his own way yet.'

Two of his favourite topics - Art and Death - a subject which he treats
many times throughout both his stories and novels - the artist-figure as a
tormented eccentric, and a representative of the almost sacred belief
Nabokov had in the value of individual human personality.

Nabokov side-steps this potential trap with some very neat linguistic
footwork. Statements of admitted invention are used as a subtle bridge
into an account of what could be known or surmised. 'I imagine for some
reason that when she started pulling on her stockings the silk kept
catching on the toenails of her icy feet. She arranged her hair as best she
could' (p.180). The transition here from surmise ('I imagine') to statement
('She arranged') is hardly noticeable. This is a very skillful manipulation
of narrative mode in a twenty-five year old writer just embarking on his
literary career.

Just then a chrysalis from the boy's collection bursts open in the warmth
of the room and a large moth emerges, opens its wings, and takes a 'full
breath under the impulse of tender, ravishing, almost human happiness'

Centuries will roll by...everything will pass, but...my happiness will
remain, in the moist reflection of a streetlamp...in everything with which
God so generously surrounds human loneliness.

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