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Nabokov: The Mysteryof LiteraryStructures Bruce KingLeona Toker1990 год

Nabokov: The Mystery of Literary Structures
статья из журнала

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Аннотация: Nabokov by a minute Sherlock-Holmesian attention to detail until its mystery that is, its specific relation to specific dreams, desires, and limitations of human life-begins to emerge.Ye t the mystery of a literary struc ture can be approximated rather than solved.It lies in the quaint ap propriateness of the structure to an attitude; the "aesthetic bliss" produced by this harmony retains mysteriousness even after the ap proaches to it have been mapped.An attempt to unravel the enigmas of Nabokov's structure ultimately confronts one with a Mystery: "a fic tional technique," if Jean-Paul Sartre is to be believed, "always relates back to the novelist's metaphysics."8But what was Nabokov's metaphysics?"Total rejection of all reli gions ever dreamt up by man and total composure in the face of total death," writes a dying fictional writer in Transparent Th ings."If I could explain this triple totality in one big book, that book would become no doubt a new bible and its author the founder of a new creed.furtunately for my self-esteem that book will not be writ ten ... because [it] would never express in one flash what can only be understood immediately" (TT, 84).The uncertainty of the latter idea is, of course, matched by the uncertainty with which the character's position can be ascribed to the author.Nabokov's own voice is more mild and modest: "I know more than I can express in words, and the little I can express would not have been expressed, had I not known more" (SO, 45).Elusive as this statement may be, it leaves no doubt of the tinge of mysticism in Nabokov's view of the world.His mys ticism was a matter of fe eling, of relationship with the world, rather than of definable hypostasis: Nabokov "knew" what he could not express the way one "knows" love, or hope, or suffering.Only a fe w aspects of his world view can be formulated as beliefs. IINabokov seems to have "liked" these beliefs rather than to have really "held" them: in his life he would have had the courage to face their crumbling, yet in his fiction he was free to create a universe controlled by the cosmogony of his choice.His favorite brand of mys ticism seems to have been the gnostical belief in a transcendent reality that can occasionally be glimpsed through the chinks in our material 8
Год издания: 1990
Авторы: Bruce King, Leona Toker
Издательство: University of Oklahoma
Источник: World Literature Today
Ключевые слова: Vladimir Nabokov Literary Studies, Russian Literature and Bakhtin Studies
Другие ссылки: World Literature Today (HTML)
Project Muse (Johns Hopkins University) (PDF)
Project Muse (Johns Hopkins University) (HTML)
Library Union Catalog of Bavaria, Berlin and Brandenburg (B3Kat Repository) (PDF)
Library Union Catalog of Bavaria, Berlin and Brandenburg (B3Kat Repository) (HTML)