Is Humbert Humbert Jewish? - Vladimir Nabokov

Vladimir Nabokov was eighteen when the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917 made his wealthy family’s continued residence in Petrograd (as St. Petersburg was renamed at the start of World War I) impossible. They fled first to the Crimea and then, in 1919, to London. The following year they settled in Berlin, where in 1922 Nabokov’s father was assassinated, more by accident than design, by extreme right-wing Russian monarchists: they were attempting to kill another Russian émigré politician, Paul Milyukov. V.D. Nabokov bravely seized and disarmed one of the gunmen, and pinned him down, but was then shot three times by the second.

In a poem called “Easter” published just a few weeks after this disaster, the twenty-two-year-old Nabokov interprets the arrival of spring as portending some kind of resurrection of his father: “Rise again,” each “golden thaw-drop” seems to sing, “blossom”; “you are in this refrain,/you’re in this splendor, you’re alive!…” Some forty years later he would allude to the ghastly manner of his father’s demise in a more characteristically Nabokovian way: the day on which Pale Fire’s John Shade is killed by mistake in another botched assassination attempt is July 21, Nabokov senior’s birthday.

V.D. Nabokov was not the only member of the family to fall victim to the chaos of the times. Vladimir’s brother Sergey Nabokov was one year younger than him, but of a very different temperament; shy, stuttering, gay, musically gifted, a Catholic convert, Sergey spent much of his exile in Paris, where he got to know Diaghilev, Jean Cocteau, Gertrude Stein, and Pavel Tchelitchew, with whom he shared an apartment for a while. His long-term partner was a wealthy Austrian called Hermann Thieme. While the rise of the Nazis drove Vladimir, whose wife Véra was Jewish, to embark for America with their young son Dimitri in May 1940, shortly before the fall of Paris, Sergey and Hermann Thieme responded, somewhat bizarrely, by moving east to Berlin. There they were arrested for homosexual offenses; Hermann was freed but forced to join the German army in Africa, while Sergey spent five months in jail. On his release he moved to Prague, where he set about openly denouncing the Nazis and Hitler; he was soon informed upon, arrested again, and in the spring of 1944 dispatched to Neuengamme concentration camp, on the outskirts of Hamburg. He did well there, in that he lasted ten months, whereas the average life expectancy was twelve weeks. Sergey was forty-four when he died, the age of Pale Fire’s Charles Kinbote, another awkward homosexual exile, who is also hounded and harried, or so he’d have us believe, by a ruthless totalitarian regime that has come violently to power.

Why, Andrea Pitzer asks in her provocatively titled The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov, did the great novelist allude only in such oblique, ludic terms both to his own personal losses and to the historical cataclysms that caused them? Cataclysms that also meant that he could never return to a country he missed acutely, and forced upon him a precarious émigré life in England, Germany, Czechoslovakia, France, and then America, where at last he struck gold with Lolita, so much gold indeed that he was able to spend the last fifteen years of his life in the luxurious Montreux Palace Hotel in Switzerland.

There are numerous ways of approaching this question. The most reassuring response might pivot around Nabokov’s famous definition of his art in his afterword to the all-conquering Lolita, which has steadily sold at the average rate of a million copies a year, and is surely the most indisputably canonical novel in English of the postwar era:

For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm. There are not many such books. All the rest is either topical trash or what some call the Literature of Ideas, which very often is topical trash….

Any attempt to write directly about political events or the “sweep of history,” to borrow a phrase from the jacket copy of any number of blockbuster epics, will be mired in the cliché and sentiment that Nabokov deplored in novels such as Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago (one of his many bêtes noires); the artist’s truest and most valuable way of resisting totalitarian modes of thought is to assert his or her independence as thoroughly and, in Nabokov’s case, as spectacularly as possible. He conceived of writing as a chess match with a razor-keen opponent always looking to predict his next move, and joy and triumph lay in outwitting that reader’s assumptions, and thereby stimulating “curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy.”

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Russian Bohemia

A performance by some of Russia's most talented performers including the Moscow Mail Choir, Kremlin Capella. Beautiful pictures and beautiful performances. 

Konstantin Paustovsky - Biography

Born 31 May 1892 in Moscow. His father, a descendant of the Zaporozhsky Cossacks, was a railroad statistician. His mother came from the family of a Polish intellectual. Russian, Polish, and Ukrainian were spoken in his home. He grew up in Ukraine, partly in the country and partly in Kiev. In 1912, he entered the University of Kiev, in the physics and mathematics faculty, but then he switched to the study of philosophy. In 1914 he transferred to the University of Moscow. His education was interrupted by World War I. He served at the front as a medical orderly.

Later, he wandered around, trying his hand at many jobs in the factories of Ekaterinoslav, Yuzovka, and Taganrog as well as among the fishermen on the Azov Sea. In March 1917 he settled down in Moscow and began work as a journalist. During the Civil War, he was again traveling, this time as a journalist. He found himself in Kiev, Odessa, Batum, Sukhumi, and Tbilisi. In 1923, he was back in Moscow.

Paustovsky started writing while still in the gymnasium. His first works were imitative poetry. He then tried prose and his first stories to be published were Na Vode ("On The Water") and Chetvero ("Four") in 1911 and 1912. During World War I he created some sketches relaying his impressions of life at the front, and one of these was also published. Paustovsky tried a return to poetry and even sent some of his poems to Bunin. However, Bunin replied, "I think that your sphere, your real poetry, is prose. It is here, if you are determined enough, that I am sure you can achieve something significant."

His first book, Morskiye Nabroski ("Sea Sketches") was published in 1925, but was little noticed. This was followed by Minetoza in 1927 and the romantic novel Blistaiushchiey Oblaka ("Shining Clouds") in 1929. In the 1930s, Paustovsky, like other writers of the time, visited various construction sites and wrote in praise of the industrial transformation of the country. To this period belong the novels Kara-Bugaz (1932) and Kolkhida (1934). Kara-Bugaz won particular praise. It is essentially a tale of adventure and exploration around and near the Kara-Bugaz Bay, where the air is mysteriously heavy. It begins in 1847 and moves to the Civil War period when a group of Reds are abandoned to near-certain death on a desolate island. There are, however, survivors, who are rescued by an explorer. Some of the survivors continue on to help in the exploration, development and study of the natural wealth of the region.

Paustovsky continued to explore historical themes in Severnaya Povest ("Tale of the North") (1938). In this tale, following the anti-Tsarist Decembrist uprising in Petersburg, a wounded officer who took part in the uprising and a sailor try to make it by foot across the ice to Sweden. They are captured amid a series of dramatic events. Years later, in Leningrad of the 1930s, the great-grandsons of the participants in the events unexpectedly meet.

During the later 1930s, Russian nature emerged as a central theme and leitmotif for Paustovsky, for example, in Letniye Dni ("Summer Days") (1937) and Meshcherskaya Storona (1939). For Paustovsky, nature was a many-faceted splendor in which man can free himself from daily cares and regain his spiritual equilibrium. This focus on nature drew comparisons with Privshin. And, in fact, Privshin himself wrote in his diary, "If I were not Privshin, I would like to write like Paustovsky."

During World War II Paustovsky served as a war corresondent on the southern front. From 1948 until 1955 he taught at the Gorky Institute for Literature.

In 1943 Paustovsky produced a screenplay for the Gorky Film Studio production of "Lermontov", directed by A. Gendelshtein. Another work of note is Tale of the Woods1948. This story opens in remote forest in the 1890s, where Tchaikovsky is working on a symphony. The daughter of the local forester often brings Tchaikovsky berries. Half a century later, the daughter of this young girl is now a laboratory technician at the local forest station.

Perhaps Paustovsky's most famous work is his autobiography, Povest o Zhizni ("Story of a Life") (1945-1963). It is not a mere historical document, however; rather, it is a long, lyrical tale, focusing on his personal perceptions of events. In 1955, Paustovsky gave us The Golden Rose, a book about "literature in the making". It consists of stories and fragments dealing with creativity, the role of the writer, and the function of literature. One of the stories in this work is "Precious Dust", in which a trash collector spends two years gathering the grains of gold dust from the trash bins of a jewelry shop. When he has enough gold, he smelts it into a beautiful golden rose as a gift for the woman she loves. But, by then, she has moved to America and left no forwarding address.

Paustovsky also edited a few literary collections, Literary Moscow (1956) and Pages from Tarusa, in which he tried to bring new writers to the public's attention and to publish writers suppressed during the Stalin years.

Other major works include "Snow", Crossing Ships (1928); The Black Sea (1936); Summer Days (1937); and The Rainy Dawn (1946). He is also the author of several plays and fairy tales, including "Steel Ring".

In 1965, Paustovsky was nominated for a Nobel Prize.

In February 1966 he was one of more than 125 prominent figures from science and the arts who signed a letter to the 23rd Party Congress appealing against re-Stalinization.

He died in Moscow on 14 July 1968. ...

Tolstoy’s Resurrection and Dostoevsky

Siberia, as a theme with both personal and literary significance, must have been very much in Tolstoy’s mind during the writing of Resurrection. At a personal level, he himself would have been aware, that as Russia’s foremost dissident, he ran the risk of some form of banishment.[1] His hero Nekhlyudov, taking up an idea of the American writer Thoreau, asserts that prison is the only place fitting for an honourable man in Russia (II, 29). The novel itself is a political bombshell with its attack on the very pillars of the state - the Church, the courts, the civil servants, those in authority, including a personal attack on the all-powerful Procurator of the Holy Synod, and an open reference to the political reaction introduced by the tsar Alexander III (I, 3) after the assassination of his father. Tolstoy knew that exile to the east was almost the set reaction to such dissidence by those in power. The Siberian exile of the so-called Decembrists after 1825[2] is in Nekhlyudov’s mind as he goes to see the important general in charge of prisons in St Petersburg (II, 19). The political prisoner Kryl’tsov, quoting Herzen, points to the impoverishment of Russian intellectual life brought about by their exile, and also by the exile of Herzen himself (III, 18)[3]. The 1860s saw the banishment to Siberia of another intellectual leader, N.G. Chernyshevsky, and however great Tolstoy’s own reputation and moral authority might be, he was not immune even from the punishment of Siberia.

But there is another aspect of Siberia which must also have been in Tolstoy’s mind as he wrote his novel – its strong literary associations. Nine years earlier Chekhov (a writer whom Tolstoy patronised) had made the hazardous journey across Siberia to conduct researches on the island of Sakhalin among the inmates of the penal colony there, and had described his outward journey in Out of Siberia (Iz Sibiri) (1890) and the product of his research in The Island of Sakhalin (Ostrov Sakhalin). Even the unlikely traveller Goncharov had been forced to return to European Russia from Japan by a gruelling trek across Siberia, which he described in the second part of The Frigate Pallas (Fregat Pallada).[4] The wives of the Decembrists had followed their husbands into Siberia, and impressed Dostoevsky with their care and solicitude, when he met them on his own way to Siberian servitude. Their example influenced his own later writing; in Crime and Punishment Sonya follows Raskolnikov into Siberia, and in The Brothers Karamazov it is a journey to accompany Dmitriy contemplated by Grushenka. Tolstoy adds a new twist of gender to the theme, when he has a male hero follow a heroine.

Above all it was the actual experience and writing of Tolstoy’s great literary rival Dostoevsky that appears to have had most influence.[5] Dostoevsky, for what seemed on the surface to be a minor act of political dissidence, had been arrested and condemned to penal servitude in the Siberian town of Omsk. These experiences were later given literary form in his Notes from the House of the Dead, a book which Tolstoy called ‘a wonderful thing’, and which he read for a third time before writing Resurrection.[6] In the novel his hero Nekhlyudov gives some (unspecified) work of Dostoevsky to Katyusha to read (I, 12). Like Katyusha herself the heroes of two of Dostoevsky’s novels, Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment and Dmitriy in The Brothers Karamazov would be faced with the Siberian experience. Whether Dostoevsky’s writing on the subject consciously influenced certain aspects of Resurrection is not certain, but clearly there are parallels to be drawn.

In Notes from the House of the Dead Dostoevsky describes how a wounded steppe eagle was harboured by the convicts and then allowed to go free: ‘It was a strange thing. Everyone was somehow pleased, as though in part they themselves had received freedom’.[7] Tolstoy was impressed by the episode and in 1904 reprinted it in his Reading Circle (Krug chteniya) under the title ‘The Eagle’ (Orel) [8].

However, when Tolstoy uses a bird as a symbol of freedom, it is not the macho image of the eagle, but, appropriately (in the context) the feminine one of the dove. In the very first chapter the female prisoner Maslova is depicted as about to tread on a dove or pigeon (golub’): ‘The dove rose up, and with trembling wings, flew past the convict’s very ear, brushing her with the wind of its flight. The convict smiled and then sighed deeply, remembering her own situation.’ In this same opening chapter Tolstoy, as does Dostoevsky, stresses the spontaneity of the charity shown towards such convicts by the Russian common people: a peasant in from the country, crossing himself, gives the prisoner a kopeck.

A second section from Notes from the House of the Dead was also published in 1904 in Tolstoy’s Reading Circle under the title ‘Death in the Hospital’ (Smert’ v gospitale). It was reprinted from the opening of the second part of Dostoevsky’s work, which ends with the stark scene of the convict Mikhaylov lying dead in hospital and still in his chains.[9] In Part II, chapter 37 of Resurrection a convict also lies dead in chains. Nevertheless, Dostoevsky claims that in the prison hospitals there is a far more enlightened attitude towards the convicts: ‘It is well known to all convicts in the whole of Russia, that the people most compassionate towards them are the doctors’.[10] In Resurrection Nekhlyudov comes across such a person: ‘This doctor showed all kinds of indulgences to the convicts and was therefore constantly involved in unpleasant clashes with the prison authorities and even with the senior doctor’ (II, 13).

Like Dostoevsky, Tolstoy too points to the availability of alcohol in the prisons (I, 32),[11] and both authors mention the abuse of prisoners being able to exchange sentences through bullying or negotiating with one another. The fictional hero of Notes from the House of the Dead explains this in general terms:

To swap [smenit’sia] means to exchange names with somebody, and consequently also his fate. However weird this fact might seem, it is true, and in my time it still existed in full force among those under arrest who were being transported to Siberia. At first I could not at all believe it, although finally I did come to believe the evidence.[12]

Tolstoy gives his own concrete example:

The fact was that the convict Karmanov had put up a lad with a face like his, but sentenced to exile, to do a swap with him, so that the convict went into exile, and the lad, in his place, went to the penal colony (III, 10).

Both Dostoevsky and Tolstoy are concerned to divide the convicts into types. Typically, Dostoevsky goes no further than a dichotomy: ‘decisive people’ (reshitel’nye lyudi) as opposed to those ‘impoverished by nature’ (nishchie ot prirody). This is clearly a psychological division. Nekhlyudov, however, is unable to see ‘that criminal type about which the Italian School speaks, but only saw people antipathetic to himself personally, exactly the same as he saw at large in tail-coats, epaulettes, and lace (II, 30). His reading of the literature discourages him from ever hoping to find a psychological explanation for ‘criminal types’. Instead he divides the convicts into five categories, not based on psychology, but according to the nature of their crimes. The difference between the two writers is striking: Dostoevsky adopts a more intuitive psychological approach; Tolstoy seems more rational – he tests the authorities on the subject, then comes up with his own more sociologically based division, placing the convicts into neat pigeon holes. But there is something else: each author has his own polemical agenda in his presentation of the convicts.

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Lyubov Sergeyevna Popova

Lyubov Sergeyevna Popova was born April 24, 1889 near Moscow. She grew up in an enlightened merchant family with a strong interest in art, especially Italian Renaissance painting. At eleven years old she began art lessons at home and in 1907 she studied art with S. Zhukovskiy. Then in 1908 - 1909 she attended the art school of Konstantin Yuon and Ivan Dudin.

Portrait of a Philosopher

Popova traveled widely to investigate and learn from diverse styles of painting, but it was the ancient Russian Icons and 15th and 16th century Italian painters, Giotto and others which at first interested her the most.

Space Force Construction

1909 Travels to Kiev.
1910 Then to Pskov and Novgorod.
1911 Other ancient Russian cities including St. Petersburg to study icons.
1912 Works in Moscow studio known as the Tower with Ivan Aksenov, Vladimir Tatlin. Visits Sergei Shchukin's collection of modern French paintings.
1912-13 Studied art in Paris with Nadezhda Udaltsova.
1913 Meets Alexander Archipenko and Ossip Zadkine. Returns to Russia and works with Tatlin, Udaltsova and Vesnin.
1914 Travels in France and Italy at the development of cubism and futurism.

Portrait of Artist's Sister

Through a synthesis if disparate tendencies Popova worked towards the culminating painterly arcitectonics. Exploring firstly an impressionist style, by 1913, in Composition with Figures, she is experimenting with the particularly Russian development of Cubo-Futurism; a fusion of two equal influences from France and Italy. In the painting The Violin of 1914 the development from cubism towards the painterly architectonics of 1917-18 is clearly visible. Before joining the Supremus group her paintings , the architectonic series have defined their own artistic trajectory, quite different to that of Malevich, Rozanova, Tatlin and Mondrian in abstract form. The canvas surface is an energy field of overlapping and intersecting angular planes in a constant state of potential release. At the same time the elements are held in a balanced and proportioned whole as if linking the compositions of the classical past to the future. By 1918 colour is used as an iconic focus; the bright colour at the centre drawing the outer shapes together.

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Mayakovsky’s muse on the road

Alexander Rodchenko immortalized Lilya Brik in an iconic 1924 portrait for the cover of a Soviet art magazine. She is again Rodchenko’s subject in an exhibition of photographs on display at the Multimedia Art Museum, which show a never-completed 1929 journey Brik made in a Renault that the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky sent to her from France.

Brik was Mayakovsky’s muse, and the pair had a famous and passionate love affair, despite her marriage to Oleg Brik. Mayakovsky dedicated many of his most famous poems to her, such as “Lilechka! Instead of a Letter,” in which he wrote, “besides your love I have no sun.” A portrait of Brik, eyes staring intensely, is on the cover of his poem “Pro Eto” (About This).

The pair were no longer a couple in 1929, but remained on good terms. Brik had written to Mayakovsky with instructions of what kind of car she wanted: a Buick or a Renault, definitely not one that looked like a taxi. She also asked for motorist’s gloves and clothes.

“Her enthusiasm for the ‘Renoshka’ was unconditional and true to character,” said curator Alexander Lavrentiyev, using the diminutive term for the Renault. Rodchenko captures moments such as Brik taking advantage of a f lat tire to fix her makeup, and an impromptu picnic.

“I was in one dress, then I got changed and popped into the gas station on Zemlyanoi Val. He took a photo of me in the backseat,” Brik wrote of the trip she and Mayakovsky later nicknamed “the incomplete journey.” “We agreed that I would go 20 versts, he would take photos and then go home, and I would go on further. But I didn’t go any further, as I found out the road was terrible and the car started to sneeze and, well, going so far alone is boring and dangerous.”

This brief glimpse of Brik is on at the same time as a more substantial exhibit, “Mayakovsky’s Family,” dedicated to the 120th anniversary of the poet’s birthday.

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A collection of poems by Soviet dissident poet published in English

The novice reader who dives into Alexander Vvedensky’s flood of words will find strange, but not un-beautiful depths: Themes float and grow like seaweed, shoals of images flash past and submerged ideas lurk in the shadows.

The writer, who died on a prison train in 1941, has garnered a new English-language audience since Pussy Riot’s Nadezhda Tolokonnikova quoted Vvedensky at her trial in August 2012. The New York Review of Books published the first English-language collection of Vvedensky’s poetry in April 2013. “Invitation For Me to Think” challenges poetry lovers and politicians alike.

Alexander Vvedensky was born in St Petersburg in 1904 and as a young adult became part of Leningrad’s Futurist movement. Much of his work has been lost and destroyed and what remains, mostly published posthumously, is not easy to understand. “The only thing that is positive to the end is meaninglessness,” he wrote.

The hundred-odd lines of “The Meaning of the Sea,” written in 1930, begin: “to make everything clear/ live backwards.” The poem has no capital letters or punctuation and nouns congregate seemingly at random: “here’s a candle snow/ salt and mousetrap.” The poem’s structure – such as it is – relies on echoes and metaphorical patterns, like the repeated images of drowning: “sea time sleep are one/ we will mutter sinking down” and “glory to heaven washed away/ my oar memory and will.”

Several poems draw on theatrical conventions, with stanzas spoken by different characters and bizarre stage directions in italics (“The servants bring in a large sofa”). The longest poem in the book is one of these quasi-dramatic verse-dialogues, “God May Be Around” (1931), a manifesto of profound nonsense to suit an era of apocalyptic doom; it ends: “A star of meaninglessness shines,/ it alone is fathomless./ A dead gentleman runs in/ and silently removes time.”

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