Colloque international / International Conference
Vladimir Nabokov et la France / Vladimir Nabokov and France
Société Française Vladimir Nabokov / Vladimir Nabokov French Society
Paris, 30 mai – 1er juin 2013 / May 30th – June 1st, 2013
RÉSUMÉS DES COMMUNICATIONS / PAPER ABSTRACTS
PRÉSENTATION DU COLLOQUE PROGRAMME AUTOUR DU COLLOQUE PRATIQUE
CONFERENCE MAIN PAGE PROGRAM AROUND THE CONFERENCE PRACTICAL INFO
ALLADAYE, RENÉ – Université de Toulouse II-le Mirail, France
Pale Fire et la France : variations sur une recherche du temps perdu
Cette communication se propose d’explorer la présence de la France dans Pale Fire (1962). Il s’agit de l’un des romans phares du versant américain de la carrière de Nabokov, mais ses premiers mots furent écrits à Nice, où les Nabokov résidaient en novembre 1960, et les échos français y sont particulièrement nombreux. Manifeste dans certains épisodes, ou parfois plus subtile, cette petite musique française se fait entendre autant dans le poème de John Shade que dans le commentaire de Charles Kinbote.
En termes d’intrigue, la France joue un rôle non négligeable dans la vie de Shade (c’est également à Nice que sa fille, Hazel, a été conçue) mais marque surtout l’épopée zemblienne que retrace Kinbote : une grande part de l’aventure de Gradus se déroule ainsi entre Paris et la Côte d’Azur, selon un parcours qui mérite une analyse détaillée. Etudier le motif français dans Pale Fire, c’est aussi se pencher sur la présence de la langue française. Elle intervient dans le poème et occupe une place de choix dans le commentaire (on pense notamment à la note consacrée à Sybil Shade et à ses traductions françaises des poèmes de Donne et Marvell). Il s’agira enfin de montrer que le roman fait la part belle à la France en ramenant constamment le lecteur à sa littérature. La Recherche du Temps Perdu est omniprésente dans le poème autant que dans le commentaire (on songe par exemple à l’épisode de l’anniversaire de Shade), et son narrateur, Marcel, fait même une apparition dans l’Index, pourtant particulièrement sélectif, de Kinbote. L’intertextualité française est aussi largement portée par La Fontaine, autre auteur de référence du roman. Un réseau très dense d’allusions à ses fables donne sens à certains passages du poème autant qu’il informe de façon évidente certaines pages du commentaire.
Ces explorations nous amèneront à apprécier la manière dont Nabokov, qui soulignait auprès d’un de ses biographes qu’il aurait pu être « un grand écrivain français » (M. Couturier, Nabokov ou la tentation française, Gallimard, 2011, 17), « rachète » en quelque sorte la lacune de cette occasion manquée en donnant à la France une place centrale dans l’un de ses romans les plus accomplis. C’est en ce sens qu’on lira Pale Fire comme une « recherche du temps perdu ».
ANOKHINA, Olga – Institut des Textes et Manuscrits Modernes, France
Nabokov et la langue française : étude de l’utilisation du français dans les œuvres publiées, les manuscrits, les traductions et la correspondance de Vladimir Nabokov
Notre contribution aura pour objet d’étude l’utilisation par Nabokov de la langue française. L’étude exploratoire des documents de travail, de correspondance et de traductions de Vladimir Nabokov conservés à la Bibliothèque du Congrès (Washington, USA) et à New York Public Library (NY, USA) nous a permis d’observer la place qu’occupait la langue française dans la création littéraire et dans l’activité linguistique quotidienne de l’écrivain. En effet, l’analyse des œuvres publiées, des manuscrits, des traductions et de la correspondance de Vladimir Nabokov montre le fonctionnement cognitif d’un écrivain multilingue où l’usage de la langue française occupait une place d’égale importance avec l’anglais et le russe.
Pour illustrer notre propos, nous nous appuierons sur des exemples concrets comme cette lettre de Nabokov à Michael Glenny où une expression française vient interrompre l’écriture en anglais : « I have reworked a number of descriptive passages (enclose dis a little list of mistranslations à titre documentaire) ». Nous allons montrer que ce phénomène peut être observé dans différents écrits de l’écrivain. Nous évoquerons aussi les stratégies utilisées par Nabokov pour rendre accessible à son lecteur anglophone des interférences en langues française et russe qui abondent dans ses romans. Nous essayerons de comprendre pourquoi, notamment dans le texte d’Ada or ardor qui contient un grand nombre d’expressions françaises, Nabokov trouve superflus de les traduire en anglais, contrairement à des incursions en langue russe.
L’observation des documents de travail de Nabokov, comme par exemple, le manuscrit de la nouvelle Mademoiselle O écrite directement en français, les lettres à ses traducteurs français ou à ses amis résidant en France ou encore ses corrections des traductions françaises de Maurice-Edgar Coindreau ou de Georges Magnane témoigne de la maîtrise exceptionnelle de la langue française et nous laisse à penser que Nabokov aurait pu devenir l’écrivain français. Si cela restera à jamais une supposition, il est incontestable – et nous nous attacherons à le montrer dans notre contribution – que les langues russe, anglaise et française constituaient le fondement du multilinguisme de Nabokov et que l’écriture en français était pour lui tout aussi naturelle que celle en sa langue maternelle ou en sa langue d’adoption.
BINTEIN, Bénédicte – Lycée d’Albertville, France
Une pointe de « grasseyement » : quelques faux Français dans l’œuvre de Nabokov
Le rôle des personnages français, ou feignant de l’être, est le plus souvent ambivalent dans l’œuvre romanesque de Nabokov, oscillant entre une séduction miroitante et une étroitesse d’esprit qui en tempère les effets. Le choix d’émailler d’idiotismes français l’angoissant fatras d’inepties des geôliers de Cincinnatus dans Invitation au supplice n’est pas anodin, et nous invite à penser que cette langue occupe une place de choix dans l’hybridation chère à l’auteur. Le français suscite une certaine fascination, à laquelle n’est pas étranger le « grasseyement » dont sont dotés nombre de personnages de cette nation, mais aussi beaucoup d’héroïnes russes (Machenka, Katya, Alla…) ; et il indique souvent une ambiguïté, une forme de danger sournois, comme chez cette madame Lecerf à l’identité usurpée, qui trouble in fine le portrait plutôt positif que V. élaborait de son demi-frère Sebastian Knight, ou, dans Look at the harlequins !, chez ce « Monsieur Pouf », qui semble donner du relief aux angoisses de l’auteur expatrié, et fournit du « faux Français » une version plus burlesque, mais non moins menaçante. Certains véritables représentants de la France sont par ailleurs des imposteurs à divers titres : tricheurs, dissimulateurs. Le professeur d’université spécialiste de la langue française en fournit un exemple : dans Pnine comme dans Brisure à Senestre, Leonard Blorenge et le professeur Beuret sont des incapables, coupables d’incompétence et de plagiat pour le premier, ou, plus grave, d’emphase citationnelle voisinant avec une complaisance au régime en place dans le cas du second. On peut se demander quelle est la part de traîtrise conférée à la langue française – sans toutefois la réduire à ce rôle négatif-, en notant la présence de quelques sinistres messages qui, dans différents romans, émanent de personnages francophones.
COATES, Jenefer – London, United Kingdom
The original of Lolita: Nabokov’s Suite (and Poursuite) du Merlin
Humbert is a littérateur, author of « Histoire abrégée de la poésie anglaise » and a « history of French literature for English-speaking students ». This historical perspective – which reflects Nabokov’s own study of Medieval French at Cambridge – shapes the narration of Lolita itself, for Humbert, this paper suggests, casts the account of his own sordid life through a fairytale that originated in twelfth century France: an early verse romance by Robert de Boron, it tells of Merlin the Enchanter’s doomed love for a « pucele » known later as Viviane. This paper will explore Nabokov’s debt to this tale and the long tradition to which it gave rise, examining his prodigious treatment of its themes of magic and madness, trickery and entrapment. Focus on the early Merlin texts reveals the extent and ingenuity of his transformations: his exuberant but acute interpretations of key medieval French tropes such as « enchantement », « gieus » (jeux) and « fols » (fou) infuse every aspect of Lolita, shaping design and detail and subtly inspiring the set pieces and tours de force. Humbert’s expertise in French literary history allows for a plausible, if crazily encoded, recapitulation of the story’s long trajectory from Celtic myth via the influential Suite du Merlin to Malory and beyond, spawning variants and genres as it spread far and wide. Nabokov draws threads from them all to enrich and complicate his own re-telling. He contentiously called Lolita a fairytale yet its New World setting, its flamboyant language and style and above all its genre-bending form conspire to disguise its true origins: yet another trick, another feat of shapeshifting, worthy of Merlin himself, perhaps? CONNOLLY, Julian W. – University of Virginia, USA
Fluid Spaces, Illusive Identities: Nabokov’s Depiction of France in the Late 1930s
In “Time and Ebb,” a story written in April 1944, Nabokov’s narrator makes reference to “those little European towns one half of which is in France and the other half in Russia” (Stories of Vladimir Nabokov, Vintage, 2002, p. 585). This curious phrase—“one half of which is in France and the other half in Russia”—turns out to apply extraordinarily well to the plot of an earlier story, “The Visit to the Museum” (written in October 1938), in which a man enters a museum in a small town in France and exits onto a street in Soviet Leningrad. This strange warping of spatial dimensions, however, is not confined to “The Visit to the Museum.” An examination of Nabokov’s handling of French settings in his fiction of the late 1930s and early 1940s reveals that locale to be an unusual realm in which time, space, and even identity are fluid, unstable, and unreliable. It is the premise of this paper that Nabokov’s experience in France in the late 1930s involved a considerable element of dislocation and anxiety, and that he reflected this condition in his fiction. The chronotope of France depicted in his fiction of this period is not the happy, tranquil, and stable site recalled in his memoirs of summers spent at the French seashore. Rather, it is an ambiguous, disorienting locale tinged with intimations of a nightmare. Works to be analyzed in this papar include “The Visit to the Museum,” “Lik,” “‘That in Aleppo Once…’,” and The Real Life of Sebastian Knight.
COURT, Elsa – University College, London, UK
Deux étés, Ada: Traductions et correspondances codées de Vladimir Nabokov à Erik Orsenna
« La traduction ? Sur un plat
La tête pâle et grimaçante d’un poète,
Cri d’acra, jacassement de singe,
Profanation des morts »
Ces propos de Vladimir Nabokov nous sont rapportés (et traduits) par Erik Orsenna, qui dans Deux étés retrace le voyage d’une traduction de l’intraduisible : celle d’Ada ou l’Ardeur en français, par le discret Gilles Chahine. Cet ami de Jean Cocteau, nous conte Erik Orsenna, aura réquisitionné deux années durant une île au large de la Bretagne et tous ses habitants, tel l’équipage d’un navire immobile, à la tâche colossale de la traduction de la plus longue et la plus fantasque des œuvres de l’écrivain Russe. Voilà donc le sujet d’un tiers-texte, rejet organique non seulement d’une première œuvre mais aussi de sa délicate transposition en français.
L’auteur du texte source était lui-même un traducteur méticuleux, et qui plus est francophone. Les « petits bleus, » télégrammes proustiens que l’on rencontre fréquemment dans Ada, parsèment le texte d’Orsenna des mots de Vladimir Nabokov, rappelant au traducteur comme à l’auteur de « l’autre » roman ce que Maurice Couturier a appelé, en parlant de Nabokov, la « tyrannie de l’auteur ». Quel portrait nous est alors peint de « l’écrivain Vladimir, » lointain dans son palace de Montreux, et que l’on disait alors, au début des années soixante-dix, « nobélisable » ? L’objet de la présente communication sera d’examiner, à la lumière de ce « troisième texte », l’influence sur le paysage littéraire français de cette traduction « revue par l’auteur » : celle d’un roman qui, déjà, jouait avec le français, les lettres françaises (Rimbaud, Maupassant) et les lettres (missives) dans le texte d’origine.
A la lumière des écrits de Vladimir Nabokov portant sur l’art de traduire, (notamment ceux qui accompagnent sa traduction d’Eugene Onegin), il s’agira de se pencher sur le parallèle répété de la traduction avec la correspondance écrite, en tant qu’elles occupent une grande place thématique dans Ada mais sont aussi matériellement provoquées par le texte.
COUTURIER, Maurice – Université de Nice
L’érotisme à la française de Nabokov
Dans un précédent ouvrage, Roman et censure ou la mauvaise foi d’Eros (Champ Vallon 1996), j’avais examiné attentivement les différents modes d’écritures adoptés par toute une série de grands (et moins grands) romanciers pour parler du sexe. J’avais constaté que Nabokov avait innové en usant d’un mode que je qualifiais de « poérotique », c’est-à-dire de poétique et d’érotique à la fois. Un mode qui n’est pas sans rappeler celui de Ronsard, Belleau (cités dans Lolita), ou encore Baudelaire, et que l’on retrouve, en moins efficace peut-être, chez de nombreux romanciers français depuis le roman troubadour Flamenca jusqu’à Proust au moins, à l’exception notoire du Marquis de Sade, cependant. La littérature anglaise ou américaine, corsetée par un certain puritanisme, a aussi su parler du sexe mais sur un mode très différent dans bien des cas, y ajoutant tantôt le rire (Sterne), tantôt le didactisme (D. H. Lawrence), quand ce n’est pas le débridement stylistique (Joyce). Dans cette présentation, je vais donc comparer la pratique poétique de Nabokov à celle d’un certain nombre d’écrivains français, tout en prenant la précaution de signaler que, depuis la quasi disparition de la censure pour les œuvres littéraires dans les années cinquante, la tonalité de nos romans français en la matière a beaucoup changé, et pas toujours en mieux, malheureusement.
DRAGUNOIU, Dana – Carleton University, Canada
The French Duel and Nabokovian Moral Autonomy
In Speak, Memory, Nabokov asserts that “[a] Russian duel was a much more serious affair than the conventional Parisian variety.” In his annotations to Eugene Onegin, Nabokov traces this lack of seriousness to the 1830s when the French bastardized the dueling code that they had made influential in the late 16th century and turned it into the farcical “‘back-to-back-march-face-about-fire’ affair popularized in modern times by movies and cartoons.”
The lovingly detailed description that Nabokov lavishes on “the classical duel à volonté of the French code” may strike us anachronistic. Historians of the duel (Kiernan, Reyfman, Appiah) tell us that dueling met with fierce criticism even at the height of its popularity. Montaigne spoke for many such critics when he noted that the duel’s “laws of honor […] shock and trouble those of reason.” Nabokov’s own father published an influential essay in the liberal juridical weekly Pravo denouncing dueling as a barbaric custom opposed to the principles of justice and the mores of cultured society. And yet, in spite of his public condemnation of dueling, Nabokov’s father did not hesitate to fight a duel when his own honor was impugned. My paper will make a two-pronged argument. First, I will argue that Nabokov was deeply invested in the duel for reasons at once personal, literary, ethical, and metaphysical. Second, I will argue that Nabokov’s understanding of the duel was inextricably tied to the French cultural landscape.
“No Russian writer of any repute has failed to describe une rencontre, a hostile meeting,” he writes in Speak, Memory. His choice of language underscores the dual citizenship of what he calls “the Franco-Russian code” that Russian duelists adopted and dutifully upheld in their own battles over personal honor. By focusing on what Nabokov wrote about such famous Russian historical and literary rencontres (Pushkin’s with Georges d’Anthès, Onegin’s with Lenski, Bazarov’s with Pavel Petrovich Kirsanov), I will argue that dueling becomes the ultimate test case of a man’s autonomy and moral virtue in Nabokov’s hierarchy of values.
DE LA DURANTAYE, Leland – Claremont McKenna College, California, USA
Pure Time and Perceptual Time, or The Influence of Henri Bergson on Vladimir Nabokov
While Henri Bergson was likely not what Maeterlinck suggested he was –“l’homme le plus dangereux du monde”—Bergson’s vision of time and memory, more even perhaps than for the philosophers of his generation and the one that was to follow it, was phenomenally influential for the creative writers of the first part of this century (one would do well to remember the intensity of feelings that Bergson’s writings raised for members of Nabokov’s generation: Julien Benda remarked that he would have joyfully killed Bergson if he might thus have arrested his influence; T.S. Eliot was at no small pains to denounce the « epidemic » which was « Bergsonism”; William James said of reading Bergson that, « it is like the breath of the morning and the song of the birds”). For his part, Vladimir Nabokov was charmed enough by Bergson’s matinal song to list him among his preferred authors in the years he was forming his literary vision.
Bergson was such a phenomenally appealing philosopher to artists of Nabokov’s generation, and the one directly preceding it (which was Bergson’s own, and that of his cousin Proust), for a number of reasons. One is indeed his style, the rhythms and cadences of his elegant and flowing, his “musical” prose (Bergson was awarded in 1928 the Nobel Prize for Literature). What is more, this eloquence, this fluidity and facility of Bergson’s prose is ringed with a sort of désinvolture in that Bergson ceaselessly indicts language for its creation of false problems, its false découpures of rolling, swelling, constantly creative life. And yet this eloquence and its corresponding dismissal as not essential, and even as an impediment, to the intuitive apperception of durée also appealed (and appeals) to artists for the place it gives precisely to artistic intuition. Bergson consequently presented art, works of art, and artistic gestures as undivided motions which can only be falsified by the analyzing (that is, the dividing, the segmentarizing) mind. To wit, the artist need not answer to the critic; the critic can never be commensurate, at least by way of analysis, of division and separation, with the artist and his or her initial, original gesture.
These aspects of Bergson’s writing in all probability contributed to the attention that Nabokov devoted to Bergson—at least during the ‘20’s to the ‘30’s (and again in the mid-60’s during the composition of Ada—as evidenced by the preparatory notes to that novel contained in the Berg Collection). But more particularly, in questions pertaining to theories of time and memory that Bergson was most important for the development of Nabokov’s thought—and most useful in its understanding today. It is for this reason all the more surprising that the profound links between the two writers have gone relatively unremarked upon by critics of Nabokov. One is pleased to note that the editor of The Garland Companion dedicates an entry to their relation, but one is disappointed to find that, given the importance of the connection, that the entry in question fails to take into account the points on which Nabokov and Bergson most powerfully agree and disagree. The Bergson studied in The Garland Companion is the mystical Bergson, the Bergson who left no visible traces in Nabokov’s work but who, following the author of this entry, shared with Nabokov a belief in another world beyond this one. Writers who believe in another world beyond this one are not rare in this or any other century and thus the mere presence of this theme in both writers hardly seems important enough to dedicate such attention to it (no case is made in said entry that Nabokov’s belief in immortality, or his manner of evoking it, was directly or even indirectly conditioned or formed by his reading of Bergson). Nabokov repeatedly rejected organized religion and aligned his faith in another world and time-eternal with no system of beliefs; Bergson, on the other hand, was a practicing and openly religious man and wrote openly of his religiosity. This is disappointing as an exploration of a shared “cosmogony” given that it is conducted to the detriment of the conceptions of time and memory which so link Nabokov and Bergson (and are which accorded a single summary paragraph). Other critics have studied the relation, such as Michael Glynn, Brian Boyd, and others, and advanced its understanding. That said, I believe a more direct linking of the two men’s views can reveal essential insights into Nabokov’s conceptions of creativity and memory. I propose, therefore, to align Bergson’s so-called “anti-intellectualism,” his dismissal of Einstein’s relativity, his definitions of image, reality and perception and his theories about the memory and time with Nabokov’s very similar views on those questions. In doing so I will stress the ways in which Nabokov’s conception of memory sharply differs from Proust’s, and is extraordinarily close to Bergson’s. The goal is a clearer understanding of the relation between what Nabokov calls in Speak, Memory “the prison of time” and art’s way out of it.
EELLS, Emily – Université Paris-Ouest Nanterre La Défense, France
Proust, Nabokov and “the language of rainbows”
A few years after ranking ‘the first half of Proust’s fairy tale, In Search of Lost Time’ as the fourth ‘greatest masterpiece of twentieth-century prose’, Nabokov paid open tribute to Proust in his request that the cover illustration for the Penguin paperback edition of Ada should be a cattleya orchid. His works bear the imprint of his reading of Proust; to cite Lolita, they ‘prolong the Proustian intonations’ of time and memory which have been insightfully analyzed by Robert Alter (1991), John Foster (1995) and Michael Wood (2002), to name but three of Nabokov’s exegetes. The paper proposes to mark a departure from their work by concentrating on the Proustian reflections in the colored language Nabokov uses in Ada and Speak, Memory, including the first version of chapter five, published in French as ‘Mademoiselle O’. As suggested by the rest of the sentence in Ada from which the title of this paper is extracted (it refers to those “colored-chalk pencils whose mere evocation (Dixon Pink Anadel!) makes one’s memory speak in the language of rainbows”), a study of Proust and Nabokov’s literary relationship cannot ignore the question of memory and time. However, the particular focus here will be on the synaesthetic inflection of their language. Nabokov identified Proust as a synaesthesist who, like himself, “saw sounds in color” (cf. Lectures on Literature). This paper will highlight how both Proust and Nabokov filter experience through the prism of the senses. It will consider the importance of mauve in Proust’s novel which Nabokov singled out as ‘the color of time’. It is also the color of affect, from the emblematic cattleya of Swann and Odette’s love-making to the hue of amaranth evoked by the narrator’s infatuated reverie on the name of the Duchess of Guermantes. Nabokov uses that ‘purple passage’ to color Van Veen’s family’s name, and it will serve as the point of departure of a comparative analysis of the chromatics of Proustian and Nabokovian onomastics.
FAYE, Sabine – Université Paris III – Sorbonne Nouvelle
Nabokov et Mallarmé
Des références aux poèmes du poète symboliste Stéphane Mallarmé apparaissent dans certains romans de la période américaine de Nabokov. Les analogies entre l’œuvre de Nabokov et celle de Mallarmé ne manquent pas tant d’un point de vue esthétique que d’un point de vue métaphysique.
Nabokov partage avec Mallarmé certains traits stylistiques. L’un et l’autre font usage d’images et de métaphores qui tendent à déréaliser le monde représenté.
Dans ses écrits théoriques Mallarmé élabore un véritable Art Poétique. Sa réflexion sur le langage, sur les sons, les mots et leur autonomie par rapport au sens annonce l’Art Poétique de Nabokov illustré dans ses romans les plus novateurs. Le défi lancé au hasard devient l’un des enjeux de l’écriture.
Le traitement de l’espace et du temps, chez Nabokov comme chez Mallarmé, passent par une vision idéalisante. A un ailleurs idéal et inaccessible correspondent la mélancolie d’un passé idéalisé et le désir d’un futur idéalisé, mais la vision extatique a pour corollaire une vision ironique.
Nabokov comme Mallarmé représentent dans leurs œuvres un monde onirique ou un monde platonicien qui remet en question les apparences et suggère la possibilité d’une essence. Cette quête s’exprime par l’évocation obsessionnelle des figures de l’absolu. Hantés par l’absence et la disparition l’autre défi qu’ils relèvent est de rendre l’essence concrète et l’invisible visible.
FILIMONOV, Aleksey – Saint-Petersbourg
Le thème français dans la poésie de Nabokov-Sirine
Pour le prosateur et poète Sirine (le Nabokov russe), la période parisienne fut l’une des plus fécondes. Après avoir quitté Berlin pour Paris à l’automne 1937, Nabokov y resta jusqu’à son départ pour l’Amérique en mai 1940. C’est à cette période qu’est consacré le « Poème parisien » (1943), chef-d’œuvre du Nabokov mûr, où les realia du temps, les personnages historiques, la douleur de la perte de la Russie, le pressentiment qu’il s’agit d’une époque tragique pour l’Europe et la conscience que la littérature de l’émigration va disparaître, sont exprimés de manière particulièrement aigüe, par l’utilisation de procédés artistiques pour lesquels sa prose est si célèbre et qui sont ici transférés sur le terrain de la poésie.
Dans ce poème la figure de Khodassévitch, vivant dans une mansarde, est significativement décrite par l’auteur comme une créature immatérielle. Khodassévitch était le frère d’armes de Sirine et des échos de la lutte littéraire avec Adamovitch, Hippius et Georgij Ivanovitch apparaissent clairement dans les lignes du « Poème parisien ».
Les figures romantiques des chevaliers-croisés, du Roi Arthur, de la Belle Dame, apparaissent dans les poèmes de sa jeunesse, pour partie inspirés par la poésie d’Alexandre Blok et de Nikolaï Goumiliov, qu’aimait beaucoup Nabokov. Dans un poème écrit encore plus tôt, « Napoléon en exil », Nabokov consacre une stance, écrite en Crimée, à son propre destin :
Il s’est arrêté ; il est pitoyable
Dans ce chapeau à larges bords
Dans tous les vers français de Nabokov-Sirine on peut encore distinguer un thème, qui est le filigrane de toute la poésie russe, le thème du bonheur, de la victoire sur le tragique au travers de la « Joie de vivre », selon le titre en français de l’un de ses poèmes.
Dans les poèmes intitulés « La bonne Lorraine » et « L’inconnue de la Seine » transparaissent les figures fémines sacrifiées de Jeanne d’Arc et d’une inconnue, retrouvée noyée au 19ème siècle, dont le masque mortuaire était devenu un attribut de la culture de masse. Dans ces œuvres-là Nabokov exprime la sensation d’un art contemporain qui copie les représentations de tous les jours.
Le monde artistique de l’auteur, tourné ves l’essence des événements historiques et vers le monde individuel de l’homme résiste au déclin par l’instauration d’un dialogue étroit avec l’héritage de la poésie russe et mondiale. Ce n’est pas un hasard si Nabokov a traduit en russe Pierre Ronsard, Alfred de Musset, Charles Baudelaire et Arthur Rimbaud.
Dans l’œuvre « Provence » (1923) Sirine écrit sur le sentiment d’harmonie universelle qu’il a éprouvé sur l’antique sol français :
Comme il est bon dans ce monde résonnant
De se couler de l’épaule le long de clôtures crayeuses
D’être un poète russe égaré
Parmi les murmures de la cigale latine !
C’est cette habileté à retranscrire le monde dans toute sa beauté et son tragique en s’appuyant sur l’expérience vivante de l’homme et le dialogue avec la poésie française qui a fait de cette œuvre poétique une œuvre profonde et à multiples facettes.
GASSIN, Alexia – Université Paris-Sorbonne – Paris IV, France
L’hommage de Serge à Vladimir
Même si presque trente années les séparent, Vladimir Nabokov et Serge Gainsbourg présentent de nombreuses similitudes. Par exemple, sur le plan biographique, ils sont tous les deux nés de parents russes qui, suite à la Révolution de 1917, sont contraints de quitter la Russie en 1919. Outre les difficultés de l’exil, ils doivent affronter la discrimination et la persécution antisémites. Ensuite, d’un point de vue artistique, les deux hommes, à l’âge adolescent, se destinent à une carrière de peintre mais se tournent finalement vers la littérature ou la musique tout en continuant de développer leur œil d’artiste et d’insérer d’autres arts (le cinéma, par exemple) dans leurs compositions. Ils peuvent alors être considérés comme des artistes complets dont un autre point commun essentiel est le sens du jeu de mots et le goût de la provocation.
Gainsbourg n’a jamais caché son enthousiasme pour l’œuvre de Nabokov, notamment pour le roman Lolita (1955) qui reste pour lui une révélation, ce qu’il explique clairement dans une interview de 1982 menée par Noël Simsolo et intitulée Une Journée avec Serge Gainsbourg. Lors de cet entretien, Gainsbourg évoque ainsi le poème composé par Humbert Humbert à l’intention de Lolita et débutant par les mots « Perdue : Dolorès Haze » qu’il avait souhaité mettre en musique dès 1962. Pour ce faire, il avait essayé de joindre Nabokov mais en vain, l’auteur étant occupé par le tournage du film Lolita de Stanley Kubrick. Malgré ce « rejet », l’inclination de Gainsbourg pour l’écrivain se retrouve néanmoins tout au long de la carrière du compositeur qui utilise régulièrement le motif de la nymphette, ce que nous pouvons entendre notamment dans son album Histoire de Melody Nelson (1971) et plusieurs autres chansons, telles que Cha cha cha du loup (1959), Rocking-Chair (1978), Mister Iceberg (1978), Hey man amen (1988), etc., et que nous pouvons aussi voir dans son film Stan the Flasher (1990) qui raconte l’histoire d’un exhibitionniste.
Dans notre communication, nous nous proposons d’explorer les œuvres connues et méconnues de Gainsbourg sur le thème de Lolita et d’étudier ses relations avec les principaux textes de Nabokov à ce sujet, à savoir les romans Chambre obscure (1933) et Lolita (1955) et la nouvelle « L’Enchanteur » (1939).
GRANT, Paul Benedict – Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada
Blessing the Freak : Nabokov contra Bergson
Nabokov’s fondness for the work of French philosopher Henri Bergson is a matter of record (Strong Opinions, 43), and critics have consequently traced correspondences between the two writers based on Bergson’s theories on time, consciousness, and evolution. A few critics have also studied Nabokov’s fiction in relation to Bergson’s essay on the comic, Le Rire (1900), and almost all find an ideological kinship with respect to their views on laughter. This paper will, by contrast, focus on the differences that exist in their approach to this subject. Bergson locates the source of laughter in ‘something mechanical encrusted on the living’ and sees it as a corrective by which errant individuals are humiliated into returning to the group: ‘it is the business of laughter to repress any separatist tendency. Its function is, to convert rigidity into plasticity, to readapt the individual to the whole’. Nabokov’s fiction contains many mechanically-minded figures who invite laughter: Franz, the molded mannequin of King, Queen, Knave; Paduk, the doll-like dictator of Bend Sinister; Gradus, the clockwork killer of Pale Fire. But laughter is not intended to bring these figures back to the fold: they are beyond redemption because they represent the herd that Nabokov despised. This points to an ideological parting of the ways. While Bergson believes that the group is flexible and innovative and the individual is rigid, Nabokov argues the opposite, and champions the lone eccentric: ‘true art deals not with the genus, and not even with the species, but with an aberrant individual of the species’ (Strong Opinions, 155); ‘let us bless the freak; for in the natural evolution of things, the ape would perhaps never have become man had not a freak appeared in the family’ (Lectures on Literature, 372). Nabokov’s fiction is full of such freaks, and although he’s not averse to laughing at their mishaps, his laughter is laced with pathos. This appeal for pity highlights another crucial difference between Nabokov and Bergson with respect to their approach to laughter, because Bergson thinks that for laughter to be possible we must cultivate an ‘anesthesia of the heart’. Nabokov may chloroform an overly emotional response, but his real concern lies with the residue of guilt and sorrow that’s left when the anesthesia wears off and his readers come round to the realization of what they’ve been laughing at.
HAMRIT, Jacqueline – Université de Lille III
Sartre, Lacan, Derrida and Nabokov
In order to explore the relationship between Nabokov and French thought, I propose to proceed in two parts. In a first part, I would like to study the contents and significance of what two main leading French modern philosophers, such as Sartre and Lacan, wrote on Nabokov’s works. As regards Sartre, I will prolong D. Barton Johnson’s thorough article entitled « The Nabokov-Sartre controversy » and published in Nabokov Studies (Volume 1, 1994) where he recalls Sartre’s commentary on Despair and Nabokov’s reaction to and dismissal of Sartre. As for Lacan, I will analyse his commentary on Lolita in the document owned by « L’association freudienne internationale » and which corresponds to Lesson 26 (dated June 24, 1959) of the 1958-1959 seminar entitled « Le désir et son interpretation » where Lacan opposes the neurotic structure of Humbert’s desire to the perverse one of Quilty.
In a second part of the paper, I would like to prolong my reflexions on the relationship between Nabokov and French philosopher Jacques Derrida that I exposed in an article published in 2003 in The Oxford Literary Review where I analysed the epistemological proximity of Derrida’s and Nabokov’srepresentation of reality. Indeed, although Derrida never wrote on Nabokov – though he told me he had read Lolita and was pleased to be associated to Nabokov- , it is possible to resort to deconstruction and a great number of Derrida’s concepts to indulge in a fruitful literary criticism of Nabokov’s works.
I will conclude by wondering why French thought and French philosophers have been useful in the interpretation of Nabokov’s works. And last but not least, to what extent can Nabokov be considered himself as a thinker?
LAFONT, Anne-Marie – Lycée Jean Cocteau, Miramas, France
Comment adapter Vladimir Nabokov dans le programme de français au lycée
Dans le cadre de l’étude d’un roman et ses personnages en classe de 1ère, nous avons travaillé sur l’adaptation filmique du deuxième roman russe de Vladimir Nabokov, Roi, dame, valet. La volonté première a donc été d’intégrer dans le programme de français une œuvre qu’on inclura également dans la tradition des romans d’apprentissage du XIXe siècle. Pour cela, nous avons pris le parti de faire une parodie en mettant l’accent sur l’intertextualité.
A partir de quelques scènes choisies, nous montrerons tout d’abord comment nous avons réécrit le roman de Nabokov tout en respectant non seulement la trame du livre, mais aussi l’ « esprit » nabokovien. En effet, partant tout d’abord de pastiches des romans de Flaubert, nous avons ensuite fait le choix d’intégrer des scènes non inscrites dans le roman, issus en revanche d’autres extraits littéraires étudiés en classe, afin de montrer aux élèves ce que représentait l’intertextualité.
Par ailleurs, nous expliquerons certains choix de réécriture comme par exemple le parti pris de ne faire jouer que des « jeunes filles en fleur », et celui d’avoir délibérément mélangé les années 30 à nos jours, ce qui a permis de parodier l’époque des adolescentes et, de là, de leur faire apprécier davantage la notion de « parodie ».
Enfin, nous démontrerons, par le témoignage de certaines élèves, que le but de comprendre l’œuvre en question, son inscription dans une époque, l’écho qu’elle a avec d’autres œuvres du patrimoine français, a été possible avec l’aide de cette réalisation filmique sans laquelle le roman de Nabokov aurait pu rester non seulement incompris, mais surtout non apprécié.
Cette intervention nous permettra de montrer comment adapter un auteur russo-américain, souvent perçu comme élitiste, à une classe de 1ère, dans le cadre du programme de français. Ceci justifiera son appartenance à la tradition littéraire française, mais aussi son étude dans le secondaire.
LEVING, Yuri – Faculty of Art and Social Sciences, Dalhousie University, Canada
French Theory, Russian Legacy: Reading Nabokov with Pierre Bourdieu
In this paper I will provide a critical context for understanding issues that dominate Nabokov’s art and social discussions of literary fame, politics of bestselling, prize distribution, and posthumous legacies in literature – an activity which Pierre Bourdieu defines as “enterprises with a long production cycle, founded on the acceptance of the risk inherent in cultural investments and above all on submission to the specific laws of the art trade.” Relying on the critical theory of P. Bourdieu, the leading French sociologist, anthropologist, and philosopher, I am going to examine the creation and maintenance of Nabokov’s literary reputation within the Russian literary tradition from the perspective of the economics of culture.
Literature is not only about aesthetics, but almost equally about economics. The successful marketing of an author and his literary works is more dependent on the activities of cultural merchants than on the particular words and phrases found in the author’s prose. While alive, the author must work with these cultural merchants in order to sustain his place within the literary market. Once the author is dead, the real work of maintaining a posthumous legacy begins for friends, family, scholars and publishers, in order to continue to profit from the deceased’s creative works, becoming a literary industry of its own.
Bourdieu’s critical theory and his French academic adepts put forth an argument that cultural interactions are understood as transactions of tangible and intangible products within an economic framework of markets, exchange value, price and other such concepts. These economic exchanges of culture result in what Pierre Bourdieu calls symbolic capital, bestowing individual artist’s with the reputation for competence and an image of respectability. Nabokov’s symbolic capital is transmitted to writers by agents and institutions possessing the economic and cultural capital necessary to confer relative value for the creative gesture. Economics, therefore, play an underlying role in this mutually advantageous relationship.
LOISON-CHARLES, Julie – Université Paris-Ouest Nanterre La Défense, France
French xenisms in Look at the Harlequins! : Are these French words symptomatic?
This paper will focus on Nabokov’s last complete novel, Look at the Harlequins!, from the perspective of its self-referential and metaliterary dimension with the hope that our conclusions could be broadened to apply to Nabokov’s other works. We will try and see whether the use of French words is merely a consequence of Nabokov’s multilingualism and if it serves a diegetic purpose. In Look at the Harlequins!, three general trends can be found in the use of French words and references to France.
First of all, many are circumstantial and illustrative; they reflect the narrator’s francophilia but also Nabokov’s cosmopolitan world: France was an unavoidable place of transition and exile for Russian émigré writers, and French was widely spoken by the Russian aristocracy to which Nabokov belonged.
Secondly, French often enables Nabokov a great deal of linguistic play, as ornamentation, but also with the aim of arresting and drawing the reader’s attention to specific humoristic or verbal prowess.
The third, and probably more interesting, use of French is the revelation of the plot to the reader. French is often used to point either to the problematic relationships the narrator has with his wives, or to his madness; French can therefore be seen as “symptomatic” of the narrator’s schizophrenia.
The link between madness and multilingualism has often been made by psycholinguists or by critics such as Todorov, and in the novel under study, it is hinted at by the use of italics. We will question why French specifically, and not Russian, is the privileged language to indicate the polyglot’s schizophrenia. We’ll end with a reflection on whether this symptomatic aspect of French is an involuntary aspect of Nabokov’s writing or whether it is one of his numerous literary strategies.
NORMAN, Will – University of Kent, UK
A Taste for Freedom: Lolita and the Existentialist Road-Trip
This paper reads Nabokov’s Lolita alongside a lesser-known road-trip, undertaken by the French writer and philosopher Simone de Beauvoir. Through the 1940s and early 1950s Nabokov undertook almost annual summer tours of the United States, travelling west first in search of butterflies and later taking notes for and eventually composing Lolita. De Beauvoir travelled to the United States in 1947, visiting her friend Richard Wright in New York before touring the West and South by car and Greyhound. Her journey is described in the extraordinary travelogue L’Amérique au jour le jour, a phenomenology of the intellectual road-trip which shares many of the concerns of Lolita, including questions about freedom, authenticity and responsibility, against the backdrop of the rise of domestic mass tourism in the United States. My interest here will be first in the way both Humbert Humbert and Beauvoir use their position as European aliens to subvert and interrogate the ideological assumptions behind the American road narrative and the discourses of freedom associated with it, but I will also address intriguing moments in their work when American mass culture and the commodified landscape they pass through fall into strange harmony with the French cultural traditions they have come from. Comparing their treatment of tourist attractions, neon lights and Hollywood movies, I will argue that Lolita and L’Amérique au jour le jour emerge as unexpected companions, offering an estranged and ambivalent transatlantic vision of the US at the high point of its culture industry.
OLSEN, Lance – University of Utah, USA
Not-Knowings: Debord’s Influence on Nabokov’s The Real Life of Sebastian Knight.
« Every writer creates his own precursors, » Jorge-Luis Borges once reminded us. « His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future. » In the spirit of Borges’s mischievous and productive observation, my presentation will listen for the not-knowings present in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight and its resonances with Debord’s politics of the spectacle, especially in terms of Nabokov’s novel’s (his first in English, written between 1938 and 1939 in Paris) disruptive onto-epistemology and its strategies for derailing capitalist notions of temporality, where time is money, and so is quantified, mechanized, stabilized, made to run in a beeline that disavows mystery, complexity, and subjectivity.
PERHONEN, Mikko – Helsinki, Finlande
A venir / Forthcoming
PONOMAREVA, Tatiana – Directrice du Musée Nabokov à Saint-Pétersbourg, Russie
Nabokov’s French Childhood
The talk will focus on the various French cultural influences that Vladimir Nabokov experienced in his formative years, growing up in the early 20th century St. Petersburg. To the contemporary readers of Nabokov the immense wealth of his French cultural heritage was not fully revealed until the publication of his work on “Eugene Onegin” but the roots of this heritage can be traced not only to his university education but, primarily, to his family upbringing.
In Nabokov’s own words, he was raised as a “perfectly normal trilingual child”. However, the importance of each of all the three languages varied at different times. Though his very first teachers were English, French remained the everyday household language and there were years when Nabokov didn’t use much English at home. Along with reading French books from the vast family library and classes with his French governess, Nabokov was immersed into a Francophone environment at home, at school and even on the way to school. In my talk I will try to follow the young Vladimir Nabokov on his typical day in St. Petersburg, in the midst of that unique culture that nourished the future writer.
POULIN, Isabelle – Université Michel de Montaigne Bordeaux III
« Le vol de la mémoire : Nabokov lecteur de Rimbaud et Mallarmé »
Dans le prolongement d’études consacrées à l’intertexte français de l’œuvre de Nabokov (v. Isabelle Poulin, Vladimir Nabokov lecteur de l’autre, PUB, 2005), il s’agira de montrer comment Vladimir Nabokov s’approprie certains aspects de l’univers poétique de Rimbaud et Mallarmé pour construire le récit de la mémoire, bien avant de lui donner la parole (dans Speak, Memory !). Deux poèmes en particulier, « Mémoire » de Rimbaud (que Nabokov a traduit en russe) et « Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd’hui… » de Mallarmé (hypotexte de « Mademoiselle O »), participent à la construction du motif du « coup d’aile » qui sert à dire l’exil et la douleur de la langue perdue.
RAMPTON, David – Faculty of Arts, University of Ottawa, Canada
Mediocrity, Platitudes, and Arch Criminals: French Literature in Nabokov’s Eugene Onegin
Nabokov’s Eugene Onegin has quite rightly come to be seen as a dramatic encounter between Russian and English, an attempt to work out a new understanding of how the “to” language in a translation can be related to the “from”. It is also a four-volume magnum opus, organized around one grand idea, the dream of absolute fidelity, and occasioned by a desire to mitigate the difficulties of aesthetic access, even as it acknowledges the necessity of resigning oneself to them. In this way Pushkin’s great narrative poem becomes Nabokov’s extraordinarily useful crib and a monumental exercise in the exigencies of exhaustive annotation and creative commentary. But French figures prominently in every aspect of this edition. As we work through the massive number of notes, Nabokov’s third language and its literature create their own set of reference points and apposite allusions, their matrix of sources, their conventions and their admonitions. In the end, the relevance of what a multitude of French writers – poets, translators, novelists, philosophers, literary critics – did in the hundred years preceding the poem’s publication arguably makes French as important a language for this version of Eugene Onegin as Pushkin’s inimitable Russian and Nabokov’s fiendishly precise and provocative English.
Scholars have made substantial efforts to annotate Nabokov’s annotations, and now that French Slavists and French critics interested in his work are seeing so much of each other, we shall no doubt learn more about the multiple roles that French literature played in the creation of Pushkin’s masterpiece. Yet despite the considerable work devoted to discussing this translation in the almost 50 years since its appearance, it seems fair to say that the tone of Nabokov’s commentary has militated against instant, enthusiastic, and universal recognition of his achievement on the part of French critics. True, Nabokov heaps extravagant praise on Chateaubriand, speaks highly of Constant’s Adolphe, compliments Parny on his erotic poems, describes Musset as colourful and witty, greatly admires Senancour’s Oberman, and writes sympathetically about figures like Bichat, but dozens of figures from 18th– and 19th-century French literature are banished from the ranks of serious literature and consigned to the scrap heap of the mediocre. Its poets are hopelessly conventional, its translations (from languages ancient and modern) appalling, its conventions outdated, its insights mere commonplaces, its studies superficial, its ultimate irrelevance utterly assured. Virulent black humour is the order of the day: one of the worst offenders, Paul Bitaubé, who had the audacity to publish a well received prose abridgement of Homer’s epics in the 1780s is called an “arch criminal”.
My purpose here is not so much to explain the reasons for or debate the cogency of such sweeping and passionate dismissals but rather to muse about their consequences. By concentrating on four major figures singled out for special opprobrium – Madame de Stael, Voltaire, Sainte-Beuve and Rousseau – I want to show how such judgments can deflect the attention of those interested in the links between Pushkin and French literature, and how his insistence on their vapidity orchestrates the inexorable return of what Nabokov seeks to repress. Far from being negligible figures in the complex story of Onegin’s genesis and execution, what these writers thought and wrote links them in important ways to the many issues Pushkin’s great poem raises, and to the concerns that Nabokov revisits in his commentary on it.
In this paper, I shall confine myself to a few examples. Nabokov quotes Mme de Stael on how interesting it would be to compare Schiller’s views on lost youth (in his poem “Ideals”) with Voltaire’s. Nabokov goes on to say that he performed such a comparison and found nothing of note. In fact, the links between Schiller’s poem and Voltaire’s nostalgic meanderings turn out to be quite illuminating, and set up a veritable matrix of suggestive echoes. Voltaire’s verse may be as “abominably pedestrian” as Nabokov says it is, but it relates in interesting ways to the discussion of Gallicisms, platitudes, and general ideas raised by Pushkin’s poem. Where Pushkin finds “dry precision” in Sainte-Beuve’s comments on Delorme Nabokov can see only florid generalities. As the context of Pushkin’s observation and the thrust of Sainte-Beuve’s commentary make clear, the eminent French critic’s insights take us far beyond Delorme, to the very heart of the debate about melancholy and ennui in Europe at this time. Nabokov insists that the trashy quality of Rousseau’s work obviates the need for musing about parallels between his novel Julie and Onegin. Again, his claim is as misleading as the connections are suggestive.
Of course Nabokov’s loathing for what he calls in his commentary “elephantine platitudes” and their purveyors goes far beyond 18th– and 19th-century French literature. In the Onegin commentary he mentions Cervantes, George Eliot, Mann and Faulkner as examples of the same phenomenon, mediocre writers whose reputations have been inexplicably puffed up by academics incapable of recognizing genuine art. Such comments certainly generated a great deal of heat when Nabokov was alive. I want to see what kind of light they have to shed on the questions that continue to interest both Pushkin’s commentators and those of his magisterial and iconoclastic translator.
ROWBERRY, Simon – University of Winchester, United Kingdom
Reading Queneau Reading Nabokov
As Jane Grayson has previously discussed in “Nabokov and Perec,” there is little overlap between the Oulipo and Nabokov biographically, although both parties appeared to have appreciated some of the other’s work. It is from a formal perspective that Nabokov and Oulipo authors have the greatest crossover, since both are known for their love and use of word games in their fiction. Rather than suggesting a comparative reading of Oulipian and Nabokovian texts, this paper will explore the possibilities of applying the interpretative possibilities of Oulipo, including Jean Lescure’s “n+7” method to Nabokov’s corpus, to perform what Jerome McGann and Johanna Drucker call a deformative reading. This paper will consider the fruitfulness of such a methodology for reading Nabokov’s texts, acknowledging that such an approach can often lead to creative misreadings rather than strict and rigorous interpretation. This can be off-set, however, by the use of equivalent misreadings in Nabokov’s works, such as Shade’s pivotal misreading in his poem, “Pale Fire.” Through careful negotiation of these tricky issues, I hope to reveal a potential reading of Vladimir Nabokov’s works.
SCHUMAN, Samuel – University of Minnesota, USA
The Riddle of Genre in ‘Mademoiselle O’
The short story “Mademoiselle O” was, according to its author Vladimir Nabokov, first written in French, in France, and published in Paris in 1939. It reappeared, in an English translation by Nabokov and Hilda Ward, in The Atlantic Monthly, then in Nine Stories. It re-reappeared, in a “final, slightly different version, with stricter adherence to autobiographical truth” as Chapter 5 in Conclusive Evidence/Speak Memory. Brian Boyd discusses the real-life Cecile Miauton, the model for Mademoiselle O in Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years, and French echoes and influences in the story have been described and analyzed by Jacqueline Hamrit.
My interest is in the “meta questions” raised by this work. Can essentially the same utterance be understood to be a fictional short story and a non-fiction autobiographical essay? To what extent does the publication context of a work determine its genre (that is, if it is published in an autobiography is it “fact” and if the same words appear as a short story, does it become “fiction”)? What does this tell us about how VN sees the relationship between fiction and fact? Is the border between fact and fiction one of those transparent things, through which it is easy to fall? What does all this tell us about how VN sees the relationship between his imagination and his life? To what extent is it relevant that this work grew in part from the French cultural context and did that cultural context influence these generic issues?
SCHVABRIN, Stanislav – Princeton University, USA
“Quand le chagrin, l’exil et les années auront flétri ce cœur désespéré…”: Alfred de Musset, Vladimir Nabokov and the Invention of Exile
In “Mademoiselle O” V. Nabokoff-Sirine (1936) famously contrasts the tastes of an average Russian lover of French literature, an unimaginative admirer of Sully Prudhomme and de Musset, with the decidedly finer predilections that distinguished his younger self, a “barbare, ami de Rabelais et de Shakespeare,” over whose adolescence presided not Copée or Lamartine, but Verlaine and Mallarmé.
In reality that same exuberant savage felt compelled to tone down – or suppress altogether – a number of frivolous images in his adaptation of Romain Rolland’s Colas Breugnon, and it has long been established that V. Nabokoff-Sirine’s repudiation of de Musset’s “lyrisme sanglotant” in “Mademoiselle O” conceals a far more complex and intriguing relationship inextricably connecting Vladimir Nabokov with the author of the “Nuits.” Nabokov, who published a highly personalized Russian version of de Musset’s “La Nuit de décembre” in 1916 only to retranslate it for a 1928 publication (a Russian version of “La Nuit de mai” had been published a year earlier) not simply continued to nourish a peculiarly strong attachment to the French poet whose brand of Romanticism had been ridiculed as derivative and outmoded by his Russian critics as early as 1863, but persisted in incorporating references to “La Nuit de mai” into such diverse mature principle texts as his eulogy of Vladislav Khodasevich (1939) and Ada (1969).
Without the slightest inclination to underestimate the groundbreaking research and excellent interpretative work by Jane Grayson (see her “French Connection: Nabokov and Alfred de Musset. Ideas and Practices of Translation,” 1995), I am nonetheless prepared to argue that our knowledge of Nabokov’s association with de Musset is far from complete. Nabokov’s attachment to de Musset may have all the appearance of a hopelessly pathetic liaison with an infatuation of one’s early days; surprisingly or not, the role played by de Musset in Nabokov’s evolution places him on the same pedestal where we find such true beacons of his literary tastes as Byron, Keats and Heinrich Heine. It is to the task of highlighting such lesser-known aspects of Nabokov’s alliance with de Musset that I hope to be able to apply myself should my abstract be deemed worthy of inclusion in the program of the Parisian forum.
SWEENEY, Susan Elizabeth – College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, Massachusetts, USA
Nabokov, Charles Perrault, and Tales of Times Past
Nabokov’s intertextual gambits invoke many popular narrative genres, including “nursery tales.” Although he was clearly influenced by Russian folklore (as the pseudonym “Sirin” suggests) and English fairy tales, Nabokov’s most frequent allusions to this genre are to the French tales recorded and revised by Charles Perrault, in 1697, as Histoires ou Contes du temps passé. Nabokov probably first heard them from his Swiss governess, Cécile Miauton—later memorialized as “Mademoiselle” in Speak, Memory—who devoted lessons to reading French classics aloud to her charges. He may have also encountered them at Cambridge, where one of his two principal subjects was medieval and modern French; he wrote more than one final examination essay set during Perrault’s literary period, and told a girlfriend that he was working hard reading volumes of seventeenth-century French (Boyd, VNRY 183, 186, 194).
In his fiction, Nabokov alludes to at least four of Perrault’s original eight tales: “La Belle au bois dormant,” “Le Petit Chaperon rouge,” “Cendrillon,” and “La Barbe-bleue.” I have previously discussed his references to “Sleeping Beauty,” as well as to Doré’s illustration of that tale; Dmitri Nabokov points out imagery in The Enchanter relating to “Little Red Riding Hood” (100); other critics mention, in passing, the numerous allusions to “Cinderella” in his English novels. However, no one has considered Nabokov’s focus on Perrault’s tales, in particular, or the way that he emphasizes their origins with French phrases and multilingual puns, as in “La Petite Dormeuse ou l’Amant Ridicule” (Lolita 129); “brat’ia s shapron-ruzh’iami,” a Russian homophone for “chaperon rouge” (“Volshebnik” 41); or the pervasive motif linking Blanche with “Cendrillon” in Ada. In addition to Perrault’s evident impact on Nabokov’s imagery and wordplay, the earlier writer’s ironic tone—especially in the multiple morals appended to each tale—may have influenced Nabokov’s own witty, self-reflexive narration.
WOOD, Michael – Princeton University, USA
‘Do you mind cutting out the French: Nabokov’s disinvention of Europe’.
Nabokov said it had taken him ‘some forty years to invent Russia and Western Europe’. The chief sense of ‘invent’ in this context is ‘recreate’, compose worlds that are both imaginary and real, like Balzac’s Paris and Dickens’ London. But Nabokov’s phrase has another, more polemical sense: he has replaced the received ideas of others with constructions of his own, devised and denied the cultures and histories he needs for his work. This lecture seeks to explore one of these constructions, which we might think of as the France of Pierre Delalande.
ZHULINA, Alisa – Harvard University, USA / Ecole Normale Supérieure, France
Le Feu pâle de l’échange entre Vladimir Nabokov et Alain Robbe-Grillet
Peu d’écrivains contemporains de Vladimir Nabokov ont gagné son respect. Cependant Nabokov a appelé Alain Robbe-Grillet le plus grand auteur vivant de la langue française. Cette admiration était réciproque. Robbe-Grillet a déclaré qu’il sentait une grande parenté avec Nabokov, “l’auteur de Lolita, mais plus encore celui de Feu pâle, qui est un roman extraordinaire” (Le Monde, 1967). En plus, Robbe-Grillet a participé à l’une des premières interviews françaises de Nabokov en 1959.
Les deux n’étaient pas toujours d’accord sur les questions de psychologie ou à propos du Nouveau Roman dont Robbe-Grillet était le théoricien. Bien que ce dernier ait appelé Nabokov « un grand auteur du Nouveau Roman» (The Paris Review, 1986), Nabokov était étranger à tout esprit « de groupe » et rejetait les étiquettes du « Nouveau Roman » et de « l’anti-roman » (proposée par Sartre).
Comment peut-on examiner les résonances de l’œuvre de Nabokov dans le paysage artistique français et la manière dont ce paysage l’a inspiré? Il ne s’agit pas d’une question triviale d’influence directe. Cependant quand Nabokov a commencé Feu pâle en 1959 (Autres Rivages), il était déjà familier avec les romans de Beckett, de Robbe-Grillet, et de l’Oulipo. On peut donc argumenter que la littérature française des années 50 lui a fourni au moins des questions sur l’état du roman. En fait, Paul Braffort a déjà traité du rapport entre Nabokov et Queneau. Jane Grayson a examiné les échos entre Nabokov and Perec.
Je propose d’examiner les relations artistiques entre Nabokov et Robbe-Grillet d’une manière comparative. Feu pâle et les romans de Robbe-Grillet lus par Nabokov — Le Voyeur (1955), La Jalousie (1957, « le plus beau roman d’amour depuis Proust, » selon Nabokov), et Dans le labyrinthe (1959) — abordent souvent les mêmes thématiques: le roman policier, les jeux narratifs, le rapport entre l’auteur et le lecteur, la voix d’un narrateur-voyeur, et l’obsession. Il existe des échos entre les techniques narratives de Nabokov et les effets cinématiques de Robbe-Grillet qui a admis que, bien que Feu pâle n’ait pas influencé Trans-Europ-Express (1966), son film avait « un peu la même structure: une pyramide d’imaginaires. » Leurs solutions artistiques sont souvent différentes cependant. Le rapport entre ces deux écrivains est un dialogue intellectuel et artistique qui les défie de penser l’avenir du roman et qui met leurs talents à l’épreuve.
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