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Colloque International : « Vladimir Nabokov et la France »

Les Chercheurs enchantés : Société Française Vladimir Nabokov

Paris, 30 mai-1er juin 2013

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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.

 

Alisa Zhulina : Doctorante en littérature comparée et études cinématographiques à l’Université de Harvard. Pensionnaire étrangère à l’Ecole Normale Supérieure 2012-2013.

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Colloque International : « Vladimir Nabokov et la France »

Les Chercheurs enchantés : Société Française Vladimir Nabokov

Paris, 30 mai-1er juin 2013

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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. 

 

Susan Elizabeth Sweeney teaches English and creative writing at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, USA.  She has published over 30 essays and book chapters on Nabokov, including, since 2009, “Thinking about Impossible Things in Nabokov,” in Transitional Nabokov; “‘Bad, Bad Girl’: Juvenile Delinquency in Lolita,” in Lolita: From Nabokov to Kubrick and Lyne; “Lolita, I Presume: On a Character Entitled ‘Lolita,” in Miranda; and “‘Almost Completed but Only Partly Corrected’: Enacting Revision in Nabokov’s Novels,” in Revising Nabokov Revising.  Beth is presently co-editing a volume of essays entitled “Nabokov’s Morality Play: Ethical Problems in His Fiction,” and was invited to serve as associate editor for a proposed edition of Nabokov’s complete works.  Twice elected president of the International Vladimir Nabokov Society, she continues to co-edit the Vladimir Nabokov Electronic Forum (NABOKV-L).  Beth also publishes on American literature, detective fiction, narrative theory, postmodernism, and Poe.

 

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Colloque International : « Vladimir Nabokov et la France »

Les Chercheurs enchantés : Société Française Vladimir Nabokov

Paris, 30 mai-1er juin 2013

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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?

 

Dr. Samuel Schuman served as President of the Vladimir Nabokov Society in 1980-82.  He is the author of Vladimir Nabokov:  A Reference Guide, and has published over 25 articles on VN.  He has presented papers on Nabokov at the MLA and AATSEEL Conferences, at the Nabokov Museum in St. Petersburg, and at the international Nabokov meetings in Kyoto and Auckland.

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Colloque International : « Vladimir Nabokov et la France »

Les Chercheurs enchantés : Société Française Vladimir Nabokov

Paris, 30 mai-1er juin 2013

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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 18^th– and 19^th-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 18^th– and 19^th-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.

 

David Rampton, Professor of English at the University of Ottawa, is the author of Vladimir Nabokov: A Critical Study of the Novels (1984), Vladimir Nabokov (1993), William Faulkner: A Literary Life (2007), and Vladimir Nabokov: A Literary Life (2012). He has published numerous articles on 19th and 20th-century American Literature, and co-edited four anthologies of essays and short fiction.

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