From Onegin to Ada: Nabokov’s Canon and the Texture of Time Marijeta Bozovic Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2011 2011 Marijeta Bozovic all rights reserved ABSTRACT From Onegin to Ada: Nabokov’s Canon and the Texture of Time Marijeta Bozovic The library of existing scholarship on Vladimir Nabokov circles uncomfortably around his annotated translation Eugene Onegin (1964) and late English-language novel Ada, or Ardor (1969). This dissertation juxtaposes Pushkin’s Evgenii Onegin (1825-32) with Nabokov’s two most controversial monuments and investigates Nabokov’s ambitions to enter a canon of Western masterpieces, re-imagined with Russian literature as a central strain. I interrogate the implied trajectory for Russian belles lettres, culminating unexpectedly in a novel written in English and after fifty years of emigration. My subject is Nabokov, but I use this hermetic author to raise broader questions of cultural borrowing, transnational literatures, and struggles with rival canons and media. Chapter One examines Pushkin’s Evgenii Onegin, the foundation stone of the Russian canon and a meta-literary fable. Untimely characters pursue one another and the latest Paris and London fashions in a text that performs and portrays anxieties of cultural borrowing and Russia’s position vis-à-vis the West. Fears of marginalization are often expressed in terms of time: I use Pascale Casanova’s World Republic of Letters to suggest a global context for the “belated” provinces and fashion-setting centers of cultural capital. Chapter Two argues that Nabokov’s Eugene Onegin, three-quarters provocation to one-quarter translation, focuses on the Russian poet and his European sources. Nabokov reads Onegin as a masterpiece of theft and adaptation: the lengthy notes painstakingly examine precedents, especially in Byron and Chateaubriand, and evaluate for originality by comparison. When does Pushkin engage in derivative “native” imitations, and when in subtle and brilliant parody? Chapter Three concludes that Nabokov attempts his own timeless masterpiece with Ada, or Ardor. Planet Antiterra, Nabokov’s personal “world republic of letters,” transplants and conflates his beloved literatures. To create this Russo-Franco-Anglophone world, Ada lifts lines, characters, and fabula from Onegin but also from works by Byron and Chateaubriand. A pattern emerges of great English, French, and Russian triads; it repeats more faintly with Dickens, Flaubert, and Tolstoy (Nabokov hoped one day to translate Anna Karenina); but the most fraught iteration is Joyce, Proust, and Nabokov himself. Chapter Four looks at traces of Joyce and Proust in Ada. The two modernists serve as signs by which great readers recognize one another, as indexes to the “real” and the beautiful, and as carriers of tradition; but Ada subsumes its rivals through imitation and parody. However, the incestuous lovers Ada and Van Veen, heirs to the greatest literary traditions in the world, die childless. Is Ada a dead end, Nabokov’s Finnegans Wake? Or can masterpieces interbreed indefinitely? Chapter Five examines Ada in the context of its working title, The Texture of Time. Van is a scholar of Henri Bergson, of the duration of the past into the present, and of spatial metaphors for time. Van aspires to an eternal present, but the one-way time of ordinary mortality threatens to take over the narrative. The structure of the novel mimics Zeno’s paradox, famously refuted by the French philosopher: Part Two is roughly half the size of Part One, and so on. The arrow (Ardis in Greek, the name of the Veens’ lost paradise) speeds towards the final target, but the Veens aim for immortality and to die into their book. Chapter Six turns to the visual arts. Nabokov’s novel reads like a gallery, with Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights in pride of place. Ada animates the Old Masters, but there are also no fewer than three film adaptations depicted in the novel, betraying an ongoing struggle between the media (and echoing Stanley Kubrick and Nabokov’s skirmishes over Lolita the film). If it is to survive beyond inbreeding with diminishing results, the novel form must subsume more than its own recent greats. I conclude with Nabokov as an image in the work of contemporary novelists, a source and a transcultural precursor to a new generation of international writers. From Onegin to Ada: Nabokov’s Canon and the Texture of Time Acknowledgments ii Dedication iv Introduction: Influence, Translation, Parody, Struggle 1 Chapter One: Pushkin’s Evgenii Onegin: The Breguet Keeps Time 22 Chapter Two: Nabokov’s Eugene Onegin: Readings in the Chateaubyronic Genre 62 Chapter Three: Nabokov’s Ada, or Ardor: Translating the Russian Novel 99 Chapter Four: Ada and the Modernist Agon: In Pursuit of Proust and Joyce 138 Chapter Five: Ada, Bergson, and the Texture of Time 192 Chapter Six: Nabokov’s Words and Moving Images 240 Conclusion: Transculture and the Butterfly Man: Nabokov as Image 271 Bibliography 280 i Acknowledgements My love of Nabokov has always been colored by the joy of arguing about his works with brilliant co-readers, mentors, and friends. Fitting into all of those categories is my advisor Valentina Izmirlieva, whose fierce intellectual integrity and passion have shaped this project—and me—over the past eight years, in deeper ways than I can express here. The dissertation would have collapsed in on itself without the wisdom and unfaltering support of Irina Reyfman, who will remain a model to me of an intellectual and intelligent, and of all that is fair, true, and sans reproach. And I owe so very much to Cathy Popkin, who once upon a time convinced me to come to Columbia, years later persuaded me to stay, and flew to my aid discreetly countless times in between. I am deeply grateful to my other teachers along the way—to Boris Gasparov, Cathy Nepomnyashchy, Richard Gustafson, Tatiana Smoliarova, Rebecca Stanton, and really all the Columbia Slavic faculty, including those whom I hope to thank one day in the acknowledgements to other projects; to Gareth Williams, whose guidance in teaching Literature-Humanities uncovered for me unexpected links in my own field; to the breathtaking and distinct phenomena of Gayatri Spivak, Lydia Goehr, Joseph Massad, and Andreas Huyssen, who inspired me more than they will ever know; and to Svetlana Boym and Stephanie Sandler at Harvard, today as ever twelve years ago. My beautiful friends and comrades-in-arms read countless chapters, abstracts, and drafts—or else helped me through conversation and the power of their example: my profoundest gratitude to Katie Holt, Maksim Hanukai, Rossen Djagalov, Bella Grigoryan, Dehn Gilmore, Jennifer Nelson, and Liam McCarthy; and as always, to Henry Rich, Rob ii Dennis, Maria Cristina Rueda, Katie Burch, Kate Burgin, Elyse Lightman, Timothy Dunne, Reif Larsen, Meleko Mokgosi, Halle Eaton, and more recently, Hugues Tremblay Manigouche. This project was made possible by the support of the Columbia Slavic Department, the Columbia Core, the Harriman Institute’s Junior Fellowships and summer funding, the Ruth Hettleman Young Scholar award, the Foreign Languages and Area Studies Fellowship earlier on in my research, and the Fulbright, which started it all. Finally, I owe my best ideas and first gray hairs to Sergey Levchin, my other difficult and brilliant Russian émigré. And I owe everything, everything else—the very building blocks of my world—to my sister Dolores, and to my parents Ivan and Natasha Božović. iii to my parents iv 1 Introduction: Influence, Translation, Parody, Struggle How the Romans Enriched Their Language: Imitating the best Greek authors, transforming themselves into them, devouring them; and after having well digested them, converting them into blood and nourishment, taking for themselves, each according to his nature, and the argument he wished to choose, the best author of whom they observed diligently all the most rare and exquisite virtues, and these like shoots, as I have already said, they grafted and applied to their own tongue. —Joachim du Bellay The Defense and Illustration of the French Language, 15491 There are two goddesses of Eris on earth….The one Eris would a man praise, if he has any sense, likewise the other would he rebuke; for these two goddesses have an entirely distinct character. For the one fosters awful war and strife, the cruel woman!...The high-throned Zeus, however, placed the other Eris in the roots of the earth and among men, as a much better one. She drives even the inept man to work; and should one man lacking in property look upon another man who is wealthy, he will then rush to sow and to plant in the same fashion and to put his house in order; neighbor competes with neighbor, striving toward affluence. Good is this Eris for men. The potter also resents the potter and carpenter the carpenter; the beggar envies the beggar and the poet the poet. —Friedrich Nietzsche, translating Hesiod Homer’s Contest, 18722 I. Influencing Nabokov Vladimir Nabokov, one of the most allusive—and elusive—literary grandmasters of the twentieth century, was notoriously cagey on the subject of influence and “family resemblances” to other authors. “I do not believe that any particular writer has had any 1 Quoted in Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, trans. M. B. DeBevoise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 45. 2 Friedrich Nietzsche, “Homer’s Contest,” trans. Jordan Dietrich and Janet Lungstrum, in Agonistics: Arenas of Creative Control, ed. Janet Lungstrum and Elizabeth Sauer (New York: State University of New York Press, 1997), 37-38. 2 definite influence on me,” he liked to claim consistently and improbably, disputing the eager suggestions of one critic or interviewer after another.3 And yet in spite of Nabokov’s protests, a veritable library of Nabokov scholarship has sprung up, seemingly in an attempt to do precisely what he sought so passionately to prevent: to fix his meaning, to contextualize Nabokov, to unravel and unmask his similarities to, and perhaps his reliance on, earlier and contemporary writers.