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Chapter Five. COMMENTARY ------------------------------------------------------------------- References ------------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------------- Chapter Five --------------------------- COMMENTARY — 311 — ---------------------------------------------------- Chapter Five. COMMENTARY --------------------------------------------------- — 312 — ------------------------------------------- The Gift as Hypertext: Digital Databases ------------------------------------------- Anyone who is going to read a somewhat sadistic author like Nabokov must keep encyclopedias, dictionaries, and handbooks handy if he wants to understand even half of what is going on . The reader must be a researcher. Carl Proffer, Keys to Lolita The Gift as Hypertext: Digital Databases Though arguably the greatest Russian novel of the past century, The Gift is also Nabokov’s most challenging work, especially for readers lacking familiarity with Russian and European culture and history of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In this book I have decided not to provide a page by page commentary to The Gift for several reasons: fi rstly, because it would expand the present edition considerably, and secondly because this effort has already been made by Alexander Dolinin in his exemplary commentary to the Russian edition of the novel, published in the fourth volume of Nabokov’s Collected Works by Symposium (1999–2001). Since this publication a decade ago, Dolinin has been regularly updating his fi ndings, and the expanded English translation of his work is due to appear soon. Some additional important work aimed at providing essential explanatory commentary on the novel has been undertaken by the students in courses on Nabokov taught by the author of this book over the few past years at Dalhousie University in Canada. The project was established as a wiki and has allowed students to collaborate and to display their work both to their peers and to any interested readers worldwide through the creation of an original scholarly compendium with multimedia material and digital images. The main goal was to create a comprehensive concordance, along with some basic annotations, but without exploring the subtle literary allusions in the way that Alexander Dolinin has done so well. This collaborative project has yielded a functioning computerized database devoted to the novel, where commentary is organized both page by page and alphabetically (hyperlinks lead to an extensive network of materials, and various articles are interconnected and provide a useful critical apparatus to Nabokov’s novel). Paintings, photographs, and other works of visual art are linked on this site for identifi cation and critical commentary, including images illustrative of a particular technique or school. The project showcases various covers and jacket — 313 — ---------------------------------------------------- Chapter Five. COMMENTARY --------------------------------------------------- designs for The Gift, including archival photographic reproduction of the original journal publication in 1937. The portal hosts basic entries under the headings: “Timeline in the novel,” “Motifs,” “Criticism,” “The Gift Bibliography,” and other categories. The interactive interface features elements of fl ash animation and complements the present print edition. It is available at www.keystogift.com. [Ill. 5-1] Screenshot of the main page of the website. Concept — Y. Leving; design and computer graphics — A. Bashkin, 2009 What Requires a Footnote? Some general imperatives related to broader problems of commentary, as well as those peculiar to The Gift, should be touched upon. I will outline some rules of thumb which can be applied to studying and appreciating Nabokov’s last novel of the Russian period, and provide some specifi c examples. A typical complaint about annotating literature in general and Nabokov in particular that has been raised again in the debates surrounding the recent publication of Nabokov’s last unfi nished English novel, The Original of Laura (Knopf, 2009), is that academic studies by nature concentrate their attention on detailed aspects of Nabokov’s oeuvre and tend to establish that Nabokov knew an outlandish amount about almost everything . [T]hey establish clearly that Nabokov knew a surprising amount about, respectively, painting, especially Old Master painting, and science — and they establish that knowledge with sanity and energy, and no hint of the presence of Charles Kinbote, the crazy enthusiast who takes over the task of annotating John Shade’s work in Pale Fire, and who presides over Nabokov studies like Banquo’s ghost (Lanchester 16). — 314 — --------------------------------------------------- What Constitutes a Footnote? --------------------------------------------------- Indeed, one would not want to resemble Kinbote in his academic writing, and comments by critics and general readership such as the one above should not be simply dismissed, despite what might be interpreted as disdain towards serious scholarship. In a more sober context, an example of a very close, almost a “Kinbotian,” reading of the opening pages of The Gift will be offered in the second part of this chapter. A commentator’s goals, to a certain extent, can be modeled on the literary- philosophical school of explication in Judaism. Wolfgang Iser maintains that “interpretation as we have come to understand it in the West arose out of the exegesis of the Torah in the Judaic tradition” (Iser 13). The oral tradition of the Torah distinguishes between four basic approaches in analyzing the Biblical text: Pshat (this level refers to the intended meaning of the text), Remez (alluded meaning, hint), Drash (interpretative or allegorical meaning that is not explicit in the text), and Sod (literary, secret; the mystical or esoteric meaning). The entire complex of the four levels is referred to as Pardes, an acronym formed from the fi rst letters of each word, which also means ‘orchard’ in Hebrew (the English word “paradise” is derived from the same root). In the case of The Gift we are mainly concerned with Pshat, or the intended meaning of Nabokov’s work. In my close reading, which I call a “total commentary,” I will offer a near-molecular analysis, registering direct linguistic links between the words along with the thematic nodes and subtexts in the narrative itself. What Constitutes a Footnote? Names and Characters I will start with what would seem to be the easiest method — by posing a series of empirical questions and possible answers. What must be annotated in order to provide essential assistance to the reader when dealing with such a complicated work of art as The Gift? Obviously, the historical events, dates and real-life personae mentioned in the narrative should be glossed in notes. Thus we would have, for instance, for all the names occurring on just one page (G50): Italian composer Giacomo Puccini (1858–1924); French author Anatole France (1844–1924); Italian actress Eleonora Duse (1858–1924), known for her naturalistic and unique style as well as for her many love affairs, and British mountaineer George Mallory (1886–1924), who took part in the British expeditions to Mount Everest in the early 1920s. The Gift enlists real people from fi elds as diverse as science, the arts, and politics both contemporary and historical: from the “Westernizing” Russian Tsar Peter the Great (1672– 1725), to the German revolutionary philosopher Karl Marx (1818–83); from — 315 — ---------------------------------------------------- Chapter Five. COMMENTARY --------------------------------------------------- the canonical John Milton (1608–74) and Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1829) to the less recognized (in our time) German general and statesman Paul von Hindenberg (1847–1934) and French mathematician and politician Paul Painlevé (1863–1933). How extensive should the encyclopedic information on each mentioned character be? Minimal biographic data would suffi ce; it is essential to indicate the era and occupation of a given historical fi gure. Briefl y noting the relevance of each character to the narrative, whenever this makes practical sense, would add to the understanding of the larger context and the theme in question. Sample: Sand, George: “George Sand” was the pseudonym of the French novelist and feminist Amantine-Lucile-Aurore Dupin, later Baroness Dudevant (1804–76). Frau Stoboy is said to have “George-Sandesque regality” (G9). The possibility that “his restive spouse should take to it into her head to wear male dress — in the manner of George Sand” is one of Chernyshevski’s points against marriage as he weighs the pros and cons in his “Diary of my Relations with Her Who now Constitutes my Happiness” (G9, 229). The commentator will have to make choices based on assumptions about the a priori knowledge of the contemporary audience, presuming, for example, that some readers might be more familiar with the German philosophers Immanuel Kant and Georg Hegel than with the ancient Greek classics: page 67 features three of them — Pythagoras, Anaximenes, and Phales (also known as Thales the Milesian, c. 624 bc — c. 546 bc); if this is the case, then the fundamental theoretical doctrines can be sketched in a couple sentences for each. The same principle applies to politicians (Édouard Herriot [1872–1957], three times President of France’s Third Republic, is virtually unknown today outside of his native country; G36) and eminent writers: the commentator should probably omit introductory information
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