From Onegin to Ada

306 Pages·2011·1.95 MB·English

by  Marijeta Bozovic

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. Why is this so? What are we
after, and what is it that we respond to so strongly as readers, that drives us to such
intertextual quests?
I will attempt an answer in the following work. Rather than offer one more study of
“Nabokov and Author X,” I hope to use my three principal texts—Pushkin’s Evgenii
Onegin (1825-32), Nabokov’s voluminous annotated Eugene Onegin translation (1964),
and Nabokov’s late English-language novel Ada, or Ardor (1969)—to unearth a
complicated composite genealogy, along with its stakes and implications. What do we do
with these texts? Alexander Gerschenkron has said of Nabokov’s translation that it can
and should be studied, but that it cannot be read.4 Many have responded similarly to
Ada’s code-switching, trilingualism, and many-layered allusions. The two works are
often seen as Nabokov’s most overtly “aristocratic” and solipsistic, and hence as his most
controversial monuments. What the critical reaction points to and yet obfuscates is that
these are also the most ambitious moments of Nabokov’s career. I will argue that in the
one work, Nabokov sought to define a canon of “immortals”; in the other, he meant to
enter it himself.

3 Vladimir Nabokov, Strong Opinions (New York: Vintage, 1990), 46 (hereafter abbreviated as SO).

4 Alexander Gerschenkron, “A Manufactured Monument?” Modern Philology 63 (1996): 340.