vorsichtig auf dem Gipfel umseh...
Nur herein, Bernd! (Oder sollte ich "herauf" sagen?) Machs Dich bequem.
Ich bin ziemlich matt und weiss nix Gescheites im Moment zu schreiben -- es ist ein langer Tag gewesen -- stattdem also, zur Einweihung des Ortes ein Zitat, ein Brocken Altgriechisches, der Anfang vom "Ilias":
Mhnin seide jes, Phlhisdew Acilhoz
oulomeuhn, h muri Acsioiz slhe edhcen
Blaise Pascal...
Kann mir jemand mehr zu Blaise Pascal sagen (außer, dass er sich in der Statistik umgetan hat)?
Brother's secret reveals Nabokov's shame and bias
By Lev Grossman
(on CNN.COM)
In 1918, a year after the Russian Revolution, Vladimir Nabokov and his four siblings posed for a
photograph as a present for their mother. The children were in Yalta, in exile from their native St. Petersburg.
In the photo, the air of the fabulous wealth and privilege they grew up in still clings to them. The girls are wearing matching sailor suits. Little Elena, Vladimir's younger sister, holds a patient pet dachshund in her lap.
In the background looms a serious and rather beautiful young man dressed entirely in black. His intense gaze meets the camera's through an exquisite pince-nez. He is not Vladimir, who is wearing a bow tie and looking hilariously full of himself. He is Sergei Nabokov, born 11 months after his famous brother and with a very different fate ahead of him.
Vladimir Nabokov, of course, would go on to become one of the most important writers of the 20th century, earning not only critical acclaim but international fame and financial success as well. Sergei would never be famous -- in fact, his
existence has been all but covered up by his family -- but in its own way his life would be just as remarkable.
Shy, awkward and foppish, the opposite of his
gregarious brother, Sergei had a secret: He was
gay.
Sergei's homosexuality would cast a long shadow over his strange and heroic life, and it would also, ultimately, be the cause of his horrifying and untimely death. It cast a shadow over Vladimir's life as well: He loved his brother, but
whatever else he may have been -- a brilliant writer, a loving father -- Vladimir was a confirmed homophobe, and his gay brother was a constant source of shame, confusion and regret to him.
Vladimir's tortured relationship with Sergei is one of the secret stories of an otherwise very public life, and Nabokov scholars are only now slowly coming to terms with the depths of Nabokov's prejudice.
They're also becoming increasingly aware that Sergei is a crucially important figure in his brother's work, a presence with whom Nabokov grappled, in different ways and with different degrees of success, throughout his lengthy oeuvre. Meanwhile, the facts of Sergei's life are still obscure -- forgotten or concealed behind euphemisms or confined to the dusty realm of footnotes and archives.
It's a question worthy of a Nabokov novel: How could the lives of two brothers, both brilliant and talented, both rich and handsome, have led to two such different places: one to literary immortality, the other to the hell of a Nazi
concentration camp?
Sergei Vladimirovich Nabokov was born in St. Petersburg on March 12, 1900.
The Nabokovs were members of imperial Russia's most exclusive social circles, and the children grew up in a glamorous whirl of country estates, liveried servants, balls, boating parties and annual vacations in Biarritz, France, and on the Riviera.
The family was extraordinarily wealthy; their lineage included princes and generals and government ministers, and even their faithful dog, Box II, was descended from a pair that belonged to Anton Chekhov. Nabokov once told an interviewer, "I probably had the happiest childhood imaginable."
But Sergei did not. While Vladimir was the eldest and the center of attention, Sergei grew up out of the limelight, shy and unhappy and somewhat odd.
Elena Sikorski, née Nabokov, the girl with the dachshund in her lap, is now 93 and the last surviving Nabokov sibling, but she remembers her aristocratic Russian youth with absolute clarity. When I telephoned her at her home in Geneva to ask about Sergei, she spoke of him fondly, but not without regret.
Her voice is surprisingly deep, with an elegant, stateless European accent and just a hint of a quaver.
"He was not the favorite of the family," she recalls. "I think that he was rather miserable during his childhood."
Nabokov was fascinated by doubles, and his work is full of them -- in mirrors, reflections, chance resemblances. Sergei was his brother's double, a "shadow in the background," as Nabokov put it. All his life Vladimir would be the golden wordsmith, the master of language; Sergei was afflicted with an atrocious stutter that would only get worse as he got older.
He idolized Napoleon and slept with a bronze bust of him in his bed. He also loved music, particularly Richard Wagner, and he studied the piano seriously. Vladimir, by contrast, was almost pathologically insensitive to music, which he
once described as "an arbitrary succession of more or less irritating sounds." He would creep up behind Sergei while he was practicing and poke him in the ribs -- something he remembered with bitter remorse in later life.
"They were never friends when they were children," says Sikorski. "There was always a sort of aversion."
Nabokov said that he hardly remembered Sergei as a boy. He once wrote, "I could describe my whole youth in detail without recalling him once." But Sergei lurks in every corner of "Speak, Memory," Nabokov's 1951 memoir, "quiet and listless," peering at his older brother "like a little owl," or stumbling around a roller rink in Berlin as his indefatigable brother repeatedly laps him.
In a photo of the two boys taken in 1909 in front of their grandmother's mansion, 10-year-old Vladimir stands with his hands on his hips, legs apart, imperiously staring down the camera. Sergei hides under the brim of his sun hat, one arm held protectively across his midsection, the other stroking his cheek in a strikingly girlish gesture.
In retrospect it seems surprising that it took the rest of the family as long as it did to discover what Sergei probably already knew.
When he was 15 and Vladimir 16, Vladimir found Sergei's diary open on his desk and read it. He showed it to their tutor, who showed it to the children's father. In retelling the incident Nabokov writes, with uncharacteristic dryness, that Sergei's journal "abruptly provided a retroactive clarification of certain oddities of
behavior on his part."
Among those oddities was Sergei's withdrawal from the famously progressive
Tenishev school, an all-boy private school also attended by Nabokov and by poet Osip Mandelstam. According to Nabokov's principal biographer, Brian Boyd, Sergei left because of a series of "unhappy romances."
It's unlikely that he found much sympathy within his immediate family.
According to Sikorski, who quaintly refers to Sergei's homosexuality as his "attitude," the family instituted a kind of "don't ask, don't tell" policy. They took Sergei's revelation "absolutely quietly. Nobody ever spoke about it to him, and he was left to do as he wished."
Marina Ledkovsky, Sergei's second cousin and a professor emerita at Barnard College, remembers that her own mother "pitied him quite a bit ... He adored his mother, and adored his father. He was so affectionate -- that's why it was so very hard for him."
When the revolution came in 1917, the Nabokov family fled Russia, barely escaping with a fraction of their fortune on a Greek cargo boat loaded with dried fruit. Neither Vladimir nor Sergei would ever return to his motherland.
After brief stops in Athens, Greece, and Paris, Vladimir wound up enrolled at Cambridge University in England; Sergei started at Oxford but joined his brother at Cambridge a semester later. There they played tennis together -- Sergei lacked a backhand but never double-faulted -- and hung around with the same set of displaced Russians.
In Sergei's letters from the period, which have never been translated or published, most of his worries are about money and about his parents, who
settled in Berlin.
The two brothers went on to earn identical degrees, seconds in Russian and French, but in all other respects Vladimir and Sergei were utterly different.
"No two brothers could have been less alike," wrote Lucie Léon Noel, another emigre, in a memoir of her acquaintance with Nabokov:
Vladimir was the young homme du monde -- handsome, romantic in looks, something of a snob and a gay charmer -- Serge was the dandy, an aesthete and
balletomane ... [He] was tall and very thin.
He was very blond and his tow-colored hair usually fell in a lock over his left eye. He suffered from a serious speech impediment, a terrible stutter. Help wouldonly confuse him, so one had to wait until he could say what was on his mind, and it was usually worth hearing ... He attended all the Diaghilev premieres wearing a flowing black theater cape and carrying a pommeled cane.
Composer Nicolas Nabokov, cousin to Vladimir and Sergei, paints much the same double portrait: "Rarely have I seen two brothers as different as Volodya and Seryozha. The older one, the writer and poet, was lean, dark, handsome, a sportsman, with a face resembling his mother's.
"Seryozha ... was not a sportsman. White-blond with a reddish tint to his face, he had an incurable stutter. But he was gay, a bit indolent, and highly sensitive (and therefore an easy butt for teasing sports)."
When the brothers graduated in 1922, they joined their family in Berlin, which had become the social and cultural center of the Russian diaspora. Sergei fit easily into the growing gay community there, and he was friendly with German
activist Magnus Hirschfeld, founder of the world's first gay tolerance organization.
Sergei and Vladimir went to work at a bank, but the 9-to-5 routine didn't suit them: Sergei quit after a week, Vladimir in a matter of hours. Vladimir remained in Berlin, where he met and married his wife, Vera, but Sergei moved on to Paris.
Paris in the '20s meant the legendary Paris of expatriates, the Paris of modernists and the avant-garde, of Joyce, Hemingway, Stein, Picasso and the surrealists. Sergei would spend much of the next two decades there. While Vladimir never
stopped mourning the Russia of his youth, Sergei most likely felt at home for thefirst time in a city that celebrated art and music, and that took his gayness in stride.
It becomes more difficult to track Sergei when he passed out of his brother'sexhaustively documented life, but some details of his time in Paris survive.
We know that in the winter of 1923 Nicolas introduced him to painter Pavel Tchelitchev, whose work now hangs in New York's Museum of Modern Art and
who painted sets for Sergei Diaghilev. Tchelitchev was also gay and also a
Russian emigre, and the two of them shared an apartment with Tchelitchev's lover, Allen Tanner.
The flat was so tiny that when Tchelitchev saw it he remarked, "We are to live in a doll's house!" It had no electricity and no bath -- they had to wash themselves in a zinc tub using water heated on a gas stove.
Sergei survived by giving lessons in English and Russian. His circumstances may have been straitened, but the cultural scene in which Sergei found himself was rich beyond all measure. According to Andrew Field, Nabokov's first biographer,
Sergei was good friends with Jean Cocteau, and he was also connected, through Tchelitchev and his cousin Nicolas, to Diaghilev, to composer Virgil Thomson, to those aristocratic aesthetes the Sitwells and even to the legendary salons conducted by Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas at 27 Rue de Fleurus.
He must have cut quite a figure. Sergei was an incorrigible dandy, and he wore abow tie at all times. According to one story, told by a former archbishop of San Francisco, he was notorious for attending Mass in full makeup.
Nicolas' son Ivan is now in his 60s, too young to really remember Sergei, but he remembers his mother's account of him. According to her, Sergei was "the nicest of all the Nabokovs ... a sweet, funny man ... much nicer, much more dependable and much funnier than all the rest of them."
According to Ledkovsky, Sergei was deeply kind, "always a gentleman," devoted to music but also steeped in Russian, French and English poetry -- all languages that, along with German, he spoke fluently.
"He could recite anything by heart, and when he recited poetry, he would not stutter at all."
He was also himself a poet, in her opinion a good one, though none of his work survives.
"He was a very talented, brilliant man," says Ledkovsky. "If he were not so timid and shy, if he didn't feel so ... out of place, who knows? He might have been the equal of Vladimir."
The story of Sergei's life in Paris has a Cinderella ending. Sometime in the late '20s or early '30s he met and fell in love with a wealthy, aristocratic Austrian, whom Nabokov's biographies have heretofore referred to as "Hermann." After a
great deal of research, he emerges as one Hermann Thieme.
Charming, handsome, something of a dilettante, Thieme was the son of an insurance magnate. His family owned (and still owns) Schloss Weissenstein, a magnificent 12th century castle in the tiny Alpine village of Matrei im Osttirol near Innsbruck, Austria.
During the '30s Hermann and Sergei often retreated to Schloss Weissenstein. Iva Formigoni, Hermann's niece, now lives in Milan, Italy, but she still remembers the two of them lounging around the castle grounds together and playing tennis and bridge with her and her parents. When Sergei came to stay with Ledkovsky's family in Berlin, he kept a picture of Hermann on his night table.
"I immediately noticed him," she says, "because he was so extremely good-looking!"
In a letter that Sergei wrote to his mother, he describes the joy his relationship with Hermann gave him: "It's all such a strange story, sometimes even I don't understand how it happened ... I'm just suffocating with happiness." Some of
Sergei's shyness seems finally to have left him. "There are people," he wrote, "who would not understand this, to whom such things would be completely incomprehensible.
"They would rather see me in Paris, barely surviving by giving lessons, and in the end a deeply unhappy creature. There is talk about my 'reputation' and so on. But I think that you will understand, understand that all those who do not accept and do not understand my happiness are strangers to me."
Was his own brother one of those strangers? After Vladimir met Hermann for the first time, he described the scene to his wife in a letter: "The husband, I must admit, is very pleasant, quiet, not at all the pederast type, attractive face and
manner. All the same I felt rather uncomfortable, especially when one of their friends came up, red-lipped and curly."
Nabokov simply didn't like homosexuals.
Even after Sergei's death, Nabokov used homophobic slurs that make the modern reader cringe. In one letter he describes Taos, N.M., where he spent a
summer, as "a dismal hole full of third-rate painters and faded pansies." And he referred to gay Russian critic Georgy Adamovich as "Sodomovich."
According to Andrew Field, his first biographer, Nabokov considered homosexuality to be a hereditary illness. Nabokov's homophobia is in fact one of the dirty little secrets of 20th century literature, on a par with T.S. Eliot's
anti-Semitism.
"I believe Nabokov was quite homophobic," says Galya Diment, vice president of the Nabokov Society and a professor in the Slavic department at the University of Washington.
"It behooves his fans and admirers to admit it -- and also to regret it."
Where did this prejudice come from, in a man who spoke out vehemently against both racism and anti-Semitism (his wife was Jewish)?
Nabokov's father, also named Vladimir, was a politician, and he was deeply involved in legislative debates over homosexuality. In pre-revolutionary Russia consensual homosexual intercourse was a crime (as it still is in parts of the United States), and although V.D. Nabokov, as he was known, argued for the decriminalization of sodomy, his attitude toward homosexuality was complicated: He made it abundantly clear that his legislative arguments were based on purely constitutional grounds, on abstract notions of freedom and privacy, and that he personally considered homosexuality to be "deeply repugnant" to any "healthy and normal" person.
V.D. Nabokov died in 1922 in Berlin, shot in the chest while breaking up the attempted assassination of a visiting Russian dignitary. Nabokov's diary records that in their last conversation, the night before, Vladimir and his father had discussed Sergei's "strange, abnormal inclinations."
Abnormal or not, homosexuality was actually an important part of life in the Nabokov family. In "Speak, Memory," we meet little Vladimir's beloved
governess, "lovely, black-haired, aquamarine-eyed Miss Norcott," who "was asked to leave at once, one night at Abbazia."
What grown-up Vladimir doesn't tell us is that Miss Norcott was dismissed because she was a lesbian. Nabokov also had no fewer than two gay uncles. Konstantin Nabokov, his father's brother, was charge d'affaires at the Russian Embassy in London. Vasily Rukavishnikov, Vladimir's maternal uncle, was also a diplomat, though a less successful one. He did succeed, however, in making an indelible impression on his young nephew.
Uncle Ruka, as he was universally known, was a wealthy, eccentric dilettante, and there's every indication that he was in love with the young Nabokov; certainly his attachment to his favorite nephew went beyond what was appropriate.
He appears to have subjected Nabokov to a mild form of sexual abuse: "When I was eight or nine," Nabokov writes in "Speak, Memory," "he would invariably take me upon his knee after lunch and (while two young footmen were clearing the table in the empty dining room) fondle me, with crooning sounds and fancy endearments." In his biography of Nabokov, Boyd notes "Humbert's first feignedly nonchalant fumbles with Lolita," and suggests that "the adult Nabokov's disapproval of homosexuals and his solicitude for childhood innocence may all have their origins here."
Like Sergei, Uncle Ruka was gay, stuttered and loved music passionately. He considered his greatest achievement to be an original poem that he set to his own accompaniment, but of all the Nabokovs it was Sergei who learned to play it by
heart. Of course, Uncle Ruka paid no attention to him.
When he died in 1916 he left his entire estate -- a mansion, 2,000 acres (800 of land and a fortune in rubles -- to his favorite nephew, Vladimir, who was a wealthy 17-year-old for a year before the Russian Revolution took it all away again.
Since Nabokov's death in 1977, the responsibility for managing his posthumous reputation has fallen to his son Dmitri, who is fiercely protective of his father's public image: One member of the Nabokov family interviewed for this article later asked to retract her statements, for fear of incurring Dmitri's wrath.
Dmitri himself declined to be interviewed -- "out of respect for his uncle," according to his literary agent -- but in 1997 he did take part in a revealing exchange on the Internet.
When his father's attitude toward homosexuality came up on NABOKV-L, a public e-mail list devoted to Nabokov's work, Dmitri leapt into the fray.
"I knew it was only a matter of time before the sexual-preference police would go to town on my father," he wrote.
He summed up Nabokov's ambivalence perfectly: "He had a sense of justice, a homosexual brother, and not one but two homosexual uncles. Among the writers he admired there were plenty of homosexuals, from Proust to Edmund White. He
had a number of homosexual friends. I also know he would have been less than happy had his son inherited those genes."
After Sergei's death, Vladimir described him in a letter to Edmund Wilson as "a harmless, indolent, pathetic person who spent his life vaguely shuttling between the Quartier Latin and a castle in Austria." Nabokov rarely mentioned Sergei in
print -- at least not by name. It wasn't until the third published version of his "Speak, Memory" that Nabokov even felt able to include an account of Sergei's life.
In an early piece of autobiography, recently published in the New Yorker, Nabokov describes his brother "drifting in a hedonistic haze, among the
cosmopolitan Montparnassian crowd that has been so often depicted by a certain type of American writer. His linguistic and musical gifts dissolved in the indolence of his nature."
At no point did Nabokov, who in "Lolita" would wring pathos from the sufferings of a child molester, ever have the courage to publicly state that his brother was gay. "It may be a kind of prudery," muses Michael Wood, author of a book on Nabokov, "The Magician's Doubts," and chairman of Princeton University's English department. "He obviously had a terrific affection for his brother. He also had a fixed distaste for homosexuality."
But however distasteful he found it as a person, Nabokov as a writer found homosexuality perversely irresistible, and gay characters turn up in almost every one of his 17 novels. There's invariably something strangely wooden about them. Nabokov was the archenemy of cliché, a writer passionately committed to overturning tired literary conventions through careful observation of the real world, but his homosexual characters are as a rule egregiously stereotyped.
From the giggly ballet dancers of Nabokov's first novel, "Mary," to the ghastly Gaston Godin, Humbert Humbert's neighbor in "Lolita," to the egomaniacal narrator of "Pale Fire," they are vain, silly, usually effeminate -- he uses the word "mincing" a lot -- shallow, intellectually trivial and ineffectual, and the narrator generally introduces them with a nudge and a wink and a snigger. Many of them are pedophiles.
Not once did Nabokov, the master observer, describe an instance of mature love between adults of the same sex -- even though a glowing example of that love was right before his eyes.
Although Nabokov's gay characters are two-dimensional at best, Sergei found other, more interesting ways to haunt his brother's fiction.
In "The Real Life of Sebastian Knight," Nabokov's fictional account of a man's attempt to write the life of his mysterious half-brother, one finds uncanny references to Sergei everywhere, from the title character's name, which alliterates with Sergei's, to his foppishness and his failures at sports, to a series of uneasy meetings between the brothers in Paris that closely parallels those of
the real-life Nabokov brothers.
"The similarities of Sebastian and Sergei fit so well together, it's an aspect of the work that you really have to consider," says Michael Begnal, an English professor at Wesleyan University who writes on Nabokov. "My impression was that he had to put the whole Sergei situation to rest in his own mind, and in a way that's what he's trying to do."
When he learned of Sergei's death in 1945, Nabokov was in the middle of writing "Bend Sinister," his most political novel. Like Sergei, the hero of "Bend Sinister" speaks out against a brutally repressive regime, and like Sergei, he would pay for his courage with his life. But Nabokov's feelings about his brother were never simple: In "Bend Sinister" it's not the hero who's gay but the dictator who orders his death.
In 1967, when he finally told the story of Sergei's life, Nabokov's writing conveys a sense of unspoken strain and remorse: "For various reasons," he writes, "I find it inordinately hard to speak about my other brother."
In "Ada," his longest novel and one of his last, Nabokov made his best and final attempt to come to terms with his feelings about his brother in print. "Ada" is the story of an incestuous love affair between Van Veen and Ada Veen, brother and
sister. Their younger sister, Lucette, is also passionately in love with Van, and she spends most of the novel trailing around after the couple, getting in the way and generally making a pest of herself. Van's indifference drives Lucette to despair, and toward the end of the book she throws herself from a cruise ship in the middle of the Atlantic.
Brian Boyd, who is probably the single greatest living authority on Nabokov, believes that the real inspiration for Lucette was Sergei. "The centrality of Lucette in 'Ada,'" he argues in an e-mail, "in some ways seems to reflect Nabokov's sense of Sergei: the non-favorite, the frail one beside his confident sibling, the concentration camp victim ... the one we're invited to ignore, and even want to dismiss from the story, but eventually realize we should never have overlooked."
If Boyd is right, "Ada" gives us a last glimpse of Nabokov thinking about Sergei -- and maybe, at last, starting to think about him in a new light. "I think that Nabokov often tries to be inhumanly secure, and confident, and happy, and unregretful," Wood observes. "If he pulled that off, he would be a monster. It's a fine thing to try -- and an even finer thing to fail."
Whatever peace Nabokov may have made with Sergei in fiction, it came long after Sergei's death in fact. Did the two brothers ever bridge the gap between them? "Absolutely not" is the firm answer from Sikorski, their sister.
"Perhaps the last years of his life they were closer, but otherwise never." It can't have helped that by all accounts Sergei didn't get along with Véra, Nabokov's wife.
Still, in the late '30s, when both brothers were living in Paris, there were signs of warmth. Vladimir writes in "Speak, Memory" that they were "on quite amiable terms" at the time. When their mother died in Prague in 1939, and Vladimir was
unable to get away from Paris, Sergei described the funeral for him in a letter. Writing on the spare, elegant stationery of Schloss Weissenstein, he closed the letter affectionately: "I want you to know that I am with you with all of my heart."
If they had any last words to offer each other, Sergei and Vladimir never got to say them. In the spring of 1940 Hitler invaded France, and by May the Germans were bombing Paris. Vladimir and his family left for America on the last boat out of St. Nazaire, but Sergei was away in the countryside at the time. He returned to Paris to find their apartment suddenly empty.
He chose to stay in Europe with Hermann. The Nazis were already rounding up homosexuals as actively as they were Jews, and to avoid attracting suspicion Sergei and Hermann saw each other only rarely. Sergei took a job as a translator in Berlin, but he had no stomach for war, and the Allied bombings frightened him horribly.
"He was just so terrified, poor thing," Ledkovsky remembers. "Even my mother was consoling him." The fighting grew more intense, and flight became impossible; Sergei had almost no money, and as a refugee from czarist Russia his only travel document was a flimsy Nansen passport.
In 1941 the Gestapo arrested Sergei on charges of homosexuality. It released him four months later, but he was placed under constant surveillance. It's ironic that at that moment, after a lifetime of shyness and stuttering, Sergei could not keep silent. He began to speak out vehemently against the injustices of the Third Reich to his friends and colleagues. On Nov. 24, 1943, he served as best man at Ledkovsky's wedding. Three weeks later he was arrested for the second time.
The file that the police kept on Sergei accuses him of "staatsfeindlichen Außerungen" -- subversive statements. There may have been more to the story: Princess Zinaida Shachovskaya, a fellow Russian émigré (whose relations with the Nabokov family have sometimes been strained), has written an as yet untranslated memoir in which she asserts that Sergei was in fact involved in a plot to hide an escaped prisoner of war, a former Cambridge friend who had become a pilot and been shot down over Germany.
After his arrest Sergei was taken to Neuengamme, a large labor camp near Hamburg, where he became prisoner No. 28631. Conditions were brutal: The camp was a center for medical experimentation, and the Nazis used the prisoners to conduct research on tuberculosis. Of the approximately 106,000 inmates who passed through Neuengamme, fewer than half survived, and as a rule, the guards singled out homosexuals for particularly harsh treatment.
Sergei's conduct in the camp was nothing less than heroic. Nicolas Nabokov's son Ivan says that after the war, survivors from Neuengamme would telephone his family out of the blue -- they were the only Nabokovs in the book -- just to talk about Sergei.
"They said he was extraordinary. He gave away lots of packages he was getting, of clothes and food, to people who were really suffering." Meanwhile, Hermann had also been arrested, but he was sent to fight on the front lines in Africa. He would survive.
He spent his later life at Schloss Weissenstein, without a career, caring for his invalid sister. He died in 1972.
In America, Vladimir was beginning a triumphant new life. While Sergei was at Neuengamme, he spent the summer of 1944 sunning himself in Wellfleet,
Massachusetts, with Edmund Wilson and Mary McCarthy.
That fall he collected butterflies for Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology, enjoyed the benefits of American dentistry and taught Russian to Wellesley College undergraduates, with whom he flirted shamelessly. The New Yorker was beginning to print his poems. He became the first person under 40 to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship. He knew nothing of what was happening to his brother
in Europe.
In "The Real Life of Sebastian Knight" the narrator has a dream the night before Sebastian dies. He imagines that his half-brother's hand has been horribly maimed in an accident. In the early fall of 1945, in his apartment in Cambridge, Massashusetts, Nabokov dreamed of his brother Sergei. He saw him lying on a bunk in a German concentration camp, in terrible pain.
The next day he received a letter from a family member in Prague. According to camp records, "Sergej Nabokoff" had died on January 9, 1945, of a combination of dysentery, starvation and exhaustion. Neuengamme was liberated four months
later.
Hi Steven,
freut mich das ich auch eingeladen bin.
Sehr schoene Beitraege, Lucretia! Vladimir Nabokovs Homophobia ist mir schon aufgefallen (in "Lolita", in "Pale Fire" -- trotzdem aber wunderschoene Romane), aber alldas ueber seinen Bruder wusste ich nicht -- und ich hatte schon manches von ihm ueber seine Familie gelesen. Der Vorwurf der Verdraengung also scheint mir gerechtfertigt, auf der Hand liegend.
Dass Sergei sehr viel netter war als Vladimir, glaube ich gern -- allerdings, leichter als Vladimir sein war eine Leichtigkeit, "netter als Vladimir Nabokov" sagt ungefaehr so viel wie "toleranter als Hitler" oder "schoener als DeGaulle".
Ausser den verschiedenen Unanehmlichkeiten, auf die angedeutet wird in Deinen Beitraegen, misfallen mir die verschiedenen Stellen, wo er seinen englischspraechigen Lesern versichert, ihn auf Englisch lesen heisst ihn eigentlich gar nicht lesen, er koenne ja so sehr sehr viel mehr auf Russisch, auf Englisch sei er gar gekrueppelt. Na -- ich bin einfach gar nicht geneigt, das zu glauben. Er wuchs auf in einer Allerweltfamilie, er und seine Geschwister konnten von klein auf Englisch. Er wusste doch, wie ausserordentlich gut sein Englisch war. Die Behauptung, sein Russisch waere unendlich besser, scheint mir glatt schamlos, ein Karneval-Gaunertum. (Er wusste auch, wie wenige von seinen englischspraechigen Lesern, zumal die amirikanischen, auch nur ein Wort russisch konnten.) Wenn das stimmte, duenkt es mir, haetten die russischen Literati, zumal die Emigranten, ziemlich ueberschwenglicher ueber Nabokov den wunderbaren Magier der russischen Prosa geschwaermt.
(Hi CK! Willkommen!)
Hallo Steven,
Dank für die Einladung.
Hallo Anja,
diese Seiten sehen ganz brauchbar aus:
http://www.island-of-freedom.com/PASCAL.HTM
http://books.mirror.org/gb.pascal.html
Der zweite Pascal-Link fuehrt zu einer Liste, die zwar "not associated with", wohl aber "inspired by" und "based upon" dem Projekt "Great Books of the Western World" sei.
Great Books of the Western World -- "the Great Books" for short -- das hat viel Laerm gemacht hier in the home of the brave, in den 50ern, und seitdem. The Great Books -- das war (ist) eine Liste so wie die von den 100 englischspraechigen Romanen (vgl. "Literaturforum"), aber diesmal von Weltliteratur, und zwar seit der Bibel und Homer (alles ins Englische uebersetzt, natch.) Aber nicht nur eine Liste, es war auch eine Reihe von gebundenen Baendern vom Encyclopedia Brittanica, Inc. Das Ganze herausgegeben von Robert Hutcins und J. Mortimer Adler. Es war gedacht als eine Erziehungsprojekt, als eine Zivilisationkurse fuer Jederman. "The Great Books" -- das ist ein Sprichwort geworden.
Inwiefern es aber Adler et al gelang, Jederman zu erziehen, inwiefern es hauptsaechlich ein Selbstglorifikationsprojekt von und fuer Adler war, dessen Selbstbewusstsein immer so gross wie unerklaerlich war -- und vor allem, warum es denn noetig war, alle die Titel neu zu veroeffentlichen, da alle schon in vielen Edition vorhanden waren. Warum denn nicht bloss die Liste veroeffentlichen? -- das alle bleibe fuers erste dahingestellt.
Hauptsache: wir haben noch eine Liste, die wir zerrissen duerfen: folge den zweiten Pascal-Liste da oben, dann klicke auf "Authors/Home".
(Oops! Klicke lieber auf "Titles", da ist die ganze Liste, chronologisch geordnet.
Als Erstes sage ich bloss: auf dieser Liste gibts seit Shakespeare 46 englischspraechige Authoren versus nur 40 ins Englische uebersetzte.
Jede/r halbwegs gebildete Deutsche/r wuerde staunen ob des Fehlens von, zB, Schiller. (Vielleicht die ueberraschendeste Omission von vielen.)
Ein Russe wuerde da sicherlich einiges zu bemangeln finden: Pushkin fehlt, Gogol fehlt, kurz: alle die Russen ausser Tolstoi und Dostoesvski fehlen.
Und die Italien! Tasso ist nicht da, Ariosto ist nicht da -- ach Du mein Fresse! Nicht mal Boccaccio oder Petrarca ist da!!! Chaucer zu erwaehnen, aber nicht Boccaccio -- das ist mehr als seltsam. Das ist grotesk. Italien ist lediglich von einigen alten Roemer, und dann Dante, Machiavelli und Pirandello verteten.
(Liest man noch Pirandello? Ich frage ja bloss.)
Was mich in erster Linie aergert, ist nicht etwa, dass einer wie Adler sich anmaesst, sich fuer einen Erzieher der Nation zu halten und einen Kenner der abendlandischen Zivilisation -- eingebildete Trottel gibts ja an jeder Ecke, hats immer gegeben, ja ich selbst sehe dann und wann einem eingebildeten Trottel nicht ganz unaehnlich aus -- was mich hauptsaechlich deprimiert, ist, dass die USA derart eine kulturelle Wueste sind, dass ein Solcher wie Adler allgemein fuer einen Philosoph und Kenner der abendlandlischen Zivilisation gelten konnte -- derart eine Wueste zB, dass mir Namen wie Ariosto und Leopardi und Galdos erst zu Ohren kamen, nachdem ich begann, nichtenglische Sprachen zu studieren -- nachdem ich sozusagen kulturell begann, dieses Land zu verlassen.
Interessant allemal ... Deshalb habe ich mir das mit den Auswahlkriterien mal angeschaut. Drei werden genannt:
"- the book has contemporary significance; that is, relevance to the problems and issues of our times;Also bei ersterem unterstelle ich mal eine sehr amerikanisch-subjektive Sicht.
- the book is inexhaustible; it can be read again and again with benefit; and
- the book is relevant to a large number of the great ideas and great issues that have occupied the minds of thinking individuals for the last 25 centuries."
Sind die Existentialisten etwa nicht relevant? Und wie ist das z.B. mit Rousseaus "Emile": Für das europäische Erziehungsdenken das relevante Werk überhaupt in bezug auf die Sicht der Jugend als Entwicklungs- und Experimentierphase ohne eigene Verantwortung; in Amerika eher nicht, sonst gäbe es Fälle wie den mit diesem 11jährigen Jungen nicht.
Unerschöpflichkeit als Kriterium - das ist ja die Subjektivität schlechthin. *kopfschüttel* Und durchgehalten wird das Kriterium offensichtlich weitestgehend auch nicht.
Das dritte Kriterium, Relevanz für die "großen Ideen", wird beschrieben als Zitationsindex, also im Grunde ein sehr konservatives Kriterium.
Die Frage der heutigen und vor allem der zukünftigen Bedeutsamkeit spielt offensichtlich keine Rolle. Was ich gemessen am erzieherischen Anspruch der Liste schade finde.
Dennoch, da steckt sicher sehr viel Arbeit drin. Und alles online: fein.
Klar es ist eine feine Sache, dass das alles online ist, und es ist nicht, als ob irgendein Author auf dieser Liste unbedeutend zu nennen waere. (Na ja: Fitzgerald vielleicht.) Das Dumme, und vor allem das Schaedliche dran, ist die bloede Behauptung, diese sind die wichtigen Buecher des Abendlandes. Warum nicht einfach sagen, Dies sind einige Werke, die sehr wichtig in der Entwicklung der abendlandischen Kultur gewesen sind. Auch wenn es eine Liste waere, die sehr viel besser waere, als diese, waere es dumm, zu behaupten: "OK, das sind sie, die wesentlichen Werke." Niemand koennte ein derart ungeheuerliches Gebiet genuegend kennen, um sagen zu duerfen, Ich kenne, was wesentlich hier ist, und was nebensaechlich. Und es bedarf keines sonderlichen Genies, dies einzusehen. Einzusehen, dass auf jeder solchen Liste vieles Wesentliches fehlen muesste. Aber Arroganz und Unbescheidenheit sind der Dummheit steten Begleiter.
Und warum erst recht immer noch diese Einschraenkung auf "western civilisation"? Kipling und Spengler lassen gruessen! Als ob nicht seit Jahrhunderten die scharfe Trennung zwischen Ost und West endlich alfredenewmanseidank zu broeckeln beginnt -- und eindeutig zur Bereicherung der abendlandischen Kultur. Als ob nicht Konfuzius und Buddha und die Vedas und die Koran und Tagore und Mishima sehr wesentlich die Kultur praegten, nicht nur des Orients.
Ach, eins mehr:
Bitte sehr, Annette: wir sind nicht alle so doof, auch wenn es bedauerlicherweise viele doofe amerikanische Promis gibt. :-) Ich glaube, Saul Bellow, zB -- der BTW sehr viel berufener waere, ein solches Projekt zu leiten, wenn denn ein solches Projekt sein muesste -- hat einiges ganz Gescheites ueber das Great Books Project geschrieben, ich werde versuchen, das zu finden.
Zitat:...amerikanisch-subjektive Sicht
Also bei ersterem unterstelle ich mal eine sehr amerikanisch-subjektive Sicht.*lach* So direkt wollte ich das nun nicht sagen.
Bitte sehr, Annette: wir sind nicht alle so doof
Du darfst meine Unterstellungen btw gerne inhaltlich auseinandernehmen.
Und noch lieber widerlegen.
Die Beschränkung auf die westliche Zivilisation hat mit diesem Kriterium der Relevanz für die "großen Ideen" zu tun, die sich darüber ergibt, wie oft jemand von anderen wichtigen Schreibern zitiert wird. Also alles ein Saft.
Viel spannender und zukunftsweisender fände ich es, so ein Projekt mal entlang von vermuteten Zukunftsentwicklungen zu machen.
Also: Dominante naturwissenschaftlich-technische, wirtschaftliche und gesellschaftliche Entwicklungen, Religionen, Konflikte, Bevölkerungsgruppen, Grundfragen der zukünftigen Sicht des Menschen von sich selbst etc. ...
Wahrscheinlich müßte man dann Esther Dyson oder Christiane Nüsslein-Volhardt o.ä. lesen. Und langsam auch anfangen, die eine oder andere Web-Page als relevante Literatur dauerhaft zu archivieren.
Ich muss Dir sagen, Annette -- obwohl es durchaus sein kann, dass ich Dich gar nicht verstehe, und obwohl zB weder Dyson noch Nuesslein-Volhardt mir ein Begriff ist -- Woerter wie
lassen mich ein wenig zurueckschrecken.
Zitat:...entlang von vermuteten Zukunftsentwicklungen...
Denn ich meine, es ist einem (auch noch so hochintelligenten) Mensch schwierig genug, zu verstehen, was in der Jetztzeit und vor seinen Augen passiert. Erst recht schwierig wird dann eine vernuenftige Aufwertung von Vergangenem. (Scheint mir eher wenig Historiker zu sein, denen diese Schwierigkeit durchaus bewusst sind.) Und in die Zukunft sehen ist mE ganz unmoeglich und wird es bleiben bis eventuell eine Zeitmaschine erfunden wird.
Mehr noch: scheint mir dass die Versuche, auch von hochintelligenten Menschen, die Zukunft vorauszusehen, viel eher schaedlich als nuetzlich gewesen sind. Mir fallen sofort drei Beispiele ein: die Bibel, Marx, Spengler: die wiederauferstehung Jesu, die Diktatur des Proletariats, der Untergang des (sogenannten) Abendlandes. Wieviele Unheil ist von Anhaengers jeder diesen Zukunftsvisionen angerichtet werden! Wieviele nuetzlicher, vernuenftiger waeren jede von diesen drei Quellen gewesen, haetten sie die Prophezeihung gaenzlich ausgelassen, und stattdem konzentriert auf ihre Widergebe und Analyse von schon Gewesenem!
Was ist immer wieder so koestlich amusierend an aelteren Sc-Fi-Movies? Das, was sie gaenzlich falsch vermutet haben. Die Papier-Faxmaschinen in der Pilot-Episode von "Star Trek" zum Bleistift. Die Kolonisation von Jupiter in "2001" -- ein gar feiner Film, aber wenn nicht erstaeunlich Vieles im naechsten Jahre losgeht, dann wird die Prognose etwas voreilig aussehen.
Sci-Fi aber ist einerlei, das ist ausdruecklich Unterhaltung und freie Spekulation. Nix gegen Sci-Fi. Wenn Zukunftprognosen aber beginnen, sich ernster zu nehmen, ohne sich bewusst zu sein, dass das alles sowieso Sci-Fi ist, finde ich das ungut.
"Vermutete Zukunftsentwicklungen"?
Ich verstehe Dich nicht ganz recht, Annette, soviel ist gewiss. Zum Bleistift ist mir weder Dyson noch Nuesslein-Volhardt ein Begriff. Aber solche Phrasen lassen mich ein wenig zurueckschrecken. Denn, so scheint es mir, es ist einem auch noch so intelligenten Mensch schwierig genug, zu kapieren, was in der Jetztzeit und vor seinen Augen passiert. Erst recht schwierig wird es, wenn versucht wird, Vergangenes zu verstehen. (Eine Schwierigkeit, die mE leider eher wenigen Historikern bewusst ist.) Und die Zukunft verlaesslich voraussehen ist schlicht unmoeglich und wird so bleiben bis eventuell eine Zeitmaschine erfunden wird.
Mehr noch: ich sehe viel mehr Schaden, der von Vermutungen der Zukunft ausgegangen ist, als Nutzen. Drei Beispiele fallen mir sofort ein: die Bibel, Marx, Spengler: die Wiederauferstehung Jesu, die Diktatur des Proletariats, der Untergang des sogenannten Abendlandes -- wieviel Unheil ist angerichtet worden von den Anhaengern jeder diesen Zukunftsvisionen! und zwar um so schlimmer, um so fester sie glaubten, die Zukunft zu sehen.
Das Lustige an aeltere SF-Movies ist ja immer wieder das, was sie falsch vermutet haben: laermige ungelenke Papier-Faxmaschinen wurden vermutet fuer AD 2200 oder so, in der Pilot-Sendung von "Star Trek"; Kolonisation von Jupiter fuers Jahr 2001 voraugesagt, in "2001".
Nichts gegen SF. "2001" zB ist ein gar feiner Film. Und Hauptsache -- SF nimmt sich nicht so fuerchtbar ernst. Wenn Zukunftsvision sich ernster nehmen, als SF, mit Betonung auf "fiction", es tut -- finde ich das ungut.
(Auch finde ich ungut, dass wir nahe dran sind, den Bezug aufm Thema 'Literatur" zu verlieren -- womoeglich wollen wir ein neues Forum aufmachen?)
Esther Dyson
Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard
(Beides nur eine Auswahl, die mir gerade so einfiel, auch deshalb, weil in dieser Greatest Books-Liste z.B. Max Planck genannt wird. Amerikanische Nobelpreisträger würde ich btw auch in den seltensten Fällen kennen ...
Und noch ein Einwand: Es ist ja ein Unterschied, ob ich als Auswählende davon überzeugt bin, daß diese Dinge einmal relevant sein könnten, oder ob ich, wie Karl Marx, schreibe, wie sich die Dinge entwickeln werden. Und erst recht, ob ich aus meiner Auswahl weitreichende Konsequenzen ziehe.
Damit zurück zur Literatur.)
(Ich hatte da oben Unrecht, die Koran ist doch auch drin.)
(Ich dachte zuerst, ich haette den Beitrag von 22:50 versehentlich verschwunden lassen, deshalb die Fast-Doublette von 23:16. Falls das jemanden verwirrt haette. *verlegen lache*)
(Bin ich denn ein kompleter Idiot? Und wenn schon -- wie wuerde ich das wissen?)
(Ein Fall von Jungscher Syncronizitaet: waehrend ich meinen letzten Beitrag schrieb sah ich gleichzeitig die "Simpsons" aufm Glotz -- und zwar die Episode, in der Lisa von Unkie Herb ein Abo zur "Great Books of the Western World" -- Serie geschenkt bekommt.)
(Wie waers mit ein bisschen mehr von Homer?)
...pollas d ifdimouz vucaz Aidi proiaveu
hrwwu, autouz de elwqia teuce xuvessiu...
Kolonisation von Jupiter fuers Jahr 2001 voraugesagt, in "2001".
Kleiner Einwand:
Das ist natürlich falsch.
Der Jupiter wird mutmaßlich nie kolonisiert werden.
Dies ist nicht nur der Tatsache geschuldet, daß die Gravitation Dich binnen Sekunden zu Mus verarbeiten würde.
Auch die Abwesenheit einer festen Oberfläche (wie auf allen Gasriesenplaneten) steht dem zwingend entgegen.
Und so war natürlich auch in '2001' lediglich ein Jupitermond das Ziel.
Welcher gleichwohl nicht kolonisiert wurde.
So sorry.
Bin ich denn ein kompleter Idiot? Und wenn schon -- wie wuerde ich das wissen?(Nein. Objekt zoologischer Experimente. But don't worry. Weiß der Panther, daß er im Käfig sitzt? Nein. Und das ist ja wohl besser so.)
Also oben ging's um Achilles. Jetzt um Aeneas. Schätze ich. Nur wovon handelt das Ganze bitte?
Nicht doch! Immer ein Vegnuegen. Uebrigens: hast natuerlich ganz recht.
Zitat:So sorry.
Annette: das erste Altgriechisch-Zitat sind die ersten 2 Zeilen des Ilias, das zweite Zitat sind Zeilen 3 und 4 (Und sicherlich sind hie wie dort reichliche Tippfehler.); also das Ganze auf Deutsch waere, so ungefaehr:
Sing, Muse, vom Wut des Achills, des Sohnes von Peleus
Und seiner Zerstoerung, die tausendfach den Achianern Schmerz gab,
Schmiss grosse Mengen von starken Heldenseelen zu Hades,
Ihre Koerper aber zum feinen Genuss der Hunde und aller Voegel gab, und der Wille des Zeus war vollbrachte.
(Diese erste Textstelle wird von Julian Jaynes übersetzt mit 'Singe, Oh Göttin, vom Zorn'.)