Nabokov on Joyce, Kafka

[Ya Sam]

I was going to read 'Petersburg' anyway. It's one of those books looming in 
the offing.


"Russian symbolist poet and theorist, memoirist, essayist and novelist, 
whose best-known work is Peterburg (1916, Petersburg), a baroque evocation 
of pre-revolutionary capital of Russia. Bely's masterpiece, with its playful 
use of language and literary experiments, has often been compared to James 
Joyce's Ulysses. "

http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/bely.htm

"To the question who or what made James Joyce a writer, it is possible to 
suggest: his perceptions. He is a writer with no difficulty in parading his 
influences. Critics invariably look more to his influence over his 
successors than to the mentors who shaped him. Living and writing in Europe 
as he was, it is likely that Joyce would have read or at least have been 
aware of Andrei Bely's Petersburg which was first published between 1913 and 
1914 and later twice reworked with editions in 1916 and 1922."

http://www.ireland.com/events/bloomsday/story9.htm


>From: "Charles Albert" <cfalbert at gmail.com>
>To: pynchon-l at waste.org
>Subject: Re: Nabokov on Joyce, Kafka
>Date: Fri, 27 Oct 2006 10:29:36 -0400
>
>For fun, you might want to take a bite out of "St. Petersburg".........
>
>
>love,
>cfa
>
>On 10/27/06, Ya Sam <takoitov at hotmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>and on "mediocrities". I haven't read this interview before, and I should
>>say professor Nabokov can be harsh. I disagree on Mann and Faulkner
>>(haven't
>>read Pasternak).
>>
>>"What  is  your  approach to the teaching of literature?
>>
>>
>>      I can give you some examples. When studying Kafka's famous
>>story, my students had to know  exactly  what  kind  of  insect
>>Gregor  turned  into  (it  was  a  domed  beetle,  not the flat
>>cockroach of sloppy translators) and they had  to  be  able  to
>>describe  exactly  the  arrangement  of  the  rooms,  with  the
>>position of doors and furniture, in the Sarnsa  family's  flat.
>>They  had  to  know  the  map  of  Dublin for Ulysses. I
>>believe in stressing the specific detail; the general ideas can
>>take care of themselves. Ulysses, of course, is a divine
>>work of art and will live on despite the  academic  nonentities
>>who turn it into a collection of symbols or Greek myths. I once
>>gave  a  student  a  C-minus,  or  perhaps  a  D-plus, just for
>>applying to its chapters the titles borrowed from  Homer  while
>>not  even  noticing  the  comings  and goings of the man in the
>>brown mackintosh. He didn't even know who the man in the  brown
>>mackintosh  was. Oh, yes, let people compare me to Joyce by all
>>means, but my English is patball to Joyce's champion game." ...
>>
>>"Ever   since   the   days   when  such  formidable
>>mediocrities as Galsworthy, Dreiser, a  person  called  Tagore,
>>another called Maxim Gorky, a third called Romain Rolland, used
>>to be accepted as geniuses, I have been perplexed and amused by
>>fabricated  notions  about  so-called  "great books". That, for
>>instance, Mann's asinine Death in Venice or  Pasternak's
>>melodramatic  and  vilely  written Zhivago or Faulkner's
>>corncobby chronicles can be considered  "masterpieces,"  or  at
>>least  what  journalists call "great books," is to me an absurd
>>delusion, as when a hypnotized person makes love to  a  chair.
>>My greatest masterpieces of twentieth century prose are,
>>in     this     order:    Joyce's    Ulysses,    Kafka's
>>Transformation, Biely's Petersburg, and the first
>>half of Proust's fairy tale In Search of Lost Time."
>>
>>http://www.lib.ru/NABOKOW/Inter05.txt
>>
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>>

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