Andrey Bely possible connection ad GR in Russian

[Mark Kohut]

Great Congratulations! An achievement of hard work and well-won honor. Much harder than our plist probes, but thank you for thanking us.

I've got a couple FACEBOOK friends in Russia, I'll try to sell them on getting a copy....more info?



----- Original Message -----
From: Max Nemtsov <max.nemtsov at gmail.com>
To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Cc: 
Sent: Friday, April 20, 2012 6:34 AM
Subject: Andrey Bely possible connection ad GR in Russian

Colleagues, has anyone explored the possible connection of GR and Andrey Bely's Petersburg (1913) in true detail? I don't seem to be able to find anything, apart from Belorussian researcher Alexey Lalo's rather brief and (to my mind) superficial notice on satire and historicism in PN. The theme seems valid to me (again, I may be inventing bicycle, so to say), for I have recently re-read Petersburg, and was astonished to find many stylistic parallels, from the construction of dialogues to the use of silly songs, and a whole array of key symbols (including Baedeker, bombs, zeroes, streets and crowds, etc.). What seems to support the idea, is the fact that TRP's possible mentor Nabokov thought Petersburg to be the greatest Russian modernist novel of the 20th century, and an English translation (the first one?) by John Kournos had been available in 1959, so TRP might have read it. The connection with another Russian novel (We, by Zamyatin) had already been
 inspected, I know. So - please suggest if anything exists in the canon of Pynchon studies ))

On the informational note, you might be also interested to know that we (Anastasia Gryzunova and myself) have finally finished the Russian translation of GR, and the book is due some time this summer, published by Eksmo Publishers in Moscow. Among other people we are grateful to, there are all members of this list, which fact is duly noted in our acknowledgements )) Thank you guys, you've been of huge help to us, and the archives of the list were in many instances invaluable.

Mx