Andrey Bely possible connection ad GR in Russian

[Kai Frederik Lorentzen]

On 20.04.2012 12:34, Max Nemtsov wrote:

> 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.

https://circle.ubc.ca/handle/2429/24320

Haven't read (neither the study nor /Petersburg/), just fed a 
search-engine with "Pynchon Bely".

It's adequate that you write "possible mentor", because John Krafft 
couldn't find any proof for this.

"No reliable evidence available to date supports the persistent rumor 
that Pynchon took a course taught by Vladimir Nabokov, the author of 
/Lolita/ (1955), although he may have audited Nabokov's classes, known 
him personally or worked with him informally. Pynchon's most famous 
instructor of record was M. H. Abrams, later the founding editor of /The 
Norton Anthology of English Literature/."
(The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Pynchon, p. 10)

More than Nabokov I do like Bulgakov :

Would you recommend /Petersburg/ to me?


> 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
>
>
>


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