Andrey Bely possible connection ad GR in Russian

[Max Nemtsov]

On 20.04.2012 16:49, Mark Kohut wrote:
> "mentor' or whatever, Vera did claim in The Paris Review interview to 
> remember P's handwriting and
> P. had his friends and great writers as influence, at least and
> read Nabokov some, we know---see Real Life of Sebastian Knight vis a 
> vis V at least,
yeah, I've marked it, too, for the future detailed inspection, thanks
> so N's essay in Strong Opinions comes later, it seems, from his 
> lectures which P seems to have audited
>  BUT from the wikipedia Petersburg entry---and the one below on Bely 
> ---we can learn that Nabokov seemed to express his love for that novel
> in the US in @1958 (knowing the translation was coming?) as well as on 
> TV in 1965!......if P did not
> hear him talk about it in a classs....
> So, ambitious reader and writer TRP could have made sure he read 
> Petersburg when pubbed in English.
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrei_Bely
> A--and 'revolutionary politics" and an assassination plot and a time 
> bomb---& Bely came to be influenced
> by Steiner and his system of beliefs (I occasionally wonder what led 
> TRP to Blavatsky and those folk among
> whom I put Steiner) and does anyone see a possible thread somehow into 
> and through Against the Day [just
> one of AtD's plot threads]?
thank you, Mark, - this seems to be an excellent point. theosophists 
were a wonderful bunch, and it makes one think what led TRP to them 
indeed, apart from his apparent general interest in historical curios of 
the time
Mx
>
> *From:* Kai Frederik Lorentzen <lorentzen at hotmail.de>
> *To:* Max Nemtsov <max.nemtsov at gmail.com>
> *Cc:* pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> *Sent:* Friday, April 20, 2012 7:29 AM
> *Subject:* Re: Andrey Bely possible connection ad GR in Russian
>
>
> 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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