Smert' i bessmertie v russkikh rasskazakh Vladimira Nabokova (review)

Reviews 253 imprinted in one's memory: the wife of a Cornell professor once saw Vera Nabokov come out of a grocery store with two heavy shopping bags which she had to put into the trunk, while Nabokov was sitting in the car without offering her any help. (I hope that somewhere a doctor's certificate will turn up saying that Nabokov should not have exposed himself to the open air that day—but then I am acting like Pnin, who, in disagreement with the Webster, in his disbelief starts looking for the enata.) In Galya Diment's study many emotional episodes and heartfelt opinions are reported, which are always discussed in a detached, deliberate and balanced way. Nevertheless, her account is always clear and cogent. This combination makes her interesting book even more attractive. It is difficult to imagine that a better book could have been written on this subject. Svetiana Polsky. "Smert' i bessmertie ν russkikh rasskazakh Vladimira Nabokova." Independently published dissertation. 109 pp. + LVI. Paper. Review by Paul D. Morris. The approximately sixty Russian stories published by Nabokov in the 1920s and 1930s provide the basis for Svetiana Polsky's dissertation, "Smert i bessmertie ν russkikh rasskazakh Vladimira Nabokova. " Polsky observes in her introduction tiiat Nabokov's substantial contributions to this "small Alpine form" have received relatively little critical attention and her study further contributes to the small but growing body of works addressing tiiis critical lacuna. As her title would suggest, Polsky's interest is primarily thematic and descriptive, although her examination addresses a number of potentially expansive issues. Polsky's text—from introduction to appendix—is comprised of five sections. 254 Nabokov Studies The introduction to Polsky's study simultaneously reviews the existing critical literature treating Nabokov's short stories in general and establishes her familiarity with the critical material dealing with previous discussions of her particular subject matter —the representation of death and "the otherworld" in Nabokov's Russian stories. Polsky does not announce adherence to any pre-articulated critical metiiodology. Radier, in emphasizing the importance of detail in Nabokov's writing, she indicates that her approach will reside in a close reading of me individual stories witii particular attention paid to details of transtextuality. Using the metaphor of a puzzle, Polsky suggests that the fullest understanding of Nabokov's art is predicated upon a process of first discerning the importance of each story's thematic and narrative elements and then placing them, like the pieces of a puzzle, into the context of their proper relations thus creating a unity of interpretive meaning. The bulk of Polsky's study is contained in the second section where she undertakes a reading of 22 stories. Apart from the discussion of three stories which Nabokov did not anthologize, Polsky's examination is sequential and follows Nabokov's chronology as established in his three collections: Vozvrashchenie Chorba, Sogliadatai, and Vesna ν Fiai'te. The anangement of the stories into anthologies is important, for in her reading of the stories as individual, though integrated, elements of a larger collection, Polsky suggests the progressive development of Nabokov's use of the theme of death not from story to story but rather from anthology to anthology. In the stories assembled in Vozvrashchenie Chorba death is often associated witii light and comes at a moment of happiness, sparing the protagonist from impending disdlusionment. The representation of death in the stories of Sogliadatai is complicated by a blurring of the division between life and death, whereby the central characters, in death, merge with the dreams unfulftiled in life. Finally, Polsky suggests that Nabokov's depiction of mortality Reviews 255 in the stories of Vesna ν Fiai'te had broadened to present death as an escape from a profane world into a higher realm. In Section Three, Polsky expands her study to consider the issue of transtextuality in Nabokov's poetics. From Palimpsestes : La littérature au second degree, Polsky adopts G. Genette's typology of five forms of transtextuality—intertextualit é, paratextualité, metatextualité, architextualité, hypertextualit é—zs. a means of confronting the wealth of literary allusions and references contained in Nabokov's works. Developing upon Genette's model, she then proceeds to propose the New Testament as a possible...