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  • The Models of Space, Time and Vision in V. Nabokov’s Fiction: Narrative Strategies and Cultural Frames
  • Barbara Wyllie
Marina Grishakova, The Models of Space, Time and Vision in V. Nabokov’s Fiction: Narrative Strategies and Cultural Frames. Tartu: Tartu University Press, 2006. 324 pp.

In this far-reaching and ambitious study, Marina Grishakova examines Nabok-ov’s manipulation of modes of time, space, and perspective in a context of contemporary Russian and Western cultural, philosophical, and scientific discourses. Grishakova takes a highly theoretical, densely semiotic approach, drawing upon a wide range of contemporary ideas to establish an exhaustive, broad-spectrum context for her elaboration of narrative and structural modelling in Nabokov’s work. The first forty pages of her introduction lay the ground for her analysis, with just the last twenty devoted to Nabokov — to his place in Western art as a “borderline phenomenon,” a figure positioned “between” languages and cultures (51), whose work is dominated by a preoccupation with modes of displacement, defamiliarization, and deception.

Such impulses Grishakova identifies with aspects of pre-Revolutionary and early Soviet literary and philosophical movements — the Symbolists, Formalists, Serapion Brothers (particularly Gruzdev) — as well as two key figures, Andrei Belyi and Evgenii Zamiatin. Their poetics of game, their experiments with space and time, their exploration of multi-dimensional worlds, the fantastic and the surreal, and their “thematization of mathematical problems and scientific theories of fiction” (62) can all be read as significant features of Nabokov’s art. Nevertheless, and perhaps mindful of Nabokov’s intransigence on the subject, here and throughout her study Grishakova merely suggests the possibility of influence, preferring to focus on points of connection and distinction rather than offering definitive hypotheses. Here, the most provocative of her comparisons is that of Nabokov and Zamiatin. Zamiatin’s neorealistic manipulation of optical tools to extend and transform visual experience is aligned with Nabokov’s emphasis on an intense and meticulous way of seeing that can effect “a fantastic metamorphosis of . . . routine reality” (63). Grishakova’s source for this comparison is a rarely-cited lecture “The Creative Writer” which Nabokov gave soon after his arrival in the United States and published in the Bulletin of the New England Modern Language Association in 1942. This is in fact the original version of the much later essay, “The Art of Literature and Commonsense,” posthumously published in Lectures on Literature (New York, 1980). That Grishakova chooses to cite the initial lecture is important because of the extent to which it differs from the subsequent and better-known version. In this instance, the passage quoted does not appear in the revision, which suggests the potential value of the original text to Nabokov scholars, who may not be aware of its existence. It would have been helpful if the author had pointed this out and indicated where the passages she quotes differ in the two versions.

Chapter I, “The Models of Time,” sets out to explore the “oscillation between different time scales, their interference and multiple shifts” in Nabokov’s work [End Page 155] (75), with reference to the theories, primarily, of Bergson and Mikowski. Grishakova emphasizes the significance of what Nabokov termed the “hollows” of time — the “chronological gaps” that cause time to split into “double or multiple series,” which are the main agents of “semantic indeterminacy in Nabokov’s novels” (76). Nabokov scholars will be familiar with this concept, but Grishakova offers some new insights in her consideration of George Whitrow’s notion of the “specious present,” also implicit in William James’s work. The reference to James is brief, which is surprising considering that James was one of the philosophers Nabokov read in his youth. More space is given to Whitrow, however, whose ideas, along with those of Henri Piéron, informed Nabokov’s thinking during his last two decades and are evident both in comments he made in interviews and in Van Veen’s “Treatise on Time.” Central to this chapter is an extended analysis of the “resonance” of the spiral of time in Nabokov’s fiction — in particular, his first novel, Mary. Amongst the oft-cited names of Bergson, Proust, Nietszche, Uspenskii, Belyi, Lewis Carroll, Martin Gardner, Freud, Breton, and...

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