Nabokov in Motion: Modernity and Movement by Yuri Leving (review)

Abstract

The author’s focus on Joyce’s ‘style’ creates confusion rather than clarity as indeed does his choice of selecting individual ‘themes’ (such as the leitmotif of the keys in Ulysses) for comparisons. Assessing Joyce’s impact, or presence, in the Russian texts by relying on discrete categories (plot/character/narration/ style) without sufficient consideration of the highly contentious issues of the ‘narrator’, the fusion of the ‘internal’ and the ‘external’, the parody, the multilingual puns, the pastiche (all of which probe the issues of Empire, Ireland, the English language, Catholicism, sexuality, emigration, exile etc.) produces inconclusive results. Chronotopic displacement and epistemological difference in the ways the five writers read, and responded to, Joyce should have been tackled rather than ignored. Joyce’s own awareness of, and numerous references to, Russia and Russian literature should also have been considered, as should the question of how Joyce’s work may read in the light of the Russian texts; did Joyce elicit novel, original interpretation of his texts within the five writers’ works? The Conclusion and the appended collection of bizarre statements by seemingly randomly chosen literary figures from the former Soviet Union and its successor states in a unit entitled ‘Joycean Echoes’ beg the question as to who the envisaged reader of this book is. Is it the book’s intention to demonstrate that ‘Russians too’ are ‘Joyceans’? Or perhaps that Joyce’s reception in Russia had some kind of therapeutic effect? Or is it an attempt to revalidate Dostoevskii’s ‘Pushkin Speech’ which suggests that Russians can feel/understand/convey the experience of all other nations (‘all’ of course meaning major Western European ones)? If so, there is indeed little need to consider how the five authors’ texts interact or modify or expand existing frameworks for interpreting Joyce’s texts, or to find meaningful silences in the Russian novels and interrogate these, or to consider whether the discourse of spoudogéloion — the jocoserious — finds resonances and, if so, where and how.