Canadian Slavonic Papers

Blue Evenings in Berlin: Nabokov's Short Stories of the 1920's by MARINA TURKEVICHNAUMANNReview by: R.L. BuschCanadian Slavonic Papers / Revue Canadienne des Slavistes, Vol. 21, No. 4 (December 1979), pp.560-561Published by: Canadian Association of SlavistsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40867650 .

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Book Reviews I 560

Although Laferrière is not the first to attempt a synthesis of Russian formalist (or structuralist) poetics and psychoanalysis - the Russian psychoana- lyst Ivan Yermakov pioneered the idea in the 1920s, and more recently Marshall Edelson, another analyst, has made similar attempts in this direction - no one has proceeded along this path as far and with as thorough a knowledge of linguistic theory. In the book's forward Victor Terras has labelled Laferrière's work a bold tour de force. He is quite correct.

[Donald Allen Young, Dalhousie University]

Blue Evenings in Berlin: Nabokov's Short Stories of the 1920 s . MARINA TURKEVICH NAUMANN. New York: New York University Press, 1978. xviii, 256 pp. $12.50.

This study is based on its author's doctoral dissertation, "Vladimir Nabokov's Short Stories 1924-1929: An Explication de Texte," completed in 1973 at the University of Pennsylvania. After a brief but informative introductory chapter on Nabokov's life and art, Professor Naumann devotes a chapter to each of the three story types which she finds indicative of Nabokov's early period as an émigré writer in Berlin: the realistic stories, for example, "Vozvrashchenie Chorba"; the realistic symbolic stories, for example, "Podlets"; the symbolic stories, for example, "Bakhman." In a concluding chapter Naumann summarizes the core of her study and adds some observations on the differences between the original stories and their later English translations, as well as a rundown of the relationship between the early stories and Nabokov's later writings, in particular Transparent Things (1972). The stories Naumann treats are those contained in the collection entitled Vozvrashchenie Chorba (1930, Ardis reprint, 1976) and supple- mented by "Sluchainosf " (1924), "Draka" (1925), "Britva" (1926) and "Rozh- destvennyi rasskaz" (1928). This represents nineteen of the twenty-two stories Nabokov wrote in the 1920s under the pen name of V. Sirin. In studying these works Naumann has several objectives: to rescue Nabokov's early Russian works from critical neglect; to reveal the stories as the foundation of the mature works that follow; to analyse each work as an integral whole with regard to theme, plot, setting, characterization and stylistic factors. In providing her intrinsic analyses, Naumann laudably uses the Russian text along with English translations. Besides serving to bring out the full force of Nabokov's artistry, this clearly helps to establish that Nabokov shared with considerable inventiveness in the ornament- alist or experimentalist currents so characteristic of Russian prose of the 1920s. Naumann's objectives generally demand an excellent overall knowledge of Nabokov's writings. This she obviously has, yet it is both a positive and negative factor in her monograph. Her tendency to interrupt her intrinsic analyses of individual stories to inform her reader where else a given motif or device occurs becomes tedious and severely detracts from focussing on the analysis at hand. The relating of such materials to Nabokov's overall corpus would have been better handled in a separate chapter with the use of tables, especially since differentia- tion in function from work to work is not often at issue. Additionally, although Naumann defines her categories for the stories cogently enough, one might

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561 1 Canadian Slavonic Papers

have expected her to have given sharper focus and more elaboration to what justifies placing each of them in a given category. These objections registered, one can commend Naumann for giving close scrutiny to Nabokov's stories of the 1920s, so many of which clearly merit it. Furthermore, her close reading and analysis often yield meaningful insights. Whereas her study, especially in the area of function and structure, can be improved upon, it nevertheless makes a positive contribution to Nabokov scholarship.

[R.L. Busch, University of Alberta]

Sergey Esenin. CONSTANTIN V. PONOMAREFF. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1978. 194 pp. $10.95.

Sergei Esenin was one of Russia's most purely national of poets: his psychological and poetic roots are distinctively native. The neglect, and at times outright vilification of his verse for political-ideological reasons during the Stalinist decades, are now being quite rightly redressed. In the past fifteen years or so, both Soviet and western studies of Esenin's life, of his verse and of Russian Imaginism have provided a foundation for a long overdue literary-biographical assessment of the poet. What was needed at this point in time was just that type of solid comprehensive survey and analysis which both the general and specialist reader have come to expect from the Twayne World Author's Series.

Professor Ponomareff brings to his recent addition to this growing literature on Esenin an extensive, detailed and intimate knowledge of Esenin's verse and cultural-political milieu. He has attempted the difficult task of simultaneously explaining the man in terms of his verse and the verse in terms of the man. Thus he discusses Esenin's poems chronologically with interspersed biographical chapters, followed by a description of the critical views of his contemporaries and of Eseninism. In describing the imagery of Esenin's poetry chronologically, Ponomareff tries to demonstrate that the poet's tragic incompatability with the emerging industrializing socialist state was born not just of environmental circumstances, but also of a psychological predisposition toward self-destruction. In demonstrating the persistence of certain motifs and images in Esenin's poetry from the earliest verse to the last, Ponomareff also stresses the psychological ("existential") shift in the semantics of this imagery. To prove his theses, he discusses quite briefly the thematics of very many poems, and herein lies one of the book's drawbacks. Little attention is paid to the form and linguistic style of the verse, to the unique interplay in Esenin's poetry of rhythm and imagery. The psychological roots of his lyricism are indicated (Blok), but not the formal roots (Fet, Nekrasov, Bely). In general, Esenin's and the Imaginists' debts to Symbolism and Populism, although touched on, are not clearly delineated. Ponomareffs understanding of Esenin's poetics and themes might have been more convincingly' conveyed if he had summed up cycles of poetry, while illustrating his conclusions with an analysis in some depth of a few selected important poems: such an approach would have eliminated a pronounced repetitiveness in his discussion.

Ponomareff also aims to demonstrate the inadequacy and the misinterpreta- tions of Esenin's contemporary critics (Briusov, Kliuev, Kruchenykh, Aseev,

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