''Vladimir Nabokov's Comic Quest for Reality' - Nottingham eTheses

-
223
-
and human elements. It reflects the compiler's honesty
or dishonesty, skill or sloppiness"21, and this
skill, and even more perhaps this honesty, is reflected
and proved by the editor's thorough knowledge
of his subject, his untiring pursuit of more knowledge
about it, and by absolute accuracy, to the point
of pendantry, on even the smallest point.
In his own edition of Eugene Onegin Nabokov of
course meets all these demands. Prompted in 1950 and
published in 196422, it is an awe-inspiring piece of
scholarship. Not only does it furnish, besides the
translation of the poem, the most detailed explication
of the text; behind that emerges also a portrait
of the poet, and the whole culture of Pushkin's time
is reconstructed in hundreds of notes. These deal
not only with the poem, with its language, and with
its literary sources, which Nabokov traces unerringly
past all the mistakes he finds in the commentaries
of others; they also deal with a breathtaking variety
of other fields, including such diverse subjects as
fashions, and varieties of vehicles, the quantity of
wine imported into Russia; with games, and plants
and
customs.
Nabokov does not escape (or avoid? ) the temptation
to insert purely personal remarks into his notes:
small articles that convey his bitterness, for example,
at not being able to check his material where
it is stored in Leningrad libraries23, or which ex-
press his amusement at the "incredible ignorance con-
cerning natural objects that characterizes young