"Владимир Набоков. Эссе о драматургии (англ.)" - читать интересную книгу автора

in advance a good hundred lectures.... Thanks to this method I never
fumbled, and the auditorium received the pure product of my knowledge."1 I
suspect that, since the day when the various Nabokov lectures, resurrected
from notes made more than three decades before, began to appear in print, at
least some of those objectors have realized that Father's single-mindedness
and meticulous preparation had their advantages.
There were even those who resented Nabokov's being allowed to teach at
all, lest the bastions of academic mediocrity be imperiled. Which brings to
mind Roman Jakobson's uneasy quip when Nabokov was being considered for a
permanent position at Harvard: "Are we next to invite an elephant to be
professor of zoology?" If the elephant happens also to be a brilliant
scholar and (as his former Cornell colleague David Daiches put it) a
lecturer whom everyone found "irresistible," why not? Anyway, time has put
things in perspective: those who (attentively) attended Nabokov's lectures
will not soon forget them. Those who missed them regret it but have the
published versions to enjoy. As for Professor Jakobson (and I intend no
malice), I have been racking my brain but cannot, for the life of me, recall
whether or not I took a course of his at some point during my four years at
Harvard. Perhaps what I need is the memory of an elephant.

Dmitri Nabokov.

1 Apostrophes, French television, 1975. (C)Article 3b Trust Under the
Will of Vladimir Nabokov.


Playwriting

The one and only stage convention that I accept may be formulated in
the following way: the people you see or hear can under no circumstances see
or hear you. This convention is at the same time a unique feature of the
dramatic art: under no circumstances of human life can the most secret
watcher or eavesdropper be absolutely immune to the possibility of being
found out by those he is spying upon, not other people in particular, but
the world as a whole. A closer analogy is the relation between an individual
and outside nature; this, however, leads to a philosophical idea which I
shall refer to at the end of this lecture. A play is an ideal conspiracy,
because, even though it is absolutely exposed to our view, we are as
powerless to influence the course of action as the stage inhabitants are to
see us, while influencing our inner selves with almost superhuman ease. We
have thus the paradox of an invisible world of free spirits (ourselves)
watching uncontrollable but earthbound proceedings, which--a
compensation--are endowed with the power of exactly that spiritual
intervention which we invisible watchers paradoxically lack. Sight and
hearing but no intervention on one side and spiritual intervention but no
sight or hearing on the other are the main features of the beautifully
balanced and perfectly fair division drawn by the line of footlights. It may
be proved further that this convention is a natural rule of the theatre and
that when there is any freakish attempt to break it, then either the
breaking is only a delusion, or the play stops being a play. That is why I