this is a little shitty because I started writing it ten minutes ago, but here's the "300-500-word essay" i have to hand in. pretty informal. thanks for some ideas, amanda!
" This story intrigued me in the way that a bevy of Nabokov stories have successfully intrigued me over the years: it appears to be puzzlesome and I became interested in cracking the puzzle. Of course, Nabokov is not interested in obscuring meaning from the reader, and neither is he especially interested in playing pointless games with language.
Of course, Nabokov can often come off as if he was interested in just thatsilly linguistic games. One of the better passages in Aleppo is his descriptions of the narrators youthful dalliances with poetry:
"Which reminds me--I mean putting it like this reminds me--of the days when we wrote our first udder-warm bubbling verse, and all things, a rose, a puddle, a lighted window, cried out to us: "I'm a rhyme!" Yes, this is a most useful universe. We play, we die: ig-rhyme, umi-rhyme. And the sonorous souls of Russian verbs lend a meaning to the wild gesticulation of trees or to some discarded newspaper sliding and pausing..."
Im a rhyme! Immediately, in a short turn of phrase, Nabokov was able to evoke childhood in a true and profound manner. I was interested enough to pursue what, exactly, he meant by ig-rhyme, umi-rhyme and although I didnt find much scholarship about it, while perusing the Russian version of the story, I noticed that that particular line is rendered as My igraem, my umiraem: ig-rhyme, umi-rhyme, leading me to conclude that he was toying with the Russian words for play and die. I found it interesting how the joke works differently in the Russian, where the word rhyme is as foreign to a Russian reader as igraem and umiraem are to American readers.
Yet I dont think it was just a joke. In the sentence following the ig-rhyme umi-rhyme tweak, the narrator states that by naming some mundane images with beautiful Russian words, those images are given some sort of deeper meaning than they contain as undescribed images. The act of description fixes the images as powerful things.
In the final line of that paragraph, the narrator announces, I come to you like that gushing lady in Chekhov who was dying to be described. He implores the recipient of his letter to fix him as a significant object by the art of description.
Throughhought the rest of the story (and, indeed, Nabokovs oeuvre) the dazzling descriptive language used by the author becomes something more than just prettiness for readers to lightly enjoy. The story becomes a forceful, active attempt by the author to fix and make meaningful the world, a world which has been engulfed in a deep valley of mist between the crags of two matter-of-fact mountains. The ambiguity and dream-like confusion over what is real and what is not in this story is attacked with words and description in an attemptnot entirely successfulto create something concrete and immobile to which the despairing author (who has lost his country, his social position, and his wife) can cling."
