ABSTRACT
The writer V l a d i m i r Nabokov (1899-1977) and the composer Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971) were not friends, as Nabokov expresses in a 1969 interview: "I know M r . Stravinski [sic] very slightly and have never seen any genuine sample of his outspokenness in print" (SO 172). 1 Further widening the gap between writer and composer, V l a d i m i r Nabokov said he wasn't particularly interested in ballet (cf. 171), one of the genres in which Stravinsky was most successful as a composer, and that he had, according to his own statement,
no ear for music, a shortcoming I deplore bitterly. When I attend a conce r t . . . I endeavor gamely to follow the sequence and relationship of sounds but cannot keep it up for more than a few minutes. . . . I am perfectly aware of the many parallels between the art forms of music and those of literature, especially in matters of structure, but what can I do if ear and brain refuse to cooperate? (35)
Besides deploring his deafness to music, this passage from a 1964 interview hints at N a b o k o v ' s convic t ion that each work of art comprises a structure which the reader/listener tries to discern. Nabokov and Stravinsky have expressed several similar ideas about creating and perceiving art. For example, both point out that in contrast to perceiving the visual arts, reading literature and listening to music depend on following a fixed sequence in time: while the eye can take in
S
, . ert. r e
88 Nassim W. Balestrini
the entirety of a painting at once, reading and listening require a chronological process, so that one discerns intricacies of structure (such as cross-relations between layers of motifs) only in the process of repeated reading/l istening. 2 Furthermore, Nabokov and Stravinsky describe that the creators of art have the privilege of knowing that entire works, in all their complexity, pre-exist in some other realm to which inspiration grants them access so that the writer/composer needs to discern and recreate the puzzle bit by bit (cf. SO 32, 69 and PM 51). Nabokov and Stravinsky also demand that an artist possesses technical excellence in his respective field, perceptive observation, acute sense perceptions, and openness to inspiration; and, in turn, they expect the reader/listener to tune into the artist's mind by recreating "the working of a mind [i.e., the artist's mind] that orders, gives life, and creates" (PM 24; cf. also "Good Readers and Good Writers," LL 2).
