Iconography

First I must note that my blog must be peeved about something because the blogroll doesn't seem to be working at the moment. Everyone else's seems fine.



I mentioned, during my presentation, that I was initially curious about Nabokov and religious influence. One of the things that tipped me off to this subject was an essay call Vladimir Nabokov and Orthodox Iconography that was written by Samuel Schuman. I found it on jstor while doing some searching. It comes from a journal called Religion & Literature.

The essay is interesting in a lot of different ways and gave me many ideas (no matter how peripheral) for my term paper. As for "orthodox iconography"... well I didn't really find much evidence to support a notion that Nabokov includes such icons in his writing, whether purposefully or not.

Nabokov, being a devout aesthete, would probably argue that his images are concoctions of his imagination and surely devoid of icons that carry a hidden meaning. Another reason for this, other than his love for pure aesthetics, is his strong distaste for psychologists like Freud, who would have seen Humbert Humbert as some dark repression in a deranged mind.

Schuman even points out that icons are not simply images, but symbols. Symbols that hold meaning and tradition. Of course when put this way, Nabokov's work was full of icons. The very act of allusion proves that he delighted in the extra (often esoteric) information that was conjured up by any of his thousands of references to other things.

Nabokov surely used icons in his work, but Orthodox Icons for the purpose of referencing the deeper meaning of characterized Gods? probably not.