Chekhov's Gun

After watching a documentary on the Trans-Siberian railway , I looked for an early account of this famous journey by Eugen Zabel.   He was apparently the first foreigner to take the route from Moscow to Vladivostok, publishing his account in Germany in 1903. Construction was yet to be completed and Zabel had to take a ferry at Lake Baikal to meet up with the under end.  He seemed to revel in this long journey, which stretched over 9000 km, noting the beauty of the iron bridges.  This is twice as long as the Trans-continental railroad in the United States, which the Romanovs used as a model. Russia was being industrialized at a rapid rate and the only way to bring together this far-flung empire was with a railroad line linking East and West.  It wouldn't be until 1916 that the railway line was completed, 25 years after its inception date. Russia was in a massive state of upheaval, which would stretch beyond WWI into the civil war that divided Red and White...

As Edmund Wilson found out, it is best not to try to predict Nabokov's literary tastes when he lent him a review copy of Faulkner's Light of August thinking Vladimir would appreciate it as much as he did.   Nabokov dismissed this work like he did all of Faulkner's work as trite and tedious romances. Nabokov was infamous for dismissing canonical authors such as Dostoevsky and Henry James and Albert Camus.  He had no soft spot for the much revered Cervantes either, calling Don Quixote "a cruel and crude book," although he doesn't deny the influence it had on Russian writers of the 19th century.  He just felt that his dear Pushkin and Lermontov greatly rose above it in their poems and stories. I was a bit surprised to see he so disliked Henry James.  Portrait of a Lady struck me as the type of novel that might appeal to him, as James rises above the social milieu of the time to create a very striking portrait of Isabel Archer, and James has a wonderful...