In Memoriam Gennady (Gene) Alexandrovich Barabtarlo (February 15, 1949 – February 24, 2019)

In Memoriam Gennady (Gene) Alexandrovich Barabtarlo (February 15, 1949 – February 24, 2019) Zoran Kuzmanovich (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution "What charms me personally about American civilisation is exactly that old-world touch, that old-fashioned something which clings to it despite the hard glitter, and hectic night-life, and up-to-date bathrooms, and lurid advertisements, and all the rest of it. Bright children, you know, are always conservative." Nabokov to De Janelli, 1936 I confess I was not in the right frame of mind to bid goodbye to Gene in prose when shortly after his death, The Nabokov Society website gathered wonderful tributes to, and memories of Gene from Boyd, Dragunoiu, Blackwell, Couturier, and Schwabrin, Meyer, Voronina, Vergara. My mind was still rendered numb—not so much by Gene's death which he did not seem to fear—but by the etched memory of Gene's face when I saw it the last time, after my unrehearsed, and from Gene's point of view, decidedly ungracious and irremediably disrespectful, comments at Dmitri Nabokov's funeral. I do not wish to revisit that occasion, but I must because I cannot let any more time pass without remembering Gene, even though such remembering may reveal some Kinbotean shadows of our trains of thought and may even violate some unspoken contracts I had with Gene. So, in a way, this is a farewell testimony to Gene's posthumous influences on the narratives in which I attempt to understand myself as a Nabokovian scholar. As tributes to Gene have already pointed out, Gene had a high degree of respect for privacy. It is not surprising that someone who always praised the value of privacy and respect, in fact, who always respected the privacy of others, as Gene did, also did not seek attention or recognition and preferred to work behind the scenes. As a result, Gene rarely mentioned his deep friendships with members of the Nabokov family though Gene's papers at University of Notre Dame (some still restricted) reveal the heartwarming reciprocity of those friendships and the regard in which he was held. He brushed off the suggestions that after Dmitri, Gene was easily the best translator of Nabokov's fictional prose into Russian and that his translation of Pnin was, for truly bilingual readers, more moving than the original. Gene's gracious formality, when paired with that sad smile [End Page 1] of his, often tended to be confused with arrogance, superciliousness, fastidiousness, affectation, quirkiness, or a desire to prevent other Nabokov scholars from getting too close to him. Yet, he never struck me as someone who had a lot of secrets—except perhaps the secrets of his wisdom, kindness, and generosity. For example, Gene never mentioned that he was instrumental in convincing Charles Nicol to publish my first article on the then still-untranslated and now still-ignored "A Christmas Story," and that he did it even after pronouncing my familiarity with the written Russian language as "only serviceable" and my essay's prose as "pedestrian." My essay progressed from walking to a more desirable mode of intellectual locomotion only after Gene provided it with the necessary services that he (in true Gene fashion) tactfully kept to himself. Some part of me suspects that over the years I may have psychically internalized Gene as an intellectual parent even though he was only six years older than I. Those never-identified services have often framed a mirror for me during my endeavors to think and write about Nabokov in my third language. When we speak of the dear dead, we often mention that they touched many lives in ways that we may never fully know. I cannot assess how the loss of Gene affected others. A number of prominent Nabokovians have very eloquently testified to the value of Gene's presence in their lives and their scholarship. I will attempt to do the same here, but I have no high hopes of understanding why Gene's particular mixture of brilliance, benevolence, curiosity, and humility, occasionally left me befuddled though I supect it had to do with Gene's not being good at hiding his disappointment. His dedication to...