Fight the New World Order with Global Non Compliance Pt.1
Watch in HD. www.youtube.com Please spread the word out!! Share this video to your friends, rate and comment!! www.youtube.com www.thecrowhouse.com It is time for the people of the world to stop and realise that the divisions that supposedly exists amongst us are an illusion. There is no division. Its time for everyone to understand the truth of this. Its time to approach the world and each other in a state of love rather than a state of fear. Its time for you to tap into the source and realize your own potential and its time for us all to collectively stand together and address the root cause of the problem. And all of you need to spread this information, its very important that you do. It needs to be clearly understood by people everywhere that the elite only have the power over the people that the people themselves grant to them, so stop giving it to them. Stop doing what the TV tells you to do and stop complying with the system. Understand that there truly is no division among the people of the world no matter who they are or where they are from. We are all people and we are all one. It is through the constantly promoted illusion of division that the system is able to function but in order for it to do so, it needs public compliance. Stop complying and you will shut the system down. The money system is the head of the snake. Cut the head off the snake and the rest of it will whither and die. The time for talk is over and the time has come for action. It is now time …
Video Rating: 4 / 5
Grassroots Reformers Announce Urgent Measure Following “Global Corruption Barometer 2009″
Grassroots Reformers Announce Urgent Measure Following “Global Corruption Barometer 2009″
Washington, DC (PRWEB) June 18, 2009
The grassroots good government and legal reform advocate known as POPULAR, Inc. (POPULAR) announces the 2009 midyear recipients of its “Restore Integrity Award”. The award program is co-administered by POPULAR’s Advisory Board President Katherine Moore and Advisory Board Vice President Nancy Swan. They explain that the group’s “Restore Integrity Award” is awarded bi-annually in the categories of public sector, private sector, and grassroots advocacy.
According to Advisory Board President Moore, “all of POPULAR’s award recipients have taken or otherwise pursued one or more specific acts or measures to eliminate significant inequity, waste, fraud, abuse, or other public and/or private sector corruption in America.” Advisory Board Vice President Swan conveys that “POPULAR defines corruption as any illegal or unethical conduct contributing to the systemic malfunction of government, commerce, and/or democracy in America as contemplated by the U.S. Constitution.” Moore and Swan note that POPULAR’s “Restore Integrity Award” is an urgent measure given results and implications of the “Global Corruption Barometer 2009″ of Transparency International (TI), a prestigious anti-corruption coalition.
TI indicates that overall perception of corruption has increased 8 percent worldwide. The group’s Global Corruption Barometer 2009 reports a stunning 61% of surveyed Americans and Canadians believing “in their county the private sector used bribery to influence government policies, laws, and regulations.” TI’s 2009 barometer indicates “there needs to be greater effort made to ensure that the general public has access to and believes in the effectiveness of formal reporting mechanisms.”
POPULAR’s Moore and Swan believe their group’s first round of award recipients deserve recognition for their efforts to expose and combat corruption, poverty, unethical behavior in public and private institutions, and to provide relief as well as evoke helpful reform. Moore adds “these individuals have exhibited courage and bravery without any regard to personal gain and we laud them for ideals that are consistent with POPULAR’s goals.” Swan interjects that “POPULAR seeks out and honors those worthy of the Restore Integrity Award, our sometimes silent heroes who break down proverbial walls of silence and light the way for others, and who serve to inspire, encourage, and help others join to restore integrity.”
POPULAR’s 2009 midyear “Restore Integrity Award” recipients are as follows:
Public Sector Category:
Senator Richard (Dick) Durbin (D-IL) for declaring that banks which enabled America’s current financial crisis, remain the most powerful lobby on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. and “frankly own the place” as his colleagues in the U.S. Senate vote down his proposed amendment to a bill that would have allowed bankruptcy judges to help desperate homeowners renegotiate their mortgage payments.
Senator James (Jim) Henry Webb, Jr. (D-Va) for introducing “The National Criminal Justice Act of 2009″ calling for a national commission to “undertake a top-to-bottom review of (America’s) entire criminal justice system” and offer recommendations for reform.
Private Sector Category:
Dr. Richard I. Fine for being the first attorney to expose the illegality and inherent conflicts of interests spawned by the now notorious, “double benefits” payments from Los Angeles County, California to the state’s superior court judges, all to Fine’s professional and personal detriment as he was subsequently disbarred and jailed indefinitely on contempt of court charges.
Grassroots Advocacy Category:
Ms. Marcel Reid and Ms. Karen Inman, co-recipients, for spearheading the grassroots fight for truth, transparency, and accountability within ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now), a purported advocate for low and moderate income people. Reid and Inman began their fight to reform ACORN while serving on its now defunct, Interim Management Committee and are among the co-founders of ACORN 8, “the people’s movement to reform ACORN.”
Mr. William (Bill) Stegmeier for financially underwriting America’s highest profile though failed ballot initiative to accomplish substantial citizen oversight of alleged judicial misconduct known as the South Dakota J.A.I.L. (Judicial Accountability Initiative Law) Initiative or Amendment E.
POPULAR will mail all of its 2009 midyear “Restore Integrity Award” recipients an encased certificate, commemorating their award. They were personally notified of and congratulated for receiving the award prior to this public announcement. POPULAR will announce its second round of award recipients in December 2009.
POPULAR is an acronym for “Power Over Poverty Under Laws of America Restored”. The nonprofit corporation is essentially an association of public interest attorneys and Juris Doctors, advised by a board of nonlawyer, community leaders. These good government advocates are committed to helping poor and other disadvantaged people access affordable and competent legal representation, appropriate judicial oversight, and important civil and criminal justice system reforms. See: http://www.popular4people.org
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UNDP, Global Fund Announce New Financial Safeguards
UNDP, Global Fund Announce New Financial Safeguards
New York (Vocus/PRWEB) February 04, 2011
The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) today announced new measures aimed at strengthening even more its safeguards against fraud and corruption in the global fight against pandemic diseases in the developing world. UNDP also welcomed the similar safeguards just announced by the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.
“Over the last decade, the global fight against AIDS and other infectious diseases has been remarkably successful, saving many millions of lives and helping families, communities, and countries to grow stronger,” UNDP Administrator Helen Clark said in a statement. “When funds intended for life-saving treatment and prevention are stolen, that theft is tantamount to murder.”
The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria is the largest international channel of financial support for work on those three diseases, which disproportionately affect the world’s least developed countries. UNDP works with the Global Fund as an intermediary in 27 countries to ensure that funding is invested in effective programmes for vulnerable populations.
UNDP is a Principal recipient for approximately 12 percent of the Global Fund’s overall portfolio, often working in challenging environments, such as in countries emerging from natural disasters, conflicts, or political crises.
“UNDP welcomes the steps announced by the Global Fund today to enhance its financial safeguards and strengthen fraud prevention. UNDP will be supporting the Global Fund’s efforts, and taking additional measures of its own,” Helen Clark said.
The measures announced by UNDP today include:
Recruitment of a dedicated and specialized fulltime investigator to respond to credible allegations of fraud or corruption in UNDP-managed Global Fund grants, to strengthen further the existing UNDP investigative team and complement UNDP’s three dedicated Global Fund audit specialists;
Development of formal “capacity development” initiatives in all countries where UNDP manages ongoing Global Fund grants, with specific attention to long-term anti-corruption, governance, and accountability systems. Twelve such initiatives have been developed and launched in the last twelve months, and a further thirteen will be put in place by the end of 2011
Submission of a proposal to UNDP’s Executive Board to allow the Global Fund to access UNDP audit reports of Global Fund projects, a privilege currently restricted to UN Member States.
Agreement of a Memorandum of Understanding between UNDP’s Office of Audit and Investigation and the Global Fund’s Office of the Inspector-General to strengthen co-operation and information-sharing on investigations into fraud and corruption.
UNDP’s partnership with the Global Fund has already brought treatment to more than 26 million cases of malaria and 700,000 cases of tuberculosis from Southern Sudan to the Democratic Republic of Congo to Liberia, Belarus, Haiti, and Tajikistan.
“Hundreds of thousands of people with HIV are surviving and thriving on the medication provided by these projects. We have an excellent track record in managing risk, preventing fraud and corruption, recovering money when it has been stolen, and collaborating with police and judicial authorities as required. Working in partnership with the Global Fund, we can and we must do better,” Helen Clark said.
UNDP is the United Nations global development organization, on the ground in 166 countries and focused on democratic and effective governance, crisis prevention & recovery, climate change & energy, and reducing poverty.
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Lex Mundi Publishes Best Practices in Preventing Fraud and Corruption in a Global Business
Houston (Vocus) July 17, 2009
Responding to the challenges confronting corporate legal departments today in ensuring global anti-corruption compliance, Lex Mundi has compiled and published Best Practices in Preventing Fraud and Corruption in a Global Business. Developed by Lex Mundi member firms around the globe, in collaboration with in-house counsel and members of the Lex Mundi Client Advisory Council, Best Practices in Preventing Fraud and Corruption in a Global Business provides practical suggestions and steps to enable corporations and their law firm advisors to work together to develop effective compliance programs to avoid, detect and remedy wrongdoing, especially fraud and corruption.
As a result of significant changes in the regulatory landscape, global businesses are facing more numerous and complex regulations as well as increasingly aggressive enforcement environments. The true impact for businesses is a shift in emphasis from detection of corruption to enforcement – a shift that increases the pressure on corporate legal departments to demonstrate compliance.
E. Leigh Dance, President of ELD International, Inc., who helped develop these best practices, commented, “Corporate law departments spend a great deal of time and focus on reducing the risks of corruption and fraud for their organizations wherever they are active. It is a demanding task in light of rapid global expansion and the wide range of cultures and business practices affected by regulation. The costs associated with ensuring compliance globally are high, and too many corporate law functions do not have the resources or the management commitment they need. Beyond the mammoth task of understanding and responding to new regulations, in-house counsel also have the challenge of educating the corporate workforce and its leadership about the issues in order to reduce the significant risks. Law firms advising global companies can respond to this challenge by working alongside in-house counsel on training, auditing, reporting, investigations, responding to regulatory inquiries and other areas.”
The publication covers the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) and recent FCPA enforcement actions, as well as other existing anti-corruption standards. The best practices also cover the issues that are central to effective compliance programs and provide suggested ways that in-house and outside counsel can work together in the areas of:
Corporate Policies and Procedures
Monitoring, Controls, Reporting and Audits
Investigations, Disciplinary Actions and Sanctions
Compliance Structure: Coordination With Other Functions Within the Company
Communication: Promoting Compliance and Maintaining Vigilance
Education and Training in a Global Corporate Setting
Responding to Third-Party Fraud and Corruption Risk
Frank Eichler, General Counsel and Executive Vice President of Ozburn-Hessey Logistics, a global supply chain solutions company with operations on seven continents, also commented, “Understanding the requirements of the FCPA is critical for in-house counsel of companies that do business internationally. The stakes at risk for FCPA violations are enormous today for both companies and individuals and under-managing or ignoring the risks is simply not an option.”
The publication is developed as a part of Lex Mundi’s best practices series ‘Working Together: In-House Lawyers and External Counsel’. It, as well as other best practices publications, is available on the Lex Mundi web site free of charge at: http://www.lexmundi.com/images/lexmundi/PDF/BestPractices/BestPractice_FraudCorruption.pdf.
Lex Mundi is the world’s leading association of independent law firms. The association has more than 160 member firms around the world, representing approximately 21,000 lawyers. Membership in Lex Mundi provides member firms with a trusted network of law firms that share similar values and a similar focus on quality through which they can access global legal resources that enable them to serve their clients better and to improve continuously all aspects of their firms. Member law firms are located throughout North America, Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean, Asia and the Pacific, the Middle East and Africa. Through its nonprofit affiliate, the Lex Mundi Pro Bono Foundation (www.lexmundiprobono.org), Lex Mundi member firms provide pro bono legal assistance to social entrepreneurs around the globe. For more information about Lex Mundi, please visit www.lexmundi.com.
For a printable version of this press release, please visit http://www.lexmundi.com/images/lexmundi/PDF/PressReleases/BestPractices_FraudCorruption.pdf.
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Corruption: Global Virus or Weapon of Mass Destruction?, presented by Miklos Marschall
Miklos Marschall, regional director for Europe and Central Asia for Transparency International, defined corruption and explained its impact on societies and countries at The University of Scranton’s Schemel Forum Luncheon Series on 3/31/10.
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INSZoom?s 4th Annual Global Immigration & Mobility Conference on November 11, 2010 in Bangalore, India
INSZoom’s 4th Annual Global Immigration & Mobility Conference on November 11, 2010 in Bangalore, India
Bangalore, India (PRWEB) October 27, 2010
INSZoom’s 4th Annual Global Immigration & Mobility Conference (GIMC) will take place in Bangalore, India on November 11, 2010. This event, the leading global mobility conference in India, is being hosted and organized by INSZoom.com Inc., the world’s leading immigration Software Company.
At this year’s GIMC conference, immigration management and human resources professionals from many of the world’s leading international businesses will participate as attendees. This year’s conference will include sessions on the ways that the global economy affects immigration policies and strategies, new management strategies for employee on-boarding and compliance, I-9 compliance strategies, risk management and the value that immigration departments deliver to international corporate entities.
The keynote speaker for the November GIMC conference will be Som Mittal, President, NASSCOM. Mittal is one of the leading experts in global technology management; in his illustrious career, he has held key leadership positions at Compaq, SRF, Wipro and other leading international organizations.
“The Global Immigration & Mobility Conference is the premier event of the year for professionals in immigration and human resources that work with global employee bases,” says Umesh Vaidyamath, CEO of INSZoom. “This is the key opportunity for HR and immigration specialists to learn about the latest changes and updates in technology, global economy, immigration legislation and emerging markets.”
Other speakers and panelists at the 4th Annual Global Immigration & Mobility Conference include immigration professionals from companies such as Wipro, Infosys, Mphasis an HP Company, Microland, Biocon, Accenture, KPIT Cummins, Capgemini and Computer Science Corporation, as well as leading immigration attorneys from Fragomen, Del Rey, Bernsen and Loewy, LLP and Fakhoury Law Group.
Murali Kakolu, Head-Global Immigration Services at Cognizant Technology Solutions, while delivering his speech at GIMC last year said, “In this digital world, the face of business has changed drastically over the past ten years”. To understand the most demanding challenges you face when managing a global workforce, you need to hear a wealth of best practice case studies on international deployment management from a range of speakers/organizations. My view is that GIMC has been addressing this aspect and specially designing its programs to focus in-house Immigration / HR professionals responsible for the immigration management & administration of international employees while encouraging working with the top notch immigration advisors / law firms for their highest immigration governance across the globe.
“Last year’s conference was a true learning experience and an exceptional forum in which immigration and mobility professionals could share their thoughts on best practices and challenges confronting global immigration professionals,” said Stella Nagesh, Associate Leader of Immigration Services at Mphasis HP Company. “The speakers covered a wide range of vital global immigration topics, including how immigration impacts business and its profit margins and was a true ‘looking forward’ event. The conference provided valuable insights that could be translated into the day-to-day work we engage in.”
In the new world order, global mobility is going to be at the forefront in terms of success factors for growth of nations. The challenges that face the industry on this front are collective and the Global Immigration and Mobility Conference provides an apt platform for professionals to meet and discuss these challenges. Such forums are extremely helpful and, in my view, essential for the industry as a whole to find better ways to manage their workforce across nations” said Eshan Joshi, Associate Vice President – HRD at Infosys.
“GIMC 2009 was a great forum for immigration professionals to discuss the issues and challenges of immigration compliance,” said Noorulla Khan, Program Lead of Immigration & Visa Operations at IBM India Pvt. Ltd. “Being able to hear about immigration best practices and compliance from representatives from major IT companies was very valuable and the conference provided ample opportunity for networking.”
Learn More
Learn more online at http://www1.inszoom.com/GIMC2010/index.html or by calling (US) 925-244-0600 Extn. 206, (India) 91-80-6696 9735
About INSZoom: The Global Immigration & Mobility Conference is hosted and organized by INSZoom.com Inc. With headquarters in San Ramon, CA, and operations in UK and India, INSZoom is a leading immigration case management software company that helps corporations, enterprises, law firms, and consultants with the right software in case initiation, workflow management, I-9 and E-Verify compliancy. Founded in 1999, INSZoom today includes Microsoft, Motorola, IBM, Wipro, Cognizant, and other leading firms as clients. For more information, please contact press(at)inszoom(dot)com
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Fight the New World Order with Global Non Compliance 3/3
Understand your enemy and understand the weapons they use so you may then use those same weapons in reverse. The money system is the head of the snake. Cut the head off the snake and the rest of it will whither and die. The time for talk is over and the time has come for action. It is now time for the people of the world to stop complying with the system. Everyone. Stop complying with it and you will shut it down. And the best form of non compliance is love. Approach every issue with love. It is much easier to fight for principles than to live up to them and it takes a far braver man to stand up for what is right and spit in the face of authority than it does to blindly follow orders due to fear of the consequences. Understand that we are all one and the key to real change and unity in this world lies with love. Its time to shut them down and starve them out. Start NOW! Please share and rate. Hi resolution copies of this film may be downloaded from thecrowhouse.com
Video Rating: 4 / 5
For high quality, dual layer DVD’s, please visit my MySpace page (www.myspace.com ) or email me at john.nada@hotmail.co.uk Some of the topics covered in the film: The New World Order, Federal Reserve, Bilderberg Group, Trilateral Commission, Council on Foreign Relations, North American Union, the Rockefeller/Rothschild families, Freemasonry, Bohemian Grove, the Illuminati, Illuminati symbolism, Problem-Reaction-Solution, 9-11, war profiteering, the phony ‘War on Terrorism’, the impending ‘Big Brother Surveillance Society’, the war on civil liberties, microchipping, mind control, media control and ‘education system’ indoctrination. Featuring: Alex Jones, David Icke, Aaron Russo, Jordan Maxwell, G. Edward Griffin, Jim Marrs, Bill Hicks, Daniel Estulin, Jim Tucker, Ted Gunderson, Anthony Hilder, Professor Steven Jones, Webster Tarpley, George Carlin, John Taylor Gatto, Charlotte Iserbyt, Dave vonKleist, Stan Monteith and others… Please spread the word as much as you can! Google Video version: video.google.co.uk Torrent: thepiratebay.org
Video Rating: 4 / 5
Incredible Fox News Exclusive “America For Sale” New World Order Sells USA Sovereignty
Incredibly, A Fox News Hannity Guest, Jerome Corsi, exposes what’s really going on in our country and how it is being bankrupted by design, including the very individuals doing it. A TRUE MUST SEE. Criminals have taken over our country and are destroying our sovereignty! Rate and share with everyone.
Duration : 0:7:29
“TYRANNY” – extended trailer
This is the official trailer for the Tyranny series.
The new series from Weatherman films about a man who begins having visions of a threatening future which leads him on a worldwide journey to expose a twisted conspiracy involving giant corporations which monitor and control the lives of millions of people.
For more info: http://www.tyranny.tv
Duration : 0:3:33
“Unquenchable Russia”, or Forbidden Themes in Nabokov’s Prose
“…What I feel to be the real modern world is the world the artist creates, his own mirage, which becomes a new mir (“world” in Russian) by the very act of his shedding, as it were, the age he lives in” . Such an answer Nabokov once gave to an interviewer who was interested in his opinion regarding the modern world and contemporary politics. The book which contains this interview as well as many others, is entitled Strong Opinions, and, indeed, Nabokov is well-known not only for his brilliant fiction but for his original, independent and uncompromising views on creativity, art and the place of artist in the world. Whenever interviewed, he avoided discussion of “general ideas” such as social, political and moral issues and asserted that such global concerns lay outside the realm of art: “A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual, and only the individual reader is important to me. I don’t give a damn for the group, the community, the masses, and so forth… There can be no question that what makes a work of fiction safe from larvae and rust is not its social importance but its art, only its art . A work of art, for Nabokov, is a world in itself, brought to life by one’s creative imagination. It leads its own independent existence, unrelated to its historical surroundings and realities. In the introduction to his Lectures on Literature Nabokov explains once again: “…The real writer, the fellow who sends planets spinning and models a man asleep and eagerly tampers with the sleeper’s rib, that kind of author has no given values at his disposal: he must create them himself. The art of writing is a futile business if it does not imply first of all the art of seeing the world as the potentiality of fiction” . In this statement, visions of cosmic grandeur and an obvious reference to the story of Adam and Eve reflect a parallel between creator-artist and creator-God. In one of his interviews Nabokov explicitly brings out this comparison: “A creative writer must study carefully the works of his rivals, including the Almighty. He must possess the inborn capacity not only of recombining but of re-creating the given world” .
Nabokov’s position is, to a degree, a reaction to the situation in Soviet Russia, where demands of the state dominated the needs of a human being, where the individual was suppressed by the collective and details by generalities. He asserts once again the power and independence of personal creativity, the ability of one’s imagination to build worlds of its own, and makes a sharp distinction between a work of fiction and everything outside of it, including the personality of its creator. “Literature is invention. Fiction is fiction. To call a story a true story is an insult to both truth and art” .
Nabokov insisted on a specific approach to literature from the readers as well. He renounced the usual tendencies of identifying oneself with a book’s characters, searching for clues to the social and political realities of the time the work was written, or trying to form “general ideas” about a book without absorbing all its specific details. Emotional involvement, he pointed out, could also prevent the reader from objective appreciation of the work “…A wise reader reads the book of genius not with his heart, not so much with his brain, but with his spine. It is there that occurs the telltale tingle even though we must keep a little aloof, a little detached when reading” .
Nabokov avoided formulating his ideas under the famous slogan “art for art’s sake” just as he avoided labels of all kinds, but this well-known phrase can undoubtedly be used to describe his views and attitudes towards literature. In this hierarchy of values, aesthetic concerns dominate all others, and the influence of a great work of art on its reader is limited to a “tingle in the spine”. However, it remains to be seen, to what extent Nabokov’s ideas penetrate his own fiction; whether his novels are entirely a product of his creative imagination or a result of the deep personal experience that saturates them with great intensity.
Nabokov changed countries and languages during his creative life, and it is interesting to analyze whether these changes affected his books. Comparing two of Nabokov’s novels, The Gift, written in Russian mostly in Berlin of the 1930s, and Pale Fire, written in English at a much later date, can provide an insight into these questions.
As Nabokov mentioned in the foreword to The Gift, “the main heroine” of the novel is Russian literature, and the main character is a writer, an emigre author Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev, who shares many autobiographical details with Nabokov. Like Nabokov during his post-Cambridge years, Fyodor lives in Berlin of the 1920s, writes poetry and makes a living by giving lessons in English and French. He leads, for the most part, a solitary existence, devoting his time first and foremost to literature. Happy childhood in St. Petersburg, love of butterflies and chess problems, synesthesia, – all this Fyodor has in common with Nabokov. Description of certain episodes mirrors incidents from Nabokov’s own life, depicted much later in his autobiographical book Speak, Memory, – for example, the story of a childhood illness: high fever, obsession with numbers and a huge Faber pencil, given as a gift by the mother.
Perhaps, the most significant trait that Fyodor shares with Nabokov is passionate love of literary language, faith in the power of the written word: “Since there were things he (Fyodor) wanted to express just as naturally as unrestrainedly as the lungs want to expand, hence words suitable for breathing ought to exist” . Fyodor reflects on his youthful interest in rhyme and meter, analyzing the very mechanisms by which words interact and fit together like pieces of a puzzle to form the harmonious whole of a poem. Fyodor shares Nabokov’s dislike of generalities such as social issues or psychiatry. When he briefly considers the possibility of fulfilling his acquaintance, Mme. Chernyshevski’s yet unvoiced request to write about her son, he explains his aversion to the idea as follows: “I would have become enmired involuntarily in a “deep” social-interest novel with a disgusting Freudian reek” .
Most clearly, Fyodor’s (and Nabokov’s) views on literature are expressed in Fyodor’s (imaginary) conversations with Koncheyev – a fellow emigre poet, the only one whose work he admires and whose opinions he considers valuable. When Fyodor and Koncheyev leave a literary gathering and walk together down the street, a unique, brilliant dialogue, filled with allusions to various works of Russian literature, takes place between them. “…There are only two kinds of books: bedside and wastebasket. Either I love a writer fervently, or throw him away entirely” , – declares Fyodor, and the two proceed to discuss what, in their opinion, is the best and the worst in the works by famous Russian writers. Both are utterly uninterested in “general ideas” or the moral significance of the writings they talk about (aspects which always attracted Russian critics and gained new importance in the Soviet period), and all they do is lovingly point out purely artistic findings of this or that writer. They praise Leskov’s Jesus – “the ghostly Galilean, cool and gentle, in a robe the color of ripening plum” or “the gray sheen of Mme. Odintsev’s black silks” in Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons. Speaking of dismissed Dostoyevski, Fyodor notes: “In the Karamazovs, there is somewhere a circular mark left by a wet wine glass on an outdoor table”, – and that, for him, is the only thing “worth saving” . As for several writers known for their beautiful depictions of nature, Fyodor ruthlessly criticizes them for mistakes in their descriptions of natural phenomena: “My father used to find all kinds of howlers in Turgenev’s and Tolstoy’s hunting scenes and descriptions of nature, and as for the wretched Aksakov, let’s not even discuss his disgraceful blunders in this field” . All these statements obviously echo Nabokov’s own approach to literature, with his love of detail, his insistence on accurate knowledge of the natural world and dismissal of any other criteria in judging works of literature.
Nabokov’s belief in the power of deception and invention in creating fiction frequently finds expression in his attempts to mislead the reader, to establish this or that false move in the development of the plot, which, after a few pages, turns out to be an illusion, a figment of the character’s imagination. The whole exchange between Fyodor and Koncheyev proves to be such an illusion: “Whose business is it that actually we parted at the very first corner, and that I have been reciting a fictitious dialogue with myself as supplied by a self-teaching handbook of literary inspiration?” However, the significance of this non-existent conversation in the novel is not limited to expression of opinions on art and display of Nabokov’s mystification devices. It shows the extent of Fyodor’s loneliness, the absence of interlocutors with whom he could share his extensive knowledge of literature and love of language: the degree of detachment from the surrounding world. In his book Speak, Memory Nabokov describes the way native Europeans were perceived by Russian immigrants in Germany or France: “These aborigines were to the mind’s eye as flat and transparent as figures cut out of cellophane, and although we used their gadgets, applauded their clowns, picked their roadside plums and apples, no real communication, of the rich human sort so widespread in our own midst, existed between us and them” . The Gift recreates that atmosphere of cultural and human isolation in which Fyodor has to dwell. Deprived of his own cultural environment, Fyodor feels nothing but resentment towards the German-speaking world he is trapped in. “The Russian conviction that the German is in small numbers vulgar and in large numbers – unbearably vulgar was, he knew, a conviction unworthy of an artist” , – and still he cannot help it, as he directs all his irrational hatred at a German who pushes him in a bus (and who, ironically, turns out to be a Russian).
Like Nabokov, Fyodor is trilingual, but his French and English in his current situation serve a purely utilitarian purpose, whereas Russian remains the language of his soul and his art. Riding a bus to one of his tedious teaching jobs, Fyodor thinks of himself: “…there he is, a special, rare and as yet undescribed and unnamed variant of man, and he is occupied with God knows what, rushing from lesson to lesson, wasting his youth on a boring and empty task, on the mediocre teaching of foreign languages – when he has his own language, out of which he can make anything he likes – a midge, a mammoth, a thousand different clouds” . This is why there are hardly any examples of word play and language switch in The Gift.
On the way to yet another hateful lesson Fyodor becomes completely immersed in the memories of Russia and his past life there, – memories ”swift and senseless, visiting him like an attack of a fatal illness at any hour, in any place” . The warm, sunny vision of the Russian countryside after a short summer rain stands out in such a sharp contrast with the surrounding colorless reality and the upcoming encounter with a hopeless pupil, that Fyodor ends up skipping the lesson and going home to his writings. This is another theme expressed in The Gift with great emotional power – the theme of nostalgia, longing for the lost homeland. Whenever faced with the question about Russia during his interviews, Nabokov gave replies such as “all the Russia I need is always with me” or “exile means to an artist only one thing – the banning of his books” . Sometimes, however, he speaks of Russia quite differently: “In the first decade of our dwindling century, during trips with my family to Western Europe, I imagined, in bedtime reveries, what it would be like to become an exile who longed for a remote, sad and (right epithet coming) unquenchable Russia, under the eucalypti of exotic resorts. Lenin and his police nicely arranged the realization of that fantasy” .
References to Russia in Nabokov’s novels, particularly The Gift, bear a trace of an overwhelming and bitter sense of loss, coming, undoubtedly, from personal experience. Like Nabokov, Fyodor transforms his inner world into art, and his poetry, born out of childhood memories, justifies, as he says, the years spent in exile. But even creative fulfillment in literature cannot fully relieve Fyodor of his nostalgia, which sometimes becomes almost a physical sensation: “For a long time he had wanted to express somehow that it was in his feet that he had the feeling of Russia, that he could touch and recognize all of her with his soles, as a blind man feels with his palms” . Again and again, he imagines an impossible return to his familiar and changed country: “And when will we return to Russia? What idiotic sentimentality, what a rapacious groan must our innocent hope convey to people in Russia. But our nostalgia is not historical – only human- how can one explain this to them?” Immediately following these lines is one of Nabokov’s central thoughts expressed through the words of his character and given a somewhat ironic ending: “It is easier for me, of course, than for another to live outside Russia, because I know for certain that I shall return – first because I took away the keys to her, and secondly because, no matter when, in a hundred, two hundred years, I shall live there in my books – or at least in some researcher’s footnote. There; now you have a historical hope, a literary-historical one…”
In this passage, there are two distinct perspectives on Russia, two different ways of perception – that of an artist and that of a simple human being, and it is the more independent, proud and detached position of an artist that Nabokov prefers to present to the world. He always vigorously protested against being identified with his characters, and, perhaps, it was his way of concealing that part of himself, which contained his own human feelings and dreams, often painful, often helplessly irresolvable. Nevertheless, just like in one of Fyodor’s childhood memories colors leak into his vision of letters and irrevocably affect his perception of language, this private and forbidden world of Nabokov inevitably enters his fiction in various guises and through different characters. Besides the theme of nostalgia, there is another highly personal development of the plot in The Gift, and it is Fyodor’s relationship with his father. Konstantin Godunov-Cherdyntsev is an explorer who is also very absorbed in his occupation and uninterested in the major upheavals that occur in Russia. In 1917, despite the troubled situation in Russia, he departs on one of his expeditions and never returns. It is another loss that haunts Fyodor: even though there is hardly any hope of seeing his father again, he keeps dreaming of his return, imagining that one day he would meet his father on the street, or hear a phone call… In one of the most poignant episodes in the novel, the phone rings, after all, in the middle of the night, and Fyodor rushes to the house of his former landlady along the streets of Berlin which suddenly become transformed into a beautiful, mysterious world somewhat reminiscent of St. Petersburg in a white night. Fyodor enters the room and sees his father. “With a moan and a sob Fyodor stepped toward him, and in the collective sensation of woolen jacket, big hands and the tender prickle of trimmed mustaches there swelled an ecstatically happy, living, enormous, paradisal warmth in which his icy heart melted and dissolved” . And again, almost unbearably this time, the whole scene turns out to be one of Nabokov’s false twists, and Fyodor wakes up from yet another dream to a cold and empty morning.
Nabokov denied a work of art any kind of “truth” aside from artistic one, but the episode with Fyodor’s father radiates with human truth: warmth, longing, vulnerability, the void of shattered hopes… One just has to remember the tragic death of Nabokov’s own father, to understand where all this is coming from.
In The Gift, covers are often transparent, and its hero is presented from multiple angles. He is not just a writer who “treats life as a possibility of fiction”, he is a human being who sees the world through the prism of his own experience, his own joys and sorrows.
The Gift was the last novel Nabokov wrote in Russian. In 1940, he immigrated to the United States and, since then, wrote his major works only in English. The change, as he said, was not easy: “My complete switch from Russian prose to English prose was exceedingly painful – like learning anew to handle things after losing seven or eight fingers in an explosion” . Pale Fire, one of Nabokov’s English novels, was written partially at the end of his stay in America, partially in Switzerland, where Nabokov spent his later years. The novel has important structural and thematic similarities to The Gift. Like The Gift, where a whole separate chapter is devoted to Fyodor’s biography of Chernyshevsky, a book on its own, Pale Fire contains a work of literature within it – a long poem written by an American poet John Shade. The rest of the novel is a commentary, which for the most part has nothing to do with the poem itself. It is an elaborate story of remote Zembla, whose king has been swept off the throne by the revolution and fled the country. Gradually, it becomes clear that Charles Kinbote, Shade’s neighbor and the author of the commentary, is himself the fugitive king. Therefore, as in The Gift, there is a theme of exile and a theme of creativity, though in Pale Fire they take quite a different development.
As Kinbote explains, “the name Zembla is a corruption not of the Russian zemlya, but of Semblerland, a land of reflections, of “resemblers” . Zemblan language resembles several European languages at the same time. There are obvious traces of Russian in it, and some words are borrowed almost unchanged: for example, there is a picture of bogtyr (bogatyr’ in Russian) in a Zemblan history book, and there are “stone-faced, square-shouldered komizars” (Russian: commissar) maintaining order on Zemblan streets after the revolution. Besides, French and German can be vaguely discerned in other phrases. “Minnamin, Gut mag alkan, Pern dirstan (my darling, God makes hungry, the Devil thirsty)” , – a Zemblan nurse says to Kinbote, and one hears, besides the Russian “alkat’” and, possibly, the English “pernicious”, “mon amie”, “Gott”, and the first person of the German “mochten”.
Nabokov in his interviews stressed that Zembla is not Russia, and, indeed, there is another Russia in the novel, a totalitarian state that contributes to the Zemblan revolution. Kinbote talks about “the tainted gold and the robot troops that a powerful police state from its vantage ground a few sea miles away was pouring into the Zemblan Revolution” . Kinbote’s constantly talks about Zembla, but his memories of it lack that depth of human feeling, which marks Fyodor’s nostalgia. Even though Kinbote repeats again and again “my Zembla”, “dazzling Zembla” , tenderness that shines through the best pages of The Gift, is missing from his story. It is essentially a story of himself and his escape from the country. For a king, Kinbote shows a remarkable lack of interest in the revolution that struck his country and the possible causes which led to it. He is more preoccupied with aesthetic and literary pleasures and calls the whole business of politics “a tiresome subject” . As for the revolution, all he can say about it is that it was “tedious and unnecessary” . In Kinbote’s attitude, there is some of Nabokov’s own indifference towards social and political issues. On the whole, the theme of exile is treated in the novel with certain coldness and detachment, but there are passages, which by their warmth and profound lyricism can be compared to The Gift. For example, Kinbote comments on his roommate who gets up early in morning and plants flowers with a very curious name: Heliotropium turgenevi. “This is the flower whose odor evokes with timeless intensity the dusk, and the garden bench, and a house of painted wood in a distant northern land” . Even aside from the reference to Turgenev, it is clear that this land, for Nabokov, is no other than Russia, – not the monstrous police state in the vicinity of Zembla, but the real, immortal, beloved Russia of Nabokov’s memory. And this short passage retains more emotional freshness and power than colorful descriptions of Zemblan mountains that have no counterpart in the author’s childhood recollections.
It seems that, to Kinbote, being in exile means not so much the loss of the homeland as the loss of his name and title (which he now has to hide), and thus partially the loss of his identity, and in this way his isolation and detachment is more complete than that of Fyodor in The Gift. One of the critics of Pale Fire interprets his behavior as follows: “…he is trying to get the poet John Shade to confirm his identity, to validate the Zemblan reality which is his hope of salvation by turning it into a poem” . With maniacal persistence Kinbote keeps talking with Shade about Zembla: “I mesmerized him with it, I saturated him with my vision, I pressed upon him, with a drunkard’s wild generosity, all that I was helpless myself to put into verse” . Kinbote calls his relationship with the poet “friendship”, but, in fact, he cannot care less about Shade as a human being with his own hopes and sorrows. While commenting on the poem, he utterly neglects the parts about Shade’s wife and daughter. Sybil Shade, who protects her husband from his neighbor’s intrusions, for Kinbote, is just as annoying obstacle in the way, and to him, the tender lines that Shade devotes to his wife are nothing but “embarrassing intimacies” . Kinbote haughtily deals with the theme of Shade’s daughter, Hazel’s, suicide, obviously a very painful and personal subject for the poet, as if it was merely a stylistic device: “The whole thing strikes me as too labored and long, especially since the synchronization device has been already worked to death by Flaubert and Joyce” . When Kinbote feels lonely and afraid in his empty house, he wishes that Shade had a heart attack, – just to have an excuse to come over and escape loneliness and fear. At the end of the novel, when Shade has been mistakenly shot by the assassin, his “friend” is in no hurry to call for help: instead, he rushes to hide the poem, which, he thinks, contains the story of his own life.
In comparison to Kinbote, John Shade appears to be a much more appealing character, and he possesses some traits that bring more human warmth into his image: he can be lazy, he likes hearty meals, brandy and wine; he loves his wife and daughter and is generally more tolerant towards people who are not as bright and talented as he is. Nabokov gives his character some of his most cherished thoughts. For example, Shade, who is also a teacher of literature, expresses his views on teaching: “First of all, dismiss ideas, and social background, and get the freshman to shiver, to get drunk on the poetry of Hamlet or Lear, to read with his spine and not with his skull” . However, since Shade’s personality is seen in the novel only through Kinbote’s uncaring eyes, his inner world is more or less concealed from the reader. It is only through Shade’s poem that one can glimpse into the questions, which preoccupy the poet. The poem, on the whole, is a painful, difficult search for meaning, an attempt to make sense of the whole puzzle of human life and death, to find a way of transcending one’s mortality. No human thought or emotion can relieve one from being trapped in one’s own finite world. Everything fails except art: art for its own sake, art that contains a unique, perfectly harmonized inner reality, which can be perceived as a reflection of a greater pattern:
I feel I understand
Existence, or at least a minute part,
Of my existence, only through my art,
In terms of combinational delight…
“Combinational delight”, indeed, is important not only in Shade’s poem but in the whole novel. As in The Gift, artistic detail is a focus of concentration in Pale Fire, but here attention is focused on an even subtler level where language itself is analyzed. Pale Fire is an example of extremely dense prose where individual words are more than just carriers of meaning: they become, in a way, themselves a subject of the novel. One of Shade’s warmest images of his family together is a memory of the evenings when both he and Sybil helped their daughter to understand really obscure words from her English textbook. A difference of one letter in the words “mountain” and “fountain” becomes crucial in the story of Shade’s attempt to penetrate the mystery of the hereafter. The book is filled with examples of word play, often involving several languages, and references to numerous works of literature (some of which are likely to be Nabokov’s own inventions). In Shade’s poem, there are such peculiar combinations as: “Fra Karamazov, mumbling his inept all is allowed” , which is a mixture of Alyosha Karamazov, Raskol’nikov, and, perhaps, Italian painter Fra Angelico with his intensely spiritual religious art. But nobody in the novel is more involved in digging into words than Kinbote. He is constantly preoccupied with deciphering literary allusions, musing over interplay of words, meanings, rhymes and sounds. Nabokov mentioned in his lectures that a dictionary should be a necessary attribute of a good reader, and, ironically, Kinbote, who can hardly be called a good reader, dutifully follows the lines of Shade’s masterpiece with his dictionary. For the most part, he is obsessively searching references to Zembla and his own life story in the poem, but sometimes he simply takes aesthetic pleasure in certain lines of it:
“Lines 131-132: I was the shadow of the waxwing slain by feigned remoteness in the windowpane.
The exquisite melody of the two lines opening the poem is picked up here. The repetition of that long-drawn note is saved from monotony by the subtle variation in line 132 where the assonance between its second word and the rhyme gives the ear a kind of languorous pleasure as would the echo of some half-remembered sorrowful song…” Shade’s commentator genuinely enjoys the magic of words, and so does Nabokov, whose multilingualism, artistic sense and incomparable mastery of language found full expression in the creation of the truly marvelous poem, as well as other parts of the novel.
Perhaps, the refined world of literature allows Kinbote a way of escape from his troubled personal reality, and so it does for Shade, and, to a degree, for Fyodor in The Gift, and, ultimately, for Nabokov. In his commentary, Kinbote recounts an episode when someone in the presence of Shade tells a story of a mad railroad worker, who “thought he was God and began redirecting the trains”. “That (“mad”) is the wrong word”, – he (Shade) said. – “One should not apply it to a person who deliberately peels off a drab and unhappy past and replaces it with a brilliant invention” . Still, comparison of Nabokov’s novels shows that the most “brilliant invention” becomes truly alive only if the light of one’s own human experience, however “drab and unhappy”, illuminates it from within. In Pale Fire the walls sheltering Nabokov’s private world of memory and feeling are thicker than in The Gift, and the novel follows more closely Nabokov’s ideas of art as elegant deception, an entirely invented world which should be approached on aesthetic rather than emotional grounds. This is the major difference between Pale Fire and The Gift.
Time is likely to be one of the factors behind this change: Pale Fire was written almost twenty years later than The Gift, as greater and greater distance separated Nabokov from his Russian past with which he had stronger emotional bond than with the years spent abroad. Another important factor is, probably, language. Nabokov was very proud of his English works and repeatedly called himself an American writer, but sometimes he provided his readers with unexpected revelations such as: “My private tragedy, which cannot, indeed should not, be anybody’s concern, is that I had to abandon my natural language, my natural idiom, my rich, infinitely rich and docile Russian tongue, for a second-rate brand of English” . In another interview, when asked which language he considered the most beautiful, Nabokov replied: “My head says English, my heart, Russian, my ear, French” . It is possible to say that for him Russian conveyed emotional power, while English had more of an intellectual appeal, and this is one of the reasons why Pale Fire, written in English, appeals to the brain more than it does to feelings.
One of the most striking confessions that bridges Nabokov’s inner world with his public self exists in a poem. An Evening of Russian Poetry, written in English in 1945, is a rhymed presentation of a public lecture which Nabokov gives to an audience of American students, predominantly female. Russian poetry is the theme of the lecture, but Nabokov approaches it in the way typical for him: he does not talk about schools, trends and periods. Again, he speaks of letters, shapes, individual intricate details, and hidden tenderness shines through his words, staying invisible for his listeners. They ask him questions about his favorite trees and stones, echoing that insensitive critic from The Gift, whose “discussion of Koncheyev’s book boiled down to his answering for the author a kind of implied questionnaire (Your favorite flower? Favorite hero? Which virtue do you prize most?)” In Nabokov’s discussion of Pushkin and Nekrasov everything merges and melts together: the sky and the grass, the beauty of verse and human feeling, – and inevitable theme of exile. Nabokov speaks of memories, saying openly: “I must remind you in conclusion that I am followed everywhere and that space is collapsible” . His private tragedy is lost on his young listeners, whose innocent inquiry prompts what becomes the most remarkable ending of a poem:
How would you say “delightful talk” in Russian?
How would you say “good night”?
Oh, that would be:
Bessonnitza, tvoy vzor oonyl i strashen;
lubov moya, otstoopnika prostee.
(Insomnia, your stare is dull and ashen,
my love, forgive me this apostasy.)
All of Nabokov’s carefully hidden private world that, he insists, “cannot, indeed should not, be anybody’s concern”, is suddenly revealed in these poignant lines: long nights, loneliness, the feeling of guilt over abandoning one’s language and nostalgia for inaccessible, unforgettable, “unquenchable Russia”.
Bibliography
1). Kernan, Alvin B. “Reading Zemblan: The Audience Disappears in Nabokov’s Pale Fire”. Vladimir Nabokov (Modern Critical Views). Ed. Harold Bloom. Chelsea House Publishers, 1987. 101-125.
2). ???????, ????????. ???. ??????: ??????, 1990.
3). Nabokov, Vladimir. The Gift. New York: Capricorn Books, G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1970.
4). —. Lectures on Literature. Harcourt Brace & Company, 1982.
5). —. Pale Fire. New York: Quality Paperback Book Club, 1993.
6). —. Poems and Problems. McGraw-Hill International, Inc. 1970.
7). —. Speak, Memory. New York: Quality Paperback Book Club, 1993.
8). —. Strong Opinions. McGraw-Hill International, Inc. 1973.
Elena Koutcherova
http://www.articlesbase.com/fiction-articles/unquenchable-russia-or-forbidden-themes-in-nabokovs-prose-204030.html