As a reader I dearly love the short novel Death in Venice by Thomas Mann. The story of an old man obsessed with a beautiful boy is Thomas Mann’s only writing that I love, it is my beloved story, and a talk of it evokes a small whirl of emotions in my mind, for my beloved author Nabokov disliked T. Mann as a writer and attacked T. Mann’s works in every way. Nabokov’s hatreds to some good writers always seemed to be suspicious to me, because I suspected a kind of a jealousy in his attacks. Once, trying to explain the notion “platitude”, as we, his compatriots understand it, Nabokov cited as an example the short novel Death in Venice. That’s a little too thick, in my view, and bewildering (or, perhaps, as the author of the famous novel Pale Fire Nabokov showed his emphasized homophobia in this way? I really don’t know). Yet, when Nabokov first saw the movie Death in Venice, our beloved movie that all of us in the yahoogroup Ecclesia Antinoi love so much, he did not find any words to criticize Visconti’s beautiful and imaginative work. In all appearance Nabokov liked the movie; I think he was disarmed.
“...the head was poised like a flower, in incomparable loveliness. It was the head of Eros, with the yellowish bloom of Parian marble, with fine brows, and dusky clustering ringlets standing out in soft plenteousness over temples and ears”--the young Bithynian boy of the name of Antinous could be portrayed in this way.
“It seemed to him the pale and lovely Summoner out there smiled at him and beckoned: as though with the hand he lifted from his hip, he pointed outward as he hovered on before into an immensity of richest expectation”. (Thomas Mann, Death in Venice)
“Some shots of Bjorn Andresen, the Tadzio of the film, could be extracted from the frame and hung on the walls of the Louvre or the Vatican in Rome. For this is not a pretty youngster who is supposed to represent an object of perverted lust; that was neither novelist Mann's nor director-screen writer Visconti's intention. Rather, this is a symbol of a beauty allied to those which inspired Michelangelo's David and Da Vinci's Mona Lisa, and which moved Dante to seek ultimate aesthetic catharsis in the distant figure of Beatrice”. (Lawrence J. Quirk)
I'll be thankful for some new quotation on the subject.
