MONTREUX MOMENTS

Literature and Lepidoptera were on the minds of viewers on Monday at the opening of a photography show by Horst Tappe called “Nabokov in Montreux,” on exhibit at the Harriman Institute at Columbia University through April 22.

Co-sponsored by the Russian American Cultural Center and curated by Regina Khidekel, the show graces a 12th floor gallery space at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs building.

Taken between the years 1961-1977 in Montreux, Switzerland, the photos show Nabokov in various endeavors such as catching butterflies or buying Time magazine at a local kiosk. Mr. Tappe, who has photographed Picasso, Chaplin, and Hitchcock among other luminaries, focuses a skilled lens on Nabokov, showing the writer’s vivacity.

The Russian emigre novelist Nabokov fled Europe during World War II with his Jewish wife and son. He always considered it symbolic that the sole surviving relic of his past was the family suitcase.

In response to the question, “Why do you live in hotels?” Nabokov said, “It simplifies postal matters, it eliminates the nuisance of private ownership, it confirms me in my favorite habit – the habit of freedom.” Nabokov also composed chess problems, which found their way into the canon.

Among those at the opening were Nabokov’s niece, Marina Ledkovsky; Russian movie star, Irina Shmeleva; Vilna-born professor Elizabeth Kridl Valkenier, who is an expert on Russian painter, Ilya Repin, and whose father was Manfred Kridl, the great Polish literary critic whose papers reside in Butler Library. Also seen were Yvonne Simons, artist and vice president for education of the South Street Seaport Museum; writer Tatiana Pahlen; Jean-Claude Javet of the United Nations Population Fund; jazz and blues musician and composer Val Belin, known as “King B.”; photographer Fred George; Gabriela Eigensatz, cultural attache of the Consulate General of Switzerland. Nabokov’s renown helped bring out this crowd, even though he once somewhat disingenuously claimed, “Lolita is famous, not I. I am an obscure, doubly obscure, novelist with an unpronounceable name.”

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COMMENTING ON KURT

“He didn’t say much, but you knew what he meant,” Lotte Lenya once described her husband, composer Kurt Weill, as recalled by Writers in Performance moderator Steve Lawson. Mr. Lawson remembered her lecturing his Yale Drama School Class. “But what was he like as a director?” a questioner pressed Lenya. “I think I just told you,” she retorted.

The German immigrant who wrote the music for works as varied as “The Threepenny Opera,” “Knickerbocker Holiday,” and “Lady in the Dark” was described by the three authors of “Kurt Weill: A Life in Pictures and Documents” (Overlook) as a versatile genius who impacted the work Leonard Bernstein, Marc Blitzstein, and Steven Sondheim, among others. After the Monday night program at the Manhattan Theatre Club, editor David Farneth signed books with his co-authors, Elmar Juchem and Dave Stein.

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TALENTED TEACHER

“Lolita” was Nabokov’s famous book about sexual obsession. In teaching about personal essays to her journalism classes at New York University, The New School, and Mediabistro, Susan Shapiro suggests her students write about their obsessions. Taking her own advice, she recently published two memoirs, “Lighting Up” (Delacorte) about quitting her 27-year two-pack a day smoking habit, and “Five Men Who Broke My Heart” (Delacorte) about re-meeting her ex-boyfriends, which was just optioned by Sony Pictures. The six-figure deal, negotiated by her L.A. Agent, John Ufland, was complicated because she’s written so much first person: “In the end, they get the rights to my self-destructive relationships, but I get to keep rights to my self-destructive addictions,” Ms. Shapiro said.

Ms. Shapiro is reading Monday at Borders Bookstore at Park Avenue, at 57th Street, at 6:30 p.m. and also downtown at KGB Bar on April 19.

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‘WILD EXACTITUDE’

At the Small Press Center, Adam Gopnik, author of “Paris to the Moon” (Random House) spoke the other day on the New Yorker magazine and culture. He said the New Yorker’s early style was best captured by Joseph Mitchell, as one of “wild exactitude.”

It was first characterized by “a great facticity – using facts, respecting facts, loving facts, writing primarily not out of an opinion or attitude but a slowly constructed, inevitable seeming pyramid of facts.” Beyond that, Mr. Gopnik said, early New Yorker writers added “some romantic element of transformation – a peculiar, an idiosyncratic, or eccentric, or visionary element to raise it just above the level of the merely observed, the merely registered.”

Mr. Gopnik described the New Yorker tradition as rooted in American empiricism as well as in a comic tradition that takes things further and makes people laugh.

Mr. Gopnik made the audience laugh when told of a writing class he taught at a local university. He wanted to teach the students how to write by asking them to compose a parody of an author they admired: “I did it myself as young writers do and should do, to understand the mechanics” of writing. He found the 18 and 19 year olds disinclined to want to do it. Why? “They were all writing their memoirs!”

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IN PRAISE OF LUCID PROSE

“The interstitial moment that emerges through the rupture of language is an instance of hegemonic sublation,” said comparative literature professor Andre Aciman, parodying jargon-filled academic writing. He was introducing a panel at the CUNY Graduate Center Tuesday evening called “The Literary Editor in New York.”

Mr. Aciman later confessed to having made up that unwieldy sentence, which sounded like a cross between Hegel or Gramsci and an automotive manual. He summed it up as follows: “You wouldn’t talk that way to your partner at night.” Mr. Aciman stressed the need for clear prose in writing book reviews and cultural reportage, which aims to reach a wider audience than academia.

Moderated by the director of the New York Public Library’s Public programs, Paul Holdengraber, the wide-ranging panel offered the audience – many of whom were students – an overview of the profession and a few tips for the beginning reviewer.

The panel also addressed the larger picture. Musing about the business realities of literary publishing, Los Angeles Times Book Review editor Steve Wasserman recalled an anecdote about Arthur Koestler. The author of “Darkness at Noon” was once asked if he would rather have 100 readers in the present or 10 readers a century from now. He chose having ten readers 100 years hence, adding, “But I suppose such sentiment gives no comfort to my publisher, who still hopes to be in business a 100 years from now.”