Context
Reading Vladimir Nabokov
Keith Gessen
If Nabokov was, as he often claimed, a God
in his fictional universes, and his loyal readers were, as he sometimes
called them, little Nabokovs, then the posthumous Nabokov has produced
a very jealous bunch of little Gods. How they hate one another! The
poststructuralists sneer at the befuddled early reviewers; his second
biographer takes every possible opportunity to denigrate his first; the
Nabokov Estate wages a campaign of intellectual terror against all
would-be heretics; and everyone seems to loathe Edmund Wilson. Nabokov
has many admirers, the admiring Martin Amis once grumbled, but they are
"the wrong kind of admirers." It’s true. Personally, I have a problem
with the French. You know who I mean—the aesthetes, the
punsters, the turtlenecked acolytes of reading-as-wanking and
literature as play. Nabokov is their favorite writer, the convenient
novelistic illustration of their theoretical axioms. For all the swipes
he took at the various hermeneutic rackets of the American academy—Pale Fire, for one—he eventually became, as Gore Vidal put it way back in 1973, "just the sort of writer the racketeers like to teach." Nabokov
played right into their hands, of course, with the obsessive
lepidopterism, the inveterate snobbery, the photo caption in Speak, Memory that actually takes the trouble to point out the "half-empty package of
Gauloises cigarettes . . . between the ink bottle and the overful
ashtray." And his puns, his games, all those doubles doubling and
artifices multiplying—he is as perfectly suited to the
poststructuralist "play of signs" as T. S. Eliot’s dense poetry was to
the New Critics’ close reading, and perhaps as much of a culture hero,
in certain narrowing circles, as we’ve had since Eliot himself. It was
as if Nabokov had glimpsed the legions of Barthesans (rhymes with
partisans) coming around some queerly straightened bend in time, and
liked what he saw. But. There is a short letter Nabokov sent to
Solzhenitsyn shortly after the dissident writer was finally expelled
from the Soviet Union in 1974. "I was happy to learn today of your
passage to the free world from our dreadful homeland," wrote Nabokov: .
. . I doubt if even you have read [the] poems, articles, stories [and]
novels . . . in which, ever since the vile times of Lenin, I have not
ceased to mock the philistinism of Sovietized Russia and to thunder
against the very kind of vicious cruelty of which you write and of
which you will now write freely. The newspapers cannot decide
in which country you will settle; but if you should happen to visit
Switzerland, let me know and we shall get together. I never make official "political" statements. Privately, though, I could not refrain from welcoming you. Mostly he seemed to thunder against other people’s thundering. In
interviews, lectures, and a series of prefaces to the American
translations of his Russian novels, he declared again and again his
scorn for the "topical trash" that was the (supposedly progressive)
Literature of Ideas. "I composed the Russian original [of Invitation to a Beheading] some fifteen years after escaping from the Bolshevist regime and just
before the Nazi regime reached its full volume of welcome," he yawned.
"The question whether or not my seeing both in terms of one dull
beastly farce had any effect on this book, should concern the good
reader as little as it does me." In an early version of what now
arrives in the form of neoconservative broadsides against political
correctness, he went so far as to equate the pressure of
nineteenth-century progressive criticism with the censorship of the
Tsars. "Government and revolution," he wrote, "the Tsar and the
Radicals, were both philistines in art." And philistines he didn’t like. In fact, philistinism—or its less cumbersome and richer Russian equivalent, poshlost—is
the central term in Nabokov’s critical vocabulary. It was a word the
enthusiasm for which was undampened by repetition. But the energy
Nabokov devoted to discerning and then speculating upon the qualities
of people and books he despised was not merely spent to keep his nose
out of joint. "To apply the deadly label of poshlism to
something," he explained, "is not only an esthetic judgment but also a
moral indictment." It is, furthermore, an indictment applicable even to
empires: the Soviet Union, writes Nabokov, "a country of moral
imbeciles, of smiling slaves and poker faced bullies, has stopped
noticing poshlism." A thundering Nabokov is just the Nabokov we need, and the tirades against poshlism—those
are the thunder. Which helps to explain, as well, some of Nabokov’s
more difficult narrative moves, the same ones capable of producing the
impression that, though he writes a dense, high-pitched prose, Nabokov
is somehow cold and aloof. One of the most interesting tricks in this
regard is the misdirected affection, a ploy we find time and again in
the work. In The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Nabokov’s
lovely first novel in English, Sebastian takes a long journey to the
village where his mother died. He stays in her hotel, imagines what she
saw and thought on her last days on earth: "I felt sure," he writes,
"that there had been before her eyes that same bed of purple pansies."
Later, he learns that not only has he been in the wrong hotel, but in
the wrong village entirely. In Speak, Memory, the only direct
mention Nabokov makes of his father’s 1922 assassination occurs in a
scene in which the father does not die at all, but has, instead, just
narrowly escaped fighting a duel. In Pale Fire, John Shade is assassinated (perhaps) by accident. Lolita relates the tragedy of a monstrously misdirected affection—Humbert
Humbert’s passion is so overwhelming, no one, much less a not entirely
interesting twelve-year-old girl, could possibly hope to reciprocate. It
would be easy enough to read all these instances of disappointed
emotion as excessive literary gamesmanship, a spectacular instance of
what Trilling called Nabokov’s "moral mobility." But that would be to
ignore the thunder. Nabokov is thundering here against the imposition
of reality onto the significant play of the emotions. He suggests his
intention in a typically grandiose pronouncement to his friend and
correspondent, Edmund Wilson: "It has never occurred to critics to note
that Hamlet does kill the king in the middle of the play; that it turns
out to be Polonius does not alter the fact of Hamlet having gone and
done it." Nabokov’s misdirected affections attempt to dissociate his
characters from the objects of their emotions, to grant them autonomy
by freeing them from the oppressive cause-and-effect of human
relations. And he’s right, in a way: for a moment there, thrusting his
sword through the arras, Hamlet did experience the killing of the
king—though it would perhaps be going too far to suggest that Polonius,
after a life of slavish mendacity, died a king’s death. If an
attack on narrative conventions is an odd sort of thundering—and it
certainly would have seemed odd to Solzhenitsyn—it was one firmly
founded on Nabokov’s belief in the sanctity and independent meaning of
the printed word. To put it swiftly and crudely—and Nabokov’s critical
judgments are often precisely that—the fundamental fact of Nabokov’s
life, the "syncopal kick," was his flight from the Bolsheviks in 1919.
What we need to understand about his twenty years l’entre deux guerres, when he quite neatly produced all his Russian novels, is that the
community for which he wrote, though it was bound by a common hatred
for the Bolsheviks and a fractious, shrill, and vibrant cultural life,
was not a nation. It lacked the land and the army and the political
reality to nurture the causal relationship between word and deed. The
Russian emigres controlled no city budgets, named no streets, and
culture, especially literature, became the only certain sign of their
existence. Simply to write a Russian as uncorrupted by cliché and as
unconcerned with fashionable nineteenth-century Ideas as Nabokov’s was
to thunder against Bolshevism. Make no mistake: Nabokov maintained a
very exalted notion, in moral-political terms, of his profession. He
was amazed by literature: "This capacity to wonder at trifles—no matter
the imminent peril—these asides of the spirit, these footnotes in the
volume of life are the highest form of consciousness." Imminent peril?
This is not a man who believes literature to be a version of chess. He
was the finest young novelist of the emigration—he was the Whites’
Great Hope—and nothing was ever so interesting to him as literature, no
other human creation, and certainly not humans themselves, excited his
admiration quite so profoundly as did the putting of words to paper. Like
many newly minted Americans, Nabokov worked to reinvent himself upon
new shores—but he did not fall upon us from the sky. What should be
made clear about his Russian work is that his poetry was
straightforwardly lyrical, emphatic, and peculiarly lacking in the
sleights and feints we associate with Nabokov—it is not, in short, very
interesting poetry. His Russian prose, too, though full of ironic
tricks and intricate detail, tilted toward the sentimental. He would
claim that his English was "second-rate" compared to his "infinitely
docile" Russian (and then admit to some discomfort over this arrogance
in his postscript to the Russian translation of Lolita), but
this may only prove that infinite docility, a limitless ease, is not
what great writing requires. What Nabokov managed in English he could
not do in Russian. Of a nostalgic old housekeeper in Speak, Memory, he writes: My dear friends—we must save Nabokov from the French! They are
the ones behind the books about Nabokov’s butterflies. Behind the
articles on mirrors and play. They probably organized last
summer’s tiresome display of Nabokov ephemera at the New York Public
Library, with Nabokov’s various pedantic recipes and quips dutifully
recorded in our intellectual magazines. They have domesticated his
thunder and made it trite. And we’ll never really know what he meant by
that phrase, incidentally, because Solzhenitsyn was never able to ask
him: despite Nabokov’s proffered invitation and despite Solzhenitsyn’s
passing through Switzerland on his way to the States, the two never
met. The younger writer contacted Nabokov and suggested a time. Nabokov
did not realize that a confirmation was expected. On the appointed day,
Solzhenitsyn and his wife Natalia approached the Montreaux
Palace-Hotel. Nabokov and Véra had requested a table for four and were
waiting patiently. At the last moment, the Solzhenitsyns lost their
nerve, and turned back. Perhaps it was for the best; one finds it
difficult to imagine two such disparate temperaments, with such
violently differing ideas on the nature of literature, getting along.
But one is probably mistaken. And that hour which the Nabokovs spent,
certain that the Solzhenitsyns were about to walk through the door—like
the night Sebastian Knight spent wondering at the wrong garden—was that
not real?
I am happy as well that your children will be attending schools for humans, not for slaves.
This is easily recognizable, classic Nabokov—the formulaic
contempt for "philistinism," the proud disdain for "official" politics—
only the "thunder" gives one pause. Now, Solzhenitsyn: Solzhenitsyn was
imprisoned, threatened, his manuscripts seized and himself finally
deported, all the while attempting to bring down a dictatorship. He
flung his defiance and the three volumes of Gulag Archipelago into their leering mugs. Solzhenitsyn, we can reasonably assent to
Nabokov’s formulation, thundered against vicious cruelty. But in what
way did Nabokov thunder?
She had spent all her life feeling miserable; this misery was
her native element; its fluctuations, its varying depths, alone gave
her the impression of moving and living. What bothers me is that a
sense of misery, and nothing else, is not enough to make a permanent
soul.
Emotion was not enough; detail was not enough. It took the trip
not only from poetry to prose but to the prose of another language to
uproot all traces of poshlism from his writing, to perform the
narrative twists of misdirected affection and open his characters to
experience. He was the subtlest thunderer of all.
