O Window in the Dark!
The Early Career of Vladimir Nabokov
appendix D: Parallel Scenes in Nabokov’s Novels and
Speak, Memory
In Despair, Hermann notes, “Every man with a keen
eye is familiar with those anonymously retold passages from
his past life: false-innocent combinations of details, which
smack revoltingly of plagiarism.” Despite the claims of many
critics concerning Nabokov’s “unworldliness,” he often draws
upon very specific recollections, and some of his novels are
filled with what he has called “autoplagiarism.” The
following passages are just a few of the many instances in
which Nabokov has paralleled his art with scenes from his
own life.
- from the Foreword to Mary: “I
had not consulted Mashenka when writing Chapter Twelve of
the autobiography a quarter of a century later; and now
that I have, I am fascinated by the fact that despite the
superimposed inventions . . . a headier extract
of personal reality is contained in the romantization
than in the autobiographer’s scrupulously faithful
account.”
- from Mary: “The fact was that
he had been waiting for her with such longing, had
thought so much about her during those blissful days
after the typhus, that he had fashioned her unique image
long before he actually saw her.”
from Speak, Memory: “During
the beginning of that summer and all through the previous
one, Tamara’s name had kept cropping up (with the feigned
naiveté so typical of Fate, when meaning business)
. . . as if Mother Nature were giving me
mysterious advance notices of Tamara’s existence.”
- from Mary: “In its small
diamond-shaped window frames were panes of
different-colored glass; if, say, you looked through a
blue one the world seemed frozen in a lunar trance;
through a yellow one, everything appeared extraordinarily
gay; through a red one, the sky looked pink and foliage
as dark as burgundy.”
from Speak, Memory: “But the
most constant source of enchantment during those readings
came from the harlequin pattern of colored panes inset in
a whitewashed framework on either side of the verandah.
. . . If one looked through blue glass, the
sand turned to cinders while inky trees swam in a
tropical sky. The yellow created an amber world infused
with an extra strong brew of sunshine. The red made the
foliage drip ruby dark upon a pink footpath. The green
soaked greenery in a greener green.”
- from Mary: “Some village
rowdy had linked their names by a short, crude verb,
which moreover he had misspelled.”
from Speak, Memory: “I
remember the coarse graffiti linking our first names, in
strange diminutives, on a certain white gate and, a
little apart from that village idiot scrawl, the adage
‘Prudence is the friend of Passion,’ in a bristly hand
well-known to me.”
- from Mary: “Presently,
through the streams of the night, there became visible
the slow rotation of columns, washed by the same gentle
whitish beam of his bicycle lamp; and there on the
six-columned porch of a stranger’s closed mansion Ganin
was welcomed by a blur of cool fragrance.
. . .”
from Speak, Memory: “As I
reached the top, my livid light flitted across the
six-pillared white portico at the back of my uncle’s
mute, shuttered manor. . . .”
- from Mary: “At this, their
first meeting in St. Petersburg, Mary seemed subtly
different, perhaps because she was wearing a hat and a
fur coat. From that day began the new, snowbound era of
their love. It was difficult to meet, long walks in the
frost were agonizing. . . .”
from Speak, Memory: “With the
coming of winter our reckless romance was transplanted to
grim St. Petersburg. We found ourselves horribly deprived
of the sylvan security we had grown accustomed to.
. . . This permanent quest for some kind of
refuge produced an odd sense of hopelessness, which, in
its turn, foreshadowed other, much later and lonelier,
roamings.”)
- from The Defense: “Slowly and
heavily, to the sound of creaking stairs, crackling
floorboards and shifting trunks, filling the whole house
with her presence, the French governess had first
appeared.”
from Speak, Memory: “I have
often noticed that after I had bestowed on the characters
of my novels some treasured item of my past, it would
pine away in the artificial world where I had so abruptly
placed it. . . . the portrait of my old French
governess, whom I once lent to a boy in one of my books,
is fading fast, now that it is engulfed in the
description of a childhood entirely unrelated to my own.
The man in me revolts against the fictionist, and here is
my desperate attempt to save what is left of poor
Mademoiselle. . . . A large woman, a very stout
woman, Mademoiselle rolled into our existence in December
1905. . . .”
- from Glory: “Mayne Reid’s
hero Maurice Geraldo having stopped his steed
side-by-side with that of Louise Poindexter, put his arm
around the blond Creole’s limber waist, and here the
author exclaimed in a personal aside:
‘What can compare with such a kiss?’”
from Speak, Memory: Re. The
Headless Horseman, a Mayne Reid novel read by an
adolescent Vladimir and his cousin
Yuri: “And here we find the gallant
author interpolating a strange
confession: ‘The sweetest kiss that I
ever had in my life was when a woman — a fair creature,
in the hunting field — leant over in her saddle and
kissed me as I sate in mine.’
“The ‘sate,’ let us concede, gives
duration and body to the kiss which the captain so
comfortably ‘had,’ but I could not help feeling, even at
the age of eleven, that centaurian lovemaking was not
without its special limitations. Moreover, Yuri and I
both knew a boy who had tried it, but the girl’s horse
had pushed his into a ditch.”
- from Glory: “When, late at
night, the sacred flame of the fireplace threatened to
die, he would scrape the embers together, pile some wood
chips on them, heap on a mountain of coal, fan the fire
with the asthmatic bellows, and make the chimney draw by
spreading an ample sheet of the Times across the mouth of
the hearth. The taut sheet would grow warm and
transparent, and the lines of print, mingling with the
lines showing through from the reverse side, looked like
the bizarre lettering of some mumbo-jumbo language. Then,
as the hum and tumult of the fire increased, a fox-red,
darkening spot would appear on the paper and suddenly
burst through. The whole sheet, now aflame, would be
instantly sucked in and sent flying up. And a belated
passer-by, a gowned don, could observe, through the gloom
of the gothic night, a fiery-haired witch emerge from the
chimney into the starry sky. Next day Martin would pay a
fine.”
from Speak, Memory: “So I
would heap on more coals and help revive the flames by
spreading a sheet of the London Times over the smoking
black jaws of the fireplace, thus screening completely
its open recess. A humming noise would start behind the
taut paper, which would acquire the smoothness of
drumskin and the beauty of luminous parchment. Presently,
as the hum turned into a roar, an orange-colored spot
would appear in the middle of the sheet, and whatever
patch of print happened to be there . . . stood out with
ominous clarity-until suddenly the orange spot burst.
Then the flaming sheet, with the whirr of a liberated
phoenix, would fly up the chimney to join the stars. It
cost one a fine of twelve shillings if that firebird was
observed.”
Despite his denial of The Gift’s relationship with
the life that he himself led (a point he makes with
suspicious vehemence in the Foreword to that novel), careful
readers will nevertheless find hoards of episodes from
The Gift that overlap with reminiscences in Speak,
Memory, in which he more candidly admits: “I have
sufficiently spoken of the gloom and the glory of exile in
my Russian novels, and especially in the best of them,
Dar (recently published in English as The
Gift).”
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