O Window in the Dark!
The Early Career of Vladimir Nabokov
Chapter 5: Artistic Reality
Nabokov has said that by the mid-1930s, he and most other
émigrés had given up any realistic hope of
returning to Russia. Under Stalin the Soviet Government was
stronger and more dangerous than ever, and there was little
reason to expect its collapse or relaxation. At the same
time in Berlin, the Nazis were gaining political momentum;
no longer were they merely beerhall buffoons. It is against
this backdrop that Invitation to a Beheading was
written in 1935.
The novel is perhaps one of the two or three
finest (and certainly the most imaginative) of his Russian
works, a masterpiece of terror and black comedy. Despite the
seeming political nature of its inspiration and content,
Nabokov has said that the subject of Invitation to a
Beheading is consciousness, and that which threatens
consciousness.
The novel’s central figure is Cincinnatus C.,
who has the deadly misfortune to live in an unspecified
fantasy nation where “the solicitous sunshine of public
concern” penetrates everywhere. “In reality everything in
this city was always quite dead and awful by comparison with
the secret life of Cincinnatus and his guilty flame.” He is
accused of “the most terrible of crimes,
gnostical turpitude, so rare and so
unutterable that it was necessary to use circumlocutions
like “impenetrability,” “opacity,” “occlusion”; sentenced
for that crime to death by beheading; emprisoned in that
fortress in expectation of the unknown but near and
inexorable date. . . .
Cincinnatus is guilty of having an “opaque” soul in a
nation of transparent zombies, where secrets are not
allowed, and so “with the gracious consent of the audience,”
he “will be made to don the red top hat.”
Nabokov can get away with the rather gruesome
humor of this novel because it does not exist on the
“realistic” plane where characters are to be pitied, or are
even meant to be seen as human beings. The novel is
not an allegory or a roman à clef.
Rather, Invitation to a Beheading pits consciousness
(Cincinnatus, Nabokov) against stupidity and bestiality. The
“action” of the novel is simple: Cincinnatus waits, is given
hope, has all hopes dashed, and finally is executed.
Throughout the story, though, Cincinnatus struggles to leave
this horrible fictional plane, as if to lift himself right
out of the novel and into the safe plane of artistic
consciousness.
There are really two of Cincinnatus: one
waiting meekly for a meaningless death, the other (“the
double, the gangrel, that accompanies each of us — you, and
me, and him over there — doing what we would like to do at
that very moment, but cannot”) feverishly prying himself out
of the novel and into reality. This being a Nabokov novel,
it goes without saying that Cincinnatus’ only hope is to
write. He knows with his “criminal intuition how words are
combined,” and through the dark fog of his nightmare world
he can glimpse a spark of redeeming light:
. . . and in the end the logical
thing would be to give up and I would give up if I were
laboring for a reader today, but as there is in the world
not a single human who can speak my language; or, more
simply, not a single human who can speak; or, even more
simply, not a single human; I must think only of myself, of
that force which urges me to express myself.
His goal is the salvation that can be obtained by the
soul’s “surrounding itself in a structure of words.”
Compare this to the jovial sentiments of the
headsman, M’sieur Pierre: “There is nothing more pleasant
. . . than to surround oneself with mirrors and
watch the good work going on there — wonderful!” The
opposition couldn’t be more explicit. Consciousness
surrounds itself with art, unconsciousness with mirrors.
Invitation to a Beheading is a key to Nabokov’s
Russian career in that it combines these themes and sets
them in distinct contrast; heretofore no single one of his
novels had done so.
The mirror theme that developed in The
Eye and evolved in Despair finds its clearest and
most powerful expression in Invitation to a
Beheading. Nabokov introduces the concept of
Nonnons, absolutely absurd objects,
shapeless, mottled, knobby things, like some kind of fossils
— but ... when you placed one of these incomprehensible,
monstrous objects so that it was reflected in the
incomprehensible, monstrous mirror, everything was fine, and
the shapeless speckledness became in the mirror a wonderful,
sensible image; flowers, a ship, a person, a landscape.
Cincinnatus’ world is a nonnon, and through art
(something which, at its Nabokovian best, can be an absurd,
shapeless, mottled, and knobby thing, like this very novel)
he produces a mirror whose reflection is reality.
This metaphor “works” throughout the novel,
and on every level. We can even find nonnons in the
novel’s sentence structure. For example, when Cincinnatus is
shown his weeping, half-real wife; “Cincinnatus took one of
these tears and tasted it: it was neither salty nor sweet —
merely a drop of luke-warm water. Cincinnatus did not do
this.” (The “negative comparison,” otrisatel’noe
sravnenie, is a fairly common verbal figure in Russian
folklore.) In the end, it does not matter that Cincinnatus’
own nonnon body is “made to don the red top hat,”
because the nonnon mirror of his art has succeeded in
freeing the double, real, Cincinnatus. The world of the
novel dissolves completely, no longer necessary:
Everything was coming apart. Everything was
falling. A spinning wind was picking up and whirling: dust,
rags, chips of painted wood, bits of gilded plaster,
pasteboard bricks, posters; an arid gloom fleeted; and
amidst the dust, and the falling things, and the flapping
scenery, Cincinnatus made his way in that direction where,
to judge by the voices, stood beings akin to him.
Waking up is normally the mere first mundane
action of a mundane day. To awaken from a nightmare, though,
is a joyful, almost triumphant return to consciousness and
reality. Much of Nabokov’s art lurks in the dimly-lit side
streets between dreamworlds and consciousness, a distinction
that art turns to profit. “Thought likes curtains and the
camera obscura,” he observes in The Gift. “Sunlight
is good in the degree that it heightens the value of shade.”
Art can display the grandeur of human consciousness either
by portraying the thing itself, or the horrifying
nonnon absence of it, understood only by the
accompanying nonnon mirror of artifice.
The dream is an important symbol to Nabokov,
a fascinating gray area between levels of reality. Smurov
exclaims, “It is frightening when real life suddenly turns
out to be a dream, but how much more frightening when that
which one had thought a dream — fluid and irresponsible —
suddenly starts to congeal into reality!” Martin (Glory)
notes “a certain peculiarity about his life: the property
that his reveries had of crystallizing and mutating into
reality, as previously they mutated into sleep.” In King,
Queen, Knave, Nabokov describes the “not infrequent”
experience of coming to, but
actually, though, this is a false awakening,
being merely the next layer of your dream, as if you were
rising from stratum to stratum but never reaching the
surface, never emerging into reality. Your spellbound
thought, however, mistakes every new layer of the dream for
the door to reality. You believe in it. . . .
Something happens, however — an absurd mishap and what
seemed reality abruptly loses the tingle and tang of
reality. Your consciousness was deceived: you are still
asleep. Incoherent slumber dulls your mind. . . .
Who knows? Is this reality, the final reality, or just a new
deceptive dream?
The Paris Review asked for Nabokov’s
response to some criticule’s fatuous notion that Nabokov’s
worlds “may become tense with obsession, but they do not
break apart like the worlds of everyday reality.” Nabokov
snorted back:
Whose “reality”? “Everyday” where? Let me
suggest that the very term “everyday reality” is utterly
static since it presupposes a situation that is permanently
observable, essentially objective, and universally known.
When stalking this issue in Nabokov’s work we must keep
continually aware of the many facets of his attitudes toward
“reality.” First, any individual has as many “realities” as
his consciousness can endure, and all of these — his past,
his dreams, his present, his future — are unique and
distinct from those of anyone else. Second, it is not a
continuum, but a mélange of patches of an
individual’s perceptions (Nabokov’s empiricism), some of
which may be utter distortions of the forms behind them
(Nabokov’s Platonism). Third, to discuss “reality” in
relation to art is to beg several questions. Isn’t
all art artifice, by definition? Can a series of
symbols inked on sewn-together pieces of paper actually
be a downy-limbed nymphet? Is the subject of a
biography of Chernyshevsky less “real” after Chernyshevsky
has died? Suppose Chernyshevsky had never lived, and the
book is thus fiction: is he “real” then?
As Nabokov has said, “‘Reality’ is a very
subjective affair.” Any time we shift our perceptions, a
leap of faith is involved. (As when we wake up, for example,
we habitually assume — but it is only an assumption — that
our existence is a continuation of what was left unfinished
the night before.) Remember that Nabokov thinks of himself
as a psychologist, and that his work can be seen as a study
of the ways that the human mind constructs the world through
consciousness, perception, and imagination. The ever-visible
artifice of his fiction reminds us that we are making leaps
of faith, and Nabokov invites us to leap to the levels he
has imagined for us. In Glory, he asserts:
Human thought, flying on the trapeze of the
star-filled universe, with mathematics stretched beneath,
was like an acrobat working with a net but suddenly
realizing that there was no net, and Martin envied those who
attained that vertigo and, with a new calculation, overcame
their fear.
Though the nonnon is an important and
useful metaphor for Nabokov, there is another that is really
the key to all of his work and all of his philosophy. Fyodor
hints at it in The Gift:
Nature was seeing double when she created us
. . . , that symmetry in the structure of live
bodies is a consequence of the rotation of worlds
. . . , and that in our straining toward
asymmetry, toward inequality, I can detect a howl for
genuine freedom, an urge to break out of the circle.
In Speak, Memory, Nabokov completes the metaphor:
The spiral is the spiritualized circle. In
the spiral form, the circle, uncoiled, unwound, has ceased
to be vicious; it has been set free. I thought this up when
I was a schoolboy, and I also discovered that Hegel’s
triadic series (so popular in old Russia) expressed merely
the essential spirality of all things in relation to time.
We can construct a model by winding a string around a
pencil, preferably one that is not round, but facet-sided.
The pencil’s lead here is time. It is dark and travels in a
straight line. Or does it? After all, we can’t see it, and
we can only guess about it since the wood obscures our view
of it, the wood being the world, or the “knowable universe,”
or “reality” in its common usage. The string is human
experience, bumping up against the wood, the texture of life
(which itself has a glossed-over exterior). Through the
course of, say, a twenty-four-hour day, we have made what
seems to be a circle, but we are not quite where we started.
Instead we are one loop further along. And in the course of
making that loop, we encountered six bumps (the pencil’s
facets) that corresponded exactly to the six bumps of the
previous day, and tomorrow we may even encounter six more
bumps (though it would be just like nature to put the eraser
there). These bumps are the physical manifestations in our
existence of the underlying pattern of reality (the wood)
that enshrouds time (the lead).
Fyodor writes that “the molders of opinion”
— meaning Chernyshevsky and his claque — “were incapable
of understanding Hegel’s vital truth: a truth that was not
stagnant, like shallow water, but flowed like blood, through
the very process of cognition.” Herein lies the key to all
of Nabokov’s work: cognition, perception, consciousness,
ever spiraling around time, form impressions of it, and with
the aid of the imagination the mind can then conjecture
about the pattern and meaning of experience. In Nabokov’s
understanding of Hegel, Truth is an ongoing process of
consciousness, a life-giving force. To be alive is to be
aware, to feel, to ponder. “Twirl follows twirl, and every
synthesis is the thesis of the next series.”
Almost everything in Nabokov can be expressed
in a Hegelian syllogism. A few samples:
- Thesis: Nabokov’s idyllic Russian childhood.
Antithesis: marginal émigré life in
Berlin.
Synthesis: starting all over again in 1940 with a new
language and culture. Each arc in this case represents a
twenty-year period. (“A colored spiral in a glass, that
is how I see my own life.”)
- Thesis: Nabokov’s first novel, Mary, is warm and
sentimental, with many autobiographical connections.
Antithesis: King, Queen, Knave, his second novel, is a
cold, “bright brute,” an almost purely imaginative work.
Synthesis: Nabokov’s third novel, The Defense, is
quite autobiographical in its depiction of Luzhin’s
childhood, and utterly imaginative in plot, patterning,
and outcome.
- Thesis: Cincinnatus tasted his wife’s tear.
Antithesis: He did not do this.
Synthesis: “He” did neither because “he” is not a
human being but a device in a work of artifice, and by
realizing this we have spiraled up to a higher level of
understanding and consciousness.
Here is an example from Laughter in the Dark:
Uncle alone in the house with the children
said he’d dress up to amuse them. After a long wait, as he
did not appear, they went down and saw a masked man putting
the table silver into a bag. “Oh, Uncle,” they cried in
delight. “Yes, isn’t my make-up good?” said Uncle, taking
his mask off. Thus goes the Hegelian syllogism of humor.
Thesis: Uncle made himself up as a burglar (a laugh for the
children); antithesis: it was a burglar (a laugh for the
reader); synthesis: it was still Uncle (fooling the reader).
A final sample, involving the trick to a chess problem:
“The unsophisticated might miss the point of the problem
entirely, and discover its fairly simple, ‘thetic’ solution
without having passed through the pleasurable torments
prepared for the sophisticated one.”
At one point in The Gift, Fyodor
admires a chess problem he has found in a magazine, and
finds that “perhaps most fascinating of all was the fine
fabric of deceit, the abundance of insidious tries (the
refutation of which had its own accessory beauty), and of
false trails carefully prepared for the reader.” Nabokov has
said that “in a first-rate work of fiction the real clash is
not between the characters but between the author and the
world.”
The “fine fabric of deceit” that Fyodor finds
so admirable in chess problems is also a crucial element in
Nabokov’s fiction. Each of his novels is completely
consistent in its own terms, but these may be carefully
concealed terms that we’ve never encountered before. One of
the reader’s tasks is always to find the most stable toehold
upon which to stand and view the swirling lights of
spiraling nonreality. Often the only weight of actuality
upon which gravity can tug is our knowledge that a real
author sat down (or, in Nabokov’s later years, stood at a
lectern) and wrote the book. He once explained to an
interviewer, “I work hard, I work long, on a body of words
until it grants me complete possession and pleasure. If the
reader has to work in his turn — so much the better. Art is
difficult.” Nabokov is little interested in the
Book-of-the-Month-Club passive reader of “entertainment.”
Reading, like writing, is an artistic craft when done
“right,” and we need a few tools to read Nabokov: tenacity,
humor, skepticism, a pencil for marginalia and
cross-checking, and above all an unabridged dictionary.
In describing The Overcoat, Nabokov
wrote:
Gogol was a strange creature, but genius is
always strange; it is only your healthy second-rater who
seems to the grateful reader to be a wise old friend, nicely
developing the reader’s notion of life. Great literature
skirts the irrational. . . . Give me the creative
reader; this is a tale for him.
Art is difficult, but rewarding for the creative reader.
Nabokov recalls a childhood memory of falling blossom petals
and their pool-reflected twins: “Every time the delicate
union did take place, with the magic precision of a poet’s
word meeting halfway his, or a reader’s, recollection.”
Nabokov is not interested in any sort of art-for-art’s-sake
that puts a book in a vacuum. Books exist to be read, to
promote the encounter of one creative consciousness with
another. In Laughter in the Dark, Nabokov writes of
Axel Rex:
Even when he was talking quite seriously
about a book or a picture, Rex had a pleasant feeling that
he was a partner in a conspiracy, the partner of some
ingenious quack — namely, the author of the book or the
painter of the picture.
Rex is Nabokov’s kind of reader.
We might put our Hegelian triad model to use
yet again, this time in describing approaches to reading:
- The thetic reader: a simple soul who
“empathizes” with the characters, thrives on plot and
dialogue, and skims over long descriptive or (more boring
yet) philosophic passages. He looks for blurbs like
“riveting” and “powerful.” Thetic readers were disgusted
to learn that Lolita’s prurient reputation came
from criteria quite apart from those more common to most
of the offerings of the Olympia Press, circa 1956.
The antithetic reader: the denizen of cocktail
parties who will praise a novel for its general ideas,
its “commitment,” who cannot see the trees for the
forest, and who will sagely discover things like “Christ
symbols.” (From Strong Opinions: “The symbolism
racket in schools attracts computerized minds but
destroys plain intelligence as well as poetic sense. It
bleaches the soul. It numbs all capacity to enjoy the fun
and detachment of art.”) Marxist and especially Freudian
critics are antithetic readers.
The synthetic reader: a toiler who encounters
the whole of a book, the texture of every level; who
looks up words he doesn’t know; who savors particularly
poetic passages; and who will experience the “stab of
wonder,” the “aesthetic bliss” at the discovery of a
book’s patterns. He dutifully tracks down all leads, but
always keeps in mind that art is artifice: when he’s
being (willingly) led by the nose, he remembers who is
doing the tugging. He reads — hard — and then rereads.
In The Gift Fyodor muses about an ideal reader of
his poems:
Can it really be that he has understood
everything in them, understood that besides the good old
“picturesqueness” they also contain special poetic meaning
(when one’s mind, after going around itself in the
subliminal labyrinth, returns with newfound music that alone
makes poems what they should be)? As he read them, did he
read them not only as words but as chinks between words, as
one should do when reading poetry?
With all this in mind, it does not require a
terribly heroic leap of the imagination to comprehend
Vladimir Vladimirovich’s annoyance with group thought.
Groups don’t read books, individuals do — such is the
nature of the printed word. Nabokov told Playboy that
the pleasures of writing
correspond exactly to the pleasures of
reading, the bliss, the felicity of a phrase is shared by
writer and reader: by the satisfied writer and the grateful
reader. . . . I write mainly for artists,
fellow-artists and follow-artists.
This time the “grateful reader” is not the same as the
grateful fellow mentioned above; he is grateful
not for finding his own ideas, but is delighted at
discovering new ones. Nabokov is emphatically not a
mind-reader. He can only allow himself one possible model of
the ideal reader: Vladimir Nabokov (or someone with exactly
his sensibilities, like Vivian Darkbloom). In the foreword
to Despair he describes “the ecstatic love of a young
writer for the old writer he will be someday is ambition in
its most laudable form.” In Strong Opinions we find:
“I think that the audience an artist imagines, when he
imagines that sort of thing, is a room filled with people
wearing his own mask”; and “I write for myself in
multiplicate, a not unfamiliar phenomenon on the horizon of
shimmering deserts.”
It comes as no surprise to read in The
Gift that “the real writer should ignore all readers but
one, that of the future, who in his turn is merely the
author reflected in time.” As a sentiment of this author it
is fairly typical and characteristic. Within the context of
history, though, it rings with prophetic irony. The
Gift was not published complete until 1952, fifteen
years after its composition. (Nabokov’s émigré
publishing house refused to include the Chernyshevsky
chapter, already described.) And since the Soviets continue
to ban Nabokov’s novels, these still haven’t found a
Russian audience beyond the pitifully small
émigré communities of the 1920s and 1930s. The
“future” mentioned in The Gift, the crowning
achievement of Nabokov’s Russian work, has not yet come to
pass.
In the foreword to the novel, Nabokov gruffly
insists, “I am not, and never was, Fyodor
Godunov-Cherdyntsev.” Later, though, he coyly admits that
“here and there history shows through artistry.” Readers of
Nabokov (synthetic, skeptical souls that they are) realize
that The Gift contains a wealth of autobiographical
material, not only in its writer-protagonist, but also in
its Berlin émigré setting of the mid-1920s,
its heroine (a none-too-distant cousin of Nabokov’s wife
Véra, whom he married in 1925), and especially in its
continual evocation of the author’s favorite themes, moods,
and attitudes. The Gift is a wonderful keystone to
his Russian work, a synthesis of all the autobiographical
and imaginative impulses displayed in his earlier fiction, a
book that would not be surpassed until Lolita.
As the novel opens, we learn that young
Fyodor has just published a volume entitled Poems,
containing about fifty twelve-line poems
devoted to a single theme: childhood. In fervently composing
them, the author sought on the one hand to generalize
reminiscences by selecting elements typical of any
successful childhood — hence their seeming obviousness; and
on the other hand he has allowed only his genuine quiddity
to penetrate into his poems — hence their seeming
fastidiousness. . . . The strategy of inspiration
and the tactics of the mind, the flesh of poetry and the
specter of translucent prose — these are the epithets that
seem to us to characterize with sufficient accuracy the art
of this young poet. . . .
Through Fyodor’s musings about the book, we learn that
his was a wonderful childhood not at all unlike that of the
author of Speak, Memory. He showed promise as a
painter, a chess player, and a lepidopterist, before
deciding to become a writer. After the revolution he settled
into the haphazard lifestyle that Nabokov describes of
himself: a mixture of poorly paid artistry (poems sold for
pittances to émigré newspapers) and
lesson-giving. (From Speak, Memory: “Patiently I
thwarted the persistent knack Berlin businessmen had of
pronouncing ‘business’ so as to rhyme with ‘dizziness’; and
like a slick automaton, under the slow-moving clouds of a
long summer day, on dusty courts, I ladled ball after ball
over the net to their tanned, bob-haired daughters.”
Despite his high hopes for the book’s
success, it is generally ignored — an experience Fyodor
shares with his author and his first books of poetry,
The Cluster and The Empyrean Path (both 1923).
Nevertheless it is clear to the reader from the samples of
the poems themselves and especially from Fyodor’s attitudes
about art that he has “the gift” of
true inspiration. The agitation which seized
me, swiftly covered me with an icy sheet, squeezed my joints
and jerked at my fingers. The lunatic wandering of my
thought which by unknown means found the door in a thousand.
. . .
Nabokov never, in any of his writing, attempts to dissect
clinically the artistic imagination. In The Gift as
elsewhere it is a miraculous mystery, literally a gift of
Fate.
Fyodor soon recovers from his disappointment
over his Poems; “he was already looking for the
creation of something new, something still unknown, genuine,
corresponding fully to the gift which he felt like a burden
inside himself.” Art is difficult, it is both the artist’s
bliss and burden, and it is something that he cannot evade.
Fyodor first considers composing a biography of his father,
a famed naturalist (and generally not unlike V. D. Nabokov),
but, after months of work the book refuses to materialize
and the project is abandoned — after the narrator has given
us the biography anyway.
As a joke, a friend challenges Fyodor to
write a life of Chernyshevsky, and he sarcastically assents.
Later, though, the idea continues to claw at his mind, and
with the encouragement of his new-found love, Zina Mertz
(also an émigré, and half-Jewish, like
Véra) he plunges into the project with zeal. Zina
oversees his work with amusement and wonder.
Fyodor’s idea of composing his biography in
the shape of a ring, closed with the clasp of an apocryphal
sonnet (so that the result would be not the form of a book,
which by its finiteness is opposed to the circular nature of
everything in existence, but a continuously curving, and
thus infinite, sentence), seemed at first to her to be
incapable of embodiment on flat, rectangular paper — and so
much the more was she overjoyed when she noticed that
nevertheless a circle was being formed.
Fyodor has difficulty finding a publisher,
but (unlike his creator’s actual experience), he at last
finds an émigré firm that will print The
Life of Chernyshevsky. After some initial vicious
attacks upon the book — they are parodies of the sort of
vitriolic drivel that greeted much of Nabokov’s work — and
a few sensitive, comprehending, and highly favorable
reviews, the biography begins to sell.
In short, the book found itself surrounded by
a good, thundery atmosphere of scandal which helped sales;
and at the same time, in spite of the attacks, the name of
Godunov-Cherdyntsev immediately came to the fore, rising
over the motley storm of critical opinion, in full view of
everyone, vividly and firmly.
The final chapter of The Gift portrays
Fyodor radiant with his success, his love, and his hopes for
the future. “Definition is always finite,” intones the
narrator, and in a characteristic shift to the first person,
he continues, “but I keep straining for the faraway; I
search beyond the barricades (of words, of senses, of the
world) for infinity, where all, all lines meet.” In the
novel’s closing moments we see Fyodor “Pondering now fate’s
methods . . . , found a certain thread, a hidden
spirit, a chess idea for his as yet hardly planned ‘novel.’”
One of the many themes of The Gift is
the interface between poetry and prose, where the artist
disregards any distinction. The Gift depicts this
theme in its action — Fyodor, like Nabokov, makes the
transition from “mainly a poet” to “mainly a fictionist” —
and at the same time, the novel’s verbal texture is directly
infused with poetry. Sometimes this is explicit, as in the
poems that Nabokov has given to his hero (see, for example,
the poem included here on p. 48). Often, the poetry is
much more subtle. The reader, strolling comfortably through
a long descriptive passage, may begin to feel a tingle, to
notice a certain lilt in the surface of the words, and then
realize (with a stab of wonder, of course) that the “prose”
has slid quietly into hidden lines of iambic pentameter. The
final paragraph of The Gift (one hesitates to call it
“The End”) lifts itself off the page with a “wafture of
bliss”:
Goodbye, my book! Like mortal
eyes, imagined ones must close some day. Onegin from his
knees will rise — but his creator strolls away. And yet the
ear cannot right now part with the music and allow the tale
to fade; the chords of fate itself continue to vibrate; and
no obstruction for the sage exists where I have put The End:
the shadows of my world extend beyond the skyline of the
page, blue as tomorrow’s morning haze — nor does this
terminate the phrase.
The End
The Gift and Invitation to a
Beheading would seem to be antithetical novels. One
luxuriates in a crisply realistic frame, with very few
flights into the surreal, while the other is a protean
nightmare with few toeholds of realism. The former drifts
away from us into an aesthetic haze, the latter clambers
joyfully upward from its murky abyss to join us here.
The synthesis between these novels lies in
our thinking about them. Both explore the nature of art and
the relationship between reader and author. Both are quite
demanding; both are extremely rewarding. The two novels can
also be seen as two circuits of a spiral through levels of
reality, with our day-to-day actuality as the goal of the
earlier novel and the starting point of the later one.
And both are farewells of sorts.
Invitation to a Beheading, with its dark overtones,
was the last novel Nabokov composed entirely in Berlin. In
1937, Vladimir Vladimirovich and his half-Jewish bride
prudently left Germany for France. The Gift was
completed soon afterward, and in the foreword to the English
version Nabokov informs us, “It is the last novel I wrote,
or shall ever write, in Russian. Its heroine is not Zina,
but Russian Literature.”
One final syllogism with which to end this chapter:
- Thesis: the artist composes a work full of
hidden traps and veiled treasures.
Antithesis: the creative reader meets the
author halfway, encountering him at every level, reading
“synthetically.”
Synthesis: art, aesthetic bliss.
© Michael Fleming
Princeton, New Jersey
March 1980
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