O Window in the Dark!
The Early Career of Vladimir Nabokov
Chapter 1: Consciousness
Behind his words and wiles and smiles,
his pulsing art: a paradigm,
a chrysalis, a key, a wild
soaring spiral out of time
and into a torrent of consciousness,
beyond the reach of death and darkness.
I feel the echoes of your themes;
they swell to blissful harmonies. . . .
The anonymous sonneteer retraces a probe into the
back-eddies of a man’s consciousness — that of Vladimir
Vladimirovich Nabokov, who has paddled the same stream
relentlessly through the whole of his literary art. During
his Russian period in particular — that is, from the time
he composed the first poem of his pre-revolution
adolescence, to the publication of his Russian masterpiece,
The Gift — Nabokov was a sort of Slavic Proust,
feverishly striving to recapture an idyllic childhood that
had been lost to time and politics. Even after more than
forty years as an émigré and twenty years as
an American writing in English, he nevertheless told a
reporter in 1962:
I do feel Russian and I think that my Russian
works, the various novels and poems and short stories that I
have written during these years, are a kind of tribute to
Russia. And I might define them as the waves and ripples of
the shock caused by the disappearance of my Russian
childhood.
In a way, it is impossible to write about
Vladimir Vladimirovich’s work without creating at least a
pallid ghost of something he himself might have written. To
touch upon any one of his themes is to feel the shiver of
the single creative consciousness at the heart, and the hum
of the whole reverberates through each of the parts.
“Looking at it objectively,” Nabokov once remarked rather
subjectively, “I have never seen a more lucid, lonely,
better balanced mad mind than mine.” The many and varied
products of his very fertile mind have an organic unity that
won’t go away, even under the knife of the most ardent
literary taxonomist. No matter how hard we might try to
isolate the melody of, say, the “mirror theme,” the echoes
of such other themes as “deceit” and “influence of
lepidopterology” can still be heard harmonizing off-stage.
When attempting to analyze Nabokov’s work,
then, perhaps the most we can hope to do is to produce at
least a crude model of one of his own infinitely more
animated creations with its surface gleam of patterned
recurrence and its structural marrow of artistic unity. One
may hope that such an approach will provide a key to the art
of this man who speaks of the “cosmic synchronization” that
a work has when the poet keeps himself firmly at the center
of things. The reader’s task, therefore, is always to keep
Nabokov in mind when trying to interrelate the facets of his
art.
Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov was born on 22
April 1899, not on 23 April and certainly not on 32 April,
both of which have been reported. (Even Nabokov was not
quite cunning enough at birth to arrive on a date that
doesn’t exist.) His family was wealthy and aristocratic, and
anything but stuffy, as we learn in Nabokov’s remarkable
memoir, Speak, Memory. (His father, Vladimir
Dmitrievich Nabokov, was himself an author and a leading
liberal jurist.) Young Vladimir led a childhood that was
happy and typical of his class: travel, plenty of play, and
private tutorings in Russian, English, and French. “As is
invariably noted at the beginning of positively all literary
biographies,” Nabokov later wrote (of Chernyshevsky), “the
little boy was a glutton for books.”
The most important date in Nabokov’s
prodigious memory is an August day in 1903, when he
experienced the “birth of sentient life.” It is his very
first lasting recollection, and the very limit to which he
has been able to stretch his formidable powers of retrieval
— he strolls hand in hand with his mother and father down a
country lane dappled by the bright sun filtering through the
trees. He remembers being acutely aware at that moment that
these two people are his parents, and thus we have a fitting
first image of what Nabokov was much later to label one of
his protagonists: “an extremely receptive boy, living in
extremely favorable surroundings.”
“In probing my childhood,” he writes in his
autobiography,
I see the awakening of consciousness as a
series of spaced flashes, with the intervals between them
gradually diminishing until bright blocks of perception are
formed, affording memory a slippery hold. . . . The
beginning of reflexive consciousness in the brain of our
remotest ancestor must surely have coincided with the
dawning of the sense of time.
Hence the importance of time to Nabokov’s art; our mode
of thought, just as Kant argued, is inextricably linked to
our sense of time’s passage. To “afford memory a slippery
hold” is nothing less than to gain an insight into the very
core of the human thought process and its development. Using
his own childhood as an example (it is, needless to say, the
only one he can know), his art provides a model of his
conception of the way the human mind evolves. To render
consciousness becomes the process of recreating the almost
magical intensity of the emotional experience of the child,
delighting in his first encounters with the world and
himself.
“Vivian Bloodmark,” he wrote of his
“philosophical” (and anagrammatic) friend, “used to say that
while the scientist sees everything that happens in one
point of space, the poet feels everything that happens in
one point of time ... all forming an instantaneous and
transparent organism of events, of which the poet (sitting
in a lawnchair in Ithaca, N.Y.) is the nucleus.” The artist
constructs an impressionistic sphere of a moment of
consciousness centered in his own perceptive and emotional
response to it. In one interview he stated, “A creative
writer must study carefully the works of his rivals,
including the Almighty. He must possess the inborn capacity
not only of recombining but of re-creating the given world.”
The key to this study, as we find in all of
Nabokov’s writings, is the inherent pattern to be discovered
in nature. It is this “web of when and where” (to quote his
English poem, “Restoration”) that contains the essence of
reality, rather than simple — and for Nabokov very “unreal”
— clock-measured chronology. “I confess I do not believe in
time,” he writes. “I like to fold my magic carpet, after
use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern
upon another. Let visitors trip.”
Another key to Nabokov’s art is this “magic”
that lets him fold time so as to display the workings of its
web. In 1946 he wrote to Edmund Wilson that “the longer I
live the more I become convinced that the only thing that
matters in literature is the (more or less)
shamanstvo [shamanism] of a book, i.e., that the good
writer is first of all an enchanter.” Herein we find the
basis of an aspect of Nabokov’s art that many critics
(including Wilson) have found troubling: his complete
indifference to any moral or didactic purpose. Nabokov
gently reproves Chekhov (a writer whom he greatly admires)
when he notes:
A famous playwright has said (probably in a
testy reply to a bore wishing to know the secrets of the
craft) that if in the first act a shotgun hangs on the wall,
it must go off in the last act. But Gogol’s guns hang in
midair and do not go off — in fact the charm of his
allusions is exactly that nothing whatever comes of them.
When critics see this love of
shamanstvo in Nabokov’s own art as an indifference to
suffering (Wilson, for example, deemed “repellent” Nabokov’s
“addiction to Schadenfreude. Everyone is always being
humiliated.”), they misunderstand Nabokov’s very Russian
priorities. Any strictures on art become anathema
when they tread upon the artist’s freedom to invent whatever
he wishes. This amorality in no sense implies immorality,
but is rather a reaction to the Chernyshevsky school of
criticism in the nineteenth century and to the “people’s
art” of the Soviet authorities. Simon Karlinsky explains:
Readers of Nabokov’s numerous interviews in
which he was wont to proclaim his “supreme indifference” to
social purpose or moral message or general ideas are usually
not aware that he was reacting to a powerful Russian
tradition which twice within a century had enslaved
literature and the other arts in the name of the same social
purpose, moral message and general ideas.
Throughout Nabokov’s canon he stresses the
existence of a form of consciousness that completely
transcends worldly morality. In the afterword to
Lolita, he announces, “For me a work of fiction
exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly
call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow,
somewhere, connected with other states of being where art
(curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm.” In
a sense, “aesthetic bliss” is Nabokov’s teleology, the end
for which art alone can be the means. It is an ecstatic pang
of timelessness, an instantaneous grasp of natural patterns,
and a sense of the highest level of consciousness that makes
all thought possible. Nabokov compares it to the “stab of
wonder that accompanies the precise moment when, gazing at a
tangle of twigs and leaves, one suddenly realized that what
had seemed a natural component of that tangle is a
marvelously disguised insect or bird.”
Nabokov is perfectly serious in considering
himself to be a scientist of the mind. His own consciousness
is his laboratory in which he works with the honesty and
thoroughness of an entomologist.
There is also the keen pleasure (and after
all, what else should the pursuit of science produce?) in
meeting the riddle of the initial blossom of man’s mind by
postulating a voluptuous pause in the growth of the rest of
nature, a lolling and loafing which allows first of all the
formation of Homo Poeticus — without which
sapiens could not have evolved. “Struggle for life,”
indeed!
For the sake of analysis we might imagine
four possible “levels” in a work of fiction (though there
may of course be any number, and to be strictly “Nabokovian”
we would admit only one — the work itself). First, there is
the plane of the minute, word by word detail. Second, there
is the specific sensory image — the play of sunlight
through the trees, for example. Third, there is the level of
social and political ideas embodied in, embedded in, or
engulfing the work. Finally, there are abstract,
philosophical upper reaches. Nabokov has a very personal
approach to his art on each of these planes.
First-time readers of Nabokov are instantly
struck by the dazzling poetry of his prose, the phonetic
devices, the vast, infinitely pliable vocabulary, and the
rather exotic use of grammar. One statement made by the
protagonist in The Gift might well be his own: “If
you like I’ll admit it: I myself am a mere seeker of verbal
adventures.”
In the last days before his execution,
Cincinnatus C. (hero of Invitation to a Beheading)
scrawls:
Not knowing how to write, but sensing with my
criminal intuition how words are combined, what one must do
for a commonplace word to come alive and share its
neighbor’s sheen, heat, shadow, while reflecting itself in
its neighbor and renewing the neighboring word in the
process, so that the whole line is live iridescence.
. . .
William Rowe, after studying Nabokov’s Russian novels in
both their originals and the author’s own English trans
lations, found that “a faintly Russian coloration further
contributes to the ‘live iridescence’ of Nabokov’s English
prose. His writings evince a unique perspective on
especially these two languages and cultures.” Even (or
particularly) on the level of closest possible reading we
find a unique mastery, and feel the pulse of his creative
consciousness delighting in every word. His adventuring in
Russian, English, and French left him a premiere stylist in
each, and his writing in any one language contains a
delightful murmur of the other two, almost as though any
word has an international essence that goes beyond culture.
At our next “level” we deal with images,
which are perhaps even more integral to the function of
Nabokov’s creativity than language itself. He once told a
BBC interviewer, “I don’t think in any language. I think in
images. I don’t believe that people think in languages. They
don’t move their lips when they think. It is only a certain
type of illiterate person who moves his lips as he reads or
ruminates.” Words are not a product of the creative
imagination — images are. The linguistic scientist in
Nabokov uses words as precision lenses with which to focus
exactly upon the images generated by the imagination.
In his imagery Nabokov adopts many of the
techniques of the impressionist painter in order to render
the sense and mood of a scene. In fact, he describes himself
as a “born painter — really!” and has one of his narrators
declare, “At the present moment it is not literary methods
that I need, but the plain, crude obviousness of the
painter’s art.” As a child, Vladimir Vladimirovich was
tutored by “the celebrated” Dobuzhinsky. Nabokov recalls:
He made me depict from memory, in the
greatest possible detail, objects I had certainly seen
thousands of times without visualizing them properly: a
streetlamp, a postbox, the tulip design of the stained glass
on our own front door. He tried to teach me to find the
geometrical coordination between the slender twigs of a
leafless boulevard tree, a system of visual give-and-takes,
requiring a precision of linear expression, which I failed
to achieve in my youth, but applied gratefully, in my adult
instar . . . perhaps, to certain camera lucida
needs of literary composition.
This exactitude in detail can be combined with an
impressionistic mood in a way that may be impossible for the
painter, but which is a central element in Nabokov’s
palette. Julia Bader has noted perceptively that we must
read a work by Nabokov as we would a painting: carefully
circling the tableau for spots of repeated color and detail,
for reflections, for symmetry of composition.
Our next level is “the Museum of General
Ideas, which is on your left as you stroll down University
Boulevard.” As noted before, Nabokov’s impatience with those
who worry about such matters stems from the suffocation he
feels by being expected to produce literature that “means
something.” In average fiction, the level of surface detail
is often a badly sketched box (which we are to regard only
passingly or not at all), into which has been dumped a cargo
of sociological jargon and “universality.” In an interview
Nabokov has described the market for such a product:
The middlebrow or the upper Philistine cannot
get rid of the furtive feeling that a book, to be great,
must deal in great ideas. Oh, I know the type, the dreary
type! He likes a good yarn spiced with social comment; he
likes to recognize his own thoughts and throes in those of
the author; . . . he does not realize that perhaps
the reason he does not find general ideas in a particular
writer is that the particular ideas of that writer have not
yet become general.
In the short story “Spring in Fialta,” the narrator
exclaims, “I will contend until I am shot that art as soon
as it is brought into contact with politics inevitably sinks
to the level of any ideological trash.”
The consumers of this sort of trash miss the
literary point in two ways. At one extreme, they fail to
understand that “form” and “content” are one, that (to take
one of the favorite apothegms of the 1960s out of context)
“the medium is the message,” that the art of a piece of real
literature is its highest (indeed only) aspiration. Of
Gogol, Nabokov has written, “His work, as all great literary
achievements, is a phenomenon of language and not of ideas,”
and “the final result . . . is due (as with all
masterpieces) not to what is said but how it
is said.” In his commentary to Pushkin’s greatest poem,
Eugene Onegin, Nabokov claims that “Pushkin’s
composition is first of all and above all a phenomenon of
style.”
That the “general reader” misses the joy of
words and imagery — form — in his myopic quest for “the
meaning” — content — is his lamentable but unconscious
loss. Even more disturbing to Nabokov is his loss at the
other extreme — consciousness itself. Nabokov’s ideal
reader will immerse himself in the surface, feeling it as
real sensory experience, while at the same time remaining
continually aware that the book is the artifice of a
distinct creative mind. Only in this way can he be vaulted
to that fourth, very abstract plane, of which most readers
(and, sadly, writers) are not even aware. It is a chilly but
exhilarating realm in which the reader’s and the author’s
consciousnesses unite and mutually experience “aesthetic
bliss” — this is the stuff of Nabokovian reality.
Nabokov’s vision of poetic heaven will be
described later. For now, we should keep in mind that irony
is his controlling tone. He very rarely asks us to make
judgments upon anything he writes about, since the undertow
— the grin behind the pen — is ever capable of pulling
that magic rug out from under any seeming reality. Our final
opinion can only concern the work itself, not its “ideas.”
Nabokov’s tone is never that of blushing adoration, or
howling anguish, or even derisive laughter. Rather, it is
the detached voice of an ironist who sees all the facets of
his subjects that can be seen, while remaining aware that
there might be many more that are unknowable. If we don’t
always believe him directly (he is often pulling our
literary leg), we nevertheless always believe in him,
in the power of his taste and intellect. Nabokov is an
“author” in the fullest sense of that term: he has
authority.
The controlling metaphor that Nabokov uses
for irony of this sort is that the authorial voice is “an
anthropomorphic deity impersonated by me.” The artist hovers
playfully over his manuscript in a way that mirrors
Nabokov’s notion of a vaguely benevolent, almost always
humorous deity hovering over his creation. The
detachment is ever apparent; we are not asked to “suspend
disbelief” or “become emotionally involved” with any one
character. The horror in novels like Invitation to a
Beheading and Bend Sinister would be unbearable
without an undercutting irony. When Charlotte Humbert is
killed by a car in Lolita the sense is not one of
death so much as deletion — she has been erased and brushed
off the page because her presence as a character is no
longer required. Our emotional reaction must be to the body
of the book, not its dismembered parts.
What, then, is the “thing itself,” a novel by
Vladimir Nabokov? People have dismissed much of his work
with the remark that “Nabokov’s worlds are unreal, they are
not relevant,” which is entirely beside the point. The
center of Nabokov’s method is the creative consciousness
which can either fabricate reality or a distortion of
reality. The “meaning” is the “stab of wonder” in suddenly
discovering a certain key, often some sly narrative trick or
a cleverly concealed structural pattern, and the “aesthetic
bliss” to be had in experiencing both the surface and
artifice.
The floodgates of Nabokov’s creative
consciousness were ever open; even a single sentence can
release a torrent of allusions, ironies, puns, and
associations both real and false. Consider this sample from
Despair:
There is the rub, there is the horror; the
more so as the acting will go on and on, endlessly; never,
never, never, never, never will your soul in that other
world be quite sure that the sweet gentle spirits crowding
about it are not fiends in disguise, and forever, and
forever, and forever shall your soul remain in doubt,
expecting every moment some awful change, some diabolical
sneer to disfigure the dear face bending over you.
Besides the contextual meaning (narrator Hermann’s
mocking sort of atheism) and the iteration of several
“Nabokovian themes” (his unique form of deism; authorial
presence in a god-like incarnation; etc.), we also find
allusions to Hamlet, Heart of Darkness, King Lear,
Macbeth, and — doubtless — more. (Nabokov was
astonishingly well read and never hesitated to “borrow”
material from sources ranging from Shakespeare to the comics
page.) In describing Gogol’s art, Nabokov says,
The difference between human vision and the
image perceived by the faceted eye of an insect may be
compared with the difference between a half-tone block made
with the very finest screen and the corresponding picture as
represented by the very coarse screening used in common
newspaper pictorial reproduction. The same comparison holds
good between the way Gogol saw things and the way average
readers and average writers see things.
With Nabokov’s own many-faceted art we find exquisite
reproduction of any number of literary effects: parody,
poetry, mimesis, allusion, word-play, and so on. This is the
meaning of Nabokov’s art: he renders the many levels of
consciousness in the creative mind, which has perceived them
already in the pattern of nature. Just as “a bad play is
more apt to be good comedy or good tragedy than the
incredibly complicated creations of such men as Shakespeare
or Gogol,” so do Nabokov’s works bristle with life on every
plane.
All of Nabokov’s novels are fairly similar in
relation to the tradition terms of fiction: plot, character,
and so forth. A central character (or less frequently,
characters), not necessarily an artist, but with some form
of creative consciousness, grapples with exactly the sort of
problems that Nabokov sets for himself. In a sense each
deals in some way with the same isolation of
time/consciousness that Nabokov describes in Speak,
Memory:
I have journeyed back in thought — with
thought hopelessly tapering off as I went — to remote
regions where I groped for some secret outlet only to
discover that the prison of time is spherical and without
exits. Short of suicide, I have tried everything.
Like their creator, Nabokov’s figures are searching for
exits.
It is fairly simple to divide these central
characters into two groups. On the one hand there are those
who have been called “equivalents” or “favorites.”
Especially in Nabokov’s Russian novels, these all tend to be
émigré writers much like their creator. They
share his tastes, manners, background, and most important,
his groping for an escape from the prison of time through
some heroic feat of imaginative re-creation. Ganin in
Mary and Fyodor in The Gift are artists whose
happiness lies in recreative fulfillment. Martin in
Glory, Luzhin in The Defense, and Albinus in
Laughter in the Dark have Nabokov’s hypertrophied
vision but lack his creative powers; they are doomed.
Cincinnatus in Invitation to a Beheading is saved
from a dismal fate by literally escaping to a realm of
higher consciousness through art.
Nabokov’s villains — at the center of a
number of his novels — are quite like sinister doubles to
his heroes. They are consciousness run amuck, perversions of
artistry. Smurov in The Eye is a false artist, though
not quite so wicked a charlatan as the monstrous Hermann of
Despair. Franz, in King, Queen, Knave, lacks
the imagination for his acts to be really evil, but Rex in
Laughter in the Dark makes up for him.
Nabokov has little interest in some of the
main themes of fiction, such as “character development” or
“self-recognition.” Just as no action can occur in a single
point of time, so does plot play a relatively minor role in
most of these novels. Rather, their interest is in the
presentation of minds and worlds that are relatively static.
“Development” here is more a function of unfolding narrative
patterns than of action, and whenever plot does appear to
predominate momentarily (as, say, in Laughter in the
Dark), we can be sure that our jovial author is
parodying some convention, such as the Hollywood romance.
Witness even this short passage from Lolita: “Then I
pulled out my automatic — I mean, this is the kind of fool
thing a reader might suppose I did. It never even occurred
to me to do it.”
These books are not “about” their characters
or plots but a reality (not the “reality” of the literary
cocktail circuit, with its twin claw marks, but the real
thing) that is the product of the actual, sensory world as
interpreted through the creative imagination, which defines
the patterns and meanings of real experience. This reality
is not a set of dogmas but an evolving, spiraling system
that Nabokov termed
a very subjective affair. I can only define
it as a kind of gradual accumulation of information; and as
specialization .... You can get nearer and nearer, so to
speak, to reality; but you never get near enough because
reality is an infinite succession of steps, levels of
perception, false bottoms, and hence unquenchable,
unattainable. You can know more about one thing but you can
never know everything about one thing: it’s hopeless.
Nabokov’s characters are projections of this quest for
reality which can either be a satisfying attempt in its own
right, or an exercise in deadly futility, but which can
never end in complete fulfillment: mortality (that is, the
human mind and its earthly a priori prison of time)
is an inescapable sphere, which we can transcend only
through the abyss of suicide and madness, or dull
unconsciousness, or the aesthetic bliss found in art.
Speaking of Gogol (but obviously relevant to
his own work), Nabokov writes:
There can be no moral lesson in such a world
because there are no pupils and no teachers: this world is
and it excludes everything that might destroy it, so that
any improvement, any struggle, any moral purpose or
endeavor, are as utterly impossible as changing the course
of a star.
Imputing moral purpose to Nabokov’s work is to stomp on a
mirror-surface of very thin ice, and more than one criticule
has fallen through the work and into an abyss of absurdity.
Lionel Trilling airily informs us that “Lolita is not
about sex, but about love.” Actually, Lolita is as
profoundly “about” sex as any novel ever written, and is
about love in a mainly oblique manner — Nabokov calls the
book his “love affair” with the English language.
When we venture out onto that metaphorical
ice we should delight in its sheen and structure. If there
is a “lesson” it might be this: Nabokov shows us how to live
the way we should read his books — consciously, carefully,
skeptically, individually, taking special delight in the
texture of things as we go along.
Two final notes on “morality.” First,
authorial presence is so strong in Nabokov’s novels, the
strictures of his reality so singly defined, that the
characters cannot really be moral actors at all; they have
no choices. “Fate” and “predetermination” hinge solely on
authorial whim, and Nabokov is an absolute tyrant in his
fictive worlds.
Second, his characters don’t represent “good”
and “evil,” nearly so much as “consciousness” and “flawed
(or lacking) consciousness.” Morality is such a natural
offshoot of consciousness for Nabokov that he finds it
trivial and misleading even to utter the word. Hence the
continual denials in his forewords and interviews of having
any moral purpose. He is saying, in effect, Morality in
the way you think of it is beside the point. I
have an entirely different way of thinking about it, so
let’s talk about the creative consciousness.
Before discussing Nabokov’s Russian novels
individually, a few more facts about him should be stressed.
First, Nabokov “developed” almost as little
as any of his characters; his genius was evident at the
outset. Readers looking for metamorphoses might best see
Vladimir Vladimirovich as one of his beloved butterflies, a
Plebejus (Lysandra) cormion Nabokov,
which emerges a little sticky and new perhaps but is fully
conceived, ready to flutter among the thriving greenery in
the meadow of his own mind.
Each of his novels was a new approach to
various philosophical and literary challenges that he
continued to confront throughout his career. When asked,
“Why did you write Lolita?” he answered:
It was an interesting thing to do. Why did I
write any of my books, after all? For the sake of the
pleasure, for the sake of the difficulty. I have no social
purpose, no moral message; I’ve no general ideas to exploit,
I just like composing riddles with elegant solutions.
In fact, Nabokov’s career seems very much the realization
of a remark made by young Fyodor in The Gift: “It’s
queer, I seem to remember my future works, although I don’t
even know what they will be about. I’ll recall them
completely and write them.” Nabokov lived his own themes, no
matter how “unrealistic”: nature, patterning, timelessness,
humor, butterflies.
Second, Nabokov’s Russian novels were
published under the pseudonym “V. V. Sirin,” which he
adopted in order to differentiate his work from the
treatises on legal matters published by his already-famous
father, V. D. Nabokov. (The “sirin,” by the way, is a
mythical bird.) The Russian émigré communities
of Berlin (where Nabokov spent most of the 1920s and 1930s)
and Paris were intensely intellectual and their influence
upon Nabokov has not yet been fully analyzed. Far from being
a band of White Russian generals, tsarists, and old women
with lorgnettes, the Russian émigrés included
many democratic liberals (such as the Nabokovs), artists,
and Jews. A “best seller” in this milieu might only sell
1,500 copies, but literature was the lifeblood of the
émigrés, and Nabokov/Sirin quickly became
famous within that small circle.
Nabokov’s pre-1940 career can be seen as his
process of creating a world that could replace his lost
Russia. This process was a two-fold conjuring of mainly
autobiographical works (e.g., Mary, Glory) on the one
hand, and mainly imaginative works (e.g., King, Queen,
Knave; Invitation to a Beheading) on the other. These
twin lines spiral like strands of DNA (or Yeats’ “gyres”);
where they cross we have works like The Defense and
The Gift.
A final point: our English versions of these
novels do not necessarily reflect exactly their Russian
originals. Nabokov has said,
If some day I make a dictionary of
definitions wanting single words to head them, a cherished
entry will be “to abridge, expand, or otherwise alter or
cause to be altered, for the sake of belated improvement,
one’s own writings in translation.
Mary follows its prototype by forty-four years,
and Glory (his last novel to be Englished) completes
Nabokov’s canon only in 1971, more than fifty years after
the time period described in the novel. Further, bilingual
critics have noted substantial revision of King, Queen,
Knave and Laughter in the Dark (which was
Camera Obscura in a 1938 English incarnation), and
not much less in Despair. Time and authorial second
thoughts may distort somewhat our English-language ideas
about these Russian novels; still, Nabokov himself insists
that they are nevertheless quite representative and
bilingual readers generally agree. We’ll have to take him at
his word, armed with the circumspect skepticism we bring to
all of his work.
In The Defense, young Luzhin is
“wonderfully stirred by the precise combinations of these
varicolored pieces that formed at the last moment an
intelligible figure.” As we study Nabokov’s fiction, we can
delight in the “stab of wonder” that occurs when we grasp
the patterns laid out for us by this “anthropomorphic
deity.” This is the teleological purpose of Nabokov’s art,
to take us to the very edge of mortal experience of time and
space, that we might squint happily into the haze beyond. In
his 1952 poem “Restoration,” Nabokov marvels
To think that any fool may tear
by chance the web of when and where.
0 window in the dark! To think
that every brain is on the brink
of nameless bliss no brain can bear.
© Michael Fleming
Princeton, New Jersey
March 1980
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