The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov

by Vladimir Nabokov

  I can understand the smooth-haired women of our mountain tribes when, abandoned by a lover, every morning, with a persistent pressure of their brown fingers on the turquoise head of a pin, they prick the navel of a clay figurine representing the fugitive. Many times, of late, I have summoned all the force of my mind to imagine at a given moment the flow of his cares and thoughts, in order to duplicate the rhythm of his existence, making it yield and come crashing down, like a suspension bridge whose own oscillations have coincided with the cadenced step of a detachment of soldiers crossing it. The soldiers will also perish—so shall I, losing my reason the instant that I catch the rhythm, while he falls dead in his distant castle; however, no matter what the method of tyrannicide, I would not survive. When I wake up in the morning, at half past eight or so, I strain to conjure up his awakening: he gets up neither early nor late, at an average hour, just as he calls himself—even officially, I think—an “average man.” At nine both he and I breakfast frugally on a glass of milk and a bun, and, if on a given day I am not busy at the school, I continue my pursuit of his thoughts. He reads through several newspapers, and I read them with him, searching for something that might catch his attention, even though I know he was aware the evening before of the general content of my morning paper, of its leading articles, its summaries and national news, so that this perusal can give him no particular cause for administrative meditation. After which his assistants come with reports and queries. Together with him, I learn how rail communications are feeling today, how heavy industry is sweating along, and how many centners per hectare the winter wheat crop yielded this year. After looking through several petitions for clemency and tracing on them his invariable refusal—a penciled X—the symbol of his heart’s illiteracy—he takes his usual walk before lunch: as in the case of many not overbright people devoid of imagination, walking is his favorite exercise; he walks in his walled garden, formerly a large prison yard. I am also familiar with the menu of his unpretentious lunch, after which I share my siesta with him and ponder plans for making his power flourish further, or new measures for suppressing sedition. In the afternoon we inspect a new building, a fortress, a forum, and other forms of governmental prosperity, and I approve with him an inventor’s new kind of ventilator. I skip dinner, usually a gala affair with various functionaries in attendance, but, on the other hand, by nightfall my thoughts have redoubled their force and I issue orders to newspaper editors, listen to accounts of evening meetings, and, alone in my darkening room, whisper, gesticulate, and ever more insanely hope that at least one of my thoughts may fall in step with a thought of his—and then, I know, the bridge will snap, like a violin string. But the ill luck familiar to overly eager gamblers haunts me, the right card never comes, even though I must have achieved a certain secret liaison with him, for around eleven o’clock, when he goes to bed, my entire being senses a collapse, a void, a weakening, and a melancholy relief. Presently he sleeps, he sleeps, and, since, on his convict’s cot, not a single praedormitory thought troubles him, I too am left at liberty, and only occasionally, without the least hope of success, try to compose his dreams, combining fragments of his past with impressions of the present; probably, though, he does not dream and I work in vain, and never, never, will the night be rent by a royal death rattle, leading history to comment: “The dictator died in his sleep.”

  15

  How can I get rid of him? I cannot stand it any longer. Everything is full of him, everything I love has been besmirched, everything has become his likeness, his mirror image, and, in the features of passersby and in the eyes of my wretched schoolchildren, his countenance shows ever clearer and more hopelessly. Not only the posters that I am obliged to have them copy in color do nothing but interpret the pattern of his personality, but even the simple white cube I give the younger classes to draw seems to me his portrait—perhaps his best portrait. O cubic monster, how can I eradicate you?

  16

  And suddenly I realized I had a way! It was on a frosty, motionless morning, with a pale pink sky and lumps of ice lodged in the drainpipes’ jaws; there was a doomful stillness everywhere: in an hour the town would awake, and how it would awake! That day his fiftieth birthday was to be celebrated, and already people, looking against the snow like black quarter notes, were creeping out into the streets, so as to gather on schedule at the points where they would be marshaled into different marching groups determined by their trades. At the risk of losing my meager pay, I was not making ready to join any festive procession; I had something else, a little more important, on my mind. Standing by the window, I could hear the first distant fanfares and the radio barker’s inducements at the crossroads, and I found comfort in the thought that I, and I alone, could interrupt all this. Yes, the solution had been found: the assassination of the tyrant now turned out to be something so simple and quick that I could accomplish it without leaving my room. The only weapons available for the purpose were either an old but very well preserved revolver, or a hook over the window that must have served at one time to support a drapery rod. This last was even better, as I had my doubts about the performance of the twenty-five-year-old cartridge.

  By killing myself I would kill him, as he was totally inside me, fattened on the intensity of my hatred. Along with him I would kill the world he had created, all the stupidity, cowardice, and cruelty of that world, which, together with him, had grown huge within me, ousting, to the last sun-bathed landscape, to the last memory of childhood, all the treasures I had collected. Conscious now of my power, I reveled in it, unhurriedly preparing for self-destruction, going through my belongings, correcting this chronicle of mine. And then, abruptly, the incredible intensification of all the senses that had overwhelmed me underwent a strange, almost alchemic metamorphosis. The festivities were spreading outside my window, the sun transformed the blue snowdrifts into sparkling down, and one could see playing over distant roofs, a new kind of fireworks (invented recently by a peasant genius) whose colors blazed even in broad daylight. The general jubilation; the Ruler’s gem-bright likeness flashing pyrotechnically in the heavens; the gay hues of the procession winding across the river’s snowy cover; the delightful pasteboard symbols of the fatherland’s welfare; the slogans, designed with variety and elegance, that bobbed above the marchers’ shoulders; the jaunty primitive music; the orgy of banners; the contented faces of the young yokels and the national costumes of the hefty wenches—all of it caused a crimson wave of tenderness to surge within me, and I understood my sin against our great and merciful Master. Is it not he who manured our fields, who directed the poor to be shod, he whom we must thank for every second of our civic being? Tears of repentance, hot, good tears, gushed from my eyes onto the windowsill when I thought how I had been repudiating the kindness of the Master, how blindly I had reneged the beauty of what he had created, the social order, the way of life, the splendid walnut-finished new fences, and how I plotted to lay hands on myself, daring, thus, to endanger the life of one of his subjects! The festivities, as I have said, were spreading; I stood at the window, my whole being drenched with tears and convulsed with laughter, listening to the verses of our foremost poet, declaimed on the radio by an actor’s juicy voice, replete with baritone modulations:

  Now then, citizens,

  You remember how long

  Our land wilted without a Father?

  Thus, without hops, no matter how strong

  One’s thirst, it is rather

  Difficult, isn’t it,

  To make both the beer and the drinking song!

  Just imagine, we lacked potatoes,

  No turnips, no beets could we get:

  Thus the poem, now blooming, wasted

  In the bulbs of the alphabet!

  A well-trodden road we had taken,

  Bitter toadstools we ate,

  Until by great thumps was shaken

  History’s gate!

  Until in his trim white tunic

  Which upon us its radiance cast,


  With his wonderful smile the Ruler

  Came before his subjects at last!

  Yes, “radiance,” yes, “toadstools,” yes, “wonderful,” that’s right. I, a little man, I, the blind beggar who today has gained his sight, fall on my knees and repent before you. Execute me—no, even better, pardon me, for the block is your pardon, and your pardon the block, illuminating with an aching benignant light the whole of my iniquity. You are our pride, our glory, our banner! O magnificent, gentle giant, who intently and lovingly watches over us, I swear to serve you from this day on, I swear to be like all your other nurslings, I swear to be yours indivisibly, and so forth, and so forth, and so forth.

  17

  Laughter, actually, saved me. Having experienced all the degrees of hatred and despair, I achieved those heights from which one obtains a bird’s-eye view of the ludicrous. A roar of hearty mirth cured me, as it did, in a children’s storybook, the gentleman “in whose throat an abscess burst at the sight of a poodle’s hilarious tricks.” Rereading my chronicle, I see that, in my efforts to make him terrifying, I have only made him ridiculous, thereby destroying him—an old, proven method. Modest as I am in evaluating my muddled composition, something nevertheless tells me that it is not the work of an ordinary pen. Far from having literary aspirations, and yet full of words forged over the years in my enraged silence, I have made my point with sincerity and fullness of feeling where another would have made it with artistry and inventiveness. This is an incantation, an exorcism, so that henceforth any man can exorcise bondage. I believe in miracles. I believe that in some way, unknown to me, this chronicle will reach other men, neither tomorrow nor the next day, but at a distant time when the world has a day or so of leisure for archaeological diggings, on the eve of new annoyances, no less amusing than the present ones. And, who knows—I may be right not to rule out the thought that my chance labor may prove immortal, and may accompany the ages, now persecuted, now exalted, often dangerous, and always useful. While I, a “boneless shadow,” un fantôme suns os, will be content if the fruit of my forgotten insomnious nights serves for a long time as a kind of secret remedy against future tyrants, tigroid monsters, half-witted torturers of man.

  LIK

  THERE is a play of the 1920s, called L’Abîme (The Abyss), by the well-known French author Suire. It has already passed from the stage straight into the Lesser Lethe (the one, that is, that serves the theater—a stream, incidentally, not quite as hopeless as the main river, and containing a weaker solution of oblivion, so that angling producers may still fish something out many years later). This play—essentially idiotic, even ideally idiotic, or, putting it another way, ideally constructed on the solid conventions of traditional dramaturgy—deals with the torments of a middle-aged, rich, and religious French lady suddenly inflamed by a sinful passion for a young Russian named Igor, who has turned up at her château and fallen in love with her daughter Angélique. An old friend of the family, a strong-willed, sullen bigot, conveniently knocked together by the author out of mysticism and lechery, is jealous of the heroine’s interest in Igor, while she in turn is jealous of the latter’s attentions to Angélique; in a word, it is all very compelling and true to life, every speech bears the trademark of a respectable tradition, and it goes without saying that there is not a single jolt of talent to disrupt the ordered course of action, swelling where it ought to swell, and interrupted when necessary by a lyric scene or a shamelessly explanatory dialogue between two old retainers.

  The apple of discord is usually an early, sour fruit, and should be cooked. Thus the young man of the play threatens to be somewhat colorless, and it is in a vain attempt to touch him up a little that the author has made him a Russian, with all the obvious consequences of such trickery. According to Suire’s optimistic intention, he is an émigré Russian aristocrat, recently adopted by an old lady, the Russian wife of a neighboring landowner. One night, at the height of a thunderstorm, Igor comes knocking at our door, enters, riding crop in hand, and announces in agitation that the pinewood is burning on his benefactress’s estate, and that our pinery is also in danger. This affects us less strongly than the visitor’s youthful glamour, and we are inclined to sink onto a hassock, toying pensively with our necklace, whereupon our bigot friend observes that the reflection of flames is at times more dangerous than the conflagration itself. A solid, high-quality plot, as you can see, for it is clear at once that the Russian will become a regular caller and, in fact, Act Two is all sunny weather and bright summer clothes.

  Judging by the printed text of the play, Igor expresses himself (at least in the first scenes, before the author tires of this) not incorrectly but, as it were, a bit hesitantly, every so often interposing a questioning “I think that is how you say it in French?” Later, though, when the turbulent flow of the drama leaves the author no time for such trifles, all foreign peculiarities of speech are discarded and the young Russian spontaneously acquires the rich vocabulary of a native Frenchman; it is only toward the end, during the lull before the final burst of action, that the playwright remembers with a start the nationality of Igor, whereupon the latter casually addresses these words to the old manservant: “J’étais trop jeune pour prendre part à la … comment dit-on … velika voïna … grande, grande guerre.…” In all fairness to the author, it is true that, except for this “velika voïna” and one modest “dosvidania,” he does not abuse his acquaintance with the Russian language, contenting himself with the stage direction “Slavic singsong lends a certain charm to Igor’s speech.”

  In Paris, where the play had great success, Igor was played by François Coulot, and played not badly but for some reason with a strong Italian accent, which he evidently wanted to pass off as Russian, and which did not surprise a single Parisian critic. Afterwards, when the play trickled down into the provinces, this role fell by chance to a real Russian actor, Lik (stage name of Lavrentiy Ivanovich Kruzhevnitsyn), a lean, fair-haired fellow with coffee-dark eyes, who had previously won some fame, thanks to a film in which he did an excellent job in the bit part of a stutterer.

  It was hard to say, though, if Lik (the word means “countenance” in Russian and Middle English) possessed genuine theatrical talent or was a man of many indistinct callings who had chosen one of them at random but could just as well have been a painter, jeweler, or ratcatcher. Such a person resembles a room with a number of different doors, among which there is perhaps one that does lead straight into some great garden, into the moonlit depths of a marvelous human night, where the soul discovers the treasure intended for it alone. But, be that as it may, Lik had failed to open that door, taking instead the Thespian path, which he followed without enthusiasm, with the absent manner of a man looking for signposts that do not exist but that perhaps have appeared to him in a dream, or can be distinguished in the undeveloped photograph of some other locality that he will never, never visit. On the conventional plane of earthly habitus, he was in his thirties, and so was the century. In elderly people stranded not only outside the border of their country but outside that of their own lives, nostalgia evolves into an extraordinarily complex organ, which functions continuously, and its secretion compensates for all that has been lost; or else it becomes a fatal tumor on the soul that makes it painful to breathe, sleep, and associate with carefree foreigners. In Lik, this memory of Russia remained in the embryonic state, confined to misty childhood recollections, such as the resinous fragrance of the first spring day in the country, or the special shape of the snowflake on the wool of his hood. His parents were dead. He lived alone. There was always something sleazy about the loves and friendships that came his way. Nobody wrote gossipy letters to him, nobody took a greater interest in his worries than he did himself, and there was no one to go and complain to about the undeserved precariousness of his very being when he learned from two doctors, a Frenchman and a Russian, that (like many protagonists) he had an incurable heart ailment—while the streets were virtually swarming with robust oldsters. There seemed to b
e a certain connection between this illness of his and his fondness for fine, expensive things; he might, for example, spend his last 200 francs on a scarf or a fountain pen, but it always, always happened that the scarf would soon get soiled, the pen broken, despite the meticulous, even pious, care he took of things.

  In relation to the other members of the company, which he had joined as casually as a fur doffed by a woman lands on this or that quite anonymous chair, he remained as much a stranger as he had been at the first rehearsal. He had immediately had the feeling of being superfluous, of having usurped someone else’s place. The director of the company was invariably friendly toward him, but Lik’s hypersensitive soul constantly imagined the possibility of a row—as if at any moment he might be unmasked and accused of something unbearably shameful. The very constancy of the director’s attitude he interpreted as the utmost indifference to his work, as though everyone had long since reconciled himself to its hopelessly poor quality—and he was being tolerated merely because there was no convenient pretext for his dismissal.

  It seemed to him—and perhaps this was actually so—that to these loud, sleek French actors, interconnected by a network of personal and professional passions, he was as much a chance object as the old bicycle that one of the characters deftly disassembled in the second act; hence, when someone gave him a particularly hearty greeting or offered him a cigarette, he would think that there was some misunderstanding, which would, alas, be resolved in a moment. Because of his illness he avoided drinking, but his absence from friendly gatherings, instead of being attributed to lack of sociability (leading to accusations of haughtiness and thus endowing him with, at least, some semblance of a personality), simply went unnoticed, as if there was no question of its being otherwise; and when they did happen to invite him somewhere, it was always in a vaguely interrogative manner (“Coming with us, or …?”)—a manner particularly painful to one who is yearning to be persuaded to come. He understood little of the jokes, allusions, and nicknames that the others bandied about with cryptic gaiety. He almost wished some of the joking were at his expense, but even this failed to happen. At the same time, he rather liked some of his colleagues. The actor who played the bigot was in real life a pleasant fat fellow, who had recently purchased a sports car, about which he would talk to you with genuine inspiration. And the ingénue was most charming, too—dark-haired and slender, with her splendidly bright, carefully made-up eyes—but in daytime hopelessly oblivious of her evening confessions on the stage in the garrulous embrace of her Russian fiancé, to whom she so candidly clung. Lik liked to tell himself that only on the stage did she live her true life, being subject the rest of the time to periodic fits of insanity, during which she no longer recognized him and called herself by a different name. With the leading lady he never exchanged a single word apart from their lines, and when this thickset, tense, handsome woman walked past him in the wings, her jowls shaking, he had the feeling that he was but a piece of scenery, apt to fall flat on the floor if someone brushed against him. It is indeed difficult to say whether it was all as poor Lik imagined or whether these perfectly harmless, self-centered people left him alone simply because he did not seek their company, and did not start a conversation with him just as passengers who have established contact among themselves do not address the foreigner absorbed in his book in a corner of the compartment. But even if Lik did attempt in rare moments of self-confidence to convince himself of the irrationality of his vague torments, the memory of similar torments was too recent, and they were too often repeated in new circumstances, for him to be able to overcome them now. Loneliness as a situation can be corrected, but as a state of mind it is an incurable illness.