Nabokov in America

by Robert Roper

  The big overgrown38 and neglected old garden which stretched at the back of the house, and coming out behind the village, disappeared into the open country, seemed the one refreshing feature in the great rambling village, and in its picturesque wildness was the only beautiful thing in the place. The interlacing tops of the unpruned trees lay in clouds of greenery and irregular canopies of trembling foliage against the horizon. The colossal white trunk of a birch-tree, of which the crest had been snapped off by a gale or a tempest, rose out of this green maze and stood up like a round shining marble column; the sharp slanting angle, in which it ended instead of in a capital, looked dark against the snowy whiteness of the trunk, like a cap or a blackbird.

  Nabokov makes this,

  An extensive old garden which stretched behind the house and beyond the estate to lose itself in the fields, alone seemed, rank and rugged as it was, to lend a certain freshness to these extensive grounds and alone was completely picturesque in its vivid wildness. The united tops of trees that had grown wide in liberty spread above the skyline in masses of green clouds and irregular domes of tremulous leafage. The colossal white trunk of a birchtree deprived of its top, which had been broken off by some gale or thunderbolt, rose out of these dense green masses and disclosed its rotund smoothness in midair, like a well proportioned column of sparkling marble; the oblique, sharply pointed fracture in which, instead of a capital, it terminated above, showed black against its snowy whiteness like some kind of headpiece or a dark bird39.

  Both versions seem a bit wordy after seventy years. Nabokov cares about that not at all; his standard is not concision but fidelity to Gogol’s words and pace (“udar molnii,” for example, is rendered as “gale or thunderbolt,” not as “a gale or a tempest,” which flirts with redundancy, aside from being incorrect). He manages a certain streaming quality in the prose, a subtle onrushingness absent from the Garnett. His first sentence comes to rest on the exciting “vivid wildness”; Garnett concludes instead with the benign, doughy “the only beautiful thing in the place.”

  This passage of lyric description—somewhat unusual in Dead Souls—may have excited Nabokov for reason of its thoroughness, its air of going the whole hog, taking all the time it needs to make its subject live. That subject is a bit of greenery, no more—nature and man’s diggings and plantings all run together, higgledy-piggledy, somewhere in Russia. One can walk on, pay it not a moment’s thought, or—wait a second—look again. See it thoroughly and try afterward to put it in words, using metaphors if necessary, being fanciful and funny and even ominous: “showed black against its snowy whiteness,” Nabokov writes, “like some kind of headpiece or a dark bird.” (Garnett mistranslates and trivializes, makes cuddly, with “a cap or a blackbird.”)

  The passage continues,

  Strands of hop40 [a sinuous, twining vine], after strangling the bushes of elder, mountain ash and hazel below, had meandered all over the ridge of the fence whence they ran up at last to twist around that truncate birchtree halfway up its length. Having reached its middle, they hung down from there and were already beginning to catch at the tops of other trees, or had suspended in the air their intertwined loops and thin clinging hooks which were gently oscillated by the air.

  This is Nabokov. Garnett does not cut the passage, as other translators had done, but she loses detail, turning the vine’s grasping hooks into the vaguer “tendrils faintly stirring41 in the breeze.” Maybe she has begun to tire, to run out of words. (Nabokov never runs out of words.) His “truncate birchtree,” which reenacts the shattering of a trunk, is for her a simple “broken birch-tree,” and his “oblique, sharply slanting fracture,” suggesting the violence of the tree-topping but also the shattering of bone—stark white like a birch—is in her milder version a “sharp slanting angle.”

  A bit of green background, no more. There are millions—billions—of such views to be had in Mother Russia. Someone hoping to write his own books may feel inspired, seeing how much can be done with even the waste places. Dead Souls is in a large sense a study of waste places, a bringing to scandalous, teeming life of Russian backwaters and Nowheresvilles, and Nabokov, who first read the novel as a youth, might have felt a sort of invitation from the future. By happy accident this garden, which belonged to the fictional landowner Plyushkin, came to be the focus of a question42 on Nabokov’s honors exams at Cambridge, in 1922; asked to describe the neglected garden, he deliriously ran away with the question, recalling detail after detail.

  Summer of ’42, near-penniless, the Nabokovs returned to the Karpovich place in Vermont, where they spent an impecunious but sunny July and August. Dmitri, eight years old, had been sick most of the winter and had just had his tonsils out. He was a good-looking, stork-shaped boy whose long limbs and neck were striking—by age ten he had nearly caught up with his tall mother in height, and a few years later he would top out at a full six foot five, a species of young American giant, confident, athletic, car crazy.

  In the coming years, the Nabokovs scrimped on everything but his education. Véra sometimes lamented that his natural sweetness had been worn away by contact with rougher American boys. Both parents were anxious that he get the best education affordable, and though Véra feared that American coarsening, both recognized that a process of acculturation was in order. Dmitri would recall his Wellesley days in a memoir published in the 1980s:

  I ride my balloon-tired43 bicycle to a neighborhood school on my own … along a tree-shaded lane. We live in a shingled house on Appleby Road, whose name will remain mnemonically entwined with the green apples that grow in the leafy depths at its dead end, and that serve as missiles for elaborately staged battles. In the spring I shall be initiated into the rites of marbles by the girl next door. Her mysterious femininity at twelve … will appear unattainably mature to me at eight, and my crush will remain undeclared.

  Often dissatisfied with the schools they find for him—quick to pull him out and put him in others—the Nabokovs are gratified when Americanizing is on the program:

  One wonderful thing will happen44 here [at a school in Cambridge, Massachusetts]. Mrs. Ruedebush, the music teacher … will notice that I, a European child with no grounding in traditional American singing, have trouble carrying the tune of hymns sung during the school assemblies. She will take me under her musical wing, give me lessons in solfege and piano, and begin training my high soprano… . Enthusiasm will replace frustration. I shall go on to sing in choirs and student performances, and eventually reward her early efforts by becoming a professional operatic basso.

  True conversion, though, happens on the athletic field:

  I sit on the lawny grounds45 of Dexter School. It is the day of spring sports awards. I entered Dexter three years ago [1944], still quite unequipped for life as an American boy. The school’s headmaster, Francis Caswell, has been the second superb pedagogue of my life. He has taught me not only Cicero and Caesar, but also how to bat a ball and throw a block, how to give a firm handshake while looking the other squarely in the eye, how to be a “citizen.” … I have managed to win maroon Dexter Ds in various sports, but still think of myself as a skinny, imperfectly coordinated outsider… . I am in mid-reverie when I hear my name announced as overall winner of the spring sports contest, a cumulative competition comprised of track and field events plus such things as baseball throwing. I look around, thinking I have misheard.

  Dmitri and Vladimir in Vermont, Véra traveled to Boston to find them an apartment. The one they could afford, at 8 Craigie Circle, Cambridge, has become a site of pilgrimage for Nabokov fans: here they stayed longer than anywhere else in America, in a third-floor flat (No. 35) in a building of six stories. The redbrick structure, with vertically coursed, bright-white ashlar blocks, has an elegant wood-paneled lobby and a secure feel, with a small courtyard leading to an oaken front door. The flat itself was cramped, and Nabokov once called it “dingy46.” He had to write “under an old lady47 with feet of stone and above a young woman with hypersensitive hearing
,” but during the war he was proud enough of the place to draw his sister Elena a floor plan and to describe watching from an upstairs window as Dmitri, “looking very trim48, wearing a gray suit and a reddish jockey cap,” set out for school in the morning.

  Nabokov would set out an hour later. His daily walk to the Museum of Comparative Zoology, at Harvard, where he had begun to volunteer, took him along level streets beneath mature eastern hardwoods—he seems proud as he informs Elena49 that Véra and he live “in a suburb … in the Harvard area.” His walk of fifteen minutes took him past tennis courts gone to weeds50 during the war. The transformation of Harvard51—its depopulation by ordinary students and its repopulation as a military training facility, with thousands of soldiers, ROTC candidates, and lab workers taking over the grounds—is nowhere reflected in his letters or other writings of the time. As a recent immigrant he can be expected to have been less comprehending of changes than a local; still, his not noticing, or not recording, what he saw suggests his absorption in private matters.

  8 Craigie Circle, Cambridge, where the Nabokovs lived from 1942 to 1948

  Those were lepidopteral, mainly. Nathan Banks, head of the Department of Entomology at Harvard, welcomed him when Vladimir wandered into the MCZ one day, bearing specimens from the Grand Canyon. Banks knew some of the same people Nabokov knew in New York, and Vladimir’s energy and specialist knowledge made him good to have around. Positions at the MCZ would soon go unfilled as men were called away to war. Banks, though a professional entomologist, was somewhat at sea among the lepidoptera—his areas of expertise included wasps, lacewings, fish flies, and mites (he was probably best known for his Treatise on the Acarina, or Mites, 1905). To sister Elena Vladimir described his good luck in landing where he had:

  My museum52—famous throughout America (and throughout what used to be Europe)—is … part of Harvard University… . My laboratory occupies half of the fourth floor. Most of it is taken up by rows of cabinets, containing sliding glass cases of butterflies. I am custodian of these absolutely fabulous collections. We have butterflies from all over the world; many are type specimens (i.e., the very same specimens used for the original descriptions, from the 1840s until today). Along the windows extend tables holding my microscopes, test tubes, acids, papers, pins, etc. I have an assistant, whose main task is spreading specimens… . My work enraptures but utterly exhausts me.

  The collections were in disarray—surprising at such an institution. Sometimes he put in fourteen-hour days53 at his worktable, which caused Véra to fear that he would be lost to literature. “To know that no one before you has seen” what you are seeing among the specimens, he wrote, “to immerse yourself in the wondrous crystalline world of the microscope, where silence reigns, circumscribed by its own horizon … all this is so enticing that I cannot describe it.” After a long day of complete fascination, he would stumble home, “already in the blue darkness54 of winter, the hour of evening newspapers … and radio phonographs [that] burst into song in the illumined apartments of large ivy-colored buildings.”

  Lepidopterology was solace, sanctuary: he needed to be moving on, proceeding with American-style alacrity to make a future as a writer, yet he also needed to absorb, to adjust, to become. He expressed his perplexed state of mind to Wilson, whose own career provided a daunting example of self-furthering: “Funny—to know Russian55 better than any living person—in America at least—and more English than any Russian in America,—and to experience such difficulty in getting a university job.” He was in possession of authentic goods, literary riches, that he knew one day could secure his future. By virtue of the same playful fate that had arranged for him to be born in the last year of the nineteenth century, exactly one hundred years after the birth of his idol, Pushkin, then had arranged for him a ringside seat at the Revolution and the arrival of the Nazis, he found himself in a country badly in need of basic education in matters Russian at that rare moment when America was asking to be taught. Some of his obsessing over issues of translation betrays an anxiety of near possession, a kind of greed. He knew things others did not, had read more deeply and passionately—he should be the one delivering the Russian treasure, to claim the new audience.

  Meanwhile, he was half out of the living sea of his Russian, half into the dimensionless American air. After complaining that he had bogged down with Gogol because he had to retranslate so much, he stated the problem more honestly: “The book is progressing slowly56 because I get more and more dissatisfied with my English. When I have finished, I shall take three months’ vacation with my ruddy robust Russian muse.” The truth was that his muse was being left behind.§ “I envy so bitterly57 your intimacy with English words,” he wrote Wilson. Whether or not he truly envied Wilson’s English, he was effectively tongue-tied: the “urge to write58 is sometimes terrific, but as I cannot do it in Russian I do not do it at all.” He wrote little fiction, only a bit of what would become the dystopian novel Bend Sinister (1947). His later descriptions of the ordeal of changing his language have a weary tone, but that does not mean he was not suffering. Isaiah Berlin59, who had made the same switch at a younger age, felt loss and regret for the rest of his life, as he expressed to a friend:

  Blue butterflies, collected by Nabokov and others, Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard

  It is our Russian conversations which I adore & look forward to & think about and remember the longest… . I can never talk so … to anybody in England … Russian to me is more imaginative, intimate and poetical than any other [language]—& I feel a curious transformation of personality when I speak it—as if everything becomes easier to express, & the world brighter and more charming.

  Tormented by his loss—feeling unreal in English and, incidentally, barely able to pay the rent at Craigie Circle (sixty dollars a month60)—he completed a wonderful book, the first manifestly brilliant work of his American years. Nikolai Gogol is a work of urgent, amusing directness, the ten-dollar words of his usual style mostly absent. He plunges the reader—his hoped-for American reader—into the bizarre Slav profonde material right off: Gogol is dying in Rome. He is forty-two years old and has come under the care of “diabolically energetic” foreign doctors who apply leeches to his long, pointed nose, a nose that he used to touch to his lower lip to impress people. The leeches have been placed inside it, the better to feed from the tender membranes, and a Frenchman, himself a perfect leech, orders that Gogol’s hands be restrained when he tries to brush them away.

  Nabokov’s own face, exhibiting a twisted grin, hovers above the tableau. “The scene is unpleasant61 and has a human appeal which I deplore,” he declares—and here is Point One in “Nabokovian Aesthetics for Americans”: the idea that claims on fellow feeling are reprehensible, those shameless pluckings of the chords of compassion that literary writers have too long indulged in. The book develops62 in short form the argument presented at whopping length in The Gift: how the dangerous bacillus of social compassion came to infect Russian literature, leading to its near extinction. Angels of reform in the Russian intelligentsia became dictators of taste—if you were not writing against tsarist repression, then you did not deserve to be read—became, inevitably, proto-commissars, precursors of the Soviet beasts who really knew how to deal with writers who didn’t behave. Nabokov arrived at his hatred of thought policing through experience of the twentieth century, but in the phrase “human appeal which I deplore” there is a glimpse of an arrogant prodigy, a youthful reader of the Russian Futurists and Acmeists, disgusted by old-lady poetry of the heart-tugging sort.

  Gogol exhibits a “queer genius,” Nabokov goes on, and here is Point Two of his program: great, immortal artists are all sui generis. They may appear in suggestive pairings, like Pushkin and Gogol (who both enjoyed fame in the 1830s), but they are not exemplars of “movements” or “developments” in the history of culture. Real writers are inherently “strange; it is only your63 healthy second-rater who seems to the grateful reader to be a wise old friend, nicely dev
eloping the reader’s own notions of life.” Nabokov is tipping us to something about himself. We will find him daring, he believes; we will also find him a bit cold. The forthright talk of “second-raters” and “geniuses,” of “the greatest artist that Russia has yet produced”—this discourse was already old-fashioned in 1942. Writers were discussed more often in terms of schools they could be assimilated to, or were hardly identified as human subjects at all, by critics shy of speculating about their intentions. Nabokov lays claim to the old categories, and by subtle inference to the mantle of genius. Here he is being modernist as well as old-fashioned: Joyce and Eliot, Proust, Pound, Stein, Woolf, Faulkner—these were writers who believed in the old idea, the notion of the towering, unexampled masterwork, the literary product that could stun an entire civilization.‖ Each suspected that he or she had written such works. The decline from this position to gentle mockery of the whole idea, to recognition of the special privilege enjoyed by certain categories of author or work, to an ironical sense of how any creation is full of shameless gleanings from other cultural artifacts: this was all off in the future, though not too far off. Nabokov might have been the last true, outspoken believer. His assertiveness about geniushood and how you, if you imagine yourself a writer like him, are laughably deluded, betrays unease, an awareness that the ground was shifting beneath his feet. Gogol, in any event, was such a genius. Gogol, with but a wave of his magic wand—maybe of his big nose—had called the Russian novel into being.

  Struggling with the languages, he consoled himself with science-speak. No one at Harvard had anything like his knowledge of the Blues, the tribe of butterflies that he had decided to make his specialty, following William Comstock’s example. But here was more of the same bounty, the plenitude of needful work and glaring niches to fill, that marked his relation to Russian literature in America. To Wilson he wrote, “It is amusing to think64 that I managed to get into Harvard with a butterfly as my sole backer.” The first scientific papers65 he wrote, using museum specimens for taxonomic context, show him in a process of education like the one with Wilson—hoping to learn the ropes, he relies freely on his American friends, on Comstock and another researcher at the AMNH, Charles Duncan Michener, in particular. “If my paper seems all right to you will you please pass it on,” he wrote Comstock after an exhaustive back-and-forth about his first research, “to whatever journal or Proceedings you think would publish it.” Later, using the same tone he used with Wilson, he wrote, “I am taking advantage66 of your kindness but it is your own fault if I have grown accustomed to it.”