by Robert Roper
His friend Mikhail Karpovich, of the skunk-and-moth-rich Vermont farm, was going on sabbatical, and he asked Nabokov to take over his classes at Harvard for the spring of ’52. In Cambridge they sublet a house39 from the memoirist May Sarton, who remembered them afterward for their kindness to her old cat, which had health problems, and for breaking a number of dishes. Véra audited a course in which Dmitri was also enrolled, and she was upset40 to see how often he was late to class or simply didn’t show up.
Nabokov had first read Eugene Onegin at nine or ten41. Modern Russian literature comes “out from Gogol’s ‘Overcoat,’ ” Dostoevsky is supposed to have said, but others thought it came from Pushkin’s dueling pistol; Nabokov had no doubt that in writing a readable translation of Pushkin’s intoxicating novel in verse he would be introducing a supreme work of art42, also furthering his project of Russifying the Anglophones. While at Harvard he learned that he had been awarded the Guggenheim. Thus he could take a second semester away from Cornell (spring of ’53), and his researches, as he investigated the social and literary context of Pushkin’s work, expanded.
“Being at heart a pedant43,” as he said of himself, he battened on the deep research. “For two months in Cambridge44,” he wrote Wilson, “I did nothing (from 9 A.M. to 2 A.M.) but work on my commentaries to E.O. The Harvard libraries are wonderful.” The story of Onegin, jaded Russian nobleman of the 1820s who retreats to the country, where he befriends a mediocre young poet, Lenski, whom he later kills in a duel, for Nabokov as for other Russians was a giant leap forward in sophistication, wit, and self-awareness in a work of art. Onegin does not invent the attitude of “weary negligence45”—a pose first named, perhaps first identified, by Shakespeare, in King Lear—but he bodies it forth ably, and for Nabokov the way that attitude and Onegin’s whole character are constructions out of the books he has read—lots of Byron, for example—was a fruitful idea.
Tatiana, the novel’s heroine, falls in love with Onegin. She writes him a rash letter, impassioned, frank, self-compromising:
’Tis now, I know, within your will46
to punish me with scorn.
But you, for my unhappy lot
keeping at least one drop of pity,
you’ll not abandon me.
At first, I wanted to be silent;
believe me: of my shame
you never would have known
if I had had the hope,
even seldom, even once a week,
to see you at our country place,
only to hear your speeches,
to say a word to you, and then
to think and think about one thing,
both day and night, till a new meeting.
A retired rake, Onegin refuses her—not unkindly, but he does refuse. He is a man of “sharp, chilled mind.” Pushkin, who portrays himself as Onegin’s close friend in the poem, explains that there were “no more enchantments” for Onegin, that he had burned out early:
him does the snake47 of memories,
him does repentance bite.
All this often imparts
great charm to conversation.
At first, Onegin’s language
would trouble me; but I grew used
to his sarcastic argument
and banter blent halfwise with bile
and virulence of gloomy epigrams.
So disenchanted is Onegin that, while still young, he gives up reading. Formerly he had been, like the poem’s translator, a quotating pedant, with scraps of Juvenal, Virgil, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, and Rousseau salting his table talk. Now in his rustic retreat he buys books, but
without avail48:
here there was dullness; there, deceit and raving;
this lacked conscience, that lacked sense;
on all of them were different fetters;
and the old had become old-fashioned,
and the new raved about the old.
As he’d left women, he left books.
Pushkin was likewise made of books, of words. Nabokov’s scholarly apparatus—more than a thousand closely printed pages, notes on everything from the first word of the poem’s French epigraph (Pétri51, meaning “steeped in,” “consisting of”) to several pages on the precise shade of red49 of a woman’s fashionable beret—shows him drunk on words, drunk on research, joyously drunk on the task of tracking down antecedents to Pushkin’s every thought or phrase. Russian verse was less than one hundred50 years old at the time, Nabokov tells us, and the new literature had been born through shameless borrowing—mostly from French but also from English, German, Italian, and classical Latin literatures.
“Pétri” appears in an epigraph that Pushkin made up, after the manner of other fictionalizing epigraphers. Nabokov tells us,
The idea of tipping a flippant52 tale with a philosophical [quote] is obviously borrowed from Byron. For the first two cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage … Byron sent [his publisher] … a motto beginning: “L’univers est une espèce de livre, dont on n’a lu que la première page,” [taken] from Louis Charles Fougeret de Monbron’s Le Cosmopolite (London, 1750), p. 1.
The oblique epigraph was a great favorite with English writers; it aimed at suggesting introspective associations; and, of course, Walter Scott is remembered as a most gifted fabricator of mottoes.
Pushkin’s 53Russian—like the Russian of other poets he salutes, parodies, or otherwise makes use of—was bursting with Gallicisms. The brains of Russians had been so colonized by French that even Tatiana, a semi-educated landowner’s daughter stuck off in the provinces, composes her love letter in that language. The plain speech of the heart had been learned not from life but from books. When Tatiana writes,
Why did you visit us?
In the backwoods of a forgotten village,
I would have never known you
nor have known bitter torment.
The tumult of an inexperienced soul
having subdued with time (who knows?),
I would have found a friend after my heart,
have been a faithful wife
and a virtuous mother
she is borrowing, unconsciously, from the literature of the day, where the phrase “an inexperienced soul” is a commonplace. She might have married another, but never would she have loved another. “Another!” she exclaims:
No, to nobody54 [else] on earth
would I have given my heart away!
That has been destined in a higher council,
that is the will of heaven: I am thine;
my entire life has been the gage of a sure tryst with you;
I know, you’re sent to me by God.
She is replicating55, or Pushkin is, a formula common in the romances of the time, as for example in French poet André Chénier’s Les Amours (“Un autre! Ah! je ne puis”) or in Byron’s The Bride of Abydos (“To bid thee with another dwell: Another!”).
A year after Tatiana’s letter—after Onegin has killed Lenski in the duel—Tatiana one day sets out for his manor house, now deserted. In his empty rooms she finds some books he left behind, with notes (“the dashes56 of his pencil”):
And by degrees57 begins
my Tatiana to understand
more clearly now—thank God—
the one for whom to sigh
she’s sentenced by imperious fate.
A sad and dangerous eccentric,
creature of hell or heaven,
this angel, this arrogant fiend,
who’s he then? Can it be—an imitation,
an insignificant phantasm, or else
a Muscovite in Harold’s mantle,
a glossary of other people’s megrims,
a complete lexicon of words in vogue? …
Might he not be, in fact, a parody?
In his charming, loquacious commentary, Nabokov explains,
At this point58 the reader should be reminded of the fascination that Byron exercised on Continental minds in the 1820s. His image was the romanti
c counterpart of that of Napoleon, “the man of fate,” whom a mysterious force kept driving on, toward an ever-receding horizon of world domination. Byron’s image was seen as that of a tortured soul wandering in constant quest of a haven beyond the haze.
The man who so captivated her was but a copy. Not that this makes Tatiana love him any less; as Pushkin writes,
Tatiana with soft-melting gaze59
around her looks at all,
and all to her seems priceless,
all vivifies her dolent soul
with a half-painful joyance.
There is a painting of Byron in the room, and even a little “puppet”—a statuette showing a man “under a hat, with clouded brow / with arms crosswise compressed” (possibly inspired by60 the 1813 oil, by Thomas Phillips, of Byron in ethnic Albanian dress).
The Onegin took Nabokov not one year to complete, but seven. He poured into it the literary equivalent of his lepidopteral passion, summoning the skills of a philologist and entering into debate with generations of Pushkin scholars, just as he had addressed, befriended, denounced, and embraced the butterfly men in his museum work. His commentary is itself parodic. Sounding like himself, but also like émigré scholars of the day61, such as Leo Spitzer and Erich Auerbach, he is exhaustless in his hunt for influence; his approach is to read everything Pushkin and his characters have read or might have, in the original language or in contemporary translation.
The commentary, like the poem, hails Lolita at many points. Onegin is a story of an obsessive love complicated by fate, as is the novel. Tatiana’s letter, cliché-ridden but from the heart, is treated more kindly by Onegin than is Charlotte Haze’s to her boarder in Ramsdale, USA, but Charlotte’s has the same tone of abject vulnerability:
This is a confession62. I love you… . Last Sunday in church … when I asked the Lord what to do about it, I was told to act as I am acting now. You see, there is no alternative. I have loved you from the minute I saw you. I am a passionate and lonely woman and you are the love of my life.
Now, my dearest, dearest, mon cher, cher monsieur, you have read this; now you know. So will you please, at once, pack and leave… . Go! Scram! Departez! I shall be back by dinnertime, if I do eighty both ways and don’t have an accident (but what would it matter?).
Lolita’s plot grows from this letter as Onegin’s does from Tatiana’s. And Humbert closely resembles Onegin. There are important points of difference—pedophilia, for one—but a strong genotypic similarity, and Nabokov the scholar traces63 the Byronic lineage both pre– and post–Childe Harold, discerning its outline in Romantic novels such as Chateaubriand’s René (1802), which he deems “a work of genius,” and Benjamin Constant’s Adolphe (1816), “a contrived, dry, evenly gray, but very attractive work.” Constant’s hero, like Humbert, blends “egotism and sensibility”:
His is a checkered nature64, now knight, now cad. From sobs of devotion he passes to fits of infantile cruelty, and then again dissolves in saltless tears. Whatever gifts he is supposed to possess, these are betrayed and abolished in the course of his pursuing this or that whim and of letting himself be driven by … vibrations of his own irritable temper.
Midway in the dark wood of his novel, Nabokov drinks deeply from exotic sources. He needs to be reminded of his idol Pushkin, needs to think of Chateaubriand, “the greatest French writer of his time,” the first foreign novelist to travel in America and to write suggestively of its wild landscape. Nabokov is, as always, putting out product for the market, writing because he needs to publish, to make his way, but his deep immersion in Pushkin is a necessary detour, allowing something in the novel to ripen. In the period 1951–53, he refreshed himself65 by going often to a great library, by preparing to write scholarly articles, and by sometimes writing on subjects that were neither Onegin- nor Lolita-related. Some months he even wrote nothing66. In the way of a professional managing his energies and hopes, he found ways to continue to work on a novel that he also kept wanting to burn.
“In my boyhood I was an extraordinarily avid reader,” Nabokov told an interviewer in the mid-sixties.
By the age of 1467 or 15 I had read or re-read all Tolstoy in Russian, all Shakespeare in English, and all Flaubert in French—besides hundreds of other books. Today I can always tell when a sentence I compose happens to resemble in cut and intonation that of any of the writers I loved or detested half a century ago.
He is not like us—us Americans. Not because he reads a lot, and not because he reads in three languages, but because he hears his sources as he writes.* He makes that recognition part of the story. Resemblance made conscious becomes homage—or parody. He might have said, “I write by borrowing, by pretending to be someone else in many lines that I compose—and I catch myself in the act of pretending.”
Novels that proceed in this way are rare in America. Often they fail to attract many readers. Eliot and Pound, not favorites of Nabokov’s, and not novelists, founded their modernism on a similar approach, but Melville is probably the American writer of whom Nabokov was aware whose literary sources likewise seem to give birth to his prose—not only add meaning or pedigree to it but seem often to generate the lines themselves.
Moby-Dick (1851), which Nabokov might have never read to the end, evinces a wide literary culture—“all Shakespeare in English,” plus the King James Bible, Greek and Roman mythology, Seneca and other Stoics, Byron, Burke, Spinoza, Plato, Kant, Dante, Pascal, Rousseau, Coleridge, many others. Much of this wide culture Melville came to late, when, having written adventure books based on his youthful years at sea, he awakened to a philosophical potential in the novel, its ability to sound deep chords. About Mardi (1849), a kind of trial run68 at Moby-Dick, Melville’s beloved friend Hawthorne wrote that it had depths that “here and there … compel a man69 to swim for his life,” and there is already some of the stylistic mashing up in Mardi that made Moby-Dick, when it had been nearly forgotten in America, a sensational rediscovery for modernist critics.
Nabokov nods, slyly, toward Melville. In a letter to the editor in 1971, he compared hunting for the sexy parts in Lolita to “looking for70 allusions to aquatic animals in Moby Dick,” and in an interview he joked about “Melville at breakfast feeding a sardine71 to his cat.” Humbert, early in Lolita, joins an expedition to the Canadian Arctic that builds a weather station at “Pierre Point72, Melville Sound,” Pierre being Melville’s last published novel.
At Harvard, Nabokov might well have lectured on Moby-Dick, which was usually on the syllabus73 for Karpovich’s survey course, but he decided not to. His preference was to teach books he had already worked up74 at Cornell. Moby-Dick, like other works of the American Renaissance—The Scarlet Letter, by Hawthorne; Poe’s last published poem, “Annabel Lee”; and Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, which broods behind that trip to the Arctic (although Pym voyaged toward the South Pole, not the North)—is a ghostly source, a distant touchstone, and maybe to find its influence is only to exemplify a dictum of Borges, that “great writers create their precursors75.” Borges meant that a work of sufficient power casts light backward as well as ahead, so that a novel about a young girl used for sex along the American road of 1947 can seem to be prefigured in a story of the Puritan seventeenth century where another lustrous, capricious child is the Pearl at the very heart of things. Moby-Dick, whether or not Nabokov read every page (and if he did not, he would only be following Melville’s method, which was to read enough of a book to catch its “idea”), shares with Lolita an immense anxiety about the world76. Ahab tries to fix the world in place with a harpoon. Likewise Stubb, the second mate on the Pequod, muses, during a rainy night watch, “I wonder77, Flask, whether the world is anchored anywhere; if she is, she swings with an uncommon long cable, though.”
Dmitri, mid-1950s, in the first of two MG TCs
Melville throws many types of rhetoric at the world. There is Puritan sermon, scientific treatise, legal brief, and Miltonian thunder in his book, not to mention comedy,
drama, and classical argument. His use of a rough sort of Shakespeare-speak achieves an earnestness beyond parody:
THE OLD MANXMAN
Sir, I mistrust it78; this line looks far gone,
Long heat and wet have spoiled it.
AHAB
Twill hold,
Old gentleman. Long heat and wet, have they
Spoiled thee? Thou seem’st to hold. Or, truer
Perhaps, life holds thee; not thou it.
OLD MANXMAN
I hold
The spool, sir. But just as my captain says.
With these gray hairs of mine ’tis not worth while
Disputing, ‘specially with a superior, who’ll
Ne’er confess.
AHAB
What’s that? There now’s a patched
Professor in Queen Nature’s granite-founded
College; but methinks he’s too subservient. Where
Wert thou born?
OLD MANXMAN
In the little rocky Isle of Man, sir.
AHAB
Excellent! Thou’st hit the world by that.
Nabokov’s parodies79 are more sarcastic. But both novels record a failure to tame the world with words. They are incommensurate, words and the world: the analogy may be to Job’s feeble, pious prayers as against the voice out of the whirlwind, or the whirlwind itself.
Nabokov does not attempt Shakespeare-speak, but Lolita is spotted with Shakespearean allusions, and a device central to the novel is borrowed from Hamlet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream: the play within a play. Boyd shows80 that the novel’s play, a work by Clare Quilty, Humbert’s nemesis, in which Lolita wins a part, is unpersuasive; Quilty describes events that he could not possibly have known about, nor could he have known that Humbert would bring his captive child to the New England town of Beardsley, there to enroll her in a school that happens to be putting on the play in question. But never mind. Lolita’s story of a selfish monomaniac imposing a scheme on others that leads to general doom evokes Captain Ahab’s in its essence. Faulkner, whose Sutpen saga grows from a similar root, said of Moby-Dick,