I would not wish, however, to create the impression that, if I fail to be spiritually excited by modern drama, I deny it all value. As a matter of fact, here and there, in Strindberg, in Chekhov, in Shaw’s brilliant farces (especially Candida), in at least one Galsworthy play (for instance, Strife), in one or two French plays (for instance, Lenormand’s Time Is a Dream), in one or two American plays such as the first act of The Children’s Hour and the first act of Of Mice and Men (the rest of the play is dismal nonsense)—in many existing plays, there are indeed magnificent bits, artistically rendered emotions and, most important, that special atmosphere which is the sign that the author has freely created a world of his own. But the perfect tragedy has not yet been produced.
The idea of conflict tends to endow life with a logic it never has. Tragedies based exclusively on the logic of conflict are as untrue to life as an all-pervading class-struggle idea is untrue to history. Most of the worst and deepest human tragedies, far from following the marble rules of tragic conflict, are tossed on the stormy element of chance. This element of chance playwrights have so completely excluded from their dramas that any denouement due to an earthquake or to an automobile accident strikes the audience as incongruous if, naturally, the earthquake has not been expected all along or the automobile has not been a dramatic investment from the very start. The life of a tragedy is, as it were, too short for accidents to happen; but at the same time tradition demands that life on the stage develop according to rules—the rules of passionate conflict—rules whose rigidity is at least as ridiculous as the stumblings of chance. What even the greatest playwrights have never realized is that chance is not always stumbling and that the tragedies of real life are based on the beauty or horror of chance—not merely on its ridiculousness. And it is this secret rhythm of chance that one would like to see pulsating in the veins of the tragic muse. Otherwise, if only the rules of conflict and fate and divine justice and imminent death are followed, tragedy is limited both by its platform and by its unswerving doom, and becomes in the long run a hopeless scuffle—the scuffle between a condemned man and the executioner. But life is not a scaffold, as tragic playwrights tend to suggest. I have so seldom been moved by the tragedy I have seen or read because I could never believe in the ridiculous laws that they presupposed. The charm of tragic genius, the charm of Shakespeare or Ibsen, lies for me in quite another region.
What then ought tragedy to be if I deny it what is considered its most fundamental characteristic—conflict ruled by the causal laws of human fate? First of all I doubt the real existence of these laws in the simple and severe form that the stage has adopted. I doubt that any strict line can be drawn between the tragic and the burlesque, fatality and chance, causal subjection and the caprice of free will. What seems to me to be the higher form of tragedy is the creation of a certain unique pattern of life in which the sorrows and passing of a particular man will follow the rules of his own individuality, not the rules of the theatre as we know them. It would be absurd to suggest, however, that accident and chance may be left to play havoc with life on the stage. But it is not absurd to say that a writer of genius may discover exactly the right harmony of such accidental occurrences, and that this harmony, without suggesting anything like the iron laws of tragic fatality, will express certain definite combinations that occur in life. And it is high time, too, for playwrights to forget the notions that they must please the audience and that this audience is a collection of half-wits; that plays, as one writer on the subject solemnly asserts, must never contain anything important in the first ten minutes, because, you see, late dinners are the fashion; and that every important detail must be repeated so that even the least intelligent spectator will at last grasp the idea. The only audience that a playwright must imagine is the ideal one, that is, himself. All the rest pertains to the box-office, not to dramatic art.
“That’s all very fine,” said the producer leaning back in his armchair and puffing on the cigar which fiction assigns to his profession, “that’s all very fine—but business is business, so how can you expect plays based on some new technique which will make them unintelligible to the general public, plays not only departing from tradition, but flaunting their disregard for the wits of the audience, tragedies which arrogantly reject the causal fundamentals of the particular form of dramatic art that they represent—how can you expect such plays to be produced by any big theatre company?” Well, I don’t—and this, too, is the tragedy of tragedy.
Books by Vladimir Nabokov available in paperback editions from Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers
Lectures on Don Quixote
Lectures on Literature
Lectures on Russian Literature
The Man from the USSR & Other Plays
Footnotes
1 © Article 3b Trust Under the Will of Vladimir Nabokov; unfinished and unpublished novel.
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2 Vladimir Nabokov, introductory note to “The Potato Elf,”A Russian Beauty and Other Stories (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1973).
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3 Apostrophes, French television, 1975. ©Article 3b Trust Under the Will of Vladimir Nabokov. As in the other citations from Apostrophes, the translation from the French is mine.
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4 Apostrophes.
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5 Apostrophes.
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6 Vladimir Nabokov, Speak Memory: An Autobiography Revisited (New York: Putnam’s, 1966).
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7 Interview with Alvin Toffler, Playboy, 11 (January 1964); reprinted in Strong Opinions. I have written in greater detail of this po/uitoronnosi’f otherworldliness, sense of the hereafter) in “Translating with Nabokov,”The Achievements of Vladimir Nabokov, edited by George Gibian and Stephen Jan Parker (Ithaca, N.Y.: Center for International Studies, Cornell University, 1984).
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* Italics added.
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8 “Vladimir Nabokov, The Great Enchanter,” BBC Radio III, March 1982.
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9 Ibid.
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10 To paraphrase Father’s reference to the idyllic dotage of Van and Ada on Apostrophes.
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11 Apostrophes.
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12 “Vladimir Nabokov, The Great Enchanter.”
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13 Ibid.
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1 The Cast of Characters was provided by the author, with the exception of one name, omitted in his mother’s transcription, and reinstated here. Stresses (') are provided for the readers’ and the performers' convenience.
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* Left and right as seen by the audience: the reverse of stage left and stage right. True of subsequent stage directions as well.
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2 Like Napoleon. For performance, this reference may be included in the speech if it is deemed unclear.
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3 Mein is deliberately incorrect; Kuznetsoffs German is not very good.
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4 The first syllable of Houbigant should be accented, and the name should be pronounced with an Anglo-American inflection.
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5 The “ch” to be pronounced as “h."
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6 A normal contraction of “Matveyevich” in spoken Russian.
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7 A suburb of Berlin where there were (and are) a Russian church and cemetery.
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1 For English-language productions, the last syllable of “Mama” should be stressed.
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2 Although generally Russian diminutives have been left unchanged, this exception has been made because it renders well the special flavor that “Lyubka” has here.
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3 In the Russian, the play is on the now abolished letter “yat”’ and is untranslatable literally.
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4 “Speech impediment” has been substituted for “Jewish accent” so that those unfamiliar with Nabokov’s lifelong contempt for anti-Semitism might not get the impression that he shared his character’s vulgarity.
This change has been branded as inane and indicative of an equivalent bias against stutterers, probably by a stuttering critic. No slur against stutterers was intended (Father was one, too, in his youth). It is just that “a Jewish accent” would have quite different connotations for an American audience than it did for the Russian émigré, and also that several million stutterers were not selectively executed in the intervening war.
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5 From Turgenev’s Prose Poems.
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6. Pushkin, Eugene Onegin, tr. Vladimir Nabokov. Bollingen, 1964; revised ed., Princeton University Press, 1975.
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7 An allusion to Eugene Onegin.
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8 Sung by Onegin before the duel in the opera Eugene Onegin. Tchaikovsky’s tune should, of course, be used.
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1 Apostrophes, French television, 1975. ©Article 3b Trust Under the Will of Vladimir Nabokov.
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Man From the USSR & Other Plays Page 25