Stravinsky and His World

by Levitz, Tamara

  Stravinsky was, by all accounts, an avid reader. But he seems to have taken no interest in Nabokov the writer. The absence of any real contact between him and Nabokov, who both arrived in America from France within two years of each other and shared common cultural and historical origins, is even more remarkable given the tight interconnections (so vividly described in Pnin) within Russian émigré circles. True, Nabokov resided in the East, and Stravinsky on the West Coast, until the mid-1960s, when he was already quite ill. But the two men seem also never to have met in Berlin or Paris, where both found themselves with some frequency, and were in contact with Russian émigrés in those cities.

  Nabokov and Stravinsky had one significant friend in common, perhaps the only person to be in attendance at the funerals of both men, Nicolas Nabokov, the composer and controversial cultural impresario. Nicolas was a first cousin of the writer. His help for Nabokov extended to arranging lodgings (his ex-wife provided Vladimir and Vera Nabokov with their first home in America in 1940), and Vladimir was in intermittent social contact with him until his death.11 Stravinsky knew Nicolas from his Paris years, and throughout the American years he was among those closest to Stravinsky and worked hard to promote his music.12 Bringing Nabokov and Stravinsky together would have been easy. It appears that they may actually have avoided each other.13

  Considering Stravinsky and Nabokov together for the mere fact of shared birthplace and common exile—first in Europe and then America—possesses a basic historical logic. There are obvious parallels in their lives, as well as key divergences that help explain the absence of contact. Despite the social distance between them, striking connections emerge between Stravinsky’s music and Nabokov’s prose when one compares their careers and work. They shared parallel premises and prejudices in their views on art. And their respective places in the history of modernism bear comparison.

  Upon closer inspection, the contrasts in biography stand out. The writer was seventeen years younger. Nabokov was born into a family of high aristocracy and great wealth. Stravinsky, in contrast, descended from petty aristocracy.14 He did his best to assert his aristocratic origins and prized his provenance of privilege and exclusivity, but the social gulf between them was marked. In their American years, Nabokov seems never to have complained about his loss of status and wealth and he did not try to impress Americans with his ancestry. Stravinsky, in contrast, exaggerated his vanished social distinction and was notoriously obsessed about money. Both men had famous fathers, but Vladimir Nabokov idealized and idolized his whereas Igor Stravinsky seems only to have harbored resentment against his distinguished father, Russia’s finest operatic bass before Fyodor Chaliapin.15 Nabokov’s parents, music lovers, were in the patron class. Chaliapin and Serge Koussevitzky performed in the Nabokov home, and perhaps so too did Igor’s father.16

  Both the writer and the composer spent the interwar years in exile in Europe. Both lived at one time in Switzerland, a country for which each had a particular fondness. Stravinsky spent most of the years between 1917 and 1939 in France, whereas Nabokov chose Berlin. In Berlin Nabokov kept close to the Russian émigré community. Stravinsky had many Russian friends and colleagues in France, but he became a French citizen and emerged by the 1930s as the leading and most influential composer among the French. Ironically, Stravinsky’s best foreign language from childhood was German. His French developed later, during his many years in France and in French-speaking Switzerland. Nabokov (for whom English was a childhood language and his second language) preferred French, his years in Berlin notwithstanding. He read German and spoke it, but never used it as a language of writing, even though he wrote most of his early novels in Germany. Stravinsky shifted from an initial hostility to the German cultural tradition in music to an increasing admiration and consideration of it as normative.17 He never could quite accommodate Wagner, but in his later years Beethoven and Schubert became important to him in a manner they had not been early in his career. By the mid-1930s he was most eager, despite the Nazi seizure of power, to gain acceptance in Germany. Nabokov was repulsed by things German, except for scientific works. His novels—particularly King, Queen, Knave and The Gift—are peppered with contempt and parody of German habits and culture. For Nabokov, the Germans came to be emblematic of the worst of pseudo-culture, prime purveyors of a particularly pretentious tradition of poshlost'.18

  Nabokov, like his father, was an ardent foe of anti-Semitism. He despised not only the Nazi variety but also the anti-Semitism so commonplace within the Russian intelligentsia. Nabokov hated the fascists, and indeed all tyranny. The same cannot be said of Stravinsky. Stravinsky admired Mussolini; in 1936 he was annoyed only that Il Duce had no time for him.19 The text of Stravinsky’s 1939 Norton Lectures, The Poetics of Music, is marked by an obsessive assertion that the centrality of “the stern auspices of order and discipline” in modern life and art were being neglected. Stravinsky declared, “Modern man is progressively losing his understanding of values and his sense of proportion.” This was “serious” since it challenged the “fundamental laws of human equilibrium.” Whether intentionally or not, Stravinsky evoked the pseudo-historical justification peddled by purveyors of fascist ideology as the proper antidote to chaos and degeneracy. Stravinsky thought that the errors of contemporary culture revealed that “the mind itself is ailing.” Much of the music of the time, Stravinsky told his audience, “carries within it the symptoms of a pathologic blemish and spreads the germs of a new original sin.”20 His rhetoric possessed an uncanny and perhaps unintended family resemblance to the aesthetics favored by fascist regimes that defined “degenerate art.” Despite Stravinsky’s unambiguous dislike of the Soviets in the 1930s, the Eurasiansim he subscribed to led him to a critical skepticism in 1939 more implicitly consonant with the Stalinist dogma of the mid- and late 1930s that ostracized Dimitry Shostakovich and Gavriil Popov. The criticisms shared a tone of moral disapproval.

  In exile, Stravinsky not surprisingly developed an overt commitment to religion, in particular Russian Orthodoxy. And by the mid-1920s he assumed, under the guise of neoclassicism, a stark anti-modernist stance. Stravinsky had no use for socialist realism, but his problem with Russia under Communism was comparatively nuanced. During the years he flirted with Eurasianist notions, Stravinsky observed, “Now Russia has seen only conservatism, without renewal or revolution without tradition.”21 Nabokov shared none of this. Organized traditional religion remained foreign to him. He maintained the same strict and unwavering contempt for post-revolutionary Russia, the Soviets, as he did for the fascists. He kept his distance from all “isms.” His views on human history and progress were linked to his own lifelong encounter with the detailed scientific observation of nature. Individuality and freedom in art and thought were endangered by the politics and culture of modern times. In 1937 Nabokov wrote, “The symmetry in the structure of live bodies is a consequence of the rotation of worlds … and that in our straining toward asymmetry, toward inequality, I can detect a howl for genuine freedom, an urge to break out of the circle.”22 For all his snobbery about writers past and present, Nabokov never strayed from the modernism he came to admire early in his career, that of Andrey Bely, Franz Kafka, the Proust of Swann’s Way, and the Joyce of Ulysses.23

  Although both men were anti-communist, Nabokov’s pessimism about modernity never led him down the more reactionary path taken by Stravinsky in the years between 1922 and the mid-1950s. Nabokov feared the populist embrace of the despotic imposition of order and discipline in political life—including the sort of uniform assertion of a “healthy” social utilitarian aesthetic promoted by Hitler and Stalin. He also did not romanticize autocracy, including that of the czars before 1917. The trap faced by Adam Krug, Nabokov’s protagonist in Bend Sinister, is the futility and self-destructiveness of any struggle to hold on to a shred of individuality, genuine refinement, originality, and morality—particularly by engaging with language, thought, literature, and culture—in the context of modern dictatorship. The
pretense of value on behalf of culture and the making of art itself are complicit in concealing this trap—a truth grasped by Ember, the Shakespeare translator and Krug’s friend in Bend Sinister.24

  The cult of self-improving culture displayed in Lolita by Dolores Haze (consider the meaning of the name) and the sort of bad art associated with middle-class, semi-educated taste for the sentimental and the emotionally illustrative provide no protection against barbarism and violence. Humbert Humbert’s highly cultivated and persuasive tastes in literature, music, and art, his evidently learned superiority over the Americans he meets seduces the reader; Humbert’s aesthetic sensibility, even his capacity for poetic eloquence, makes the case for his defense hard to resist. Yet connoisseurship does not prevent his crimes. It merely softens the cruelty and deepens the plausibility of rationalization. Whether delivered by would-be individualists like Humbert or bureaucrats and dictators who create concentration camps, aesthetic gifts and cultural sensibilities fail, for Nabokov, as antidotes to the evil in modern life.25

  When Humbert Humbert chases Clare Quilty, attempting to shoot him, his victim “sat down before the piano and played several atrociously vigorous, fundamentally hysterical, plangent chords, his jowls quivering, his spread hands tensely plunging, and his nostrils emitting the soundtrack snorts which had been absent from our fight. Still singing those impossible sonorities, he made a futile attempt to open with his foot a kind of seaman’s chest near the piano.”26 Nabokov could not have evoked a more effective caricature of the pretentions of the modern piano virtuoso and the cheap, illustrative Romanticism of the kind Stravinsky also despised, and the futility of a tradition of cultural consumption (the seaman’s chest) as means of escape from a fatal barbarism that threatens the survival of morality, civility, and the humane—much less that of talent, originality, beauty, and learning.

  For Nabokov, the Russia of his youth was personal; it vanished and lived only in his memory. The pretense of finding in the past a legitimate basis for nostalgia held no allure. In his adult life Nabokov remained resistant to organized causes and ideologies, including patriotism and cultural chauvinism. Although Russian was his primary language, the Russia that continued to occupy him was his own invention, and bore little, if any relation to the Russia that existed after 1917. He never sought to return to Russia or to maneuver to gain access to readers in Soviet Russia. Stravinsky on the other hand held on to the idea of an ongoing residual national solidarity, while rejecting a narrow nationalism. He saw himself as a supranational, universal figure above politics. Yet he subordinated his distaste for Communism and joined with other émigrés in taking some pride in the Soviet part of the Allied war effort in the 1940s. Stravinsky may have been ambivalent about returning to Russia, but he calculated correctly that if he did, he would return in triumph—which happened in 1962, after an absence of fifty years. He embraced the Russia he encountered on that trip; it evoked not only nostalgia but also a renewed sense of connection.

  Stravinsky rose to fame in 1913 with The Rite of Spring not as an exile, but as a Russian composer on a voluntary, temporary sojourn from Russia, the sort of visit to the West commonplace in the history of Russian music and literature, as seen in the examples of Pyotr Tchaikovsky, Nikolay Gogol, Alexander Scriabin, and Ivan Turgenev. In contrast, Nabokov’s great fame occurred in the context of involuntary exile. He always resented comparison with Joseph Conrad. Conrad was not an exile. He had no career as a Polish writer. Nabokov was a respected writer of Russian poetry and prose. Like Conrad, he achieved worldwide fame as a writer in English. But Nabokov did so while maintaining an explicit commitment to a particular tradition of Russian literature. His harsh loyalty to the virtue of literal translation (and skepticism about any other sort) was rooted in a view of the indivisible uniqueness of language. Its meanings were contingent on specificity, on time and place.

  In the end, however, Nabokov’s origins as a Russian did not define him in America, despite his teaching of Russian language and literature in a manner that suggested an indisputably superior knowledge and authority. The works that made him famous—Lolita, Pnin, and Pale Fire—were all novels located in America. In Stravinsky’s case, the explicitly Russian aspects of his music never disappeared, no matter how subtly altered and camouflaged, and actually helped shape some of his finest music written in America. With his Russian influences intact, Stravinsky influenced decisively the direction of French music between the early 1920s and 1940. The role he played in French musical life as a lionized personality was analogous to the place Nabokov came to occupy as a writer in America from the late 1950s until his death in 1977.

  If Stravinsky’s breakthrough came in 1913, Nabokov’s occurred between 1955 and 1958 with the publication of Lolita in Paris and New York. Both artists experienced—at different stages of their careers—a sudden burst of worldwide notoriety because of the scandal associated with a single work. Stravinsky became world-famous at age thirty. He arrived in America a well-known, influential, and admired figure, which led to the invitation to give the prestigious Norton Lectures at Harvard. Stravinsky complained constantly about money, but he came to America without the sort of dire financial worries common among émigrés (consider the fate of the Austrian composer Alexander Zemlinsky, who died in penury and obscurity in 1942 in Larchmont, New York). When Nabokov arrived in 1940, he brought with him at best an arcane reputation limited to émigré circles. He was in desperate straits. Among those prepared to help him were Sergey Rachmaninoff and Serge Koussevitzky, who provided the affidavit. Nabokov’s rise to the status of a superstar came when he was in his late fifties. As Stravinsky with the Rite, Nabokov was made famous by the surface of a single work, Lolita, rather than by the work’s greatness and importance as ultimately identified by a common critical consensus. With respect to the Rite, the choreography and the spectacular orchestral sonorities and effects generated the scandal. In the case of Lolita, the predictably reductive account of the plot and overt subject of the novel, the sexual passion for a “nymphet,” made the writer rich and famous—not its language and structure or its many tantalizing asides.

  Stravinsky’s renown when he arrived in America came about partly through the proselytizing of Nadia Boulanger, with whom Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson, and many others had studied, and this identity he retained. Nevertheless Stravinsky, like Nabokov, faced the problem of how to establish himself in America. Robert Craft was central to this process, helping to reinvent the composer’s image. Stravinsky was always keenly attuned to the winds of fashion and the critical reaction to his own music. His disappointment at the reception of his 1951 opera The Rake’s Progress, a work that many have regarded as the culmination of the composer’s romance with the “order and discipline” of neoclassicism—understood strictly as evocative of eighteenth-century practices—motivated him to explore serialism, with Craft’s help and Ernst Krenek’s guidance. The major works of his final serial period, along with Craft’s deft handling of the composer as a personality, helped place Stravinsky within the center of American classical musical life. Craft’s role made the output of new music possible. Yet despite this remarkable late period, the repertoire that defined the composer’s public persona to the end of his life was that written before the American years.

  Nabokov did not have a past visible to his new American public. And he did not require a Craft to assist him. Yet, as Nabokov freely admitted, his entry into the American literary world would certainly have been even more difficult than it turned out to be without the critic Edmund Wilson. In the end, however, Nabokov achieved his own carefully crafted iconic status as an American writer through the works he wrote in English. The supposed poetic masterpiece around which Pale Fire is constructed is evidence of Nabokov’s deep immersion into American life and letters. Nabokov’s Russian novels gained a wide reading public only in retrospect after Lolita—a pattern between old and new work that is the exact reverse of Stravinsky’s.

  Nabokov used his American success to w
ithdraw, in part, from America. Living in Montreux for his final sixteen years, he continued to assert his affection and allegiance to America; he maintained his prominence in the world of letters from afar and continued to write in English. “I am trying to develop, in this rosy exile, the same fertile nostalgia in regard to America, my new country, as I evolved for Russia, my old one.”27 His move was only in a minor way a move “back.” It ought not be compared to the return to Europe of Thomas Mann, Theodor W. Adorno, or Paul Hindemith—none of whom ever considered America a plausible second home. Craft may have briefly considered getting Stravinsky to move back to Switzerland in the 1960s, but Stravinsky never truly considered returning to Europe after 1945. When he decided to leave the West Coast in the 1960s, he settled in New York. He managed, like Nabokov, to balance his own construct of a lost homeland with affection for his new American home. In the end, however, he was buried in Venice, near Diaghilev.

  Method and Influence

  Richard Taruskin, in his brilliant, definitive, and exhaustive two-volume account of Stravinsky’s career through to the composition of Mavra in 1922—with its epilogue on the composer’s final masterpiece, the 1964 Requiem Canticles—has painstakingly and persuasively described the defining early phases of the composer’s career.28 These modes of engagement with Russian traditions and contemporaries shaped the composer’s method and aesthetic. Stravinsky’s music, from the 1920s to the 1960s, reveals a lasting debt to Russian sources, the Russian context in which he came of age, and the manner in which he transformed Russian elements in the first years of exile in Switzerland.29