Feu d’artifice and The Firebird display the young composer’s initial debt to a late nineteenth-century aesthetic, an older Romantic nationalism in which folklore was adapted into music for the stage and domestic use—the Kuchkist heritage of the so-called Mighty Five. Stravinsky, as his comments on Tchaikovsky suggest, also sought to prove himself within the Rimsky-Korsakov circle by demonstrating his command of the craft of composition defined in the German-centered “Western European” terms of Glazunov’s more conservative formalism. That craft involved the display of symphonic thinking, in which a dynamic if not self-declared organic logic drives the use and transformation of harmony and melody. There, harmony serves a functional purpose in shaping musical time and structure, providing context for the process of thematic transformation, development, and recapitulation. These in turn generate audience expectations and the mechanisms by which instrumental music can appear to mimic narrative patterns in prose. These strategies made it possible for composers successfully to occupy duration and recalibrate long stretches of time.
The Russian music of the 1880s and ’90s was Stravinsky’s initial formative aesthetic environment. It can be taken, with its nationalist colorings, as the musical equivalents of the literary realism that dominated Russian literature, if not into the early 1900s, then, at minimum, until the mid-1880s, after the death of Czar Alexander II.30 Social and political content and straightforward narrative and plot structure dominated, whereas matters of style, the self-conscious awareness of form, or any pretense to rendering prose closer to the poetic were subordinated. Literature, notably in the case of Dostoevsky and the later Tolstoy, became a prose forum for ideas—mostly on behalf of social and political changes that could elevate the moral significance and worth of all human beings. Method and form were contingent on a commitment to realism. The spiritual betterment of the reader became a goal. Ideas were rendered through action, description, and dialogue. The reader was drawn in by the writer’s manipulation of the illusions of sequential time and pictorial realism. Not surprisingly, one of Nabokov’s father’s favorite novelists was Charles Dickens.
Although Nabokov was considerably younger than Stravinsky, they both confronted these qualities, colored by nationalist sentiment, as the dominant aesthetic credo of their parents’ generation. Whether in prose or in music, the objective was to use aesthetic conventions to master the suggestion and evocation of content whose plausibility was located in methods of persuasion tied to realist criteria. Stravinsky, even when he abandoned the Rimsky-Korsakov model, sustained a nationalist impetus by drawing on more ethnographically authentic sources of Russian folk music. But he located new formal possibilities for music in their melodic and rhythmic elements and articulated a nationalist sensibility less defined by the aesthetics of Romanticism and at once more novel and authentic. His means deviated from the program music tradition and were influenced by the ideas of contemporaries, several linked to the Mir iskusstva (World of Art) circle—Serge Diaghilev, Léon Bakst, and Alexandre Benois in particular. The last two were themselves part of the circle of artists around the Nabokov family. The vogue for symbolism and synesthesia, particularly in the work of Bely and Scriabin, also played a role in shaping the path Stravinsky took.
In the Rite, Stravinsky used abstraction of the archaic Russian materials he appropriated to achieve an “architectural” rather than “anecdotal” use of musical time. Repetition in the form of sustained rhythmic pulsation was juxtaposed with abrupt harmonic shifts and changes in sonority at odds with the tradition of the symphony. The combinatorial ingenuity Stravinsky revealed (meant here not strictly in the sense defined by Milton Babbitt) employed the octatonic scale and intervallic cells—“a syntax of subsets and super-sets” derived from them.31 With that as a base he pursued intentional “simplification”—the abstraction of genuine folk melodic and rhythmic usage. This led Stravinsky to achieve what Taruskin describes as “a hard-nosed esthetic modernism.”32 Harmony was no longer directional and dynamic, but static. The effect was not unlike the visual aesthetic pursued by Nicholas Roerich, the designer of the first Rite production. Roerich, working from the suggestion of authentic national antique sources, produced flat, static, frozen imagery further abstracted from any form of realism by the stark uninflected use of color and the reduction of perspective; juxtaposed geometric patterns in the visual frame undercut the nominal suggestion of narrative meaning.33
By the time he composed the Rite Stravinsky, distancing the experience of musical time from traditional expectations, had shifted the relationship of the listener to a musical work away from an analogy with that of a reader following a narrative. In the realist novel, opera, and Romantic symphony, the plausibility of an imagined past, present, and future, occurring in a logical sequence had been enhanced by the realist plainness (or naturalistic resemblance) of prose style (including dialogue) and the manipulation of the narrative voice. In music, these expectations among listeners had been amply met by the techniques of musical usage of both sides of the apparent divide between the circles around Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov. But with the Rite, anticipation and release as well as recollection during the act of listening were subordinated to the intensity of the momentary encounter with sound and the unprepared contrasts in the sharply delineated sequence of events. Music intensified the experience of time in the immediacy of its encounter, emancipating it from any dependence on recapitulation and foregrounding accumulation. Stravinsky’s Rite appeared in direct conflict with musical realism’s most skilled practitioner of the fin de siècle, Richard Strauss, notably his two last symphonic works, the Sinfonia Domestica and the Alpine Symphony.
However fierce the antipathy may have been between the Kuchkists and their opponents (or between the Wagnerians and anti-Wagnerians), the advent of modernism circa 1913 in Stravinsky unmasked what all of these separate camps held in common in terms of the function of harmony and the character of form, and therefore the construct of musical time. Whether formalist (in the sense of Eduard Hanslick and later Stravinsky himself, who in his autobiography never tired of underscoring the idea that music expressed nothing except itself), or blatantly illustrative, as in Wagner’s, Liszt’s, and Strauss’s compositions, musical time had been controlled by convention so as to confirm the apparent reality of a past and present moment, and the existence of a causal nexus analogous to the empirical experience of events or its linguistic representation. Art sought to engender either a remembered, imagined, or implied narrative.34
Stravinsky’s achievement in the 1913 Rite and more strikingly in 1917 with Les Noces—a distillation of a modernist aesthetic out of neo-nationalist material using simplification and abstraction that recalibrated the experience of time and defined a style—can be compared with the project that Nabokov undertook as a novelist in his twenties, after his years at Cambridge and his move to Berlin. Nabokov shared sources of inspiration with his older composer compatriot, notably the Mir iskusstva movement that argued the autonomy of the aesthetic and the primacy of matters of style and form against the inherited utilitarian aesthetics of realism. Symbolism and the World of Art movement motivated Stravinsky and Nabokov to question the claim of a correspondence between aesthetic experience and the quotidian encounter with experienced time, both measured and remembered. This challenge to the traditional logic of art extended to a critique of the late Tolstoy’s insistence that there be an evident moral and, by implication, redemptive justification beyond a purely aesthetic one. Stravinsky and Nabokov experimented not only in terms of their engagement with their respective traditions in Russian music and literature, but in terms of the fundamental character, function, and purpose of the work of art and its relationship to its audience, the link between literature and reader or music and listener.
The Gift, Nabokov’s last novel from his Berlin years (and for some his finest) is in part framed by two exchanges between the two most sympathetic figures in the book: Fyodor, the nominal protagonist, who writes a satirical, almost Gogol-
like biography of Nikolay Chernyshevsky (the arch-realist of the nineteenth century and a favorite of Lenin and the Soviets), and Koncheyev, the poet. In the first exchange Fyodor asserts, quoting Koncheyev, “Yes, some day I’m going to produce prose in which ‘thought and music are conjoined as are the folds of life in sleep.’”35 Thinking in words is idealized by language’s musical properties—its sounds and rhythms—not meanings that might be detached from sound and form. For the young Nabokov, the writing of literature was framed by language that revealed a nonlinear temporal logic outside of ordinary time, comparable to the distortion of time in dreams, yet possessed of a precision reminiscent of science and susceptible to being captured in works.
In the second exchange Fyodor picks up this theme (one Nabokov would return to explicitly at the end of Ada, or Ardor):
It would be a good thing in general to put an end to our barbaric perception of time. … Our mistaken feeling of time as a kind of growth is a consequence of our finiteness which, being always on the level of the present, implies a constant rise between the watery abyss of the past and the aerial abyss of the future. Existence is thus an eternal transformation of the future into the past—an essentially phantom process—a mere reflection of the material metamorphoses taking place within us. … The theory I find most tempting—that there is no time, that everything is the present situated like a radiance outside our blindness—is just as hopeless a finite hypothesis as all the others.36
Nabokov attempted to find the “radiance outside our blindness” by writing a poetic prose that treated language as music—shattering the inherited narrative and structural conventions of the novelistic form of realism and locating in its place an alternate sensibility that transcended the mundane. Despite the evident contrasts, this project took shape in a manner comparable to Stravinsky’s evolution from the 1907 Symphony in E-flat to the 1917 Les Noces. Nabokov experimented not only with language at every point in a novel (or short story)—each unit of which was ultimately contained on index cards—but in the overall structure, routinely divorcing each novel from following an inherited model as a sequential narrative marked by character development and a clear demarcation of past, present, and future. Stravinsky, by rejecting the symphonic model and the conventions of late nineteenth-century musical continuity, formed what Edward T. Cone identified as a “method” in three parts: stratification, interlock, and synthesis.37 These three terms could also be applied to Nabokov’s novels from the 1930s, particularly The Gift and Invitation to a Beheading, and those from the 1950s, particularly Lolita and Pnin.
The privileging of the aesthetic pioneered by the World of Art movement and the symbolists of the Silver Age in Russia offered both Stravinsky and Nabokov ideological bases for shifting the criteria of an artwork from matters of content to those of structure and form. Within formal criteria, style and method were foregrounded. Cone identified the use of successive “time-segments” in the 1920 Symphonies d’instruments à vent.38 Each of these is suspended, creating opportunities for their employment in contrapuntal usage. The synthesis comes not in a climax, but in the reduction or the assimilation of one element into another. Bridges and divergences are common. Stratification using discrete musical variables defines Stravinsky’s compositional procedure well into the music of the 1940s; in Cone’s view, it also describes the way in which the strong tonal components of the 1930 Symphony of Psalms are organized. Another way of imagining Stravinsky’s method in the Symphonies d’instruments à vent is, as Louis Andriessen and Elmer Schönberger have argued, to apply the metaphors of montage and collage in which the structural relationship and identity of disparate fragments are altered and manipulated, generating an overarching unified framework in which the discrete elements remain visible.39 Taruskin has perhaps the most elaborate and persuasive way of characterizing Stravinsky’s novel approach to form, for which he uses the Russian term drobnost', or “splinteredness,” a “sum of parts.”40
The parallels to such procedures can be found in Nabokov in the fragmentation of time, the subtly arranged but sudden shifts in voice, and in the inconsistent presence of the narrator. Nabokov’s “time fragments” are deployed so as to create ambiguities between the real and imagined. The reader is continually alert to the persistent shedding of the illusions of realist narration; just as the listener to Stravinsky is struck by the distinct substance of each musical moment apart from any functional implication backward or forward, Nabokov’s reader is forced to confront sentences and paragraphs as stylistic entities, with significance apart from any overarching narrative frame. Literature, insofar as it is part of “the forces of imagination,” is a “force of good,” Nabokov observed in 1965. Translating The Eye more than three decades after its publication, Nabokov confessed he was in search of the “reader who catches on at first”; this reader will derive “genuine satisfaction,” but from more than a story.41 Nabokov’s ideal reader is asked to jettison the commonsense notion of language as representational or corresponding to an external reality. A different sort of precision is required. Stylistic self-awareness of how observation can be discussed alters the perception of elapsed time and preserves it in memory. The more detailed, the more unusual and poetic, the more vivid. Through writing fired by the poetic imagination a new reality comes into being that is more real than the “real” itself.
The framing of the novels—visible in the cloaked identity of the narrator in Pnin; in the construction of Pale Fire out of segments of commentary that follow a text and scramble past, present, and future and the multiple identities of its protagonist Kinbote; in the form of Lolita as an account by a man awaiting trial; or in the uncertain connection to dream life and everyday existence in Despair, Invitation to a Beheading, and Bend Sinister—suggest parallels to Stravinsky’s procedures of stratifying elements that have been abstracted from otherwise familiar patterns. In music, pitch and rhythm are the elements in play; in prose they are words, plot, time, and character. Nabokov’s method of collage and montage is clearest in his use of time, his layering of perspectives using fragments of memory and distortions of the way time is segmented into a sequence of past, present, and future.42 Nabokov’s syntactic inventiveness, his virtuosic use and invention of words, his nearly Shakespearean synthesis of word use and thought, as well as his assemblage of the novel by the ordering of completed units (his beloved index cards) show his literary method as not dissimilar from musical composition as practiced by Stravinsky. Stravinsky’s meticulous habits in the process of composition, as understood by theorists and as evident in the manuscripts of The Rake’s Progress and the Requiem Canticles (to cite just two often reproduced examples), suggest that Nabokov and Stravinsky shared an innovative combinatorial genius.43
Consider, for example, the elegance, variety, and ingenuity in the disposition of intervals and sonorities in the Requiem Canticles as analogous to the illusory simplicity of the relationship of poem to commentary in Pale Fire. Kinbote, with knowing irony, speaks early of the one line that “would have completed the symmetry” of Shade’s poem. Nabokov has him end this thought by writing “damn that music. Knowing Shade’s combinatorial turn of mind and subtle sense of harmonic balance, I cannot imagine that he intended to deform the faces of his crystal by meddling with its predictable growth.”44 Yet deformation precisely describes what he as a novelist and Stravinsky as composer, in their relationship to the traditions in their respective arenas, actually accomplished. The deformation and meddling were directed at the narrative conventions of form and continuity that derived their power from a presumed correspondence to lived experience that was ultimately banal.
Nabokov was fabled for his visual acuity. His love of Sherlock Holmes rested less on the detective’s deductive powers than on his eye for detail. Nabokov’s meticulous work on butterflies, his fanatical concern for the accuracy of descriptive detail, his poetic response to landscape in his novels all attest to the primacy of attention to the smallest detail in a work of art and the imagination. “I d
iscovered in nature the nonutilitarian delights that I sought in art. Both were a form of magic, both were a game of intricate enchantment and deception.”45 No wonder he derided novelists of “general” ideas who penned prosaic sentences filled with the vocabulary of abstraction. In Speak, Memory Nabokov pointed to the moment of intense sight as the means by which the finest that is human can stake its claim:
It is certainly not then—not in dreams—but when one is wide awake, at moments of robust joy and achievement, on the highest terrace of consciousness, that mortality has a chance to peer beyond its own limits, from the mast, from the past and its castle tower.46
In Nabokov’s writing, the aural experience in the present moment, not only the visual, mirrors “the heightened terrace of consciousness” that can be set to words. At stake is not a talent for synesthesia (as with the Lithuanian composer Mikalojus Čiurlionis, who perceived color and sound at one and the same time) or its ideology (as developed by Scriabin).47 Nabokov did, however, recall that the imagining of the outline of a single letter of the alphabet produced a “fine case of colored hearing.”48 But Nabokov’s memories were framed not only by sight but by sounds—a “throbbing tambourine,” “trilling” nightingales, the sounds of village musicians, the rhythm of Mademoiselle’s speech.49 King Charles in Pale Fire was a musician. Nabokov routinely praised poetry in terms of music (its “contrapuntal pyrotechnics”), and for its music (“that dim distant music”).50 Cincinnatus C. recalls the world being “hacked” into “great gleaming blocks” by the “music that once used to be extracted from a monstrous pianoforte.”51
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