A corollary of this formalist claim is the assumption that the formal character of a piece of music has an objective character that can be exactly described and rendered. Bely’s synthesis of natural science and aesthetics was a source of Stravinsky’s intense disparagement of the practice and justification of subjective interpretation by performers and his personal affinity first for the pianola, and subsequently for recording technology, through which exact and objective representations of a musical work could be transmitted.
Art and Consequences
Stravinsky shared with Nabokov the belief that the work of art held its value in its aesthetic and formal properties. Art was powerful to the extent it contested commonsensical notions of the real and categories of space, time, and causality. Nabokov once observed, “Both memory and imagination are a negation of time.”81 Nabokov and Stravinsky held on to a belief in valid norms of aesthetic value that allowed for individuality while at the same time they mistrusted a view of art as mere subjectivity, of art without objective criteria of judgment. Precision and exactness were indispensable attributes. In the end, however, such exactitude and precision were inevitably compromised by Stravinsky’s concession that even in music, the least “realistic” of the arts, something other than itself always seems to be expressed.82 Stravinsky was aware that the actual social function of music—its reception—derived from the assignment of meaning on the part of the listener, intended or not: the listener ascribed to music meanings both symbolic and literal that, strictly speaking, did not reside in the work itself.
For Stravinsky, this was actually a convenient error, one with which, for practical reasons, he could readily reconcile himself. At best, a truly informed aesthetic response to art permitted the listener to make legitimate contact with a religious sensibility—a communion, as Stravinsky concluded in 1939, with a generalized notion of humanity, “our fellow man” and with the “Supreme Being.” Thus for Stravinsky the formal power of art did in the end connect with faith through some perhaps quasi-mystical religious feeling not contained in the music itself. In this manner the theologian Jacques Maritain influenced Stravinsky in his Paris years. Maritain reconciled “art for art’s sake” and the premium on form with ethics and the suggestion of content: art, by being just art, mirrored the divine. Despite Stravinsky’s vigorous distaste for communal ideologies, his 1939 Maritain-inspired evocation of the divine recognition that derived from music had much in common with Romain Rolland’s suggestion in the late 1920s of the possibility of “an oceanic” feeling that might be a force for good. Both mirrored in different ways the interwar search for spiritual solace in the wake of the Great War. Stravinsky had no use for Rolland. Neither did Nabokov or Nabokov’s least favorite theorist, Sigmund Freud, in Civilization and Its Discontents. Nabokov’s hostility to Freud rested in the writer’s mistrust and contempt for a reductive causality about creativity, his denial of a deeper reality beyond the visible empirical world unmediated by the individual imagination, and therefore the freedom of the individual imagination. But Freud’s criticism of Rolland did not redeem either Freud or Rolland for Nabokov. And for Nabokov, the religious issue—the stuff about an “oceanic” sensibility or a divine “Supreme Being”—was a matter of silence, beyond words.83 For Stravinsky, however, a quite conventional appeal to religious justification remains buried beneath his denial of music’s power to express.
For Nabokov the formal virtues of art, properly grasped by the reader, did more than lead the reader into a vague humanism or Stravinsky’s moment of spiritual recognition. Implicit in the act of reading literature, particularly poetry and prose written in a modernist style defined by the attributes of poetry (as in Bely’s St. Petersburg and Joyce’s Ulysses) was a potency that could prevent the reader from denying the power of art. Art contested the utterly mundane, so that the aesthetic did more than merely conform to the ordinary experience of reality. Indeed the artwork, by its formal greatness, could stop readers in their tracks. True art in the medium of literature provided writer and reader an escape from the tyranny of experience that emanated from everyday life. Here was a form of deception: experience transfigured by the imagination, a reality consciously protected from barbarism and vulgarity. For Nabokov the making of art and its proper appreciation was at its best a purely inner moral act of rescue, a route for individuals to confront freedom and the paradox that human decency—culture notwithstanding—is endangered.
Nabokov undermines the act of reading as a passive experience in the same way Stravinsky demands the concentration of the listener. The recollection of details, the passage back and forth in the narrative, force the reader to reflect and piece together fragments, to reconsider and remember, creating within the present moment the allure of a complex interpretation. Nabokov and Stravinsky found comparable ways for an aesthetically generated control, distortion, and manipulation of elapsed time to define present experience.
Thus the structure of a Nabokov novel can be said to share formal aspects similar to those used in music, particularly Stravinsky’s. Repetition, abrupt transitions, modulations, fragmentation, inversions, cross-references abound, as do excursions into intense counterpoint with multiple subjects placed in discrete units. Nabokov’s methods resemble Stravinsky’s insofar as the elements of the composition are not present or utilized as placeholders for other meanings or expressive of something other than themselves. Even when words are set to music, as in Stravinsky’s settings of texts, from the Three Japanese Lyrics (1912) to The Rake’s Progress, they are used as sound elements, with syllables manipulated as musical elements.84 The attempt to “set” the meaning of the words or illustrate them in a Wagnerian manner reliant on ordinary diction is subordinated. Stravinsky’s procedure in 1912 already bears comparison with the purpose and method of the relationship between text and music articulated by Arnold Schoenberg that same year in the essay “The Relationship to the Text.”85 Even when linguistic meaning is presumed—as in song or opera—the text is used musically and proceeds independently of any “meaning.” The parallel in Nabokov occurs when the presumed reality of the narrative object of the novel—its setting and character—is put in question by the defiance of a single familiar perspective. The argument or plot of the novel is disconnected from a fabric of continuity and displaced from the reader’s attention. Rather, the act of writing, the craft of writing, and the predicament of the writer take center stage within the text itself.
This approach elevates Nabokov’s prose to the status of music. Nabokov, like Stravinsky, calls explicit attention to the craft and method of his compositions. In order to foreground the act of writing Nabokov asks for a reader more akin to the listener imagined by Stravinsky—a person who can follow the musical logic and smile, when necessary, at complex structures and the elegance with which past tradition becomes part of the present moment, as in the 1924 Concerto for Piano and Wind Instruments, and the 1931 Violin Concerto, with their evident allusions to Bach. Nabokov’s writing is often about other writing, just as Stravinsky’s music, particularly in the 1920s, has as its premise music from the past. Both Nabokov and Stravinsky, as exiles, used the aesthetic tradition in which they worked against itself, albeit respectfully, cloaking the new with evocations of the past.
It is not surprising that from their shared heritage both artists, skipping over the tastes of the previous generation, were particularly attached to Pushkin. The tradition they drew on was in that sense pre-modern, at the intersection of eighteenth-century classicism and early Romanticism. Furthermore, Pushkin, like Tchaikovsky later in the century, represented an ideal synthesis of the Russian and the Western. Yet his star began to fade even towards the end of his career. Those who regarded themselves part of the intelligentsia were, to quote D. S. Mirsky, “indifferent” or “hostile” after 1860; whatever surviving cult of Pushkin remained became “the religion of a paradise lost.”86 Nabokov idealized the poet who was neglected in the literary age of realism and social utility. He and Stravinsky identifi
ed with the very quality in Pushkin that outraged the older Tolstoy of the 1890s—the focus on an elite readership and the absence of a moralizing agenda. Pushkin’s use of language defined what was distinctive about Russian poetry and the musical and expressive possibilities of Russian speech, even as he found a means for their expression in Western forms.87 Stravinsky lamented that for “foreigners” Pushkin was little more than “a name in an encyclopedia.” Yet for these two exiles of an aristocratic sensibility and inclination, Pushkin’s “nature, his mentality, and his ideology” was “the most perfect representative of that wonderful line which began with Peter the Great … and has united the most characteristically Russian elements with the spiritual riches of the West.”88
Stravinsky turned to Pushkin, first during the composition of Les Noces and then explicitly with Mavra in 1922.89 Stravinsky sought to signal a shift away from the patterns of late nineteenth-century Russian musical nationalism. He reinvented a lineage for himself located in Glinka and Tchaikovsky—a lightness, economy, and elegance reminiscent of Mozart and explicitly defiant of Wagnerism and post-Wagnerian German modernism. Following Pushkin—and Tchaikovsky—he would attempt a synthesis of the Russian with the refined Western sensibilities derived from the era during which aristocratic patronage dominated musical culture, the age before the death of Beethoven. Stravinsky recalled with regard to Mavra:
This poem of Pushkin led me straight to Glinka and Tchaikovsky, and I resolutely took up my position beside them. I thus clearly defined my tastes and predilections, my opposition to the contrary aesthetic, and assumed once more the good tradition established by these masters. Moreover I dedicated my work to the memory of Pushkin, Glinka, and Tchaikovsky.90
Nabokov did not share Stravinsky’s enthusiasm for Tchaikovsky. He disdained Tchaikovsky’s operatic version of Eugene Onegin for what he regarded as its mawkish sentimentality, “cloying banalities,” and bowdlerization of Pushkin’s text.91 This disdain rested in the recognition, extensively argued by Bely, that in the streamlined elegance of Pushkin’s verse the full power of Russian rhythm and usage was exploited.92 (Well before Nabokov, Pushkin’s work was known to resist proper translation.) Pushkin, by being tied to the West while remaining the greatest exponent of the distinctive qualities of the Russian language, emerged as a matter of some obsession for the exiled Nabokov and as a powerful anchor for the emigré Stravinsky.93
As Stravinsky observed, “the national element occupies a prominent place with Pushkin as well as with Glinka and Tchaikovsky.”94 In exile, Nabokov and Stravinsky found in Pushkin a mirror of their dual condition: in possession of a uniquely Russian instrument (language for Nabokov, source material and harmonic usage for Stravinsky) but trapped in a Western context. That “fortunate alloy,”95 as Stravinsky termed Pushkin’s synthesis, remained present in the work of both men to the end. It is even visible in Nabokov’s American novels but dominant in his translations of his earlier works into English. The synthesis of the Russian and the Western is audible, for example, in three of Stravinsky’s later works, the Canticum Sacrum, Babel, and the Requiem Canticles.96
Nabokov and Stravinsky called on their respective publics to confront the method and materials of their work—the self-conscious distinctive style they developed in the making of art. The listener to Stravinsky’s music, from The Rite of Spring and Les Noces through the finest of the late works, was confronted with intense moments, abrupt changes in sonority without conventional preparation, and complex but unified contrapuntal combinatorial elaborations. All these were independent of a late-Romantic reliance on duration and structural devices based on habitual expectations or derived from practices dependent on easily located thematic expositions, repetitions, variations, recapitulations, and transitions.
Stravinsky’s and Nabokov’s initial sources were Russian but their audiences—certainly after 1940—were not. They embedded in their styles what for them was distinctly and irreducibly Russian—not the Russian of the late nineteenth century but of Pushkin and, in terms of humor, Gogol. By recasting that aspect of tradition they engaged in their own distinctive manner of nostalgia—a nostalgia that suggested a highly conservative but idiosyncratic and imaginary past, inherently critical of aspects of modernity and modernism fashionable during the mid-twentieth century. Stravinsky may have employed his own version of serialism, but after 1939 kept his distance from the radical experimentalism of Pierre Boulez (with whom Stravinsky had a complex relationship), Olivier Messiaen (whom Stravinsky disliked), or John Cage (whom Stravinsky dismissed), just as Nabokov, despite a commitment to modernism, disparaged most if not all of his contemporary “modern poets” (T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, for example).97 At the same time both men shunned populists, particularly the writers and composers in the Soviet Union. Stravinsky’s appreciation for Schoenberg and Webern derived from his recognition that they too drew from an idealized pre-Romantic tradition located in Viennese classicism. Nabokov had contempt for the books sent to him in the 1950s and ’60s and resisted the academic enthusiasm for and literary emulation of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.
The legacy Stravinsky and Nabokov shared helped inspire them to produce a body of work tied to a mythical past kept fresh in their minds in exile, yet stylistically modernist in an individualist manner. They remained independent of dominant modernist trends such as the derision of style per se, the devaluation of ornament, and the suspicion of complexity. Their distinctive modernism stood apart from any reactionary embrace of the strategies of narrative realism and Romanticism. Their appropriation of sources from a vanished past permitted them to develop formal strategies to turn the reader into the listener. The temporal frame of an encounter with music came to define the aesthetic experience of reading. Stravinsky put the idea of the reader as listener into succinct terms: “Music is based on temporal succession and requires alertness of memory.”98 Yet Stravinsky was never a literary composer in the Wagnerian sense. And Nabokov, his protestations to the contrary, turned the encounter with prose into an act of intense musical listening in which meaning derived from the formal properties and use of words that framed the reader’s encounter, her perception of time, memory, and her construct of meaning—all sealed within the framework of a work of art, an imagined abstraction from the shared encounter with ordinary reality.
Yet, for all the common ground between them in method and procedure, key differences remain in the ethical substance implicit in their work—in how they, as artists, construed modernity. At stake were not merely the predicament of the artist, but the proper purpose and character of the intended response. The experience of exile, and the distance it created from any semblance of home, rendered ordinary history and even the fragments of biography—for both, based in Russia—ultimately as fanciful as Kinbote’s Zembla. For Nabokov, that uprooted existential circumstance turned out to be the most reasonable vantage point from which to observe human nature and to write within the most noble and beautiful traditions of his craft. By moving back to Montreux, he secured the necessary distance vis-à-vis his new home, America. That distance found the possibility that, at best, he could sustain in his writing the “precision of poetry and the exactness of science.”99 The precision and exactness were located in the use of words, the acuity of observation, and his art’s penetration beneath the surface to confront the moral circumstances of the individual.
Stravinsky shared Nabokov’s allegiance to an art of precision and exactness and to an art located in a Russian tradition mediated through Western European practice. But he was rather impervious to the moral crisis represented by fascism and Communism, by the terror, barbarism, and slaughter they inspired.100 Nabokov (as he never tired of asserting in the face of the scandal surrounding Lolita) remained a moralist with eighteenth-century values located in the love of individual freedom, art, and science.101 “Actually I’m a mild old gentleman who loathes cruelty,” he told an interviewer in 1962.102 He sought to engage his best readers in confronting, albeit indirectly, the threat evident
in the course of twentieth-century history. Deftly woven within all his novels is the recognition of the nearly irresistible pressure on each individual, practical and psychological, to succumb and conform, and therefore the powerlessness of individuals to resist, escape, and reject the allure of entrapment and collaboration with cruelty. Only in the temporal realm of the imagination could the human possibility of decency find its voice.
This aspect of Nabokov helps illuminate the link between his writing and his work with butterflies. The butterfly, much like the nymphet, has a brief moment of detailed and uniquely differentiated beauty that emerges from the uncanny camouflage of the ordinary. The temporal frame of that beauty is brief, comparable to the act of writing, the act of listening, and the act of reading. It is a revealing coincidence that in concentration camps that held children, the children spontaneously drew on the walls pictures of butterflies as emblems of hope.103 Reading Nabokov and perhaps listening to Stravinsky—despite the absence of any comparable admirable intentions on the part of the composer—permits us the same fleeting hint of hope and beauty expressed by the children as their own pasts were obliterated and the present brought them only nearer to their deaths.104
NOTES
1. Vladimir Nabokov, Strong Opinions (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 171–72. Brian Boyd’s two-volume biography, Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years and Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990–91), is a necessary and indispensable source. The subject matter in this essay has been treated provocatively by Daniel Albright in the chapter on Nabokov in Representation and the Imagination: Beckett, Kafka, Nabokov, and Schoenberg (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 52–94; and in his discussion of Stravinsky in Untwisting the Serpent: Modernism in Music, Literature, and Other Arts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).
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