Stalking Nabokov

by Brian Boyd

  Nabokov’s storytelling allows a free choice at every moment, a perpetually open series of surprises, and his innovative subjects, structures, and stratagems, in works like The Gift, Lolita, Pale Fire, Ada, Transparent Things, anywhere at all, really, even as early as Mary, show him again and again opening up new dimensions of possibility and inviting us to enter and explore these strange new spaces. But his very desire for freedom, on the small scale and the large, at the level of the sentence, the life, and the work, means that his imagination is present and active everywhere. Some readers resist what they feel as his imposing himself throughout his fictional worlds. Others appreciate his work as inviting both readers and characters, in line after line and life after life, into something freer than even the ample and opulent prison of space, time, and the self.

  Unlike so many serious storytellers of the twentieth century, Nabokov can give us the pleasures of extraordinary characters and events: Luzhin and the madness that impels him to his suicide; Humbert and the obsession that drives him to abduction and murder; Kinbote and his fantastic relocation of a thoroughly realistic poem; Van and Ada and their eighty-year-long forbidden love. But even without extraordinary events, in the quiet worlds of a Ganin or a Hugh Person, Nabokov tells his stories with so much imaginative mobility and surprise that he gives us a new confidence in what our imaginations can do to apprehend our world and to step right outside it. In a sense, he tells the same story each time, since each life leads from a similar beginning to a similar end, but he also ensures, as life does, that it could not be more different each time.

  14. Nabokov’s Transition from Russian to English

  Repudiation or Evolution?

  I met Alexander Dolinin in 1990 in St. Petersburg, and within a couple of minutes realized he knew Nabokov better than almost any Western Nabokovian. We have since had many delightful arguments in person and in print. But his 2005 essay suggesting that in his years of world fame Nabokov deliberately mythologized his past, downplayed his Russianness, and denigrated his Russian achievements seemed to me both deeply wrong and deeply unfair to Nabokov. Invited to a Nabokov conference at Oxford where Sasha was speaking, I decided to issue a challenge in person and, at more length, in print. I also wanted to turn the essay from the critical to the constructive. I found a way to do so by explaining the exacting standards Nabokov applied to his own work as well as that of others. No one had noticed that behind his strong critical opinions stands his strong sense of cultural evolution, his conviction that civilization in general and art in particular have extended and will continue to extend human possibilities and sensitivities.

  Nabokov was unsparing in criticism, but outsiders—and perhaps even insiders—are surprised how sparing Nabokovians tend to be to other Nabokovians. As editor of Nabokov Studies, Zoran Kuzmanovich would like more controversy in the Nabokov world. I don’t believe in controversy for his sake, or for its own sake, but I do believe we should always be ready to challenge our own and others’ strong opinions and confident claims by testing them against the evidence.

  Five years ago in the Cambridge Companion to Nabokov, Alexander Dolinin offered a “strong” reading of Nabokov’s career.1 He characterized Nabokov’s early years as a period of creatively combative engagement with the Russian literary tradition but his later years, some time after his switch to English, in terms of, first, a disavowal of that former engagement; second, a diminution of his own Russian achievement; and third, a “mythmaking” self-portrayal as “a born cosmopolitan” never attached to anything (53). Given that these claims were made by the foremost Russian Nabokovian in an authoritative series from a major academic press, given that they would rewrite our sense of Nabokov’s late career and his character, they deserve scrutiny. Dolinin’s claims prove far more mythical than Nabokov’s pronouncements on his own career: the evidence contradicts them at every turn.

  After showing this, I pass beyond the negative to explain in a new way why Nabokov continually drove himself to develop artistically and why he was hard not just on some of his own past work but also on the work of authors he revered. High standards lurk behind his strong opinions, and these high standards are far from narrowly literary or even artistic: they derive from a broad sense of cultural development not sufficiently recognized in Nabokov.

  REPUDIATING THE RUSSIAN?

  Nabokov, Dolinin asserts, “worked out a peculiar strategy of presenting his earlier writings as inferior ‘outlines’ or ‘dress rehearsals’ for his English masterpieces” (50); he “never misses a chance to sneak in a favorable reference to his English writings and to subtly pit them against their Russian counterparts” (51). “Sirin fell victim to the tricky mythmaking and playacting Nabokov indulged in during his later years” (53); “this scenario automatically, by definition, sends all Nabokov’s Russian writings downhill, relegating them to a secondary role of immature, imperfect antecedents” (54). “It would be wrong…to follow Nabokov in downgrading them to the rank of apprenticeship” (56).

  Dolinin finds this supposed strategy of downgrading “peculiar,” but he never questions his own scenario. He does not feel any need to explain why someone like Nabokov—not unappreciative of his own work, to say the least, and not unaware that the income from sales ensured his future freedom to write—would persistently diminish the value of his old work to a new audience much larger than any he had previously had, especially in forewords that might sway browsers’ decisions to purchase or not.

  Let me cite some obvious counterevidence to the claim that Nabokov devalued his Russian work—counterevidence Dolinin knows. In September 1958 Nabokov wrote to his sister Elena, “Lolita is having an unbelievable success—but all this ought to have happened thirty years ago” (SL 259). All this international success and recognition ought to have happened, that is, in 1928, if we count exactly, or, if we take “thirty” as only the nearest round number, in 1929, the year of The Defense, which always remained one of Nabokov’s favorite novels. Would he have expected extraordinary international critical and commercial success from apprentice work, from “immature, imperfect antecedents”? Does he not imply here that his Russian work had long deserved the acclaim that had suddenly arrived for one of his English novels?

  Perhaps Nabokov believed privately in the value of his Russian work but chose to downgrade it publicly for, as Dolinin says, some “peculiar” reason, and despite the effect such deprecation would have had on his sales? No. Consider a 1964 remark to Playboy, at a time when, according to Dolinin, Nabokov’s mythmaking should be at its height. In an interview, Alvin Toffler asked him whether in view of Lolita’s becoming such a cause célèbre he ever regretted writing it: “No, I shall never regret Lolita…. Of course she completely eclipsed my other works—at least those I wrote in English: The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Bend Sinister, my short stories, my book of recollections” (SO 20–21). This is exactly the converse of Dolinin’s claim. Nabokov here diminishes by comparison with Lolita the achievement of his early English fiction and even Speak, Memory, but not that of his best Russian fiction, which he evidently sees as reaching the level of his most successful novel. Or consider a public pronouncement from 1970, where Nabokov responds to a reminiscence by James Joyce’s and his own friend Lucie Léon Noel.2 In Mme Léon’s account of a dinner where Joyce and Nabokov met at her house, Nabokov writes, “She pictures me as a timid young artist; actually, I was forty, with a sufficiently lucid awareness of what I had already done for Russian letters preventing me from feeling awed in the presence of any living writer” (SO 292). Remember what Nabokov says earlier in Strong Opinions: “My greatest masterpieces of twentieth century prose are, in this order, Joyce’s Ulysses; Kafka’s Transformation; Biely’s Petersburg; and the first half of Proust’s fairy tale In Search of Lost Time” (SO 57). Nabokov not only stresses his age, that he was far past his apprentice years, but also declares himself aware enough of what he had done for Russian literature not to feel awe even before the writer of the greatest novel of the twentie
th century. In the way he words this, it can only mean that he thought then—and he refers to his thought as “a sufficiently lucid awareness,” so not as a misapprehension he now renounces—that what he had written in Russian was in the same class as what he and so many others have named the greatest novel of the century. Where is Dolinin’s “tricky mythmaking”? How is Nabokov “sending all [his] Russian writings downhill”?

  True, Nabokov points out flaws in some of his Russian work. Dolinin cites Nabokov’s regret in the foreword to The Gift that “here and there history shows through artistry” and that he “did not have the knack of recreating Berlin and its colony of expatriates as radically and ruthlessly as I have done in regard to certain environments in my later, English, fiction” (51). That history occasionally shows through artistry, that Nabokov’s indignation at Hitler’s Germany darkens his canvas of Berlin, seems a very human and even touching admission. And it is true that in Lolita, Pnin, and Pale Fire Nabokov does recreate America at home and on the road and on campus more radically and in some ways more ruthlessly than he “recreates” German and émigré Berlin. But that doesn’t mean that he downgrades to the level of apprentice work the book he repeatedly called the best of his Russian novels. Shakespeare could quite truthfully have noted that he did not have the knack of recreating Eastcheap and Elsinore as radically and ruthlessly as he did Sicilia and Bohemia in The Winter’s Tale, but this would not mean he dismissed the Henry IV plays and Hamlet as mere apprentice work.

  Nabokov points out flaws of many kinds in Ulysses—stylistic flaws (giving too much verbal body to thought [LL 289]); structural flaws (over-elaborating the Odyssean parallels [LL 288]; “poorly balanced” chapters [LL 320]); psychological flaws (making Bloom over-preoccupied with sex almost to “the verge of insanity,” even after the masturbation scene, in a way that seems “artificial and unnecessary,” or making Stephen too artistically controlled in casual speech [LL 287, 286]); ethical flaws (presenting, as Nabokov saw it, an unduly coarsened image of woman in Molly [LL 286]), social flaws (overstressing the racial aspect in Bloom [LL 287]), esthetic flaws (“needless obscurity” [LL 290])—far more serious and numerous than the single humanly admirable flaw he notes in The Gift. Yet he thought Ulysses the greatest novel of the century and in the early 1930s volunteered to translate it into Russian at the peak of his own productivity as a writer.3 Nabokov also points out flaws in Madame Bovary, yet for much of his adult life had prized it as the greatest of all novels.4 He points out flaws in Eugene Onegin despite thinking it the masterpiece of Russian poetry and, once again, worth devoting five of his own most creative years to (EO, passim). Nabokov thought Hamlet “the greatest miracle in all of literature,” but he did not consider it flawless.5

  But take the first example Dolinin adduces after claiming Nabokov had “worked out a peculiar strategy of presenting his earlier writings as inferior” (50): “His verdict was strict: ‘Not all of that stuff is as good as I thought it was thirty years ago’ ” (citing SO 88). Is that such an odd judgment? Do we not all tend to judge our work more harshly later than in the first flush of completion? And notice Dolinin’s first example in its context in Strong Opinions, where Nabokov goes straight on to talk only about Glory in these terms: “It is the story of a Russian expatriate, a romantic young man of my set and time, a lover of adventure for adventure’s sake, proud flaunter of peril, climber of unnecessary mountains, who merely for the pure thrill of it decides one day to cross illegally into Soviet Russia, and then cross back to exile. Its main theme is the overcoming of fear, the glory and rapture of that victory” (SO 88). That is all Nabokov adds, and it reads more like advertising copy than artistic disparagement.

  Dolinin does not specify exactly when Nabokov began to “indulge in” “tricky mythmaking” but locates it “during his later years” (53), not immediately after his transition from Russian to English. He claims that the poems Nabokov wrote in Russian in the late 1930s and the 1940s were “before he created a new persona for himself,” some time in the 1950s or later, apparently. But long before Nabokov purportedly adopted his new persona, he responded to Edmund Wilson’s reference to Glory with this remark in early 1943 (Wilson had also just read all Pushkin’s longer poems, and declared himself “disappointed in the patriotic Poltava, though I can see it is finely written”): “You are quite right about ‘Poltava.’ Incidentally, ‘Poltava’ in Pushkin’s output is on the same level as Podvig in mine. I wrote it twenty years ago—and you know how one feels about one’s blevotina [vomit]” (DBDV 104, 105). Wanting to maximize distance between himself and the novel, Nabokov dates it to twenty years previously, when he had actually written it only thirteen years earlier. As late as 1966 he could say that translating Podvig as first published was not worth the effort, and that he would have to change a great deal.6

  So from at least 1943 to 1966, the year of the interview where he said, “Not all of that stuff is as good as I thought it was thirty years ago,” Nabokov appears to have looked back on Glory with some distaste, as a patriotic effusion—yet in the 1966 interview, all that he actually says about the novel makes it sound attractive. But listen to what Nabokov writes in 1970 in his foreword to Glory, after he had reread it closely in revising Dmitri’s translation and discovered he did not need to make strategic changes. This was the last of his novels to be translated, his last foreword to a Russian novel, and should therefore show his “mythmaking” in its most potent form. He writes:

  It would make things too easy for a certain type of reviewer (and particularly for those insular innocents whom my work affects so oddly that one might think I hypnotize them from the wings into making indecent gestures) were I to point out the faults in the novel. Suffice it to say that, after all but lapsing into false exotism or commonplace comedy, it soars to heights of purity and melancholy that I have only attained in the much later Ada.7

  Since Nabokov points out faults in the novels he thinks the greatest ever written, his being ready to point out faults in Glory hardly seems a dismissal of apprentice work. Nabokov writes scornfully here of “a certain type of reviewer” in the same year as his foreword to Mary, where he refers without elaborating to that novel’s “flaws, the artifacts of innocence and inexperience, which any criticule could tabulate.”8 Since nobody wants to be thought a criticule, the effect is not to draw attention to Mary’s weaknesses but to invite critics not to do so, lest they prove themselves mere “criticules,” and to lower expectations somewhat so that readers do not expect in his first novel something on the level of his maturer masterpieces. It’s not self-sabotage but a preemptive strike against potential attack.

  But Glory is not Nabokov’s first novel, and his strategy here is both similar and quite different. “It would make things too easy for a certain type of reviewer”—for a prejudiced criticule, as it were, Nabokov implies— “were I to point out the faults in the novel.” But he will not do so. Yet in the next sentence he adds: “Suffice it to say that, after all but lapsing into false exotism or commonplace comedy…” These seem hardly grave faults, especially as he refers to “all but lapsing”—not quite lapsing, therefore— and the exotism of the novel often has real charm. And he continues: “It soars to heights of purity and melancholy that I have only attained in the much later Ada.” Not to heights that he has topped in Ada, but to heights that since Glory he has only attained there. In this respect at least, he claims that Glory outdoes his other work before Ada, including his other English masterpieces.

  Everything else Nabokov writes in the foreword makes Glory sound humanly appealing and artistically accomplished: “It is the glory of high adventure and disinterested achievement; the glory of this earth and its patchy paradise; the glory of personal pluck; the glory of a radiant martyr” (xiii). Nabokov famously divided the novelist into three facets, the storyteller, the teacher, and the enchanter, and declared the enchanter the greatest of these (LL 5). He writes that “The hero of Glory…is not necessarily interested in politics—that is the first o
f two mastertricks on the part of the wizard who made Martin” (xii). Later he adds: “My second wandstroke is this: among the many gifts I showered on Martin, I was careful not to include talent. How easy it would have been to make him an artist, a writer; how hard not to let him be one” (xiii). In other words, he twice acknowledges himself the enchanter behind Glory. He then compares Glory to a chess problem he composed, whose “beauty” he explains, and adds: “The problem was diabolically difficult to construct. So was Podvig” (xiv). How can Dolinin claim that Nabokov is trying to distance himself from imperfect apprentice work?

  Nabokov concludes the foreword by warning readers not to seek for glimpses of the author’s autobiography:

  The fun of Glory is elsewhere. It is to be sought in the echoing and linking of minor events, in back-and-forth switches, which produce an illusion of impetus: in an old daydream directly becoming the blessing of the ball hugged to one’s chest, or in the casual vision of Martin’s mother grieving beyond the time-frame of the novel in an abstraction of the future that the reader can only guess at, even after he has raced through the last seven chapters where a regular madness of structural twists and a masquerade of all characters culminate in a furious finale, although nothing much happens at the very end—just a bird perching on a wicket in the grayness of a wet day.

  (xiv)

  That is the last word of Nabokov’s last foreword to his Russian novels, and it is haunting, beguiling, and a marvelous insight into the subtleties of the novel, which certainly provided me with clues to my reading of Glory in The Russian Years. Far from diminishing his Russian novels, Nabokov offers us keys to their artistry and appeal.

  Glory taps into a rich humus of Russian myth and fairytale and literature that makes it a favorite for many Russian readers. Nabokov knew it would be counterproductive to tell non-Russian readers what we are missing, but he hints at enough of the human and artistic appeal of the novel to entice us to enjoy all we can respond to. The Nabokov who dismissed Glory as patriotic “vomit” in 1943, before Dolinin says he adopted the tricky persona of a disparager of his earlier work, introduces his last-translated Russian novel in terms of respect, affection, pride, and subtle enthusiasm.