by Brian Boyd
The evidence contradicts Dolinin’s claims at every point. Nabokov also devalues his work in English, like the English poems he collects in Poems and Problems (“they are of a lighter texture than the Russian stuff, owing, no doubt, to their lacking that inner verbal association with old perplexities and constant worry of thought which marks poems written in one’s mother tongue” [PP 14]). He dismisses his early verse translations of Pushkin and others, before he adopted his later strict literalism.9 He disparages the “frivolous little book” on Gogol, before he developed his later strictly scholarly approach to Pushkin (EO 2.314). As in his comments on his Russian work, his criticisms come from the vantage point of new techniques or approaches or simply from his admission of the limitations of his second language, not from any perverse persona.
And he also praises his Russian works: Priglashenie na kazn’ (he gives it its Russian title) is the one of his works he holds in “the greatest esteem” (SO 92) in 1966, at the supposed peak of his mythmaking. From 1945 to his death, in private and in public, he unwaveringly designated his Russian poems of the late 1930s and especially the early 1940s as his best.10 He repeatedly draws attention to the challenges and beauties of his Russian works. The story “Terror” “preceded Sartre’s La Nausée, with which it shares certain shades of thought, and none of that novel’s fatal defects, by at least a dozen years” (SoVN 644). He describes “The Circle” as a satellite of The Gift but asserts that “a knowledge of the novel is not required for the enjoyment of the corollary which has its own orbit and colored fire,” while he also suggests that “the story will produce upon readers who are familiar with the novel a delightful effect of oblique recognition” (SoVN 649–50). I could go on and on.11
From before his arrival in America, and during his early years there, Nabokov passionately and persistently sought to arrange translations into English of what he thought his three best Russian novels—The Defense, Invitation to a Beheading, and The Gift. He gave up in the face of the difficulty of finding a translator up to his standards and the difficulty of finding publishers even for his English-language novels (The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Bend Sinister, Lolita, and Pnin were all rejected by American publishers). He lamented in the afterword to Lolita, “None of my American friends have read my Russian books and thus every appraisal on the strength of my English ones is bound to be out of focus” (Lolita 318). Despite finding many errors of fact, interpretation, and translation in Andrew Field’s 1967 Nabokov: His Life in Art, he welcomed it enthusiastically for opening up his still untranslated Russian works and for treating the Russian and English work as a seamless whole, for breaking down what Field calls “the meaningless and harmful division of Nabokov’s art into ‘Russian works’ and ‘English works.’ ”12
If the evidence is so decidedly against Dolinin’s claims, how can he even argue his case? The keystone of his argument is his reference to the poem “We So Firmly Believed”:
At the center of the Nabokov myth lies the very idea of his life in art as an uninterrupted path, a continuous ascension, to use the images of the poem “We So Firmly Believed” (PP, 89) from the “damp dell” of promising juvenilia up to the “alpine heath” of faultlessly crafted masterpieces, a history of triumphant emergence unimpeded (and maybe even furthered) by the painful switch to a different language. It is clear that this scenario automatically, by definition, sends all of Nabokov’s Russian writings downhill, relegating them to a secondary role of immature, imperfect antecedents.
(54)
Yet the poem does not support Dolinin’s argument as he claims it does. It does not refer to Nabokov’s art at all. It was written in 1938, before Nabokov switched to English, and therefore “by definition” before he had written his English masterpieces and before he could have possibly entertained any thought of presenting his Russian oeuvre as apprentice work. Let me cite an earlier, unpublished translation Nabokov made of the poem, which renders its sense more clearly than the version in Poems and Problems:
To My Youth
We used to believe so firmly, you and I, in the unity
of existence; but now I glance back—and it is
astounding—how impersonal in color, how unreal in
pattern you have become, my youth.
When one examines the matter, it is like the haze of
a wave between me and you, between the shallows and the
drowning—or else I see a receding highway, and you
from behind as you pedal right into the sunset on your semi-racer.
You are no more myself, you’re a mere outline, the subject
of any first chapter—but how long we believed
in the oneness of the way from the damp gorge
to the mountain heather.13
Dolinin implies that this poem “at the center of the Nabokov myth” talks about a writer’s progress. It does no such thing. He implies that the poem suggests “a continuous ascension…up to the ‘alpine heath’ of faultlessly crafted masterpieces.” Nabokov says nothing about artistic achievement. In fact, the poem is a deeply moving reflection on the gaps in memory, the gulfs in time within the self, the sense that as you look back at yourself you realize that despite the illusion of continuous identity, you may no longer feel a live connection with your younger selves. In this context, and in view of the immemorial image of a life as a river taking one at death out to the sea, it seems more likely that Nabokov is thinking of the journey back in thought from the “damp gorge” of the present to the mountain heather, to the source and spring of one’s life: the way back from the present to the origins of the self. It’s not a glorious ascension to future achievement: after all, heather hardly grows on mountain summits, but it can flourish on slopes where springs start to flow down continuously to lower “damp dells.”
This poem was written before Nabokov changed languages, before he had written any of the English works that Dolinin tries to imply the poet implies with the “ascension” to the “alpine heath” and “this scenario” that “automatically, by definition, sends all Nabokov’s Russian writings downhill.” A page later Dolinin writes: “To quote and paraphrase his poems of the late 1930s and the 1940s written before he created a new persona for himself,” (55), but when he quotes “We So Firmly Believed” and refers to “this scenario” and its consequences “by definition,” he does not note the fact that the poem was actually written in 1938, long before the supposed “alpine heath” of flawless English masterpieces and long before the new persona that he presents the poem as confirming. Who is the mythmaker?
I would like to move to subsidiary claims that Dolinin makes that are just as obviously unfounded and even more obviously unfair. According to Dolinin, the later Nabokov looking back at his Russian self “pretended that he had always stood apart from literary battles and discussions of the day”(53). Once again, Dolinin does not ask himself why Nabokov might have done such a thing—when Nabokov could declare that “next to the right to create, the right to criticize is the richest gift that liberty of thought and speech can offer” (LRL ii); when he so loved being a provocateur, in his jibes at Freud and at Soviet propaganda, in his debunking of esteemed authors, in his fierce polemics on literary translation; and when he showed such recognition that this was good copy, a sure way of provoking critics’ and readers’ attention.
Let me cite just a few instances of Nabokov insisting on his part in literary skirmishes. No scholar had approached Nabokov about his Russian work until Andrew Field in 1966. That year, reading Field’s discussion of the 1931 story “Lips to Lips” in the manuscript of Nabokov: His Life in Art, Nabokov, unprompted, volunteered the information—and suggested “one might mention” it—that “the story is based on an actual event in connection with a certain Alexander Burov being milked by the clique of Chisla.”14 In the same note, he also offers an explanation that the 1944 Russian poem “No Matter How” “was aimed at those émigré Russians whom Russian victories led to forget and forgive Soviet iniquities.”
Field duly used the information, and reported on other literary feuds he had recognized, with Nabokov’s approval.15
When Nabokov began collecting his Russian stories and poems for McGraw-Hill in the late 1960s and the 1970s, he did not miss a chance to highlight past polemics. He explains the narrative emphasis of his poetry of the late 1920s and early 1930s as expressing “my impatience with the dreary drone of the anemic ‘Paris school’ of émigré poetry” (PP 14). He refers to what had become by then the main émigré newspaper, the Paris “Poslednie Novosti, with which I conducted a lively feud throughout the 1930s” (SoVN 648). He explains the 1939 poem “The Poets” thus:
The poem was published in a magazine under the pseudonym of “Vasily Shishkov” in order to catch a distinguished critic (G. Adamovich, of the Poslednie novosti) who automatically objected to everything I wrote. The trick worked: in his weekly review he welcomed the appearance of a mysterious new poet with such eloquent enthusiasm that I could not resist keeping up the joke by describing my meetings with the fictitious Shishkov in a story which contained, among other plums, a criticism of the poem and of Adamovich’s praise.
(PP 95)
When he introduced the translation of the story, he again reprinted the whole poem and explained the tussle with Adamovich at still greater length. Dolinin may not know Nabokov’s letters to Field, but he knows Nabokov’s references to his feuds with Paris poets, critics, and periodicals. He has a copious and exact memory. How can he claim that Nabokov “pretended that he had always stood apart from literary battles and discussions of the day” (53)?
I could go on, but the point is made. No, I will go on, because Dolinin keeps impugning Nabokov, despite the evidence:
Like those unhappy expatriates who leave their native country in search of a better life and then are doomed again and again to prove to themselves that their decision was right, Nabokov had to justify his emigration from his native language and literature to their acquired substitutes. For this purpose, he would argue that “the nationality of a worthwhile writer is of secondary importance” (SO, 63) and present himself as a born cosmopolitan genius who has never been attached to anything and anybody but his autonomous imagination and personal memory.
(53)
“For this purpose,” Dolinin says—to justify his leaving first Russia and then Europe—Nabokov would argue that “the nationality of a worthwhile writer is of secondary importance.” I would have thought it did not take much to justify fleeing death for yourself and your family, and I would have thought Nabokov’s arguments about the transnational quality of the best writing deserved serious consideration rather than dismissal as spurious self-justification. In the Russian survey lectures that he taught at Wellesley and Cornell (for the first time in 1947, so before he had written any of the English masterpieces that Dolinin claims provided the pretext for Nabokov’s belittling his Russian masterpieces), Nabokov had this to say:
Individuals not nations create literature. The term “national literature” is a contradiction in terms….for me literature is not the echo of a nation but the echo of individual genius.…Literature is not created by the average Russian or the average American. It is created by a dispersed and universal family of great men. The art of Pushkin or Gogol or Tolstoy is considerably closer to that of Flaubert or Dickens or Proust or Joyce than to anything an average Russian could think up;…Dostoevsky’s divagations were much closer to the sentimental and crude phantasms of English and French mystery novels of the 18th and early 19th centuries than to any national psychology of Russian murderers and monks.16
This sounds like Nabokov’s authentic voice and his authentic convictions. It even sounds like an opinion worth taking seriously, and advice well directed at literarily unsophisticated students. What does it have to do with justifying flight from Bolshevized Crimea or Nazified France? If Nabokov concocted such ideas to consolidate the persona of a born cosmopolitan genius, why did he say this to a class mostly unaware that he was a writer and, according to Dolinin’s dating, before he adopted this late persona?
Let us turn to Nabokov’s “present[ing] himself as a born cosmopolitan genius” (53), in Dolinin’s words. Did he not present himself as a Russian, in every major work he wrote except Lolita, where he intended to hide his authorship? Asked by an interviewer in 1962, by which time the persona was supposed to be in place, “Do you still feel Russian, in spite of so many years in America?” Nabokov answered without hesitation, “I do feel Russian and I think that my Russian works, the various novels and poems and short stories that I have written during these years, are a kind of tribute to Russia….I have just finished revising a good translation of my novel, The Gift, which I wrote about thirty years ago. It is the longest, I think the best, and the most nostalgic of my Russian novels” (SO 13).
Still on this same Dolinin sentence: Nabokov would present himself as someone “who has never been attached to anything but his autonomous imagination and personal memory” (53). Not true. As always, Nabokov insisted on his independence and distanced himself from any group response or period perspective, but he “presented himself” eloquently and intensely as attached to Russia, the Russian liberal tradition, the Russian literary tradition (including particular writers of his youth like Blok, Bely, Gumilyov, and Voloshin), the Russian emigration as a continuer of both, to his family and to figures in the literary world like the critic Aykhenvald, the poet Khodasevich, and the patron and editor Fondaminsky. He kept out of the public gaze individuals he knew only in a private capacity, but the intensity of his affection for friends like his schoolmate Samuil Rosov, Georgy Hessen, the companion of his early manhood, and later Russian friends in France and America like the Marinel sisters saturates his letters. Why does Dolinin distort and insult Nabokov so?
Alexander Dolinin is a major scholar, to whom all who read Nabokov carefully now owe a great deal. Why does someone with his fund of exact knowledge overlook so much of what he knows and fall so stubbornly short by making a case for which he so rarely cites evidence but for which counterevidence lies so readily at hand?
This has genuinely puzzled me ever since I first read Dolinin’s piece. One answer can be glimpsed in the essay’s recurrent irritation at the critical stress on Nabokov’s English oeuvre at the expense of his Russian. Sometimes his irritation may be justified, although it also seems perfectly natural that scholars without Russian, like Maurice Couturier and Michael Wood, should focus primarily on Nabokov’s English works rather than his Russian, and since the proportion of the academic world that is Anglophone greatly exceeds the Russophone portion, that imbalance is likely to persist. Still, that should leave rich opportunities for Russian scholars. To the best of my recollection I have not published on Nabokov’s Russian work, except for material I have edited, since I have met Sasha because I know I can never compete with his knowledge of Nabokov’s Russian literary contexts. I have been happy to pass the ball to his usually safe hands.
I also agree with Dolinin that Elizabeth Klosty Beaujour is wrong to consider the English versions of Nabokov’s Russian works the definitive replacements of the Russian texts “to all intents and purposes” (cited at 53n. 6). Nabokov did intend the English versions of his Russian texts to be the definitive basis for all “foreign” (non-Russian) editions.17 In them he explained matters of Russian culture or émigré life obvious to a Russian émigré (and now to most post-Soviet Russian readers aware of the emigration) and found approximately equivalent allusive effects in Western European culture to those the Russian allusions would have had for the original audience and sometimes, especially in Despair, The Eye, King, Queen, Knave, and The Waltz Invention, invented additional effects. Nabokov quite naturally insisted that the new English translations should become the basis for future translations since the same problem of the inaccessibility of recherché Russian allusions and details was common to all non-Russian audiences.
But he did not intend the translations to supplant the Russian originals. When Radio Liberty select
ed The Defense and Invitation to a Beheading for publication and clandestine distribution in the Soviet Union, Nabokov did not think of suggesting the novels should incorporate Russian equivalents of the changes he had made in English (see VNAY 504–5). Except for the revisions in Laughter in the Dark and Despair, the Russian texts are artistically definitive. As translations, the English versions of Russian originals are inevitably compromises, unable to exploit the phonic, lexical, idiomatic, syntactic, associational, and allusive resources that partly shaped the content of the originals. The more artists make of their medium the more they stand to lose when their works are transposed into another, even the medium of another language. In composing his original texts Nabokov had a consistent system of artistic intentions; in translating them he had to balance what he could retrieve of those intentions against the incommensurate intention of appealing to a different audience—two different audiences, indeed, a specifically Anglophone and a generically non-Russian audience—and whatever new artistic habits, resources, and inclinations he happened to have developed by the time the translation happened to be ready to be tackled.
Dolinin has a legitimate claim, then, when he says that for artistic purposes the Russian originals have priority, although for publishing for non-Russian audiences, the English versions provide the new compromise source. He has another legitimate grievance when he protests against the judgments of non-Russian readers that Nabokov’s English style may be richer than his Russian would have become. Nabokov’s Russian was an extraordinary instrument for at least his last fifteen years as a Russian writer and during those years became ever more so, and there is no reason to suppose that he would not have continued to develop it in ways we cannot now know. Here I have to agree with Dolinin (54–55) against Michael Wood. There may have been gains from Nabokov’s being so ready to pick up the crutch of English, but there is no reason to think they more than compensated for the loss of his natural Russian gait.