by Brian Boyd
I have suggested one partial reason for Dolinin’s advancing a thesis that contradicts evidence he knows: his frustration, as a Russian scholar, and despite his own background as an Americanist, with Anglophonocentric scholarship. I will suggest two more.
Dolinin often seems to construe Nabokov’s situation in terms of his own. He moved from Russia to the United States and started writing in English, but he also returns to Russia and continues to write in Russian and to write about the Russian literary tradition in both places and both languages. Dolinin writes that “Nabokov led his English readers into believing that the switch to English was a necessity, an unavoidable stage of…evolution rather than a free choice (‘I had to’)” (54). But Nabokov’s supposedly “free” first choice was either to stay in Europe, where he had almost no income and fewer prospects and would risk the lives at least of his wife and son, or to escape from Europe. Once in America, his supposedly “free” second choice was either to become a writer of English, supporting his family that way, or to remain a writer of Russian, with no income, or to take a job that made nothing of his singular talents and inclinations. The one way he knew to earn a living was through writing, and he could not earn a living by writing for a Russophone audience in the United States. He looked for university positions but could not find a permanent academic job until 1948, by which time he was writing his sixth book in English and at last making good money from doing so. For a man in his situation and with his gifts, there was no choice.
A third reason for Dolinin’s misreading lies in his belief that as Sirin, Nabokov’s theme was “the life of Russian literature and the life of genres, styles, and themes within its framework” (59). He thinks that Nabokov’s engagement with the Russian literary tradition was the core of his work, shaping his theory and his practice, his form and his content, his themes and his techniques. A Nabokov who underplayed the Russian subtexts when translating Sirin into English, who criticized his Russian work, and who no longer in his English work focused overwhelmingly on the Russian tradition could only be betraying his old self.
But the fact that there are writers in the background or foreground of much of Sirin’s Russian fiction hardly makes the Russian literary tradition the principal theme of his Russian work, any more than the fact that writers are even more prominent in his English work makes the life of English literature, or literature in general, the principal theme of his English work. When Dolinin asserts Sirin’s theme was “the life of Russian literature,” he creates a Sirin in his own image—and a Sirin of less interest to readers than the work actually offers.
Nevertheless, the fate of Russian literature did matter a great deal to Nabokov as a Russian writer, although Dolinin claims that this preoccupation “went more or less unnoticed by…émigré criticism” (59)—hardly surprising, before his last Russian novel, The Gift, where it really does become central.
But I would link Nabokov’s concern with the fate of Russian literature with a wider motivation that has been little recognized. Nabokov was deeply concerned with the Russian literary tradition, in his Russian years and, pace Dolinin, in his American years. But we need to see this as part of a much broader motivation that explains far more of his behavior, before and after the transition from Russian to English.
EVOLVING INTO CULTURE
From his father Nabokov imbibed a strong sense of cultural meliorism, a sense that culture had evolved to make humans more humane, that it could continue to evolve much further, and that art had played and could continue to play a key role in this process. V. D. Nabokov grew up in an intellectual climate pervaded by late-nineteenth-century notions of evolution and progress, individual, cultural, and biological. Encouraged by the rapid growth in productivity and in material well-being for unprecedented numbers of people in Europe and North America, intellectual notions of biological evolution and cultural progress that had begun with Lamarck and Hegel early in the century expanded at midcentury through Herbert Spencer, even before Darwin, and at the end of the century took new forms in the work of Ernst Haeckel, William James, and Henri Bergson, all of whom Nabokov read. Both Spencer and Haeckel believed culture evolved through successive stages. Spencer’s ideas in particular seem close to those of the Nabokovs, father and son. His model of cultural evolution contrasted a primitive militaristic state of society, dominated by compulsion, force, and repression and by the collective, the good of the group, with a modern industrial state, where the good of the individual was paramount and individual initiative and independence central to new possibility. Spencer coined the term “survival of the fittest” as a summary of Darwin, but while committed to progressive evolution, he did not accept the relentless competition he thought Darwinism implied. Before Nabokov, Spencer had in a sense snorted, “ ‘Struggle for life’ indeed!”
V. D. Nabokov and his son shared Spencer’s sense of cultural evolution as progress, if without his mid-nineteenth-century confidence in the inevitability of progress. Vladimir especially sided with Bergson, who stressed indeterminacy, free will, and the ongoing openness of creative evolution. But both father and son felt the importance of trying to improve one’s own cultural level, partly in the hope that that could help raise the cultural level around one not by compulsion but by the example one set to responsive others.
One of his close political colleagues observed that V. D. Nabokov had entered politics more for cultural reasons than ordinarily political ones.18 Nabokov’s father believed that cultural development was an effortful process by which individuals could increase their distance from brute origins and societies could move beyond barbarism. He hoped to help Russia to rise to the level of the West, especially of England, and humanity to rise to higher individual levels of genuine culture (cf. VNRY 156). As a criminologist, he accepted the claims of the social sciences of his day that there were objective markers of the different levels of cultural development in different societies and that societies and individuals could raise their cultural level through effort and application. He thought that art at its best could raise the level of culture at large, so that in opposing the death penalty he naturally turned not to legal arguments but to the pity aroused by novelists like Hugo, Dickens, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky.19 He also took seriously the idea of individual development, responsibility, and freedom. When his politics sent him to prison he followed a physical exercise regime, taught himself Italian, and pursued a rigorous reading schedule in his other four languages. Improving one’s own cultural level might offer an example to others but should never be imposed on them as a model. Although he went into politics in the hope that he could help bring Russia to the level of British constitutional monarchy, as a politician he was so averse to compulsion that he even felt qualms about trying to sway voters’ minds during election campaigns (VNRY 130).
Vladimir Nabokov learned much from his father, most important, perhaps, this sense of cultural development as the effortful striving for a maximal evolution beyond the brutish. Nabokov’s cultural meliorism begins with the free individual. Unfettered individual efforts can open up new possibilities that expand the freedom and scope of culture, offering us better access to the values Nabokov sees in art: creativity and complexity and “curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy” (Lolita 317). Individuals should preserve and extend the gains of culture to the degree that they can.
The idea of the evolution of consciousness and culture saturated and structured Nabokov’s thought. In the first chapter of his autobiography, he introduces as the first concrete scene his dawning self-consciousness his sense of his father and of his father’s and mother’s ages and identities as distinct from his own:
All this is as it should be according to the theory of recapitulation [in other words, the theory that “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” proposed in 1866 by Darwin’s German champion Ernst Haeckel: that the different stages of individual development reenact the evolution of the species]; the beginning of reflexive consciousness in the brain of our remotest ancestor must
surely have coincided with the dawning of the sense of time….
My father…had that day put on the trappings of his old regiment as a festive joke. To a joke, then, I owe my first gleam of complete consciousness—which again has recapitulatory implications, since the first creatures on earth to become aware of time were also the first creatures to smile.
(SM 22)
That ends the first section of the first chapter, and the next section begins, extending the evolutionary and “recapitulatory” imagery: “It was the primordial cave (and not what Freudian mystics might suppose) that lay behind the games I played when I was four” (SM 22–23).
The last chapter of the autobiography again focuses on the dawn of consciousness at the individual (ontogenetic) and species (phylogenetic) levels, but with Nabokov as not son but father: pointedly, I think, a recapitulation in another key. Again, Nabokov thinks about the evolution of mind and culture, with a special Nabokovian twist on Darwin:
There is also keen pleasure (and, after all, what else should the pursuit of science produce?) in meeting the riddle of the initial blossoming of man’s mind by postulating a voluptuous pause in the growth of the rest of nature, a lolling and loafing which allowed first of all the formation of Homo poeticus—without which sapiens could not have been evolved. “Struggle for life” indeed! The curse of battle and toil leads man back to the boar, to the grunting beast’s crazy obsession with the search for food. You and I have frequently remarked upon that maniacal glint in a housewife’s scheming eye as it roves over food in a grocery or about the morgue of a butcher’s shop. Toilers of the world, disband! Old books are wrong. The world was made on a Sunday.
(SM 298)
We can note here a Spencerian sense that the survival of the fittest fails to explain evolution; a symbolist sense that imaginations and dreams offer the likeliest route to the deepest truths; an aristocratic sense that real refinement requires leisure rather than the coarsening effect of unremitting toil; and a purely Nabokovian sense of play.20 And poetry. A few years previously, in an essay on Lermontov, he had written: “It might be said that what Darwin called ‘struggle for existence’ is really a struggle for perfection, and in that respect Nature’s main and most admirable device is optical illusion. Among human beings, poets are the best exponents of the art of deception.”21
After “‘Struggle for life,’ indeed!” in the last chapter of Speak, Memory, the evolutionary themes persist tellingly as Nabokov goes on, and out of his way, to contrast the culturally evolved with the brutal backwardness of Hitler. Describing the various prams and baby carriages and other wheeled vehicles for Dmitri, Nabokov writes:
A new wave of evolution started to swell, gradually lifting him up again from the ground, when, for his second birthday, he received a four-foot-long, silver Mercedes racing car operated by inside pedals and in this he used to drive…down the sidewalk of the Kurfürstendamm while from the open windows came the multiplied roar of a dictator still pounding his chest in the Neander valley we had left far behind.
The next paragraph immediately makes the evolutionary imagery explicit again via the idea of ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny: “It might be rewarding to go into the phylogenetic aspects of the passion male children have for things on wheels, particularly railway trains” (SM 300). In a Parisian park Nabokov is appalled as he sees a little girl parading a live butterfly on a thread and directs his son’s gaze away; he reflects:
I may have been reminded, in fact, of the simple, old-fashioned trick a French policeman had—and no doubt still has—when leading a florid-nosed workman, a Sunday rowdy, away to jail, of turning him into a singularly docile and even alacritous satellite by catching a kind of small fishhook in the man’s uncared-for but sensitive and responsive flesh. You and I did our best to encompass with vigilant tenderness the trustful tenderness of our child but were inevitably confronted by the fact that the filth left by hoodlums in a sandbox on a playground was the least serious of possible offenses, and that the horrors which former generations had mentally dismissed as anachronisms or things occurring only in remote khanates and mandarinates, were all around us.
(SM 306)
Notice the combination of the evolution of the species and the evolution of culture (in this case, the local atavistic return to earlier cultural stages)—and the sense Nabokov shared with his father that the Orient (“khanates and mandarinates”) represented earlier stages in the evolution of civilization, like “medieval” within the Occidental context, which for Nabokov was also almost invariably a term of reproach. In view of his comment that in terms of the “struggle for perfection,…Nature’s main and most admirable device is optical illusion,” and that “among human beings, poets are the best exponents of the art of deception,”22 it is no wonder he ends the final chapter of Speak, Memory with a kind of optical illusion provided by life for Dmitri. “Find What the Sailor Has Hidden” is an illusion carefully left unbroken by his parents and carefully relived and made poetic by Nabokov in the retelling, so as to point toward the ship that would take them all from a Europe sliding back into barbarism and toward an America that he thought offered a new stage in the evolution of freedom.
Nabokov’s concern for the evolution of consciousness, the evolution of culture, and the evolution of art pervades his work. It reflects his sense that “every accepted form tends to become rigid, lose its elasticity, and deteriorate into a tight-fitting coffin, for life is growth, improvement, elaboration, change.”23(Pure Bergson, to my ear.) He thought that art has evolved, that it needs to keep evolving, and that it has a long way still to evolve. He declares in an unpublished lecture that “in the course of the historical evolution of literature…the various senses…become keener, probe deeper….Shakespeare saw colors more distinctly than Homer and a poet of today sees color more distinctly than Shakespeare.”24 (Notice that Nabokov drew on these international examples before he had published his first American novel: before, on Dolinin’s own account, he adopted the persona of the internationalist.) Tolstoy, he claims, was the first Russian writer to see lilac shades; Bunin saw them still more finely than Tolstoy.25 On the scene of Kitty’s giving birth in Anna Karenina he responds in a uniquely Nabokovian way: “Mark incidentally that the whole history of literary fiction as an evolutionary process may be said to be a gradual probing of deeper and deeper layers of life. It is quite impossible to imagine either Homer in the ninth century B.C. or Cervantes in the seventeenth century of our era—it is quite impossible to imagine them describing in such wonderful detail childbirth” (LRL 164–65). In another lecture Nabokov looks back: “How different is this world of Dickens from the world of Homer or the world of Cervantes. Does a hero of Homer’s really feel the divine throb of pity?…let us nurse no doubt about it: despite all our hideous reversions to the wild state, modern man is on the whole a better man than Homer’s man, Homo homericus, or than medieval man. In the imaginary battle of americus versus homericus, the first wins humanity’s prize” (LL 86–87). But if art and culture have evolved a long way from Homer or medieval times, they still have a long way to go: as he once exclaimed, “Art is in its infancy!” (Lucas interview).
Nabokov had such a strong sense of human possibility, and of the scope for the future evolution of human possibility, in art and in life, that he could be angry or scornful at any shortfall. As he once remarked in a deleted passage in a lecture: “I [am] so passionately fond of the good thing when I find it, that my passionate hatred for what I deem to be bad art or even worse— second-[rate art]—is on the whole, the same kind of passion.”26
He believed that the evolution of culture, art, and literature depended on individual talent and strenuous individual effort and that the most he or any artist could do for the evolution of civilization was to stick to the integrity of his art: to offer the highest standards, to open up new possibilities, which others could rise to or move beyond:
The mission of the poet to listen intently to the voice of the inner judge and never to devi
ate from the road which that judge points out to him was never betrayed by the best Russian poets and writers. Never betray what your artistic conscience tells you is right, never sacrifice your artistic purpose to the intellectual urgings, to the dictates of a party or to the [conventionality?][27] of a publisher. Somehow, therein lies the inherent apostolism of art. For only by adhering strictly to the bidding of the artist within him can a poet or writer achieve that degree of artistic persuasiveness which can make his message effective, and since true art also automatically happens to be good art it is but a betrayal of the purpose to try and artificially force upon it an extra message of goodness which, being not integrated with the artistic purpose does nothing but upset the whole delicate structure and compromise both the initial and the additional message.28
Or as he says in another lecture:
I am not telling you that art does not improve and enlighten the reader. But it does all this in its own special way and it does it only then when its own single purpose remains to be good, excellent art, art as perfect as its creator can make. The moment this only real and valuable purpose of art is forgotten, the moment it is replaced by a utilitarian aim, art stops being[29] art, and through this loss of its ego, loses not only its sense and its beauty but also the very object to which it has been sacrificed: bad art neither teaches nor improves nor enlightens.30