by Brian Boyd
Nabokov confesses to a close sympathy with Chekhov and cites with approval Chekhov’s “conclusion…that pure art, pure science, pure learning, being in no direct contact with the masses, will, in the long run, attain more than the clumsy and muddled attempts of benefactors” (LRL 250).
His idea that those artists who insist on their own creative freedom and follow the dictates and the integrity of their own art will open up new possibilities for all who choose to respond is elitist but not exclusive or complacent. It places serious responsibilities on anyone with talent. For that reason he could reproach even his beloved Pushkin on the occasions when he thought Pushkin accepted easy formulae rather than searching for new ways of seeing and saying. And just as he championed individual efforts to revise the accepted and readymade he excoriated what he saw as the opposite of genius and creative evolution: poshlost’, conformism, not thinking for oneself, not trying for the best, or falling for false gods or false goods.
Like his father studying Italian in prison, he felt determined to improve himself, in the ways he saw fit. As a child, he “dreamed” his way through Seitz’s multivolume Die Gross-schmetterlinge der Erde (The macrolepidoptera of the world) (SM 123). As a young man at Cambridge, already determined to be a writer, he did not pay attention to his studies as his father expected and not only wrote poetry compulsively but also dreamed his way assiduously through Dal’s four-volume Russian dictionary, as in later adulthood he would playfully work or workfully play his way through Webster’s New International Dictionary Unabridged (VNRY 171; VNAY 461). All his mature literary life he studied intently the works of others, questioning clichés of thought, perception, language, and narrative strategy, consciously seeking new means partly by critiquing and correcting and caricaturing the old.
Nabokov, in other words, values all cultural advance beyond the “wild state” and saw this embodied in the rapid development of Russian culture in the nineteenth century—and its converse in the tragedy of Russia’s regression after 1917. Nabokov was committed to the Russian literary tradition not only when he wrote as Sirin but also when he signed himself Nabokov, although by then his commitment reflected the ways available to him as a writer and teacher in an English-speaking environment. When he moved to English he did not lose contact with or a sense of responsibility to the Russian tradition, as Dolinin seems to imply, but he realized his English readers were starting from a very different position in relation to Russian literature than that of his émigré audience, especially if they had only the existing translations of, say, Pushkin and Gogol. He therefore translated the least accessible material: first, nineteenth-century verse, Pushkin, Lermontov, Tyutchev, and Fet; then, what he could of the least accessible nineteenth-century prose, in his Nikolay Gogol; and more Russian poetry from the medieval Slovo o polku Igoreve to the person he thought the best Russian poet of the twentieth century, Khodasevich. Once he had begun to work intensively on Pushkin for his Eugene Onegin translation and commentary—once he knew he could make Pushkin part of the heritage of world and not just Russian literature—he incorporated Pushkin in key ways in his fiction, in Pnin and Ada. And, indeed, he includes Russian language and literature as much as he can for an initially Anglophone audience in all his English-language novels from The Real Life of Sebastian Knight to Look at the Harlequins!, with the sole exception of Lolita, the one novel where he planned, while he wrote, to keep his authorship concealed.
Nabokov also displayed throughout his American and final European years a strong desire to keep alive the memory of the Russian liberal tradition, before the revolution in Russia and after the revolution outside it, and to oppose Soviet propaganda that downplayed both. He did this both as a teacher of literature, in pieces like “The Triumphs and Trials of Russian Literature,”31 and as a writer, in the forewords to his own books in translation.32 He wanted to stress the development toward freedom during (and despite) Tsarism, the regression toward intensified oppression under the Soviets, and the emigration as the preserver of the Russian liberal tradition and of the tradition of freedom in Russian literature.
Nabokov’s sense of the free growth of literature and culture—of their evolution to date, of their need to keep evolving, of the best of the past as a basis for still further evolution—lies behind his strong opinions, his commitment to the freedom that allows creation and criticism, and his distaste for what he sees as cliché, conformity, complacency, or the control of art by extra-artistic forces. But it does not apply only to the Russian literary tradition. During his Russian years Nabokov was also engaged with the Western tradition: with Theodore Dreiser in King, Queen, Knave, despite his later disclaimer;33 with Spengler and other prophets of the decline of civilization in Glory (VNRY 353); with Joyce and Proust in The Gift (VNRY 466–67).34
And during his American years he did not cease challenging current literature as well as past traditions: T. S. Eliot and Pound; Sartre, Camus, and existentialism; Mann, Faulkner, Pasternak, Steinbeck, Borges; or, further in the past, Lawrence, Galsworthy, George Eliot, Dostoevsky, eighteenth-century conventionalism; and so on. If in his Russian works he had exalted the Russian literary tradition from within his fiction and verse, in his English years he continued to exalt the Russian tradition in his roles as scholar and translator and, when he could, as storyteller; paid tribute in his English fiction and verse to Shakespeare, Donne, Marvell, Pope, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, Browning, Hardy, and Housman within the English verse tradition; celebrated Shakespeare as example and inspiration to English literature as he had celebrated Pushkin as inspiration for Russian literature (see chapter 15); and invoked Austen, Pushkin, Dickens, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Proust, and Joyce as sources of the traditions of the novel in Ada.
Because of his high standards, his sense of the need and duty of art to evolve, Nabokov weighed carefully even the work of writers he esteemed as much as Shakespeare, Pushkin, and Tolstoy and readily dismissed whole swathes of art: the primitive, the Oriental, the hochmodern, the poshliy. He criticized his own Russian work in the same spirit, not because he was trying to diminish Sirin or distance himself from him but because he thought that art needed to keep rising to the highest standards possible, by making the best of past art an inspiration and a challenge and a basis for critique and new discovery.
Nabokov’s post-1940 critiques of aspects of his Russian work and his changing treatment of Russian matters were not inexplicable denigrations of his earlier work or denials of its deep Russianness. Rather, they reflected his high expectations of literary and cultural traditions in Russia and else where and of his own contribution to those traditions over the years. If we see this we can see the range of his behavior—beyond his concern for only the Russian literary tradition—and its reasons: his consistent attitudes to cultural and individual development.
NABOKOV AND OTHERS
15. Nabokov, Pushkin, Shakespeare
Genius, Generosity, and Gratitude in The Gift and Pale Fire
Nabokov may have rejected attributions of the influence of other writers on him, yet he also paid generous homage to the way writers of genius animate their traditions and extend the possibilities of literary art. I had written (but not published) much of a book on Shakespeare in the early 1990s, and in the late 1990s wrote a book on Pale Fire, a novel whose title comes from two Shakespeare plays at once. When invited by the Institute of Russian Literature (Pushkinskiy Dom) to speak in St Petersburg in April 1999 at their conference celebrating the centenary of Nabokov’s birth and the bicentenary of Pushkin’s, I chose to speak on Nabokov’s sense of the life-giving and almost eerie reverberations of Shakespeare within English and Pushkin with Russian literature.
I did not originally note in this essay but think it worth adding here, in light of the relation between parent and child that Nabokov mingles with the influence of Pushkin and Shakespeare in The Gift and Pale Fire—so as to link the personal and the impersonal or the familial and the social handing-on of tradition—that Nabokov prompted his son to w
rite his Harvard B.A. honors thesis on Pushkin and Shakespeare, a prompt for which Dmitri always remained grateful.
Shakespeare strews his plays with portents; Pushkin probes his life for fatidic dates; but no writer can have been more fascinated by patterns in time than Nabokov. How appropriate, then, that he should share a birth year with Pushkin, ’99, and a birthday that, only after he left Russia, aligned with Shakespeare’s, April 23, as if to mark the unique role that Pushkin would play in his Russian works and Shakespeare in his English.
Shakespeare and Pushkin are special for Nabokov in terms of quality—he calls Pushkin “the greatest poet of his time (and perhaps of all time, excepting Shakespeare)” (NG 29)—and in terms of influence: as he said in an interview, “Pushkin’s blood runs through the veins of modern Russian literature as inevitably as Shakespeare’s through those of English literature” (SO 63). Indeed, his sense of the unique creative legacy Pushkin leaves in Russian literature and Shakespeare leaves in English results in a series of extraordinary parallels running through what many think are his two greatest novels in his two main languages: Dar (The Gift) and Pale Fire.
Although Nabokov often invents failed or twisted artists or near-artists, Luzhin, Hermann, Humbert, Van Veen, on two occasions he invents as a central character an artist who is not a failure or a freak, Fyodor Godunov-Cherdynstev and John Shade, and has each of them draw his own artistic self-portrait, write his own artistic autobiography, within the work we are reading. Both artist-heroes are almost exactly Nabokov’s age, Fyodor a year younger, Shade a year older; Fyodor is an émigré writer when Nabokov is one, Shade an American literature professor when Nabokov had just been one. In both cases, this artist-hero tries to comes to terms with the loss of someone he has loved—a parent or a child—and to discern the design in a life that he finds astonishingly rewarding despite all that he has lost.
Both novels mingle poetry and prose to an unusual degree, Dar through the gliding into and out of the verse that Fyodor often composes in the midst of a scene, Pale Fire through the breach and bond between poem and line-by-line commentary. Both contain a radically detached inset work, Fyodor’s Life of Chernyshevsky, a trial run before he handles the role fate plays in his own life, and Shade’s “Pale Fire,” his verse autobiography, a foil to Kinbote’s commentary. Both of these insets have a ricorso structure, circling around on itself: the concluding sestet of the sonnet that begins the Life of Chernyshevsky, the opening octet that ends it; the unended couplet that closes or at least breaks off “Pale Fire” at line 999 and invites us to complete the couplet, and fill in the apparently intended line 1,000 by returning to line 1.
Both novels juxtapose a closely observed real world (an émigré’s alien capital, a stay-at-home American academic’s cozy campus town) and an imagined, romantic elsewhere (Central Asia, Zembla) that has persistent overtones of the beyond. In both novels, an unbalanced figure who has also suffered devastating loss urges upon the central artist figure a subject for his work that is absurd from the artist’s point of view—and yet ends up as part of the whole work. In The Gift Alexandra Yakovlevna Chernyshevsky all but commissions Fyodor to record the story of her son’s death in an uncompleted suicide pact while her increasingly deranged husband prompts him to undertake a life of Nikolay Chernyshevsky. Both proposals Fyodor can only reject, yet he nevertheless ends up writing both, the second in his inset Life of Chernyshevsky, the first in The Gift itself. In Pale Fire, Kinbote urgently and insistently implores Shade to immortalize in verse the story of Charles the Beloved’s escape from Zembla, which again Shade cannot but which becomes part of the first edition of “Pale Fire.”
Each of the novels also engages with an entire literary tradition: Dar, with the whole of modern Russian literature, from Pushkin to Fyodor’s émigré present; Pale Fire, with literature in English, from Shakespeare through Pope and Swift to Frost and T. S. Eliot. And in each case, one individual talent stands out within that tradition: Pushkin in Dar and Shakespeare in Pale Fire.
In both cases, although in different ways, the source of the artist’s work becomes problematic—more deeply so, the more we reread. Why does Fyodor write what he does? Why does he feel that “divine stab” prompting him to record his father’s life and travels? Why does someone of his esthetic inclinations experience such an irresistible impulse—after his initial bemused distaste—to write a Life of Chernyshevsky? Why does he suddenly feel a powerful urge to preserve the story of Yasha Chernyshevsky and his parents and then conclude, “There was a way—the only way” (Gift 349), in a manner that somehow seems to help release The Gift itself? In Pale Fire, the problem of identifying immediate and ultimate sources is rather different. Where does the title of the poem “Pale Fire” come from? Kinbote, of course, has no clue. But is there anything to his apparently absurd claim to being the “only begetter” of Shade’s “Pale Fire” (PF 17), to his sense that his pressing on Shade the claims of the Zembla story “acted as a catalytic agent upon the very process of the sustained creative effervescence that enabled Shade to produce a 1000-line poem in three weeks” (PF 81)? And once we have enjoyed the comedy of the discords between Shade’s Appalachian poem and Kinbote’s Zemblan commentary, why do we keep detecting more and more concords between part and part, as if one owes something to the other?
In the lives of both invented writers we can discern a similar pattern, although the details and the rhythm could not be more different: a fate superficially seems to mock and frustrate but discloses a deep underlying generosity. In Fyodor’s case the frustrations begin when he cannot accompany his father on his next expedition into Central Asia and are compounded when he and family flee Petrograd and the October Revolution and when his father fails to return from his last expedition. They continue through the novel as exile settles into a round of petty tedium and dislocation, and Fyodor has to abandon the projected life of his father that seemed to offer an imaginative consolation for his losses. Offsetting these frustrations are two great compensations, the flowering of his literary gift and the gift of his love for Zina. Yet even his love is frustrated in the final sweep of the novel, which moves not to the consummation that Fyodor anticipates with such longing, but to their both being locked out of their apartment penniless, as he had been locked out of new lodgings alone on the first night of the novel.
In Shade’s case the frustrations are fewer but more absolute: the lifelong frustration of his search for something beyond death; the birth of a daughter whose life is made such a misery by her physical unattractiveness that she commits suicide; a heart attack that at last seems to offer him a vision of a beyond but then appears only to turn into a cosmic joke, when the fountain that he glimpsed seems confirmed by another woman’s near-death experience until he finds her “fountain” was a misprint for “mountain”; his senseless murder, just before he can put the last line to his poetic testament; and even after that, the theft and appropriation of his poem by the megalomaniac next door, who imposes his own irrelevant designs on the greatest achievement of Shade’s life.
In both novels we are invited to recognize the ultimate kindliness of the fate in which the writer within the story trusts, despite all his disappointments. We are even invited to discover eventually that the person whose death obsesses the writer plays some part from beyond death in the protective pattern of his fate.
Fyodor finds the generosity of fate in his own life in exactly what had seemed his most acute frustrations. His being locked out of his lodgings on the first night of the novel triggers off a new poem; the very move to these cramped quarters seems in retrospect a first attempt by fate to bring Zina and him together; when his landlady asks him to move again, it brings to an end his work on the life of his father—although this had in any case been headed for an impasse—but the shift to a new room also introduces him to Zina, his future fiancée, already living in this apartment; and even the frustration of the last night of the novel, implied beyond the final paragraph, turns out in the long run to be the perf
ect place to end his account of his own life: this time being locked out supplies him not just with a poem but with a whole book.
We can recognize all this shortly after reaching the last page of the novel, but as we reread we can see still deeper. Fyodor repeatedly tries to see and be his father, to imagine traveling on his expeditions into Central Asia; he records his father’s sense of the innate strangeness of human life (Gift 131) and again and again associates him with patterns of rainbow and shade and paradise that he highlights at turning points in his own life. The last of these turning points comes on the eve of the book’s last day, in a dream in which his disconcertingly vivid image of his father seems to give a clue to his death, to give Fyodor approval for what he has written about him, and to lead to his full recognition, the next day, of the generous role of fate in his life, which gives him the key idea for The Gift (VNRY 470–77). And now the biography of his father, which could never have stood alone, will find a perfect part in his own life’s story. As we reread, we can see that the patterns in the novel do not merely imply a generalized, somewhat playful fate but record Fyodor’s own sense that his father’s spirit has guided him toward Zina and the achievements of his art.
In Pale Fire, as I explain elsewhere (NPFMAD), Nabokov similarly allows us to see that Shade himself has been helped by his daughter Hazel after her death. When a suicidal and crazily egocentric Russian named Botkin moves into the house next door to her father’s, she helps stabilize his fancies into the imagined refuge of Zembla and the image of himself as Kinbote, disguised former king of Zembla. He feels so elated by this vision that he presses it on John Shade as the subject of a long poem he must write. Shade, of course, cannot write such a saga, but Hazel appears to have designed Zembla to satisfy not only Kinbote’s needs and her own but also her father’s. Details that Kinbote passes on, especially the escape through the tunnel, trigger Shade to write an autobiographical poem about his attempt to explore the passage to death. Some Zemblan scenes even precipitate specific images, such as the waxwing of the poem’s opening line. When Shade dies, he joins his daughter beyond death and from there adds a new element to Kinbote’s Zemblan fantasies, the Gradus story, developed from the Jack Grey who has killed Shade. In prompting Kinbote to imagine Gradus, Shade provides a close structural counterpoint between the composition of the poem and the approach of the poet’s killer that offers Kinbote’s commentary a shape and tension it would otherwise lack.