by Brian Boyd
Often when Nabokov jolts us from life to art he also tilts us from life to death. In the sentence about his father or at the end of half a dozen novels, he opens the trapdoor of terra firma and reminds us not to accept stolidly “the marvel of consciousness—that sudden window swinging open on a sunlit landscape amidst the night of non-being” (Feifer interview 22). In life we can never escape being who we are and what we are, but in art we peer inside other souls, we return at will to the past, we look from outside on an invented world. Nabokov deliberately exploits all these special conditions of the work of art. In life the present moment has the very stamp of “reality,” but once the moment recedes we can never recall it in its fullness: it becomes almost as if it had never been. But works of art are available for endless reinspection, and Nabokov ensures that in his books the past we reexamine will continue to disclose complexities simply not visible at first. He tries to change our relation to time, and that, he suggests, might be one of our new freedoms, our new doors to “reality,” if we ever escape the limitations of human consciousness.
In the world of art pain remains unreal and just as good as pleasure: the greater Lear’s agony, the more our world is enriched. Perhaps beyond the human, that might be true of mortal hopes and fears, so that what ultimately matters might be not what we feel but the answering pity or delight our feelings arouse in whoever watches over us. Perhaps: but within this world we can never know, and Nabokov returns from metaphysical speculation to insist that in this life we have no choice but to act as if another’s pain is as real as our own. Just as he chooses what sets art apart from life to define by contrast the conditions of being human, so he contrasts our moral immunity from the sorrows of art’s invented worlds with the tangled world of “real, or at least responsible life” (Ada 97).
When characters like Humbert, Hermann, Axel Rex, or Van and Ada Veen claim that they are special, that they are artists, that they inhabit a different plane of being from those around them, they exaggerate a real condition of human life. Each of us exists in a sense on a different plane from everyone else: you are all outside my consciousness, the place where I am, as I am outside yours. But human consciousness also gives us the imagination to feel how immediate another’s pain can be. Nabokov’s artist-heroes dare to claim a special dispensation from ordinary morals only because they fail to imagine that others are also special, at least to themselves. Nabokov gives these “artists” all the imaginative scope they want to record their dubious pasts, but he condemns their strategies as mere cover-ups for their failure of imagination: in his world, in this life, there are no exemptions to be granted from responsibility. And if even those of gifted imagination do not imagine well enough, what of the rest of us?
Nothing could be more quintessentially Nabokovian than the sudden focal shifts in his sentence about his father as it rises up from a real memory to hover an instant in the world of art or eternity, among those painted paradisiac personages, before returning to this world, where Nabokov grieves for the man who taught him—as he puts it—the “moral “tradition, [the] principles of decency and personal honor deliberately passed from father to son” (Laansoo interview, 41). He needs to know more than this world holds, but he never shirks the fact that this may be the only world any of us can know.
And yet, and yet . . . Nabokov tilts the plane of literature—and of life. Reading him we no longer simply observe the drama of character against character; we become protagonists in a larger arena: the reader confronting the author, the mind confronting its world. In his best works Nabokov makes us recognize that his worlds are not ready made, that they are being created before our eyes, that the more we participate in their creation— observing their details, connecting up their parts, trying to solve all the problems they pose or feign not to pose—the more “real” these worlds become, and at the same time the more their reality seems only a step toward something realer still. As discoveries multiply, the pulse of excitement quickens, the sense of wonder deepens, until we stand on the threshold of new truth.
And that, says Nabokov, is how things are. If only we refuse to take our world for granted, we can detect something artful lurking at the heart of life, inviting us deeper into the world, allowing us to penetrate further and further into the mystery of its creation, perhaps even promising us a new relation to everything we know.
A great deal can be done by examining how Nabokov transformed the raw facts of his life into the art of Speak, Memory—not by misrepresenting the facts, which so far as I can ascertain he never willfully did, but simply by selection, style, and structure. But, on the other hand, as readers we inevitably wonder about the man behind this art. We can appreciate Nabokov’s instinct for privacy, but at the same time we are deeply curious to know the original experiences behind what his imagination has transformed. In the case of the death of his father, half-assassination, half-accident, Nabokov seems to have had a particularly intense desire to control, to sublimate, to redeem the shock and horror of the initial event. That makes us wonder all the more about the way he reacted to the catastrophe before he could call on the power and consolation of his art.
I want now to cite Nabokov’s own diary account of the most tragic evening of his life—an account that he would never have wanted published because it was too private, too painful, too raw. (For details about the context, which I explained in the Moscow talk, see VNRY 189–91.)
I want to stress the contrast between this straightforward diary account and that passage from Speak, Memory I lingered over. The finished art of that single sentence from Speak, Memory has an extraordinary range of implication missing from Nabokov’s faithful transcript of a real-life scene, but it has very little of this scene’s emotional power. As readers, as people interested in Nabokov, we want the art and its implications, but at moments we also want the rawness of raw life. Yet at the same time we will see that even as he records these events, Nabokov reveals the inherent artistry of his imagination: his accuracy of observation, his ability to recreate a scene in all its power not by the contrivances of false rhetoric, not by pumping the bellows of the emotions, but by his great respect for particulars and for the harmony—in this case the terrible, nightmarish harmony—of the way they interact.
28 March. I returned home about 9 p.m, after a heavenly day. After dinner I sat in the chair by the divan and opened a little volume of Blok. Mother, half-lying, was setting the cards out for patience. It was quiet at home—the girls were already asleep, Sergey was out. I was reading aloud those tender poems about Italy, about damp, resonant Venice, about Florence, like a smoky iris. “How splendid that is,” Mother said, “yes, yes, exactly: a smoky iris.” And then the phone rang in the hall. There was nothing unusual in its ring. I was simply annoyed that my reading was interrupted. I went to the phone. Hessen’s voice: “Who’s that?” “Volodya. Hello, Iosif Vladimirovich.” “I am ringing because, . . . I want to tell you, to warn you . . .” “Yes, go on.” “Something terrible has happened to your father.” “What exactly?” “Something terrible. . . . A car is coming for you.” “But what exactly has happened?” “A car is coming. Open the door below.” “Fine.” I hung up, got to my feet. Mother was standing in the door. She asked, eyebrows twitching, “What’s happened?” I said, “Nothing special.” My voice was cold, almost dry. “Tell me.” “Nothing special. The fact is, father has been hit by a car. He’s hurt his leg.” I went through the living room to my bedroom. Mother followed. “No, I implore you, tell me.” “Nothing to worry about. They’re picking me up straight away.” . . . She both believed me and did not. I changed, filled my cigarette case. My thoughts, all my thoughts, clenched their teeth. “My heart will burst,” Mother said, “simply burst, if you are hiding anything.” “Father has hurt his leg, rather seriously, Hessen said. That’s all.” Mother sobbed, went on her knees before me. “I implore you.” I continued to calm her as I could. . . .
Yes, my heart knew, the end had come, but what exactly had happened was still a myste
ry, and in not knowing some hope could still flicker. Somehow neither Mother nor I linked Hessen’s words with father’s being that evening at Milyukov’s lecture or that some sort of scene was expected there. . . . For some reason I remembered the afternoon: on the train with Svetlana [the girl who would within a few weeks become his fiancée] I had traced on the fogged-up carriage window the word “happiness”—and every letter trickled downwards in a bright line, a damp wriggle. Yes, my happiness has run. . . .
—At last a car drove up. Out came Shtein, whom I had never met before, and Yakovlev. I opened the doors. Yakovlev followed me, took me by the hand. “Keep calm. Shots were fired at the meeting. Your father was wounded.” “Badly?” “Yes, badly.” They stayed below, I went after Mother. Repeated what I had heard, knowing inside that the truth was softened. We went down. . . . Took off. . . .
That night journey I remember as something outside life, monstrously slow, like those mathematical puzzles that torment us in feverish half-sleep. I looked at the lights swimming past, at the whitish bands of lighted pavement, at the spiral reflections in the mirrory-black asphalt and it seemed to me that I was cut off from all this in some fateful manner—that the streetlights and the dark shadows of passersby were an accidental mirage, and the sole thing clear and significant and alive was the grief, tenacious, suffocating, compressing my heart. “Father is no more.” These four words hammered in my brain and I tried to imagine his face, his movements. The night before he had been so happy, so kind. He laughed, he fought with me when I began to demonstrate a boxing clinch. Then everyone went off to bed, Father began to undress in his room and I did the same in mine next door. We chatted through the open door, talked of Sergey, of his strange, abnormal inclinations. Then Father helped me put my trousers under the press, and drew them out, turning the screws, and said, laughing: “That must hurt them.” Dressed in pyjamas I sat on the arm of the leather chair, and Father, squatting, cleaned the shoes he had taken off. We were talking now about the opera Boris Godunov. He tried to remember how and when Vanya returns after his father has sent him off. Couldn’t recall. At last I went to bed and hearing Father also going off asked him to give me the newspapers, he passed them through the slit of the parted doors—I didn’t even see his hands. And I remember, that movement seemed creepy, ghostly—as if the sheets had thrust themselves through. . . . —And the next morning Father set off for Rul’ before I woke and I didn’t see him again. And now I was rocking in a closed car, the lights were shining—amber lights, screeching trams, and the route was long, long, and the tiny streets flashing by were all unfamiliar.
At last we arrived. Entrance to the Philharmonie. Hessen and Kaminka came across the street to us. They approach. I support Mother. “Avgust Isaakievich, Avgust Isaakievich, what’s happened, tell me, what’s happened?” she asks, seizing him by the sleeves. He spreads out his hands. “Something terrible.” He sobs, cannot finish. “So it’s all over, all over?” He says nothing, Hessen too says nothing. Their teeth chatter, their eyes dart away.—And Mother understood. I thought she would faint. She threw her head back somehow strangely, set off, looking fixedly before her, slowly opening her arms to something unseen. “So that’s it?” she repeated quietly. She seemed to reason it out with herself. “How can it be?” and then: “Volodya, do you understand?” We walked up a long corridor. Through the open side door I saw the hall where it happened flash past. Some chairs were crooked, some overturned. . . . At last we went into a sort of entrance hall; people were crowded around; the green uniforms of the police. “I want to see him,” Mother repeated in a monotone. From one door a black-bearded man with a bandaged hand came out, and somehow helplessly smiling muttered: “You see I . . . I am wounded too.” I asked for a chair, sat Mother down. People crowded helplessly around. I understood that the police wouldn’t allow us into the room where the body lay. In that room the man whom one of the madmen shot at kept vigil all night. I momentarily imagined him standing over the body—a dry, pinkish, gray-haired old man, fearing nothing, loving nothing. And suddenly Mother, sitting on the chair in the middle of an entrance hall full of embarrassed strangers, began to sob aloud and emit a kind of strained groan. I clung to her, pressed my cheek to her beating, burning temple and whispered one word to her. Then she began to recite “Our Father . . .,” and when she finished seemed to turn to stone. I felt there was no reason to stay any longer in that delirious room.
There the transcript Elena Nabokov made from her son’s diary breaks off.
20. Speak, Memory: Nabokov, Mother, and Lovers
The Weave of the Magic Carpet
In the late 1990s Everyman and Knopf reissued major Nabokov titles with fresh introductions: Martin Amis for Lolita, David Lodge for Pnin, and Richard Rorty for Pale Fire. I was given Speak, Memory, which would be published, aptly, in 1999, the centennial of Nabokov’s birth. I persuaded Dmitri Nabokov that we should also publish the hitherto unread chapter sixteen, which Nabokov had intended as a key to the rest but withheld from publication, perhaps because the fiction he adopts there of being an outside reviewer of his own book seemed too much at odds with the commitment to accuracy as well as artistry in the previous fifteen chapters. It was a tricky task introducing Speak, Memory and avoiding the evocation of it in the introduction to Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years and the introduction to it in Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years. In this introduction I focus on girls and women rather than fathers and sons, and on the chapter, the most important unit between the sentence and the structure of the whole, the two levels I had focused on in the biography.
Some facts, some figures. It is a hundred years since Vladimir Nabokov was born. It is fifty years since he wrote in his autobiography “I confess I do not believe in time” (SM 139). It is just under fifty years since he wrote Lolita, which has gone on to sell some fifty million copies, and ten years since this most American of his books could be published in the Russia he loved. And it seems an eternity since the worlds he calls up for us in Speak, Memory disappeared.
Speak, Memory is the one Nabokov work outside his finest novels—The Gift, Lolita, Pale Fire, Ada—that is a masterpiece on their level. Penelope Lively recently named it her book of the century. It has been rated the greatest of autobiographies, but since such judgments depend so much on the criteria we bring to them, I will call it only the most artistic of autobiographies. It lacks the probing self-analysis of Saint Augustine or Tolstoy or the overt and the inadvertent self-display of Rousseau, the historical and categorical aplomb of Henry Adams, or the sparkling anecdotal flow of Robert Graves, but more than these and any other autobiographies, it fuses truth to detail with perfection of form, the exact with the evocative, an acute awareness of time with intimations of timelessness.
Nabokov confided to his friend Edmund Wilson in April 1947: “I am writing two things now 1. a short novel about a man who liked little girls—and it’s going to be called The Kingdom by the Sea—and 2. a new type of autobiography— a scientific attempt to unravel and trace back all the tangled threads of one’s personality—and the provisional title is The Person in Question” (DBDV 215). Adjacent in his mind and his bibliography, Nabokov’s autobiography and his most famous novel seem to demand comparison.
He had planned to call his new novel The Kingdom by the Sea because Humbert sees Lolita, the first time he meets her, as a reincarnation of the girl he loved at thirteen, whom he names “Annabel Leigh” in honor of Edgar Allan Poe’s poem (“It was many and many a year ago, / In a kingdom by the sea, / That a maiden there lived whom you may know / By the name of Annabel Lee”). Unlike the 1962 Stanley Kubrick film, Adrian Lyne’s recent (1998) movie remake of Lolita attempts the Annabel Leigh sequence but aspires no higher than the slickest of advertising clichés when it shows long-limbed young models, one male, one female, in coolly elegant 1920s summer cottons, strolling through a soft-focus palmy beach before they withdraw for a slow striptease.
Lost loves and holiday romances may invite clichés, but Humbert
’s recollections could not be more idiosyncratic: “I was on my knees, and on the point of possessing my darling, when two bearded bathers, the old man of the sea and his brother, came out of the sea with exclamations of ribald encouragement, and four months later she died of typhus in Corfu” (Lolita 15). He reports their “unsuccessful first tryst,” when one night Annabel managed “to deceive the vicious vigilance of her family” (16).The urgency and the moral muddle could only be Humbert’s: “with a generosity that was ready to offer her everything, my heart, my throat, my entrails, I gave her to hold in her awkward fist the scepter of my passion” (17).
In his novels, not only can Nabokov ventriloquize his voice into the jitter and twitch of someone like Humbert, but he can also have all the freedom his formidable imagination allows to invent incidents, characters, names, relationships. Humbert’s requited but still unfulfilled passion for Annabel can find a reprise in Lolita sunning herself on a lawn and then a mirage of promised consummation in the prospect of Lolita on the sands beside Hourglass Lake. But in his meticulously accurate autobiography Nabokov can draw only on facts, memories, and reflections, on his powers of expression and selection. He has often been rated the finest stylist of our times, and in Speak, Memory, more than in any other of his works, he has to rely on sheer style. No wonder anthologies of literary prose so often opt for Speak, Memory.
The particular “darling of the anthologists,” as Nabokov wryly notes in his foreword, has been the chapter “First Love,” since with its image of first love on a French beach early in the century, it prefigures and clearly inspires Lolita, especially its Annabel Leigh strain. Vladimir and his “Colette” are only ten, as opposed to the thirteen of Humbert and Annabel, and far more innocent, even though they elope, along with Colette’s fox terrier, and have to be retrieved by Vladimir’s tutor: