The Gift

by Vladimir Nabokov

  And then Sasha came to Astrakhan. Nikolay Gavrilovich saw those radiant, bulging eyes, heard that strange, evasive speech … Having entered the service of the oilman Nobel, and being entrusted to accompany a bargeload along the Volga, Sasha, en route, one sultry, oil-soaked, satanic noon, knocked the bookkeeper’s cap off, threw the keys into the rainbow water, and went home to Astrakhan. That same summer four of his poems appeared in The Messenger of Europe; they show a gleam of talent:

  If life’s hours appear to you bitter,

  Do not rail against life, for it’s best

  To admit it’s your fault you’ve been born with

  An affectionate heart in your breast.

  And if you do not wish to acknowledge

  Even such a self-evident fault …

  (Incidentally, let us note the ghost of an additional syllable in “life’s hou-urs” matching zhiz-en’, instead of zhizn’ which is extremely characteristic of unbalanced Russian poets of the woebegone sort: a flaw corresponding, it would seem, to something lacking in their lives, something that might have turned life into song. The last line quoted has however an authentic poetic ring.)

  The joint domicile of father and son was a joint hell. Chernyshevski drove Sasha to agonizing insomnia with his endless admonitions (as a “materialist” he had the fanatic effrontery to suppose that the main cause of Sasha’s disorder was his “pitiful material condition”), and he himself suffered in a way that he had not done even in Siberia. They both breathed easier when that winter Sasha went away—at first to Heidelberg with the family in which he was tutor and then to St. Petersburg “because of the need to get medical advice.” Petty, falsely funny misfortunes continued to spatter him. Thus we learn from a letter of his mother’s (1888) that while “Sasha was pleased to go out for a stroll, the house in which he was living burned down,” and everything that he possessed burned with it; and, by now utterly destitute, he moved to the country house of Strannolyubski (the critic’s father?).

  In 1889, Chernyshevski received permission to go to Saratov. Whatever emotions this might have awakened in him, these were in any case poisoned by an intolerable family worry: Sasha, who had always had a pathological passion for exhibitions, suddenly undertook a most extravagant and happy trip to the notorious Exposition universelle in Paris—having at first got stuck in Berlin, where it was necessary to send him money in the consul’s name with a request to dispatch him back; but no: when he received the money Sasha made his way to Paris, had his fill “of the wonderful wheel, of the gigantic, filigree tower”—and again was penniless.

  Chernyshevski’s feverish work on huge masses of Weber (which turned his brain into a forced labor factory and represented in fact the greatest mockery of human thought) did not cover unlooked-for expenditures—and day after day dictating, dictating, dictating, he felt that he could not go on, could not go on turning world history into rubles—and in the meantime he was also tormented by the panicky fear that from Paris, Sasha would come crashing into Saratov. On October 11th, he wrote Sasha that his mother was sending him the money for his return to St. Petersburg, and—for the millionth time—advised him to take any job and do everything that his superiors might tell him to do: “Your ignorant, ridiculous sermons to your superiors cannot be tolerated by any superiors” (thus ends the “theme of writing exercises”). Continuing to twitch and mutter, he sealed the envelope and himself went to the station to mail the letter. Through the town whirled a cruel wind, which on the very first corner chilled the hurrying, angry little old man in his light coat. The following day, despite a fever, he translated eighteen pages of close print; on the 13th he wanted to continue, but he was persuaded to desist; on the 14th delirium set in: “Inga, inc [nonsense words, then a sigh] I’m quite unsettled … Paragraph … If some thirty thousand Swedish troops could be sent to Schleswig-Holstein they would easily rout all the Danes’ forces and overrun … all the islands, except, perhaps Copenhagen, which will resist stubbornly, but in November, in parentheses put the ninth, Copenhagen also surrendered, semicolon; the Swedes turned the whole population of the Danish capital into shining silver, banished the energetic men of the patriotic parties to Egypt … Yes, yes, where was I … New paragraph …” Thus he rambled on for a long time, jumping from an imaginary Weber to some imaginary memoirs of his own, laboriously discoursing about the fact that “the smallest fate of this man has been decided, there is no salvation for him … Although microscopic, a tiny particle of pus has been found in his blood, his fate has been decided …” Was he talking about himself, was it in himself that he felt this tiny particle that had kept mysteriously impairing all he did and experienced in life? A thinker, a toiler, a lucid mind, populating his utopias with an army of stenographers—he had now lived to see his delirium taken down by a secretary. On the night of the 16th he had a stroke—he felt the tongue in his mouth to be somehow thick; after which he soon died. His last words (at 3 A.M. on the 17th) were: “A strange business: in this book there is not a single mention of God.” It is a pity that we do not know precisely which book he was reading to himself.

  Now he lay surrounded by the dead tomes of Weber; a pair of spectacles in their case kept getting into everybody’s way.

  Sixty-one years had passed since that year of 1828 when the first omnibuses had appeared in Paris and when a Saratov priest had noted down in his prayer book: “July 12th, in the third hour of morning, a son born, Nikolay … Christened the morning of the 13th before mass. Godfather: Archpriest Fyod. Stef. Vyazovski …” This name was subsequently given by Chernyshevski to the protagonist and narrator of his Siberian novellas—and by a strange coincidence it was thus, or nearly thus (F.V……ski) that an unknown poet signed, in the magazine Century (1909, November), fourteen lines dedicated, according to information which we possess, to the memory of N. G. Chernyshevski—a mediocre but curious sonnet which we here give in full:

  What will it say, your far descendant’s voice–

  Lauding your life or blasting it outright:

  That it was dreadful? That another might

  Have been less bitter? That it was your choice?

  That your high deed prevailed, and did ignite

  Your dry work with the poetry of Good,

  And crowned the white brow of chained martyrhood

  With a closed circle of ethereal light?

  Chapter Five

  ABOUT a fortnight after The Life of Chernyshevski appeared it was greeted by the first, artless echo. Valentin Linyov (in a Russian émigré paper published in Warsaw) wrote as follows:

  “Boris Cherdyntsev’s new book opens with six lines of verse which the author for some reason calls a sonnet (?) and this is followed by a pretentiously capricious description of the well-known Chernyshevski’s life.

  “Chernyshevski, says the author, was the son of ‘a kindly cleric’ (but does not mention when and where he was born); he finished the seminary and when his father, having lived a holy life which inspired even Nekrasov, died, his mother sent the young man to study in St. Petersburg, where he immediately, practically on the station, became intimate with the then “molders of opinion,” as they were called, Pisarev and Belinski. The youth entered the university and devoted himself to technical inventions, working very hard and having his first romantic adventure with Lyubov’ Yegorovna Lobachevski, who infected him with a love for art. After a clash on romantic grounds with some officer or other in Pavlovsk, however, he was forced to return to Saratov, where he proposed to his future bride and soon afterwards married her.

  “He returned to Moscow, devoted himself to philosophy, wrote a great deal (the novel What Are We to Do?) and became friends with the outstanding writers of his time. Gradually he was drawn into revolutionary work and after one turbulent meeting, where he spoke together with Dobrolyubov and the well-known Professor Pavlov, who was still quite a young man at that time, Chernyshevski was forced to go abroad. For a while he lived in London collaborating with Herzen, but then he returned to Russia and was
immediately arrested. Accused of planning the assassination of Alexander the Second, Chernyshevski was sentenced to death and publicly executed.

  “This in brief is the story of Chernyshevski’s life, and everything would have been all right if the author had not found it necessary to equip his account of it with a host of unnecessary details which obscure the sense, and with all sorts of long digressions on the most diversified themes. And worst of all, having described the scene of the hanging and put an end to his hero, he is not satisfied with this and for the space of still many more unreadable pages he ruminates on what would have happened ‘if’—if Chernyshevski, for example, had not been executed but had been exiled to Siberia, like Dostoevski.

  “The author writes in a language having little in common with Russian. He loves to invent words. He loves long, tangled sentences, as for example: ‘Fate sorts (?) them in anticipation (?) of the researcher’s needs (?)’! or else he places solemn but not quite grammatical maxims in the mouths of his characters, like ‘The poet himself chooses the subjects for his poems, the multitude has no right to direct his inspiration.’ “

  Almost simultaneously with this entertaining review appeared that of Christopher Mortus (Paris)—which so aroused Zina’s indignation that from that time her eyes glared and her nostrils dilated at the very least mention of this name.

  “When speaking of a new young author [wrote Mortus quietly] one usually experiences the feeling of a certain awkwardness: will one not rattle him, will one not injure him by a too ‘glancing’ remark? It seems to me that in the present instance there are no grounds for such fears. Godunov-Cherdyntsev is a novice, true, but a novice endowed with extreme self-confidence, and to rattle him is probably no easy matter. I do not know whether his book presages any future ‘achievements’ or not, but if this is a beginning it cannot be called a particularly reassuring one.

  “Let me qualify this. Strictly speaking, it is completely unimportant whether Godunov-Cherdyntsev’s effort is creditable or not. One man writes well, another badly, and everyone is awaited at the end of the road by the Theme ‘which none can evade.’ It is a question, I think, of something quite different. That golden time has passed irretrievably when the critic or reader could be interested above all by the ‘artistic’ quality or exact degree of talent of a book. Our émigré literature—I am speaking of genuine, ‘undoubted’ literature—people of faultless taste will understand menas become plainer, more serious, drier—at the expense of art, perhaps, but in compensation producing (in certain poems by Tsypovich and Boris Barski and in the prose of Koridonov …) sounds of such sorrow, such music and such ‘hopeless,’ heavenly charm that in truth it is not worth regretting what Lermontov called ‘the dull songs of the earth.’

  “In itself the idea of writing a book about an outstanding public figure of the sixties contains nothing reprehensible. One sits down and writes it—fine; it comes out—fine; worse books than that have come out. But the author’s general mood, the ‘atmosphere’ of his thinking fills one with queer and unpleasant misgivings. I will refrain from discussing the question: how appropriate is the appearance of such a book at the present time? After all, no one can forbid a person to write what he pleases! But it seems to me—and I am not alone in feeling this—that at the bottom of Godunov-Cherdyntsev’s book there lies something which is in essence profoundly tactless, something jarring and offensive.… It is his right, of course (although even this could be questioned), to take this or that attitude toward the ‘men of the sixties,’ but in ‘debunking’ them he cannot but awake in any sensitive reader surprise and disgust. How irrelevant all this is! How inopportune! Let me define my meaning. The fact that it is precisely now, precisely today, that this tasteless operation is being performed is in itself an affront to that significant, bitter, palpitating something which is ripening in the catacombs of our era. Oh, of course, the ‘men of the sixties,’ and in particular Chernyshevski, expressed in their literary judgments much that was mistaken and perhaps ridiculous. Who is not guilty of this sin? And is it such a big sin, after all? But in the general ‘intonation’ of their criticism there transpired a certain kind of truth—a truth which, no matter how paradoxical it seems, has become close and comprehensible to us precisely today, precisely now. I am talking not of their attacks on bribe-takers nor of the emancipation of women.… That, of course, is not the point! I think I shall be properly understood (insofar as another can be understood) if I say that in some final and infallible sense their and our needs coincide. Oh, I know, we are more sensitive, more spiritual, more ‘musical’ than they were, and our final aim—beneath that resplendent black sky under which life streams on—is not simply ‘the commune’ or ‘the overthrow of the despot.’ But to us, as to them, Nekrasov and Lermontov, especially the latter, are closer than Pushkin. I shall take just this simplest of examples because it immediately clarifies our affinity—if not kinship—with them. That chilliness, that foppishness, that ‘irresponsible’ quality they sensed in a certain part of Pushkin’s poetry is perceptible to us, too. One may object that we are more intelligent, more receptive.… All right, I agree; but essentially it is not a question of Chernyshevski’s ‘rationalism’ (or Belinski’s or Dobrolyubov’s, names and dates do not matter), but of the fact that then, as now, spiritually progressive people understood that mere ‘art’ and the ‘lyre’ were not a sufficient pabulum. We, their refined and weary grandchildren, also want something that is above all human; we demand the values which are essential to the soul. This ‘utilitarianism’ is more elevated, perhaps, than theirs, but in some respects it is more urgent even than the one they preached.

  “I have digressed from the immediate theme of my article. But then, sometimes, one can express one’s opinion with much more exactitude and authenticity by wandering ‘around the theme’—in its fertile environs.… As a matter of fact, the analysis of any book is awkward and pointless, and, moreover, we are interested not in the way an author executed his ‘task’ nor even in the ‘task’ itself, but only in the author’s attitude toward it.

  “And let me add this: are they really so necessary, these excursions into the realm of the past, with their stylized squabbles and artificially vivified way of life? Who wants to know about Chernyshevski’s relations with women? In our bitter, tender, ascetic times there is no place for this kind of mischievous research, for this idle literature—which, anyway, is not devoid of a certain arrogant audacity that is bound to repel even the most well-disposed of readers.”

  After this, reviews poured. Professor Anuchin of Prague University (a well-known public figure, a man of shining moral purity and of great personal courage—the same Professor Anuchin who in 1922, not long before his deportation from Russia, when some revolvered leatherjackers had come to arrest him but became interested in his collection of ancient coins and were slow in taking him away, had calmly said, pointing to his watch: “Gentlemen, history does not wait.”) printed a detailed analysis of The Life of Chernyshevski in an émigré magazine appearing in Paris.

  “Last year [he wrote], a remarkable book came out by Professor Otto Lederer of Bonn University, Three Despots (Alexander the Misty, Nicholas the Chill, and Nicholas the Dull). Motivated by a passionate love for the freedom of the human spirit and a burning hatred for its suppressors, Dr. Lederer in certain of his appraisals was unjust—taking no account at all, for instance, of that national Russian fervor which so powerfully gave body to the symbol of the throne; but excessive zeal, and even blindness, in the process of exposing evil is always more understandable and forgivable than the least mockery—no matter how witty it may be—of that which public opinion feels to be objectively good. However, it is precisely this second road, the road of eclectic mordancy, that has been chosen by Mr. Godunov-Cherdyntsev in his interpretation of the life and works of N. G. Chernyshevski.

  “The author has undoubtedly acquainted himself throughly and in his own way conscientiously with his subject; undoubtedly, also, he has a talented pen—certa
in ideas he puts forward, and juxtapositions of ideas, are undoubtedly shrewd; but with all this his book is repellent. Let us try to examine calmly this impression.

  “A certain epoch has been taken and one of its representatives chosen. But has the author assimilated the concept of ‘epoch’? No. First of all one senses in him absolutely no consciousness of that classification of time, without which history turns into an arbitrary gyration of multicolored spots, into some kind of impressionistic picture with a walking figure upside down against a green sky that does not exist in nature. But this device (which destroys, by the way, any scholarly value of the work in question, in spite of its swaggering erudition) does not, nevertheless, constitute the author’s chief fault. His chief fault is in the manner in which he portrays Chernyshevski.

  “It is completely unimportant that Chernyshevski understood less about questions of poetry than a young esthete of today. It is completely unimportant that in his philosophical conceptions Chernyshevski kept aloof from those transcendental subtleties which please Mr. Godunov-Cherdyntsev. What is important is that, whatever Chernyshevski’s views may have been on art and science, they represented the Weltanschauung of the most progressive men of his era, and were moreover indissolubly linked with the development of social ideas, with their ardent, beneficial, activating force. It is in this aspect, in this sole true light, that Chernyshevski’s system of thought acquires a significance which far transcends the sense of those groundless arguments—unconnected in any way with the epoch of the sixties—which Mr. Godunov-Cherdyntsev uses in venomously ridiculing his hero.

  “But he makes fun, not only of his hero: he also makes fun of his reader. How else can one qualify the fact that among the well-known authorities on Chernyshevski a nonexistent authority is cited, to whom the author pretends to appeal? In a certain sense it would be possible if not to forgive then at least to understand scientifically the scoffing at Chernyshevski, if Mr. Godunov-Cherdyntsev were a heated supporter of those whom Chernyshevski attacked. It would at least be a point of view, and reading the book the reader would make a constant adjustment for the author’s partisan approach, in that way arriving at the truth. But the pity is that with Mr. Godunov-Cherdyntsev there is nothing to adjust to and the point of view is ‘everywhere and nowhere’; not only that, but as soon as the reader, as he descends the course of a sentence, thinks he has at last sailed into a quiet backwater, into a realm of ideas which may be contrary to those of Chernyshevski but are apparently shared by the author—and therefore can serve as a basis for the reader’s judgment and guidance—the author gives him an unexpected fillip and knocks the imaginary prop from under him, so that he is once more unaware as to whose side Mr. Godunov-Cherdyntsev is on in his campaign against Chernyshevski—whether he is on the side of the advocates of art for art’s sake, or of the government, or of some other of Chernyshevski’s enemies whom the reader does not know. As far as jeering at the hero himself is concerned, here the author passes all bounds. There is no detail too repulsive for him to disdain. He will probably reply that all these details are to be found in the ‘Diary’ of the young Chernyshevski; but there they are in their place, in their proper environment, in the correct order and perspective, among many other thoughts and feelings which are much more valuable. But the author has fished out and put together precisely these, as if someone had tried to restore the image of a person by making an elaborate collection of his combings, fingernail parings, and bodily excretions.