Nabokov's Art of Memory and European Modernism

1 Nabokov’s Art of Memory 1

and European Modernism

1 Nabokov’s Art of Memory and European Modernism 1 1

John Burt Foster, Jr.

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS · PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY

Copyright  1993 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, Chichester, West Sussex All Rights Reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Foster, John Burt, 1945– Nabokov’s art of memory and European modernism / John Burt Foster, Jr. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 0-691-06971-9 1. Nabokov, Vladimir Vladimirovich, 1899–1977—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Modernism (Literature)—Europe. 3. European literature—History and criticism. 4. Autobiographical memory in literature. I. Title. PG3476.N3Z666 1993 813′.54—dc20 92-24040 This book has been composed in Bitstream Transitional 521 Princeton University Press books are printed on acid-free paper, and meet the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources Most of Chapter 3 was published as “Nabokov Before Proust: The Paradox of Anticipatory Memory,” in a forum edited by Dale Peterson for the Slavic and East European Journal 33 (1989): 78–93. Copyright AATSEEL of the U.S., Inc. Reprinted by permission. An earlier version of the epilogue appeared as “Not T. S. Eliot, But Proust: Revisionary Modernism in Nabokov’s Pale Fire,” Comparative Literature Studies 28, no. 1 (1991): 51–67. Copyright 1991 by The Pennsylvania State University. Reproduced by permission of The Pennsylvania State University Press. A somewhat different version of Chapter 6 appeared as “An Archeology of ‘Mademoiselle O’: Narrative Between Art and Memory,” in A Small Alpine Form: Studies in Nabokov’s Short Fiction, edited by Charles Nicol and Gennadi Alexis Barabtarlo (New York: Garland, 1992), pp. 134–63. Copyright 1992 by Garland Publishing. Reprinted by permission. Excerpts from “East Coker,” “The Dry Salvages,” and “Little Gidding” in Four Quartets, copyright 1943 by T. S. Eliot and renewed 1971 by Esme Valerie Eliot, reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc. Excerpt from “A Prayer for My Daughter” from The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats: Vol. I: The Poems, edited by Richard J. Finneran. Copyright 1924 by Macmillan Publishing Company, renewed 1952 by Bertha Georgie Yeats, reprinted by permission of Macmillan Publishing Company. Printed in the United States of America 10

9

8

7

6

5

4

3

2

1

To my parents 1 Jane Armour and John Burt Foster

CONTENTS 1

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS NOTE ON CITATIONS

ix xvii

Part One: Points of Departure

1

1. The European Nabokov, the Modernist Moment, and Cultural Biography

3

2. The Self-Defined Origins of an Artist of Memory From Synesthesia to the Two Master Narratives Nietzsche, Baudelaire, and the Discourse of Modernity

24 24 36

3. The Rejection of Anticipatory Memory: From Mary to The Defense and Glory (1925–1930)

52

Part Two: Toward France

71

4. Encountering French Modernism: Kamera Obskura (1931–1932)

73

5. From the Personal to the Intertextual: Dostoevsky and the Two-Tiered Mnemonic System in Despair (1932–1933)

91

6. Narrative between Art and Memory: Writing and Rewriting “Mademoiselle O” (1936–1967) 7. Memory, Modernism, and the Fictive Autobiographies Recollected Emotion in “Spring in Fialta” (1936–1947) The Covert Modernism of The Gift (1934–1937)

110 130 131 146

Part Three: In English

157

8. Cultural Mobility and British Modernism: The Real Life of Sebastian Knight and Bend Sinister (1938–1946)

159

9. Autobiographical Images: The Shaping of Speak, Memory (1946–1967)

178

10. The Cultural Self-Consciousness of Speak, Memory

203

EPILOGUE: Proust over T. S. Eliot in Pale Fire (1962)

219

NOTES

233

INDEX

255

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 1

THIS BOOK EXPLORES the pivotal role of memory in Vladimir Nabokov’s novels, stories, and autobiographical writings, focusing on the period from 1925 to 1950, but offering glimpses of later developments. At the same time it emphasizes how these narratives intersect with early twentieth-century modernism as an international movement. It is thus conceived both as a contribution to Nabokov criticism and as a case study in comparative literature, one that shows how a well-placed writer navigated among figures like Proust and Bergson in France, Freud and Mann in the German-speaking world, and Joyce and Eliot among Anglo-American high modernists. Key nineteenth-century precursors include Baudelaire and Nietzsche as early proponents of modernity along with Dostoevsky, a fellow Russian who had become a fixture on the modern European scene, and even Tolstoy and Pushkin, who are hardly ever mentioned in accounts of modernism. In relating the creative trajectory of one individual to a specific set of literary and intellectual circumstances, Nabokov’s Art of Memory and European Modernism explores the possibilities of what I shall call “cultural biography.” The main accent in this phrase falls on the adjective “cultural.” Nabokov’s personal development is certainly fascinating, whether we think of his migrations from Russia through Europe to the United States, or of his metamorphoses from liberal aristocrat to émigré intellectual and then to media celebrity. But though I have profited from the biographical work on Nabokov, especially the new two-volume study by Brian Boyd, and though I have also learned from the work of Boris Eikhenbaum, Joseph Frank, and Ian Watt on other Slavic writers with Western connections, this book will subordinate Nabokov’s life as such to his leading accomplishment in the cultural sphere—his writings themselves. Even with this limitation, however, the range and complexity of Nabokov’s literary affiliations have prevented full coverage of his cultural situation, a mammoth project that would risk the fate of Sartre’s unfinished Flaubert biography. Thus my decision to emphasize Nabokov’s response to European modernism necessarily downplays other facets of his earlier career, such as his love for the nineteenth-century Russian classics, his response to the Silver Age literature of his youth, and his special character as a Russian émigré writer. By the same token, Nabokov’s memory-oriented narratives have claimed so much attention in their own right that they have overshadowed his important but less sustained accomplishments as a poet, playwright, translator, and entomologist. The focus on memory even tends to bypass the more fantastic, experi-

x

Preface and Acknowledgments

mental kind of writing that first emerged in Invitation to a Beheading, written in 1934. But it does so only to give Nabokov’s autobiography Speak, Memory the attention it deserves as a major achievement alongside his fiction. Nabokov’s later career gives only limited insight into his developing responses to European modernism. Both the American novelist of Lolita and Pnin and the transnational expatriate of Ada make their appearance after midcentury, when Nabokov had already completed the first full version of his autobiography. This work, in summing up his life before he came to the United States in 1940, gives a last, culminating expression to his modernism of memory. As a result, only isolated episodes after 1950 will require detailed treatment, most notably his revision of the autobiography in the mid1960s, the retrospective glimpses of European high culture in his Cornell lectures on literature and in Strong Opinions (1973), and the new outlook on modernism suggested by the interplay of Shade and Kinbote in Pale Fire (1962). Nabokov’s fiction from Lolita onward would require a second cultural biography emphasizing his many-sided response to the American scene and the nature of his participation in late twentieth-century postmodernism. My title does not allude to Frances Yates’s well-known The Art of Memory; Nabokov apparently had no direct contact with the classical and Renaissance memory systems discussed in her book. Rather, the term “art of memory” proved a convenient and even unavoidable label for one key tendency in Nabokov’s memory-writing, his deliberate oscillation between fictive invention and mnemonic truth. This oscillation, when projected onto his choice of narrative modes, corresponds to the intricate interplay between his novels and stories on the one hand, and the different versions of his autobiography on the other. As a result, though this book does not rely exclusively on any one critical approach or theory, both its title and its basic organization reflect the enlarged significance of autobiography in contemporary literary study. I have also learned from the discussions of time and memory by narrative theorists like Gérard Genette and Dorrit Cohn; by the emergence of memory as a key issue on the deconstructive agenda; and by the Walter Benjamin revival, which has popularized a response to the French modernism of memory that contrasts revealingly with Nabokov’s. Because his art of memory centers on the mnemonic image, moreover, discussions of the verbal-visual problematic by W.J.T. Mitchell and others have alerted me to the importance of this issue both in Nabokov’s interpretations of his synesthetic literary gift and in his memory writings themselves. Nabokov criticism is rich and varied, but it has tended to neglect Nabokov’s European connections in favor of his Russian or American ones. My response to previous work has therefore been somewhat selective, in the sense that although the scholarly corpus can often clarify specific matters of

Preface and Acknowledgments

xi

interpretation, only five rather diverse books have greatly influenced my approach. Predating yet anticipating the advent of Bakhtin and Kristeva, Alfred Appel’s Annotated Lolita (1970) impressively documents the range and complexity of Nabokov’s intertextual practices, which Appel conceptualizes as literary gamesmanship and involuted narration. His notes make it clear how much the cultural self-consciousness of Nabokov’s own writings can impart about his literary world, an approach Appel then applies to another area of culture in Nabokov’s Dark Cinema (1974). Later on, Simon Karlinsky’s edition of The Nabokov-Wilson Letters (1979) revealed to readers the lively give-and-take between these two close observers of international modernism. By demonstrating the uniqueness and force of his perspective on the early twentieth century, Nabokov’s side of the correspondence helped launch the present project. Particularly useful in defining the topic were the rigorous close readings in D. Barton Johnson’s Worlds in Regression (1985), to my mind the best detailed study of Nabokov’s works in themselves. Johnson was so successful in arguing a self-reflexive, gnostic trend from Invitation to a Beheading, through the Solus Rex project around 1940, to Pale Fire and beyond that he opened the way to studying other, equally decisive issues in Nabokov’s career. Hence my current interest in Nabokov’s paradoxical modernism of memory, which surfaced in his earliest novels, developed rapidly during a creative surge in the 1930s, persisted through a later period of extreme cultural mobility, and finally led to the completed autobiography. Priscilla Meyer’s work has also intrigued me, despite her controversial view of Lolita as a disguised reworking of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin. Her interest in correspondences and syntheses among various strands in Nabokov’s multicultural personality, shown more fully in her recent book on Pale Fire (Find What the Sailor Has Hidden, 1988), stimulated my own cross-cultural research. Just as fruitful, at a later stage, was Paul John Eakin’s Fictions in Autobiography (1985); though not directly concerned with Speak, Memory, it closes with an eloquent tribute to Nabokov that encouraged my efforts to fathom the fact-fiction problematic in his work. With regard to modernism, my basic outlook probably still reflects the thrill of working with Richard Ellmann and especially Charles Feidelson, Jr., soon after publication of The Modern Tradition. In spotlighting the paradox of a tradition against itself, the title of their anthology no doubt alerted me to similar paradoxes in Nabokov. And memories of Charles Feidelson’s puzzlement with Eliot’s curt response to “Ulysses, Order, and Myth,” when he was asked to comment on this seminal essay in the anthology, remained with me as I probed Nabokov’s own dissatisfaction with Eliot. But on the whole the panoramic overview offered by The Modern Tradition differs sharply from Nabokov’s strikingly intimate encounters with modernist culture. As will be shown, his art of memory mobilizes literary reminiscences

xii

Preface and Acknowledgments

along with immediate recollections of the past; and this intertextual factor means that when Nabokov self-consciously assembles a context for his writing, modernist culture itself enters his works as something that he directly emulates, amplifies, or attacks. Here Nabokov’s practice closely parallels the insights of certain Russian formalists, most notably Boris Eikhenbaum and Yuri Tynianov, as well as the dialogical theories of culture proposed by his close contemporary Mikhail Bakhtin. This intertextual internalization of a specific literary world is crucial for understanding Nabokov’s slant on early twentieth-century European culture. Another key influence in approaching this period has been the debates about artistic modernity, modernism, and the avant-garde extending from Paul de Man to Jürgen Habermas and including literary historians like Matei Calinescu, Ihab Hassan, Fredric Jameson, Marjorie Perloff, Ricardo Quinones, and Charles Russell. In addition, current interest in canon formation obviously applies to Nabokov, whose career coincided with the academic acceptance of modernism and whose vehement objections to certain great names have become notorious. To some extent Nabokov’s Art of Memory continues the cross-cultural study of literary modernism that I began in Heirs to Dionysus. Just as Nietzsche was a major forerunner who holds up a lens to an interconnected group of European novels from 1900 to 1947, so Nabokov was a well-placed latecomer whose art of memory pulls together a network of modernists in several literatures. But except at the very beginning of his career, Nabokov had little contact with Nietzschean modernism. He did not think much of Thomas Mann, D. H. Lawrence, or André Malraux, while in Pnin the egregious Budo von Falternfels, who takes over the hero’s office, owes his triumph to studying “the influence of Nietzsche’s disciples on Modern Thought” (Pn 138). Thus, though Nabokov is just as international as Nietzsche, he highlights some very different tendencies within the modernist movement. For when he denounces myth or depth psychology, he is decidedly anti-Dionysian; but he exceeds even Nietzsche in his commitment to individuality and the literary image. Yet at the same time, despite his distrust of general ideas in literature, he certainly has more respect for the conscious mind. Despite these oppositions, I will not argue for the superiority of either Nabokovian or Nietzschean modernism. Rather, I have aimed to be as precise as possible in delineating the inner logic of Nabokov’s position. His likes and dislikes in twentieth-century culture may seem offensive in Strong Opinions, but once we understand his evolving concerns as an artist of memory, they turn out to signify more than mere prejudice. The same effort to be judicious has informed my discussions of Nabokov’s even harsher quarrels with figures like Dostoevsky, Freud, and Eliot. To reconstruct a given conjuncture of life and culture in its particularity, the cultural biographer must learn to live with finding old favorites under siege.

Preface and Acknowledgments

xiii

The three sections of Nabokov’s Art of Memory follow a conceptual-chronological order. The first section, called “Points of Departure,” begins with a chapter that situates Nabokov’s European interests within his career as a whole, then discusses the literary-historical and methodological premises of a cultural biography focused on modernism. The second chapter examines how Nabokov accounts for his art of memory within a series of self-interpretations of his creative gift from the mid-1920s to the mid-1960s. These interpretations range from the synesthetic phenomenon of “colored hearing” to the two master narratives of the French governess and the summer of love. But they also involve the paradox of tying his mood of modernity to personal memories of the past. This linkage, which the young Nabokov traced back to Nietzsche and Baudelaire, functions as the underlying assumption for his modernism of memory. In the third chapter, which shifts from Nabokov’s general sense of his career to his actual beginnings as a Russian émigré novelist, attention turns to his first narratives concerned with memory. In them he formulates and then rejects a doctrine of anticipatory memory that is ambiguously Russo-European in its cultural affiliations, and that suggests an incipient “futurism” against which his later works will recoil. The titles of the other two sections chart Nabokov’s changing course within European culture during the 1930s and 1940s. “Toward France” focuses on Nabokov’s explosive development during most of the 1930s, beginning with his initial response to Proust and Bergson’s French modernism in the early 1930s, most notably in an illuminating parody that is now unavailable in English. Discussion then turns in Chapter 5 to the much more ambitious Dostoevsky parody in Despair (written in 1932), which systematically integrates the intertextual into Nabokov’s art of memory and settles accounts with the main Russian obstacle to his emerging French slant in modernist fiction. The next chapter deals with “Mademoiselle O” (1936), one of Nabokov’s two publications in French and the much-revised first installment of the book-length autobiography that would come fifteen years later; it treats both the evolving interplay between fiction and autobiography in various versions of this work and the emergence of a more nuanced response to French modernism. The seventh chapter, on the fictive autobiographies of the later 1930s, examines how modernism intertwines with memory-writing in Nabokov’s favorite short story, “Spring in Fialta,” then shows how this story functions as a European pendant to Nabokov’s Russian émigré masterpiece, his novel The Gift. The final section, “In English,” highlights Nabokov’s decision to start writing in that language in 1938, a transition usually taken to mark the emergence of an American Nabokov, but whose meaning for a European cultural biographer is much less clear-cut. For initially English pointed Nabokov toward England more than the United States. And if his British in-

xiv

Preface and Acknowledgments

terests are obviously germane to this study, his burgeoning American connections represented for Nabokov a distinct, non-European alternative—an unexpected new option in his cross-cultural odyssey. In addition, whatever switching to English meant for his Russian émigré career, it failed to end his interests in European modernism. Quite the contrary, for after reviving a certain Anglophilia in his family background, Nabokov’s new language did not keep him from reaffirming the French roots of his art of memory. The first chapter in this section lays the groundwork for these issues, which evolve over a longer period than Nabokov’s reception of Proust and Bergson. Dealing with his first two novels in English, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (written in 1938) and Bend Sinister (completed in 1946), Chapter 8 emphasizes his general sense of cultural mobility at a time of historical catastrophe, then considers his efforts to find a British setting for his modernism of memory. The next two chapters turn to the book whose very title seems to invoke Nabokov’s art of memory, the autobiography he would eventually call Speak, Memory. Discussion begins with the complex eloquence of the book’s mnemonic images, perhaps the most polished writing in Nabokov’s English-language career and the fulfillment of his long concern with literary image-making. Chapter 10 then turns to his cultural self-consciousness as he surveys his life story up to his departure for America and devises a more inclusive Russo-European persona to replace the English option explored in the two novels. Both of these chapters take account of Nabokov’s recently published Selected Letters, with their revelations about his changing plans for the autobiography. An epilogue on Pale Fire rounds out the discussion of Nabokov’s British interlude, since his treatment of T. S. Eliot and Proust in this experimental novel of the 1960s clarifies his preference for French over Anglo-American modernism. At some level, no doubt, my approach to Nabokov reflects quirks of background and experience that ought to be mentioned. Unlike older or younger American readers, for whom either Lolita or Ada was decisive, my first strong impressions of Nabokov came in 1964, during a public reading of Pale Fire at Harvard University. Studying The Gift a year later in an eye-opening seminar for Russian majors convinced me of the importance of his émigré career. Within a year I had read everything I could get my hands on; and at a time when Nabokov’s oeuvre was growing at both ends, as John Updike put it, I found the earlier fiction just as compelling as the contemporary work. Full appreciation of Speak, Memory had to await the more recent surge of interest in autobiography. In speculating about my special sensitivity to Nabokov’s art of memory and to his European side, I think first of boyhood summers among the lakes, pines, and birches of northern Minnesota. This landscape recalls the northern Russian setting for Nabokov’s two master narratives of memory— though it was left to Joseph Brodsky to identify the ecological echo. The

Preface and Acknowledgments

xv

transnational mosaic of cultures in the upper Midwest also held certain analogies with Nabokov’s Europe. The land of the Sioux and Chippewa gained a smattering of French place-names from early explorers, who were followed by immigrant settlers with their New Ulms, New Swedens, and New Pragues, all of which ended up as English-speaking towns. More than the political map of Europe at the time or the departmental divisions of American universities, this rich layering prepared me for the cross-cultural shifts and linkages in Nabokov’s response to modernism. Most fascinating of all was his ease in moving among cultures and languages, which chimed with my parents’ fabulous stories of life in China and Japan in the 1930s and with my long-forgotten experience of learning to talk in a bilingual environment. Now that I teach students from all over the world, the European Nabokov appears as a forerunner of our global sense of cultural mobility. But multiculturalism in his case would refer less to a social ideal of diversity than to the complex personal experience of forging a literary identity from several interacting and competing traditions. 1 1 1 Completion of this project would have been impossible without the support of several institutions and granting agencies. At Stanford University, where I first conceived of Nabokov’s Art of Memory, I am grateful to Herbert Lindenberger for encouraging me to take over his course on modernism, to George Dekker and Bill Todd for letting me teach the Russian classics, and to the Overseas Studies Program for sponsoring my French literature courses at the Stanford Program in Tours. Much of the early research was funded by a Mellon Faculty Fellowship with the Department of Comparative Literature at Harvard University. The following summer, a scholarship from the School of Criticism and Theory at Northwestern University allowed me to study “The Language of Images” with W.J.T. Mitchell. I began the actual writing during a summer research grant from George Mason University, drafted most of the manuscript while holding a Fellowship for College Teachers from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and finished thanks to a Semester Study Grant from George Mason. Over the years Herbert Lindenberger, Bill Todd, W. Wolfgang Holdheim, and John Malmstad have generously supported my research and writing, as have Jan Cohn, Terry Comito, and Hans Bergmann, my department chairs at George Mason. I also want to thank Edward Ahearn, Vladimir Alexandrov, Charlene Castellano, Mechthild Cranston, Robert Detweiler, Wendy Faris, Albert Guerard, Robert Hughes, Daniel Javitch, Douglas Langston, Diane Leonard, Angel Medina, Priscilla Meyer, David Minter, Henry Rutledge, Tom Smith, and Janet and Steven Walker, whose invitations to give lectures or present papers allowed me to try out my ideas.

xvi

Preface and Acknowledgments

Along the way I received useful information and encouragement from many Nabokovians, including Alfred Appel, Jr., Gennadi Alexis Barabtarlo, Brian Boyd, D. Barton Johnson, Charles Nicol, Stephen Jan Parker, Dale Peterson, and Susan Elizabeth Sweeney. John DeMoss’s samizdat index of Strong Opinions helped me locate many well-remembered but otherwise elusive Nabokovian comments. My colleague Deborah Kaplan cogently commented on an early and all too sketchy draft, while my ex-colleague Michelle Massé helped pique my interest in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight. Elizabeth Beaujour, Douglas Berggren, Russell Berman, Ronald Bush, Arthur Evans, Irina Paperno, Naomi Ritter, Bernice Rosenthal, Arnold Weinstein, and Irving Wohlfarth also made valuable suggestions; and special thanks go to Harry Levin for sharing his memories of Nabokov despite a busy schedule. David Halliburton and Marcel Cornis-Pope gave me the benefit of detailed comments on the entire manuscript just before it went off to press, and I am grateful as well to Annette Theuring of Princeton University Press for her expert editorial assistance. Needless to say, none of these people is responsible for problems with the approach or the details. Several libraries assisted me in the course of my research, most notably the Fenwick Library at George Mason but also the Georgetown University Library, the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library, the Widener Library at Harvard University, and the Alderman Library at the University of Virginia. Special credit goes to the Jane Bancroft Cook Library at New College in Sarasota, Florida, which not only aided me materially but has the unique Nabokovian cachet of being located some fifty miles south of St. Petersburg. On a more personal note, I want to thank my brother-in-law, Dr. Thomas J. Dimino, for introducing me to word processing. Soraya Haider helped make it possible to write with a small child in the house, while Sophia (the small child) did much to brighten the rest of the day. My wife Andrea Dimino, as usual, offered both encouragement and forceful criticism; she also kept me alive to worlds beyond my research. In dedicating Nabokov’s Art of Memory to my parents, I recall many words of counsel and acts of assistance, but most of all those marvelous stories of eastern Asia that first sparked my enthusiasm for cross-cultural study.

NOTE ON CITATIONS 1

ABBREVIATIONS and page numbers in parentheses in the text and notes refer to frequently cited works by Nabokov. The abbreviations and their corresponding works are given below. All other references appear in the notes. For works Nabokov wrote first in Russian and then had translated into English (often with revisions), I give page numbers for both editions, the Russian one first, followed by a slash and then the English reference. Thus (Dar 198/G 188) designates a passage to be found on page 198 of Dar, the Russian version of The Gift, and on page 188 of the subsequent English version. In addition to decoding the abbreviations for Nabokov’s works, the following list provides all relevant bibliographical data: A At BS CE Dar DB

Def Des DS E EO G Gl

Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1969. “Mademoiselle O” (in English). The Atlantic Monthly, January 1943, 66–73. Bend Sinister. 1947. Rpt. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974. Conclusive Evidence. 1951. Rpt. New York: Grosset and Dunlop, n.d. Dar. New York: Chekhov Publishing, 1952. Translated into English as The Gift (G). Drugie Berega. 1954. Rpt. Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1978. A revised Russian version of Conclusive Evidence (CE), later retranslated into English and further revised as Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited (SM). The Defense. Translated by Michael Scammell in collaboration with the author. New York: Putnam’s, 1964. Despair. New York: Putnam’s, 1966. Details of a Sunset and Other Stories. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976. The Enchanter. Translated by Dmitri Nabokov. New York: Putnam’s, 1986. Eugene Onegin. Rev. ed. 4 vols. Translated by Vladimir Nabokov with commentary. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1975. The Gift. Translated by Michael Scammell in collaboration with the author. New York: Putnam’s, 1963. Glory. Translated by Dmitri Nabokov in collaboration with the author. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1971.

xviii

Note on Citations

KO

Kamera Obskura. Paris: Contemporary Annals, 1932. Translated into English as Laughter in the Dark (LD). The Annotated Lolita. Edited by Alfred Appel, Jr. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970. Laughter in the Dark. 1938. Rpt. New York: New Directions, 1960. Lectures on Literature Edited by Fredson Bowers, with an introduction by John Updike. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980. Lectures on Russian Literature. Edited and with an introduction by Fredson Bowers. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981. Mary. Translated by Michael Glenny in collaboration with the author. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970. Mashen’ka. 1926. Rpt. New York: Ardis/McGraw-Hill, 1974. Translated into English as Mary (M). “Mademoiselle O” (in French). Mesures, 15 April 1936, 147–72. Nabokov’s Dozen. New York: Doubleday, 1958. The first story in this collection of short stories is “Spring in Fialta,” pp. 13–38. Translated by Vladimir Nabokov in collaboration with Peter Pertzov. The Nabokov-Wilson Letters, 1940–1971. Edited by Simon Karlinsky. 1979. Rpt. New York: Harper & Row, 1980. Otchajanie. 1936. Rpt. Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1978. Translated into English as Despair (Des). Pale Fire. New York: Putnam’s, 1962. Pnin. 1957. Rpt. New York: Vintage, 1989. Podvig. 1932. Rpt. New York: Ardis/McGraw-Hill, 1974. Translated into English as Glory (Gl). A Russian Beauty and Other Stories. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1973. The Real Life of Sebastian Knight. New York: New Directions, 1941. Selected Letters, 1940–1977. Edited by Dmitri Nabokov and Matthew J. Bruccoli. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1989. Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited. New York: McGrawHill, 1967. Strong Opinions. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1973. Sogljadataj. 1938. Rpt. Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1978. Tyrants Destroyed and Other Stories. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1975. Vesna v Fial’ta. 1956. Rpt. Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1978. The first story in this collection of short stories is “Vesna v Fial’ta,” pp. 7–35. Translated into English as “Spring in Fialta” in Nabokov’s Dozen (ND). Zashchita Luzhina. Berlin: Slovo, 1930. Translated into English as The Defense (Def).

L LD LL LRL M Ma MO ND

NWL O PF Pn Pod RB SK SL SM SO Sog TD VF

Z

Part One 1 Points of Departure

CHAPTER

1

1

The European Nabokov, the Modernist Moment, and Cultural Biography

THE EUROPEAN Nabokov remains an enigma. Readers throughout the English-speaking world remember the author of Lolita, of course, and how he burst onto the literary scene in the late 1950s. During the cultural ferment of the next decade, this retired professor, heavyset and genial in appearance yet holding acerbic literary opinions, became a name to conjure with. Somewhat like the new novelists in France, Nabokov—along with Borges, Barth, and Pynchon—was seen as the founder of an innovative trend in American fiction, a trend that was militantly antirealistic, disconcertingly self-conscious, and passionately devoted to style. It was even claimed that he heralded the rise of postmodernism as an epoch-making new departure in literature.1 And there his image has remained, except for growing interest in his autobiography Speak, Memory and occasional reminders that his fiction does not in fact abandon such traditional concerns as plot, character, and moral insight.2 This Nabokov, however, is the American Nabokov. The figure one glimpses in old photographs projects another, much more fluid cultural identity. Here a lean sportsman in English clothes poses on the streets of Berlin; there a writer bends intently over a manuscript, amid French cigarettes and Russian dictionaries. Now a blurred face or receding hairline appears at a Russian émigré banquet for Bunin or with the editorial board of a Parisian literary journal; then a refugee from Hitler’s Europe stands before us, with haunted, defiant eyes.3 Such pictures summon up the unusually varied background of an author who, when he came to the United States in 1940, had survived the dizzying reversals of recent European history. As an adolescent during the heroic years of modern art, Nabokov started writing with the advantage of hindsight on its many new initiatives, and as he emulated, rejected, revised, or synthesized the elements of this legacy, he was superbly well equipped to respond cross-culturally. But he was also the victim of upheavals that drove him from country to country, making him a permanent exile who could only feel comfortable in rented houses or hotel rooms. From this stark contrast of intellectual opportunity and social disaster emerge the works that, when viewed through the prism of literary modernism, reveal the European Nabokov.

4

Points of Departure

1 1 1 The younger Nabokov’s life, quickly rehearsed, reads like a capsule account of early twentieth-century Europe. He was born in 1899 to a privileged, belle époque family in prerevolutionary Russia; his father was a renegade aristocrat who defied the tsar and became an influential lawyer, journalist, and liberal politician. The household was Anglophile and well traveled; as a boy Nabokov knew English and French almost as well as Russian, and lived for periods in both France and Germany. When he got older, he came in contact with the rapid succession of Russian artistic movements that began with symbolism and led to the avant-garde. Later, in a possible half-conscious reference to this period, Nabokov chose “Sirin” as his literary pseudonym; this siren-like creature in Russian folklore might simply suggest an identification with art, but it had also been the name of a symbolist publishing house linked with major writers like Blok and Bely.4 Then, in 1917, the revolution came; Nabokov’s father, as a liberal, joined the provisional government that was formed in February after the abdication of Nicholas II. During the Bolshevik takeover in October the elder Nabokov was briefly arrested, then served in a local White government during the Russian Civil War, and later still was killed in Berlin by Russian monarchists seeking to assassinate a close political ally. His son, fiercely loyal to his father’s memory, would discover in Europe and America alike that the myth of the revolution had blotted out general knowledge of his father’s liberal opposition to both the tsar and Lenin. In 1919, when Communist victory was obvious, the Nabokovs fled to Western Europe. They had lost most of their fortune and, though initially attracted to England, eventually decided to settle in Berlin, which had become a Russian émigré center and where the father edited a liberal newspaper until his death in 1922. The son, meanwhile, attended Cambridge University and began his serious literary apprenticeship by writing poetry. This period in the early 1920s was the high point of modernism in England, and Nabokov has reminisced about fellow students discussing Donne and Hopkins or Joyce’s Ulysses (DB 224).5 But he chose to do his own writing in Russian, addressing an émigré audience scattered across Europe; and so he took a different route to modern art. On graduating from Cambridge Nabokov moved back to Berlin, where his attention soon turned to fiction. For fifteen years, from the Weimar period and the waning of expressionism well into the Nazi regime, he continued to live in Germany. He was often poor, and because his wife Vera was Jewish, both she and their infant son faced a growing threat of persecution. During this whole period Nabokov closely followed modern French literature, and

The European Nabokov

5

made several visits to the sizable émigré community in Paris. Perhaps as a result, when he left Germany for good in 1937, he tried to reestablish himself in France. But in 1940, when it became clear that France would fall to Hitler, he had to flee again, this time to the United States. By then Nabokov had written eight novels in Russian and almost as many volumes of stories, poems, and plays; he was widely recognized as the best novelist among the émigré generation that came of age after the revolution. These varied artistic and political experiences nourished a complex, multicultural identity in which Nabokov gloried. This identity is so complex, in fact, that we should abandon the dichotomy implied so far, that of a simple contrast between an American Nabokov and an earlier European one. Rather, to take a cue from Nabokov’s own view of his past, it makes better sense to think of three categories. Looking back at his life, he finds that it “is marked by a rather pleasing chronological neatness. I spent my first twenty years in Russia, the next twenty in Western Europe, and the twenty years after that, from 1940 to 1960, in America” (SO 52).6 Even this statement says nothing about the peculiarly deracinated, perhaps even transcultural period after 1960, when Nabokov lived in Switzerland as an American expatriate. For our purposes, however, we need only consider his view of the time before 1940. Far from just distinguishing Europe from the United States, it yields another broad contrast in which Nabokov’s boyhood and youth are Russian, while only the two decades of exile in England, Germany, and France are European. As this self-analysis suggests, we need to separate the European Nabokov not just from his later American self but from a Russian one as well. Yet even this handy scheme is little more than a biographical rule of thumb. It is significant, of course, that Nabokov refuses to define Europe in terms of mutually exclusive national traditions; as befits someone who was born Russian, became an American, and at one point was a professor of comparative literature, he refers to it as a complex unit. But the movement from Russia to Europe to America, if viewed as a simple sequence, badly misrepresents the meaning of Europe within his cosmopolitan career. For if we wish to fathom an author’s cultural orientation, it makes more sense to focus on the writings rather than the life; and in that case our findings will depend on much more than an address. A given tendency can go back to an earlier period in the career, can coexist with tendencies reflecting other cultures, or can be fully expressed long after dramatic changes in outer circumstances. As a result the decision to emigrate in 1919, despite the great personal upheaval it brought, does not separate the Russian from the European Nabokov. In his writing, in fact, the very opposite holds, since Nabokov chose to be a Russian author at the very time he moved to Europe. The result of this discrepancy between life and work is a highly original juxtapo-

6

Points of Departure

sition of two cultural spheres. In Nabokov’s career, as Russia and Europe interrelate in a complex pattern of vacillation, tension, and occasional reinforcement, they resist the clear-cut periodization he applies to his life. Later chapters will consider this process of cultural self-definition in more detail, but for the moment it is worth noting Nabokov’s own awareness of intricate exchange between Russia and Europe. In his autobiography, when he finishes portraying his Francophile uncle Ruka, he recalls his uncle’s fondness for the nineteenth-century French children’s books by Madame de Ségur. It seems obvious that they helped shape his uncle’s love of French culture, yet Nabokov abruptly overturns our expectations. Observing that Madame de Ségur had been a Rostopchin before her marriage, he contends that her books transposed the country-house childhood of the Russian nobility into a French idiom and setting (SM 76). Instead of opening a window on European culture, then, she had actually written stories that uncannily grafted Russia onto France. Yet we should not conclude that Nabokov wishes to magnify the importance of his native culture. He is just as capable of highlighting the opposite case, as shown by his monumental edition of Eugene Onegin, which argues for a major French influence on Pushkin’s language. In the Nabokovian cultural universe Russia and Europe may be separate entities, but far from existing in isolation, they can intermingle to the point of undergoing startling role reversals. Nabokov’s European side expresses a cultural aspiration and not, it should be emphasized, an ethnocentric one. As a Russian, he was regarded as an outsider by most Europeans; as an émigré, he had to live on a temporary Nansen passport that in effect made him stateless during the interwar years.7 And, though partly German in background like many Russians from his class, Nabokov had no special love for German culture and utterly detested the Nazis. Even if he mastered more German than some sharply negative statements indicate, he undoubtedly knew French and English better; and by a telling irony, he would receive a small legacy from his German ancestors in 1936, just before he stepped up his efforts to leave Berlin for France or England.8 Indeed, when Nabokov does think in ethnic terms, he tends to emphasize some non-European element, as if its coexistence with his European cultural interests would reaffirm the relative freedom of intellectual life. Hence in his autobiography he could fancifully derive the family name from the Tatar prince Nabok Murza, while after 1960 he would insist to European interviewers that he was an American. Or, as a student of Eugene Onegin, he could detail Pushkin’s responsiveness to Europe while also investigating the African origins of one of his ancestors. For Nabokov as a survivor of twentieth-century rivalries and upheavals, Europe mattered not because it was his home for two decades but because of its achievements in art and science. Created by gifted individuals who

The European Nabokov

7

were not easily categorized, European culture in this sense was so compelling that even an outsider like Nabokov could identify with it. In his autobiography Nabokov has described his sense of enchantment on seeing the inscription “Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits et des Grands Express Européens” on railway cars when he set out for Europe as a boy (SM 144). The transnational openness to exceptional achievement that marked the European Nabokov as an adult would reproduce, at a more mature level of awareness, this early thrill with border crossings and high speed. 1 1 1 Despite these and many other indications of cultural multiplicity, discussions of Nabokov’s earlier career usually neglect its European side. Up to 1937, after all, his decision to write in Russian for an émigré audience would seem to speak for itself. It is clear that novels like The Defense (1929), which was chosen as the first of Nabokov’s novels to be reprinted in the Soviet Union, or The Gift (1937), with its commemoration of émigré life in Berlin, have important places in Russian literature. As a result, most students of Nabokov’s pre-American career have been Slavists. They have naturally emphasized the Russian context, and now that Nabokov can be freely read and discussed in the Russian-speaking areas of the former Soviet Union, further scholarship along these lines seems likely. Yet even Nabokov’s Russian identity does not escape the elaborate cultural interplay he found so stimulating. Thus Edward J. Brown, in a history of Russian literature since the revolution, stresses the intricacy of the 1920s and 1930s. Russian writing may have split into Soviet and émigré branches, but the two camps still related to each other in a counterpoint of tradition and innovation. In Russia itself early avant-garde tendencies gave way to the orthodoxy of socialist realism, while Russian literature abroad, originally quite conservative and unadventurous, became more innovative by the 1930s—and so a space was created for Nabokov’s rise to prominence during the interwar years.9 Still, though Slavists have greatly advanced our knowledge of Nabokov’s earlier career, the Russian tradition alone cannot account for his cultural multiplicity. Not even the “Westernizing” attitude of some Russian intellectuals quite fits Nabokov’s European dimension, which seems more ingrained because it goes back to early encounters with English, French, and German culture in boyhood. And if Nabokov insists that after leaving Russia he lived and wrote among “spectral Germans and Frenchmen” (SM 276), the record suggests that background and environment did leave a mark. Simply on the level of represented experience, the settings of his émigré works are unmistakably European. An early novel like Glory can range from Greece to Switzerland, and includes many pointed vignettes of English life;

8

Points of Departure

stories like “Spring in Fialta” and “Cloud, Castle, Lake” provide enough local color to justify their Parisian and central European datelines; and it seems revealing that the German director Fassbinder could make a periodpiece movie of Despair. Still more important, of course, is the elusive realm of basic cultural affiliations, where even Nabokov’s émigré contemporaries sensed something non-Russian in his work. To Adamovich, his most persistent critic, Nabokov was “a major Russian writer . . . out of step with Russian literature.” Or, more favorably, Nina Berberova could insist that he belonged “to the entire Western world . . . not Russia alone.”10 In the end, not even the linguistic criterion is as decisive as it might seem. At some basic level of usage, Nabokov’s multilingual background must have introduced hesitations and ambiguities into his commitment to Russian émigré literature. Thus, though his research into Pushkin’s Gallicisms came much later, it is easy to imagine similar seepages between Nabokov’s own Russian and the French and English he had known since childhood. In fact, when Nabokov recalls his apprenticeship as a Russian writer, he seems suspiciously sensitive to this situation, for as a leading motive in his authorship he specifies the “fear of losing or corrupting, through alien influence” his mastery of his native language (SM 265). Perhaps this vacillation among languages was even more subtle, if we can credit a debatable reconsideration of Freud’s Wolf Man. In the view of French psychoanalysts Abraham and Torok, Freud overlooked the peculiarly tangled way in which this patient, like Nabokov the son of a liberal Russian aristocrat, had used language. While under analysis he had spoken German; but owing to a multilingual education that strikingly resembled Nabokov’s, everything the Wolf Man said was interlaced with hidden messages in both Russian and English, the two languages he had learned simultaneously as a small boy.11 Full verification of these speculations would be difficult, and in any case would go beyond the intentions of this study. But it is worth noting that they do apply to the linguistic space occupied by Nabokov’s oeuvre. Just as the Wolf Man contrived to speak several languages at once, so do Nabokov’s writings, most of which by now exist in both English and Russian versions. Less well known is the fact that this multilingual situation goes back to the beginning of his career. Despite the relative inaccessibility of his Russian works until the success of Lolita, they had usually reached a wider readership in Europe, first in German and later in French and English. Before 1930 Nabokov’s émigré publisher in Berlin was affiliated with the major German firm of Ullstein, which quickly brought out German translations of his first two novels. After 1930, when Nabokov shifted to a Parisian émigré house, several later novels were translated into French, and by the mid-1930s English translations were also appearing. After 1935, accordingly, when Nabokov started writing in French and English himself, he was not making an entirely new departure. His Russian works had prepared the way so that

The European Nabokov

9

despite the shock of changing his literary language, he was able to exploit his incipient relationships with various European audiences. Nabokov’s protean cultural identity became especially free-floating during the later 1930s, when he was pursuing opportunities on several fronts at once. At this point he still wrote and published in Russian, though on a less ambitious scale following The Gift in 1937. He also started working in French and by 1937 completed two short but promising new pieces, both published in prestigious Parisian literary magazines and both harbingers of major projects to come. A centenary essay on Pushkin dimly anticipated the painstaking Onegin translation and commentary, while the memoir “Mademoiselle O” initiated the thirty years of writing and revision that would result in his autobiography, Speak, Memory.12 Nabokov’s concurrent work in English was at first less ambitious. After writing “England and Me,”13 an unpublished memoir that roughly parallels “Mademoiselle O,” he then turned to self-translation out of dissatisfaction with the 1936 English version of his sixth novel, Kamera Obskura. In 1937 he did his own translation of the next novel, Despair, and in 1938 went on to revise and retranslate Kamera Obskura as Laughter in the Dark. Only then did he undertake an entirely new work in English, which became a major project in its own right—his ninth novel, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight. Though it failed to find a publisher until 1941 when Nabokov was in the United States, its many English cultural references suggest that it had originally been written for an audience in England. Nabokov’s European orientation continued during the first decade of his self-styled American period. In this time of transition, as Alfred Appel has pointedly shown, a distinctively American subject matter was slow to enter Nabokov’s poetry and fiction. Only when he began Lolita at midcentury did he turn decisively to what he called “the task of inventing America” (L 314).14 But Appel’s point has another side, namely, that much of Nabokov’s work during the 1940s harks back to Europe and Russia. Thus several of his first American publications revised and translated works of the late 1930s with German or French orientations, works like “Cloud, Castle, Lake,” “Spring in Fialta,” and “Mademoiselle O.” A little later in Bend Sinister (1947), his first novel conceived and written in America, Nabokov imaginatively combined his experiences with the Soviet and German dictatorships he called the “Communazis.” And throughout the 1940s his lively correspondence with Edmund Wilson shows a continuing strong engagement with European and Russian issues. Even as he started Lolita, Nabokov was still looking back at his pre-American past, for at that time he also wrote most of the sketches later gathered in Speak, Memory. As suggested by the Russian title of this autobiography, which was Drugie Berega or “other shores,” Nabokov’s Atlantic crossing happened much later in his career than in life.

10

Points of Departure

We can now see more clearly what is meant by the European Nabokov. The label is not essentially chronological: it does not refer to a self-contained period, and certainly not to the years from 1919 to 1940. Instead, it designates a persistent trait in his cultural identity, one that interacts with others to generate the cosmopolitan diversity of his career. This European tendency originated in the circumstances of Nabokov’s childhood, and then became an important but fluctuating presence in his Russian writing up to The Gift. During this highly productive period, Nabokov functioned most obviously as an émigré author who had earned a place in Russian culture during the difficult conditions of exile. But at the same time, in the interstices of these works, he was forging an unusually broad outlook on European culture. Later, when historical turmoil disrupted his career from 1935 to 1950, the European orientation became explicit. It guided Nabokov’s efforts as he tried to capture a French or English audience just before World War II, and continued as a major preoccupation during his gradual adjustment to the United States. 1 1 1 Nabokov’s European side would deserve attention in its own right as a neglected aspect of a major twentieth-century writer. But his development from 1925 to 1950 connects with broader issues of European culture as well. After all, despite Nabokov’s strong sense of his own uniqueness, he started writing just after the literary breakthroughs of the 1920s; and as he did so, he could profit from an upbringing and experience that were exceptionally cross-cultural. A writer so well placed in time and circumstance promises new comparative insights into early twentieth-century literature. Such a project, which would attempt to reconstruct Nabokov’s Europe in its breadth and implicit logic, would require the approach of a cultural biographer. The phrase “cultural biography” is not self-explanatory, nor does it refer to an established branch of literary scholarship; but it does suggest the basic enterprise of this book, which is to study a person’s life and achievements as they unfold within a specific cultural context. Culture, of course, is a broad word with many meanings, “one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language,” as Raymond Williams has noted.15 An inquiry defined in these terms might therefore proceed in a number of very different ways. At one extreme, taking the nonrestrictive approach of a cultural anthropologist, attention might center on formative contacts with social units marked by shared habits and allegiances. Nabokov himself occasionally follows this approach in Speak, Memory, which becomes a “cultural autobiography” when it describes his encounters with English home comforts (SM 79), or French seaside life (SM 147–48), or Russian radical intellectuals (SM 28–29). But this kind of cultural biography, though certainly relevant to Nabokov’s cosmopolitan identity, would end up valuing personal

The European Nabokov

11

experiences more than his writings. As sometimes happened with early psychoanalytic criticism, it would risk putting the cultural case study above the author and artist. And, despite the fascination of Nabokov’s many migrations, his literary works are the real reason for his importance. So Nabokov’s cultural biographer should be careful to emphasize the writer’s career. In that case the meaning of culture becomes more specialized; what really matters is literary culture, the specific intellectual and artistic setting for the writer’s achievements. This setting might involve some influential work or issue of technique, or a trend in contemporary thought, or a particular historical situation as understood in literary circles. Not that so-called popular culture need be excluded from this kind of cultural biography. As readers of Lolita know, Nabokov would often explore the world of mass stereotypes with mingled zest and disgust, in the spirit of his vivid dissection of Gogolian “poshlust.”16 When Appel writes about Nabokov’s involvement with film in Nabokov’s Dark Cinema, and identifies a host of possible references in his fiction to Hollywood movies of the 1940s, he shows the importance of this level of culture for Nabokov’s career. However, as already indicated, the basic impulse that drives Nabokov’s European side comes from elsewhere, from ambitious artistic and intellectual works aimed at an elite audience. To understand this impulse, we will have to rely on cultural biography in the more restricted literary sense, which deals mainly with the artifacts of high culture. From this literary perspective, the best cultural framework for understanding the European Nabokov is early twentieth-century modernism. Nabokov himself only used the word rarely and quite vaguely, perhaps because it did not assume its current meaning as an international tendency in European high culture until late in his career. He certainly never applied the term to Joyce, Eliot, and Pound, the writers most often called modernists in the English-speaking world, even though their collaboration peaked during Nabokov’s years in England. On the other hand, as Nabokov grew up just before World War I and then matured in the 1920s, he obviously admired many other contemporary efforts at cultural renovation. As already mentioned, his literary pseudonym of Sirin chimed with an important Russian initiative rather early in this ferment. Even more revealing was his list of twentieth-century prose masterpieces in a 1965 interview with Robert Hughes. Nabokov began with Joyce’s Ulysses, but then in descending order of quality named Kafka’s Die Verwandlung, Andrey Bely’s symbolist novel Petersburg, and the first half of Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, all of which appeared in the single decade between 1913 and 1922 (SO 57).17 Clearly Nabokov looked back at this brief, Europe-wide period of new departures as an inspiring precedent. But if Nabokov does not refer to his favorite novels as modernist, why should we? Though he rightly resisted the simplistic typologies of Soviet literary policy, his disdain for period terms and literary movements should

12

Points of Departure

not prevent his critics from undertaking a more nuanced historical inquiry. Simply on pragmatic grounds, for example, the term “modernism” lends a sharper historical profile to Nabokov’s allegiances in early twentieth-century culture. More pointedly, it catches the polemical force of his list in the Anglo-American context, and thus shows how his international outlook challenges received assumptions. For when Nabokov links Joyce with Kafka, Bely, and Proust, he has removed him from the canon of English-language modernists that placed Joyce with Eliot and Pound. These two poets never interested Nabokov, who distrusted their antiliberal politics and rejected their mythic conception of literature. Only while adjusting to the United States in the 1940s did he finally learn of their overwhelming influence on what counted as “modern” in contemporary writing; but despite the urging of friends, he rejected “the poetry of the not quite first-rate Eliot and of definitely second-rate Pound” (SO 43). By contrast, in a maneuver typical of Nabokov’s European side, he moves the Joyce of Ulysses to another, international pantheon of early twentieth-century masters. More generally, modernism fits as a label because many of the assumptions behind Nabokov’s list of favorite novels have also guided Anglo-American critics of the movement. Even though these critics do not share Nabokov’s dislike for Pound and Eliot, they often do mention Kafka and Proust alongside Joyce, and agree that Ulysses is one indispensable work for any definition of the term. And Nabokov’s strategy of listing figures from several cultures at once echoes the self-contradictory status of modernism in common parlance about the arts. If, as an -ism, the word suggests a certain doctrinal coherence, even a program, in practice it refers to a general tendency that transcends the aims of any one group. Finally, by emphasizing great works before their authors, Nabokov recalls the modernist urge to rival the classics; for, though modernism seems strikingly original alongside earlier literature, it still upholds the classical aspiration to create masterpieces. Hence, despite Nabokov’s dislike for labels and his refusal to endorse the standard Anglo-American canon, his European literary identity clearly goes back to a certain spirit of innovation during the second and third decades of our century. For the cultural biographer he promises a fresh viewpoint on this modernist moment. 1 1 1 A more nuanced description of Nabokov’s literary world emerges during a 1964 interview with Alvin Toffler. Here he provides a much broader list of “top favorites,” many of which date back to boyhood: Between the ages of ten and fifteen in St. Petersburg, I must have read more fiction and poetry—English, Russian and French—than in any other five-year period of my life. I relished especially the works of Wells, Poe,

The European Nabokov

13

Browning, Keats, Flaubert, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Chekhov, Tolstoy, and Alexander Blok. On another level, my heroes were the Scarlet Pimpernel, Phileas Fogg, and Sherlock Holmes. . . . At a later period, in Western Europe, between the ages of 20 and 40, my favorites were Housman, Rupert Brooke, Norman Douglas, Bergson, Joyce, Proust, and Pushkin. (SO 43)

Some of these names evoke other facets of his cultural identity, such as his early love of poetry or popular adventure stories.18 Others highlight the distinctive tastes of the Russian Nabokov. His canon features Pushkin and Blok in poetry, and Tolstoy and Chekhov in prose, but he is unimpressed by the international renown of Turgenev and Dostoevsky, elsewhere dismissed as “Turgy” and “Dusty” (Des 190). The European Nabokov first surfaces among his boyhood readings of Wells, Flaubert, and Rimbaud, who anticipate the more focused interests of the interwar years. There the various English writers, Joyce, and Proust sharpen the impressions of the Hughes interview, while Bergson and Pushkin offer valuable new insights into Nabokov’s reception of modernism. Mentioning H. G. Wells before any other writer may simply reflect the biographical facts (Wells was once a family guest in St. Petersburg),19 but it also raises the more general issue of Nabokov’s Anglophile upbringing. Also, since Wells was on the wrong side in a famous controversy with Henry James, Nabokov has seized an opportunity to flaunt his unfashionable tastes in modern British fiction. This theme continues when he highlights the enthusiasm for Housman, Brooke, and Douglas that marked his years at Cambridge in the early 1920s. Given the attack on Eliot and Pound later in the same interview, these names seem relatively unimportant in themselves: they are a pretext for a scandalously prejudiced tableau of modern British literature that bypasses the Anglo-American modernists. With Flaubert and Bergson, the Toffler interview decisively extends the complex of affirmations and rejections that defines the European Nabokov’s attitude toward modernism. Flaubert counters Dostoevsky as the leading nineteenth-century precursor of modernist fiction. At the time of the interview Nabokov was revising his autobiography, to which he added a telling passage that indicates just how Flaubert became a boyhood influence. He had been a favorite author of his father’s, who had called Madame Bovary “the unsurpassed pearl of French literature,” a tribute his son read in the father’s copy of the novel when it was returned to the family as a memento after the assassination in 1922 (SM 174). Flaubert thus possesses the authority of a paternal legacy for Nabokov, and it is no accident that although his European triad of Joyce, Kafka, and Proust worked independently of each other, they all viewed Flaubert as an inspiring model. Yet Nabokov denies a similar precursor’s role to Dostoevsky, who was Flaubert’s close contemporary and just as vital an influence among modernists all over Europe. This choice reflects Nabokov’s conviction, to be discussed in Chapter

14

Points of Departure

5, that modern fiction should focus on aesthetics (taken in a broad and somewhat idiosyncratic sense), not on ideology. From this viewpoint, if Flaubert should be honored as the great pioneer in making the novel a work of art, fiction that sought to dramatize conflicting ideas and values could be dismissed as mere “Dostoevskian drisk” (SM 284). Significantly, three of the modern novelists Nabokov most detested are Thomas Mann, D. H. Lawrence, and Sartre, each of whom had reservations of various kinds about Flaubert but admired Dostoevsky. For this reason Nabokov’s notorious dislike for his fellow Russian novelist, despite specifically Russian sources, also has European implications.20 The only exception to this blanket condemnation was the young Dostoevsky’s somewhat neglected short novel The Double, which Nabokov regularly praised as a brilliant forerunner of Joyce’s great parodies in Ulysses. Bergson is now little read despite provocative comments by Derrida and Benjamin, but this philosopher and Nobel Prize winner in literature enjoyed an enormous international vogue just before World War I. He is often associated with modernism, for he had an impact on Eliot through his philosophical education and on Pound through Bergson’s English translator, T. E. Hulme. But Nabokov must have discovered Bergson in a Russian setting, perhaps from the Acmeist poets or the formalist critics, both of which were modernist groups with aims paralleling his own.21 Then, as his European side developed, Bergson offered a positive alternative to Freud among early twentieth-century speculative psychologists. If Nabokov vehemently rejects psychoanalytic conceptions of sexuality, the unconscious, the role of myth, and the very desirability of theory, he strongly endorses Bergson’s concern with the lived experience of time, the enriching effects of memory, and the importance of creativity. In these three areas he somewhat arbitrarily saw Bergson as nearly identical to Proust, as the philosophical psychologist whose thought prepared for the Recherche. Taken together, Bergson and Flaubert account for Nabokov’s polemical neglect of Anglo-American modernism; his own modernism has a markedly Gallic slant. From now on, when referring to Nabokov’s “French modernism,” I will mean this particular tendency. Even though the French themselves do not recognize the term,22 it has the merit of spotlighting Nabokov’s special cross-cultural position between France and England in the early twentieth century. Indeed, the Toffler interview gives even Joyce a French tinge by placing him between Bergson and Proust, a linkage that is far from arbitrary in Nabokov’s view since Joyce was living in Paris during the 1920s and 1930s. Moreover, since Bergson provides intellectual justification for Proust while Flaubert acts as his literary precursor, the ranking of the Hughes list stands corrected. Even though Ulysses and Die Verwandlung may rank above the Recherche as works of art, it was Proust more than any other modernist who guided Nabokov’s development as a self-consciously

The European Nabokov

15

modern writer. As we shall see in later chapters, Proustian issues of the reinterpreted past, of fiction and autobiography, of voluntary memory, and of retrospective emotion underlay Nabokov’s changing aims as he moved from the 1920s to the 1930s, and remained influential into the 1940s and beyond. The developing implications of this art of memory, I shall argue, provide the key to understanding Nabokov’s special perspective on European modernism. Nabokov omits Kafka from the Toffler interview, perhaps because Die Verwandlung lacks the magnitude of Ulysses and the Recherche, and thus did not stand out among Nabokov’s impressions of the period. Nonetheless, a deeper ambivalence may be at work. On the one hand, Kafka seems irrelevant to a Proustian art of personal memory, for as his compatriot Milan Kundera has suggestively remarked, “Prague in his novels is a city without memory.”23 On the other hand, Kafka may connect with a second, less explicitly European tendency in Nabokov’s earlier works. This tendency, at once self-reflexive and metaphysical, hints at an authorial realm outside the fiction so as to convey, by analogy, the sense of another world beyond our own. These issues emerge in Invitation to a Beheading, which Nabokov wrote with unusual rapidity in 1934, and which he felt was a major breakthrough. Later, when this book was compared with Kafka, he would fiercely defend its originality. But his denials of influence are undercut by a curious imprecision in giving dates. Thus, though Nabokov has stated that his first encounter with Kafka occurred in “the nineteen thirties when his La métamorphose appeared in La nouvelle revue française” (SO 151), this issue of the NRF actually came out in 1928, well before he began Invitation or even reached his first stage of maturity as a writer.24 For our purposes, however, this controversy is moot. Although D. Barton Johnson does not address the Kafka problem in Worlds in Regression, and tends to downplay the actual development of Nabokov’s self-reflexive, metaphysical tendency, his selection of works for discussion does suggest a specific trajectory. The main line, it would seem, runs from Invitation through the unfinished Solus Rex project (1939–1940) and Bend Sinister (1947) to culminate with novels of the 1960s and 1970s like Pale Fire, Ada, and Look at the Harlequins!.25 From this perspective Kafka’s influence, if it exists at all, would center on a much later period in his career. By contrast, a second initiative from the mid-1930s is more immediately productive than Invitation—Nabokov’s equally rapid composition of “Mademoiselle O” and its eventual appearance in French. At once a linguistic expression of his European side and a decisive advance in his art of personal memory, this autobiographical sketch overlapped with two other major projects: Nabokov’s favorite short story, “Spring in Fialta,” and The Gift, the novel he ranks with Invitation as his best in the émigré period. Since both The Gift and “Spring in Fialta” themselves emphasize memory, a full account of Na-

16

Points of Departure

bokov in the mid-1930s indicates that, whatever his involvement with Kafka, the dominant European interest was Proust. As Nabokov elaborates and extends his art of memory from the 1920s to the 1940s, he focuses ever more insistently on the problem of the mnemonic image. Attempting to retrieve isolated moments from the past in their full particularity, he sometimes views the result as a faithful record, but sometimes as just a vivid metaphor for irrecoverable experience. This dilemma marks the very word “image,” which, by a telling equivocation, can mean both a specific sensation and a linguistic trope. Later chapters will consider Nabokov’s vacillations on this issue, but when he started writing fiction in the mid-1920s the problem had already become current, particularly in key works during the previous decade by Eliot and Freud as well as Proust, works that emphasized both the startling sensory immediacy and the uncertain significance of remembered images. In this context, Nabokov’s seven European favorites of the 1920s and 1930s gain an even sharper focus. Through them, in effect, he retraces his course among the canonical English, French, and central European options available as he was starting out; he either encountered them at the time or rejected them later when he discovered their importance as rival accounts of the mnemonic image. In a general sense Housman, Brooke, and Douglas suggest an underlying English heritage that, by encouraging an empiricist faith in concrete particulars, helped mold the young Nabokov’s very approach to the mnemonic image. As polemical negations of Eliot and Pound, meanwhile, they highlight his later resistance to the radically depersonalized mythic memory of Anglo-American modernism. If The Waste Land begins by proposing to mix memory and desire, it ends by evoking a hallucinatory desert whose component images possess remarkable sensory specificity but whose Eastern setting suggests a cultural rather than a personal past. Only after pointedly overlooking Eliot and Pound does the Toffler interview turn to Joyce, the Irish expatriate whose retrospective re-creations of Dublin must have struck Nabokov as an obvious model for his own project of recalling Russia in European exile. And yet, though welcoming Joyce as a daring innovator, a brilliant parodist, and an unparalleled master of English, he refused to accept two of the most famous techniques in Ulysses. Memory was certainly central to the intricate temporal arabesques of the stream-of-consciousness method; but from Nabokov’s standpoint that method “exaggerates the verbal side of thought,” while missing the main point, that “Man thinks not always in words but also in images” (LL 289). By the same token, the Homeric reminiscences, used as chapter titles when Ulysses was serialized from 1918 to 1920, but suppressed when it appeared as a book in 1922, only served to reinforce Eliot’s and Pound’s mistaken emphasis on myth. Bergson, as the theorist of a French modernism of memory, serves to buttress Proust’s fiction, and he has a further, unspoken role as an alterna-

The European Nabokov

17

tive to the central European, psychoanalytic concern with memory traces in the unconscious. In Freud’s case study of the Wolf Man, as in Eliot’s poem, the reader is confronted with a powerful mnemonic image. But since it surfaces only as an enigmatic dream of white wolves in a tree, all its details must be reinterpreted if it is to reveal the repressed trauma in the patient’s early childhood. Proust’s French modernism suggests another alternative: the willed recovery of lost time. In Proust himself, of course, the element of will is somewhat obscured by his famous doctrine of involuntary memory, which, operating mostly by chance, brings back images of unusual specificity from much earlier in life. But only when these images are pondered and probed do they disclose their intensely aesthetic character—which in turn transcends the categories of art by nourishing an aesthetic individualism that enhances the personality and even seems to resist the passage of time. Thus, when the narrator in Proust’s Recherche recalls more of his childhood as the result of tasting a madeleine pastry dipped in tea, this famous mnemonic image restores his self-esteem along with bringing back forgotten aspects of his life story, and much later even helps him achieve his longpostponed artistic aims. Nabokov was hardly an uncritical admirer of Proust. But as he looked back at the options proposed by the various national modernisms, neither myth nor the unconscious but only the aesthetic individualism of this French modernism could do justice to the afterlife of vivid sense impressions in one’s memory. Eventually, as we shall see in Chapter 10, he decided that even Pushkin had developed along similar lines. Though Eugene Onegin reflects a cultural setting where romanticism jostled with neoclassicism and early realism, when Nabokov reconsidered the Russian national poet’s fascination with memory, he would give a French modernist slant to the novel’s climactic mnemonic images. He thereby reveals the inner logic of placing Pushkin’s name alongside Proust’s in his list of European literary enthusiasms. In the process, in one of the occasional instances of reinforcement among the different sides of his cultural identity, he annexes a Russian classic to the French modernism of memory. At a level of generality beyond the cross-cultural juxtapositions of major personalities, Nabokov’s boyhood linkage of Flaubert and Rimbaud indicates how his career illuminates the place of the modernists within the vicissitudes of artistic modernity since the mid–nineteenth century. Like all labels for periods, movements, and tendencies, modernism poses a challenge to historical thinking; it need not be a cut-and-dried stereotype. It is a label that allows us to make some sense of the past only if we remember that it defines itself against other such terms in an intricate process of differentiation and refinement that should always be referred back to specific artistic experiences. Such conceptualization becomes especially complex, yet potentially most valuable, at the boundary points where modernism

18

Points of Departure

confronts its forerunners, its successors, and its contemporary rivals among the waves of literary innovators after the romantics. As is well known, early modernists reacted against late nineteenth-century symbolism and a selfstyled naturalism that prolonged midcentury realism, while since 1960 the postmodernists in their turn have arisen as a self-conscious movement to challenge codified and partial versions of modernism. Even during the early twentieth century itself, modernists battled expressionists, futurists, surrealists, and other avant-garde movements, so that modernism and the avant-garde have increasingly appeared as two separate types of artistic modernity.26 Within this historical matrix Nabokov stands out because the main strands of his cultural identity cross all three boundaries. The American Nabokov, we know, has been welcomed as a postmodernist; yet this study will show that for most of his previous career he identified with many leading modernists. Similarly, the Russian Nabokov could admire both the supposed archrealist Tolstoy and the self-proclaimed symbolist Bely. Yet in Strong Opinions he takes modernist attitudes toward the contrasting goals of both writers when he disputes realism’s claims to documentary truth by consistently placing the word “reality” in quotation marks (SO 11), or when he dismisses symbols as empty generalizations alongside the telling specificity of images (SO 7). For the European Nabokov, however, a third boundary mattered most and will concern us here. As he matures, he repeatedly attacks the many avant-garde movements he encountered in Western Europe, yet his first novels propose and then reject a doctrine of anticipatory memory that shows a well-defined interest in futurism. And at several crucial points in his career he distances himself from Rimbaud, the nineteenthcentury poet whose radical experimentation made him a hero of the contemporary avant-garde. Nonetheless, among the boyhood influences named in the Toffler interview, Rimbaud appears near the modernist precursor Flaubert. Nabokov’s polemics against the avant-garde spirit thus occur within a career that had itself already crossed the line between the two leading modes of artistic modernity in the early twentieth century. 1 1 1 In approaching the European Nabokov, this cultural biography will emphasize the distinctiveness of his art of memory within literary modernism. Nabokov saw 1922 as the year of Ulysses but not of The Waste Land; and because he developed apart from Eliot and Pound, he cannot be assimilated to standard Anglo-American categories like “imagism” or the “mythical method.” Instead, he broadens the geography of modernism by looking to such Continental authors as Kafka and Proust, then extends the polemic by introducing two key oppositions: one that places Flaubert over Dos-

The European Nabokov

19

toevsky as the main ancestor of modern fiction and another that names Bergson rather than Freud as the exemplary speculative psychologist. In even wider perspective, as he responds to the competing modern movements in the early twentieth century, he emphasizes modernism over the avant-garde. In Nabokov’s case, however, cultural biography goes beyond these historical insights to offer two key methodological advantages. It defines the field of study in such a way as to circumvent the relative lack of primary materials on the European Nabokov; and it authorizes a critical approach responsive to the self-conscious intertextuality that, from within Nabokov’s writing itself, continually posits larger literary frameworks for his work. Cultural biography as practiced here, by stressing the European Nabokov’s career over his life, finesses the problem of missing or inaccessible personal records. Some unpublished papers of general interest have appeared since he died in 1977, and this study draws on his selected letters (most of them written after 1940), his separately collected correspondence with Edmund Wilson, and his Cornell lectures on the Russian and European novel, all of which help illuminate his earlier career. Otherwise, however, explicit documentation becomes very difficult. The Russian revolution, Nabokov’s years of exile, and then World War II led to the destruction or loss of biographical materials that can normally be taken for granted. Those that have survived are not usually in the public domain; only Nabokov’s most recent biographer Brian Boyd has had access to an archive of personal papers in Switzerland,27 while the Nabokov manuscripts in the Library of Congress cannot be consulted freely until the next century. In a further complication, though Andrew Field’s two biographies do emphasize Nabokov’s earlier life, he still holds the papers and taped interviews on which he based his findings. Their value, in any case, is problematic since both Nabokov and his family have denounced Field.28 In sharp contrast to all these uncertainties, we do have full access to the works Nabokov decided to publish. Since the European elements of these books are there to be analyzed and criticized, and since the early twentieth century now appears in better perspective, the way is open for a career-oriented cultural biography of the European Nabokov. Once we focus on Nabokov’s published works, we must still deal with a second difficulty—the long shadow that the American Nabokov casts on his European past. Here again cultural biography can act as a corrective. For as it works to sharpen our cultural vocabulary through a biographer’s concern for individual development, it examines the very unfolding of the career. In Nabokov’s case this stage-by-stage approach has two special consequences. It requires, first, that we carefully evaluate the English versions of his earlier work, which Nabokov first prepared on his own and later supervised, but which often include important revisions. Translations in the 1930s and

20

Points of Departure

1940s, like the ones of Kamera Obskura, “Mademoiselle O,” and “Spring in Fialta,” represent a rethinking of earlier positions and thus have a direct bearing on Nabokov’s European side. But the later translations of his entire Russian oeuvre, begun after the success of Lolita and continued until his death, are more problematic. They are model achievements in many respects, but with some novels Nabokov rewrote key passages or even whole chapters, at times clarifying what had been obscure or undeveloped but often modifying the work to reflect later interests.29 Such revisions create obvious difficulties for a cultural biography like this one: by altering our best direct evidence of Nabokov’s literary aims until the mid-1930s, they can inadvertently distort our sense of the European Nabokov. I have therefore based my research on the original editions of his Russian works, and in later chapters will alert the reader to significant variations from the better-known English versions. It will also be necessary to allow for the series of prefaces Nabokov wrote for all the translations. These sharply worded introductions, along with the public interviews collected in Strong Opinions, amount to an extended polemic for a specifically Nabokovian art of fiction. But this vision of the novel must be handled judiciously, for it belongs to the American 1960s. When ideas sometimes used to argue for a postmodern Nabokov are projected back onto fiction written in response to modernism, the possibilities for error are obvious. Not the American Nabokov’s later and somewhat tendentious interpretations of his career, but the implications of the works themselves within their European context are the proper subject for this cultural biography. Granted, our discussion of Nabokov’s modernism in this chapter has itself extrapolated from remarks in the 1960s, but we shall see in later chapters how richly these bare lists correspond to what happened decades before. Our best insights into the European Nabokov will come from the elaborate intertextual practices of these earlier works, for they offer a privileged record of Nabokov’s intense cultural self-awareness. The need to place his work within some literary or intellectual framework is inseparable from his very conception of writing, so that allusions, parodies, creative reworkings, and other references to predecessors are unusually significant in all his works. Even in his criticism of figures like Pushkin and Lermontov, Nabokov takes great pains to show how they used models, and how they both echoed and went beyond their readings. He approaches his own authorship in the same spirit, as shown by the account of his first poem in Speak, Memory. To suggest how this immature work incorporated its literary contexts, he describes a fence with the picture of a circus painted on it. The fence was then taken apart, and after being carelessly reassembled it “showed only disjointed parts of animals (some of them, moreover, upside down)—a tawny

The European Nabokov

21

haunch, a zebra’s head, the leg of an elephant” (SM 221). Nabokov condemns the intertextuality of this youthful poem as both derivative and painfully unself-conscious. But by the time he switched to fiction his awareness of relevant contexts had become more discriminating, and he would continue with ever-increasing skill to rework distinctive features of those writers who helped define the contours of his literary world. Asking readers to respond to what he called “a passing allusion tacitly recognized in the middle distance of an idea, an adventurous sail descried on the horizon” (Pn 41), Nabokov far outdid his metaphorical circus fence in taking fragments from predecessors and skillfully endorsing, altering, or even reversing their significance. In assessing the cultural meaning of Nabokovian intertextuality, I have learned from three major scholarly works: Boris Eikhenbaum’s Lev Tolstoy (1928–1931), Joseph Frank’s ongoing Dostoevsky project, and Ian Watt’s Conrad in the Nineteenth Century (1979). Though planned as multivolume studies of whole careers and not of some European aspect alone, all three deal with novelists who, like Nabokov, began in a Slavic setting and moved toward the West. Taken together they suggest how much cultural biography can profit from judicious, well-honed intertextual analysis. This method, applied by each scholar in different yet complementary ways, starts out by examining a writer’s interaction with the broader cultural environment. It then turns to particular literary works for its best evidence, isolates the most telling references to the cultural context, and interprets these references according to their function in the work, their place in the career, and their special slant on the general artistic and intellectual situation. When read with sufficient care, therefore, the intertextual links between work and milieu can themselves crystallize the distinctive subject matter of cultural biography. The Russian formalist Eikhenbaum is particularly effective at showing the intertextual field within which Tolstoy moved. When he began his project with the short, separate study called The Young Tolstoy (1922), he proposed to clarify “Tolstoy’s basic literary traditions . . . those from which he recoiled, as from a mould, and those to which he aspired, as to a model.”30 In the surviving three volumes of a projected five-volume biography, however, the instances of opposition are more memorable than those of assimilation, perhaps because Eikhenbaum’s basic ideas about how writers shape their careers emerged during the cultural ferment just before and after the Russian revolution. Alert, like other formalists, to the rapid give-and-take of avant-garde polemics, he seems to have identified a similar pattern in Tolstoy’s many skirmishes with his literary and intellectual environment, European as well as Russian. In that case Eikhenbaum’s approach derives from some of the same cultural experiences that contributed to Nabokov’s own

22

Points of Departure

fondness for built-in polemics. After all, Nabokov first encountered modern literature during the heated period just before the revolution, and he certainly admired Tolstoy’s stubborn independence. There are crucial differences, of course. Because Eikhenbaum tends to focus on the biographically documented contacts that are so plentiful with Tolstoy, he includes no detailed analyses of his fiction. But just such an intrinsic approach is required with Nabokov, where outside documentation is largely missing, since he mobilizes the intertextual resources of his art to support or attack his contemporaries. Indeed, to the extent that these battles involve clever mimicry of other viewpoints, he parallels the theories of novelistic language advanced by Eikhenbaum’s contemporary, Mikhail Bakhtin. At such moments Nabokov’s art clearly does exist “on the boundary between its own context and another, alien context.”31 But to the extent that such mimicry stresses deliberate deformation and parody, Nabokov comes even closer to Eikhenbaum’s fellow formalist, Iuri Tynianov.32 Nonetheless, only Eikhenbaum’s multivolume work on Tolstoy shows how polemical interaction with the cultural environment can generate a major career, thus suggesting the full potential of an intertextual approach applied to Nabokov.33 Joseph Frank has acknowledged Eikhenbaum’s importance, but eventually decided to supplement cultural biography with a more traditional biographical study of Dostoevsky’s key personal experiences. For our purposes, however, two other innovations are more important. Both derive from Frank’s original motive for doing cultural biography—his dissatisfaction with existentialist readings of Notes from Underground. On the one hand, the existentialists overlooked the cultural context for Notes, which Frank analyzes so as to show, much more forcefully than Eikhenbaum, the role of a specifically Western element. Thus the first volume of his biography brilliantly presents a younger, “European” Dostoevsky, against whose views, drawn from various strands in French and German culture, the mature, more nationalistic writer strongly reacted. On the other hand, Frank must also show how this information alters our sense of Dostoevsky’s writings, and so he takes a resolutely intrinsic approach as a critic. Arguing that the author is “an adjunct to his artistic concerns and their products,” he gives full interpretations of all of Dostoevsky’s works. The resulting contrast with Eikhenbaum is sharpest in Frank’s third volume, which rivals Lev Tolstoy in detailing Dostoevsky’s polemical strategies during the early 1860s but then goes on to read Notes as an artistic synthesis of all these experiences. In the process, since Dostoevsky was a highly intertextual author (he was the prime example both for Bakhtin’s theory of novelistic language and for Tynianov’s theory of parody), Frank is alert to the polemical elements embedded in Dostoevsky’s fiction.34

The European Nabokov

23

Ian Watt also combines the study of Conrad’s cultural circumstances with an intrinsic approach to his works. As a novelist of Slavic origins who underwent exile and was forced to write in English as a foreign language, Conrad has affinities with Nabokov that the younger writer never adequately acknowledged. Even more important, because Conrad actually moved to the West, his basic cultural attitudes come much closer to Nabokov’s than do those of the mature Dostoevsky, whose Russian nationalism was anathema to him. Hence Watt’s detailed account of how Conrad became an English author in the 1890s records a process of assimilation and transformation that resembles the emergence of the European Nabokov in the 1930s; without apparently knowing of Lev Tolstoy, Watt in effect revives Eikhenbaum’s initial proposal for a cultural biography that would study aspirations along with rejections. Much like Nabokov as well, the younger Conrad provides a comparative overview of modernism. Thus Watt can explore the nature of impressionism and symbolism by showing Conrad’s affiliations with both tendencies, can emphasize his indebtedness to Flaubert as a forerunner of modern fiction, or can tellingly assess such intertextual signposts as the “misty halo” image in Heart of Darkness.35 Conrad, however, was an early modernist; he freshens and diversifies our historical sense by standing on the threshold of what was to come. Joyce, Kafka, Proust, and Eliot—to mention only the most famous names—are all in the future. The European Nabokov, because he could look back on their most ambitious works and because he came to English by way of Russia and France, offers a very different perspective on modernism. The next chapter will examine this perspective more closely, by considering several interlinked accounts that Nabokov has given of his authorship from the 1920s to the 1960s. As he sees it, he became a writer owing to his odd penchant for “colored hearing,” a form of synesthesia that in turn provided the point of departure for his intense concern with mnemonic images. His sense of the significance of such images will combine psychological speculation with a quasi-philosophical interest in time, will vacillate self-consciously between fictive and autobiographical modes of narrative, and will even subsume the very intertextual practices Nabokov uses to mark his place in modernist culture. Behind these various approaches and concerns stands an abrupt, almost paradoxical juxtaposition—the modernist urge to “make it new” recoiling into the past to become an art of personal memory.

CHAPTER

2

1

The Self-Defined Origins of an Artist of Memory

“HOW DID IT BEGIN with you?” This invitation to describe the sources of one’s creativity appears in Nabokov’s last Russian novel, The Gift, written in the mid-1930s. It is directed at the artist-hero Fyodor, during an imaginary dialogue with Koncheyev, another aspiring writer he admires but barely knows. The following discussion opens up a crucial problematic in Nabokov’s own career. For again and again, as Nabokov weighs his basic motives as an author, he senses both the strong desire to be modern and an irresistible urge to remember his past. As we shall see, The Gift is pivotal for Nabokov’s exploration of this problematic. On the one hand, it looks ahead to more elaborate explanations of his art of memory from the late 1940s to the 1960s, when Nabokov probes his past in various versions of his autobiography. On the other, it refers obliquely to a development that had already occurred in the 1920s and 1930s, when Nabokov linked his emerging art of memory to two key theorists and practitioners of aesthetic modernity, Nietzsche and Baudelaire. This chapter will consider in turn each of these efforts at authorial self-analysis, beginning with the dialogue in The Gift and its later repercussions.

FROM SYNESTHESIA TO THE TWO MASTER NARRATIVES

In The Gift Koncheyev and Fyodor meet in a burst of excited shoptalk. The two young writers reassess the Russian tradition, then show their enthusiasm for “the new Russian poetry” of Blok, Bely, and Briusov in the early twentieth century. Finally, as they turn to their own aims as innovative writers, Koncheyev asks Fyodor his question about origins. The next halfpage gives a compressed and rather cryptic account of the problematic status of Nabokov’s art of memory. For if Fyodor begins by insisting on his own artistic modernity, he then veers off to provide a very different definition of his authorship, in terms of personal memory and a lyrical, almost hallucinatory resurgence of images from the past.

Origins of an Artist of Memory

25

Fyodor’s response to Koncheyev begins with an apparent tautology, since he explains his creativity by simply referring to his first encounters with the alphabet. But it turns out that he has something more striking in mind—the peculiar synesthetic experience of “colored hearing,” which enriches the bare graphic marks by evoking their sounds and linking them with specific colors. And when Koncheyev tries to name a precedent for this quirky transaction between the senses, Fyodor is quick to parry the threat to his originality. His own colored alphabet is unique, featuring “nuances he [the unnamed rival] never dreamed of” (Dar 85). For example, the “a” in each of Fyodor’s four languages can vary from lacquered black to splintery gray, while an “m” evokes pink flannel, and the Russian “y” suggests the dull color of insulating material. The polemical point is clear: because Fyodor’s creativity is “new” in its very origins, he is indeed a worthy successor to the early twentieth-century poets.1 A quarter-century later, in the lightly revised English version of The Gift (completed in 1962), Nabokov would define his hero’s self-conscious modernity even more precisely. Identifying Fyodor’s unnamed predecessor as Rimbaud, he widens the cultural frame of reference, moving beyond Russian literature to Europe. And Rimbaud, as the sloganeer of absolute novelty in the arts, gives new luster to Fyodor’s claims of originality. Most notable of all, Nabokov now makes it clear that these claims depend upon a specific case of intertextual one-upmanship. Though Fyodor presents his examples of colored hearing as a spontaneous childhood discovery, they are actually a pointed challenge to a single poem of Rimbaud’s. Synesthesia in his sonnet “Vowels” is limited to the color associations of those five French letters; it thus fails to match the experience of Nabokov’s hero, which features many consonants as well as vowels, ranges over several languages, and even includes the Cyrillic along with the Roman alphabet. As Fyodor continues talking, however, he drifts away from the originality of his gift and begins, in an apparently arbitrary change of topic, to describe an intense childhood memory. Looking back to the long-ago world of prerevolutionary Russia, he recalls his mother’s jewels, “those luminous sapphires that I touched as a child, trembling and not understanding,” while outside he could glimpse “the ominous blaze of diamond monograms” from an imperial celebration. Clearly the tableau of mingled lights and letters in the second memory relates in some way to colored hearing, but the rapidity of Fyodor’s thought prevents any real explanation. Still, whatever the precise role of synesthesia as a point of departure for his creativity, the ability to recover such precise sense impressions from the past is significant in itself. It typifies what Nabokov has already shown to be a major element in Fyodor’s mature artistry, the deliberate reliance on mnemonic images. His first book, described near the beginning of The Gift, was a collection of short

26

Points of Departure

lyrics that meticulously recalled certain aspects of his early life. Following a double logic, that book had tried “to generalize reminiscences by selecting elements typical of any childhood,” but it also sought out specific details from Fyodor’s past that allowed “only his genuine quiddity to penetrate into his poems” (Dar 15/G 21).2 This effort to temper generalities with a more individualistic “genuine quiddity,” shown in such images as the thrill of sledding on ice or the springy feel of loading a toy gun, corresponds to the resurgence of his mother’s jewels and the imperial monograms from the past. Later in the novel, Fyodor’s career will develop in other directions. Two major projects aim above all to transform reality, and no longer show such extreme fidelity in recording images from his personal past. Thus the account of his father’s scientific expeditions to Central Asia in chapter 2 is imagined, while his biography of the radical critic Chernyshevsky in chapter 4 is actually a parodistic “antibiography.” But as we finish the novel this apparent progress toward greater freedom of invention is reversed, for we discover that Fyodor’s most recent and most ambitious work is none other than The Gift itself. Based on his life and literary interests as a struggling young writer, it is a sophisticated fictive autobiography that strains but does not break the linkage of his artistic gift with memory. To be sure, Fyodor can insist that his new work will continue to transform his actual experiences, that it will “so shuffle, twist, mix, rechew, and rebelch everything . . . that nothing remains of the autobiography but dust.” But this formula is less sweeping than it seems, for despite the indicated differences between The Gift and the life story of its supposed author, it still proposes to rely on isolated particulars from Fyodor’s past. And when Fyodor adds that these details would be “the kind of dust, of course, which makes the most orange of skies” (Dar 409/G 376), the pictorial energy of his language again conveys the point that emerged during his imagined dialogue with Koncheyev: the crucial importance for his art of vivid, mnemonic images. 1 1 1 Eventually, in a metafictional mirroring of his character’s doctrine, Nabokov would acknowledge that a number of Fyodor’s experiences were his own. Specific connections mentioned in his autobiography Speak, Memory include the novel’s overall picture of émigré literary life, the account in chapter 11 of how he wrote his first poem, and a weirdly portentous anecdote about a giant Faber pencil. Still more revealing, however, is the unacknowledged overlapping in the first part of chapter 2, called “Portrait of My Mother” when published as a separate sketch in The New Yorker. Here Nabokov discusses his own experience of synesthesia, giving many more examples of correlated sounds and colors, and even adding the shapes of the

Origins of an Artist of Memory

27

letters as a second visual element. But he also supplies information that fills in Fyodor’s elisions, so that it now becomes clear how synesthesia can relate to mnemonic images. Nabokov’s autobiography is obsessed with personal origins, with probing the abyss of first things evoked so vividly as chapter 1 opens: on viewing a home movie from before his birth, a young man feels a twinge of fear when his empty baby carriage appears on the screen. Later in the first chapter Nabokov describes his first definite memory. He was four years old, walking with his parents on his mother’s birthday; and in comparing his age with hers he experienced a “second baptism” into self-consciousness and the distinct awareness of time (SM 21). This point of departure is hardly absolute, however, since Nabokov knew how arbitrary textual beginnings could be, and once remarked that chapter 1 “was only a stylistic device meant to introduce my subject” (SO 141). In chapter 2, accordingly, he tries to return to an even earlier stage of self-awareness. Looking “as far back as I remember myself” (SM 33), Nabokov thinks he sees the first signs of a lifelong susceptibility to mild hallucinations. These hallucinations typically took the form of anonymous voices or waking visions. Both tendencies were already evident in two other early memories recorded in chapter 1, when he heard a singing in his ears while hiding behind a sofa (SM 23) and imagined strange, pale animals while lying beneath his bed sheets (SM 23–24). But only in chapter 2 does Nabokov attempt to weigh their significance. Insisting that they are merely a personal oddity with no deeper meaning, he rejects any comparison with the voices heard by Socrates or Joan of Arc. And he reveals his distaste for both Freud and the avant-garde in his studied refusal to draw any of the obvious analogies with psychoanalysis or surrealism. Still, the spontaneous aural and optical creativity of these hallucinations form the backdrop for Nabokov’s treatment of colored hearing, the next topic to which he turns. His synesthesia thus loses its status as a sharply defined origin to become only one stage in his development. After describing his responses to the alphabet, Nabokov then adds two illuminating details. On the issue of predecessors, he remarks that the “first author to discuss audition colorée was, as far as I know, an albino physician in 1812” (SM 35). Whether or not such a person actually existed, it is notable that Nabokov no longer needs to square off with Rimbaud in a contest for priority. Even more important, when the boy told his mother about his colored hearing, he learned that she too associated letters with colors. This synesthetic kinship then takes the son a step further in his development, for his mother made a concerted effort to encourage his visual responsiveness, both to paintings and to natural objects. It is here—as a first token of this maternal solicitude—that the memory of the jewels reappears. Nabokov’s new version of the scene is an elaborately crafted sentence that provides the

28

Points of Departure

concluding flourish to the first part of chapter 2: “I was very small then, and those flashing tiaras and chokers and rings seemed to me hardly inferior in mystery and enchantment to the illumination in the city during imperial fêtes, when, in the padded stillness of a frosty night, giant monograms, crowns, and other armorial designs, made of colored electric bulbs—sapphire, emerald, ruby—glowed with a kind of charmed constraint above snow-lined cornices on housefronts along residential streets” (SM 36). This autobiographical rewriting of Fyodor’s scene of origins reveals several important meanings in what had seemed a random memory in The Gift. For one thing, Nabokov now points out that the jewel scene occurred when he was very young; because it must have preceded his discovery of colored hearing at seven, it becomes the middle term in a sequence running from his mild hallucinations to the revelation of his synesthesia. As a result, its place within a narrative of artistic development is much clearer than in The Gift. Also, this description shifts attention away from the literal jewels by emphasizing the figurative sapphires, emeralds, and rubies of the imperial illumination. Beyond suggesting an emergent power of metaphor in the child, it reinforces the importance of the monograms as a formative encounter with the mysterious powers of the alphabet. Finally, the description itself takes the form of a verbal picture whose increasing fullness of visual detail mimics the focusing of memory. The passage thus allows the reader to experience what Nabokov’s penchant for mild hallucinations has ultimately become in the mature writer: an artistic ability to create vivid images of the past. Because his emerging literary gift includes an important visual element, “Portrait of My Mother,” the original title for this chapter, becomes more than an obvious metaphor. The mother’s display of her jewels encouraged a painterly love for color that, when diverted into portraiture with words, followed a suitably synesthetic course to create the work we read. Nabokov does, however, insist on one major difference between this selfpresentation of his origins and his mature art. Unlike the automatism and total insignificance of his hallucinations, his verbal pictures of his mother and of other people in Speak, Memory depend on deliberate effort. Hence the adult Nabokov interrupts chapter 2 to comment on “one of the bravest movements a human spirit can make,” which is “the bright mental image (as, for instance, the face of a beloved parent long dead) conjured up by a wing-stroke of the will” (SM 33). For this artist of memory, conscious effort and not some inspired flash of recollection is paramount as he struggles to create pictures of his past. Colored hearing in the child, with its relatively simple and spontaneous verbal-visual correspondences, leads ultimately to the mnemonic image as the crowning achievement of the mature writer who intentionally strives for hallucinatory recall.

Origins of an Artist of Memory

29

1 1 1 So far most of my comments on Speak, Memory would apply equally well to the first edition, published in 1951 under the title Conclusive Evidence. But Nabokov’s autobiography exists in two later versions, the 1954 revised Russian edition called Drugie Berega and the final 1967 edition known as Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited. This final edition at once sharpens and broadens the significance of the colored hearing and jewel passages. The new title, chosen shortly after the appearance of Conclusive Evidence, usefully limits the explanatory power of Fyodor’s moment of origins. Neither the artistic gift in general nor some final judgment on one’s life but a special concern with memory will be the ultimate goal of these early artistic experiences. Nabokov seems to recognize that he has explored only one side of his authorship, that Speak, Memory says relatively little about his life in America, which was to have been the subject of a second autobiography, or about the more fantastic and metaphysical kind of writing that emerged in Invitation to a Beheading. Still this side is hardly narrow or specialized, since Speak, Memory was thirty years in the making and intersects with many of Nabokov’s novels and stories. Along with this implied sharpening of focus, Nabokov makes some strategic revisions in the autobiography that greatly extend the meaning of the colored-hearing and jewel passages. By adding a series of interconnected images at key points in his later life, and highlighting these images in an index that the foreword recommends to discerning readers, he creates an implicit story within the story of Speak, Memory. The index is particularly important since, like the parodic index in his 1962 novel Pale Fire, it is more than a passive guide to the main work. Among the conventional listings of persons, places, and books, it includes four cross-referenced items that draw attention to the family of images associated with colored hearing. Thus, if we consult the entry on “Colored Hearing,” we are referred to the new, more elaborate version of Fyodor’s synesthetic experience. But at the same time we are told to “see also Stained Glass,” and this image of tinted transparency chimes with a mysterious poetic comment in Nabokov’s foreword: “Through the window of that index / climbs a rose” (SM 16). The entry on “Jewels” needs no direct cross-referencing with colored hearing, since the two motifs are joined so closely in the text; but the entry on stained glass does mention “Jewels” as well as a passage in chapter 5 and yet another entry, “Pavilion.” This heading, in turn, draws attention to passages in chapters 11 and 12, which, along with the episode in chapter 5, establish a distinct stained glass–pavilion complex, which takes us much further into Nabokov’s conception of himself as both an artist of memory and a modernist.

30

Points of Departure

For the moment, however, we need to continue with “Jewels,” which now raises several new issues in its own right. For along with referring to “Stained Glass,” it lists no fewer than six passages scattered through the autobiography from chapter 2 to chapter 13. The most obvious purpose of these passages is to evoke the historical circumstances for Nabokov’s emerging creativity. Telling how his mother saved some jewelry during the Russian revolution and then used it to raise money in exile, they follow the vicissitudes of one material object as a way of showing Nabokov’s experience of early twentieth-century upheaval. In this context the first jewel scene becomes a pointedly ironic vignette of the family’s prerevolutionary wealth, set against the backdrop of doomed imperial magnificence. Indeed, Nabokov’s irony here confirms the genuineness of his desire, voiced more openly elsewhere, to distance himself from his background as a Russian aristocrat. The autobiographer, as he writes, identifies with the artist and intellectual he would become. Even in The Gift, in the first elliptical version of this scene, the mother had refused to wear the jewels that marked the family’s status, and attention turned to the son’s aesthetic response to them. In chapter 2 of Speak, Memory, these emblems of the family’s former wealth are displaced by the figurative gems of the imperial celebration, which have themselves lost their original political symbolism. For already, in chapter 1, Nabokov had mentioned his father’s first defiance of the tsar and his three months in prison (SM 29), while here the imperial lights foreshadow the colored letters and mnemonic images of the son’s literary calling. Even earlier in Speak, Memory, however, jewels had already appeared in an important passage not mentioned in the index. In chapter 1, in two other experiences at the verge of distinct recollection, Nabokov describes several early intimations of an artistic vocation. One of his favorite playthings was a crystalline garnet-like egg, which fascinated him with its beauty and evidently helped ignite his aesthetic sensibility. Even more important, a chance sight on an overnight train trip stirred deeper, more actively creative impulses: “a handful of fabulous lights . . . beckoned to me from a distant hillside, and then slipped into a pocket of black velvet: diamonds that I later gave away to my characters to alleviate the burden of my wealth” (SM 24). These figurative diamonds offer, in advance, an entirely new perspective on the jewel theme. For a feeling of creative plenitude that demands and finally gains expression could not contrast more sharply with the historical experience of material well-being and dispossession that jewelry will later suggest in Speak, Memory. In their own right, meanwhile, the lights on the hill suggest a second, more specifically literary approach to issues of history and creativity. Because we encounter the lights as an intense, formative memory worth recording in an autobiography, the image could be called historical in the

Origins of an Artist of Memory

31

sense of being an event in Nabokov’s life. Yet Nabokov also insists that he felt compelled to fictionalize it; and when he “gave it away” to a character like Martin Edelweiss in his 1931 novel Glory, the description of the lights took on the status of an imagined experience.3 Thus, if colored hearing suggested a synthesis of word and picture in the mnemonic image, here the associated jewel motif raises an even more basic issue, the vacillation between strict fidelity and creative reworking in the very constitution of such images. Without being explicitly thematized, of course, the same ambivalence marks Nabokov’s treatment of his mother’s jewels, which are identified in Speak, Memory as a “real-life” experience of Nabokov’s after having been presented as a memory of the fictive hero of The Gift. In the very act of writing his autobiography, therefore, Nabokov has found a new, much broader pertinence for Fyodor’s project of an autobiographical novel where isolated memories from his personal past would waver between life and literature. The lights on the hill, even as they evoke a jewel-like tension between art and social circumstance, also shift the opposition between creativity and history to another plane, where it becomes a conflict between two modes of writing—the fictive and the autobiographical. With this conflict we come to the first of several key issues embedded in the stained glass– pavilion complex, whose association with two master narratives throughout Nabokov’s career will take us much further into his art of memory and will eventually shed further light on his relation to modernism.4 1 1 1 It is a warm summer day, in the last years of belle époque Europe. On the veranda of their family’s country house some fifty miles south of St. Petersburg, two Russian boys are listening to their Swiss governess as she reads The Count of Monte Cristo or Around the World in Eighty Days in her excellent French. During the story the boys like to gaze through an ornamental window, whose panes of tinted glass offer a marvelously varied array of vistas onto the garden. A decade then passes, and one of these boys, now a teenager, is about to spend an idyllic summer of love with a girl named Tamara. She is vacationing in the neighborhood, and likes to wander the grounds of his family’s estate; but their paths do not cross until they both enter a small, rundown pavilion to escape a sudden thunderstorm. Coincidentally, this pavilion is also the place where the boy wrote his first poem the previous summer, and it has rainbow-colored windows that curiously echo the ones on the veranda. Even without the prompting of Nabokov’s index, it would be clear that these three episodes belong together. The colored-glass “theme,” as Nabokov liked to call such structurally meaningful images, is sufficiently strik-

32

Points of Departure

ing in its own right to link the Swiss governess in chapter 5 with the first poem in chapter 11 and the summer of love in chapter 12. We shall soon see, moreover, that these narratives of Nabokov’s boyhood and youth are themselves connected with major initiatives in his career that, by continuing the interplay between fictive and autobiographical modes of writing, provide a final goal for the originary memories in chapters 1 and 2. But a similar interplay, between the corresponding psychological terms of imagination and memory, marks the stained glass–pavilion complex itself. Mobilizing the implications of tinted glass in these images, Nabokov shows how both sets of windows combine colorful transformation with clear transparency to create an ambiguous double perspective on their surroundings. In chapter 5, while the governess reads adventure stories, the colored glass on the veranda gives the young Nabokov a sense of imaginative richness; as a result, the occasional pane of normal glass, which merely shows a commonplace and familiar landscape (SM 106), seems uninteresting. Yet for the autobiographer as he writes, such uncompromising fidelity to the real world seems intensely desirable, and he remarks that “this is the pane through which in later years parched nostalgia longed to peer” (SM 107). A similar tension marks his presentation of the pavilion, which according to Nabokov still haunts his dreams. In this state of heightened imagination he is attracted by the “wine-red and bottle-green and dark-blue lozenges of stained glass,” yet admits that such a vision, with its overtones of intoxication, is “perhaps a little more perfect” than the real thing (SM 215). As a corrective he offers a second, revised description of the pavilion that parallels the veranda scene in seeking to undermine the colored-glass image. Desiring a more prosaic, water-like transparency, Nabokov points out that some of the colored windows were broken, with the result that “among the bloated blues and drunken reds, one could catch a glimpse of the river” (SM 216). Both windows, initially associated with such literary experiences as poetry, romantic love, and tales of adventure, come to suggest an autobiographer’s yearning to recapture the literal past. Despite the suggestiveness of these images as they appear in Speak, Memory, their significance for Nabokov’s self-conception as an author is much broader. For throughout his career he repeatedly returns to two of the situations eventually brought together by the colored-window motif. It would not be excessive, in fact, to claim that the Swiss governess and the summer of love are both master narratives that meant even more for Nabokov’s creativity than the invention of Lolita. If, as recent publication of The Enchanter makes clear (E xix–xx), he first told the story of an adult’s love for a nymphet some ten years before starting the novel that made him famous, he wrote and rewrote these two narratives over his entire seven decades as a writer. During this time they become the vehicles for several key initiatives in his developing authorship, foremost among which is the very problematic

Origins of an Artist of Memory

33

embedded in the colored windows, the oscillation of personal memories between the imaginative and the literal. The summer of love, though placed after the Swiss governess in Speak, Memory, enters Nabokov’s writing first and goes through a greater number of transformations. Though certainly an actual experience of the teenage Nabokov, for years it provided material for fictive treatment of several kinds. This process began during the affair itself, when his love for “Tamara” inspired an immature book of poetry that in 1916 would become his first publication.5 Then, after Nabokov’s efforts in the early 1920s to become a serious poet, the same experience would initiate his more productive career as a Russian novelist. In 1925, when he wrote his first novel Mary, he returns to the summer of love and presents it as a memory, in a long flashback that usurps the action taking place in the present. The hero Ganin is living as an exile in Berlin when he suddenly learns that Mary, the woman he loved in Russia nine years before, will soon be arriving from the Soviet Union. The shock of this discovery triggers intense memories, including the scene of meeting her in a pavilion with tinted windows (Ma 86–87/M 56), and Ganin devotes several days to a meticulous reconstruction of his earlier life. But eventually, in a calculated anticlimax that suggests a denial of the past, he prefers to leave Berlin rather than try to see Mary again. But Nabokov, unlike his hero, did not try to forget, and in the 1930s, in short stories like “Reunion” and “The Circle,” he used different character types, narrative viewpoints, and techniques to create variations on the remembered summer of love. By this point the coincidence of meeting “Tamara” in the same pavilion where he had written his first poem, whatever its basis in actual fact, may seem retrospectively fitting, as an omen of how very literary this love would become. Only in 1949 did Nabokov treat the summer of love autobiographically. In the New Yorker sketch “Tamara,” which later became chapter 12 of Speak, Memory, Mary is renamed but otherwise the account closely parallels the flashback in the novel. In fact, Nabokov deliberately exploits one point of contact between the two narratives, with the aim of overturning conventional notions about their presumably distinct literary modes. Quoting a letter from Tamara in the sketch, he explains that he is using a letter written by the heroine of Mary as a source of documentary information. But this act of self-citation does not mean that he is fictionalizing the memoir. Quite the reverse: he is revealing an explicit autobiographical element in his first novel. Delighted with the confusion of categories, Nabokov exclaims: “Happy is the novelist who manages to preserve an actual love letter that he received when he was young within a work of fiction” (SM 249). In 1970, when Mary was finally translated into English, he takes this disruptive approach even further. In the preface Nabokov compares the novel’s treatment of the summer of love with the Tamara chapter, notes the presence of

34

Points of Departure

invented situations in the version he had written in 1925, but paradoxically concludes with the point that “a headier extract of personal reality is contained in the romantization than in the autobiographer’s scrupulously faithful account” (M xii). The confusion of categories reaches a dizzying new pitch several years later, when Nabokov closes out his career with the mock autobiography Look at the Harlequins! (1974). In this work of fiction the Nabokovian alter ego, a Russian-American writer named Vadim, begins his career with a novel, but its title is not Mary but Tamara. Yet even as Nabokov was insisting on the autobiographical truth of Mary, he wrote another novel that recast the story of summer love on a country estate in extravagantly fictional terms. In the 1967 version of the autobiography, the Tamara chapter is revised to include a line from Chateaubriand (SM 250), and this line, evoking “la montagne et le grand chêne” of a similar idyllic love, would reappear in 1969 as a keynote in Ada, Nabokov’s next and longest novel. In this new setting the line sums up Ada’s and Van Veen’s teenage romance at Ardis Hall, on a flagrantly unrealistic planet called Antiterra.6 The story at the heart of Nabokov’s first novel, itself once the theme of adolescent poetry and then later, at midlife, the subject of a memoir, enters near the end of his career into an imaginative and at times deliberately fantastic novel. In a further blurring of boundaries, the autobiographical handling of the summer-love story can be presented as more fanciful than Mary yet is certainly more truthful than Ada, both of which are novels. If the pavilion is linked with a narrative that is originary for Nabokov as a published author and as a novelist and that also plays audaciously with the fiction-autobiography problematic, the stained-glass image points up a narrative that is scarcely less fruitful. For, although the story of the Swiss governess does not accompany Nabokov’s entire career, it is tied more closely to his European literary identity and to his first full commitment to autobiography. As mentioned in Chapter 1, in the mid-1930s Nabokov experienced two unusual bursts of creativity when he wrote very rapidly in a new style. One of these bursts lasted a month and resulted in Invitation to a Beheading; the other lasted for several days and led to “Mademoiselle O,” a memoir of his Swiss governess in French. This second breakthrough proved harder for Nabokov to accept, for at first he doubted the literary value of such a direct transcription of reality. But apparently he was reassured by its success at public readings;7 and, having weathered the two transitions from novelist to autobiographer and from Russian to French, he eventually published the memoir in the French literary magazine Mesures. As his first non-Russian work of real consequence, it paved the way for a second, longer-lasting cultural transition, his becoming an American writer after moving to the United States in 1940. And, as his first explicitly autobiographical work, it set the stage for the book-length autobiography he wrote between 1947 and 1951, in which a revised version of “Mademoiselle O” appears as chapter 5.

Origins of an Artist of Memory

35

Yet this breakthrough into the autobiographical does not exclude certain fictional elements. Like the lights on the hillside, the image of the Swiss governess had already appeared in one of Nabokov’s novels, in this case The Defense, written in 1929. The hero of this book grew up with a Swiss governess and, though otherwise very different from his author, did enjoy hearing her read French adventure stories on the veranda (Z 6/Def 16). With this scene in mind Nabokov opens his sketch of Mademoiselle O by accusing novelists of exploiting their memories, then defiantly justifies the work at hand with the assertion that he wants to reclaim his past for himself. Yet as he closes, he wonders whether he has succeeded in maintaining such a sharp distinction between novel and autobiography, and so he asks, “Have I really salvaged her from fiction?” (SM 116). The two-sided publishing history of “Mademoiselle O” suggests contradictory answers to this question, for along with incorporating it into his autobiography, Nabokov also brought it out as a story after moving to the United States, and to this day it still circulates in collections of his short fiction. Nabokov’s changing attitudes as he writes and rewrites the summer-love and Swiss-governess narratives suggest a deliberate indeterminacy in his conception of an art of memory. In this very phrase, in fact, the conjunction of “art” and “memory” aptly captures his vacillation between an artist’s imaginative freedom and a memorialist’s strict fidelity in recording the past. Analysis of this vacillation could be taken much further, particularly if we consider the five distinct versions of “Mademoiselle O” that appeared between 1936 and 1967. As we shall see later in Chapter 6, each of these versions enlarges on the counterclaims of art and memory by introducing new images, more subtle effects of style, and a more calculated manipulation of information. But it is already clear that together the stained-glass and pavilion images express Nabokov’s fascination with the uncertain boundaries between fiction and autobiography, a fascination that also helps shape two master narratives that effect decisive changes in his career. In making these gyrations on literalism versus fictionality in his art of memory, Nabokov has implicitly taken a position on a basic literary issue. As Paul de Man once noted in surveying theories of autobiography, the question of its truth or fictionality remains a perennial topic. Though de Man himself rejects this approach, his discussion does draw attention to a helpful and particularly rigorous formulation by Gérard Genette. For Genette, as he comments on problems of referentiality in Proust’s rhetoric, the Recherche becomes a fictive autobiography in which any sharp contrast between the two terms is replaced with “an endless discussion between a reading of the novel as fiction and a reading of the same novel as autobiography.”8 Not surprisingly, this oscillation between categories closely resembles Nabokov’s evolving practice in his successive treatments of the Swiss governess and the summer of love. At the time of “Mademoiselle O,” when Nabokov made his breakthrough into autobiographical writing, he was, by his own admission,

36

Points of Departure

carefully studying Proust’s novel.9 And, as we shall see in chapter 4, his earliest reception of Proust occurred in his 1932 novel Kamera Obskura (now known as Laughter in the Dark), in an episode he later suppressed where writing that seems fictive is discovered to be autobiographical. But whereas de Man seems troubled by this indeterminacy, comparing it to being trapped in a revolving door, and calling it “most uncomfortable” and “not likely to be sound,”10 Nabokov tolerates and even revels in it. As a student of butterflies and other insects, he was fascinated by mimicry, camouflage, and metamorphosis; and in his art of memory he emulates this view of nature by deliberately straddling the line between seemingly clear-cut categories.

NIETZSCHE, BAUDELAIRE, AND THE DISCOURSE OF MODERNITY

Starting with Fyodor’s discussion of modernism and memory in terms of synesthesia, we have explored Nabokov’s reformulations and elaborations of this moment in Speak, Memory; and these reworkings of The Gift lead in their turn to two master narratives running through his entire career. The master narratives spotlight Mary and “Mademoiselle O” as key transitions in Nabokov’s career where, after an initial poetic phase, he moves first into fiction and then adds autobiography as basic literary vehicles for his art of memory. On closer examination, however, we shall see that these two versions of the summer of love and the Swiss governess are even more significant. In intertextual framing passages that anticipate Fyodor’s dialogue with Koncheyev, each of them tries to connect vivid recollection with a self-conscious commitment to artistic modernity. And the framing passages take us further than The Gift into Nabokov’s authorship. Nabokov’s care in staging these allusions to previous authors shows how he integrates his strong intertextual tendency into his art of memory, while his polemical revisions of these writers make it clear how he reconciles his urge to write about the past with the role of a self-proclaimed innovator. At the same time, at a deeper level concerned with basic assumptions, the passages reveal Nabokov’s clear awareness of an important buried issue in modernity’s very conception of itself, while highlighting the critical power of his commitment to literary rather than theoretical modes of discourse. 1 1 1 When Fyodor challenged Rimbaud on the issue of colored hearing, he showed a characteristically Nabokovian sensitivity to the intertextual nature of literature. As a natural consequence, Nabokov assumes that writers

Origins of an Artist of Memory

37

wishing to validate their literary modernity should do so in their own writings, by grappling with canonical predecessors in the modern movement and surpassing them. In his figurative account of his first poem, when he portrays the upside-down circus animals in the hastily reassembled fence, he leaves a space for this polemical strategy. But if this first work merely showed an immature writer’s failure to digest past writing, Nabokov later develops ever-greater skill at manipulating cultural contexts. Elsewhere The Gift evokes his mature practice when Fyodor describes “any genuinely new trend” as a “knight’s move” (Dar 268/G 251); this arresting metaphor, taken from the Russian formalist Shklovsky, applies to his polemical revisions of previous writing. As the only chess piece that does not move in a straight line, the knight is a perfect emblem for an intertextual method that emphasizes transformation along with imitation. Nabokov will realize this metaphor in his next novel, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, whose title is itself polemical: as the fictitious author tries to tell the “real” story of Knight’s life, he gets his bearings by citing a previous biography and quarreling with its conclusions. Even as Nabokov furthers his art of memory in Mary and “Mademoiselle O,” accordingly, both works include key framing passages that confront and pointedly overturn specific initiatives by earlier writers. On each occasion, moreover, the intertextual references establish a cultural outlook that is European as well as modernist. Nabokov does not, however, attack the figures singled out in later interviews, such as Freud, Dostoevsky, and Thomas Mann, not to mention favorites like Flaubert, Proust, and Joyce. Instead, he relates his art of memory to two writers less immediately relevant to early twentieth-century fiction, but with a special foundational role in the modern movement. They are Nietzsche and Baudelaire, who were at once precursors of literary modernism and early theorists of the concept of modernity. But before considering their multiple relation to Nabokov’s own modernity, we need to weigh their special role within the intertextual process. In Mary there are actually two framing passages that link the summer of love to salient issues in previous writers. The first one, to be discussed in Chapter 3, is an epigraph from Pushkin that aligns Nabokov the émigré with the Russian literary tradition. A second, more unofficial cultural frame involves Nietzsche; it appears at a strategic point in the text, soon after the summer of love starts to flood back into Ganin’s mind. Initially surprised at the vividness of his memories, he then recalls some of the events preceding his first meeting with Mary. Soon he begins to reflect on the meaning of his experiences: Two weeks later he was already riding himself to exhaustion on his bicycle and playing Russian skittles in the evening. . . . After another week the

38

Points of Departure event he had been waiting for happened. “And where is it all now?” mused Ganin. “Where is the happiness, the sunshine, where are those thick skittles of wood which crashed and bounced so nicely, where is my bicycle with the low handlebars and big gear? It seems there’s a law which says that nothing ever vanishes, that matter is indestructible; therefore the chips from my skittles and the spokes of my bicycle still exist somewhere to this day. The pity of it is that I’ll never find them again—never. I once read about the ‘eternal return.’ But what if this complicated game of patience never comes out a second time? Let me see—there’s something I don’t grasp—yes, this: surely it won’t all die when I do?” (Ma 55/M 34)

Ganin has confronted the painful disparity between the sensation of presence engendered by his memories and the undeniable absence of that past world of happiness, sunshine, bicycle-riding, and skittles. As he feels the irreversibility of time, perhaps with unprecedented urgency, he thinks hopefully of a law that would guarantee that nothing, not even his bicycle, would really vanish. At this point the unofficial allusion surfaces, with the cultural positioning of Ganin’s thought itself taking the form of a memory: “I once read about the ‘eternal return.’” In “Mademoiselle O,” as the work of a more experienced writer who had learned from the Dostoevsky polemic in Despair (1933), this process of intertextual recognition is more elaborate. In a concluding incident that becomes steadily more detailed as the memoir develops from the 1930s to the 1960s, Nabokov describes his last visit with his governess. She had returned home to Switzerland when he was a teenager, and now he too lives in Western Europe as an exile. He happens to find himself in Lausanne, where she lives, and after visiting her he walks along the embankment beside Lake Geneva. In the darkness he sees a large swan awkwardly trying to hoist itself into a boat: At one spot a lone light dimly diluted the darkness and transformed the mist into a visible drizzle. . . . Below, a wide ripple, almost a wave, and something vaguely white attracted my eye. As I came quite close to the lapping water, I saw what it was—an aged swan, a large, uncouth, dodo-like creature, making ridiculous efforts to hoist himself into a moored boat. He could not do it. The heavy, impotent flapping of his wings, their slippery sound against the rocking and plashing boat, the gluey glistening of the dark swell where it caught the light—all seemed for a moment laden with that strange significance which sometimes in dreams is attached to a finger pressed to mute lips and then pointed at something the dreamer has no time to distinguish before waking with a start. (SM 116–17)

The initial sight makes an uncanny impression, but unlike Ganin, the Nabokov figure here is unable to classify his obscure sense of recognition. He

Origins of an Artist of Memory

39

soon forgets the incident; yet, somewhat later, when he hears of the governess’s death, he experiences a second, more successful process of remembering: “it was, oddly enough, that night, that compound image—shudder and swan and swell—which first came to my mind when a couple of years later I learned that Mademoiselle had died.” This second memory has appropriately culminated with an image, a notably complex one whose elements of shudder, swan, and swell fan out from an underlying alliterative unity to evoke the three main aspects of the original experience—the feeling of uncanniness, the particular bird, and the lake that it was vainly trying to escape. Since in neither case Nabokov identifies the allusion’s source, he relies on the reader’s own cultural memory to supplement the moments of recognition in the text. And since Mary was written for a Russian émigré audience while “Mademoiselle O” originally appeared before a French one, the cultural past available to these audiences differs significantly. Ganin’s reference to “eternal return” is, of course, relatively transparent. This is one name for the mysterious central doctrine of Nietzsche’s best-known book, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, where it emerges as the answer to existential dilemmas resulting from the irreversibility of time. Ganin’s initial response thus echoes Zarathustra’s. Elsewhere in Nietzsche’s work, moreover, eternal return was seen as a scientific hypothesis, similar to the “law” Ganin mentions, that grand cycles of repetition might occur in the material world.11 So detailed a reference may seem surprising, since Nietzsche rarely appears in Nabokov’s later work, except as a research topic for the ominous Budo von Falternfels (Pn 138). But it suits the initial audience of Mary, since Nietzschean ideas were widely current in Russian symbolist and early modernist circles when Nabokov was growing up;12 and, though Nietzsche’s books were banned in the Soviet Union, they were obviously still accessible to the émigré audience for which Nabokov was then writing. Much more mysterious is Nabokov’s obscure shock of recognition at seeing the awkward Swiss swan. An archetypal intention seems unlikely, given Nabokov’s strong distaste for myth, while possible parallels with a swandream in Kleist’s “Marquise von O” conflict with the explicitly French orientation of Nabokov’s memoir.13 A much more likely reference is Baudelaire’s important poem “Le Cygne,” but because research has focused on Nabokov’s Russian and American cultural worlds, this key allusion has not attracted the attention it deserves. Yet the echoes are extensive and compelling. In Baudelaire’s poem, as in the memoir, the seemingly fortuitous image of an awkward swan rises up in the poet’s “mémoire fertile” (l. 5). As this bird drags itself through the streets of Paris, it is said to feel an anguish like that of “les exilés” (l. 35), and Baudelaire dedicates the poem to Victor Hugo, at that time a political exile like Nabokov. The swan’s desolation is also likened to that of “quiconque a perdu ce qui ne se retrouve / Jamais, jamais” (l. 45); and this emphatic “never,” we notice, directly answers

40

Points of Departure

Ganin’s Nietzschean reflections about a possible return of the past. Baudelaire’s poem thus generates a cluster of themes involving memory, exile, and loss that strikingly parallels several main concerns of “Mademoiselle O” and also relates back to the summer-of-love episode in Mary. Even the governess’s name takes part in this system of allusions, since Nabokov humorously likens its graphic form to the lake near which she was born (MO 148); this lake of her birth, which will reappear in the swan scene at the end of the sketch, again recalls Baudelaire’s poem, with its powerful reference to the swan yearning for its “beau lac natal” (l. 22). These references to Nietzsche and Baudelaire introduce a significant doubling into the two master narratives. Even as Ganin and the Nabokov figure struggle to recall their personal pasts, they must also come to terms with cultural memories that reflect current interests of their most immediate audiences. In both cases, though Mary’s intertextuality is quite simple compared to that of “Mademoiselle O,” the cultural memories are partial and enigmatic. As a result, readers are themselves challenged to complete them, and their success or failure in doing so mimics the efforts of the protagonists to recapture their personal pasts. Nabokov’s overall effect cuts two ways. If, on the one hand, it enhances the deliberate literariness or “involution” of the narratives,14 on the other, it heightens reader involvement in the represented world of the characters. Both character and reader, from their positions within and outside the text, are engaged in the activity of remembering. Thus, whenever Nabokov refers to literary allusions as reminiscences, the literal force of the term registers his awareness of the possibility for such doubling. In a related gesture, the framing passages in Mary and “Mademoiselle O” explicitly show Ganin’s and the autobiographer’s reader-like efforts to recall prior writing at the same time that they pursue their personal memories. In effect, then, Nabokov has integrated his self-conscious intertextuality into his semiautobiographical narratives to produce a twotiered art of memory. On one level, in the foreground, where he focuses on Ganin’s summer of love or his own meeting with the governess, he emphasizes the resurgence of a personal past. But on a second level, at a middle distance occupied by allusions to Nietzsche’s slogan or Baudelaire’s swan, the resurgent past turns out to be cultural. In “Spring in Fialta,” a searching story written about the time of “Mademoiselle O,” Nabokov would eventually create an elegant conceit for this art of memory on two levels. Early in the English version of the story, when the narrator recalls meeting the heroine in front of a snow-covered doorway, the remembered scene briefly shifts in tenor to suggest a textual artifact: “Each of the two side pillars [of the door] is fluffily fringed with white, which rather spoils the lines of what might have been a perfect ex libris for the book of our two lives” (ND 17). In such a situation objects and

Origins of an Artist of Memory

41

events from the characters’ past can simultaneously enter into transactions with other texts. Here Nabokov echoes yet another aspect of Baudelaire’s “Le Cygne,” which undertakes a similar fusion of cultural with personal pasts. Each of the poem’s two parts begins with the poet in the act of remembering, and on both occasions the thought of Andromache’s fate after the fall of Troy mingles with memories of the escaped swan on the streets of old Paris. But congenial though this parallel in Baudelaire must have been, the memories are of classical rather than modern literature; and in any case Nabokov hardly needed him as a model. A decade earlier in Mary, when he grafted a Nietzschean slogan onto Ganin’s summer of love, he had already fused the cultural and the personal to anticipate, however hurriedly, his techniques in “Mademoiselle O.” As we shall see in Chapter 5, however, it was not here but in his intervening work, most notably the Dostoevsky polemic in Despair, that Nabokov systematically explored the role of intertextuality within a two-tiered art of memory. 1 1 1 Merely alluding to Nietzsche and Baudelaire in the early twentieth century would create a certain aura of modernism, but Nabokov makes his strongest claims as an innovator when he becomes polemical. Thus, even as he echoes Nietzsche and Baudelaire in fashioning the two master narratives, he manipulates the textual reminiscences to show how he goes beyond them. In Mary, as an early work, the process is again quite simple. Right after he remembers reading about eternal return, Ganin begins to doubt the theory, objecting, “But what if this complicated game of patience never comes out a second time?” He then realizes the fragility of his memories, which are weak reflections of the actual experience of summer love and will themselves vanish when he dies. He finally breaks off inconclusively. Ganin’s thoughts reveal his suspicion that memories can provide no real return, and his fear that they are in no sense eternal. In effect, though he does not actually say so, he has turned Nietzsche’s famous phrase upside down. In “Mademoiselle O” a much richer process of reworking gives a poignant new twist to Baudelaire’s themes of exile and loss, thereby vividly reinforcing his sense of what can never be found again. As a Swiss woman who went to Russia to make her living, Mademoiselle O had been an exile herself, as suggested by the only Russian word she knows, gde or “where” (SM 98). But when Nabokov sees her again after she has returned to Switzerland, he notices an odd reversal, in that now “she spoke as warmly of her life in Russia as if it were her own lost homeland” (SM 115). The supposed homecoming is really a second exile, and this double displacement undercuts Baudelaire’s less sharply ironic portrait of an exile, a black woman in foggy Paris who

42

Points of Departure

yearns for the “cocotiers absents de la superbe Afrique” (l. 43), the absent palms of superb Africa. Nabokov’s more intricate sense of loss doubtless corresponds to his situation when he first wrote the sketch in the mid-1930s. In the final version he speaks, in a rare comment on his personal experience of twentieth-century history, about how the things and beings he most loved (meaning the country house and his father) “had been turned to ashes or shot through the heart” (SM 117). “Mademoiselle O,” as his first major work not originally written and published in Russian, responds to this perception of irremediable loss; indeed, the work’s very linguistic medium, the French in which it was originally written, proclaims the impossibility of return that he sensed on visiting his former governess. And the concluding shudder-swan-swell image, even as it recalls Baudelaire, expresses this deepened awareness of exile. This awkward swan, unlike the one in “Le Cygne,” does find itself in a “beau lac natal”; yet as Nabokov watches this “large, uncouth, dodo-like creature” try to lift itself into the boat through “the heavy, impotent flapping of his wings,” its homegrown alienation exceeds even the suffering of Baudelaire’s bird when it lurches across a Paris street. Nabokov’s emphasis on the swan’s awkwardness probably echoes another Baudelairean bird as well, the albatross captured by sailors and made to flounder helplessly on deck.15 But because the sense of banishment associated with the albatross again depends upon a simple contrast, here with its former powers of flight, it too contributes to Nabokov’s polemic with a modernist precursor. Not only does his swan, unlike Baudelaire’s, want to escape its native lake; but, unlike the captured albatross, it is also shown as it struggles to climb on board a boat. If Baudelaire, in Hugo’s famous phrase, succeeded in giving French poetry a “nouveau frisson,” then Nabokov, by giving two sharp twists to his predecessor’s treatment of exile and loss, has executed a double knight’s move that seeks to create an even stronger sensation of novelty. Today’s readers might object that Nabokov’s intertextual manipulations have avoided the most urgent intellectual and literary issues raised by their targets. With contemporaries like Heidegger and Benjamin, for example, Nietzschean eternal recurrence and Baudelaire’s swan could have led to reflections on a new philosophy of time or the nature of modern allegory. But Nabokov seems content merely to evoke two great forerunners of early twentieth-century literary modernism, and then to show how he can surpass them. Alongside Ganin’s irrecoverable summer of love, eternal recurrence becomes a hollow slogan, nor can exile under Napoleon III compare with the dislocations imposed by Lenin or Hitler. In designing situations that show his own work to maximum advantage, Nabokov focuses so exclusively on the gesture of outdoing the moderns that he does not seem to consider

Origins of an Artist of Memory

43

the more substantive question of why Nietzsche and Baudelaire should have become so influential. Yet in one key respect Nabokov’s intertextual practice goes beyond this jockeying for advantage. As his practice shows, such demonstrations of one’s modernity do not take place in a void, but depend on a rich interplay of literary echo and transformation. Here each of the two levels in Nabokov’s art of memory, the personal and the intertextual, anticipate the oscillation between history and creativity that is embedded in the jewel motif in Speak, Memory. Just as Nabokov shifts between autobiographical “truth” and fictional invention in writing his personal life, so his intertextual art functions as history when it makes recognizable allusions to the past and as creativity when it attempts to transcend these predecessors by reinterpreting them. And since the intertextual polemics aim to give an aura of novelty to the master narratives, a similar oscillation between history and creativity marks the two levels of his art of memory when they are considered together. Already, therefore, at both of these points of departure for his career, Nabokov knowingly mobilizes a wide range of transactions between the will to modernity and fidelity to the past. From this perspective Fyodor’s glide from an asserted modernism to a fixation on remembered images enacts a basic dynamic already at work in Nabokov’s writing. But the linkage of these two aspirations no longer seems arbitrary. For if Fyodor assumed, with Rimbaud, that the modern meant absolute novelty, Nabokov’s intertextual practice in the master narratives implies a different attitude, that genuine innovation can be recognized only against the background of what already exists. Modernism and memory are thus reconciled in a dialectic of history and creativity where intensely specific intertextual references become the springboard for Nabokov’s new art. 1 1 1 Discussion of Nabokov, Nietzsche, and Baudelaire has focused so far on two strategically placed signposts. The framing passages in Mary and “Mademoiselle O” vividly illustrate his cultural self-consciousness, both in the growing richness of their allusive techniques and in their polemical appropriation of earlier modernists. As already indicated, intertextual encounters like these afford powerful insights into Nabokov’s cultural identity during poorly documented periods of his career. These insights are all the more valuable because later versions of the summer of love and the Swiss governess no longer assign the same importance to Nietzsche and Baudelaire. Speak, Memory mentions eternal recurrence, but in chapter 8 rather than chapter 12, and in a manner that eliminates the phrase’s Nietzschean resonance. And the swan, though treated more fully, loses its crowning place

44

Points of Departure

within an independent, originary memoir and merely rounds out an apparently secondary chapter in a larger composition.16 But more is at stake in the framing passages than an assertion of Nabokov’s novelty within modernist culture. Nietzsche and Baudelaire were not just literary precursors; they also made a key contribution to the general theory of modernity, as Habermas has indicated in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Though this cross-cultural study faults Baudelaire and Nietzsche alike for lacking rigor in argument, Habermas identifies them with an aesthetic consciousness of modernity that preceded and nourished the discourse of the philosophers.17 This foundational role in defining the very nature of the modern takes us beyond Nabokov’s textual skirmishes to the broader question of how much and in what way his own sense of modernity takes Baudelaire’s and Nietzsche’s thought as a point of departure. We shall see that Nabokov continues a special, submerged tendency in both Nietzsche’s and Baudelaire’s concepts of modernity. In this sense he does respond to something substantive in their work, though he is less interested in their explicit ideas about the modern itself than in their more indirect and tentative reaction to these ideas. For both Nietzsche and Baudelaire, an initial encounter with the modern as a jolting temporal break leads ultimately to a complex, many-layered sense of time that still gives some authority to particular moments before the break. Turning back to the past in a countermovement of sharpened awareness, they do not try to reconstruct it as a whole but only to retrieve brilliant splinters of specific, isolated experiences. Accounts of modernism, if they acknowledge this countermovement at all, usually consider its broader transpersonal aspects, such as primitivism or the revival of myth; thus Habermas can allow for “archaic” elements in the aesthetic sense of modernity.18 But for Nabokov, in ironic agreement for once with the Freud who criticized Jungian archetypes, a distaste for myth or the primeval rules out this option. As his repeated circling back to the Swiss governess and the summer of love suggests, personal memories of scattered, apparently minor, yet mysteriously significant events and images represent another, less archaistic expression of temporal recoil. In the same spirit, the implied readings of Nietzsche and Baudelaire that inform the framing passages in Mary and “Mademoiselle O” emphasize a personal rather than a mythic or primitivist resurgence of past moments into a modern present. To understand Nabokov’s position, we need to distinguish it from the poststructuralist view of Baudelaire and Nietzsche as theorists of modernity, found in Paul de Man’s “Literary History and Literary Modernity” and in Derrida’s “The Art of Mémoires.” For de Man the crucial documents are two essays written some fifteen years apart, the later Baudelaire’s “The Painter of Modern Life” (1859–1860) and the young Nietzsche’s “The Use and Abuse of History” (1873). Since Baudelaire writes about the popular illus-

Origins of an Artist of Memory

45

trator Constantin Guys and Nietzsche about the failures of nineteenth-century historicism, the essays initially seem to deal with art criticism and historiography, fields in which they still count as major texts. Hence, as de Man concedes, neither of them is an explicit manifesto of modernity, like the ones written in the early twentieth century. Still, as soon as both writers confront the distinctive time consciousness of a culture that wants to break sharply with the past, the more ambitious theme of modernity makes its appearance, under that name in Baudelaire and as “life” in Nietzsche.19 De Man is primarily concerned with the paradoxical status of modernity as a temporal concept, which results in double binds where Baudelaire and Nietzsche are both forced at once to reject and affirm the past. When de Man then extends this paradox to literature in general, modernity loses the specific historical meaning it has for someone like Habermas, who thinks of the secularized society and culture of the industrial West. At the same time, however, de Man notices subtle discrepancies in image or turn of phrase, where Nietzsche’s and Baudelaire’s initial celebration of modernity breaks down to create “perspectives of distance and difference within the apparent uniqueness of the moment.”20 Evident here is an early poststructuralist concern with différance, but eventually de Man’s basic aims will be given a sharper focus. For, fifteen years later, when Derrida returns to this passage in “The Art of Mémoires,” he argues that the most important of these receding perspectives is memory itself, calling it a topic “of original, continuing reflection” for de Man, yet “still generally hidden . . . from his readers.”21 From the poststructuralist standpoint, then, Baudelaire’s and Nietzsche’s theories of modernity are inherently unstable, and lead to a covert concern with memory. Yet, though their position broadly resembles Nabokov’s analysis of his authorship, there are important differences. As indicated in discussing the art-memory problematic, de Man would have questioned Nabokov’s cheerful acceptance of indeterminacy. Nor would poststructuralism accept his emphasis on personal memory, which suggests an unreflective belief in the individual subject; poststructuralism prefers to connect memory with a problematic of the personal name and a constitutive failure to achieve self-presence.22 This linguistic approach again contrasts with Nabokov, whose concern for mnemonic images tends to be ultimately pictorial or iconic. Particularly important, however, in a cultural context is de Man’s impatience with historical periodization, which leads him to adopt a concept of modernity so broad that all writing can in some sense be construed as modern. As a result Rimbaud’s modernity becomes practically interchangeable with Nietzsche’s and Baudelaire’s.23 But for Nabokov, who calls on all three figures to define his own modernity in the 1920s and 1930s, Rimbaud and the entire avant-garde belonged to a separate trend, which he distinguishes from modernism by using terms like “ultramodernism” and “supermodernism.”24

46

Points of Departure

This emphasis on different versions of modernity aligns Nabokov with another contemporary approach to interpreting the modern, the historicaltypological approach, which takes historical terms as guides for inquiry, not as textbook labels or blind habits of speech. Though not always explicitly interrelated, four recent books on modernity, modernism, and the avantgarde combine to support Nabokov’s intuitions, as a close observer of the early twentieth century, about the place of Baudelaire and Nietzsche. In Faces of Modernity, the most broadly typological of these books, Matei Calinescu stresses the historical groundedness of our critical vocabulary. Most literary terms, he points out, begin as colorful evaluative labels, then acquire two separate kinds of more specific meaning, the historical and the systematic.25 From this standpoint, de Man’s analysis of modernity is open to question because it suppresses valid historical meanings in favor of systematic ones.26 Calinescu, by contrast, develops a more nuanced conception of the term that allows for such subtypes or “faces” as modernism, the avant-garde, decadence, and the postmodern. Ricardo Quinones, though primarily concerned with developments from 1900 to 1940, applies this approach to Baudelaire’s and Nietzsche’s essays themselves. In Mapping Literary Modernism, Quinones sees “The Use and Abuse of History” and Baudelaire’s various discussions of modernity as crucial nineteenth-century instances of a complex time consciousness that is distinctively modernist. But Quinones writes before the poststructuralist emphasis on memory, and therefore tends to conceive of this temporal complexity in the more traditional terms of myth and primitivism.27 Books by Charles Russell and Marjorie Perloff, meanwhile, have fleshed out Calinescu’s idea of an avant-garde distinct from modernism.28 Russell’s broad overview of the twentieth-century avant-garde, which includes Italian and Russian futurism as well as dada and surrealism, reaffirms Rimbaud’s role as the main precursor. Perloff focuses on one “moment” of avant-garde consciousness, treating futurism as the most extreme instance of an urge for temporal rupture that, among other consequences, stresses active forgetfulness at the expense of memory. For the poststructuralists, then, Baudelaire’s and Nietzsche’s theories of modernity begin by envisioning a radical break with the past. But in the very process of writing, both theorists grope toward or are even forced into a position that must still acknowledge the past despite their sense of rupture. To this extent Nabokov broadly agrees with the poststructuralists. But when he goes on to identify this complex temporal attitude with a group of writers who may be called modernists, among whom Baudelaire and Nietzsche figure as precursors, he comes closer to the insights of the historical-typological critics. Like these critics as well, he distinguishes modernism from the avant-garde, modernism’s chief rival as an innovative force in early twentieth-century culture. For an artist of memory like Nabokov, no one better

Origins of an Artist of Memory

47

reveals his differences from the avant-garde than Marinetti, who in 1915 urged futurists “to exalt the aggressive, forgetful will of man, and to affirm once again the ridiculous nullity of nostalgic memory, of myopic history, and the dead past.”29 Baudelaire and Nietzsche, of course, came too early to address this contrast with modernism, but Nabokov wrote during the high tide of the avant-garde, and throughout his career he often does criticize futurists, surrealists, and expressionists, not to mention most of abstract painting. 1 1 1 Because Nabokov’s sense of modernity straddles poststructural and historical approaches to the concept, he resists easy categorization in the current critical landscape. But since neither approach to Nietzsche’s and Baudelaire’s ideas even existed at the time he wrote Mary and “Mademoiselle O,” the question of how Nabokov came to see their relevance needs further clarification. By considering the ways that “The Painter of Modern Life” and “The Use and Abuse of History” actually address issues of temporal rupture and the resurgence of a personal past, we will better grasp how Nabokov responded to the aesthetic discourse of modernity. Oblique and nontheoretical, in sharp contrast to the rigorous argumentation of the philosophers discussed by Habermas, his response nonetheless reveals the potential for fresh critical insight within his intertextual art. Baudelaire’s essay begins by differentiating modern art from the pursuit of “general beauty, which is expressed by the classical poets and artists.”30 Today’s anticlassical artists prefer “the transient, the fleeting, the contingent,” which are the defining features of modernity; only after they have expressed such novelty will such artists attempt to “distill the eternal” from the temporary. This definition appears in a section called “Modernity,” after which, in a section on “Mnemonic Art,” Baudelaire veers suddenly to consider memory. The haphazard glide in surface structure betrays an unargued belief in some connection between the two topics. And if the term “mnemonic” often seems limited, since it refers mainly to Constantin Guys’s practice of painting from memory, Baudelaire at times does use it to enlarge his conception of modernity. In scattered, tantalizing hints, Baudelaire keeps implying that a modern sense of temporal rupture leads finally to a peculiarly vivid kind of memory, an awareness of the past so intense that it can become a present in its own right. Early in the essay, in a passage that seems particularly close to Nabokov, he had drawn attention to the vivid perceptions of the convalescent, who, as someone who has been near death and “on the point of forgetting everything,” now “remembers and passionately wants to remember everything.”31 A similar analogy, more mythic in orientation, underlies his definition of “mnemonic art,” which consists in

48

Points of Departure

“the absorbed intenseness of a resurrecting and evocative memory, a memory that says to every object: ‘Lazarus, arise.”’32 For Baudelaire, Guys can become the typical artist of modernity because of his energetic memory, which revives specific visual impressions despite the disruptions imposed by time. At first glance, the young Nietzsche of “The Use and Abuse of History” seems more aggressively “futurist” than Baudelaire. In this polemic with nineteenth-century historicism he wants to affirm the immediate present, not defend a painter who worked from memory. So Nietzsche begins with the witty picture of an utterly forgetful herd of animals, then launches a fireworks display of metaphors that praise life without memory. But his basic argument changes once the essay turns to the topic of history; for if we read history as a metaphor for memory, we realize that Nietzsche is modifying his initial affirmation of forgetfulness. In particular, when he analyzes the types of history he calls the monumental or the antiquarian, he shows how vivid patches of the past can force their way into the present. Memory, Nietzsche implies, is a selective faculty driven by current needs; thus monumental history preserves only “great moments” suitable for imitation.33 Even the more purely retrospective memory suggested by antiquarian history, which seeks to instill reverence for the past, often tries to give “soul and inspiration to the fresh life of the present.”34 And Nietzsche ends by reaffirming a “superhistorical” viewpoint that glorifies art as an activity beyond the standards of literal historical truth.35 In effect he thereby suggests the existence of an art of memory that, like Nabokov’s, has no illusions about literally reproducing the past. Baudelaire’s and Nietzsche’s essays repeatedly suggest linkages between personal memory and the mood of modernity. Yet clearly neither of them makes a definitive statement: the thought is too exploratory in nature, and they come to their topic by a route that is too indirect. But in that case how could Nabokov appeal to Nietzsche and Baudelaire at these key points of departure for his own art of memory? As someone who was stubbornly antitheoretical in intellectual matters, he might not have noticed these elusive issues at the threshold of conceptual formulation, if he even bothered to read either essay at all. On reflection, however, doubts about Nabokov’s access to the discourse of modernity seem more apparent than real. Despite the prominence of Nietzsche’s and Baudelaire’s essays in recent discussion, neither of them relied on essays alone to explore the nature of modernity and the resurgence of memory. Thus even de Man can observe of Baudelaire that the results of his analysis would be “even more obvious if we had used poetic instead of discursive texts.”36 Much more directly than in the essays, accordingly, Nabokov’s problematic of temporal recoil appears in the “literary” passages evoked by his textual reminiscences. He did not need to be a theorist to make contact with this key issue in the discourse of modernity,

Origins of an Artist of Memory

49

but only a careful reader of the very poetry and prose he subjected to such ingenious reversals in his intertextual art. Thus the basic situation in Baudelaire’s poem juxtaposes Paris and the swan. But the cityscape viewed by the poet has undergone sweeping changes—this is the period of Haussmann’s grandiose urban renewal projects—and so it pointedly embodies the temporal disruptions of modernity. More than just an instance of artistic modernity, like Guys’s sketches, it is a telling historical example. The swan, meanwhile, is not actually present as the poet passes through the new Paris. It exists only in his mind, as a personal memory of something glimpsed years before, an isolated image that attempts to answer and contain the impact of change. Baudelaire’s line “Et mes chers souvenirs sont plus lourds que des rocs” (l. 32) captures this point exactly. In the poem these personal memories refer first of all to the swan, while the banal hyperbole “heavier than rocks” is freshened by its literal application to the building materials in Haussmann’s modernization program. The poem, which dates from 1859, or the very time that Baudelaire probably wrote “The Painter of Modern Life,” thus expresses the problematic of modernity and personal memory just as vividly as and certainly more explicitly than the essay. In much the same way, but with a sense of intellectual rather than sociohistorical rupture, Nietzsche’s doctrine of eternal return first appears in a scene suffused with the mood of modernity. At the beginning of part 3 of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, his character Zarathustra is speaking to some sailors who suggest the spirit of innovation itself, since they are addressed as “searchers, researchers, and whoever has embarked with cunning sails on unknown seas.”37 And what he has to say possesses so much originality that everyday speech cannot communicate it; it must be expressed circuitously, in images and riddles, as the title of this scene suggests. So Zarathustra expounds eternal return as the dream vision of a gateway with a path running through it, the gate being the present and the path leading forward to the future and back to the past.38 The possibility that the two paths meet somewhere else is the first vague statement of eternal recurrence, but Zarathustra drops this point almost immediately. For suddenly his emerging philosophy of the future breaks off to acknowledge the past. Zarathustra’s most vivid descriptions deal with the backward path; he then finds it harder and harder to put thoughts into words, and finally he is interrupted by a howling dog.39 The sound forces his mind to “race back,” or “zurücklaufen,” as Nietzsche puts it, and he recognizes the dog as one he had heard in earliest childhood. As previously in “The Use and Abuse of History,” so in this work from Nietzsche’s major period memory has reasserted itself against a strong drive toward the future. And like Baudelaire’s swan, Nietzschean eternal recurrence appears in a literary situation that highlights the resurgence of personal memory much more forcefully than the essay.

50

Points of Departure

For the young Nabokov, then, the aesthetic discourse of modernity and its submerged interest in memory did not speak in theoretical terms. Rather than appearing in essays as an explicit thesis or as an elided issue among other topics, it was expressed by specific poetic and narrative practices in “Le Cygne” and Zarathustra. These practices, in fact, came closer than the theories to Nabokov’s own emerging art of memory, with its focus on a distant personal past. In this context we see with special clarity what Nabokov meant when he said, in interviews in the 1960s, that as an artist he thought in images (SO 14). Such artistic thinking moves beyond the novelist’s creative process and crosses into criticism and theory, with the result that Nabokov’s close attention as an intertextualist to Baudelaire’s and Nietzsche’s literary devices can teach him more about modernity and memory than their theoretical discourse. The same preference for the concrete particulars of artistic practice explains his reluctance simply to expatiate on his own authorship; instead, he places extraordinary emphasis on interlocking motifs like colored glass, veranda and pavilion, or the governess and the summer of love. Theory is therefore a highly problematic endeavor for Nabokov. With an outlook so radically empirical and individualizing that he dismisses abstract thought of all kinds, he makes no real distinctions along a spectrum from ideologies, speculative systems, and dogmas to methodologies, hypotheses, and generalizations. As a result the relation of theory and practice in his work becomes quite intricate, as just shown by his response to Baudelaire and Nietzsche on modernity or, earlier, to the theory of autobiography. And in Chapter 5 we shall see that the same intricacy recurs with Bakhtinian dialogism as well. These varied approaches become relevant to Nabokov because of specific textual conjunctures: in each case, the theories and his writing both draw on the same literary works, on Proust’s Recherche with autobiography, on Dostoevsky’s The Double with dialogism, and on issues of modernity and memory in Baudelaire’s “Le Cygne” or Nietzsche’s Zarathustra. This situation means that Nabokov encountered many of the theoretical initiatives best geared to interpreting his work as images or other equally specific literary practices. He did not need to formulate them in more general terms, and was so stubbornly antitheoretical that he would have resisted doing so. To deal with such a sophisticated avoidance of abstract thought, which goes back to data that have inspired major theories yet short-circuits the move to conceptual formulation, critics cannot simply apply preexisting ideas to the writing. Authorial practice as elaborate as Nabokov’s is a mode of discourse in its own right. Though it certainly has important theoretical implications, its literary specificity must be respected if those implications are to be rightly understood.

Origins of an Artist of Memory

51

It should be clear by now that Nabokov’s reworkings of Nietzsche and Baudelaire are essentially moments of cultural self-definition, not of some decisive, originary influence. Despite appearing at key turning points in his career, they acknowledge nothing more than his awareness of an essential affinity between his creative project and the insights of two nineteenthcentury Europeans who, more than anyone else, first noticed and defined the spirit of modernity. As part of that effort they glimpsed an intertwining of temporal rupture and a resurgent past that in them was still hesitant and quite vague, but that in Nabokov becomes a fully elaborated, sharply focused art of memory that sees itself as distinctively modern. This problematic of memory and modernity, in turn, generates further oppositions to which Nabokov will return during a lifelong meditation on his authorship— beginning with that intertextual dialectic of echo and transformation that invokes Nietzsche and Baudelaire while decisively surpassing them, moving on to the oscillation between autobiographical fact and novelistic fiction and the contrast between the mnemonic and the invented image, and ending with the final jewel motif that, in balancing historical circumstance with creativity, subsumes everything that came before. From our present perspective, however, this preoccupation with memory and modernity no longer looks like a contradiction in terms. Rejecting both the avant-garde need to posit absolute novelty and its skepticism about memory, Nabokov insists that modernity can recognize its own newness only with some knowledge, however fragmentary, of a past. For him, accordingly, the word “modern” retains a crucial comparative element: not total rupture, but that sense of a break which includes a recognition of one’s distance from a remembered past. Conceived in this more relative sense, modernism readily accommodates an art of memory like Nabokov’s that, at once personal and intertextual, keeps glancing backward as it innovates.

CHAPTER

3

1

The Rejection of Anticipatory Memory FROM MARY TO THE DEFENSE AND GLORY (1925–1930)

IN THE GIFT Nabokov retrospectively located an origin for his mnemonic art. Modernity and memory come together in a primal experience of synesthesia, and eventually he builds on this moment to create the cluster of images that he associates with his very identity as a writer. But this “colored glass” account of his beginnings, though it refers back to Nabokov’s actual beginnings as a novelist and an autobiographer, is still quite schematic. Even the key initiatory allusions to Nietzsche and Baudelaire, which accompany these fresh departures in his writing and suggest the basic assumptions that guided Nabokov’s reception of European modernism, are part of a much richer cultural pattern. To reconstruct this pattern will require a more detailed biographical approach that, acknowledging the value of Nabokov’s own unconventional account of his origins, can nonetheless look beyond it. The specific projects undertaken in Mary and “Mademoiselle O” need to be defined more clearly, both in their own terms and in relation to Nabokov’s other works dealing with memory. Not just Nabokov’s links with the underlying presuppositions of modernity should be explored, but also his involvement with the various currents of literary modernism active in the early twentieth century. And rather than Europe in general, we have to weigh the complex cross-cultural transactions that occur when a Russian émigré encounters a shifting array of German, French, and Anglo-American motifs. This fuller, more immediate approach to Nabokov’s cultural biography takes us back to Mary again, which now becomes a point of departure in the more specific context of a young writer’s evolving career. This novel, taken with The Defense, written in 1929 and his first major success, and with his neglected fourth novel Glory (1930), marks Nabokov’s apprenticeship as a European modernist and an artist of memory. In it he completes a first, preliminary stage in his career before turning to that French version of modernism, dominated by Proust and hostile to the avant-garde, that underlies his literary interests in the 1920s and 1930s as sketched in the Toffler interview. All three novels, in fact, deal with personal memories in ways that serve as preludes for the more mature work. As already mentioned, Mary includes an early version of the Tamara chapter in Speak, Memory, while a preliminary sketch of Mademoiselle O appeared in The Defense. And, as

The Rejection of Anticipatory Memory

53

every reader notices and Jane Greyson has documented, both Mary and Glory rehearse many other personal memories that will receive fuller development later on.1 Even more significant is Nabokov’s basic technique in two of the novels, which subverts the linear, developmental logic of the ostensible plots to center attention on the chronologically disruptive activity of remembering. Thus in Mary the hero Ganin’s intense memories of the woman he loved in Russia supplant the promised reunion with her, which, anticlimactically, never occurs. In The Defense the hero Luzhin’s mad sense that key events from the past are being repeated in the guise of a malevolent chess game overwhelms his wife’s efforts to create a hopeful new existence for him, and leads eventually to his suicide. Despite suggestive anticipations of later work, however, these novels do not yet convey the characteristic cultural outlook of the European Nabokov. Though later he would identify with Proust more than any other modernist, during this early period his main allegiances were quite different. The reason is very simple: though Nabokov had certainly read Proust by the late 1920s,2 he did not yet know his work in any real depth, and did not view him as a model for his own work. Years later, in a 1973 interview with J. E. Rivers, he insisted that he only studied À la recherche du temps perdu in 1935–1936, when he was already fully formed as an artist.3 The words “fully formed” are quite misleading, as has been suggested in Chapter 2 in discussing the new initiatives associated with “Mademoiselle O.” But the notion that the young Nabokov developed independently of Proust is valid if we limit its application to this period of apprenticeship. For in the early novels up to 1930 Proust’s presence is indeed only incidental. Mary, it will become clear, avoids any direct confrontation with the Recherche; and even Glory, the last of these novels, shows only a dawning interest as it briefly portrays the young émigré novelist Iogolevich who hopes to learn from both Proust and Joyce (Pod 164/Gl 142). Pre-Proustian though these early novels might be, the contrast between two Proustian writer-heroes from much later in Nabokov’s career highlights the distinction between them and his mature art of memory. In John Shade’s poem “Pale Fire,” from the 1962 novel of the same name, Nabokov interweaves haunting memories of the past with speculations about the hereafter, thereby creating an intricate temporal pattern that will dissolve abruptly at the very end of the poem. Shade is murdered just as he declares his lyrical faith in the future, and so the past asserts a threefold primacy: as plot when his murderer Jack Grey returns for vengeance on Shade’s lookalike Judge Goldsworth (PF 299), as omen with the recurrence of the wheelbarrow motif that preceded an earlier encounter with death (PF 38), and as poetic pattern if his poem’s missing last line repeats the first one with its image of the “waxwing slain” (PF 292). Earlier in the poem, when Shade welcomed paradise as a place where he could talk with Socrates and Proust

54

Points of Departure

(PF 41), his graceful tribute had resulted in a similar though much sunnier reversal of temporal perspective. For Shade’s two favorite writers are both artist-theorists of memory, and this vision of a possible afterlife has uncannily turned into a triumph of the retrospective. The witty conceit, which confirms Shade’s previous characterization of himself as a “preterist” devoted to the past, underlines the distinction in Nabokov’s view between the complex time consciousness of modernism and the more simplistic forwardlooking attitude of the avant-garde, particularly futurism. In The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, written a quarter-century before Pale Fire, Nabokov created an imaginary writer who in this respect contrasts sharply with Shade. Knight’s later career includes fleeting analogies with Proust: he affects a similarly involved prose style (SK 54), owns a copy of Le Temps retrouvé (SK 41), and is said to imitate some of Proust’s social mannerisms (SK 116, 183). But he starts out as the opposite of a preterist, for as a young man in 1917 he spent several months on an improbable junket with the poet Alexis Pan, an invented Russian futurist. The narrator, Knight’s half-brother and biographer, is so hostile to futurism that this episode remains “a complete mystery” to him (SK 30). But the contrast between Shade and young Knight offers a telling insight into Nabokov’s career. Their distinct temporal perspectives, one involving a mature inspiration oriented toward Proust and stressing a complex sense of the past, the other linked to a youthful pre-Proustian phase with vague tendencies toward the future, suggest the possibility of a similar “futurism” in Nabokov’s early novels. As we shall see, this enigmatic futurism does indeed exist, and is at first affirmed and then systematically denied; its vehicle is a paradoxical attitude toward time that might be called anticipatory memory. 1 1 1 Mary presents anticipatory memory as an experience of the main character Ganin, a young Russian émigré living in Berlin in the 1920s. Like Nabokov himself at that time, he manages to survive on odd jobs; but rather than being a writer, he thinks of himself as an adventurer. He is essentially a romantic rebel, capable of real sensitivity but often egotistical and even somewhat brutal. Shortly after the novel begins, Ganin learns that Mary, his first love nine years ago in Russia, will be coming to Berlin. Strangely moved by the possibility of seeing her again, Ganin enters what Nabokov calls “a clairvoyant trance” (Ma 44/M 27) and spends the next days recalling a former life he had totally forgotten. When he reflects upon this psychological drama, he realizes that it mingles past and future in a peculiar temporal structure that Ganin leaves unnamed but that can be called anticipatory memory.

The Rejection of Anticipatory Memory

55

Ganin’s reflections surface in the course of some scenes that show the emotional power of pictorial images from the past. At the time he learns of Mary’s arrival, Ganin’s normal attitude of brisk resolve has yielded to nervous indecision. He cannot end a casual affair with a woman he no longer loves, and he has recently had a disturbing experience with her at the movies. While watching a second-rate film, Ganin suddenly recognized himself among the extras, and felt “a deep shudder of shame” at seeing this shadowy travesty from his past (Ma 36/M 21). In his disgust he needs to reaffirm himself, and here a second image is crucial, the one through which he rediscovers Mary. Later that evening Alfyorov, a neighbor in Ganin’s rooming house, shows him a snapshot of her, informs him that she is his wife, and states that she will soon be arriving from the Soviet Union. This new confrontation with his past transforms Ganin. His self-esteem restored, he wanders the midnight streets possessed by “a glorious, dazzling recollection of past happiness—a woman’s face resurgent after many years of humdrum oblivion” (Ma 45/M 27). Emotionally, the photograph of Mary has replaced shame and indecision with an assurance of past happiness, while in a corresponding substitution of images, it offsets the tawdry film with a keepsake that triggers a complex process of mental representation. This delight in Mary’s resurgent face is the situation highlighted by Nabokov’s official epigraph for the novel—“Having recalled intrigues of former years, / having recalled a former love”—a passage from Eugene Onegin that evokes an uncharacteristic period of carefree memory in Pushkin’s hero.4 At first startled by the strength of these memories, Ganin isolates three factors that help explain their hallucinatory power and that, taken together, make up the paradox of anticipatory memory. The essential groundwork comes from a mood of anticipation in the period just before his first encounter with Mary. As a sixteen-year-old, Ganin had fallen ill one summer on the family estate in Russia; as he lay in bed recuperating, he faced an open window that gave him the odd sensation of lying on air, or of feeling his bed take off into the open sky (Ma 51/M 31). Both this magic-carpet mood of freedom from normal restraints and the state of convalescence itself suggest a special orientation toward futurity, and Ganin remembers the delicious sensation of looking forward to “how one would soon be getting up” (Ma 53/M 32). It was then that Mary’s image formed in his mind, not as a specific person, to be sure, but just as the dream of meeting some girl. From one perspective the experience is what the text calls “simply a boyish premonition,” a banal symptom of adolescent sexuality; yet Ganin also senses an extraordinary sharpening of his perceptions. He has been able, after all, to recall all the specific details of his bedroom and of those summer days, whose continued presence in his mind he ascribes to “that happiness, the image of that girl he was to meet in real life a month later”

56

Points of Departure

(Ma 53/M 32). Were it not for these anticipatory dreams, Ganin decides, his memories of the past would not be so overwhelming. Later on, Ganin concludes that since the mood of anticipation was initially so important, his picture of that summer must derive as much from imagination as from literal truth. He can remember Mary so vividly only because “their imaginary meeting and the meeting which took place in reality had blended and merged imperceptibly into each other” (Ma 70/M 44). Some such close relation between memory and imagination is, of course, a literary commonplace; but we should notice that Ganin’s insight foreshadows a guiding assumption behind Nabokov’s very idea of an art of memory, that artifice is an unavoidable part of remembering and counts as much as fact. Even more striking, however, is the attribution of this necessary fictive element to anticipation rather than retrospection. Ganin does not make the usual point, that the remembering mind’s preoccupations in the present select and shape what is recalled, and so introduce deviations into an ideally precise transcription of the past. Rather, he finds the telling subjective factor in the earlier self’s impatience to confront its future, during the time before the key memory. Finally, Ganin insists that the best memories depend on a deliberate mental technique and not on chance inspiration. To move from the initial jolt of Mary’s snapshot to a more complex mental image of her as he knew her requires that Ganin retrace in memory the peculiar structure of the initial experience. The original period of anticipation thus becomes a mental strategy of deliberate delay, which lingers over early and seemingly peripheral details so as to intensify the climactic moment of recapturing Mary’s image. Ganin explains his method in the following terms: “her image, her presence, the shadow of her memory demanded that in the end he must resurrect her too—and he intentionally thrust away her image, as he wanted to approach it gradually, step by step, just as he had done nine years before” (Ma 54/M 33). By emphasizing the dependence of his memories on a special technique, Ganin has further highlighted the artifice in his art of memory. Yet, paradoxically, this return to the past ultimately depends on an attitude toward time that seems to conflict with memory, the forward look of anticipation. In the following days Ganin immerses himself so thoroughly in the past that his initial concern with the future recedes from view. In Mary’s surprising open ending, however, the motif of anticipation returns with new force when Ganin suddenly abandons the past and leaves Berlin without seeing Mary again. The pretext for this decision is an apparently trivial event, the sight of three roofers at work on a new building, which nonetheless frees Ganin from his memories as he senses that “the yellow sheen of fresh timber was more alive than the most lifelike dream of the past” (Ma 168/M 114). Earlier in the novel Ganin had sometimes felt the power of the present,

The Rejection of Anticipatory Memory

57

particularly when he got involved with the problems of his fellow lodgers, and realized that daily life “was all much more mysterious and vague” than his memories (Ma 62/M 96). But now his intuitions range beyond the pure present to include a telling element of futurity. Thus it is significant that the roof is incomplete, part of a building still under construction. And through the unfinished roof Ganin can see “the ethereal sky,” the same image of uncharted possibilities that accompanied his first premonitions of Mary. The openness of roof and sky then modulates into the novel’s anticlimactic open ending, which shows Ganin on the way to France, which he plans to enter by crossing the border without a visa. This dream of adventure is appropriately romantic, but at the same time Ganin has isolated and reaffirmed the original mood of anticipation that created his vivid memories of Mary. As an abrupt juxtaposition of future and past that defies conventional notions of smooth chronological progression, anticipatory memory must be distinguished from its counterpart, the imaginary practice of “future retrospection” that appears episodically in Nabokov. This term is coined during another exchange between Fyodor and Koncheyev, when they think of some devoted reader in the distant future looking back at their meeting. From such a perspective, their immediate experience will be transformed from a present to a remote past that must be investigated by historians: “Try to experience that strange, future retrospective thrill,” pleads Fyodor, emphasizing a strangeness that acknowledges the disruption of normal time (Dar 383/G 354). Similarly, in “The Admiralty Spire,” two young lovers quite like Mary and Ganin try to create an otherwise nonexistent past for themselves by viewing their present happiness as if it had happened long ago (TD 131). The fullest treatment of future retrospection occurs in Speak, Memory, when Nabokov recalls a parodistic biographical game he once played. Each of his simplest daily actions, when remembered in the distant future by an imagined chronicler, would lose its place in “the very spacious present” and turn into “a kind of paralyzed past” (SM 248). As these formulations suggest, future retrospection is based upon an exaggerated movement forward in time that gives the present the false appearance of being a closed past. It is thus the reverse of anticipatory memory, whose rearrangements of normal time strive to preserve the open-endedness of an as-yet-unknown future even though it is looking back at a past whose outcome is no longer in doubt.5 1 1 1 As Ganin relives his past, certain moments of heightened intertextual significance give further insight into the nature of anticipatory memory. At the same time, these moments reveal the novel’s uneven and half-

58

Points of Departure

hearted attempts to identify with contemporary European modernism. Unexpected blind spots alternate with oddly intense moments of receptivity to produce an overall impression of ambiguous vacillation between Russian and European frames of reference. And, though Nabokov makes no explicit distinction between modernism and the avant-garde, he does show a growing awareness of difficulties with the avant-garde position. In the process of writing, it seems fair to conclude, Nabokov is trying out various possible literary identities. He feels the need to position himself within an international web of cultural relations that rather vaguely affirms modernity while sometimes turning toward Europe, sometimes gesturing back to Russia, and sometimes hovering in between. A particularly telling example of ambiguous self-placement would be Nabokov’s handling of the mnemonic image itself. The emergence of Ganin’s memories has repeatedly depended on images, whether in his chance views of himself in the film and of Mary in the snapshot or in his deliberate “anticipatory” technique for evoking mental pictures from the past. Yet despite an insistence on the culturally loaded Russian word obraz, which can mean “icon” as well as “image,” Nabokov does not explore its implications. There are icons in Ganin’s sickroom, briefly described as “swarthy-faced images behind glass” (Ma 51/M 31), but this phrase is relatively inconspicuous. It underlines the precise detail with which Ganin can remember his past, but does not amount to a self-conscious acknowledgment of his place within a Russian tradition of image-making. Similarly, despite the contemporary importance of so-called imagism for new writing throughout the West, Nabokov does not elaborate on Ganin’s affinities with this aspect of literary modernism.6 The image as such remains culturally indefinite in Mary. Nabokov is, however, much more explicit about a related issue, the strong emotional impact of these memory-images. His point of reference here is emphatically Russian; it is the Pushkin epigraph, whose obvious relevance to Ganin’s situation has already been mentioned, but whose significance within Eugene Onegin adds other important nuances. At this point in the poem Pushkin has introduced himself into the action, and in a witty confusion of the factual and the fictive that itself suggests the uncertain status of Nabokov’s later art of memory, he digresses on his supposed friendship with the hero Onegin. They met in Petersburg, he says, and enjoyed each other’s company because of a shared mood of disillusionment; in this spirit Onegin would normally view memory as an occasion for bitter remorse, or as Pushkin puts it, “him does the snake of memories, / him does repentance bite.” But when their conversation took another turn, they could talk about the exceptional moments of happiness described in the epigraph. At such times memories of love would revive “the beginning of young life” and make the two friends “carefree again.” It is precisely this power of memory to restore feelings of happiness known in the past that Ganin experiences during his emotional transformation in Mary.

The Rejection of Anticipatory Memory

59

The Onegin epigraph functions as a publicly announced point of departure for Nabokov’s career as a novelist and as an artist of memory. By linking himself with a classic sometimes viewed as the very fountainhead of Russian literature, but by remaining silent about the work’s many European elements he would later analyze in such detail, Nabokov has proclaimed his identity as an émigré author writing for émigrés. And, by citing a passage on memory, Nabokov enhances his particular choice of subject by summoning up Pushkin’s own major achievements in that area.7 At the same time, however, he asserts his artistic independence by responding selectively to Pushkin, for by choosing a passage that evokes Onegin’s positive experience of memory, he emphasizes an atypical element in that young man’s character. Indeed, Nabokov probably considered Onegin’s usual mood of bitter disillusionment to be an easy cliché. Many years later, in his rueful account of his first poem, which as seen in Chapter 2 was written during the TamaraMary experience itself, he singled out the Oneginesque phrase “memory’s sting” as an example of its triteness of expression (SM 225). For Nabokov at midcentury, as for Nabokov the young émigré novelist, the emotional impact of memory was primarily affirmative. On occasion, however, Ganin senses the precariousness of his encounter with the past. To the extent that he recognizes the irreversibility of time at such moments, he must face the paradox of yoking memory with anticipation. Indeed, since Ganin’s efforts to remember vainly seek to oppose the very passage of time that he welcomed in his elated mood of anticipation, the result is an existential dilemma. This dilemma first began to surface when Ganin saw his former self in the film. His feeling of shame before this image, he noticed, coexisted with a heightened awareness of time’s constant movement into the past, “a sense of the fleeting evanescence of human life” (Ma 37/M 22). Now, despite his joy in remembering Mary, these feelings persist and lead him to wonder where his past with her has gone. As a result, Ganin begins a kind of incipient research into lost time; but, as seen in Chapter 2, his only answer to this Proustian quest turns out to be Nietzschean. Desperately hoping that his past still exists somewhere, he briefly considers the doctrine of eternal recurrence. At this point of uncertainty and vulnerability, Nabokov’s cultural horizons have notably widened. A certain European modernism briefly challenges Pushkin’s overt authority as an artist of memory, but—most unusually for Nabokov—it is German and speculative rather than French and literary. Nietzsche’s famous hypothesis, we notice, could resolve the paradox of anticipatory memory, for endless circularity does reconcile a fervent desire for the future with the urge to bring back the past in all its plenitude. But Ganin, far from pursuing these implications, immediately doubts whether time could curl back on itself. As we saw earlier, he implicitly reverses both terms in Nietzsche’s well-known phrase and, contemplating the transience of the world he has recalled so vividly, he anxiously inquires, “surely it won’t all die when I do?” (Ma 55/M

60

Points of Departure

34). And yet, though he is unable to affirm either eternity or the possibility of return, Ganin will continue until the end of the novel to relive his love for Mary while giving up his emphasis on anticipation. In the open ending, however, he finally swings back from memory to anticipation. Though the two images that trigger this switch are futureoriented in themselves, the unfinished building and the open sky both refer to the future in a more culturally specific sense as well. In a 1915 manifesto the Italian futurist Marinetti had declared that two symbols for the futurist movement were the “frame of a house in construction” and its “aerial quarterdecks from which the eye embraces a vaster horizon.”8 It is unclear, however, whether Nabokov’s carefully orchestrated imagery is meant as a deliberate act of self-alignment with a European cultural figure. Several years later in The Defense, the chess master Luzhin meets his match when he plays against the Italian Turati, whose “glittering extremism” suggests futurism in its disregard for tradition and its obsession with the very latest style (Z 82–83/Def 96–97).9 Yet Sebastian Knight’s youthful escapade had been with a Russian futurist. And Mary itself has specified Russian futurism in a vivid scene that undermines Ganin’s concluding decision to reject his past. In chapter 11, one of Ganin’s fellow lodgers in whose problems he gets involved, the elderly poet Podtyagin, forgets his passport in a bus. He does so because he is distracted by his efforts to describe a strange dream about Russia, where “the houses had sloping angles as in a futurist painting” (Ma 123/M 81). Later, when he returns home crushed by the loss, he still has futurism on his mind, for his disordered babble includes the title of Mayakovsky’s famous poem “The Cloud in Trousers” (Ma 127/M 84). Podtyagin’s unhappy predicament has broader implications—his failure to remember his papers ironically undercuts the allusions to a cultural movement that would forget tradition—but he has placed the anticipatory images of house and sky in a futurist framework that is explicitly Russian. The basic cultural situation in the open ending is further complicated by the fact that Ganin is leaving Germany for France, a transition whose implications remain undefined. In any case, the Podtyagin incident now reveals its broader significance as a critique of the avant-garde outlook, for to the extent that it questions Ganin’s very decision to abandon his memories, it goes beyond any national version of futurism, Russian or Italian. For the old poet has not lost his passport out of some “futurist” impatience with routine, but because he was absorbed in remembering something else. And, by a pointed irony, the Russia he recalls includes a memory of futurism itself. Everything, it seems, even the most determined impulse to go forward, will eventually be viewed in retrospect; or, as Nabokov’s philosopher Van Veen would say much later, time may well be nothing “but memory in the making” (A 559). In a similar spirit, when Ganin leaves for France, he can reflect

The Rejection of Anticipatory Memory

61

that everything he has experienced in the novel is “already a memory” (Ma 168/M 114). But his “futurist” mood of anticipation fails to acknowledge the most radical lesson implied by the Podtyagin incident, that soon even this mood will recede into the past. As this irony indicates, Nabokov is about to resolve the paradox of anticipatory memory by insisting that the essential priority belongs to memory. From this vantage point at the end of the novel, Ganin’s several days of reminiscences show remarkably few affinities with a Proustian drama of memory. After all, he sidestepped Proust in favor of Nietzsche as he wondered about recapturing the past, and the step-by-step mnemonic technique he eventually favors is deliberate, thus contrasting with the doctrine of involuntary memory so prominently displayed in the madeleine episode. And yet, though Nabokov would eventually identify Proust’s great theme as “the unsuspected riches of our subliminal minds which we can retrieve only by an act of intuition, of memory, of involuntary associations” (LL 208), his novel offers no clear indication of how Ganin’s memories differ from those in the Recherche, whose last, posthumous volumes were even then appearing. Moreover, even Mary’s apparent exceptions to this divergence from Proust turn out to confirm Nabokov’s basic independence. If Ganin’s initial encounter with Mary’s snapshot is as fortuitous as Marcel’s with the madeleine, a snapshot is a memento and is meant to evoke memories, while the taste of pastry soaked in tea is much more random. Later, when one part of Ganin’s past does return in a genuinely spontaneous way, this influx of memory will actually run counter to another striking scene in Proust. Ganin’s experience occurs quite late in the novel, after he has tried to remember Mary’s perfume. This attempt fails because, as the narrator didactically affirms, “memory can restore to life everything except smells” (Ma 93/M 60). On the other hand, the narrator continues, “as we all know, nothing revives the past so completely as a smell that was once associated with it.” Soon Ganin gets to discover this truth: he smells an odor of carbide while walking by a garage, and immediately recalls the carbide lamp on his bicycle in Russia. This association in turn brings back a new episode from his love for Mary (Ma 103/M 66–67). At the beginning of Proust’s novel, smell had also played a key role, but its relationship with memory turns out to be very different. In the overture to “Combray,” before the madeleine incident, when the boy Marcel is sent to bed without being able to kiss his mother, he trudges up a staircase whose odor of varnish seems the very distillation of his misery.10 This smell, however, belongs to the complex of memories that entrap the adult Marcel before the madeleine experience, and is thus the very opposite of a spontaneous memory. And, contrary to Nabokov’s observations about the carbide, Marcel has no trouble recalling the precise texture of this odor, and he certainly does not require a varnish smell in the

62

Points of Departure

present to remember the traumatic drama of the good-night kiss. As a comment on memory, this scene diverges so much from the one in Mary that we must assume the young Nabokov did not yet see the Recherche as a major reference point for his own work. To do justice to this novel’s fluctuating cultural attitudes, we should probably see them as symptoms of an incipient Russian modernism. As signaled by the Pushkin epigraph and the very language in which Mary was first written, the Russian element dominates. But the references to futurism, overtly Russian and covertly Italian, suggest a growing international tendency alongside the primary commitment to émigré literature. And the allusion to Nietzsche also shows a willingness to consider the achievements of European modernism. This mixed outlook, which hovers between a sense of divided loyalties and a delight in moving freely between different cultural contexts, suggests an early motive for Nabokov’s canonization of Andrey Bely in the 1960s as the Russian counterpart of Joyce, Kafka, and Proust. Like Mary, but on a much grander scale, Bely’s Petersburg masterfully reworked the Russian tradition, including Pushkin, yet also stayed in touch with recent European developments, and especially Nietzsche.11 Yet at this point Nabokov’s modernism is above all incipient. By highlighting the image yet neglecting its centrality within early twentieth-century literature, he fails to indicate the full cultural context for his art of memory in Mary. Nor does he come to terms with the achievement of Marcel Proust, the best-known and most important artist of memory in contemporary Europe. At most the odd dissonances in their approach to the power of specific sense impressions, the capacity of memory to dissolve the present, and the possibility of total recall help explain why Nabokov would later be so receptive to Proust. The incipient state of Mary’s modernism becomes the most obvious, however, in its failure to distinguish its stance from the avant-garde. Despite the ironic attitude toward futurism in the Podtyagin episode, Nabokov’s own art of memory in Mary depends upon a loosely “futurist” motif of anticipation. In the years to come, as a first step toward a more explicitly modernist approach to memory, he would subject this initial position to a stinging critique. 1 1 1 The temptation to read Nabokov’s early works in light of major achievements to come is almost irresistible, but with The Defense and Glory such an approach would be misleading. Though the two novels differ strikingly in most ways, they both invite comparison with Mary by referring back to its open ending and by featuring scenes that forcefully reject Ganin’s mood of anticipation. Quite late in The Defense, for example, Mary herself makes a cameo appearance that reveals that she now lives in Berlin with her

The Rejection of Anticipatory Memory

63

husband (Z 182–83/Def 203), thus making up for Nabokov’s previous failure to show her arrival. But by this point it is clear that the hero, the disturbed chess master Luzhin, inhabits a closed, claustrophobic world with almost none of Ganin’s sense of an expansive future. The brilliant first chapter had already set the tone for this antianticipatory consciousness of time. There Luzhin appears as a moody, difficult child, about to catch the train home after summer in the country and start his first year in school. The prospect horrifies the boy, and when he rejects it as “something new, unknown, and therefore hideous, an impossible, unacceptable world” (Z 11/Def 22), he seems almost to deny the passage of time itself. There is no room in this chapter for the initial basis of memory in Mary, the promise of happiness to come. Luzhin tries to avoid the onslaught of time by running away, along a woodland path that leads back to his family’s country estate. But his parents eventually find him and overcome his frantic resistance with the aid of a “black-bearded peasant . . . , future inhabitant of future nightmares” (Z 13/ Def 24). The story here leaps forward in time to mention Luzhin’s later nightmares, otherwise never described. Though the emphatic repetition of “future” only occurs in the English version (the Russian said simply “the inhabitant of future nightmares”),12 the original already foreshortens the story line in the same temporally expressive manner. And both versions introduce the black-bearded peasant at the very end of chapter 1, where he appears with maximum effect. This incidental character recalls Anna Karenina’s portentous visions of a similar peasant, also associated with train travel, whom Nabokov would analyze with loving detail in his lectures on Tolstoy (LRL 175–88). Indeed, during the sanatorium scene much later in the novel, which as we shall see includes several other decisive intertextual references, Luzhin himself will read Anna Karenina (Z 149/Def 167). But he does not notice the peasant, presumably because he is preoccupied with how his psychiatrist’s black beard harks back to this childhood trauma (Z 140/Def 159). Defying standard judgments that Tolstoy was an outmoded realist, Nabokov often portrays him as a modernist precursor. Unpublished lecture notes show that he taught him along with Blok and Chekhov in a course on “Modernism in Russian Literature.”13 In the European context, he liked to argue that Anna Karenina foreshadowed both Joyce’s experiments with stream-of-consciousness writing (LRL 183) and Proust’s elaborate manipulation of imagery (LL 220–21). Anna’s fateful dream suggests a third contribution that is particularly important for Nabokov’s own sense of modernism, a complex awareness of time that, in contrast to avant-garde attitudes, stresses the continuing pressure of the past and therefore can be used to undercut Nabokov’s own earlier interest in the “futurist” motif of anticipation.

64

Points of Departure

Thus, when the story mentions the black-bearded peasant, it glances ahead to Luzhin’s nightmares and thereby seems to thrust the reader forward in time, to the point of even using the word “future.” But the basic effect, which prefigures John Shade’s self-conscious preterism in “Pale Fire,” is actually quite different. This moment transforms what had been a vivid narrative present throughout chapter 1 into an oppressive memory, thereby establishes a temporal viewpoint that suggests fate and its foreclosure of an open future, and thus deliberately subverts the anticipatory impulse. Ultimately, of course, Luzhin’s existence will mirror the slowly constricting circle of options experienced by Tolstoy’s heroine. Though his youthful talent for chess temporarily gives his life an aura of anticipation, as an adult he eventually succumbs to a nightmarish sense of total entrapment and, like Anna, he commits suicide. In fact his mood of entrapment is so all-encompassing that even at the moment of death when he imagines “what kind of eternity was obligingly and inexorably spread out before him” (Z 234/Def 256), he still believes he is the victim of a monstrous chess game exploiting his memories of the past. The Defense, which began by stressing Luzhin’s basic inability to welcome the future as Ganin had during his convalescence, has ended on a note of remorseless closure that contrasts sharply with Mary’s final mood of adventure. Glory will take a complementary approach, for it will undercut the basic temporal structure of Mary at the very point where it recalls its open ending. Like Ganin, but without his tinge of brutality, the hero Martin Edelweiss is a young Russian émigré devoted to a romantic code of adventure. In his last attempted exploit, he too plans to cross a border illegally, and once again Nabokov avoids any description of the actual event. But now the crossing involves hostile territory, and ultimately Martin’s quixotic “visit” to the Soviet Union appears in a very different temporal perspective. Alongside his Ganin-like intoxication with open possibility, Glory begins to reveal another future clouded by memories of an uncertain but probably tragic past. This shift first occurs near the middle of the novel, where a passage showing Martin as he writes home jumps ahead to his mother examining his letters after Martin has failed to return (Pod 87–88/Gl 73–74). In his preface to the English edition, Nabokov aptly evokes the special temporal status of this passage, which exists “beyond the time-frame of the novel in an abstraction of the future” (Gl xiv). He thereby underscores an authorial manipulation of time that effectively subverts any open ending expressive of pure possibility. The last few pages of Glory, which without giving specifics imply that Martin met a brutal end, register this foreclosure of anticipation with great dramatic effect. The novel’s final image is especially haunting. Martin’s English friend Darwin is walking down a woodland path that closely resembles Martin’s favorite picture as a child, a trail suggesting “fabulous possibilities” as it wound into an alluring distance (Pod 5/Gl 12). A similar “enchanted”

The Rejection of Anticipatory Memory

65

picture will reappear at a climactic moment in Speak, Memory (SM 86), where it evokes the many cultural contexts that have gone to form Nabokov’s mature art of memory.14 But the path at the end of Glory is closer in mood to young Luzhin’s inauspicious flight through the woods back to the family estate. For as Darwin’s path disappears into the trees it evokes either the enigma of Martin’s fate or even, if this trail somehow recalls Martin’s trip to the border, his last moment of freedom before capture. The picture that initially conveyed romantic anticipation now suggests the darker uncertainty of imagined tragedy, and proposes not hope but at most the attitude of Martin’s mother as she manages to persist in adversity. Glory and The Defense thus work together to undermine Mary’s paradoxical linkage of memory with the future. But Luzhin’s experience of the past, so much more developed than Martin’s, also needs to be considered, since it too reflects back on Mary. Both novels mobilize certain treasured memories of Nabokov’s, which he would later use in Speak, Memory. But whereas Mary directly prepared for the Tamara chapter, to the point where fiction fuses with autobiography, The Defense shows how Nabokov could use details from his life to depict “a childhood entirely unrelated to my own” (SM 96). Such a complete reversal suggests this novel’s real status as an inversion, in the manner of a photographic negative, of a desirable or even tolerable scale of values. As a one-sided chess master, Luzhin at first views memory as nothing more than a technical resource, an archive of moves and strategies from previous matches, not at all as a nourishing link with his own past. He sees no point to personal memory, which is concrete to no purpose and much too human; since Luzhin lives by the splendidly schematic, his earlier life can only fascinate him once he begins interpreting it as a monstrous chess game.15 Luzhin’s madness thus interests Nabokov less as a psychological disorder than as a situation with special expressive possibilities: it works as a dramatic reversal of everything memory ought to be. Nabokov’s changed handling of Pushkin pinpoints this novel’s thorough inversion of Mary. In fact, as if to show the distance between the two works, he accompanies the story of Luzhin’s unhappy childhood with the comment that he never read Pushkin (Z 21/Def 33). The carefree memories of young life in the Onegin epigraph to Mary seem impossible for this hero. In the sanatorium scene he may briefly feel some nostalgia for the past, but he is disoriented after his breakdown, and the reader remembers better than Luzhin how miserable he really was. His dominant sense of being trapped by a sinister pattern of repetition is thus more faithful psychologically to the tenor of his early experience. The most significant reworking of the Pushkinian legacy involves a striking innovation in narrative structure. Near the end of chapter 4 (Z 57/Def 71) Nabokov jumps over sixteen years of Luzhin’s life, and suddenly the boy nearing adolescence turns into the fully developed man. The interim period

66

Points of Departure

remains obscure, but we gather that Luzhin falls under the tutelage of Valentinov, who manages his career as a precocious chess genius but prohibits any normal human contacts as a drain on his energy. This sublimation theory of creativity, which seems loosely Freudian, has catastrophic results. In sardonic contrast with the epigraph to Mary, the adult Luzhin has no “former love” to recall, and his pathetically inept courtship of the unnamed heroine throws some light on his life with Valentinov, whose very name becomes a mockery. But his full misery bursts upon the reader only at the end. Here, when Luzhin’s paranoid replay of his life finally brings him back to the suppressed Valentinov period, he prefers to kill himself rather than endure its utter lovelessness again. In staging this sudden influx of what had previously been elided for character and reader alike, Nabokov displays an impressive new assurance in making structure serve expression. And, as he replaces Ganin’s heartening recovery of former happiness with Luzhin’s desperate denial of adolescent misery, the reversal of his earlier appeal to Pushkin is complete. In this novel’s inverted world, the very absence of tenderness and love from Luzhin’s vision of the past reveals their supreme importance for a genuine art of memory. Even more revealing of changes in Nabokov’s basic cultural orientation is the sanatorium chapter, which significantly reworks Ganin’s thoughts of eternal return. Luzhin is recovering from his breakdown and is treated by a therapist who, like Valentinov, seems loosely indebted to Freud. He therefore encourages him to remember his childhood; among other memories, Luzhin recalls with zest his enormously fat French governess (Z 146/Def 164), this being Nabokov’s first tribute to Mademoiselle O. Then, like Ganin, he must confront the precariousness of the past: “For the first time in all his life, perhaps, Luzhin asked himself—where exactly had it all gone, what had become of his childhood, whither had the veranda floated . . . ?” (Z 147/Def 165). And this question soon inspires a second denial of what was called “eternal return” in Mary: “It seemed as though that distant world was unrepeatable.” But from this point on, Luzhin’s experience of memory diverges rapidly from Ganin’s; instead of doubting Nietzsche’s hypothesis and feeling anguish at the transience of all things, he accepts the possibility of literal recurrence. The result is paranoid delusion, since Luzhin succumbs to the belief that he is reliving his childhood in exact succession, with the parallels representing moves in a menacing game of chess. By a crowning irony, as we have seen, one of the first parallels links his black-bearded psychiatrist with the black-bearded peasant. Nabokov’s positioning of the sanatorium scene within modernist culture is suggestive, for it shows his attention turning from Nietzsche to Freud. In Mary, Nietzsche’s metaphysics of repetition proved hollow, for it merely alerted Ganin to the fragility and contingency of his memories. But now, when Luzhin reflects that his past seems unrepeatable, Nietzsche no longer

The Rejection of Anticipatory Memory

67

enters the text as an explicit cultural memory; even his phrase-making survives only in “repeat,” an inconspicuous temporal equivalent for “return” that reflects a similar shift in the original Russian.16 As a result, though Luzhin’s mad pattern-seeking depends on a sense of repetition that he interprets as a game of chess, its immediate cause is not Nietzsche’s philosophy of eternal return. Instead, since the repetitions focus on childhood experience, they derive from the therapist who in psychoanalytic fashion attempts to find repressed links between boy and man. With this ingenious caricature, which pillories a second major modern thinker for theories bearing on memory, Nabokov has launched his lifelong campaign against Freud.17 In his preface to the American version of the novel, he reenacts this transition. For if Nabokov closes with a by-then-standard warning against the “Viennese delegation” (Def 10), he opens with a veiled allusion to his earlier interest in Nietzsche. Just as Nietzsche recalls first conceiving of eternal recurrence near “a powerful pyramidal rock,”18 so Nabokov associates the genesis of his novel with a similar scene: “I remember with special limpidity a sloping slab of rock, in the ulex and ilex-clad hills, where the main thematic idea of the book first came to me” (Def 7). With characteristic selfconsciousness, the alliterative pairing of ilex and ulex embodies just that dual logic of echo and transformation which guided polemical parodies like Luzhin’s mad sense of repetition as a put-down of Nietzschean eternal return. In even broader perspective Luzhin’s memories of his governess hint at another cultural transition in Nabokov’s career. Rather than conforming to the therapist’s preconceptions, they take on a life of their own whose high point is the key image of reading on the veranda, described as early as the first chapter. There Nabokov briefly described Luzhin’s boyhood through memories he had much later, perhaps at the sanatorium, when he would recall with “swooning delight” the hours during which his governess would read him The Count of Monte Cristo (Z 6–7/Def 16). Thus, if the obtuse German therapist yields to the veranda scene in Russia, that scene also features the reading of French fiction. Luzhin himself is not very sympathetic to the governess, but to the extent that his process of recollection sets up an opposition between theory and literature that correlates with different European cultures, Nabokov has given a new specificity to Ganin’s move from Germany to France. In the years to come this rather crude opposition will become more nuanced and original as he begins to assimilate French modernism. Ganin’s and Luzhin’s sensitivity to the evanescence of remembered experience has posed a genuine existential predicament; but as Nabokov’s work will soon proclaim, only a Proustian devotion to the art of fiction, and not the breakthroughs of central European thought, can truly do justice to memory.

68

Points of Departure

1 1 1 Despite the systematic undermining of anticipation that occurs in The Defense and Glory, certain key elements from Nabokov’s early portrayal of memory do persist in his later work. Thus, as already mentioned, the link between anticipation and imagination looks ahead to his emphasis on the artifice of memory. To illustrate this persistence further, we should consider two examples of how Ganin’s original mood of anticipation and his step-bystep memory technique extend to Nabokov’s art of memory in Speak, Memory and The Gift. As we now know, Ganin’s romance with Mary is a fictional reworking of the experiences recounted in chapter 12 of Nabokov’s autobiography, the Tamara episode. But earlier in the book, as he leads up to these memories, Nabokov creates a richer version of the same anticipatory structure that appeared in Mary. In English versions of the autobiography, of course, the parallel is somewhat obscured because “Tamara” is preceded by chapter 11, on Nabokov’s first poem, which is omitted in the Russian version. But chapter 10, whose New Yorker title “Curtain Raiser” is a metaphor for anticipation, has focused on the ambiguous connection between adolescent sexuality and an impulse toward futurity. Alongside the hilarious citations of erotic passages from Mayne Reid, an Irish-American author of westerns he had read as a boy (SM 201–3), and the parodic reincarnation of Proust’s “jeunes filles en fleurs” as “Gala Girls” in Berlin (SM 206–7), Nabokov also emphasizes how these and other women were essentially preparations for the image of Tamara herself—“all would merge to form somebody I did not know but was bound to know soon” (SM 213). Then, as he concludes the chapter, Nabokov transcends even this projection of desire through a second image, which elaborately reworks Ganin’s fascination with the open sky and thereby creates a sense of pure possibility. In one of the autobiography’s set pieces of eloquent rhetoric, he describes a memorable sunset that finally revealed “a family of serene clouds in miniature . . . remote but perfect in every detail” (SM 213). And the chapter’s last words equate this vision with his future: “my marvellous tomorrow ready to be delivered to me.” Meanwhile, Ganin’s step-by-step memory technique based on anticipation has reappeared in a crucial passage at the end of chapter 8, or “Lantern Slides.” Here, at another rhetorical high point of the autobiography, Nabokov shows his family seated around a long table beneath the trees, in an idealized picture of his childhood that he calls “the supreme achievement of memory” (SM 170). But creation of this culminating image has depended on two kinds of deliberate postponement in the spirit of Ganin’s slow movement from periphery to center. Thus it is meaningful that Nabokov sum-

The Rejection of Anticipatory Memory

69

mons up this family picture at the very end of the chapter, after devoting most of his attention to the extended family of his varied tutors, as if he had to linger over secondary impressions before he could proceed to the main effort. The motivation here is less purely psychological and more self-consciously compositional, but the parallel with Ganin is obvious. Along similar lines, Nabokov casually mentions that he can imagine the scene beneath the trees only from the viewpoint of “an alley of birches, limes, and maples,” as if he were an outsider approaching “from the depth of the park—not from the house” (SM 171). This emphasis on secondary details in a set order, carefully arranged so as to correspond to a possible past experience leading up to a climactic moment, recalls a scene from The Gift (Dar 102/G 101). Mother and son in that novel play a memory game in which they both think of a path on the old family estate, separately imagine walking along it, and then compare results to find they have arrived at the same spot. In this case, however, the main image that directs the game— their unspoken memories of the absent father—appears only in the form of fleeting allusions; its full public expression becomes highly problematic. Yet this simultaneous evasion and evocation of the main memory through peripheral details clearly looks ahead to the implicit logic of “Lantern Slides” while also recalling Ganin’s deliberate mnemonic technique in Mary. The Gift, Nabokov’s last Russian novel, was followed by The Real Life of Sebastian Knight. Knight’s escapade with Alexis Pan, we recall, baffled his biographer, but the analogous “futurist” phase within Nabokov’s career as an artist of memory seems much less opaque. Though linked with images that evoke Russian futurism and may also echo Marinetti, this paradoxical doctrine actually owes relatively little to an avant-garde urge to forget the past. Nabokov is much more interested in how certain extremely vivid memories depend upon an attitude of eager welcome toward the future. As a result, he takes an unusual approach to the imagination as a product of memory and desire, and develops a highly deliberate method for calling up the past by focusing on peripheral details. In Nabokov’s early career, anticipatory memory played a pivotal role as he moved from Mary to the threshold of the 1930s, while in the context of European modernism it led to revealing skirmishes with Nietzsche and Freud. Later, certain haunting passages in his mature works suggest that Nabokov may have abandoned the doctrine but never really gave up some of the basic attitudes associated with it. He simply subordinated them to a more ambitious art of memory, for which, he would acknowledge in the 1930s, Proust had furnished the best model among contemporary European modernists. In the process, Nabokov will finally make a clearer distinction between his own modernism and the avant-garde and will begin a more searching investigation of the nature of the image.

Part Two 1 Toward France

CHAPTER

4

1

Encountering French Modernism KAMERA OBSKURA (1931–1932)

DURING the early and mid-1930s Nabokov passed through a period of remarkable, even explosive, creativity. Foreshadowed in May of 1930 by the semifantastic psychological novella The Eye, it began in earnest after Glory when he wrote Kamera Obskura (1931–1932), Despair (1932– 1933), and Invitation to a Beheading (1934) in quick succession. It culminated with Nabokov’s émigré masterpiece, the long novel The Gift (1934– 1937). All of these works differ significantly in conception, tone, style, and thematic orientation; taken as a series, they display an intense will to experiment on several fronts at once, thereby suggesting a more active commitment to modernism on their author’s part. It is easy to imagine that Nabokov was thinking of this dynamic period when, in an unusually jaded mood around midcentury, he looked back at his émigré career and remarked: “I was young in those days and much more keenly interested in literature than I am now” (SM 283–84). Certainly when he says of himself, using his émigré pseudonym, that “Sirin passed . . . like a meteor” (SM 288), the simile does not exaggerate the innovative spirit that marked his work from Kamera Obskura to The Gift. The decisive advances that occurred in Nabokov’s art of memory during the 1930s thus represent just one part of a more varied achievement. But since Despair filters cultural reminiscences through an ironic personal confession, and since The Gift identifies memory with literary creativity itself, his innovations in this area obviously counted for a great deal. Toward the end of this period, moreover, when Nabokov had already embarked on The Gift, he also wrote two shorter works that are equally important for our purposes. We shall need to return to “Mademoiselle O,” his first avowed memoir and the beginning of his full-scale autobiography Speak, Memory. Meanwhile, in “Spring in Fialta,” his favorite short story, Nabokov treated the narrator’s experience of memory in ways that make it a miniature counterpart to The Gift. Appearing within three months of each other in 1936, these two works crystallized the emerging distinction between the fictive and autobiographical modes in Nabokov’s art of memory. Later chapters will examine what Despair and The Gift, as well as the memoir and the story, contributed to the formation of Nabokov’s European

74

Toward France

identity. But first we need to consider the earliest expressions of that growing French orientation that would lead Nabokov to study Proust in 1935– 1936 and that would become especially striking in “Mademoiselle O” and “Spring in Fialta.” Both Proust and Bergson, he was beginning to realize, had worked out a French version of modernism whose particular treatment of time and memory could decisively further his own evolving concerns. This process of discovery, though later largely obscured by Nabokov himself, dates back to 1930 and finds its fullest expression in the original Russian version of his fifth novel, now known as Laughter in the Dark but then called Kamera Obskura. 1 1 1 In 1930 Nabokov received a special questionnaire that was circulated among Russian émigré writers. Drawn up by Numbers, a controversial new Russian journal that was published in Paris and closely connected with the French literary scene, it asked whether Proust was “the most powerful spokesman of our epoch” and whether he would “have a decisive influence.” Nabokov quarreled with the assumptions of the questionnaire, and so avoided saying anything of substance about Proust, though he did make a tantalizing remark about his conception of influence: “It happens that a writer has an oblique influence through another writer, or that some sort of complex blending of influences takes place. . . .”1 To the extent that this statement allows for the intervention of a different, presumably earlier influence or for the synthesis of several allied figures, it corresponds to Nabokov’s shifting cultural horizons as he moves from his initial interest in anticipatory memory to his encounter with Bergson and Proust. Along with the Proust questionnaire the first issue of Numbers also included a scandalously biased review of Nabokov’s early work, and so he never moved closer to the journal. But soon the problem of Proust’s significance began to haunt his fiction; and later that year, as noted in Chapter 3, he would mention the French novelist by name in Glory. The situation involves a suggestive contrast between the cultural orientations of two émigré writers, the neophyte Iogolevich who “had read Proust and Joyce” and the well-established Bubnov whose literary interests are exclusively Russian (Pod 162–64/Gl 140–42). Proust’s position ahead of Joyce in this initial roll call of European modernists is surprising, given Nabokov’s later preference for Ulysses over the Recherche. But it reflects his priorities at that time as a writer, and in his next novel, Kamera Obskura, he would include an elaborate and revealing parody that suggests several reasons for Proust’s importance. This parody would be dropped from the book in 1938 when Nabokov retranslated Kamera Obskura into English as Laughter in the Dark.

Encountering French Modernism

75

In both versions of the novel the main character is a German art connoisseur. He conceives a grand romantic passion for a young and utterly amoral usherette he meets at a movie theater, and eventually leaves his wife to live with her. But then, while vacationing in the south of France with this mistress and a cynical cartoonist he has recently befriended, he is shattered to learn that they are having a love affair behind his back. In Kamera Obskura the vehicle for this revelation is the Proust parody. During an excursion, when Nabokov’s main character and his two companions are separated in a train station, he happens to meet an old friend, the novelist Dietrich von Segelkrantz, who now lives in the town where the connoisseur is vacationing. Segelkrantz is an aspiring modernist of a special kind, for we are told that he “once knew the late Marcel Proust personally, imitated him and several other innovators, so that from his pen came strange, complicated, and heavy things” (KO 143). Soon the train is ready to leave; in the confusion the connoisseur barely makes it onto the last car while Segelkrantz enters the same compartment as his mistress and the cartoonist, who have not met him and assume that he is French. Their shameless love talk in German, which the novelist then uses for his work-in-progress and later reads back to the connoisseur during a chance visit, finally reveals the truth. The narrative contrivance needed for this recognition scene helps explain why Nabokov later rewrote the whole episode. Also, by 1938 his involvement with Proust had become much richer and more discriminating, and he probably felt he had outgrown this early response. Such detailed references to a French author were further discouraged by the fact that Nabokov was then addressing the novel to an English-speaking audience. Still, as a German writer who prefers to live in France, Segelkrantz pointedly embodies the continuing migration of Nabokov’s cultural sympathies within Europe. And the nature of his new orientation has now become more specific, since Proust’s Recherche has replaced Ganin’s trip to France or Luzhin’s delight in French adventure stories. More important, however, than such shifts in outlook is Segelkrantz’s decision as an artist to use his own experiences in his novel. Though not relevant to Kamera Obskura, whose stylized characters barely possess inner lives, not to mention reveries about the past, this decision does reflect a basic problematic in Nabokov’s art of memory. Thus, when Segelkrantz reads his novel to the connoisseur, the result is a complex oscillation between fiction and autobiography. His novel has incorporated the real-life incident of the cartoonist and the mistress, thereby turning memory into art; but when the connoisseur recognizes the people concerned, he changes the art back into a memory. At a further, metafictional level, of course, the reader realizes that the whole situation is an artistic invention of Nabokov’s. Yet it would be wrong to insist on an ultimate triumph of pure art, not only because Nabokov later disowned the scene but also, more profoundly, because of the logic of the novel’s title.

76

Toward France

The camera obscura, after all, projects an upside-down world, and is thus a suitable metaphor for the ironic strategy of inverting reality that Nabokov uses in this novel, as in The Defense. In some indirect way, therefore, the art may express an autobiographical situation, if only by projecting Nabokov’s uneasiness at using autobiographical material in his fiction. Another variant of this oscillation occurs on the intertextual level, where the references to Proust evoke a work of art that gave the impression of straddling both categories. Not only is the Recherche a novel in the form of a fictive autobiography, but its narrator Marcel can seem an alter ego of the author.2 This interplay between literary modes elaborates on the confusion of the factual and the fictive that underlay the Pushkinian epigraph to Mary, and looks ahead to the major transition that will occur in “Mademoiselle O.” But once we consider Segelkrantz’s novel in its relations to Kamera Obskura, Nabokov’s attitude toward Proust shows a striking ambivalence. At one level, which we might call explicit imitation, the four pages Segelkrantz reads aloud to the connoisseur bear out warnings of a heavy and complicated style. He is clearly a mere epigone, and the mockery of his model’s famous long-winded sentences is all the more pointed because the passage contrasts so sharply with the normal, almost telegraphic style of Kamera Obskura. But this heavy-handed pastiche of Proust’s style, which perhaps betrays an anxiety of influence or at least some initial hostility toward Proust on Nabokov’s part, must also be read in its broader, more significant narrative context. At this level, which involves the action rather than the style of the novel and which may be called implicit imitation because the cues are more subtle, the passage communicates a generally favorable response to its model. Confronting Proust in a spirit of genuine artistic engagement, it assumes the proportions of a critical adaptation, or serious parody.3 Hence, when Segelkrantz’s novel delivers the message that shatters the connoisseur’s romantic dreams by revealing a sordid love triangle, its impact on the plot of Kamera Obskura is highly Proustian. As with Swann’s painful recognition of Odette’s real past, or Marcel’s startled discovery that Charlus is a homosexual, Nabokov’s connoisseur must confront the one indubitable fact that overturns his whole interpretation of the world. For both writers, such experiences are so shattering that they not only negate their characters’ views of the present but compel a drastic revision of their memories as well. If Swann’s discoveries about Odette destroyed his own highly romantic love, they also shook his entire past with her to its foundations.4 Similarly, when the art connoisseur looks back at his friendship with the cartoonist after Segelkrantz’s reading, he briefly recalls certain ambiguous details that suddenly change their meaning: they “now were lit with the same deadly light as recently had catastrophically illuminated his life” (KO 158). Memory sharpens the pain of revelation, for as it thrusts the new knowledge back into

Encountering French Modernism

77

the past, customary and comfortable meanings must yield to unpleasant truths. Later in Kamera Obskura Segelkrantz himself seems to realize that his pastiche of Proust’s style has turned into something more profoundly Proustian. Once the euphoria of creation has passed, he senses that somehow his work-in-progress has had a disastrous effect on his friend. He reflects that “what he had written already seemed . . . not to be literature, but a coarse anonymous letter in which an ignoble truth was seasoned with the contrivances of an ornate style” (KO 176). His doubts about the literary value of material taken so directly from life reinforce the earlier problematic of art and memory. But his emphasis on the anonymous letter is more important, since in “Un Amour de Swann” just such a letter had played a key role in triggering Swann’s disillusionment with Odette and leading to the utter transformation of his memories.5 Segelkrantz’s moment of self-accusation thus highlights the shift in Nabokov’s handling of Proust from pastiche to parody, from easy mockery of his language—“the contrivance of an ornate style”—to a deeper engagement with the thematics of “ignoble truth” and all that it implies about a process of reinterpretation within one’s memory. In 1938, in Laughter in the Dark, the love triangle of the connoisseur, the cartoonist, and the usherette builds up to the same abrupt reversal of perspectives on the past. But Nabokov drops the Proustian parody and, though he keeps the situation of a German writer living in France, he now calls this character Conrad, “not the famous Pole, but Udo Conrad who wrote Memoirs of a Forgetful Man” (LD 7). This offhand comment not only serves to ingratiate Nabokov with his new audience by mentioning another Slavic writer who had made English his literary language; the paradoxical book title also preserves some sense of the character’s previous relation to Proust while acknowledging the relative unimportance of memory in Laughter in the Dark. Yet Nabokov still emphasizes the Proustian resonances of the story, this time by placing some briefer echoes of “Un Amour de Swann” at the very beginning. Just as Swann, who was himself an art connoisseur, liked to detect resemblances between his favorite paintings and the people he met socially, so Nabokov’s main character “had often amused himself by having this or that Old Master sign landscapes and faces which he, Albinus, came across in real life” (LD 8).6 By the same token, if Swann’s serious passion for Odette began when he noticed her resemblance to one of Jethro’s daughters in a fresco of Botticelli’s, so Nabokov’s hero falls in love with the usherette after seeing “the melting outline of a cheek which looked as though it were painted by a great artist against a rich dark background” (LD 20).7 Though in this version Nabokov evokes the initial alluring image rather than the catastrophic revelation, he still patterns the story on a

78

Toward France

Proustian drama of reinterpretation, with the parallel now apparent to the reader from the first. Nabokov’s involvement with Proust has thus begun by taking an oblique approach to his predecessor’s concern with memory. As in Mary Nabokov avoids a direct confrontation with the famous doctrine of involuntary memory; instead, he focuses on a less-known yet equally characteristic facet of the Recherche. For although the dramatic moments of reappraisal that Odette and Charlus force on Swann and the narrator do not depend upon an explicit theory of memory, they do call forth an intense activity of remembering. Proust’s characters must review the past, give a new emphasis to disregarded or forgotten items, and then reassemble the fragments to create another, very different picture. And Proust’s reader, who has been almost as deceived as the character, must do likewise. By fixing on this grand theme, which differs from the madeleine episode in depending much more directly on a prolonged immersion in Proustian narrative, Kamera Obskura shows that Nabokov has already passed beyond just sampling the Recherche and is beginning to assess its implications. But this novel has hardly done justice to the full drama of reinterpretation in Proust. Nabokov’s characters have relatively few memories, after all, and the reader learns about the love triangle long before the connoisseur and thus does not participate in his devastating new awareness of the past. It seems fair to conclude that at this point Nabokov was still feeling his way, responding to the texture of Proust’s fiction and venturing some independent judgments, but not yet attempting a full assimilation. “Un Amour de Swann,” as a rather short, self-contained section of the Recherche, must have furnished a convenient vantage point on the monumental work as a whole, especially since it had the proportions of the short novels Nabokov himself was writing at the time. Even more specifically, the structure of reinterpretation in “Un Amour de Swann” must have appealed to the author of The Defense. Just as Proust’s story involved a series of systematic cross-references between lyrical moments in Swann’s early love for Odette and his later memories of those moments—like her letter written from the Maison Dorée, her promise always to be free for him, or their enjoyment of the Vinteuil sonata—so Nabokov had used a similar set of cross-references between Luzhin’s boyhood experiences and his adult life, but in his case to show paranoia rather than disillusionment. 1 1 1 Beyond the thematics of reinterpretation and “ignoble truth,” the Segelkrantz episode briefly raises several other points that help clarify Nabokov’s emerging interest in Proust. Especially provocative are the assumptions it makes about the name and nature of what we now call modernism.

Encountering French Modernism

79

At the very outset, by simply naming Proust and no one else when he speaks of Segelkrantz’s interest in recent “innovators,” Nabokov follows the questionnaire in Numbers by isolating the Recherche as the leading modern novel. Other major possibilities from his writer’s Franco-German cultural milieu, such as Kafka, Mann, Gide, or Joyce (by then established in Paris), do not seem to count. Nabokov’s use of the Russian word novator in this passage is equally loaded, and probably expresses a certain European slant. In the Soviet Union this very term was coming to mean officially approved revolutionary art, including Mayakovsky’s futurism, but it pointedly excluded many recent European writers such as Proust. Eventually the distinction would become cut-and-dried, so that, as Wladimir Weidlé observed in the 1970s, “in today’s official lexicon, ‘Modernist’ indicates the enemy and ‘innovator’ a friend.”8 At the time of Kamera Obskura, of course, Nabokov did not refer specifically to modernism; but because he wished to identify with an artistic tradition of the new, he saw novator as a valuable label. His introduction to Segelkrantz sought to rescue the word from misuse and to redirect it in accordance with his own aspirations for early twentieth-century literature. An even more revealing token of these aspirations appears during Segelkrantz’s work-in-progress, which meticulously (and with some unplanned humor) describes the mental world of his intelligent and sensitive hero Hermann as he goes to a dental appointment. The excerpt opens with his reflections on the underlying unity of his thoughts, which Hermann believes is the result of his toothache but which the reader notices seems to depend just as much on questions of modern art. Most obviously, he briefly considers Rimbaud’s famous poem “The Drunken Boat,” which in this context acquires a double-edged significance. On the one hand, Segelkrantz is hoping to validate the modernity of his own Proustian art by showing an easy familiarity with Rimbaud, whose more radical break with tradition had achieved an almost mythic authority in the early twentieth century. On the other hand, Hermann’s actual thoughts about the poem are curiously unimpressive: he notices that its style reproduces “the intonation of a Parisian street urchin” and realizes that he remembers Rimbaud only because of an odd association with one line in the poem, from “having seen an advertisement—the word leviathan—on a wall between the shaggy trunks of two palms” (KO 148). These rather banal cultural contexts undercut the poet’s reputation for absolute novelty. Rimbaud, the hero of the avant-garde, turns out to be linked with the strident clichés of billboard advertising; and this affinity with mass culture echoes the main plot of Kamera Obskura, where the cartoonist is introduced as the creator of the guinea pig “Cheepy,” which enjoys a worldwide craze but then quickly loses its popularity (KO 5–8). Through Segelkrantz, then, Nabokov has adroitly manipulated Rimbaud’s prestige as an innovator: after creating a situation that suggests that

80

Toward France

Proust belongs on the same pinnacle, he then withdraws the aura of novelty from Rimbaud. The sleight of hand implies a dawning skepticism about the avant-garde, with its hunger for publicity and its haphazard experiments and provocations. But, through the parody of Proust’s style, a new respect is emerging for a modernist trend of single-minded dedication to masterworks that place unusual demands on the audience. Along these very lines, Hermann’s initial thoughts had focused on his dentist’s “grey hair and gestures of a master,” which he saw as signs of “an artistic attitude” beyond the comprehension of the profane (KO 147). In this confrontation with Rimbaud, Proust remains as the only genuine innovator; French modernism triumphs over the French avant-garde in Nabokov’s vision of modern literature. In Segelkrantz’s own writing, the modernist quest for an innovative masterwork coexists with an attitude of rigorous detachment from society. Thus Nabokov can introduce his character by remarking that he “was very solitary, loved his solitude, and was now working on something new” (KO 142). Here Segelkrantz raises the issue of aesthetic individualism, which he envisions as a discipline, a stern self-isolation in the cause of art that far transcends the poses of bohemian nonconformism. Such a sense of vocation again mimics Proust, who, once he conceived of the Recherche, dedicated the rest of his life to the project. But the hermetically sealed cork-lined room where he worked in the midst of Paris seems less extreme than Segelkrantz’s “solitude,” which entails virtual exile from Germany and the loss of ordinary daily contact with his native language. This sharper awareness of modernist separation from society obviously reflects Nabokov’s own experience of exile. Kamera Obskura will later distinguish Segelkrantz’s individualism from the blatant egoism of the cartoonist. After discovering the love triangle the connoisseur loses his eyesight in an auto accident; his supposed friend gains total control over him, coldly manipulates the helpless man, and rationalizes his behavior as brilliant artistic play. This stunning callousness recalls Proust’s disillusioned analyses of social cruelty; and when Segelkrantz eventually exposes the cartoonist’s sadistic tyranny, his behavior recalls Proust as well. At first, because he has only the vaguest suspicions to go on, he has trouble deciding to intervene; he suffers through agonies of hesitation, or what Nabokov calls “that convulsive fussiness which in him replaced decisiveness” (KO 178). This delay in recognizing and acting on one’s best intuitions corresponds to what Roger Shattuck has called the problem of “soul error” in Proust’s Marcel.9 Yet in the end both Marcel and Segelkrantz do act, and they act impressively. Aesthetic individualism in both writers can thus move from art to life, where it designates a moral process of self-definition that is as arduous and uncertain as artistic creativity. Segelkrantz’s act has also shown that his individualism, unlike the egoism of the cartoonist, does not violate the individuality of others. This behavior

Encountering French Modernism

81

bears out John Stuart Mill’s doctrine in On Liberty that full freedom can be exercised only in self-regarding acts, and thus supports Nabokov’s later assertion that his liberalism is “classical to the point of triteness” (SO 34). More important, Segelkrantz’s attitude reveals the difference between the emerging modernism portrayed here and the antiliberal syndrome diagnosed by Lionel Trilling. In 1946, when Trilling proposed his own list of modernist masters, which included “Proust, Joyce, Lawrence, Eliot, Yeats, Mann (in his creative work), Kafka, Rilke, Gide,” he was impressed above all by the fact “that to these writers the liberal ideology has been at best a matter of indifference.”10 But for Nabokov, though he agreed with Trilling’s ranking of Proust, aesthetic individualism implied sociopolitical attitudes that were very far from suggesting cold neutrality toward liberalism. The author of Kamera Obskura was passionately loyal to his father’s political principles, while Trilling’s formulation was probably influenced by Englishlanguage writers who meant nothing to Nabokov in the 1930s—by Lawrence, Eliot, and Yeats, and perhaps Pound as well. To be sure, Nabokov’s portrayal of Segelkrantz’s dedication to individuality does go beyond the Recherche in one important respect. Marcel’s ultimate triumph over procrastination occurred at the very end of the novel, when he finally committed himself to becoming a writer; it highlighted the crucial self-directed element in aesthetic individualism. But when Nabokov makes Segelkrantz realize that the connoisseur needs help, he places greater emphasis on sensitivity to others. This shift in priorities does not mean that Nabokov is downplaying a Proustian knowledge of the hard inner struggle needed to form an individual, but it does reflect a change in historical circumstances. Just as Nabokov’s experience of exile colors his treatment of the detached modern writer, so his encounters with a totalitarian contempt for individuality suggest why this novel of the 1930s should single out Segelkrantz’s decision to help the connoisseur. If the Dreyfus Affair appears in the background of the Recherche, Kamera Obskura includes brief vignettes of the early Nazi movement. By 1932, then, Nabokov was already starting to explore Proust’s significance as a self-consciously modern writer. The pastiche of his style in Kamera Obskura may be rather obvious, but it appears in a narrative setting where the oscillation between fiction and autobiography already suggests a more profound response. Even more impressive in the novel itself is Nabokov’s reworking of the Proustian drama of reinterpretation, which he treats with real insight into its relevance for an art of memory. Through Proust he also confronts the distinction between modernism and the avantgarde as two main kinds of modern literature and begins to ask what the French writer’s aesthetic individualism, formed in the relatively tolerant conditions of belle époque France, might mean for a Russian émigré writing in the 1930s. All of these initiatives are impressive, but right after the discussion of Rimbaud in Segelkrantz’s work-in-progress Nabokov goes still fur-

82

Toward France

ther. Briefly indicating the nature of his interest in Bergson, he then links Bergson with Proust and at this point finally confronts Proust’s most celebrated approach to memory. When interpreted with an eye to Nabokov’s evolving career, these allusions suggest a new awareness of what French modernism might mean for his art of memory, and particularly for the problem of the mnemonic image. 1 1 1 In this key passage Segelkrantz is still probing his hero’s consciousness. As Hermann continues to reflect on his toothache, he begins to realize that it obscurely points to something more basic, “something enduring, something involving the very essence of time, or rather it was connected with time, like the buzzing of flies in autumn, or the noise of an alarm clock which at one time Henrietta could neither find nor stop in the pitch dark of his student room” (KO 148). The concern shown here for philosophical and psychological nuance is unusual among the stark surfaces of Kamera Obskura. Hermann’s initial language is palpably Bergsonian, since the fleeting identification of time as “something enduring” recalls the philosopher’s master concept of duration, which did indeed try to capture the “essence of time” and which was as closely linked with his thought as “eternal return” was with Nietzsche’s. Even more striking, however, is the close association between this quasi-philosophical discourse and several highly specific images of time. Hermann’s ideas are direct responses to the peculiar significance he senses in the constant throbbing of his toothache. And soon he abandons his attempt to define “essences” and turns to figures of speech that take the indirect route of supplying verbal “connections.” Thus the buzzing flies and the sound of the alarm clock provide similes that seem to advance his thought, though there is a certain comic redundancy to choosing a clock as an image of time. Much later in his career Nabokov would elaborate on a similar shift from philosophical to literary discourse in part 4 of Ada, published in 1969 but discussed earlier in interviews. This thirty-page essay, which Nabokov has said was one of the most difficult things he ever set himself to write, aims to substantiate the hero Van Veen’s claims to be a philosopher; it thus has much the same function as the four cantos of “Pale Fire,” which prove that John Shade was indeed a poet. The essay consists of a rambling exploration of the “texture of time,” and mentions Bergson twice. But this casual display of philosophical knowledge is less important than Van’s first major point, that “time is a fluid medium for the culture of metaphors” (A 537). Here Van is suggesting that all discussions of time necessarily depend on imagery in the sense of figurative language. Yet such language fatally clouds the ideal transparency of abstract thought, so that when the essay closes with the

Encountering French Modernism

83

phrase “It is like—” (A 563), the brilliant suspension of the simile implies that ultimately it is impossible to avoid imagery in philosophical discourse. To end on this note is eminently Bergsonian, because Bergson was convinced that only metaphors and pointed illustrations were capable of explaining his key philosophical terms, among them time. Thus, in a famous passage from the Introduction to Metaphysics (1903), he could argue that philosophers should adopt a technique of overlapping images, because images “may, by the convergence of their action, direct consciousness” to fuller understanding than was possible with conceptual thought.11 This argument for an essentially literary element in all philosophy has gained a new currency with Derrida. Indeed, when Derrida maintains in Of Grammatology that “since there is no nonmetaphoric language to oppose to metaphors here, one must, as Bergson wished, multiply antagonistic metaphors,”12 he finds some merit in appealing to this otherwise unfashionable philosopher. Hermann’s dependence on similes as he thinks is thus just as Bergsonian as his fascination with defining the nature of time. But when he considers the alarm clock, his thought pivots abruptly and veers off in a more Proustian direction. For the ringing alarm is an image with two aspects. If it begins as a figure of speech that seems comically unsuited for broadening anyone’s understanding of time, it turns into a concrete sensory experience that, lodged in Hermann’s memory, recalls the long-ago episode of Henrietta in the dark room. This form of memory differs markedly from either Swann’s or the art connoisseur’s rereadings of the past in light of current disillusionment. As with Proust’s madeleine, where specific sense impressions evoked a past beyond Marcel’s preoccupations in the present, the alarm has triggered a fortuitous association that opens up an entirely different period in Hermann’s life, outside the charmed circle of his toothache. Nabokov’s treatment of this theme is admittedly sketchy, since he shows only the first fugitive revival of the distant past. But this tight bundle of allusions has countered the strident but finally fruitless quest for novelty just detected in Rimbaud. It suggests, instead, a more substantial project that, focusing on images as both metaphors and sense impressions, would call on Bergson as well as Proust to develop a new and more searching literature of time and memory. More detailed intertextual evidence of how Nabokov responded to Bergson in the 1930s is hard to find. Because neither his name nor his works appear as explicitly as Proust’s or Rimbaud’s, the best indications take the form of veiled allusions or unattributed echoes. It is during the 1930s, for example, that Nabokov starts to take an interest in portraying fictive philosophers who share key traits with Bergson. In 1934 he supplies Invitation to a Beheading with an invented epigraph by one Pierre Delalande, who resembles Bergson by being French and somewhat mystical and who, to judge from the title of his book Discours sur les ombres, is just as determined an

84

Toward France

anti-Cartesian. Delalande’s two most notable successors were Adam Krug and Van Veen, the philosophers Nabokov impersonates at greater length in Bend Sinister and Ada; both of them are also linked with Bergson. On the first occasion that Krug’s way of writing philosophy is directly mentioned, he is said to have used a memorable “simile of the snowball and the snowman’s broom” (BS 46); this example not only illustrates Bergson’s metaphorical method of exposition but comically elaborates on a passage in Creative Evolution that explained duration by comparing it to a snowball.13 As we have seen, the same issue of philosophical imagery is also central to Van Veen’s reflections on time, which also mention a series of lectures on Bergson (A 548). Further evidence of Nabokov’s interest in Bergson appears in two short stories written about the time of Kamera Obskura. Not only do the endings of both stories covertly echo the French modernist treatment of memory, but they also confirm an elusive implication of the Henrietta passage. For if her unexplained presence in Hermann’s dark room during his student days is meant to suggest adolescent love, then Segelkrantz’s work-in-progress has circled back to the first of Nabokov’s two master narratives of memory, the summer of love in Mary. This juxtaposition of Ganin’s and Hermann’s stories would also flag the intervening change in Nabokov’s cultural horizons, from the incipient Russian modernism of 1925 to a dawning interest in French modernism during the early 1930s. This supposition is borne out by “Reunion” (1931) and “The Circle” (1934), both of which draw much more explicitly and fully on the summer-of-love narrative in Mary as they build to a final revelation where Bergson blends with Proust. In “Reunion” two brothers separated by the Russian revolution meet in Berlin for the first time in over ten years. They have little in common, and their evening together goes very awkwardly until the sight of a picture on the wall reminds the elder, Soviet brother of a poodle that was owned by a woman he had admired one summer as an adolescent, during a family vacation in the country. United by this memory, the brothers try to recall the dog’s name, just as Nabokov himself will pretend to do with Colette’s dog Floss in chapter 7 of Speak, Memory. But though they experiment with various letters and syllables, they get nowhere. Only when the younger, émigré brother is alone does he feel a slight motion in his mind, which then hesitates but finally yields up “lightly, silently, mysteriously, the live corpuscle of a word” (Sog 141/DS 137–38). As the story ends, he wonders whether his older brother had also recalled this name, whose power to transcend time and the divisions of history had in some measure made up for their wretched evening together. This climactic recovery of the past seems to rework a Bergsonian discussion of how we remember proper names. We begin with the letters of the alphabet, then make groping efforts to say the name, and in the end feel the

Encountering French Modernism

85

emergence of the desired word, which “glides as if into a frame prepared to receive it.”14 Bergson uses this example, moreover, to clinch an argument against physiological doctrines of the mind, the very position that the more scientific elder brother takes when he insists that the poodle’s name must be inscribed in one of his brain cells. It is left to the more artistic younger brother to experience a true awakening of the past, which in its penultimate stage of struggle against the inertia of forgetfulness also suggests Proust’s dogged persistence in reviving a buried past. Thus the sense in Nabokov of “a hint of motion, as if something very small had awakened and begun to stir,” something “like a mouse emerging from a crack when the room is quiet” corresponds to Marcel’s experience right after he tastes the madeleine and still does not recognize his restored memories of Combray: “I feel something start within me, something that leaves its resting place and attempts to rise, something that has been embedded like an anchor at a great depth.”15 A story that mobilizes not only the master narrative of adolescent love from Mary but even such associated motifs as the picture that brings back the past or the postrevolutionary reunion in Berlin has ended by placing these familiar elements in a new, French cultural setting. At the end of “The Circle,” written several years after “Reunion” and closely linked with The Gift because it involves members of Fyodor’s family, the hero experiences a moment of ecstatic insight that seems to abolish the passage of time. To be sure, such knowledge is usually hidden from its possessors, for as he admits, these “stored-up secrets form in darkness and dust.” Still, far from sharing Ganin’s sense of the irrevocable disappearance of his past, Nabokov’s hero insists that “nothing is lost, nothing whatever; memory accumulates treasures” (VF 53/RB 268). Once again, the pretext for this revelation is a meeting, after many years of separation, with someone who brings back a summer of adolescent love. And, though the social classes of the lovers have been reversed, for now the girl’s family owns the country estate while the hero has the more ordinary background, they meet in the same northern Russian landscape evoked in Mary. As in “Reunion,” however, the cultural framework that dominates the hero’s climactic revelation is modernist and French. His basic insight into the permanence of the past seems to echo Bergson, who had similarly insisted on memory’s power to preserve everything, “all that we have felt, thought, desired since early childhood.” Also like Nabokov’s character, Bergson would stress how the details of our past experiences generally remain hidden even from ourselves. Despite a constant accumulation of new memories, which exist “pushed up against the present which is about to join the past, pressing against the doors of consciousness,” normally very little succeeds in crossing the threshold of awareness: “at most some deluxe memories succeed . . . in pushing through.”16 But when Nabokov’s hero goes on to compare the emergence of these treasured memories to “a book that

86

Toward France

has not once been asked for in twenty-two years” but is now requested by “a transient visitor at a lending library,” this element of absolute fortuitousness suggests the way Marcel’s involuntary memories first arrive in the Recherche. “The Circle” then justifies its title by having the story curl back to its beginning, thereby creating an impressively vivid sense of eternal return. But now this structural device does not evoke a Nietzschean metaphysics of repetition but simply the hero’s delight in recalling his summer of love again and yet again. The master narrative has thus undergone a cultural metamorphosis, with Nabokov’s closing allusions to Bergson and Proust establishing a French cultural framework to supplant the German one that had briefly surfaced in Mary. 1 1 1 In both Kamera Obskura and the two stories, Nabokov’s references to French modernism have moved almost indiscriminately between Bergson and Proust. Such an approach is debatable, since critics of the two French writers have differed on their degree of likeness, and even on whether the philosopher actually influenced the novelist. But Nabokov has made it clear that he saw them as practically identical. Years later in the 1950s, when lecturing on Swann’s Way to college students, he would begin with some short but highly suggestive remarks on the joint impact of Bergson and Proust. In his view the collaboration went back to Proust’s study of Bergson as a young man; eventually, through a smooth process of cultural diffusion, it would result in a shared philosophical, psychological, and aesthetic perspective. Nabokov’s attempt to describe this outlook will further illuminate his first contact with French modernism in the 1930s. Nabokov’s overly condensed prose can sometimes blur important transitions, but his main points are reasonably clear. He emphasizes what he calls Proust’s and Bergson’s “fundamental ideas regarding the flow of time,” and begins as he had in the Henrietta passage by mentioning the master concept of duration. This term he defines as the attempt to grasp “personality” in terms of “constant evolution,” a phrase that suggests Bergson’s book Creative Evolution. Nabokov goes on to indicate that French modernism sensed the inadequacy of “mere reason,” but he is much more interested in its fascination with the “act of intuition, of memory, of involuntary associations,” which is essential for recovering “the unsuspected riches of our subliminal minds” (LL 208). Involuntary association through the image of the ringing alarm clock had triggered Hermann’s memory of Henrietta, while “riches” echoes the treasure metaphor used to describe buried memories in “The Circle.” However, in the years after Kamera Obskura Nabokov will repeatedly distinguish his own highly conscious art of memory from the famous Proustian doctrine of involuntary memory. The reference to the

Encountering French Modernism

87

“rich” subliminal mind, which suggests an opposition between the self-enhancing memories proposed by French modernism and the pathogenic repressed past in psychoanalysis, probably reflects Nabokov’s more combative attitude toward Freud by the 1950s. Discussion then turns to Proust’s and Bergson’s conviction that “the genius of inner inspiration” and its expression in art were “the only reality in the world.” Awareness of one’s personal past is a supreme value because it enhances personality, yet such awareness is neither automatic nor self-evident. It depends upon a special ability to remember that is basically creative in operation and that manifests itself most fully in works of art. Time, memory, and literature have thus converged in what amounts to a brief manifesto for a Bergsonian and Proustian art of memory whose possibilities Nabokov first glimpsed two decades earlier. Having stressed these thematic parallels between his two French modernists, Nabokov would conclude with a snappy formula suggesting certain distinctions: “Proustian ideas are colored editions of the Bergsonian thought.” This statement, though it may reflect a more philosophical Nabokov in the 1950s, partially misrepresents the situation in the 1930s. It gives the impression that Proust is secondary to Bergson, but even in Kamera Obskura Nabokov’s response to the Recherche is so many-faceted that it is clear his art of memory gained more from the language and techniques of fiction than from any strictly philosophical argument. Hence, despite the forceful references here to “ideas” and “thought,” Nabokov initially recognized that the real center of gravity in French modernism lay elsewhere. Hermann had showed no such illusions about the transparency of philosophical language when he approached the essence of time through Bergsonian figures of speech. Later in the Proust lecture itself, Nabokov would linger over a suggestive passage in “Combray” where the young Marcel, already dimly aware of his future vocation as a writer, mistakenly identifies literature with a philosophical theme rather than with the concrete sensations to which he responds so strongly (LL 236–37). Thus the phrase “colored editions” in Nabokov’s aphorism on the French modernists is less misleading than his emphasis on general ideas. After all, the phrase is itself a somewhat pallid image, and in that capacity it does acknowledge the centrality of the image both in Proust and Bergson and in Nabokov’s own art of memory. It also reverses the apparent priority given to Bergson, who now becomes the precursor, in mere black and white, for Proust’s more vivid achievement. Most important of all, because “colored editions” is a metaphor for pictures, it captures the crucial duality of the image as a term that can mean both figure of speech and concrete sensuous detail. In Kamera Obskura, when Hermann’s thought pivoted on the ringing alarm clock in a passage suffused with motifs from French modernism, he had confronted that duality, and in the lecture Nabokov will conceptualize

88

Toward France

it when he tries to sum up Proust’s achievement. Using the words of a critic to draw conclusions he had reached long before in his own literary practice, Nabokov praised the Recherche from two separate perspectives, as “a sequence of illustrations, of images” and as “an extended comparison” that was essentially metaphorical (LL 208). After the vague imagism of Mary, this sharpened understanding of the image as both trope and sensation represents a decisive advance in Nabokov’s art of memory. He will pursue the creation of such “colored editions” of the past with a new urgency and precision in the years following Kamera Obskura. Nabokov’s special slant on French modernism will become even clearer once we consider Walter Benjamin’s reception of Bergson and Proust around the same time. As a Francophile German Benjamin oddly parallels Segelkrantz, while his additional interests in both Jewish mysticism and the Russian revolution suggest a wide-ranging cultural identity just as complex as that of Nabokov, who was seven years his junior. From 1929, when he welcomed the Recherche as “the outstanding literary achievement of our time,”17 to the late 1930s, when he returned to Bergson and Proust during his research on Baudelaire and nineteenth-century Paris, Benjamin’s outlook on the French modernists intersects with Nabokov’s in a revealing set of parallels and contrasts. Beyond sharing Nabokov’s sense of Proust’s primacy in early twentiethcentury literature, Benjamin agrees that Proust belongs with Bergson in proposing a view of time and memory whose natural form of expression can only be artistic. Bergson’s Matter and Memory, he remarks, “defines the nature of experience in the durée in such a way that the reader is bound to conclude that only a poet can be the adequate subject of such an experience.”18 Benjamin also shares Nabokov’s fascination with the ambiguous status of the Recherche, which surpasses the established genres by creating a structure “which is fiction, autobiography, and commentary in one.”19 This formula, which reflects Benjamin’s calling as a literary critic as well as his experience in writing autobiography, seems to envision a three-way oscillation of categories that would exceed the double movement of Nabokov’s art of memory. Especially striking, given the contrast between Nabokov’s disdain for social messages and Benjamin’s reputation as an innovative sociologist of literature, both writers take Proust seriously as a prophetic social analyst. Despite his seeming frivolity as a social climber in belle époque France, he saw that world in ways that were relevant for the crisis-laden Europe of the 1930s. Thus when Benjamin stresses Proust’s “merciless depiction” of Parisian high society, then suggests that his full social significance will become apparent only “in the final struggle,”20 his Marxist terminology conveys the same general insight as Kamera Obskura. For the atrocious cruelty of the cartoonist reveals Proust’s continued power as a social analyst in the era of an emerging Nazi Germany, though Nabokov parts with

Encountering French Modernism

89

Benjamin when he parries the cartoonist with Segelkrantz’s aesthetic individualism, which is just as Proustian as the novel’s vision of social cruelty but not at all Marxist. Alongside their convergences, however, Nabokov and Benjamin differ sharply on several issues. Because Benjamin responded more favorably to the avant-garde, and particularly to French surrealism, he could propose that in Proust “the true surrealist face of existence breaks through.”21 But when Kamera Obskura downplays Rimbaud in favor of Proust, Nabokov implicitly rejects any such effort to assimilate the modernist masters to the avant-garde; later in the 1930s, in “Spring in Fialta,” he will extend this attack to surrealism itself. Nabokov is also much less receptive to German and Austro-German thought than Benjamin; indeed, as his cultural identity develops from the mid-1920s to the early 1930s, Bergson and Proust function as polemical alternatives to Nietzsche, whom they replace, and then to Freud, whom they oppose. But Benjamin, though hardly an orthodox German theorist, does not hesitate to align the French modernists with Marxist or psychoanalytic discourse. Thus Proust’s awareness of the aesthetic aura, shown when Marcel’s grandmother gives him art reproductions from which she has tried to eliminate the mechanical element, can contribute to Benjamin’s extension of Marxist cultural theory in “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Mechanical Reproduction.”22 Similarly, the Baudelaire project can shift easily from Bergson to Freud as it assesses the implications of Proustian involuntary memory.23 But as heirs to French modernism, Benjamin and Nabokov diverge the most strikingly in their treatment of involuntary memory and the mnemonic image. For Benjamin as he moves from Bergson to Freud, involuntary memory is gradually displaced from its original French context, despite his trick of calling it “mémoire involontaire.” First it offers a standpoint for criticizing Bergson’s “mémoire pure,” which too readily equated memory with consciousness; but then it allows Benjamin to criticize Proust himself for “overemphasizing the inventory of the individual” and neglecting “material of the collective past.”24 When read in these ways, the madeleine episode suggests a Freudian or even a Jungian unconscious. Nor does Benjamin emphasize the mnemonic image, for when he distinguishes between two levels of involuntary memory, he insists that only a relatively superficial layer is concerned with “isolated, though enigmatically present, visual images.” At a deeper level, which can only be inferred in Proust, “the materials of memory no longer appear singly as images, but tell us about a whole, amorphously and formlessly.”25 Nothing could be further from Nabokov’s basic tendency as an artist of memory in the years after Kamera Obskura. For, once he explores the madeleine episode in more detail, he will show none of Benjamin’s interest in setting bounds to consciousness, or in subordinating one’s personal past to

90

Toward France

a collective one. Indeed, he will even sidestep Proust’s distinction between voluntary and involuntary memory. And, far from striving to capture an amorphous whole, he will give decisive priority to mnemonic images marked by vivid pictorial detail. So great are the differences between these responses to French modernism that it is hard to imagine the two writers even agreeing on the single most important passage in the madeleine episode. Benjamin, with his interest in the collective past, would probably have pointed to the introductory comment where Marcel likens his experience to ancient Celtic belief; but Nabokov would have chosen the narrator’s state of intense concentration afterwards, which reaffirms the value of consciousness and leads to a hallucinatory vision of Combray.26

CHAPTER

5

1

From the Personal to the Intertextual DOSTOEVSKY AND THE TWO-TIERED MNEMONIC SYSTEM IN DESPAIR (1932–1933)

NABOKOV WROTE Despair right after Kamera Obskura, at an interval so close that excerpts from the two books came out simultaneously in late 1932. But this novel, as if reacting against the stark externality of its predecessor, gives a much larger role to memory. As the story of a supposed “perfect crime,” told retrospectively by the murderer himself, Despair focuses almost entirely on the narrator Hermann as he writes down memories of the past year. Occasionally he quotes from letters, which offer a more objective view of certain situations, but only at the very end, when Hermann switches to a diary while awaiting capture, does he abandon the project of recalling the past. The emphasis on memory in this novel is thus even greater than in Mary, with its long flashbacks, or in The Defense, with its pattern of repetition beginning in chapter 5. The name of Nabokov’s narrator resonates with Segelkrantz’s Hermann, who does indeed foreshadow Despair’s treatment of memory. Though he is no self-deluded murderer and though his memories reach much further back in time, this earlier Hermann did experience the resurgence of a personal past that seemed to demand a similar effort of recovery. Even more striking, the parodic references to Rimbaud and Proust in the Segelkrantz episode receive a grandiose extension in Despair, which constantly plays with narrative conventions in general or with the situations and styles of specific authors. This broader engagement with previous literature gives the novel its special status as Nabokov’s first deployment of a two-tiered mnemonic system, in which a character’s recollections of a personal past coexist with intertextual reminiscences directed at the reader. Granted, from a cultural perspective Despair might seem a throwback. The French milieu that consorted so oddly with the German cast in the Segelkrantz episode now yields to a Russian orientation—the natural one for Nabokov’s émigré audience, which would of course relate the hero to Pushkin’s Hermann in “The Queen of Spades.” Yet the name, as it passes from a character invented by a Francophile German writer to this novel’s Russianized German hero, in no way signals a retreat from Europe. For

92

Toward France

paramount among the Russian references in Despair is a wide-ranging polemic with Dostoevsky, one of whose purposes is to dispute his international vogue as a model for modernist fiction, especially in France. Traces of this critique survive in Nabokov’s 1965 preface to the American version of the novel, which denies various European influences only to imply that the twentieth-century French enthusiasm for Dostoevsky might mislead readers: “I do know French and shall be interested to see if anyone calls my Hermann ‘the father of existentialism’” (Des 9). This sardonic remark only hints at Dostoevsky’s intricate role in Nabokov’s European career. To recover its full complexity, the present chapter will first reconstruct the basic framework for Nabokov’s polemic in Despair. Within a novel that consistently mobilizes both aspects of his art of memory, and also shows some consciousness of their interplay, the Dostoevsky parodies occupy a transitional area where personal memories shade over into intertextual ones. Turning then to Dostoevsky’s significance as an intertextual presence, we shall examine several crucial parodic passages that begin to reveal Nabokov’s rival slant as a modern novelist. In effect, Despair serves as a laboratory for critical positions that reappear in his Dostoevsky lectures of the 1950s; but though they emphasize the artistic failures of a generalizing, idea-oriented brand of fiction, they are not so uniformly negative as often thought. Nabokov greatly admired The Double, saw some merit in Notes from Underground and The Possessed, and reserved his harshest judgments for Crime and Punishment. Further insight into what these polemics mean for Nabokov’s fiction will come from a Russian contemporary who stayed in the Soviet Union. Though the cultural theorist Mikhail Bakhtin also singles out The Double in his approach to Dostoevsky, he ends up viewing modernist fiction as primarily ideological in nature, and not aesthetic as Nabokov would have it. 1 1 1 Throughout Despair, Nabokov repeatedly emphasizes this novel’s new, more intense concern with memory. His mouthpiece is Hermann, who as a neophyte author keeps interrupting the narrative to insist that he is inventing nothing; he is simply remembering his bungled attempt at a perfect crime. In a typical aside, he tries to excuse his inexperience as a storyteller by stating that “it is not I who am writing, but my memory, which has its own whims and rules” (O 51/Des 62). Eventually Hermann’s commentary on his creative process obliquely acknowledges that such a thing as an art of memory does exist. In chapter 10 of this eleven-chapter novel, Hermann believes that he has finished his manuscript. But then, in one of the book’s climactic moments,

From the Personal to the Intertextual

93

he rereads it only to discover a fatal error: he forgot to dispose of the victim’s incriminating walking stick, mentioned again and again in the text. He now realizes that he is bound to be arrested, but despite his stunned surprise Hermann can pause to wonder at the nature of writing, with its power to preserve even this minor item: “An artist’s memory—what a curious thing! Beats all other kinds, I imagine” (O 194/Des 213). Here Hermann briefly recognizes the existence of an art of memory that, his story suggests, is mainly devoted to retrieving concrete images from the past. For, though Hermann normally overlooks details, most notably when he mistakenly identifies his victim as his exact physical double, the walking stick stubbornly reasserts its existence once he becomes a writer. At the moment he recognizes his error, when he lingers in astonishment over this “roughly hewn stick branded with the owner’s name, Felix Wohlfahrt from Zwickau” (O 193/Des 212), his precision of language accomplishes a goal he previously thought impossible, to give words a pictorial energy that might rival “the plain, crude obviousness of the painter’s art” (O 19/Des 26). Hermann made this last statement when he despaired of convincing the reader that he and his double were look-alikes; but now, even as he confronts the failure of his original project, he ironically does create a mnemonic image. In the English version of Despair, where Hermann wonders on going back through his manuscript whether he “was reading written lines or seeing visions” (Des 212), the imagistic outcome of his inadvertent art of memory is even more explicit. Nabokov further emphasizes memory’s role in Hermann’s story by foregrounding an autobiographical point of view that shifts freely between the time of remembered events and the time of the remembering author. Hermann, it is true, seems to dismiss this method when he criticizes stories that, to avoid the convention that the narrator is “a kind of spirit, hovering over the page,” then follow the equally conventional notion that “while a man is writing, he is situated in some definite place” (O 43/Des 53). Nonetheless, his tale is full of reminders of his own situation as he writes. Despair even attains a striking circularity in this regard when Hermann’s memories eventually catch up with the time when he started writing. Thus chapter 10, by showing his dismay with the first newspaper accounts of his crime (O 187/Des 205), finally gives reasons for the “burning, itching sensation” he said affected him when he began writing (O 7/Des 14). Nabokov also draws on the potential for abrupt temporal leaps in autobiographical narrative. Since the recent past normally remains accessible to someone remembering a more distant past, Hermann’s “impatient memory” (O 37/Des 47) can anticipate later details on the basis of early situations. He sees little girls in one city who later, in another city, will help him mail a letter to his double; he spots a signpost on a summer outing that marks the site of the murder

94

Toward France

next winter; or he interrupts an early scene with his wife to describe a coffee grinder used the day before the murder.1 Beyond stressing personal memory as the basis for Hermann’s narrative, Nabokov suggests another, intertextual level of memory as early as the second page of Despair. As a Russianized German, Hermann informs us, he was interned for security reasons during World War I, in which period he read “exactly one thousand and eighteen books . . . kept count of them” (O 6/Des 14). As the novel progresses, his memories of these and other readings impinge on the “real world” depicted in his story. But for Hermann, who flatters himself that he is a genius, the idea that he may be imitating prior works is unacceptable. Even as a schoolboy he was so enamored with his originality that when asked to retell the classics, he would reverse the roles of the major characters (O 45/Des 56). Such a practice crudely resembles Nabokov’s own intertextual manipulations, but lacks their finesse and their guiding polemical motives. Indeed, a key issue raised by the parodies in Despair, yet one apt to be lost among the spoofs and squibs, involves Hermann’s inadequacies as an intertextualist. As a believer in free invention, he can never bring himself to see how conditioned his memories actually are; he is repeatedly confounded by uncanny interchanges between the lived and the read. The novel’s false ending is especially interesting in this regard. Obeying his characteristic spirit of reversal, when Hermann believes his tale is finished in chapter 10, he deliberately plays with conventions learned during his reading binge. Telling us that his wife has collected the insurance money from his supposed death and joined him in the south of France, Hermann closes by humorously recalling a portrait of himself mentioned in a previous chapter. After all, readers enjoy a send-off that recycles “an insignificant object which just flicked by in some earlier part of the novel” (O 172/Des 190). But then Hermann upsets the audience’s expectations: because the police did not accept the victim as his double, there was no insurance money and no southern idyll. Despite this show of ingenuity, however, the tables are turned on Hermann as soon as he rereads his manuscript. For there he finds an object just as insignificant as the portrait, yet pointedly relevant to his real story—the famous walking stick. By this point, originality has passed from Hermann to his author, who has manipulated a trite piece of fictional machinery in the interest of dramatizing the resurgence of a mnemonic image. Hermann’s intertextual trick on the reader has a validity he had not bargained for, tired novelistic conventions gain a fresh psychological relevance, and the reader passes abruptly from one level to the other in Nabokov’s art of memory, in this case from the already written to the personal. The 1,018 books Hermann read in internment suggest a broad range of intertextual references. But within this field Dostoevsky is primary, as sug-

From the Personal to the Intertextual

95

gested by Hermann’s efforts to give his manuscript a title just before his discovery of failure makes Despair the inevitable choice: “Assuredly I had at one time invented a title, something beginning with ‘Memoirs of a —’ of a what? I could not remember; and, anyway, ‘Memoirs’ seemed dreadfully dull and commonplace. What should I call my book then? ‘The Double’? But Russian literature possessed one already. ‘Crime and Pun’? Not bad—a little crude, though. ‘The Mirror’? ‘Portrait of the Artist in a Mirror’?” (O 192/Des 211). Despite the Russian allusions, the reference to Joyce’s Portrait suggests a continuing link with European modernism, which we shall explore further in the next section. But “Memoirs,” which translates the widely used Russian literary term zapiski in the original, sets the dominant cultural tone. For it evokes such classics as “Zapiski Sumasshedshego,” or Gogol’s “Diary of a Madman,” and Zapiski Okhotnika, or Turgenev’s Sportsman’s Sketches. And Hermann makes no fewer than four references to Dostoevsky, the author of Notes from the House of the Dead and Notes from Underground, both of which also used “Zapiski” in their titles, along with the more obvious Crime and Punishment (added in translation) and The Double. These last two titles, in particular, align Hermann’s story of murdering a supposed look-alike with earlier writing rather than with personal memories. But this alignment occurs at a parodic level accessible to the knowledgeable reader, not to Hermann. A few pages earlier, when the possibility that he bears “a grotesque resemblance to Rascalnikov” occurred to him (Nabokov introduced the pun in the American version), Hermann limited the comparison to a brief episode of nervous hysterics, then denied even that connection: “—No, that’s wrong. Canceled” (O 181/Des 199). Incapable of viewing his own past as anything but original, he barely acknowledges the prior existence of Dostoevsky’s titles, certainly not the texts. At least two of Hermann’s stories during the novel sum up his inability to recognize how much Dostoevsky has patterned his life. In chapters 4 and 5, when he describes meeting his victim in Tarnitz, he is haunted by an uncanny sense of repetition that reaches back to his internment (O 65/Des 77). As the episode unfolds, and Hermann likens these reminders of his past to the experience of reading passages “which smack revoltingly of plagiarism” (O 68/Des 80), the déjà vu of personal memory has begun to change to the “déjà lu” of intertextuality. Still later, when Hermann recounts a story he invented to entice his victim, he notices from his perspective as narrator how closely it follows Dostoevsky. He breaks off in bemusement: “Did it actually go on like this? Am I faithfully following the lead of my memory, or has perchance my pen mixed the steps and wantonly danced away? There is something a shade too literary about that talk of ours, smacking of thumbscrew conversations in those stage taverns where Dostoevski is at home” (O 85/Des 98). Though admitting an interchange between personal and literary

96

Toward France

memories, Hermann limits it to the time of writing, implying that the actual conversation in Tarnitz could not have imitated Dostoevsky. Or so he would have the reader believe. This alibi, however, does not apply to a second story. In chapter 8, Hermann prepares his wife for news of his death by inventing an equally Dostoevskian cover story for the murder, then dismisses her comment that the whole situation sounds like something in a novel (O 136/Des 152). Yet just before his arrest, when Lydia’s cousin Ardalion writes him to denounce the entire plot, he singles out this conversation in accusing Hermann of having filled her head with “dark Dostoevskian stuff” (O 196/Des 215). If this letter is more trustworthy than Hermann’s direct narrative, then Hermann does not simply imitate Dostoevsky while writing in the present. He was already obsessed with him in the past, not only when telling this story to his wife but even earlier when he devised his scheme—when like Golyadkin in The Double he discovered a person mirroring himself and like Raskolnikov planned the perfect murder. Within the framework established by Despair, therefore, Hermann assumes his strikingly parodic persona through a specific inflection in Nabokov’s two-tiered art of memory. An intertextual self, drawn mainly from Dostoevsky, usurps his life to such an extent that any genuinely personal element threatens to vanish entirely. Nabokov’s urge in Despair to systemize the mnemonic is so powerful that it colors two situations that, though presented as vivid events in Hermann’s life, comment obliquely on the intertextual as a second level of memory. In one, during Hermann’s encounter with Felix in Tarnitz, he dreams of a loathsome dog molded out of congealed grease (O 106–7/Des 94–95); he repeatedly wakens from the nightmare only to see the dog again, until finally he wakes up for good. This powerful scene gives a special mnemonic twist to the Nabokovian motif of “worlds in regression,” as D. Barton Johnson has called it, the sense of ultimate reality receding from character to author and then beyond. For in this case the nightmarish sense of worlds within worlds corresponds to Hermann’s entrapment in what he has read, to his existence within a confused, secondhand realm of unmastered intertextual memories that permit no sure access to reality. As the novel develops, it makes no difference that Hermann awakens from his dream in this scene, and regains control over himself; for his decision to give up the plan of murdering his double is only temporary. Even at the end, when his forlorn question, “What on earth have I done?” (O 201/Des 220), suggests some moral awareness, his moment of insight does not prevail. When we last see Hermann, he is invoking a medium that outdoes books as a vehicle of collective illusion: in the hope of evading the police, he tells bystanders they are extras in a movie who must help him, the star in a chase scene, to make his escape. Hermann’s very idea that Felix is his double makes a second oblique comment on intertextuality. During their first meeting just outside Prague, Her-

From the Personal to the Intertextual

97

mann’s amazement at their resemblance gave way to a moment of uneasiness. Shaken in his self-confident sense of originality, he imagined that Felix must feel a certain superiority, “as if I were the mimic and he the model” (O 15/Des 22). This model-mimic relation is spurious, of course, in the case of characters who scarcely resemble each other, but it does apply to the intertextual level in Nabokov’s art of memory. For, despite Hermann’s mistaken idea that Felix is his double, he is right to think of mimicry—but his model is not a person but a book, Dostoevsky’s The Double, whose hero Golyadkin similarly projects an exact copy of himself onto his surroundings. Somewhat later, in chapter 4, a vivid image suggests Hermann’s state of mind: he sees a falling leaf meet its reflection in the water, and is reassured that Felix must be his physical double (O 59/Des 72). But this image also has a second logic that reflects back on the ongoing systemization of Nabokov’s art of memory. For the image eventually reappears in his autobiography, a book devoted explicitly to memory, in the form of a petal falling into a river. In this new context it suggests, not the resemblance between two people, but “the magic precision of a poet’s word meeting halfway his, or a reader’s, faithful recollection” (SM 271). Viewed in retrospect by the author, Hermann’s experience has turned into a telling emblem of Nabokov’s two-tiered art of memory. If the poet’s recollection (like Hermann’s) is personal, the reader’s is intertextual, as this very image demonstrates once we recognize the link between the moment of mnemonic self-consciousness in Speak, Memory and its more oblique expression in Despair. 1 1 1 If Dostoevsky already contributes to Nabokov’s systemization of his two-tiered art of memory in Despair, his role as the novel’s chief parodic target is even more striking. Nabokov’s notorious dislike for this Russian classic is hardly absolute, and even as he attacks many of his best-known works, he uses methods that show his admiration for Dostoevsky’s early and somewhat underrated novella The Double. For as Nabokov knew very well, this work had itself followed a similar parodic strategy toward one of its Russian predecessors: The Double, like Dostoevsky’s first novel Poor Folk, was in part conceived as a takeoff on Nikolai Gogol. Even contemporary critics had noticed its intertextual links with stories like “The Nose” and “Diary of a Madman,” but among the Russian formalists who were active when Nabokov started out, the young Dostoevsky’s act of recoiling from Gogol led far beyond a traditional study of sources or parallels. Thus Yuri Tynianov, in a major essay called “Dostoevsky and Gogol: Toward a Theory of Parody” (1921), treated The Double as a prime example of the zig-zag course of literary history, where each generation turns against the one that came before. Later in the 1920s other formalists like Vinogradov and Bem

98

Toward France

would offer more detailed readings of stylistic and polemical issues in Dostoevsky’s turn against Gogol.2 Nabokov’s general awareness of this critical tradition informs Hermann’s list of possible titles cited above. By beginning with “Memoirs of a—,” he evokes “Diary of a Madman” before he turns to The Double, in effect retracing the young Dostoevsky’s reaction against Gogol. The next suggestion, which Nabokov added in the American version, is the more polemical Crime and Pun, where parodic play with an earlier work and Hermann’s sense of Felix as a visual pun on himself still recall The Double. But this title, by pointing up the parallels between Hermann’s murder plot and Raskolnikov’s, also gestures toward the more famous Dostoevsky of the major novels, the main target of Nabokov’s polemics. By turning The Double’s antiGogolian technique of parody against its own inventor, Despair embodies the full complexity of Nabokov’s attitude toward Dostoevsky, which tempers general hostility with a dash of admiration. That admiration survived into the 1950s, when Nabokov discussed Dostoevsky in his Cornell lectures on Russian literature. The Double, he told students, was “the very best thing he ever wrote,” a judgment he admits goes against the prevailing critical response to Dostoevsky, which saw him as a great prophet and presumably found little to satisfy that view in this early novella.3 Nabokov should not be suspected of deviously picking The Double to insinuate that Dostoevsky had one modest success before plunging downhill. Rather, he considers this book to be a masterpiece unrecognized in its own time and a precursor of the modernist fiction Nabokov wants to write. Thus he cites the critic Mirsky’s opinion that The Double deserves comparison with Joyce; he even brings himself to call it “a perfect work of art.” What impresses Nabokov is Dostoevsky’s skill as an intertextualist, his “imitation of Gogol” that is “so striking as to seem at times almost a parody.” These last words, so muted beside Tynianov’s praise for a parodic masterpiece, probably reflect Nabokov’s even greater respect for Joyce. For if he discounted the mythical method in Ulysses, he had no doubts about Joyce’s dexterity with “the prism of parody” (LL 289), most of all in the “Nausikaa” episode which “manages to build up something real—pathos, pity, compassion—out of the dead formulas he parodies” (LL 347). Compared to the performance that inspired this eloquent defense of parody, The Double might well seem a hesitant precursor. In Despair, when Hermann’s list of titles jumps from Dostoevsky to the Joycean “Portrait of the Artist in a Mirror,” Nabokov had already proposed a similar ranking. Given this novel’s emphasis on intertextuality, the mirror does not just refer to Hermann’s and Felix’s supposed resemblance; it is an inverted metaphor for the parodies that actually take place, which depend upon creative distortion rather than faithful reflection. In a process that reverses Despair as it

From the Personal to the Intertextual

99

twists themes and situations from other authors, Hermann’s imagined identity with his double reworks an original text that is Felix himself in his irreducible difference. Nabokov would wittily underline Joyce’s importance in the American version by calling Hermann’s car an Icarus, reminding the reader of Stephen Dedalus’s much more solid artistic abilities. A further implication would be that Hermann’s model, Dostoevsky, is a relative novice in intertextuality compared to the old master Joyce. Apart from The Double, however, Nabokov regarded Dostoevsky as a mediocrity, and Despair teems with disparaging references to him and his work. Thus Hermann can equate him with mystery writers like Conan Doyle, Leblanc, and Wallace (O 117/Des 132), or can call him “our national expert in soul ague and the aberrations of human self respect” (O 86/Des 98). Even Hermann’s trip to Tarnitz to meet Felix evokes a grotesque allusion to Dostoevsky’s favorite example of artistic sublimity, the Sistine Madonna in nearby Dresden (O 62/Des 75). The corresponding parodies are so numerous that discussion must be limited to three examples that suggest major distinctions among Dostoevsky’s mature works as well as the basic motives for Nabokov’s attack. Despair opens with a takeoff on Notes from Underground that focuses on style rather than thought, leads up to a complex reworking of Shatov’s murder in The Possessed, and draws its basic situation from a polemic with Raskolnikov’s theory in Crime and Punishment. Several of these creative parodies acknowledge Dostoevsky’s power, but guiding them all is Nabokov’s preference for what he would call an aesthetic rather than an idea-oriented conception of modernist fiction. In this scheme of things, the aesthetic should not be confused with a narrow art for art’s sake; instead, it refers to an array of values that Nabokov associates with art, such as creativity, individuality and specificity, and even moral sensitivity.4 Despair begins with Hermann’s spasmodic attempts to launch his story. We first read a paragraph of contrary-to-fact statements affirming the author’s genius, then a bus-catching metaphor that is polished yet conveys self-doubt, and finally a trite autobiographical sketch that harks back to Hermann’s parents. Like the first part of Notes from Underground, Nabokov has devised a disorienting first-person monologue, at once self-contradictory and self-undermining. At the same time, he has Hermann echo specific quirks in the underground man’s opening tirade, most notably the continual asides to an imaginary audience and the vertigo-inducing admission that the narrator delights in lying. Yet Nabokov’s basic purpose differs from Dostoevsky’s. For if the underground man’s twists and turns offered an intuitive protest against nineteenth-century determinism, Hermann is clearly not interested in philosophical issues. He cancels the hypothetical first paragraph because it was too abstract and given to logic-chopping, while his obsessive use of terms

100

Toward France

like “power to write,” “marvellous ability,” “gift,” and “creative faculty” suggest that he is concerned above all with artistic creativity. Hence his lie contrasts sharply with the one in Dostoevsky. When Hermann remembers his mother as a “languid lady in lilac silks,” he tells us the image typifies his “inspired” talent for lying; but when we learn that it was pirated from the labels on the chocolate he sells for a living, his vaunted originality turns out to be quite stale, a mere openness to intertextual suggestion. By contrast, when the underground man begins by announcing that he is a spiteful man, then confesses that he was lying, only to end by commenting that “I was lying from spite,” his gyrations combine a philosophical and a psychological point. Not only do they show his struggle to avoid hard-and-fast categories, but they also suggest an elusive, many-layered inner life where spite can be false in one sense only to be true in another. Thus, though Nabokov’s parody pays tribute to the underground man’s unique style, it avoids the specific issues Dostoevsky raises by focusing on creativity rather than psychology and philosophy. Nabokov would follow a similar approach in his lectures on Notes. Focusing on Dostoevsky’s narrative style while discounting his ideas, he insisted that “manner, not matter” made the novella so striking. And when he criticized the underground man for not basing his rebellion upon “a creative impulse,” he explicitly invoked creativity as the decisive term in his polemic.5 To the natural objection that this point seems forced, that the creative cannot be separated from philosophical and psychological issues, Nabokov’s lecture has no clear answer. But when he developed these attitudes in Despair, a crucial parody of The Possessed directed attention to his radical distrust of generalizations. The best art strives to be faithful to immediate sense impressions, Nabokov holds; and this stubborn concreteness opposes Dostoevsky’s issue-oriented fiction, whose relative abstraction undermines true creativity. In assuming that the aesthetic depends upon specifics while ideas involve broad generalities, Nabokov does not consider whether Dostoevsky’s skill in dramatizing wide-ranging intellectual problems might itself be an impressive achievement. He defines artistic creativity quite simply as the capacity to individualize. In charging Dostoevsky with abstraction, Nabokov turns to an issue that is secondary in much fiction but central for his art of memory, the failure to create compact but vividly individualized images. When Fyodor and Koncheyev discuss Russian literature in The Gift, they claim to remember only one detail from Brothers Karamazov, “a circular mark left by a wet wine glass on an outdoor table” (Dar 84/G 84–85). Along the same lines, Nabokov’s lectures would stress how “the natural background and all things relevant to the perception of the senses hardly exist” in Dostoevsky’s fiction (LRL 104). The Possessed was a partial exception, for Koncheyev ranks this novel with The Double (Dar 382/G 353) while Nabokov admires the gloomy grandeur

From the Personal to the Intertextual

101

of its landscapes (LRL 128–29). The park on the Stavrogin estate is particularly impressive, with its twilit pines, its chilly solitude, its abandoned grotto, and its nearby lake. Here is where Peter Verkhovensky murders Shatov; as a barbed acknowledgment that Dostoevsky created at least one memorable image, Nabokov draws on this scene when Hermann shoots Felix in Despair.6 This climactic moment meant a lot to Nabokov, who tells readers in the preface to watch for “the final scene with Felix in the wintry woods” (Des 9). The chapter also appeared, with his endorsement, in Page Stegner’s Portable Nabokov as one of three excerpts worth reprinting from his Russian novels. But to read it in isolation spoils the intertextual resonance set up much earlier in the novel. In chapter 2, when Hermann first visits the site of the murder, an undeveloped lot at a failed summer colony, he feels an obscure sense of recognition (O 35/Des 45). Though in retrospect this feeling seems to warn of events to come, it could come just as well from vague memories of Dostoevsky. For the solitude, the pine trees, and the nearby lake all recall the scene in The Possessed, and when Nabokov describes the murder itself, he includes other key details like the gathering darkness and the dominant sensation of cold. Moreover, by making the place a Depression-era remnant of a middle-class resort, he devises an ingenious contemporary equivalent for Dostoevsky’s run-down grotto on an aristocratic estate. Yet despite his admiration for the scene, Nabokov cannot resist sharpening several details. Where Dostoevsky’s pine trees were “vague sombre blurs,” Hermann’s earlier, daytime visit to the site resulted in a vignette of “bark resembling reddish snakeskin drawn on tight” (O 36/Des 46). Or the bare comment from Dostoevsky’s narrator that the evening was chilly gives way to Hermann shaving Felix with lather made from melting snow. Even this tribute to one of Dostoevsky’s most memorable images ends by confirming Nabokov’s case against him as an inveterate generalizer. 1 1 1 Nabokov’s reworking of The Possessed is two-sided, for beyond highlighting the specificity and sensory immediacy of the image, it brings out moral issues that help explain his harsh attacks on Crime and Punishment. In depicting Felix’s and Shatov’s deaths, he and Dostoevsky both take pains to avoid a conventional or merely summary account that would lessen their impact. Rather, the bleak and gloomy setting prepares for the murders themselves, whose repellent inhumanity suggests that Nabokov and Dostoevsky are writing out of their own moral shock as sons of murdered men. Thus both killings are undertaken in cold blood, and give maximum advantage to the killer. Three of Peter’s fellow conspirators surprise Shatov and hold him down to be shot, while Hermann coolly asks Felix to turn around

102

Toward France

so he can gun him down from the back. Thus, too, both killings involve the deliberate repression of moral qualms, which Dostoevsky dramatizes by having Peter overrule Virginsky’s protests and which Nabokov reveals in Hermann’s ambivalence toward Felix’s dead body. When he writes, “I could not say who had been killed, I or he” (O 164/Des 182), he is ostensibly confirming that Felix was indeed his double, but his words also show an awareness of his own degradation. In imitating The Possessed, Nabokov may secondguess Dostoevsky’s images, but he basically reaffirms his moral attitude toward the appalling events. Similar issues in Crime and Punishment, however, provoked his vehement objections, and his lectures tell of his disenchantment with this novel. After finding it “wonderfully powerful” as a boy, he lost interest in later readings, one of which occurred as preparation for “discussing Dostoevski in one of my own books,” presumably Despair.7 But only when teaching Crime and Punishment did Nabokov pinpoint its fatal flaw, which “for sheer stupidity has hardly the equal in world-famous literature.” The problem surfaces when Sonya Marmeladov reads the Bible to Raskolnikov; Nabokov points out language that suggests that her sin of prostitution is comparable to his, objecting that such an equation “between a filthy murderer and this unfortunate girl” is morally obtuse as well as artistically slipshod. Dostoevsky’s error reveals his weakness for the clichés of Gothic and sentimental fiction, Nabokov contends; but his harshness in attacking this failure to know better about murder should probably also be ascribed to the trauma of his father’s assassination.8 Nabokov condemns Crime and Punishment, accordingly, by standards from both levels in his art of memory: not only does the novel betray the parodic brilliance of The Double with this crucial fragment of unmastered intertextuality, but it also falsifies the author’s painful personal experience. When he wrote Despair, of course, Nabokov had not yet discovered this particular touchstone for judging Crime and Punishment. But he had already assembled the materials for a searching critique, since, as Sergei Davydov has shown, the two novels have many thematic and structural parallels.9 Only the most notable thematic parallel will concern us here, the one that helps shape the basic donnée of Despair, the rationalization of murder as a creative act. With this radical perversion of Nabokov’s own belief in art as an agent of moral sensitivity, the novel emulates Kamera Obskura and once again places its readers in a world turned upside down. For Hermann, who develops this parallel in his contrary-to-fact first paragraph, Felix’s death is no mere crime but an audacious work of art, well worth an analogy that links “the breaker of the law which makes such a fuss over a little spilled blood, with a poet or stage performer.” This kind of thinking recalls Raskolnikov’s famous article on homicide, which proposed that murder was permitted for a small elite of extraordinary individuals. Raskolnikov’s theory preceded his

From the Personal to the Intertextual

103

crime, while Hermann’s self-justification comes after the fact. But both characters see themselves as exceptionally talented, and are drawn to murder as the best way to reveal their talent. In his parodic use of this theory, as later in lecturing on Sonya’s meeting with Raskolnikov, Nabokov criticizes Dostoevsky for broad generalizations that fail to preserve needed distinctions. Raskolnikov’s article depended upon hasty reasoning, for if it began by praising Kepler and Newton as creative “lawbreakers,” it then extended the analogy to Napoleonic leaders who had no qualms about acting ruthlessly. By this route Raskolnikov ended up holding that certain exceptional people could commit murder. He is probably deranged when he develops these ideas, yet Dostoevsky never makes it clear that his character, and not Kepler or Newton, is responsible for the idea that great scientific discoveries can authorize gratuitous acts of murder. He leaves the reader with a lingering sense of something tainted in these breakthrough moments for Western modernity. Nabokov, by contrast, is careful to stress contradictions in Hermann’s creative process, first by having him show so little talent when he starts his book, then by having his bravado crack to reveal another, very different state of mind. This occurs when Hermann mentions that inner sense of burning and itching that plagues him while he is writing chapter 1; the moment’s significance as the foundation for his entire narrative is reinforced when the novel catches up with its own beginning in chapter 10, and the same sensation is again described. By having him exclaim on its first appearance, “No, these are not the throes of creation . . . but something quite different” (O 8/Des 15), Nabokov carefully distinguishes Hermann’s deluded sense of genius from real creativity. No such clarity appears in Dostoevsky when he links Raskolnikov with the scientific revolution. Nabokov’s lecture on Crime and Punishment confirms the importance of this polemic. For when he discusses the theory of justified homicide, he singles out “the fast transition” from Newton to Napoleon, which he insists is “worth a more detailed psychological analysis than Dostoevski, in his hurry, can afford to make” (LRL 114). As this formulation shows, Nabokov remains concerned with the lack of specific details in Dostoevsky, caused here by the very rapidity of the references to Newton and Napoleon. But he is mainly appalled by a speculative brand of thinking that, posing as psychology, can equate innovative rule-breaking in science with deliberate murder. If, on its way to a pretended abstract truth, Raskolnikov’s theory lurches recklessly among loose assertions that even Dostoevsky fails to disentangle, for Nabokov (who was an entomologist as well as the author of Despair) crime could never be a valid analogue for either scientific or artistic creativity. As a result, despite the powerful impression that this scene can make on readers, it is basically ideological in a bad sense. Raskolnikov’s theory wakens misplaced doubts about scientific discovery and the creative process in gen-

104

Toward France

eral, and it does so by handling ideas with a carelessness and bias that undermine the moral subtlety required of great art. And, since the ideas in question take their point of departure in an originary moment for Western conceptions of creativity, this scene in Crime and Punishment contrasts tellingly with Nabokov’s aims for modern fiction, which would replace ideology with such “aesthetic” values as individuality, creativity, and sensitivity. 1 1 1 The importance of these issues makes it clear that the parodies in Despair involve more than a local quarrel between Russian writers. But in Nabokov’s cultural biography, his attack on Dostoevsky has another, more specifically European dimension. Not only is this rejection of a Russian classic intertwined with Kamera Obskura and its growing interest in French modernism, but Dostoevsky had himself become an international figure widely followed by twentieth-century novelists. These two factors come together in Nabokov’s strongly worded rejections of fiction by Malraux, Camus, and Sartre. None of these figures was exclusively or even primarily a novelist; but all of them made their names or got their starts in the 1930s, and in that sense were Nabokov’s contemporaries when he encountered the French modernism of Proust and Bergson. And yet, with a French “Slavophilia” that ironically reversed his own Russian “Gallicanism,” they preferred to follow Dostoevsky’s example. In the 1940s and after, when they had become famous as “existentialist” authors, Nabokov looked back at their work and realized how much their program for fiction diverged from his own. It reveals Despair’s importance as a turning point in his movement toward France that Nabokov should criticize Malraux, Camus, and Sartre by linking them with Dostoevsky and judging them by criteria developed in this polemical parody of the early 1930s. In the mid-1940s, when he read Malraux at the urging of Edmund Wilson, Nabokov wrote a letter detailing his objections to La Condition humaine. A major target is the Russian character Katov, one of the novel’s two revolutionary heroes. By suggesting that his name unwittingly fuses Kaliaev, a real-life terrorist in 1905, with Dostoevsky’s victim Shatov, modeled on the Nechaev Affair of 1869, Nabokov turns Malraux’s exemplary hero into an unintended allusion to the prehistory of Bolshevik terrorism (NWL 176). This exercise in literary onomastics conflates several aspects of Nabokov’s response to Dostoevsky. Offsetting his admiration for the murder scene in The Possessed is the insinuation that Malraux is a hasty writer who shares Dostoevsky’s weakness for unmastered intertextuality and for dramatic generalizations that sidestep essential distinctions. Camus, in contrast, never gets criticized so closely, but the 1967 Speak, Memory includes the episodic vignette of a “sturdy Swiss hiker with Camus in his rucksack”

From the Personal to the Intertextual

105

(SM 129). This young man failed to notice a brilliant swarm of butterflies that crossed his path, and since Nabokov sees butterflies as nature’s counterpart for the compactness and vivid individuality of mnemonic images (see later, p. 183), the vignette aligns Camus with his hero Dostoevsky as a writer blind to specific details. But Nabokov’s sharpest criticisms are reserved for Sartre, who reviewed a translation of Despair in 1939 and, understanding only the most obvious parodies, dismissed its author as overly dependent on Dostoevsky.10 When Nabokov got a chance to review the English translation of Nausea, he responded by calling it a derivative of “Dostoevski at his worst” (SO 229). His two criteria are excessive generalization and fuzziness of imagery. To the extent that the novel takes place at “a purely mental level” that expresses its author’s “idle and arbitrary philosophic fancy” (SO 230), it recalls the underground man’s empty pretentiousness as a thinker. But Sartre’s “tenselooking but really very loose type of writing” (SO 229) does not match Dostoevsky’s stylistic originality at its best; in thus preferring matter to manner, Nausea is the negative counterpart to Nabokov’s parodic treatment of Notes from Underground. Moreover, in the scene where the hero Roquentin listens to a record of “One of These Days,” a barrage of cultural clichés defuses an intended moment of imagistic intensity, leaving only “an equivocal flash of clairvoyance” (SO 229).11 Given these critiques of Sartre and the others, Nabokov himself could easily agree with the idea that Dostoevsky was the father of French existential fiction. To see Despair in the same terms, however, as he ironically suggests in his preface to the novel, would obliterate the intricate pattern of Franco-Russian interchange he had experienced in the 1930s. At the very time his French contemporaries embraced Dostoevsky as the model for a modern fiction of ideas,12 Nabokov was attacking him in the interests of a Proustian art of memory that, we shall see, looked back to Dostoevsky’s own French contemporaries, Baudelaire and Flaubert. Image, parody, and general ideas—these are the three foci of Nabokov’s Dostoevsky polemic in Despair. Within his ongoing effort to extend his art of memory, each of these issues also bears directly on his own career. Thus Dostoevsky’s normal unwillingness to create vividly specific images must have blinded Nabokov to that growing interest in memory which, Robert Belknap contends, animates Dostoevsky’s later work.13 In particular, the key role in Brothers Karamazov of picture-like recollections of early childhood would mean little for Nabokov’s art of memory, where discussion of such issues counted less than the actual memories rendered in hallucinatory detail. On the other hand, despite later tendencies to fall into cliché, the young Dostoevsky was a parodist of genius. In this role he could easily serve as a model for the second, reader-oriented level in Nabokov’s art of memory; and this side of Dostoevsky’s fiction, though less important within modernism than Joycean intertextuality, clearly outweighed Ulysses as a model for

106

Toward France

the two-tiered mnemonic system in Despair. Despite The Double, however, Dostoevsky was best known as a novelist of ideas, and the problem of general ideas, particularly as posed by the major fiction, leads to the heart of Nabokov’s resistance. Because such ideas were abstract, they threatened the specificity of personal memories; because they often took the form of ideologies that appealed to social groups, they threatened the individuality of those memories. For Nabokov, as a result, Dostoevsky’s burning interest in general ideas is the reverse side of his neglect for the singularity and concreteness of true images. 1 1 1 Nabokov’s position on Dostoevsky contrasts sharply with Bakhtin’s Problems in Dostoevsky’s Poetics, originally published just a few years before Despair, though neither author seemed aware of the other’s work. Bakhtin’s point of departure is the same, for he agrees with Nabokov that The Double is a crucial work, and not the youthful mistake it is often taken to be. But he then argues that it offers the key to Dostoevsky’s major fiction, rather than being a brilliant exception, and so he does not split the “good” parodist off from the “bad” ideologist. Bakhtin thereby highlights the special strengths and limitations of Nabokov’s second, intertextual level of memory. Born just four years before Nabokov, Bakhtin also came of age during the futurist and formalist challenges to Russian symbolism, in the years of war and revolution from 1914 to 1925. But because he stayed in the Soviet Union, he lacks Nabokov’s wide and detailed knowledge of European modernism. Even the revised 1963 version of Dostoevsky’s Poetics adds only a few hasty references to Thomas Mann, and though Bakhtin does address the Dostoevsky-Flaubert contrast, he does so at second hand, by citing a congenially worded attack on the “epopée of the Flaubert school, cut from a single piece, polished and monolithic.”14 “Single” and “monolithic,” of course, are terms that contrast with Bakhtinian polyphony, which postulates a breakthrough into modernity on a far grander temporal scale than Nabokov’s century-long European perspective. For Bakhtin, Dostoevsky is more than a precursor of Joyce; he is hailed as the inventor of the polyphonic novel, a new kind of writing that, anticipated by various tendencies among the ancients, had vindicated the give-and-take of prose fiction over the traditional classical genres and thus decisively reshaped literature. Like Nabokov, Bakhtin discusses Dostoevsky in the wake of formalist study of his intertextual link with Gogol. Thus he begins his discussion of The Double by offering yet another interpretation of this striking moment of recoil from a literary predecessor. Focusing on narrator-character relations, Bakhtin is expounding the master concept in Dostoevsky’s Poetics, the dialogical principle that, when fully realized by Dostoevsky, resulted in the

From the Personal to the Intertextual

107

polyphonic novel. In this light The Double marks the point where true dialogism emerges from Gogol’s monologically conceived fiction; it is here, Bakhtin argues, that the young Dostoevsky transformed earlier fiction, carrying out “a small-scale Copernican revolution when he took what had been a firm and finalizing authorial definition and turned it into an aspect of the hero’s self-definition.”15 But only in the fifth and final chapter of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, on discourse and the metalinguistic approach to literature, does Bakhtin discuss The Double in depth. Making high claims for its priority in Dostoevsky’s career, and thus for its role in literary history, he holds that dialogism appears in this novella “with a sharpness and clarity not found in any other work of Dostoevsky’s.”16 Here Bakhtin’s master concept reveals itself with “extraordinary boldness and consistency, carried to their conceptual limits.” It is clear that Dostoevsky’s parodic polemic with a predecessor fascinated Bakhtin as he formulated a major theoretical principle in the late 1920s just as much as it would engage Nabokov when he systematized his art of memory in the early 1930s. But as Bakhtin continues his fifth chapter, he tends to downplay the double-voiced dialogue of parody in favor of interacting voices within the novella. He begins with the hero Golyadkin’s split personality, which, he argues, generates an inner dialogue that oscillates between extreme self-effacement and exaggerated boldness. Then, when Golyadkin’s double appears as a separate character, this dialogue becomes delusional, with the double’s hyperbolic self-assertiveness balancing the original Golyadkin’s timidity. Later in the story, this split spreads to the narrator, whose condescending, even jeering tone toward the hero mimics the attitude of the double. By this point, Nabokov might object that the analysis had caved in to Dostoevsky’s obsession with “aberrations of human self respect.” But from the perspective of Bakhtinian dialogism, the Gogol parody in The Double was just one strand in a much broader, many-layered interaction with what he calls “the word of another.” Hence, when Bakhtin charts the linguistic and literary situations where such interaction takes place,17 he simply includes parody as one item among issues ranging from the style of single words to broad questions of irony and point of view. The dialogical principle is thus a synthetic concept that cannot be limited to intertextuality. In fact, although Julia Kristeva coined this last term while reviewing Bakhtin, his book spends relatively little time on how The Double illustrates the classic intertextual point that “every text is built as a mosaic of citations, every text is the absorption and transformation of another text.”18 Though Bakhtinian dialogism certainly acknowledges this tendency in the young Dostoevsky, it is Nabokov’s art of memory that gives it real prominence. On the other hand, when Bakhtin turns to the major works, he greatly enlarges our sense of Dostoevsky as an intertextualist. In his third chapter,

108

Toward France

on the status of ideas in Dostoevsky, Bakhtin makes the essential connection: Golyadkin, he asserts, laid the groundwork for the polyphonic novels.19 This development, which Nabokov of course rejects, allows Bakhtin to expand his interest in “the word of another” still further. It now covers the interacting value systems, or ideological positions, of a character like Raskolnikov vis-à-vis Sonya, Svidrigailov, and the magistrate Porfiry Petrovich; or of the Karamazov brothers taken as a group. And values and ideologies, even more than parodies of writers from an author’s literary world, represent discourse systems from outside that nonetheless exert pressure upon the work. Bakhtin thus endorses Dostoevsky’s move from parody to the novel of ideas, with its sharply distinguished sociocultural positions. In the same spirit, and now in direct contradiction to Nabokov, he can praise Raskolnikov’s theory as an epitome of Dostoevsky’s genius.20 The glide from Newton to Napoleon to murder, far from overriding elementary distinctions, and even despite its implicit critique of Bakhtin’s own admiration for “Copernican revolutions,” deserves to be saluted as a triumph of artistic thought. It shows how the polyphonic novel struggles to reveal the full implications of any idea: it is a triumph precisely because it unites “ideas and world-views, which in real life were absolutely estranged and deaf to one another.”21 Rejecting in advance Nabokov’s aesthetic critique of Dostoevsky’s general ideas, Bakhtin accepts the canonicity of the major period and its ideological “pro and contra.” As students of Dostoevsky, Bakhtin and Nabokov are contrasting counterparts. The self-conscious intertextuality of Nabokov’s fiction pointedly illustrates the dialogical principle of defining one’s position against the utterances of others. And the reader-oriented level in his art of memory, which received its first major systemization in Despair, is a creative response, launched within fiction itself, to Dostoevsky’s reworking of Gogol and thus parallels the corresponding aspect of Bakhtinian theory. Nabokov, of course, knows European modernism much more intimately than Bakhtin, and can therefore compare Dostoevsky with Joyce or reflect in detail on how his influence differs from Flaubert’s. But he lacks Bakhtin’s belief in the value of theoretical generalizations. He makes no attempt to define the relation between his parodic practices and some more basic interactive process throughout discourse, and he seems remarkably insensitive to Bakhtin’s sheer delight in intellectual synthesis. Nonetheless it is Nabokov rather than Bakhtin who indicts Dostoevsky for careless thinking. Nabokov diverges still more from Bakhtin when he insists that novels ought to belong to an aesthetic realm apart from ideology. He affirms the individuality, specificity, creativity, and sensitivity of an artistic language that constantly strives to capture the unique. For Bakhtin, however, when he wrote “Discourse in the Novel” several years after Dostoevsky’s Poetics, fiction becomes the form of literature “least susceptible to aestheticism” precisely because it incorporates so much ideology. In a formula that pre-

From the Personal to the Intertextual

109

serves the basic continuity Bakhtin found between the young Dostoevsky’s parodies and the mature novels of ideas, fiction can be defined as “a dialogized representation of an ideologically freighted discourse.”22 Nabokov’s textual memories in Despair disrupt this continuity, for they deny the emphasis on ideology even as they retain the polemical possibilities of “dialogized representation.” Yet for all their differences, both writers agree finally on one basic point about The Double: that its title does not ultimately and most interestingly refer to the psychological problematic of the Doppelgänger—“a frightful bore,” Nabokov once remarked in an interview (SO 83)—but to the complex doubling of discourse that this novella so signally displays.

CHAPTER

6

1

Narrative between Art and Memory WRITING AND REWRITING “MADEMOISELLE O” (1936–1967)

IN 1936, when “Mademoiselle O” first appeared in the French literary magazine Mesures, it marked a double breakthrough in Nabokov’s art of memory. Not only was it his first avowedly autobiographical work, but by being written in French it was also the fullest expression to date of his European cultural identity. Yet the breakthrough into autobiography is hardly absolute, for such is Nabokov’s fascination with the counterclaims of art and memory that as he repeatedly rewrites “Mademoiselle O” in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, he vacillates between regarding the work as autobiography and as fiction. Thus, after translating and greatly revising the original French memoir to produce an initial English version that appeared in The Atlantic Monthly in 1943, Nabokov then publishes a second English version in Nine Stories (1947), his first short-story collection as an American author. Just a few years later, however, this supposedly fictional account becomes chapter 5 of Conclusive Evidence (1951), the first book-length version of Nabokov’s autobiography. Two further revisions of this version, first in Russian and then in English, will form chapter 5 of his Russian autobiography Drugie Berega (1954), and of the final English autobiography, Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited (1967). Meanwhile, however, Nabokov would reissue the 1947 version in his 1958 short-story collection Nabokov’s Dozen, and during his lifetime this earlier fictive variant of “Mademoiselle O” would remain in print alongside the autobiographical ones. Nabokov’s concluding bibliographical note to Nabokov’s Dozen epitomizes the uncertain status of his memoir/story. For though the book’s subtitle reads “A Collection of Thirteen Stories,” the note maintains that neither “Mademoiselle O” nor “First Love” (which also appears in the collection despite being chapter 7 of Speak, Memory) is fictitious: they “are (except for a change of names) true in every detail to the author’s remembered life” (ND 214). Yet even this blanket statement has telling loopholes. Not only do name changes preserve some fictionality but, more subtly, Nabokov’s proclaimed fidelity to “remembered life” sidesteps the broader, more rigorous claim of being “true to life.” No matter how much the autobiographer

Narrative between Art and Memory

111

strives for meticulous veracity, he cannot rule out an element of inventiveness in the memoir. This indecisiveness in classifying “Mademoiselle O” corresponds to Nabokov’s deeper ambivalence about his art of memory itself. In the course of reworking personal experience, he can place varying emphasis on each of the two terms, from one extreme, where memory seems merely a springboard for the supreme freedom of art, to the other, where the exactness of remembered experience far surpasses the vague gropings of imagination. On some middle ground, however, Nabokov realizes that only authorial invention can restore the erasures of time.1 The writing and rewriting of “Mademoiselle O” illustrates this problematic of art and memory especially clearly, for as the work evolves it registers Nabokov’s shifting and ever-more-intricate responses as a fiction writer to the new project of creating an autobiography. To bring out these responses, the present chapter will examine relevant material from all five versions of “Mademoiselle O.”2 Without attempting a full bibliographical description of each stage in the writing, we shall be able to see how the changing text reflects Nabokov’s oscillations between the claims of art and memory. Two other aspects of “Mademoiselle O” are just as crucial for understanding Nabokov’s cultural biography. As a decisive new step in the formation of his European identity, this work at once broadens and consolidates the initial reception of French modernism in Kamera Obskura. As already shown in Chapter 2, the final swan image pays tribute to Baudelaire as both a precursor of literary modernism and a theorist of the interdependence of modernity and memory. But other intertextual signposts are equally revealing and significant: in various versions of “Mademoiselle O,” Nabokov outlines the basic cultural background for his interests in French modernism, pushes much further in the process of assessing Proust’s doctrines of memory and the mnemonic image, and starts to explore Flaubert’s significance as Dostoevsky’s great rival among the nineteenth-century forerunners of modern fiction. On a third front, meanwhile, because “Mademoiselle O” dates back to Nabokov’s career in the mid-1930s, it occupies a pivotal position between his still earlier, fictional treatments of memory and his final completion of the autobiography in the 1950s and 1960s. In novels like Mary, The Defense, and Glory, written in an émigré setting where Pushkin initially held the presiding role later assigned to the French, Nabokov had already experimented with temporal order and with image-making in ways he develops in “Mademoiselle O” and still later in Speak, Memory. The oscillation of “Mademoiselle O” between memoir and story thus has three facets, which this chapter will discuss in turn: the presentation of the art-memory problematic itself, the intertextual links with issues of modernity and memory in French modernism, and the transition from Nabokov’s earlier fictions of memory to his autobiography.

112

Toward France

1 1 1 Because “Mademoiselle O” is so unusually variable, discussion will be simplified if we make further divisions in the work’s overt structure, whose ultimate seven-part format goes back to the 1947 version.3 The following table correlates these parts with sixteen segments that will then be described in more detail: Part 1 =

Segments

Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5

= = = =

Segment Segment Segment Segments

Part 6 =

Segments

Part 7 =

Segments

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

Prologue Initial Image and Background Information Imagined Arrival and Sleigh Ride Nabokov Country Home Attempted Escape Governess’s Hands Readings on the Veranda Governess’s Memories and Rooms Nabokov’s Insomnia Springtime Excursion in Petersburg Estrangement from Family Praise for her French Quarrel and Departure Reunion in Lausanne The Swan Epilogue

The first part of “Mademoiselle O” begins with a prologue on the difficulties of novelists who write memoirs. It then gives an initial picture of the governess, along with varying kinds of background information, before turning to an imagined account of her first impressions of Russia, in winter, at a rural train station and on a sleigh ride to Nabokov’s home. The next three parts, all short ones of a single segment, include memories of the Nabokov country house just before her arrival, the story (added, like the seven-part structure, in 1947) of how the Nabokov boys tried to run away from the governess, and a brief vignette of her hands. The heart of the memoir is the much longer fifth part, which divides into four segments: summer readings of French fiction on the veranda, the governess’s later memories of her Russian life along with an evocation of her rooms in the country and the city, Nabokov’s difficulties in sleeping due to childish fears of the dark, and the account of a triumphant springtime excursion in St. Petersburg. The sixth part deals with the governess’s estrangement from the family, pays tribute to the excellence of her French, and discusses her eventual departure following a quarrel with the tutor known variously as Lensky and Orlov. The last part portrays Nabokov, now dispossessed and an émigré, as he visits Mademoiselle O in Lausanne in the 1920s; it then describes the awkward

Narrative between Art and Memory

113

swan seen later that evening on Lake Geneva, and in most versions closes with an epilogue. Among the many changes in “Mademoiselle O,” those made in the prologue and epilogue, which frame the sketch, are the most drastic. Still, all five versions of the prologue focus on Nabokov’s problematic situation as a novelist undertaking a memoir. He opens with a confession: he has already used certain vivid personal experiences in his fiction, and now realizes that he has undermined the authenticity of his memories. In particular, something sinister happened when he placed his French governess in the Luzhin household in The Defense (1930). In the French prologue, which is the most detailed, Nabokov speaks of having torn Mademoiselle O “from the warm and lively past where she had been so well sheltered from my literary art” (MO 147). In the brief Russian prologue, he issues a terse warning about how imagination threatens memory: “Mnemosyne is dying in a cold room, in the care of a fiction writer” (DB 85). Professing alarm at this novelistic urge to devour one’s own experience, Nabokov presents the memoir as a desperate effort to reclaim his past. In the mid-1930s his desire to write about the governess appears as a fortuitous idea “to save what is left of this image” after the fiction-making of The Defense (MO 148). But in English versions Nabokov forcefully upholds memory against the distortions of art, as he sharply distinguishes his present autobiographical intentions from his previous novelistic ones: “The man in me revolts against the fictionist” (At 66/CE 58/SM 95). A year later, in his other major French publication, a centenary essay on Pushkin called “Pouchkine, ou le vrai et le vraisemblable,” Nabokov views the dilemma of lived experience and its artistic treatment from another angle. Phrasing it in terms of truth and verisimilitude, he begins by defending the truth of a writer’s actual life story against the verisimilitude of novelized biographies that use his or her writings as a direct expression of the life. But once Nabokov applies the point to Pushkin, the issues become less clear-cut. In this case, he concedes, literature can give some elusive sense of the poet’s personality; and he goes on to picture the real Pushkin in various poses, for example, as he stands “on the Neva embankment, in a dreamy state, an elbow propped on the parapet.”4 This image comes from early in Eugene Onegin, from the very passage Nabokov had used in choosing the epigraph for Mary; there, when Pushkin imagines befriending his hero Onegin in Petersburg, he has himself created a scene that dissolves the boundaries between the writer and the written. Nabokov, by advancing a playful biographical reading of this ostensibly literary passage, has simply given a further twist to Pushkin’s erasure of distinctions between the factual and the fictive. If the Pushkin essay suggests that the truth of life cannot be separated from the verisimilitude of art, the analogous point in “Mademoiselle O” would be to start questioning the prologue’s stated intention of separating

114

Toward France

literal memories from the creative imagination. The various epilogues, where Nabokov evaluates his attempt at autobiography, explore this issue with the urgency of direct self-involvement. The French version simply reverses the prologue by defending imagination over life. Indeed, it stresses memory’s artificiality to the point where the sketch of Mademoiselle O and her novelistic treatment in The Defense seem indistinguishable: “Now that it’s done, I have the strange sensation of having invented her out of whole cloth, just as much as the other characters who go into my books” (MO 171–72). Asking if his representation of the governess ever lived, Nabokov denies its correspondence with reality, but then he states, “from now on she is real, since I created her,” thereby asserting the primacy of artistic invention (MO 172). As Nabokov continued work on the autobiography, he retreated from this unqualified celebration of contrivance. Overtly, at least, Drugie Berega is noncommittal, since it omits the epilogue. But it suggests contrivance by ending with the image of the awkward swan that mysteriously rises up to supplant any direct memories of the governess (DB 110). The two English versions of the autobiography, by contrast, take much more interest in the governess as an actual person. Conclusive Evidence includes a new epilogue in which Nabokov criticizes himself for not doing justice to her “permanent soul,”5 then makes the unusual personal comment about how everything he loved as a child “had been turned to ashes or shot through the heart” (CE 78), which ends the sketch by linking this deepened sense of the governess’s life with his own experience of loss. Speak, Memory keeps this confessional epilogue, but adds a self-styled appendix that, from the perspective of Nabokov’s life in Switzerland after 1960, documents certain “amazing survivals” among Swiss governesses of Mademoiselle O’s generation (SM 117). He thus heightens the impression of writing from lived experience. Despite these changes, however, all the later endings ask whether he has really saved her from fiction. This question, whose force varies somewhat in context, still acknowledges Nabokov’s original awareness of imaginative factors.6 Autobiography may not be totally illusory, as the initial French version seemed to imply; but its relationship to actuality certainly remains problematic. Even more striking than these vacillations in expressed attitude is Nabokov’s shifting treatment of two key scenes within the memoir proper. The evolution of the third and fifth segments, the imagined scene of the governess’s arrival and the attempted escape of the Nabokov boys, shows his increased reluctance to make a single-minded commitment to either memory or imagination. In the original French version, the very decision to imagine the governess’s arrival undercuts the just-announced project of recovering literal autobiographical truth. Nabokov makes the irony clear when he accompanies his account with the statement, “I make every effort now to imagine what she saw and experienced” (MO 151). Yet the reliance on fic-

Narrative between Art and Memory

115

tion is hardly absolute, for the detailed descriptions that follow portray a setting obviously known from personal experience, and even quote the governess in an effort at documentary veracity. But, unlike the clear contrast with the aims of the prologue, this discrepancy between an intended imaginative effort and an actual reliance on transposed memories is mainly implicit. Later, more detailed versions of the segment will directly engage the reader in a complex oscillation between factual and fictive approaches. On the one hand, these later versions go beyond invocation and vividly personify Nabokov’s imagination as a “ghostly envoy” who observes the governess’s arrival at the train station and even offers her his arm. Identification with the scene goes so far that a startled Nabokov eventually asks, “What am I doing in this stereoscopic dreamland?” (SM 99); and, despite the momentary breaking of illusion, he ends the segment by bending down and scooping up a handful of real snow. Imagination, it would seem, has outdone memory in recovering the literal truth. On the other hand, the governess’s sleigh bells blend with the adult Nabokov’s pulse (At 68/CE 61); or, more emphatically, he is said to be wearing an American overcoat as he accompanies the governess (DB 88/SM 99–100). These details suggest that the real snow at the end does not come from the author’s Russian boyhood, but from his contemporary American world. A few pages later, in the escape segment added to the 1947 version of “Mademoiselle O,” Nabokov ingeniously reinforces the sense of memory’s intricate collaboration with the imagination. Here he recounts how he and his brother rebelled against the governess by running away from home “on one of the following days, if not the very day after” (SM 102). Through telling hints, the reader is made to realize that the most vivid details from the governess’s imagined arrival, such as the full moon or the shadows on the snowdrifts, probably come from memories of this escapade, which took place in “a wilderness of snow” beneath a “fantastically shiny” moon (SM 102, 104). Indeed, because these links with something already read serve to activate the reader’s memory, the reading experience itself parallels Nabokov’s effort as a writer to pin down elusive details from his past. By dramatizing both imaginative and mnemonic approaches to the governess’s arrival, later versions of the sketch make the audience undergo Nabokov’s own dilemma as novelist-turned-memorialist. As “Mademoiselle O” evolves, Nabokov also revises two key passages on his artistic awareness in childhood so as to enhance the problematic of imagination and memory. In the country-house segment all versions focus on the five-year-old Nabokov drawing pictures, and he lingers fondly over memories of his colored pencils. The particular shades vary, but he always describes the white one last, which seemed useless until he discovered “it was really the ideal pencil, because I could imagine for myself anything I wished as I scrawled lines on the page” (MO 155). Several pages later, in the sum-

116

Toward France

mer reading segment, colors enter the memoir again when Nabokov introduces the colored-glass theme. Now somewhat older, the young Nabokov notices the stained glass in the veranda windows; and in the original version, as he listens to the governess’s voice, he looks through the “enchanted crystal” of the windows into a garden tinged blue, red, and yellow (MO 159). Even at this stage the juxtaposition of the two scenes is significant. The boy who once used color mimetically, to represent green trees or a blue ocean, now notices that the tinted panes of glass, like the white pencil, give him the power to transform reality. And the French fiction read in the background suggests that an artistic orientation once predominantly visual is becoming verbal as well. Later versions of the two scenes will qualify this vignette on the power and growth of the author’s imagination. Revising the passages to make their parallels even more obvious, Nabokov generally makes the colors of the pencils and the stained glass coincide, and his description of the veranda now ends with a transparent pane of glass, which becomes the counterpart of the white pencil. This window conveys Nabokov’s more complex attitude in the later versions, for if in the country house he had emphasized the imagination’s total freedom, on the veranda he praises memory’s utter fidelity to lived experience. Thus, though he still delights in the white pencil because it allows him to “imagine whatever I wished” (SM 101), now the “matter-offact white bench” (SM 106) that he remembers seeing through the untinted glass fills him with an unappeasable desire for the literal truth. As Nabokov commits himself to autobiography, the quest for literal truth assumes new prominence in his art of memory. In a 1966 interview with Alfred Appel, Nabokov would recapitulate the inner debate he had pursued through the five versions of “Mademoiselle O.” Appel confronted Nabokov with a definite position on imagination and memory, introducing him as “a writer who believes passionately in the primacy of the imagination,” and then asking him about his surprising interest in autobiography (SO 77). The question seems to be based on an AngloAmerican tradition going back to Coleridge’s distinction between creative imagination and mere fancy, where fancy was defined as “no other than a mode of memory.”7 Working within a different cultural framework, Nabokov had suggested a similar view when he celebrated the memorialist’s creative freedom at the end of the French “Mademoiselle O.” But by the time of the interview, as he prepared the final edition of Speak, Memory, Nabokov had become more circumspect about the supremacy of the imagination. Thus, when he tells Appel that “imagination is a form of memory” (SO 78), he implicitly denies Coleridge’s distinction in favor of the oscillation between art and memory he had come to recognize since the 1930s. Later in the response, written in advance like all his interviews, Nabokov evoked the complexity of this oscillation: “When we speak of a vivid individ-

Narrative between Art and Memory

117

ual recollection we are paying a compliment not to our capacity of retention but to Mnemosyne’s mysterious foresight in having stored up this or that element which creative imagination might want to use when combining it with later recollections and inventions” (SO 78). Despite the phrase “mysterious foresight,” which perhaps reflects some residual awareness of anticipatory memory, this elaborate sentence is essentially retrospective in outlook, with Nabokov holding that total recall of even a “vivid” past is impossible. Because we have no absolute “capacity of retention,” imagination must intervene to fill the gaps, and this reclamation work is so intricate that merely defining it results in a situation of infinite regress. Memories of the past do not remain unalloyed, but become “elements” appropriated by the imagination, and this synthesis enters into further combinations that include not only “inventions” but also “recollections.” This latter term, by returning to the sentence’s point of departure, suggests an unending cycle where memory is repeatedly compounded with imagination. And Nabokov heightens the sense of continuous interplay by appealing to Mnemosyne, mother of the Muses, and thus the personification of memory’s link with creativity. This carefully crafted statement distills Nabokov’s evolving position in the multiple versions of “Mademoiselle O”: fictive invention cannot supplant the effort to remember, even though imagination necessarily colors the autobiographer’s quest. 1 1 1 In its intertextual aspect, meanwhile, “Mademoiselle O” seeks to establish a French cultural context for this newest manifestation of Nabokov’s art of memory. As with the reworking of Baudelaire’s swan, the text generally uses tacit echoes and parallels to reveal its Gallic affiliations, but one version is more explicit: as might be expected, the original sketch teems with allusions to French literature and culture, most of which were later removed. Beyond catering to French readers, Nabokov seems mainly concerned with placing his own mixed heritage in perspective, by evoking various kinds of cultural transmission from France to Russia. Thus he prefaces the governess’s arrival with a humorous vignette of Diderot as he “tutored” Catherine the Great; or, as she becomes estranged from the family, he evokes an indigenous “Franco-Russian tradition” of household French and album verse which she never knew (MO 150, 166). But though such direct commentary reveals Nabokov’s fascination with cultural multiplicity, it touches on the French background for his modernism only once. At stake is the characteristically French dichotomy of classical and modern. To be sure, this cultural vocabulary still does not address the issue of literary modernism, a term with little currency in France at the time. Even now modernisme possesses much less resonance than modernité, which re-

118

Toward France

fers to all the movements against tradition beginning with the romantics, not just to early twentieth-century innovators like Proust and Bergson. This broader notion of the modern enters Nabokov’s sketch by way of his hostility to French neoclassicism, whose personification is none other than the governess herself. Her great love for Corneille and Racine is one more sign of her estrangement from the family, especially from Nabokov, who had to perform in her home theatricals. In the eleventh segment, in a diatribe whose tone anticipates his strong opinions of the 1960s, he attacks neoclassicism as a literature of stereotypes, as a “sublimation of mere commonplaces resulting in a masterpiece of falsity” (MO 167). A moment earlier, in comments on Rostand’s, Maeterlinck’s, and Verhaeren’s popularity in prerevolutionary Russia, Nabokov introduced the contrasting cultural term when, mimicking the governess, he dismissed them as “the young, the ‘moderns”’ (MO 167). But Nabokov makes it clear that he himself looks elsewhere for models of modernity, for he has already explained that in his circle “the literary tendency was of another order,” and it was “Verlaine and Mallarmé who watched over my adolescence” (MO 166). This preference for a more demanding symbolist literature, which led historically to early twentieth-century modernism,8 suggests that Nabokov’s anticlassicism is not simply modern but modernist. Beyond these explicit references to Verlaine and Mallarmé, of course, stands the concluding image of Baudelaire’s swan. But even in this initial version of “Mademoiselle O,” Baudelaire is more than an early French symbolist; because his memories of the swan on the streets of Paris awaken thoughts of Andromache after the Trojan War, his poem involves a dichotomy of classical and modern much like the one that governs Nabokov’s response to French culture. And the notion of modernity that informed his closely related essay “The Painter of Modern Life” was itself a major influence on French formulations of this dichotomy. Nabokov’s final tribute to the governess is thus highly ironic in more than one sense. Not only, as shown in Chapter 2, does he affirm his independence as a modern writer by vying with a major precursor of modernism, but by evoking Baudelaire’s notion of modernity he also manages to get the last word in his childhood debate with an ardent classicist. English versions of “Mademoiselle O” cut all explicit references to these issues, leaving only two traces of Nabokov’s position on the classical-modern opposition, the image of the Baudelairean swan itself and a vignette of the governess as “the ghastly Jezebel of Racine’s absurd play” (SM 108).9 But these revisions do not disturb some important implied references to Proust, while later versions introduce a key textual parallel with Flaubert. As a result, later versions of “Mademoiselle O” have a sharper intertextual focus than the French original, in that they give special attention to how Nabokov’s new role as an autobiographer relates to a certain modernist current

Narrative between Art and Memory

119

in French fiction. These allusions prepare the way for Nabokov’s rather general tributes to Proust and Flaubert in Strong Opinions, but are much more informative, because they reveal how he responded to both writers in the midst of undertaking a major transition in his art of memory. In addition, because they take works of fiction as reference points for a memoir, they extend the oscillation between art and memory to the intertextual plane. At this level the governess still acts as Nabokov’s foil in a process of cultural self-definition that depends upon an autobiographical mingling of narrated past with narrating present: the boy to whom she once read adventure stories has now become the sophisticated modern author who writes the sketch. In assessing the Proust references, we should recall that Nabokov first published “Mademoiselle O” at the very time he remembers studying the Recherche with his wife. Unlike Kamera Obskura, therefore, with its more oblique approach, the memoir focuses directly and in detail on Proust’s famous view of memory at the beginning of Swann’s Way. Both the veranda and the insomnia segments parallel important opening scenes in this novel; but earlier, in the French prologue, Nabokov began “Mademoiselle O” with a telling verbal echo. Speaking of autobiographical material in his fiction, he pointed out that he had limited it to “some image” rather than taking “large patches of my past,” or “de grands pans de mon passé” (MO 147).10 The French for “patch,” pan, is a word Proust uses three times in the crucial scene that deals with how his narrator Marcel stayed up as a child for his mother’s good-night kiss. Proust’s account begins with the memory of a magic lantern show, which projects the mysterious “patch” of a castle on the boy’s bedroom wall. Then, in his final reflections on the good-night kiss, the adult Marcel describes it as merely a “luminous” or “truncated patch” when compared with his buried past, accessible only in the involuntary memories released by the famous madeleine pastry soaked in tea.11 In thus evoking the episode of the good-night kiss, Nabokov’s language suggests a threefold response to Proust. There is, first, the obvious difference in scale, since the Recherche aims to recapture much larger expanses of time, whole patches rather than Nabokovian images. In addition, the word pan in Proust shifts decisively in meaning, from a simple patch of color on the wall to a metaphor for a special kind of memory. It thus functions both as a concrete sense impression and as a trope, thereby revealing that duality in the very nature of images which so impressed Nabokov in French modernism. As he wrote “Mademoiselle O,” this ambivalence in terminology must have seemed especially fruitful because it parallels the narrative’s oscillation between the precise fidelity of memory and the inventions of art. Above all, however, Nabokov’s verbal echo betrays his characteristic preference for psychologies stressing lucidity and deliberate effort. The goodnight kiss is Marcel’s only memory of his childhood in Combray before tast-

120

Toward France

ing the madeleine pastry, and differs in kind from both his “voluntary” and his “involuntary” memories. Because it is so vivid, the scene of the kiss is not a true example of the abstracted “voluntary” or “intellectual” memory rejected by Proust, but because it is so readily accessible to the narrator’s remembering mind, it can hardly be called involuntary either. Marcel must later devise a third category, that of his “oldest” memories, to distinguish this perspective on the past from both of these other possibilities.12 In effect, by aligning his verbal echo with a mode of memory that is noninvoluntary yet still concrete, Nabokov has chosen to avoid the famous conclusions drawn from the madeleine incident. Direct echoes of Proust’s French are no longer possible in the later versions of the prologue, but, ever the resourceful translator, Nabokov now adds a telling comment on how fiction-writing has destroyed his personal past: “Houses have crumbled in my memory as soundlessly as they did in the mute films of yore” (At 66/CE 58/DB 85/SM 95). Alongside the cinematic reference, this vivid image again evokes the opening of the Recherche. For at the height of the drama of the kiss, when the boy’s father allows his mother to stay with him, the narrator breaks in to say that the house in Combray has since been torn down. But he does so indirectly, by referring to a specific detail from the drama itself: “the wall of the staircase where I saw the reflection of his [the father’s] candle rising has ceased to exist for a long time.” When he adds that “in me as well many things have been destroyed that I thought would last forever,”13 the earlier detail carries over to the verb “destroyed,” lightly tracing the metaphor of memory as a collapsing house that will appear with such emphasis in “Mademoiselle O.” Both English and Russian texts thus manage to preserve Nabokov’s interest in Proustian shifts between sense impression and trope as well as his affinity for the earliest, noninvoluntary memories in the Recherche. The veranda and insomnia segments thicken these introductory allusions to the Recherche. When the governess reads French fiction to Nabokov, she recalls Marcel’s mother, who read George Sand at the end of the drama of the kiss. And each of the boys as he listens confronts his future vocation as a writer, with Nabokov’s Russian setting adding the element of multicultural identity to the author’s discovery of fiction. Even more meaningful are the parallels between Nabokov’s sleeplessness as a child and the descriptions of wakeful nights in the Recherche. The sense of having lost all moorings in a dark chamber is the same, and there are specific correspondences as well. Just as Nabokov gazes at the saving “line of light” from the governess’s room (SM 109, 110), so Proust’s narrator compares himself to a sick man rejoicing at the hall light beneath the door.14 Or, just as Nabokov gets his bearings by picking out a dimly lit window, so the narrator in a later scene will use the same method to decide where he is. In fact, Proust stresses memory along with direct perception, for his narrator reconstructs his surroundings “by

Narrative between Art and Memory

121

orienting myself through memory alone, or with the help of a dim light at the base of which I placed the window curtains.”15 In a similar mingling of faculties, the boy Nabokov peers into the dark until he picks out “certain more precious blurrings which roam in aimless amnesia until, half-remembering, they settle down as the dim folds of window curtains” (SM 110–11). Yet a crucial difference remains, for when Proust’s sick man sees the hall light, he mistakenly thinks morning has arrived, and his narrator will learn that he has confused the window with a door. These deceptive lights in darkened rooms suggest the Proustian drama of reinterpretation, the repeated discovery that things are not as they seemed and the resultant need for drastic changes in one’s sense of the past. But despite Nabokov’s earlier receptivity in Kamera Obskura, “Mademoiselle O” downplays this theme in favor of others. In that Nabokov’s room has two sources of light, one from the Swiss governess and one from a Russian world outside, he again emphasizes Franco-Russian cultural multiplicity. In that his lights are unambiguous, his room suggests unusual confidence in the power of lucid consciousness, and thus reinforces Nabokov’s predilection for Proust’s oldest, noninvoluntary memories. This valorization of lucidity becomes steadily more pronounced as he writes and rewrites “Mademoiselle O.” In the French version Nabokov already contrasts the realms of light and sleep, linking the boy’s fear of sleep with a vague scene of torture or execution (MO 160), but the underlying issues are not yet clear. In the intermediate English and Russian versions, however, he accounts for his insomnia as a refusal to accept “the wrench of parting with consciousness” (DB 99), and the scene of execution even centers on the apt figure of a “headsman” (At 70). The final version further accentuates these changes by ending with a lyrical evocation of the “long light” of the past, which “finds so many ingenious ways to reach me” (SM 118). Nabokovian insomnia closely parallels Proustian sleeplessness, and thus pays tribute to a modernist master; but it also transforms the model to affirm a lucid ingenuity that reflects the heightened role of consciousness in Nabokov’s art of memory. Still, for all his avoidance of the madeleine episode, Nabokov is responsive to the strong current of deliberate intellectual effort in Proust. Despite the critique of voluntary memory, it is this current that surfaces once Marcel tries to understand the significance of the madeleine and that reappears in the suggestions of “research” implied by Proust’s title, Recherche. 1 1 1 The link with Flaubert, which is less detailed, enters the memoir somewhat later in its compositional history. It centers on the stained-glass veranda windows that fascinated the boy Nabokov during the reading scene,

122

Toward France

and, rather than alluding to a finished, canonical text, Nabokov uses Flaubert’s working drafts for Madame Bovary, initially published in 1936 and reprinted in a new format in 1949. In these drafts a passage meant for the crucial Vaubyessard chapter describes Emma the morning after the ball that crystallized her romantic dreams. She wanders over the noble estate, enters a pavilion where she imagines lovers have met, then gazes at the park through a window with colored panes of glass. After she has inspected a blue, a yellow, and a green vista, a red one frightens her by suggesting blood and fire, and then a clear one shows her the park as it is, with morning dew and sheep and a woman combing her hair. But Emma finally sees nothing at all as she enters a characteristic trancelike state of waking dreams.16 Despite Flaubert’s eventual rejection of this scene, its importance for the actual novel becomes apparent when he describes Emma’s state of mind just before the ball. To escape the dull routine of her home, she likes to take walks with her greyhound Djali to another abandoned pavilion, and there she encounters some of the same imagery of color-tinted landscapes while undergoing the same emotional transition from imagined glamour to fear and trance.17 When Nabokov first read this passage cannot be determined, whether in France in the late 1930s or later in some research library in the United States. But, as discussed in Chapter 1, the final version of Speak, Memory makes it clear that Madame Bovary held a special paternal authority for him. As the veranda scene evolves from the 1930s to the 1960s, accordingly, Nabokov adjusts its details so that even as he continues to depict a formative moment in his artistic consciousness, he also suggests Flaubert’s relevance to his art of memory as practiced in “Mademoiselle O.” In the initial French version, where the intertextual resonances are minimal, emphasis falls on the content of the memory itself and on internal echoes linking it with the colored-pencil scene in the fourth segment. But later versions of “Mademoiselle O” change the description of the veranda windows so that both the colors (but not their sequence) and the climactic moment of transparent vision recall the scene in Flaubert. More significantly, the tinted and clear panes of glass set up a contrast between two types of vision, one involving an imaginative heightening of reality and the other emphasizing absolute literalism, which reenact the larger interplay of art and memory throughout the sketch. That Flaubert’s fictional account of Emma warns against imaginative excess while “Mademoiselle O” chooses to echo a novel in the course of recording autobiographical truth merely adds new intertextual ironies to the Nabokovian oscillation between story and memoir. Yet Nabokov keeps his distance from Flaubert both in certain details and in their implications. Thus Emma’s fears on looking through the red window suggest forebodings about the future, while Nabokov closes the scene by emphasizing the retrospective gaze of memory. In another sharp con-

Narrative between Art and Memory

123

trast, Emma responds to the transparent window by daydreaming, but Nabokov vainly wishes to recapture its promise of unvarnished truth. In short, the later versions of “Mademoiselle O” rewrite Flaubert’s discarded draft so that it becomes an emblem of Nabokov’s own art of memory. The centrality of this passage becomes especially clear in the final version of Speak, Memory, where (as noted in Chapter 2) both text and index establish connections between the stained glass and pavilion themes, thereby evoking the joint presence of these themes in Emma’s pavilion and at the same time linking Nabokov’s master narratives of the Swiss governess and the summer of love. Thus, as early as the 1943 version of “Mademoiselle O,” Flaubert is becoming a crucial reference point for Nabokov’s colored-hearing creativity, in effect assuming the precursor’s role denied several years earlier to Rimbaud during Fyodor’s dialogue with Koncheyev in The Gift.18 When reinterpreted as an emblem of memory, the colored-window draft suggests an alternation between inventiveness and truth that dovetails with what Nabokov was learning from Proust. Not surprisingly, therefore, his lectures on fiction can emphasize Flaubert’s affinities with the Recherche (LL 147). They do so not in a sweeping thesis statement, but in a suggestively knotty aside on the Vaubyessard scene, this time as it appears in the canonical Madame Bovary. Speaking of the Viscount’s cigar case, found by chance when Emma and Charles return from the ball, Nabokov observes that this object feeds her “daydreaming romantic image of Paris” much as Proust’s “little town of Combray with all its gardens (a memory) emerges from a cup of tea” (LL 139). The parenthetical comment acknowledges the difference between Flaubertian reverie and Proustian memory, along lines implied by the reworking of Emma’s transparent window to suggest retrospective truth in “Mademoiselle O.” But otherwise the passage stresses the cigar case’s affinity with Marcel’s cup of tea, in that both are image-like provocations of psychological processes that expand to create an entire mental world, either imagined or remembered. This glancing linkage of the two writers recaptures the more powerful intertextual logic in “Mademoiselle O,” where in effect Nabokov transformed Flaubert into the quasi-Proustian artist of memory suggested by the memoir’s references to the Recherche.19 Against the background of Despair, moreover, both the cigar case and the colored glass suggest a fidelity to concrete sense impressions that was mostly lacking in Dostoevsky. For Nabokov, as he weighs first one and then the other of these great nineteenth-century models for modern fiction, Flaubert clearly has more to offer an art of memory concerned with mnemonic images. On one level, as a narrative of Nabokov’s earliest exposure to French culture, “Mademoiselle O” might easily have been called “My French Education.” In the completed autobiography it corresponds quite closely to chapter 4, originally published as “My English Education,” and more loosely to chapter 9, or “My Russian Education,” a title even better suited to chapter

124

Toward France

8 with its portraits of Nabokov’s Russian tutors. But on an intertextual level the memoir directs attention to the mature writer’s sense of French modernism, most explicitly when he chooses sides in the perennial classicalmodern debate. Implicitly, however, and with greater cultural specificity, the text’s richly nuanced echoes and parallels identify with Proust as France’s leading novelist in the modernist decades from 1910 to 1930. In interpreting Proust, Nabokov prefers to stress deliberation and conscious lucidity as the royal road to memory, and therefore tends to bypass the madeleine episode and the doctrine of involuntary memory; he also likes to stress the uniqueness of his multicultural identity. But he does respond to the rich ambivalence of Proust’s mnemonic images, whose glide between concrete sensation and elaborate trope mirrors the oscillation of Nabokov’s narrative between autobiographical and fictional modes. Meanwhile, with increasing attention as the text evolves, Nabokov treats Flaubert as Proust’s precursor in creating a modernist fiction of memory. And, though Flaubert is largely assimilated to the perspectives of the Recherche, he also has the role of easily surpassing Rimbaud as a model for Nabokovian synesthesia and of countering Dostoevsky’s influence by encouraging a twentieth-century fiction devoted more to images than to ideas. 1 1 1 The problematic of memory and art is not exclusively French, of course. Nabokov’s only other French work, the centenary essay on Pushkin, may be viewed in this context as a reminder of the initial Russian genealogy for his art of memory. As we have seen, this essay harks back to the same situation in Eugene Onegin that had been highlighted by the epigraph to Mary. Only now Nabokov stresses the presence of fact-fiction uncertainties in Pushkin that parallel his concerns in “Mademoiselle O” and will later characterize the summer-of-love narrative itself, once he rewrites it as chapter 12 of Speak, Memory. Given the shape of Nabokov’s career, the centenary essay on Pushkin transcends its occasion to attest to an essential continuity between this Russian classic and the French modernism of Proust and Bergson. Nabokov will develop this point still further in his commentary on Eugene Onegin, written after he had completed his autobiography. But this cultural link between “Mademoiselle O” and the early Russian novels is relatively minor compared to their close relationship in matters of technique. Experiments with image-making and the manipulation of time, which appear in scattered isolation in Mary, The Defense, and Glory, come together in the memoir, where they contribute directly to its presentation of memory and prepare the way for Speak, Memory. Thus “Mademoiselle O” can defy normal chronological order with a verve that extends earlier practice. At times it cuts boldly forward through the past, shifting first from the

Narrative between Art and Memory

125

governess’s arrival in winter to summer readings on the veranda, and from there to the insomnia episode in Petersburg. These temporal breaks recall the jump from Luzhin’s late boyhood to full manhood between chapters 4 and 5 in The Defense; and if “Mademoiselle O” never leaves out so much time, it moves more often from level to level. But now Nabokov makes it clear that memory provides the rationale for this compositional practice. In the French version he directly ascribes the two most drastic transitions to memory: shifting from winter to summer, he remarks that “my memory has quickly acted to transport Mademoiselle” (MO 157), while in the insomnia episode he comments, “My memory now, leaving the country, has moved into our Petersburg house” (MO 160). Later versions, however, omit these remarks, so that the transitions appear as unmediated reading experiences. Moving from memories of a definite time and place, through the repeated impressions summarized in the segments on the governess’s hands or her rooms, then back to a very different time and place, they imitate the author’s freedom in looking back at the past. Though not as jagged as the sixteen-year hiatus in The Defense, the temporal gaps in “Mademoiselle O” give a better sense of the remembering mind. Even more striking, the memoir can jump ahead in time to depict a narrative present now placed in distant retrospect. Thus, though the eighth segment, on the governess’s memories of her Russian life, probably reflects her “tumultuous outburst of affection” during the reunion in Lausanne in the fourteenth segment (SM 115), these memories appear between the much earlier veranda and insomnia scenes (SM 107). Glory (1933) did something similar by juxtaposing the scene where the hero Martin writes home from Cambridge with the glimpse of his mother rereading the letters years later, after he has disappeared on his “mission” to the Soviet Union. Here again “Mademoiselle O” uses a device from the Russian novels, and once again Nabokov stresses a thematics of memory as he repeats an earlier chronological experiment. For when he vehemently disputes the governess’s memories of her Russian past, he highlights the partiality of memory and further alerts the reader to its possible fictionality. The time shift in this scene also sets off an unusual but expressive temporal glide in the reader. Since the passage assumes two levels of time—the Russian past and the moment of recollection in Lausanne—the reader is abruptly thrown into a future whose real position in time is only apparent several pages later. In effect, this movement reverses the one-way street of memory, as Nabokov exploits the very act of reading to defamiliarize our normal transactions with the past. The text thus enhances our awareness of the complexity of human time, even creates an exhilarating sense of temporal freedom; and if we object that no one can pursue a memory into the future as the author seems to do, this thought experiment has conveyed an analogous but very real ability to move through time while recalling the

126

Toward France

past. In this spirit, in the brilliant “Butterflies” chapter that directly follows “Mademoiselle O” in Speak, Memory and that manipulates temporal order with even more zest, remembered time is likened to a magic carpet that can be folded “in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another” (SM 139). 1 1 1 But in “Mademoiselle O” even these striking disruptions of linear time are subordinated to memory’s final goal—which is image-making, just as it was when Ganin sought to recapture the image of his former love in Mary. Nabokov reaffirms this aim in the French prologue, where he refers to the memoir as a “portrait” that attempts, despite the ravages of fictionwriting, “to save what is left to me of this image” (MO 148). The pictorial language is no loose analogy, for in the country-house segment Nabokov will link his fascination with images to the visual arts, by portraying his childish artistic consciousness as it expresses itself in line and color instead of words. Indeed, even as literature starts to claim his attention during the readings on the veranda, his pencil still fixes on the governess as a subject in this other sense, for Nabokov studies “the expression of that face which I had tried to draw so often—the jowls tempted my sly pencil in an irresistible fashion” (MO 158). In a tantalizing conjunction, past and present touch while the remembered boy plans a literal portrait that the remembering author is figuratively rendering in words. On balance, however, the most important word pictures in the memoir do not focus on the governess. To be sure, the second segment regularly includes a description of her appearance, and Nabokov can even remark, “I see her so plainly” (At 67). But in the French version he emphasizes other, more writing-specific methods of imaging. Thus the early pages play repeatedly with the shape of the letter O, which suggests not only the governess’s native lake, but the plumpness of her body and the fullness of the moon when she arrives in Russia (MO 148–49, 152). And, of course, Nabokov’s very language in this version gives special immediacy to what he most admired in her, the excellence of her French. In later versions, however, the body of the memoir pays increasing attention to images that do not concern the governess directly—the Russian snow, the colored pencils, the tinted panes of glass, the darkened Proustian bedroom. Memories of Mademoiselle O have prepared the way, but these images are basically self-reflexive, in that they combine elements of Nabokov’s own past and present to create a many-layered portrait of the author. A memoir seemingly meant to commemorate someone else has started to turn into an autobiography. If in this perspective the governess can appear as merely a mnemonic pretext, her role suggests the persistence of one key element from Nabokov’s treatment

Narrative between Art and Memory

127

of anticipatory memory in Mary, the peripheral detail that sets the stage for the main activity of remembering. The last image in the sketch, the awkward swan that offers a final comment on the governess’s life, is particularly complex. Apart from its echoes of Baudelaire, Nabokov’s revisions of this passage raise questions about his development after 1936. In 1943 he expanded the original brief vignette to a full paragraph, then rounded it off with an alliterative triad of images that emphasized the bird’s uncanny appearance as it struggled to climb from the lake into a boat—“shudder and swan and swell” (At 73). He was undoubtedly influenced by a similar triad in “Cloud, Castle, Lake,” written in Russian in 1937 and translated into English in 1941. But though the swan’s awkward movements are certainly pictorial in their descriptive detail, they are not an actual memory of the governess’s life but a metaphor for what Nabokov believes is its essential misery. And since this trope resonates intertextually with Baudelairean themes of exile and irremediable loss, it applies equally to Nabokov, now an émigré who has fled Russia and must address his audience in a foreign tongue. The mood of uncanniness, moreover, the shudder that accompanies the swan and the swell, refers to Nabokov alone.20 For he associates the power of this image with a peculiar dream-logic, which the French version calls “the logic of the subconscious” (MO 171) and which later becomes the “strange significance” of dreams (At 73). Has Nabokov’s lucidity finally conceded something to the unconscious, or even to Freud? Probably not, for even if it cannot be proved that this incident was a deliberate invention, the text itself works to place the swan image within a receding series of voluntary memories. After seeing it in Lausanne, where it already functions as an uncanny memory of Baudelaire, Nabokov remembers it when he learns of the governess’s death, then remembers it again while writing the memoir. As a result, whatever subconscious or involuntary motives may have prompted the first acts of memory, his final return to the past while writing reaffirms his conscious effort and deliberation as an artist. Moreover, it is the insistent repetition of this effort over three decades that keeps bringing Nabokov back to “Mademoiselle O,” and eventually results in Speak, Memory itself. Equally important for the autobiography as a whole are two self-reflexive images in the third and tenth segments of the French “Mademoiselle O.” In Nabokov’s treatment the remembered experiences of the sleigh ride and the spring excursion, like the Proustian pan in the prologue, shift in status from sensation to trope and become images of memory rather than actual images. In the station segment Nabokov uses the sleigh to suggest an initial phase in memory’s process, the first awakening of the past. After a jolt when the horses strain to move, the governess soon “slips” along “as if entering a new ambiance” (MO 152). This change of pace parallels the author’s efforts to

128

Toward France

bring the past to life, as his early hesitations yield to a confident sense that like the sleigh driver he “can make my memory slip into the depths of a snowy night” (MO 153). By the country-house segment, he can abandon his initial effort to imagine the past because his former world is returning to memory almost without effort and in vivid detail. The triumphant spring excursion highlights a final phase in memory’s process, the emotional aftereffects of recollection. Offsetting the problematic insomnia scene with a picture of what the French prologue called Nabokov’s “festive childhood” (MO 148), this segment confirms Ganin’s basically happy sense of the past in Mary. As the description passes from people in the foreground to the clouds, the cathedral, and the river, Nabokov remembers “an image of surprising sharpness” whose keynote is a group of banners waving in celebration (MO 162–63). This burst of exhilaration enacts and confirms some comments on the psychology and metaphysics of retrospection, which appear in a transitional passage between the third and fourth segments. Remarking that his memories tended to distill what was “perfectly pure and healthy” in the past, Nabokov projected this tendency into the future and wondered whether the afterlife might also consist in looking back at experience in a mood of “abstract beatitude” (MO 153). This hypothesis of retrospective perfection is borne out by his high-spirited vision of a remembered Petersburg spring. In later versions of “Mademoiselle O” the sleigh and the excursion lose their broader status as images of memory. Once the memoir becomes chapter 5 of Nabokov’s autobiography, it no longer needs to serve as the origin for an effort of personal memory, nor is it even a self-sufficient work. As a result “Mademoiselle O” does not have to establish an independent, allinclusive framework for memory. Yet Nabokov’s concerns with beginnings and ends, with how recollection starts into movement and how the remembered past colors the emotions, will persist. These concerns resurface in the first chapter of Speak, Memory, whose quest for memory’s origins in Nabokov’s childhood and whose provisional title “The Perfect Past” develop the self-reflexive implications of the sleigh ride and the spring excursion. But, as Nabokov’s important revisions have shown, the absorption of “Mademoiselle O” into the autobiography belies its full importance. Written and rewritten from the 1930s to the 1960s, this memoir/story played a pivotal role in his developing art of memory. In it Nabokov reached back to earlier fictional experiments with time and image and, placing them in a new, quasi-autobiographical setting, made their link with memory explicit, and so laid the groundwork for Speak, Memory. At the same time his references to Proust, Flaubert, and Baudelaire decisively enlarged his response to French modernism, and this cultural overlay to his émigré Russian beginnings not only brought other fictive elements to bear on his life story but sharpened the memory-art problematic by stressing the ambiguity of mne-

Narrative between Art and Memory

129

monic images, as either concrete sensations or tropes. Later, during the four revisions of “Mademoiselle O,” Nabokov would become more self-conscious about the transactions between the literal and the imaginative in his writing. From the simple about-face equating memory with invention in the first French epilogue he eventually moves to a complex and unresolvable oscillation between fictive and autobiographical modes, as reflected in direct commentary, in self-reflexive passages on his artistic gift, and in the workings of the text. Both because it crystallizes so much in Nabokov’s art of memory from the early Russian novels to Speak, Memory and because it marks his closest approach to France and French modernism, “Mademoiselle O” clearly ranks with Invitation to a Beheading as one of the major breakthroughs in his career. But whereas Nabokov’s surge of fantasy in the latter work prefigures Pale Fire and Ada, the deepened commitment to memory-writing and to cultural multiplicity in the memoir would lead to more immediate results.

CHAPTER

7

1

Memory, Modernism, and the Fictive Autobiographies

MORE THAN a decade would pass before Nabokov proceeded to turn “Mademoiselle O” into a full-fledged autobiography. In that period his circumstances changed dramatically: not only did he move from Germany to France and then to the United States, but he settled on English rather than French as his new literary language, to replace Russian. Nabokov’s delay in realizing the memoir’s potential does not, however, mean that his art of memory failed to advance on other fronts. For in the later 1930s, during his last years as a Russian writer, questions of memory, modernism, and their possible relationship are crucial for his single most important initiative—the decision to write fictive autobiographies. This new turn in Nabokov’s career resulted in two of his best works, one being the major short story “Spring in Fialta” and the other his longest and most varied Russian novel, The Gift. Nabokov continued to view both of them as major achievements: not only did he make efforts to publish them in English as soon as he arrived in the United States, but when he had the opportunity to reprint some of his Russian works in the 1950s, they were his first choices. Indeed, as things worked out, this publishing venture suggestively conjoined three major expressions of Nabokov’s art of memory, since it also included the Russian version of his autobiography.1 “Spring in Fialta” and The Gift may be called fictive autobiographies for the obvious reason that both of them have fictitious first-person narrators who not only decide to write about their lives but reflect in detail about the implications of that decision. Even more characteristic of Nabokov, however, is the basic mood of his two invented autobiographers. Both of them, though clearly different from their author, display a lyrical zest in commemorating the past that parallels Nabokov’s unanticipated delight in writing “Mademoiselle O.” Like Nabokovian autobiography, his fictive autobiographies express joy at remembered happiness and love; and this shift in emotional key sets them apart from the savagely ironic first-person narrative of Despair, which is autobiographical in approach but which shows Hermann’s “perfect past” to be murderous delusion.2 “Spring in Fialta” and The Gift are less directly European in orientation than “Mademoiselle O,” if only because they were written in Russian for a

The Fictive Autobiographies

131

Russian audience. Yet in complementary ways both works testify to Nabokov’s complex cultural affiliations in the later 1930s, when he was pulled between Europe and Russia, yet lacked the perspective he would have in Speak, Memory and the corresponding ability to integrate the two realms. The Gift would seem to avoid meaningful European contacts, for as a recreation of émigré literary life in the 1920s, it looks back to a period before Nabokov’s direct encounter with French modernism. And when he insists, in the preface to the English translation, that the real heroine of The Gift is Russian literature (G 10), he encourages the view that the novel is essentially a throwback to an earlier literary identity. Certainly the controversial fourth chapter, with its parody of Chernyshevsky, the nineteenth-century aesthetician and “progressive” literary hero, has struck European and American readers as forbiddingly and even hermetically Russian. Nonetheless, we shall see that The Gift has a covert European side; operating in the margins of Nabokov’s émigré subject matter, it confirms and extends the position on memory and modernism already developed in “Spring in Fialta.” This story, which is set in the more recent past, is also more openly European. Along with lovingly detailed vignettes of both Paris and a European resort town, it includes a cosmopolitan author who overcomes his foreign origins to become a French writer. Later Nabokov would even exaggerate the story’s French slant, for though “Spring in Fialta” first appeared in 1936 when he was still based in Berlin, both English and Russian collections of his stories give it a “Paris, 1938” dateline, which would assign it to his period of French residence.

RECOLLECTED EMOTION IN “SPRING IN FIALTA” (1936–1947)

“Spring in Fialta” was published in both Russian and English versions from the 1930s to the 1950s, and though changes in wording do occur, they are relatively minor when compared to the fluctuating text of “Mademoiselle O.” Our discussion will follow the English version that took shape in the early 1940s, which usually adds helpful clarifications, but significant Russian variations will also be mentioned. The “Fialta” of the title refers to an invented town on the Adriatic, originally a fishing village with a vaguely Slavic background that is now becoming an international resort. In the early 1930s Nabokov’s narrator, a Russian émigré with a management position at a German film studio, decides to stop there for a break in a business trip. Victor (Vasen’ka in Russian versions) is alone and, though happily married, is pleasantly surprised when he runs into Nina, another Russian whom he first met before the revolution and at intervals ever since in Europe. She is also married, to a writer named Ferdinand, a “Franco-Hungarian” with a

132

Toward France

reputation in Paris; but she has a warm, even promiscuous nature, and Victor has been one of her many lovers. Their chance meeting in Fialta causes Victor to remember their past together; sometime later, as a result of Nina’s death that same day in a car accident, he decides to commemorate his whole relationship with her, with the story we read as the result. Victor’s memoir shuttles between an account of their reunion in Fialta, itself a memory by the time he writes it down, and all the memories of their previous encounters released by that meeting. Indeed, the complex historical identity of Fialta becomes an emblem for this free movement among several distinct layers of time, consisting as it does of an old and a new town which relate in such a way that “the new and old were interwoven . . . and in certain places struggle with each other” (VF 28/ND 32). But memory, as it creates similar transactions and collisions in people’s minds, can vary widely in quality, and Nabokov opens the story by stressing this point. At issue are two contrasting kinds of images, the lifeless ones that do not attend to the particularity of past experience and are therefore inert stereotypes, and the vivid ones created by an awakened perception that drinks in concrete sensations. Hence the initial juxtaposition of Fialta’s tourist-trade souvenirs with the narrator’s ability, despite his inexperience as a writer, to recover precise impressions of his visit. Picture postcards of Mount Saint George, a local landmark, have never been updated since 1910. But Victor, who has arrived with “all my senses wide open,” can remember the mountain with a pictorial intensity that crosses over to humanizing metaphor: it appears in “a watery vista between the jagged edges of pale bluish houses, which have tottered up from their knees to climb the slope” (VF 7/ND 13). This contrast between lively personal memories and cliché-ridden public souvenirs will return later in the story, where it helps to clarify the narrator’s quarrel with Ferdinand about what art and memory might mean for a writer. In Ferdinand’s view, as Victor describes it in his hostile account, actual experience has nothing to do with art, which should depend on verbal invention alone. His praise of artifice seems to align him with Nabokov’s pronouncements in the 1960s; but actually, as we have just seen, “Mademoiselle O” was teaching him that imagination and memory were intricately related. Indeed, when the narrator sums up Ferdinand’s works by referring to “the stained glass of his prodigious prose,” he echoes a key detail from the veranda image presented in the memoir. But there is a crucial difference, for if Ferdinand’s tinted windows once revealed “some human landscape, some old garden, some dream-familiar disposition of trees,” now they are opaque; and behind their bright colors the narrator suspects “a perfectly black void” (VF 19–20/ ND 24–25). The balance between color

The Fictive Autobiographies

133

and transparency that marked the tinted windows in “Mademoiselle O” has vanished from Ferdinand’s empty and lifeless art. His misuse of experience is confirmed by one of his stories. Victor notices a woman character whose “friendly smile was always ready to change into an ardent kiss” (VF 25–26/ND 30), and immediately recognizes Nina. But because this passage portrays Ferdinand’s wife “probably in spite of his conscious will,” it reveals his blindness to the role of deliberate memory in the creative process. Even Ferdinand’s vaunted inventiveness boils down to a facility with elevated clichés. Cleverly mimicking current intellectual trends in France (Nabokov might be thinking of the shift from Maritain’s neoorthodoxy to Malraux’s activism), Ferdinand has moved from “a brief period of fashionable religious conversion” to a phase of political engagement in which he “turned his dull eyes toward barbarous Moscow” (VF 30/ND 34). This description of Ferdinand may seem obviously biased, but Nabokov does not simply leave the reader with a conflict between two subjective viewpoints. Here, as at the beginning of the story, Mount Saint George functions as the litmus test. Ferdinand is a sardonic lover of Kitsch, who thrives on Fialta’s souvenirs, and when he triumphantly buys “a dreadful marble imitation of Mount Saint George showing a black tunnel at its base, which turned out to be the mouth of an inkwell, and with a compartment for pens in the semblance of railroad tracks” (VF 24/ND 29), he has judged himself. At the level of mass culture, this grotesque artifact embodies both the stereotypical attitudes and the remoteness from experience that also define Ferdinand’s highbrow art of pure invention. Hence, though his success as a Hungarian in France might suggest that he is a model of cultural mobility, he has rightly been termed a “decoy character” whose resemblance to Nabokov is more apparent than real.3 Rebelling against this barren inventiveness, the narrator declares his faith in an art of memory. Thus he bluntly tells Ferdinand that “were I a writer, I should allow only my heart to have imagination, and for the rest rely upon memory, that long-drawn sunset shadow of one’s personal truth” (VF 19/ ND 24).4 Paradoxically, of course, this statement occurs in a work that the reader knows is fictitious, but the implicit devaluation of imagination in favor of memory aligns Victor with the author of “Mademoiselle O,” and thus identifies him as a fictive autobiographer. The text itself of “Spring in Fialta” bears witness to his literary views, for as Victor writes he learns to remember his life with Nina in loving detail. We shall soon see how this process works, but for now it should be noted that Victor has thereby realized his first response to seeing Nina in Fialta, the impulse to go “back into the past, back into the past” (VF 10/ND 16). As the repetition suggests, his retrospective impulse is not a simple one, but double. It results in a narra-

134

Toward France

tive that describes two pasts simultaneously—the one-day “drama” of Victor’s and Nina’s reunion in Fialta, and the more diffuse “chronicle” covering the series of their prior meetings. To be sure, Nabokov does limit his manipulation of time: both drama and chronicle are largely told in chronological order, nor do jagged breaks disturb the portrayal of individual episodes. But because Victor tells the two stories side by side, his narrative does jump back and forth between widely separated levels of time on eight occasions.5 Through these shifts between the recent drama and more distant chronicle, Nabokov produces that “intertwining of the retrospective romance” which he modestly described as “rather neat” to Edmund Wilson (NWL 64). More than just the manipulation of time, however, is at stake in Victor’s art. Indeed, in presenting this aspect of memory, “Spring in Fialta” may seem less daring than stream-of-consciousness fiction. Rather than rapidly juxtaposing past and present in the mind of a single character, the story clearly indicates the transitions between layers of time while offering leisurely “vignettes” of each layer—the pictorial term is Victor’s and indicates the extent to which he shares Nabokov’s interest in mnemonic images (VF 10/ND 16).6 But Victor has another goal beyond simply imitating the play of memory through a moderately quickened use of flashbacks; in fact, in the later, English version of the story he even condemns “a ripple of stream of consciousness” as a trite literary fad (ND 34).7 Memory’s great value lies elsewhere, in its power to crystallize feelings that were latent in experience but can become conscious only in retrospect, if at all. Hence the key point with which Victor begins his defense of memory to Ferdinand, when he insists that a writer’s real subject is the “heart.” Memory only enters later as the “long-drawn sunset shadow of one’s personal truth,” as the faculty that preserves the heart’s commitments in the wake of immediate emotion. Though Victor speaks somewhat elliptically, clearly he expects an art of memory to provide emotional insight. Beyond the complex movements of consciousness back and forth in time, it should try to show the strong affective currents from the past that, when captured by memory and rendered in an image, can sustain the present. 1 1 1 A convenient emblem for Victor’s view of memory would be the Roman letter Z, an abrupt diagonal of emotional connection between two distinct levels of time. It is therefore fitting that he should twice associate this very letter with Nina, the main subject of his memories.8 In fact the economy and precision of Nabokov’s writing are such that these two moments do more than offer a generalized diagram for the whole story. Each incident features a specific instance of emotional insight triggered by mem-

The Fictive Autobiographies

135

ory, while both of them, taken together, involve the reader in an analogous process of recollection. Early in his relationship with Nina, Victor once saw her in Berlin, comfortably sprawled on a sofa with her body in a Z-shape (VF 15/ND 20). She has broken off her engagement with a well-bred guardsman, and greets him warmly, as if they had been more intimate than they actually were. Victor realizes that she has forgotten the actual circumstances of their first meeting—a party on a snowy night in Russia, a general movement outdoors, two stragglers in the dark, and a sudden impulse of tenderness leading to a kiss. But if the details are cloudy in Nina’s mind, her greeting does hark back to her emotions at that time. Thus Victor can remark that although “the whole cast of our relationship was fraudulently based upon an imaginary amity,” he must concede that this error “had nothing to do with her random good will.” As a comment on Nina’s character, the phrase “random good will” is somewhat misleading. For it trivializes Victor’s sense of the kiss as “a wonderful sunburst of kindness” or as “spring water containing salubrious salts” (VF 13/ND 19). It also misrepresents the corresponding Russian passage, which in speaking of Nina’s “careless, generous, friendly amorousness” suggested that it might be “a real virtue” (VF 15). Still, even as “random good will,” it is clear that Nina’s generous feelings have persisted, and, despite her forgetfulness of the actual situation, this warmth of character has bridged the gap that revolution and emigration have opened between their meetings. Years later, when Victor is beginning to sense the waste of their brief, scattered encounters, he sees Nina in the same posture at a party in Paris (VF 33/ND 36). Victor does not specifically say that he recalls the earlier moment, but because Nina is smoking in the same way and makes the same exclamation in recognizing him, readers undoubtedly do remember. As a result they can experience Victor’s unspoken shock of recognition, while the sudden juxtaposition of then and now allows them to identify with his otherwise mysterious feelings of heartbreak. Not only has the sudden Z-flash of memory cast more light on the narrator’s attitude toward Nina, but Nabokov has constructed the story in such a way that the reader participates in the same process. Later in this scene Victor experiences a more obscure memory that reaches still further into his life with Nina. As he circulates among the guests, he overhears a chance remark that deepens his sadness: “Funny, how they all smell alike, burnt leaf through whatever perfume they use, those angular dark-haired girls” (VF 33/ND 37). There is no explanation for why the image of burned leaves should affect him so strongly, but careful attention to sensory details in the text suggests that it joins two of Victor’s best moments with Nina. At the time of their first kiss they may have gone out-

136

Toward France

side to see a distant fire (hence the impact of “burnt”), while after their first lovemaking Victor went out on a balcony and breathed “a combined smell of dry maple leaves and gasoline” (VF 18/ND 23). The implied comparison between these promising beginnings and the relatively hopeless present has sparked Victor’s sudden melancholy. As with Nina earlier, so with Victor here: even though he cannot identify the specific details, he does sense a relevant current of emotion. In the memories considered so far, the feelings released in Nina and Victor have been strong but relatively undefined. Such vagueness is essential to the story, which Victor began by confessing his failure “to find the precise term” to describe his relationship with Nina (VF 10/ND 16).9 In three key scenes, however, memory shows its power to focus the emotions and give them new significance. Each scene involves a convergence of past and present at a different level of time, first in the period before the meeting in Fialta, then during the encounter itself, and finally while Victor is writing down his memories. These varied scenes lay the groundwork for the story’s grand finale, the elaborately crafted concluding sentence that makes no fewer than three Z-strokes through time on its way to defining Victor’s last attitude toward Nina. Before Fialta, Victor’s single most revealing meeting with Nina took place by chance on a Berlin railroad platform. She is on her way to Paris to marry Ferdinand, and Victor begins to sense a pattern of missed opportunities in his encounters with her. His mood crystallizes once her train has left, when, after a blank interval, he suddenly recalls a passionate love song that a maiden aunt used to sing “with a powerful, ecstatically full voice” (VF 17/ ND 22). The intensity of romantic feeling may be somewhat dated, but these words “from the music box of memory” continue to obsess Victor for hours. Not only does he recall his aunt’s exact voice with an image-like specificity, but the song’s subject marks his first oblique acknowledgment of love in his elusive feelings for Nina. Since the song is a form of art, moreover, it also suggests his dawning awareness of an art of memory that would link the heart with the imagination by recollecting sharply focused portions of the past. The second key scene occurs in Fialta itself, near the end of their last reunion, when the narrator and Nina climb to a deserted terrace. It is a special moment, marked as such by a superb view of Mount Saint George, and Nina suddenly kisses him. Victor remembers their first kiss on that snowy evening in Russia, all their other encounters revive as well, and— retrospectively likening this fullness of memory to the triumph of a “circumnavigator, enriched all around”—he blurts out the awkward emotional insight: “Look here—what if I love you?” (VF 34/ND 37). This is a climactic moment of perception, since until now neither of them has ever pronounced the word “love.”

The Fictive Autobiographies

137

But Nina reacts enigmatically to Victor’s words: “something like a bat passed swiftly across her face, a quick, queer, almost ugly expression.” This odd image highlights our uncertainties about Nina’s character, for it could register her disenchantment with marriage to “her eclectic husband” (VF 27/ND 31); or perhaps her own promiscuity makes her uncomfortable with a sincere declaration of love. Perhaps, too, the image simply expresses Nina’s inability to remember, apparent in her vague memories of their first kiss in Russia and seen in later meetings as well. And yet, though Nina does not acknowledge Victor’s question, and though he quickly says he was only joking, the scene ends on an affirmative note. There is a gap in Victor’s narrative—“From somewhere a firm bouquet of small dark, unselfishly smiling violets appeared in her hands” (VF 34–35/ND 38)—and the reader recognizes Nina’s affinity with the “unselfishness” of these flowers. This awareness in some measure counteracts Victor’s stated mood of helplessness, for even if their love remains elusive, at least an atmosphere of generous feeling does surround their relationship. Finally, at a third level of time after the meeting in Fialta, where Victor is author of the story, the very act of writing can create new fusions of memory and emotion. This level of the text becomes particularly evident during the fuller portrayal of Ferdinand midway through the story. Victor breaks off his account of the past when he gets to his character, protesting, “I would rather not dwell upon him at all”; yet his desire to keep silent is overcome by his reawakened disgust: “I cannot help it—he is surging up from under my pen” (VF 19/ND 24). A less obvious suspension of time due to strong emotion occurs as the story opens, where the effect is at once more subtle and more revealing of the writer’s character. Though Victor normally uses the past tense in “Spring in Fialta,” he gives his first impressions of the town in the present. As a result, the reader is placed in an ambiguous position, between the actual scene and Victor’s viewpoint as author, and this chronological slippage underlines the temporal ambiguity of memory itself, which acts in the present to bring back vivid fragments of the past. Only on a second reading, however, is the emotional charge of these opening comments released. Between the actual experience of Nina’s violets, told at the end, and the decision to write about his last meeting with her, which motivates Victor here, he has had a chance to reflect on what the flowers mean. And so, as he celebrates his delight with Fialta, time circles again, as it had when he used the circumnavigator metaphor. The name of the town triggers a subliminal verbal association that might normally be considered a symbolic anticipation of the ending, but that in this fictive autobiography suggests emotion matured by memory: “I feel in the hollow of those violaceous syllables the sweet dark dampness of the most rumpled of small flowers” (VF 8/ND 14). As Nina’s last gesture reappears before him while he writes, Victor shows that he senses as never before the value of her

138

Toward France

generous spirit. Indeed, when he remarks “I am fond of Fialta,” the name’s associations with the past mean that this rather ordinary statement amounts to a renewed declaration of his love for Nina, a refusal to endorse his decision at the time to treat it as a joke.10 These varied transactions between different levels of the past culminate with the story’s elaborate and highly original final sentence. Not only does it shift suddenly to the authorial plane and reveal new depths in Victor’s feelings, thus showing how memories evoked while writing have sharpened his perceptions; but it also dramatizes two distinct shocks of retrospective insight at earlier levels of time. As the sentence begins, Victor and Nina are still standing together on the terrace. He notices the warmth of the stone parapet and realizes the explanation for some chance details glimpsed earlier—a glint of tinfoil (VF 24/ND 28), a shining glass of liqueur (VF 30/ND 34), or the sparkle of waves (VF 34/ND 37). The cloudy day has gradually become sunny, but this emblem of hope (which may reflect the younger Nabokov’s interest in anticipatory memory) is soon dispelled. For when Victor looks up, he discovers an essentially ambiguous resolution to his Fialta experiences: the sky’s “brimming white radiance grew broader and broader, all dissolved in it, all vanished, all passed . . .” (VF 35/ND 38). The burst of sunlight, still quite straightforward while it grows “broader and broader,” has become problematic with “dissolved.” By the end of the phrase it suggests a remote realm of uncertain truth, somewhat like the distant sky seen by Tolstoy’s Prince Andrew Bolkonsky after the battle of Austerlitz.11 For the radiance that began by spreading light also has the power to make things dissolve, while “passed” transfers this image to time, whose onward flow gives memory its perspective but also erodes the basis for its insights. The sentence then turns to a second discovery in retrospect, occasioned by news of Nina’s death, which occurred when her car crashed into a circus wagon just outside town. This tragedy naturally absorbs Victor’s attention, but for the reader it gains added meaning as the final realization of all the scattered hints of an approaching circus throughout the story, particularly of the circus posters that the characters keep seeing all over town.12 Yet, though Nabokov also pointed out “the crescendo of the circus theme” to Wilson (NWL 64), it brings no retrospective insight to Victor. But the juxtaposition of sun and circus has undermined the openness of futurity in a gesture that anticipates the temporal reversal at the end of John Shade’s “Pale Fire,” when the poet envisions a tomorrow that never comes. And the implicit presence of fatal omens alongside an explicit recognition of ambiguity obviously intensifies the bittersweet closing of “Spring in Fialta.” As discussed in the next section, however, the manner of Nina’s death also makes sense on an intertextual level, as a signpost marking Nabokov’s repudiation of myth-oriented versions of modernism.

The Fictive Autobiographies

139

Even more pointedly eloquent than these retrospective insights linked with sun or circus is the abruptness with which the narrative shifts from the terrace to Victor’s discovery of Nina’s death. The phrase cited above continues as follows: “all vanished, all passed, and I stood on the station platform at Mlech with a freshly bought newspaper.” It is this paper that tells Victor what happened. As we have seen, temporal blanks and gaps accompanied earlier revelations, but here the startling elision of an entire day reaffirms the narrator’s presence as author. For in this passage past and present fuse, with Victor’s memories of Fialta becoming so vivid that the remembered sun dazzles his mind now as much as it did his eyesight then, producing a hiatus in the narrative. This authorial level of time remains effective for the rest of the sentence, which reports the emotional insights stirred in Victor by the crash. First, as he looks back at Ferdinand and his dubious sidekick Segur, his aversions, which had abruptly punctured his story when he first portrayed Ferdinand, now rise to a mythic intensity that is rare for Nabokov. Because both of them have survived the crash, Victor denounces them as “those salamanders of fate, those basilisks of good fortune” for having given the ambiguous portents surrounding Nina their permanent bias. In his final thoughts, however, Victor gains new, more profound insights into his feelings for Nina. Over the years those feelings were sapped by two growing fears, that their relationship was corrupt because it accepted “the lies, the futility, the gibberish” of Nina’s environment and thus squandered “something lovely, delicate, and unrepeatable” (VF 28/ND 31–32), and that it was frivolous because it pretended to exist in “another, lighter time-medium” apart from ordinary life (VF 27/ND 31). But Nina’s death allays these fears. Not only does it rescue her from her “faithful, long-standing imitation” of her sordid companions; but since, in the story’s last words, she has “turned out after all to be mortal,” she also reaffirms her common humanity. For Victor, meanwhile, as he looks back at this tragic moment, his feelings undergo one final sharpening of focus. His last word “mortal” conveys his anguish at the precariousness of all things subject to time, yet it also voices a definite pride. In a world of constant transience, Nina’s kindness and generosity were worthwhile, had even been a gallant retort to time’s voraciousness. With this final insight into the value of her love, Victor has decisively surpassed Ganin, for despite a shared perplexity at the irretrievable pastness of his memories, he can still find meaning in them. 1 1 1 For the cultural biographer, “Spring in Fialta” is a rich distillation of the European Nabokov’s sympathies, doubts, and disagreements just before he abandons Russian and switches to English. Through a variety of

140

Toward France

allusions and adaptations, it creates a cultural field defined along three major axes: a strong orientation toward France rather than Germany, an equally strong preference for modernism over the avant-garde, and a more ambivalent oscillation between Western Europe and Russia. Both Russia and the avant-garde confront Victor with cultural situations that help illuminate Nabokov’s sense of European modernism by going beyond its boundaries. But the German-French opposition, which is much more specific than Nabokov’s early fiction in expressing his preferences among several competing accounts of memory, focuses on a conflict within European modernism itself. Two key images that surface when Victor discovers his art of memory have strong polemical overtones directed against major central European innovators in psychology and literature. Ferdinand’s mountain-shaped penholder, with its “black tunnel” for dipping the pens, is obviously Freudian, so much so that it can only be meant to mislead the unwary. Its real point is to demote psychoanalytic readings of experience to the level of Kitsch, with the text suggesting two main motives for the attack. The Nabokovian preference for precise mnemonic images over deconcretized symbols reappears in the contrast between this grotesquely sexualized memento of the natural scene and Victor’s careful description of Mount Saint George as he remembers it. Even more profoundly, Ferdinand’s weird souvenir evokes the primal scene, that ultimate mark of the past in Freudian psychology, which Nabokov would attack at the beginning of Speak, Memory. Lurking behind the two layers of memory, both recent and childish, this persistent trace of infantile experience can enter consciousness only as a distorted displacement. Nabokov, by contrast, emphasizes a more direct reading of the past, for if the narrator’s love for Nina is also scattered across recent and more remote levels of time, reassembling this love never requires that he combat stubborn mechanisms of repression, as in Freud. Hence Victor’s lyrical tribute to Mount Saint George at the beginning of “Spring in Fialta” can function as an undisputed given. Though Nabokov would concede that such a memory was partly constructed (as the humanizing metaphor at the end of Victor’s image makes clear), he rejects the Freudian theory that even the most concrete mnemonic image serves to screen one experience, in the last analysis always the same, which is buried in the unconscious. Nabokov’s other quarrel with central European modernism involves Thomas Mann, whose Magic Mountain was the target of a passing squib as early as 1928, when he still lived in Berlin.13 In the 1940s, while struggling to publish the English version of “Spring in Fialta,” Nabokov continued to dispute Mann’s stature, this time in an American view of modernist fiction. “How could you name that quack Mann in one breath with P. and J.?” (NWL 148), he protests to Edmund Wilson, where the initials show his own deter-

The Fictive Autobiographies

141

mination to save Proust and Joyce from a similar guilt by association. Later, in Strong Opinions, his criticisms would center on Death in Venice, which held a special place among his literary dislikes. Not only does Nabokov compare it directly with Ulysses, The Metamorphosis, Petersburg, and the Recherche, only to dismiss it as “asinine” alongside these modernist masterpieces; but he also calls it a culminating example of poshlost’, the evocative Russian word he tried to Americanize in his Gogol book. When applied to Mann, its most relevant connotations would seem to be “bogus profundity” and a loosely German penchant for the “poetically antique and mythological.”14 Nabokov thus associates Death in Venice with intellectual pretentiousness and with what Habermas would call the archaistic element in aesthetic modernity. Given these attitudes, it is significant that the basic situation of “Spring in Fialta” recalls Death in Venice, most notably in its combination of Adriatic setting, Slavic characters (Poles as well as Russians in Mann), and illicit love. Victor’s story might plausibly have been called “Death in Fialta”; and before Mann’s hero Aschenbach goes to Venice, he stays at a resort where the wet weather and the inhabitants “speaking an outlandish tongue” suggest Nabokov’s invented town. And both stories deploy a pattern of interlocking motifs, or “themes” in Nabokov’s terminology, which foreshadow Aschenbach’s and Nina’s fates. Thus the circus posters that fail to warn anyone about the impending car crash correspond to the series of impudent strangers whose full import Mann’s hero fails to grasp as they lead him to his death. Nabokov’s polemic concentrates on Mann’s motif of the strangers, who are at once avatars of Dionysus and figures from a medieval dance of death. In these roles they contribute to the explicitly mythic art of Death in Venice, as it seeks to reawaken the spirit of “primeval legend, handed down from the beginning of time.”15 Nabokov’s rejection of this kind of collective cultural memory explains the absence of mythic glamour in his story, most notably in the circus, which consists merely of “thoroughly fooled elephants” (VF 9/ND 15) and “mediocre Indians” (VF 32/ND 36). By taking this position, he apparently misses Mann’s irony, which makes Death in Venice a critique as well as an enactment of myth. Nonetheless, the story does display enough hankering for the antique to support Nabokov’s attack. The full significance of Nabokov’s revisionary gesture will emerge in Speak, Memory, where, as noted in Chapter 1, he reworks the circus motif to make it an emblem for his own art. As his anecdote of the rearranged circus fence suggests, he conceives of cultural memory not as a mythic reawakening of some distant past but as an intertextual confrontation with immediate predecessors. Mann’s Dionysian strangers are mythic in another sense as well, for they herald a “metaphysical” world of mystic significances and dreamlike distor-

142

Toward France

tions of reality. Nabokov himself has a genuine interest in creating a sense of “other worlds” in his fiction, but rejects this rather literalistic, unselfconscious way of doing so. In his story, though it may be disquieting to remember all the circus posters once the car crash has occurred, there is nothing necessarily uncanny about repeatedly spotting advertisements for a public spectacle. The one genuinely occult event in “Spring in Fialta” happens elsewhere, with the episodic character of an English traveler. Victor notices that he has his eye on Nina and then, quite late in the story, he is shown capturing a moth. Since moths and butterflies are emblems for the soul, both in Nabokov and other writers, this act could be seen as deciding her fate. But it is clear that Nabokov’s traveler differs markedly from Mann’s strangers. Rather than invoking the collective realm of Greek myth, this character refers back to Nabokov himself in his singular roles of lepidopterist and Anglophile. He thus serves as an authorial signature within the text, as a self-conscious acknowledgment of the writer’s role, at a level of reality beyond the fiction, in determining Nina’s fate. Nabokov reveals a metaphysical dimension through an individualistic self-consciousness about the artifice of narrative, rather than through a direct appeal to mythic motifs. French modernism tellingly asserts its priority over both Mann and Freud during Victor’s chance encounter with Nina in the Berlin train station. Since she is leaving for Paris, her departure echoes Ganin’s projected trip to France at the end of Mary, except that now the cultural issues are much more precise. Only the English version evokes the peculiarly vivid mood in the station, “where everything is something trembling on the brink of something else” (ND 22), a comment on novelty and transience that strongly suggests Baudelaire’s sense of modernity. Both versions, however, do spotlight the actual moment of Nina’s departure, when “all was slipping away with beautiful smoothness” (VF 17/ND 22), until Victor recalls his greataunt’s song. Here he experiences the full problematic of modernity beset by resurgent memory. So marked is the French orientation at this moment that when Victor remembers the song, which is doubtlessly part of that “FrancoRussian” culture discussed in “Mademoiselle O,” he actually slips into French. Moreover, though there is nothing specifically Proustian about this moment, the identification of the song with “some Parisian drama of love” from the previous century momentarily places Victor in the position of Proust’s narrator as he looks back to Swann’s love for Odette in the 1870s. In a more general sense, certainly, as a fictive autobiographer who finds literary inspiration in his own past, Victor does recall Proust’s Marcel. In fact, Nina is a Nabokovian version of Odette, but one that diverges from its source in one key respect even as it pays homage to it. To understand her relationship to Proust, we need to distinguish two levels of reception on Nabokov’s part. From one perspective, Nina’s careless promiscuity

The Fictive Autobiographies

143

might suggest a direct continuation of the Proustian inferno of romantic love and jealousy portrayed in Kamera Obskura. Victor briefly glimpses this possibility when he rejects the notion of leaving his wife for Nina. Such a life would be too painful, he reflects, for “every minute . . . would be listening, trembling, to the silence of the past”; and the English version sharpens the allusion to a Proustian drama of memory and reinterpretation by describing “a past teeming with protean partners” (VF 28/ND 32). But as we have seen, Victor subordinates this side of Nina to a very different image of her character, which overlooks her easy virtue to celebrate her capacity for “women’s love” (VF 13/ND 19). It is this underlying generosity and warmth that leads him to make his declaration on the terrace and to renew this affirmation of love while he writes. We might want to debate Victor’s assumption that these qualities are specifically feminine. But in the terms set by “Spring in Fialta” the issue is moot, since the point of Victor’s art of memory is to awaken the same “feminine” emotions in him, thereby dissolving his conventional gender distinctions. For Victor, the art dealer’s Proustian jealousy in Kamera Obskura yields to those values that he associates with the “heart,” values that his meetings with Nina have encouraged in himself. At the same time, however, Nabokov is responding to a deeper current of Proustian inspiration, which now enters his writing for the first time. Beyond the drama of reinterpretation and the question of involuntary memory, and alongside the oscillation of narrative between fiction and autobiography or of the image between concrete sensations and tropes, he also identified Proust as the analyst of that very conjunction of memory with emotional insight that concerns Victor. Hence in his Cornell lectures on the Recherche he could define Proust’s achievement in the following terms: “The transmutation of sensation into sentiment, the ebb and tide of memory, waves of emotion such as desire, jealousy, and artistic euphoria—this is the material of the enormous yet singularly light and translucid work” (LL 207). The first two parts of this statement apply directly to Victor’s relationship with Nina, except that they merely list points whose interconnection is shown much more forcefully in the story. Certain sensations given in direct experience acquire a new power of sentiment only when enhanced by memory, whose “ebb and tide” implies a selective emphasis on certain details while others are elided. The reference to “waves of emotion” in the third part of the statement returns to the main issue that separated Nabokov from Proust in “Spring in Fialta.” Not that this formula fails to cover Victor’s reliance as a writer on deferred emotional insight, but the specific emotions he emphasizes are quite different. Instead of the cycle of desire and jealousy presented in both Swann in Love and Kamera Obskura, “Spring in Fialta” looks ahead to the basic project of Speak, Memory—the creation of images that would crystallize feelings of tenderness and love dispersed through the past and threatened by the harshness of history.

144

Toward France

1 1 1 On a second cultural axis that reaches beyond this Franco-German opposition within modernism, “Spring in Fialta” at once broadens and sharpens the polemics in Kamera Obskura that defended the “innovators” against rival modes of modern writing. In the 1936 Russian version of the story, Victor’s intensely private Proustian memories of Nina contrast with Ferdinand’s vogue in advanced artistic circles, which are made to seem cliquish, superficial, and lacking in any real commitment to art. When Ferdinand is first spotted among a crowd of mediocre disciples, he suggests a nightmarish caricature of The Last Supper (VF 20–22), and he cynically caters to the revolutionary myth of the 1930s by identifying antitraditional art with radical politics (VF 30–31). In the 1947 English version, Nabokov adds more details on the French context for this polemic. Ferdinand is said to frequent Montparnasse, one of his disciples paints vaguely cubist “eyeand-guitar canvases,” and another is a businessman who finances “surrealist ventures” (ND 26). And the tendency to link innovative art and left-wing politics is now diagnosed as a tactic of “ultramodern literature” (ND 34). Nabokov had already rehearsed this attack on the avant-garde in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941), where, as seen in Chapter 3, the Proustian novelist Knight had joined the Russian futurist Alexis Pan on an improbable junket. Like Ferdinand, Pan was accused of exploiting “the queer notion (based mainly on a muddle of terms) that there is a natural connection between extreme politics and extreme art” (SK 30). Owing to this hasty equation of all radicalisms along with a vaguely Freudian fascination with the “submental,” he was dismissed as an instance of the “super-modern” fallacy (SK 28). Nabokov’s polemic with the avant-garde proceeds on two different levels as he moves from the Russian to the English version of “Spring in Fialta.” Explicitly he is concerned with the much-discussed topic of literary tendency and political allegiance, which bedeviled so many writers on the left at that time, from Brecht and Benjamin in Germany and Auden in England to the surrealists in France. Nabokov was better informed than most about the basically antimodern tastes of Russian radicals, but otherwise he has little to add to this debate. His second, implicit point is more interesting, for his choice of polemical terms indicates that he is thinking about the relationship between the modernist and the avant-garde consciousness of time. Hence neither of his pejorative labels, neither “super-modern” nor “ultramodern,” rules out an honorific use of “modern.”16 Nabokov cannot object to the basic project of trying to outdo past art, only to an exaggerated onesidedness in pursuing that project. For one thing, as suggested by Victor’s and Ferdinand’s contrasting attitudes in writing about their personal pasts,

The Fictive Autobiographies

145

such one-sidedness would exclude the countermovement of memory. Another result would be the loss of all historical context, a denial of the past that ultimately destroys the sense of modernity itself; for without some knowledge of what has been surpassed, it is impossible to assess the newness of the new. When Victor says of Ferdinand that “The fame of his likes circulates briskly but soon grows heavy and stale; and as for history it will limit his life story to the dash between two dates” (ND 24), the fate he assigns him is merely a logical extension of the avant-garde’s willful blindness to the past. Nabokov would make a related point to Wilson in describing Pushkin as an innovator while he worked on the English version of “Spring in Fialta.” He remarks, “Pushkin never broke the skeleton of tradition,—he merely rearranged its inner organs,—with less showy but more vital results” (NWL 67). The essentially modernist pursuit of the new against the old requires a surgical lightness of touch that differs strikingly from the heavy-handed interventions of the avant-garde. Along a third cultural axis that contrasts Western Europe with Russia, “Spring in Fialta” suggests Nabokov’s divided loyalties during a time of major changes in his literary identity. The town itself reflects this ambivalence, for its division into two parts suggests more than the purely temporal opposition of past and present. The new town, with its express trains and Riviera atmosphere, belongs to Europe, but a certain Slavic flavor persists in the old town, with its fading mosaics, Dalmatian natives, and Yalta-like name. At one point, when Nabokov mentions how the two towns, though thoroughly interwoven, still struggle “either to disentangle themselves or to thrust each other out” (VF 28/ND 32), the difficulty of cultural synthesis is made explicit. This unresolved duality reappears in Victor’s impressions of Nina herself, summed up in two composite images with divergent cultural implications. The special quality of these images must be distinguished from the concrete sense impressions—the smell of burnt leaf, the bouquet of violets, Nina’s Z-shaped posture, or her batlike grimace—that normally punctuate Victor’s double narrative. Rather than aiming at documentary accuracy, they are more general; and, by joining many experiences in a single verbal picture, they attempt to give an overview of Nina’s life. The first of these images comes quite early in the story, when Victor pauses to describe “her average pose.” In another situation that echoes Death in Venice, he imagines Nina at the counter of a Cook’s travel agency, “left calf crossing right shin, left toe tapping floor,” intent on making a train reservation (VF 15/ND 20).17 But later he replaces this dominant “European” image with a covert one attuned to a “Russian” experience of emigration and exile. At the end of some quick vignettes of random meetings, Victor reports a dream that mingles recent impressions of Nina with something he may have glimpsed during his own flight from Russia: “I saw lying on a trunk, a roll of burlap under her head,

146

Toward France

pale-lipped and wrapped in a woolen kerchief, Nina fast asleep, as miserable refugees sleep in God-forsaken railway stations” (VF 27/ND 31). This visionary traveler, so different from the affluent tourists who patronize the new Fialta, deepens the rift between the story’s fading Russian past and its insistently European present. This rift is never really closed. Both composite images do convey Nina’s restless life of moves and trips, and by emphasizing the disorientation of exile give added value to her capacity for generosity and love. But otherwise their authority is problematic. Since neither comes as directly from “experience” as the story’s mnemonic images, it is hard to decide which gives more insight into Nina’s life, the imagined “average pose” or the scrambled dream vision. And if placement in the story gives a certain climactic punch to the dream, temporal perspective favors the pose, which occurs to Victor in the course of writing. In one sense, however, these uncertainties are themselves meaningful, for the oscillation between a European and a Russian Nina corresponds to the dilemma Nabokov then faced in his literary identity. Even the writing itself, with its two languages and Parisian dateline, reflects the tension between maintaining a Russian literary vocation and deepening his involvement in European modernity. A similar tension will reappear in The Gift, Nabokov’s other major fictive autobiography of the 1930s, but in this account of the young manhood and literary apprenticeship of an émigré writer, the cultural hierarchy implied by Nina’s image is reversed. Russia becomes the dominant presence while in the interstices of the text Nabokov’s European interests continue to lead a hidden existence. Only later, as he writes Speak, Memory in America, will Nabokov attempt a more thorough Russo-European synthesis.

THE COVERT MODERNISM OF THE GIFT (1934–1937)

Among Nabokov’s increasingly innovative Russian novels in the 1930s, The Gift at first seems the least European. Its largely Russian cast of characters sets it apart both from Glory’s openness to England and from Laughter in the Dark’s sardonic portrayal of a German art world. And its creation of a specific milieu as it commemorates Berlin émigré life in the 1920s contrasts sharply with the invented dystopia in Invitation to a Beheading, which can suggest Western as well as Russian conditions of unfreedom. As for the controversial Chernyshevsky biography in chapter 4, this belated salvo in modern fiction’s long struggle with nineteenth-century realism certainly bears comparison with the Flaubert-Sand correspondence in France or the James-Wells debate in England. But in this case Nabokov’s target lacks the immediate European resonance of his Dostoevsky parody in Despair.

The Fictive Autobiographies

147

Nonetheless, even this most Russian of Nabokov’s later Russian novels does reveal something of its author’s multicultural identity. Thus an English element enters with the incidental vignette of the writer Vladimirov (Dar 359/G 332–33), an Anglophile rival of the hero Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev. Indeed, Nabokov’s preface to The Gift identifies this character as a partial avatar of himself in the 1920s, soon after his graduation from Cambridge (G 9). Similarly, a certain postwar German neoromanticism colors the self-contained story of Yasha Chernyshevsky’s suicide pact, especially the portrait of Yasha’s German friend Rudolf. More significant than either of these episodes, however, is the French undercurrent that marks several key discussions and scenes. In them Nabokov’s novel about the life and works of a young émigré writer in Berlin in the 1920s reaches ahead to confront the author’s own turn toward French modernism a decade later. 1 1 1 During Fyodor’s two imaginary conversations with the poet Koncheyev, in chapters 1 and 5 of The Gift, Nabokov presents a dazzling, rapidfire exchange of critical insight in the service of literary creativity. Both of these independent-minded innovators vie with each other in surveying and reassessing the Russian literary tradition. But on two occasions Fyodor and Koncheyev depart from their overwhelmingly Russian agenda, and each of these departures highlights Fyodor’s modernity as a writer by referring to major figures from nineteenth-century French literature. As a result, though Nabokov has insisted that Koncheyev more closely resembles “myself as I was circa 1925” (G 9), it is Fyodor who better embodies Nabokov’s French interests at the time of writing. As already noted, Fyodor speaks in chapter 1 of Rimbaud’s sonnet “Voyelles” (Dar 85/G 86), which seems to anticipate his own colored hearing. Rimbaud thus becomes a crucial model for Fyodor’s authorship, yet only in a special, limited sense—he glimpsed a few superficial distinctions where Nabokov’s character sees numerous options and even senses the possibility of an art of memory centered on the mnemonic image.18 In effect Fyodor has recycled the two-edged attitude toward Rimbaud that surfaced in Kamera Obskura. On the one hand, because Rimbaud epitomized radical innovation for many early twentieth-century European writers, Fyodor is advertising his familiarity with the modern movement. On the other, because Rimbaud failed in this case to see the full newness of what he discovered, he can seem something of a disappointment. He thus corresponds to Nabokov’s doubts about what he called the “super-modern” or “ultramodern” side of modern literature, to what is now known as the avant-garde. Fyodor’s very real modernity as a writer does not mean that he needs to accept Rimbaud as the touchstone of ultimate novelty.

148

Toward France

The second imagined dialogue, in the fifth and final chapter, develops a contrasting view of the modernity of French literature. At one point, when Koncheyev tries to sum up his differences with Fyodor, he points out their disagreements about the nineteenth-century poet Fet, about Dostoevsky, and about Petersburg’s value as a cultural center. But then these Russian issues give way to the problem of Fyodor’s “Gallic taint, your neo-Voltaireanism, and weakness for Flaubert” (Dar 382/G 353). Given Fyodor’s genuine love for Pushkin and modern Russian poetry, this attack on his literary Francophilia may seem surprising; but perhaps Koncheyev is thinking of his most recent work, the Chernyshevsky biography, which has just been reproduced in chapter 4. Its irreverent treatment of a canonical Russian radical may well be considered a revised and redirected Voltaireanism, and it does make passing comparisons that tend to judge Chernyshevsky by the standards of his French contemporary, Flaubert.19 At any rate, Fyodor’s supposed weakness for Flaubert corresponds to that author’s growing importance in Nabokov’s own response to French literature, as shown by the evolving colored-glass motif in “Mademoiselle O” or by the linkage between his father and Madame Bovary in the final version of Speak, Memory. Within The Gift, meanwhile, this passage clarifies Fyodor’s position on Rimbaud and the right direction for modern writing. For Flaubert’s uncompromising devotion to literature, as expressed in his conception of the novel as a work of art or his struggles for the best turn of phrase or his aloofness from literary politics in Paris, counters the flashiness of the avant-garde. In honoring Flaubert, therefore, Fyodor identifies with a second trend in modern European literature, one that suggests Nabokov’s favorites in the Hughes interview, Joyce, Kafka, and Proust. All three were individualistic masters and careful readers of Flaubert who ended up keeping their distance from the avant-garde movements of their time and place. In these references to Flaubert and Rimbaud, then, modernism once again confronts the avant-garde as a model for twentieth-century art. And if we turn from Fyodor’s literary debates to the main action of The Gift, we find a sequence of scenes that suggest a more specific sense of French modernism. Their “Gallic taint” may be less explicit, even largely camouflaged compared to the discussions, but in several respects they go beyond “Spring in Fialta” in showing Nabokov’s response to European modernism just before English becomes his main literary medium. Indeed, along with giving new prominence to a Proustian mood of modernity, he includes a polemic with Joyce that foreshadows later critiques of Anglo-American “high modernism.” The Gift begins by evoking the circumstances of the emigration. It is moving day; and when Fyodor, who has just changed rooms himself, leaves his home, he sees a large yellow van in the street. This chance event turns out to be a missed opportunity, for his new neighbors could have introduced

The Fictive Autobiographies

149

him to his future love, Zina Mertz. But for the time being Fyodor’s own move provokes some humorously morose reflections on the power of habit, since he is a light sleeper who finds new bedrooms a terrible ordeal. Early in chapter 1, as he returns from an errand, Fyodor meditates darkly on the “vile yoke of recurrent new quarters” and on “the impossibility of living face-toface with totally strange objects” (Dar 14/G 19). Then, quite late in the chapter, when he comes home at the end of the day, Fyodor again feels the anguish of the unaccustomed, as personified by a “malevolent wardrobe” in his room (Dar 63/G 65). Chapter 3 opens with a final echo of this “strange room theme,” as Nabokov might have called it. Fyodor is now ensconced in yet another new room, one that has at last brought him together with Zina, who is the landlady’s daughter. And because three months have passed since he moved in, he feels that these lodgings have “long since become familiar and harmless” (Dar 175/G 167). This series of encounters with the unaccustomed, which then becomes automatized, might recall Russian formalist doctrines of defamiliarization, but the evocation of Proust is more pointed and precise. As with the magiclantern scene, the fiction-reading, or the darkened bedroom of “Mademoiselle O,” Nabokov’s point of departure is again the overture to the Recherche. But now he refers in greater detail to the very early passage that describes the narrator’s rapidly shifting memories of various bedrooms he has used throughout his life, including a weird one at the seaside resort of Balbec that caused him many nights of sleepless anxiety. Among its furnishings were several relatives of Fyodor’s malevolent wardrobe, such as “hostile” velvet curtains, an “insolently indifferent” clock, and “a strange and pitiless mirror.”20 Eventually, however, even this ordeal succumbs to habit, and like Fyodor in Zina’s apartment Proust’s narrator finds that his surroundings have become harmless and barely perceptible. Nabokov’s character may have stronger nerves and more self-confidence than Proust’s overprotected child, but clearly the disruptions of exile have induced in him an equivalent sensitivity to change. The Gift has thus added a new issue to the various Proustian echoes in “Mademoiselle O.” Even more than Nina’s Odette-like waywardness in “Spring in Fialta,” this allusion highlights the Proustian element in Nabokov’s own sense of modernity. For if the mood of the modern depends upon a heightened awareness of temporal rupture, then it also requires some recognition of the ineluctable otherness of the past. Yet this recognition can only be temporary, for once forgetfulness dulls the startling discrepancy between then and now, even the shock of innovation loses its force; hence both Marcel’s and Fyodor’s new rooms are eventually stripped of their painful novelty. But in the interval before habit anesthetizes the two characters, their access to a past that is radically different allows them to sense the originality of their situation. In both Proust and Nabokov, there-

150

Toward France

fore, the mood of modernity requires a certain persistence of memory, not its total denial. Proust is the French modernist, but not the only European modernist whose presence haunts the rooms of this struggling émigré writer. Despite Nabokov’s categorical judgment in 1966 that Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was “feeble and garrulous” (SO 71), certain external details surrounding Fyodor’s poem about Zina Mertz, which he writes at the beginning of chapter 3, recall Stephen Dedalus’s villanelle of the temptress.21 Both young men lie in bed as they compose their poems, both have awakened in sordid rooms that clash with their mood of poetic exaltation, both are conscious of returning to a period a decade earlier in their lives,22 and— most strikingly—both use similar metaphors for the poetic state. Thus Stephen’s triumphant conviction that “in the virgin womb of the imagination the word was made flesh”23 is matched by Fyodor’s sense of “reveling in the womblike warmth of the bed” as he composes (Dar 175/G 167). And Stephen’s notion that his inspiration radiates outward “in cloud on cloud of vague circumstance”24 corresponds to Fyodor’s euphoric experience of a “pulsating mist” (Dar 175/G 168). Yet, despite the similar atmospheric and gestational metaphors for creativity, the two poets are finally very different. Stephen’s villanelle, whose insistent eucharistic imagery shows his continued ambivalence about leaving the priesthood for literature, is the work of a gifted apprentice. But Fyodor, after the meager success of his first book of poems, is gathering his forces for a more ambitious effort. In fact, it may be the immaturity of Joyce’s young artist that accounts for Nabokov’s later dismissive judgment. If “feeble” and “garrulous” fail to describe Joyce’s art in the Portrait, the terms do apply at times to Stephen, and arguably so in the scene of his poem.25 The outlook on modernism from Fyodor’s rented rooms, like the one implied by Iogolevich’s preferred readings in Glory, does not agree with Nabokov’s later priorities. In the Hughes interview, after twenty-five years of writing in English, Ulysses comes first and the Recherche fourth; yet in The Gift, before his change of literary language, Proust still comes before Joyce. As a matter of fact, the poem Fyodor actually writes bears only a general resemblance to Stephen’s villanelle. In both poems the young men address the women they love as if they were also their Muses, and so their love allows them to proclaim their basic literary aims. But these aims differ markedly, for if Fyodor focuses on an individualistic art of personal memory, Stephen is concerned with something more grandiose, even cosmic, religious, and mythic. His unnamed temptress does not correspond in any direct way with the girl he loved in real life, and when she is identified with the “lure of the fallen seraphim,” she suggests analogies between the poetic imagination and the condition of sinful humanity. As Stephen’s reference to himself as

The Fictive Autobiographies

151

“a priest of eternal imagination” suggests, he remains ambivalent about his choice of a literary vocation. Nabokov, by contrast, dismissed such far-reaching equations of literature and myth, whatever the value system or religion involved. As already seen, when “Spring in Fialta” was published the previous year, he took issue with the mythic motifs in Mann’s Death in Venice, and later in his career, he would even denounce Joyce’s Homeric references in Ulysses: “there is nothing more tedious than a protracted and sustained allegory based on a wellworn myth” (LL 288). Here Nabokov was criticizing a major, perhaps even a defining tendency in Eliot’s and Pound’s as well as Joyce’s high modernism, a tendency that Eliot described as the “mythical method” in his famous 1923 review of Ulysses.26 At the time of The Gift, of course, which does not yet envision any direct relation with an English-language literature, this polemic is still quite muted. Nabokov’s account of his poet’s creative process may recall Stephen, but Fyodor’s poem counters the implicitly mythic approach of Joyce’s villanelle by simply refusing to say anything about it. 1 1 1 To move from the circumstances of Fyodor’s poem to the poem itself returns us to Nabokov’s French modernism. For though the poem generally urges the supreme importance of the imagination, at its heart it includes Fyodor’s famous encoded address to Zina Mertz; and here, as his muse unites with the woman he loves to evoke a more specific literary program, he identifies not with myth but with an art of personal memory. In the process the Proustian subtext of The Gift shifts decisively, from a special mood of modernity to a direct engagement with the aesthetic worth of remembering the past. Within the novel’s presentation of Fyodor’s creative process, the two lines of the address to Zina are isolated and given emphasis because Nabokov’s author composes them just after being interrupted by the telephone. They read as follows in Russian: “Kak zvat’ tebia? Ty poluMnemozina/ polumertsan’e v imeni tvoem” (Dar 176). Both parts of Zina’s name are included in this invocation, where they appear as the last half of “Mnemozina” and the first half of “mertsan’e,” thereby forming a play on words that the English version approximates as “What shall I call you? Half-Mnemosyne?/ There’s a half-shimmer in your surname too” (G 169). As mother of the Muses and the goddess of memory, Mnemosyne was certainly a mythic figure. But her role here is limited to a relatively modest allusion; for this writer, it is suggested, recollections of actual experience are just as inspiring as the imaginative invention stressed elsewhere in the poem. “Mertsan’e,” meanwhile, introduces the image of faint reflected

152

Toward France

light, the “pale fire” of a much later Nabokov novel, or a “glancing shine,” as this word is translated elsewhere in the poem when the same constraints of sound and rhythm no longer apply. For Fyodor, then, the name of his beloved combines a direct appeal to memory as the ultimate source of artistic inspiration with a suggestive image for memory’s status as a diminished yet persistent reflection of experience. In the Russian original, at least, this combination could even be called a synthesis, since the words “Zina Mertz” make a single unit of the unrelated terms “Mnemozina” and “mertsan’e.” In addition, this emphasis on a proper name spotlights the individualistic side of Fyodor’s art of memory. The typically Nabokovian precision of certain details in the poem, such as “veined lime-leaves” and “wet asphaltic shine,” further enhances the impression of utter individuality. But is the retrospective muse plucked from Zina’s name necessarily Proustian? The answer is an unqualified yes, as some allusions later in the chapter make clear. In a witty triptych of literary adaptations, Fyodor evokes Zina’s difficult life by associating her wretched stepfather with Dostoevsky (Dar 210/G 198) and the uncongenial office where she works with Dickens (Dar 212/G 201). But he decides that her fond anecdotes of her dead Jewish father recall Proust’s character Swann (Dar 210/G 199). This direct reference after so many covert allusions is especially meaningful, for it elaborates on Victor’s situation in “Spring in Fialta” when he was so deeply moved by the nineteenth-century Parisian love song. Now, Zina, as a character, assumes the same basic role as the narrator of the Recherche when he writes of Swann: they are both memorialists of cultivated European Jews. The very name of Mertz thus acquires a pointedly Proustian resonance. Equally relevant is Zina’s ability to call up fortifying memories from the distant past, for this kind of memory highlights the distinctively Proustian element in Fyodor’s appeal to Mnemosyne. At first glance, perhaps, his invocation of memory may seem trivial: in the mornings Fyodor writes poetry commemorating his furtive meetings with Zina the night before. But this practice has deeper roots in his past, thereby establishing the long temporal perspective associated with memory in Proust, which abruptly juxtaposes two utterly separate, almost foreign epochs in one’s life. In this spirit Fyodor’s poems to Zina in the émigré world of Berlin hark back to his first efforts as a poet ten years earlier, when—in yet another reprise of the Nabokovian summer-of-love narrative—he began to write after falling in love on the family estate in Russia (Dar 166–69/G 159–62). It is the long-term, revivifying memory of this original inspiration that, like Zina’s treasured stories of her Swann-like father in her current difficulties, underlies and explains Fyodor’s euphoria as an unknown young émigré writing in Berlin. Here the poem anticipates the greater structure of The Gift itself, which depends on the same effect of commemorative distance, as we realize once we learn that the book we are reading is a fictive autobiography written by

The Fictive Autobiographies

153

a more mature Fyodor. Near the end, when Fyodor discovers that the novel he wants to write lies in the very experiences recounted in The Gift, he adds the crucial proviso that he will “be a long time preparing it, years perhaps” (Dar 409/G 376). He thus opens up the characteristic gap spanned by a Proustian effort of memory, while his decision to use his own personal past in creating this ambitious work confirms the shift envisioned in the poem, from pure invention to an art sponsored by Mnemosyne. To push further and see how The Gift’s covert European modernism relates to its mainly Russian orientation, we need to consider the complex cultural role it assigns to Pushkin. Here it is significant that chapter 3 does not begin with Fyodor actually writing his poem but with an apparently random series of perceptions and memories. At one point he recalls a literary argument with his father some ten years earlier. Though the elder Godunov-Cherdyntsev was a naturalist who did not read much poetry, he greatly admired Pushkin; his son, meanwhile, eagerly devoured the “noveishaia poeziia,” or, as Nabokov allowed this phrase to be translated in the 1960s, the “avant-garde verse” of the early twentieth century (Dar 167/G 160). Their disparate tastes led to friendly quarrels about the relative worth of different historical periods and the broader issue of one’s attitude toward the past. Thus Fyodor would chide his father for a tradition-bound “classicism,” and the father responded by conjuring up a loutish “mug of modernism” (Dar 168/G 161). By the time of Fyodor’s poem, however, the son realizes the falsity of this contrast. Many of his youthful enthusiasms have become hopelessly dated, and those modern poets he still admires do not oppose Pushkin, but continue his “long, life-giving ray” (Dar 168/G 161). Despite this belated rapprochement, Fyodor still allows for a “true face of innovation [novizni],” and therefore refuses to accept his father’s antimodernism in its entirety. A similar ambivalence had already surfaced in chapter 1, when he missed his first chance of meeting Zina at his new neighbors’ apartment. The pretext was Fyodor’s dislike for the painter Romanov, a member of his neighbors’ circle who had experienced “all the trials of socalled modernism” (Dar 68/G 70) and whose art both fascinated and repelled the young writer. These explicit references to modernism and the avant-garde are almost unique in Nabokov. In contrast to the desynonymization in recent usage, it is notable that the terms seem practically interchangeable in Fyodor’s memories of his father, and “modernism” appears pejorative alongside honorific words like “noveishaia” or “novizni,” both of which suggest “newness.” Apart from these verbal inconsistencies, however, the issue of Pushkin’s relation to recent poetry bears directly on Nabokov’s attitudes toward early twentieth-century European literature. Thus Fyodor’s discovery that many novelties fade mirrors his author’s characteristic impatience with the various avant-garde movements. And the implication that Pushkin might be viewed as either classical or contemporary parallels

154

Toward France

the resistance of the modernist masters (in our parlance rather than Nabokov’s) to the slogans and dogmas of particular literary groups. Finally, and even more suggestively, Fyodor’s very discovery that Pushkin could be a “life-giving” influence on modern literature points up the cultural complexity of Nabokov’s art of memory in The Gift. For in this novel, as in stories like “Reunion” and “The Circle,” the summer of love has been reconfigured to fit a new, Proustian context. Indeed, Fyodor’s courtship of Zina Mertz, the faithful daughter of a Swann-like father, not only deepens his first emotions of love but renews his poetic inspiration. But in Mary, as we know, Nabokov had initially placed this story within a Russian framework defined by the Onegin epigraph. In the real author’s career, therefore, Pushkin functions just as he did in Fyodor’s response to modern poetry. He is the precursor from an earlier cultural epoch who made it possible to identify genuine innovation in the early twentieth century, not just among the Russian poets but in Nabokov’s own turn toward French modernism. The multicultural logic of Nabokov’s career thus undermines his famous remark in the preface to The Gift, that the novel’s “heroine is not Zina, but Russian literature” (G 10). On the contrary, his art of memory in this novel reaches beyond the Russian literary tradition to establish a meaningful, though largely covert, connection with French modernism. In the process, even Pushkin’s sponsorship of the original summer-of-love narrative is replaced by the Proustian implications of Fyodor’s later love for Zina. As for Zina herself, her character—in the traditional sense suggested by a term like “heroine”—does not contribute much to this cross-cultural exchange. But Nabokov’s comment bypasses the significance of her name, which by uniting Mnemosyne with the image of reflected light and then superimposing a reminiscence of Swann has linked his art of memory in The Gift with French modernism. The importance of Zina’s name as a focus for Nabokov’s intricate cultural situation in the later 1930s becomes even clearer in the context of “Spring in Fialta,” the European counterpart to The Gift. At a time when Nabokov was poised between Russian and French, and therefore using both the Cyrillic and Roman alphabets, Zina Mertz’s name begins and ends with the same letter that had been a hallmark of Victor’s memories of Nina. The shape of that Roman Z suggested a Proustian flash of memory between two widely separated levels of time, an implied lightning metaphor that is further supported by Nabokov’s colored hearing, which associated this letter with the bluish tint of thunderclouds (SM 34). If we heed “Spring in Fialta,” therefore, the very spelling of Zina’s name offers a graphic representation of her role as muse for Nabokov’s art of memory. Yet this association only works when Zina’s name is transliterated out of Russian; it is never made explicit in The Gift. Nonetheless, it cannot be dismissed as fanciful or farfetched, for given Nabokov’s fascination with col-

The Fictive Autobiographies

155

ored letters and the very shape of the alphabet, it expresses his complex cultural affiliations at the time in a peculiarly concrete way, in the very letters he inscribed upon the page. In a novel that seems to deal almost exclusively with émigré Russian life and literature, therefore, Zina epitomizes the largely camouflaged presence of European modernism. The possibility of a European orthography, like the echoes of Joyce and especially Proust, lurks beneath the surface of the text. It calls out for recognition as a continuing trace of Nabokov’s multicultural identity, which remains active even in the most Russian novel he wrote during his great outburst of achievement in the 1930s.

Part Three 1 In English

CHAPTER

8

1

Cultural Mobility and British Modernism THE REAL LIFE OF SEBASTIAN KNIGHT AND BEND SINISTER (1938–1946)

THE GIFT was Nabokov’s last Russian novel, though he continued to write in Russian after 1937. Several stories and plays appeared in the later 1930s, and in the early 1940s two chapters from the never-finished novel Solus Rex; during this period he also found a new vitality as a Russian poet. But all this activity seems peripheral to his main achievement, his transformation into an English-language author. Nor was this sharp turn in Nabokov’s career the only major change around 1940. Unlike his period of rapid development in the early 1930s, when he lived in relative freedom, circumstances now seemed to prevent a similar intensity of literary commitment. Forced to flee Hitler’s Europe, then to establish himself in America, Nabokov not only began teaching Russian full-time but devoted so much energy to entomological research that only the late evenings, it seemed, were left for writing. It is not surprising, therefore, that from 1938 to 1946 he completed only two novels in English. The first, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, was written in Paris in the late 1930s when Nabokov still contemplated moving to England. As noted in Chapter 3, its artist-hero Sebastian Knight has affinities with Proust, but he is more obviously an alter ego for the linguistic and literary transformation that Nabokov then envisioned for himself: after growing up in Russia, he moves to England and becomes an English author. The other novel was Bend Sinister, written entirely in America but closely linked to Solus Rex, a title that Nabokov even considered reusing for this book (NWL 169). The vividly antirealistic style with which it evokes a nightmarish police state elaborates on Nabokov’s discoveries while writing Invitation to a Beheading. Both Sebastian Knight and Bend Sinister are thus still expressions of the European Nabokov in the limited sense of relating back to projects begun before his Atlantic crossing. In broader terms, the mere choice of English as a medium says nothing in itself about a new, American Nabokov. In these years English still meant mainly England for him. Although he does mention boyhood readings of Mayne Reid’s Wild West fiction in Speak, Memory, he emphasizes, with the

160

In English

insight of later experience, that it was a West filtered through the author’s distinctly British sensibilities (SM 201).1 And England held a much larger place in Nabokov’s own development up to 1940, whether by way of his father’s Anglophilia, his own Cambridge education, or the English motifs in his earlier work. One notable example of this separate, rather episodic English orientation would be Martin’s complex relationship with Darwin, his English friend in Glory. Another landmark, from about the time of “Mademoiselle O,” would be the unpublished sketch “England and Me,” which presumably occupied a similar position in the writing and rewriting of certain English memories. The “fire-bird” of flaming newspaper, the portable rubber tub, the tutor who puts tea things on the floor—all these images shift from fiction to autobiography, like the Swiss governess reading adventure stories on the veranda. But in this case, rather than moving from The Defense to “Mademoiselle O,” the trajectory runs from Glory to Sebastian Knight and on to Speak, Memory. When Nabokov came to the United States, accordingly, he still had a largely European perspective on the English language, and, as Alfred Appel has shown, it naturally took time merely to digest his new, American experiences, much less to put them in writing. Until then he remained in an ambiguous situation like the one that bemuses his character Ember in Bend Sinister. After years of translating Shakespeare into his fictitious Eastern European language, this scholarly Anglophile reverses the process by putting his compatriot’s, the philosopher Krug’s, latest treatise into English. Yet this apparently innocuous act ends by shattering the parameters of Ember’s bilingual world, for against all expectation the book becomes a best-seller in America. Amazed at a language that permits this intercontinental glide, he can use epithets as diverse as “outlandish” and “rich synthetic” in a single sentence (BS 29). When he realized that writing in English would add an American overlay to an already varied Russo-European identity, Nabokov’s feelings may well have lurched between a similar fear of rootlessness and pride in multiplicity. In many respects Nabokov’s first two novels in English would seem to resist comparison.2 Yet both do reveal their author’s continuing preoccupation with his art of memory. As a fictive biography, Sebastian Knight obviously complements the fictive autobiographies, especially in chapters where the biographer V. remembers meetings with his half-brother Knight or his personal experiences in researching the book. And if Bend Sinister derives mainly from that other trend in Nabokov’s authorship during the 1930s— the fantastic vision of Invitation to a Beheading—it does probe its hero Krug’s memories of the past. Both novels converge, moreover, in insisting on the artistry of memory, in showing that although invention necessarily affects our pictures of the past, they should not for that reason be considered false. Thus, despite the gaps and even mistakes in his narrative, the biographer in Sebastian Knight senses that he has intuited some basic truth

Cultural Mobility and British Modernism

161

about his subject’s life. Or, when Krug’s schooldays with the dictator Paduk rise to the surface in chapter 5 (BS 63–82), they include dreamlike distortions that in the final analysis seem to assist rather than obstruct the reader’s understanding of the two characters. Without some imaginative involvement in the remembered facts, Nabokov suggests, the facts themselves remain essentially meaningless. Still, this refinement of the fact-fiction oscillation in Nabokov’s art of memory is secondary; what really counts in Sebastian Knight and Bend Sinister are the cultural adjustments that accompany his transition to writing in English. Most obvious for the casual reader are situations of multiplicity and hybridization that respond to this radical shift by harking back to Nabokov’s earlier experiences of mobility, either from Soviet Russia to Nazi Germany or from the Russian language to French. More directly relevant to his situation in the late 1930s, however, is a series of secondary episodes, buried metaphors, and implied overtones of meaning that experiment more obliquely with potential British identities that might replace or be added to a Franco-Russian persona. At the same time, in more specifically literary terms, a variety of intertextual pointers in both novels grapple with British modernism as a possible new setting for Nabokov’s interests in an innovative art of memory. From this perspective Sebastian Knight represents a more broadly exploratory effort of acculturation, while Bend Sinister weighs specific modernist modes of expression developed by imagism and by Joyce’s Ulysses. But in the end, of course, Nabokov discovers, like Ember, that English can also lead to America, and the British option peters out. 1 1 1 Nowhere is Nabokov’s fascination with mobility between cultures more evident than in the Eastern European language he invents for Bend Sinister. Ostensibly used to create local color and normally accompanied by a translation, it embeds multiplicity in the very words we read. According to Nabokov’s 1963 preface to the novel, the language consists of “a mongrel blend of Slavic and Germanic with a strong strain of ancient Kuranian” (BS, x; “Kuranian” is a Nabokovian invention). Its actual makeup, then, does not respond directly to his shift in the late 1930s from a French to an English orientation within Europe. But because the language belongs to a country ruled by a dictator, it embodies both the Russian and German political upheavals that propelled Nabokov into his multiple exiles. And because it straddles a linguistic boundary, this Germano-Slavic mixture resonates with Nabokov’s more recent Franco-English transition. In Sebastian Knight mobility between cultures never takes such a radical linguistic form, perhaps because Nabokov was finding his own shift from writing in Russian to English enough of a challenge. But ambiguity of cul-

162

In English

tural identity does underlie a vivid twist in the plot. As the author V. nears the end of his half-brother’s biography, he becomes obsessed with tracking down the unknown Russian woman who made Knight’s last years miserable. All V. knows is that they met at a health resort. From the guest book he learns that there are only four possibilities and, after ruling out three of them, he goes to see the fourth. She is not at home, but in her absence he talks with her French friend, Madame Lecerf. This woman tells V. he has come to the right place, gives some plausible secondhand information about the love affair, tantalizes him with an invitation to meet the Russian woman, and awakens a certain sexual interest in herself. Nabokov lets the situation simmer until suddenly V. guesses the truth. Madame Lecerf is really Nina Rechnoy, another woman in the guest book, whom he had eliminated after talking with her ex-husband. Camouflaged by her mastery of French and her remarriage to a Frenchman, she has toyed with Sebastian’s half-brother in much the way she once treated Sebastian himself. At this point the linguistic issue does briefly surface, for V. confirms his suspicion by watching Madame Lecerf react to his comment in Russian that there is a spider on her neck. In a vertiginous realignment of cultural identities that parallels the anecdote of the Russian-born Madame de Ségur in Speak, Memory, what seemed French turns out to be Franco-Russian. Like the Germano-Slavic language in Bend Sinister, this turn in the action bypasses the author’s own quest for an English identity. Again it harks back to an earlier stage in his trajectory across Europe: Sebastian’s Nina, though utterly without the natural kindness of her namesake in “Spring in Fialta,” recalls Nabokov’s Russo-French route to Europe earlier in the 1930s. But this climactic instance of mobility does not rule out other, more buried options; indeed, the plot line of Sebastian Knight leads up to Nina’s cultural duplicity by way of two earlier situations that do suggest Nabokov’s predicament at the time of writing. First, Sebastian’s helpless passion for Nina caused him to break off a happy, practical relationship with Clare Bishop, the Englishwoman who has come to personify all that was English in this child of an Anglo-Russian marriage. Then, when Nina tries to entice V. in Sebastian’s place, she treats the two half-brothers as counterparts. Within the novel as a whole, this complementarity goes beyond the love intrigue to suggest the contrast between Nabokov’s actual path to Europe, as shown by the Franco-Russian V., and an imagined Anglo-Russian route followed by Sebastian. This dilemma is finally resolved by an Anglo-French substitution that leads to Sebastian’s eerie coalescence with V., a coalescence which, as V.’s closing words imply, has produced the novel itself. More than a throwback to the problem of Russian essence and French facade, the unmasking of Nina Rechnoy crowns two earlier plot motifs that both deal with English issues and thus confront Sebastian Knight’s own cultural mobility as a book in that language.

Cultural Mobility and British Modernism

163

Like Nabokov himself in Speak, Memory, Sebastian Knight’s direct contact with England begins when he flees revolutionary Russia to attend Cambridge. Until then he had grown up in St. Petersburg, where he wrote English verse and cherished the memory of his English mother Virginia Knight, who left his father when the boy was four and died when he was nine. Though his reasons for taking her name are never explained, Sebastian apparently does so both to show his Anglophilia and to blend in at Cambridge, where at first he tries to “out-England England” (SK 46). But he is not at all successful, for in matters of cultural adaptation he is a “colour-blind chameleon” (SK 67); only when he decides to become a writer does he overcome this outsider’s urge to conform. At this point, according to V., Sebastian “grimly started to cultivate self-consciousness as if it had been some rare talent or passion” (SK 44). “Self-consciousness” here suggests neither discomfort with oneself nor reflexivity; it means personal uniqueness, and in tandem with “rare talent,” it hints at the characteristic Nabokovian equation of art and individuality. By now it is the early 1920s, and Sebastian starts to act out the role of an alternative, far more anglicized Nabokov. In contrast to his author in those years, he decides to make English his literary language, and after leaving Cambridge chooses to stay in England. His relationship with Clare Bishop, which soon follows, grounds his emerging artistic individualism in an unassertive but genuine British aestheticism. Thus, though Clare attends art school only “rather vaguely,” V. emphasizes both her strong imagination and her “real sense of beauty which has far less to do with art than with the constant readiness to discern the halo around a frying-pan or the likeness between a weeping-willow and a Skye terrier” (SK 83). Moreover, though the couple never marry, they make this decision with “nothing of your advanced prejudice-be-damned stuff” (SK 82). “Advanced” perhaps echoes Nabokov’s dismissal of the avant-garde; but in any case, Sebastian and Clare choose an independent nonconformity that clearly transcends iconoclastic or bohemian poses. Above all, however, Clare displays strong affinities with Nabokov’s aesthetics of personal memory. Not only is she “subtly endowed with the gift of being remembered” (SK 82), but her sense of beauty focuses on images with two distinct qualities: either the concreteness of frying pans or the bold metaphorical quality of the fleeting analogy between willows and terriers. As a writer, of course, Sebastian Knight does not share his author’s fascination with the actual process of remembering. Yet here, when Clare Bishop experiences the Nabokovian vacillation between sensation and trope, she seems to express his hope of finding an English home for his art of memory. By 1930, however, when Sebastian meets Nina, he has veered away from this prospective anglicization. His motives for leaving Clare remain somewhat obscure owing to V.’s lack of information, though at this point Sebas-

164

In English

tian does learn that he is suffering from an incurable disease. But his grand passion for Nina does have a cultural angle: she corresponds to his buried Russian side. Here it is important to realize that Sebastian cannot share his half-brother’s sense of Nina as a hybrid. Though he knows some French, he likes to cultivate the deliberate ignorance of “a real healthy Britisher” (SK 73). So the first thing we learn of his relationship with Nina, from the burning letter glimpsed by V. while settling Sebastian’s affairs after his death, is that they communicated in Russian (SK 38). Sebastian’s status as an Anglo-Russian drawn toward women from both cultures is reinforced by the bilingual chess metaphor that informs the love triangle. For if he and Clare are obviously knight and bishop, Nina’s first documented family name is Toorovetz (SK 147), from the Russian word for rook. Not only does the knight stand between the other two pieces when a chess game begins, but its way of moving, which V. evokes in another context as “that special ‘Knightian twist’” (SK 158), combines a bishop’s diagonal with the straight lines of a rook. Thus Sebastian’s name, originally chosen to assert his English identity, turns into an emblem of his free-floating position between cultures. Given the way he is victimized by Nina, however, his belated rediscovery of his Russian side fails to suggest any sense of synthesis, not to mention the poise of Nabokov’s own cultural multiplicity. By a further irony, the “spiritual grace of a Russian household,” which V. had called a hallmark of his early upbringing (SK 15–16) and which is so signally absent in Nina Rechnoy, does characterize another woman on the resort’s guest list. That woman, whom V. checked on first, who politely answered his questions in the midst of a family funeral, and who vaguely reminded him of Clare, was Helene Grinstein, a Russian Jew (SK 135–37). Divided parentage and cultural mobility may have complicated Sebastian’s sense of identity, but in developing Russian spirituality as a cultural category, Nabokov has firmly rejected the racist notions sweeping Europe when he wrote Sebastian Knight.3 However, even Knight’s Anglo-Russian conflict misses the full complexity of Nabokov’s cultural situation as he turned to English. The key French element, elided in the relationship with Nina, resurfaces in the complementarity of the exiled half-brothers. For if when they flee Russia Sebastian chooses England, V. goes to Paris, where he continues his education, settles down, and presumably becomes acculturated. Nabokov highlights their contrasting routes to Europe in an autobiographical passage written by Sebastian and cited by V. Knight’s stepmother is shown discussing “the noxious way Mademoiselle had of giving my small half-brother sweets after putting him to bed,” while Sebastian sits “on the sofa, turning the pages of Chums: ‘Look out for the next instalment of this rattling yarn’” (SK 13). This Mademoiselle, it soon becomes clear (SK 21–23), is an avatar of Mademoiselle O. In effect, therefore, the new vignette reconfigures the veranda

Cultural Mobility and British Modernism

165

scene to fit the present novel’s wider and differently accented range of crosscultural options. Instead of drinking in adventure stories like The Count of Monte Cristo, the future writer Sebastian is reading an English equivalent; meanwhile, the Franco-Russian possibility is assigned to the nonartist V. and seems without literary promise. Ultimately, of course, the very existence of The Real Life of Sebastian Knight shows that V. does become a writer. But he writes in English, not in French, and in so doing mysteriously takes on much of his brother’s literary identity. Thus characters from Sebastian’s novels appear as “real people” in V.’s book, most notably the helpful Mr. Siller in The Back of the Moon, who resembles the uncanny Mr. Silbermann who gets the women’s names from the guest list for V. Key situations are also repeated, so that V.’s communion with the wrong dying Englishman at St. Damier mirrors Sebastian’s communion with his dead mother at the wrong Roquebrune, described in Lost Property. Or V.’s quest for the unknown Russian woman parodies a detective story, thus recalling Sebastian’s first novel, The Prismatic Bezel. Most important of all, the very conception of Sebastian Knight has affinities with Knight’s unfinished last novel. As a biography treating isolated patches of its subject’s life, V.’s book approaches Knight in much the way his half-brother would have handled the life of the man who sent him some scattered snapshots to use in a fictitious biography (SK 40). For some commentators, these odd correlations suggest ghostly interventions on Sebastian’s part, or a Nabokovian flaunting of artifice. But such plausible metaphysical or metafictional readings neglect the cultural point, that Sebastian’s English literary gift has been grafted onto V.’s artistically silent Franco-Russian self, which learns to speak even as we read the book he has written. The resulting new identity informs V.’s teasingly enigmatic words at the end of Sebastian Knight, where he states, “I am Sebastian, or Sebastian is I, or perhaps we both are someone whom neither of us knows.” This assertion dissolves the Anglo-Russian/Franco-Russian complementarity of the two half-brothers, leaving an Anglo/Franco/Russian composite that mirrors Nabokov’s own situation, that of the émigré who now writes in English after moving toward France in the earlier 1930s. When V. puts down his pen, overwhelmed by a new sense of intimacy with his halfbrother, it is only fitting that he should feel affinities with “someone whom neither of us knows”—the author himself, who exists in a similar state of cultural mobility. 1 1 1 Even as the plot of Sebastian Knight responds to Nabokov’s shifting allegiances when he contemplated leaving France in a third exile following his departures from Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany, its intertextual refer-

166

In English

ences test out his place in an English literary world. As we shall see, Bend Sinister can be very precise about matters of technique in the English context, but Sebastian Knight is less pointed, as if Nabokov were still getting his bearings. Scattered passages do emphasize two closely related issues, however: Nabokov’s avoidance of canonical English modernists in imagining a local setting for his author, and his insistence nonetheless on Knight’s essential modernity. The most detailed account of Sebastian’s English affiliations comes after his death, when V. visits his half-brother’s London flat. While looking over Sebastian’s library, he notices a series of fifteen books that seems oddly meaningful, even familiar: “Hamlet, La morte d’Arthur, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, South Wind, The Lady with the Dog, Madame Bovary, The Invisible Man, Le Temps Retrouvé, Anglo-Persian Dictionary, The Author of Trixie, Alice in Wonderland, Ulysses, About Buying a Horse, King Lear . . .” (SK 41). Not all the titles involve modernism, of course, but as a forerunner of the lists in Strong Opinions, this one makes three main points about Nabokov’s transition to English. First, Shakespeare’s double appearance is no mere concession to his canonical status in the English-speaking world. Rather, as suggested by his place at both ends of the series, Shakespeare is the British analogue of Flaubert in Nabokov’s vision of modern fiction or of Pushkin in his view of Russian literature. He is the great master from a more distant past who can put the initiatives of more recent writers into perspective. The exact nature of his authority will become clearer in Bend Sinister, but it should be added that at this time of transition in Nabokov’s career he had strong personal reasons for identifying with Shakespeare: he thought he was born on the latter’s birthday.4 As for contemporary English writing, Knight’s books may emphasize fiction more than the Toffler interview, but they follow a similar polemical logic. Nabokov’s innovative novelist began writing about 1925, yet in looking back over a period from around 1860, he ignores the line of English fiction that is usually called modernist, from the later Henry James to Virginia Woolf. Instead, favorites mentioned to Toffler like H. G. Wells and Norman Douglas become the twentieth-century masters in an eccentric canon that includes two predecessors often named at other times in his career—Lewis Carroll, whom the young Nabokov translated into Russian, and Robert Louis Stevenson, whom he later taught just before Proust, Kafka, and Joyce in courses on modern fiction. Elsewhere Knight shows the same waywardness in poetry, for in an autobiographical passage he speaks of “my Kipling moods and my Rupert Brooke moods, and my Housman moods” (SK 68), with only Kipling appearing unusual given later accounts of Nabokov’s English tastes.5 But Knight says nothing of Eliot or Pound, not to speak of earlier poets like Yeats or Hopkins who contributed so much to the modern spirit of the 1920s.6

Cultural Mobility and British Modernism

167

Finally, though Knight can pose as a Francophobe, his bookshelf reveals inconsistencies. Malory’s La Morte d’Arthur evokes an earlier time of AngloFrench interchange, while in the modern period Knight does seem to read Flaubert and Proust, the very writers just singled out in “Mademoiselle O.” In fact, Madame Bovary and Le Temps retrouvé are better tokens of Knight’s uncompromising originality than most of the English fiction on his shelf. The only rivals would be Alice in Wonderland and Ulysses, which are suggestively placed side by side and which point up tensions in Knight’s English persona. As an amateur writing for children, Lewis Carroll was no ordinary man of letters, while an Irish expatriate like Joyce, despite his virtuosity with the English language, was hardly English in the same sense as Wells or Housman. Joyce’s loose ties with England must have been particularly obvious to Nabokov, who had met him in Paris, and as a writer whose own books could not appear in his native land, he must have been sensitive to the banning of Ulysses throughout the English-speaking world. The relation of Knight’s innovative art to British modernism thus becomes quite intricate: he admires English writers like Douglas and Stevenson who are not modernists, modernists like Proust and Joyce who are not English, and an innovative writer like Carroll who stands apart from the English modernist mainstream. From this perspective, the appearance of Ulysses on Knight’s shelf near Flaubert and Proust anticipates Nabokov’s later polemics with Anglo-American high modernism. Not Joyce’s close connections with Eliot and Pound, but his looser affinities with an international group of Continental novelists offer the best framework for understanding his importance. Along similar lines, descriptions of Knight just before his death suggest a vague synthesis of Proust and Joyce. V. first mentions his habit of attending society parties, “wearing a scarf around his neck even in the warmest dining-room” (SK 183), then says he liked to drink “hot milk in the middle of the night at coffee stalls with taxi drivers” (SK 184). The first image recalls the valetudinarian Proust during the last years of the Recherche, the second the late-night “Eumaeus” episode of Ulysses when Bloom tries to sober Stephen up at a cabman’s shelter. However, the relative weight of these images within the novel reflects Nabokov’s development more than Knight’s. For despite his fictitious writer’s overwhelmingly English orientation, the novel has stressed his affinities with Proust on several occasions,7 but only now acknowledges the importance of Joyce. This final vision of Knight implies a new openness to Ulysses on Nabokov’s part that will then be clarified by the allusions and parodies in Bend Sinister. Sebastian’s uncertain place on the English scene is compounded by his involvement in two skirmishes about what “modern” might mean in early twentieth-century literature. These quarrels reach beyond the English literary scene alone, for when V. castigates the “super-modern” trend,8 he is thinking of Sebastian’s fling with Russian futurism. And when Sebastian’s

168

In English

nemesis Nina dismisses him as “the kind of man, you know, who thinks all modern books are trashy” (SK 159), she conjures up the international style of middlebrow flappers, not the one of modern art. Still, two incidents from Knight’s English career do illuminate Nabokov’s evolving conception of modernism. At the time of his first novel, Sebastian offends a prospective publisher by refusing to tone down a parody of a well-known contemporary. Sebastian is particularly offended by the man’s reputation for being “modern,” which boils down to enjoying a vogue in Germany as well as England, being reprinted in an anthology called Modern Masterpieces, and appealing to middlebrow readers who “have been shaken up in a modern way with a dash of Freud or ‘stream of consciousness’ or what not” (SK 55). Here Knight does not oppose the modern per se but its codification and simplification, the sense that the great advances in speculative psychology and novelistic technique have already occurred, are largely English and German, and need only be copied. Equally revealing is the elaborate syntax in his letter of protest to the publisher, for in effect it retracts Nabokov’s parody of Proust’s long sentences in Kamera Obskura while again evoking Sebastian’s affinities with French modernism. When Knight tells the publisher not to think that “I am apologizing for that Proustian parenthesis” (SK 54), he acknowledges an English resistance to this version of modernism. Yet he defiantly implies that Proust is the best answer to an Anglo-German infatuation with Freud and stream-of-consciousness fiction. Later, when Clare Bishop no longer handles his affairs, Sebastian chooses the infamous Mr. Goodman as his agent. As a shrewd judge of the book market, Goodman represents a certain average level of English taste but has no real sense of Knight’s attitudes or gifts. In fact, these failures of perception explain the book we read, for when Goodman writes his biography, The Tragedy of Sebastian Knight, it provokes V. to write his Real Life. In Goodman’s view, Sebastian is a victim of the postwar world, a thesis that inspires one reviewer to hail the author’s “‘deep insight’ into an ‘essentially modern’ character” (SK 61). This identification of Knight with the “modern” launches a controversy that, downplaying differences among national varieties of modernism, focuses on how modernist writers in general relate to their current historical situation. Goodman posits a break between Sebastian and his age, a basic incongruity that he deplores and that he suggests could be healed if Knight took an interest in “contemporary questions” (SK 117). The modern writer, the biographer continues, should be “a conscientious inquirer into the life and machinery of some giant enterprise.” At this point Goodman oddly recalls H. G. Wells lamenting the meager content of a Henry James novel, for he accuses Knight of doing nothing but portraying “with elaborate circumlocution, a dead bee on a window sill.” The verbal echo would seem to contradict Nabokov’s normal defense of Wells and in-

Cultural Mobility and British Modernism

169

difference to James. But the Wells he most admired was the author of science fiction like The Invisible Man, not the critic of modern fiction, while the dead bee, though it chimes with Wells’s famous parody of James, also suggests the individualizing detail of a Nabokovian image and can therefore be associated with Knight.9 In the English context, Goodman’s notion of the modern writer as a kind of documentary journalist avoids any unsettling questions about the literary medium itself. Indeed, as the appeal to “contemporary questions” suggests, this passage anticipates Stephen Spender’s more forceful distinction between merely contemporary writers and the formally more resourceful moderns.10 V. responds to Goodman by agreeing about Knight’s sense of a break, but far from demanding that it be closed, he redefines it as “some other kind of chasm, breach, fissure” (SK 65). An artist like his half-brother does not aim to capture historical contingency but strives to transcend it in a primal creative act: “Time for Sebastian was never 1914 or 1920 or 1936—it was always year 1” (SK 65). This maxim, which attacks journalistic notions of timeliness but does not exclude the more complex cultural contextualizations that fascinated Nabokov, makes two key points. On the one hand, it responds to Knight’s sense of making a fresh start, which V. chooses to describe not as “modern” but as the “utterly new” (SK 95). The emphasis on novelty here harks back to Nabokov’s preference for “innovator” on first encountering French modernism in Kamera Obskura; with unforeseen justice, it also anticipates the ultimate venue for Sebastian Knight, which did not appear in England at all but with New Directions, the important American publisher of modern literature. On the other hand, the maxim’s emphasis on “one” also conveys Knight’s aesthetic individualism, which is later suggested by his dictum that “the only real number is one” (SK 105). When Goodman then holds that “Knight was extraordinarily vain, like most modernist authors” (SK 116), he backhandedly identifies this individualistic stance with the actual term “modernist.” And this observation, though negative and uncomprehending, further points up Knight’s basic affinities with Proust, for it is closely linked to a hostile, stereotyped portrait of that writer as weak-willed and effeminate. Shortly after reporting this nasty jab, V. refuses to discuss Goodman’s book anymore, declaring it to be “abolished” (SK 119). But Goodman, and the middle level of English literary opinion he represents, have helped Nabokov to clarify his vocabulary of modernism. Not only does Sebastian Knight touch on the emerging contrast between modern and contemporary responses to the writer’s world, the first marked by rupture while the other documents an issue of the day, but it has revalued the modernist sense of a break by looking beyond alienation and commercial failure to find aesthetic individualism and innovative breakthrough. In the process, Knight’s attempted tie-in with British modernism has become even more problematic.

170

In English

For Goodman’s dismissal of “modernist authors” does not apply the term to modern British fiction, nor to Anglo-American figures like Eliot and Pound, whom Sebastian Knight never mentions. Instead, it spotlights a French alternative, epitomized by Proust, which includes aesthetic individualism as one major characteristic. 1 1 1 England as such plays a relatively minor role in Bend Sinister, which looks back at German and Soviet dictatorships while also bearing traces of Nabokov’s Americanization. Nonetheless, this novel focuses more directly than any previous one on modernist methods of expression associated with Pound and Joyce. In its episodic treatment of the hero Krug’s creative process, it sets up an international framework for Nabokovian image-making that finally fills in the cultural indefiniteness of Mary. At the same time, it moves decisively beyond the limited reception of Joyce in Despair and The Gift. Instead of focusing on Portrait of the Artist, which is in turn subordinated to Dostoevsky or Proust, Nabokov now juxtaposes Krug’s painful family drama with major stylistic experiments in Ulysses; as a result, he can indicate the special relevance of that key work for his two-tiered art of memory. In its orchestration of allusions and adaptations, then, if not in its mixed Germano-Slavic and American content, Bend Sinister faces issues of high modernist technique that show a persistent European slant beneath Nabokov’s turn to English. Imagism can become an issue in this novel because Krug, like Bergson, writes philosophy in which images develop the thought. During most of the book, to be sure, his creative process remains in the background, obscured by his grief for his dead wife, his solicitude for his son, and his struggle to avoid compromises with his country’s dictator. Nonetheless Nabokov does show Krug’s commitment to verbal analogies based on concrete sensory details. Thus, when inspiration flags, his philosopher calls himself “a slave of images” because he uses “word pictures” to express ideas that properly speaking resemble nothing else (BS 174). In happier moods, however, such images are the very hallmark of Krug’s originality as a thinker; and, as noted in Chapter 4, he is even associated with the Bergsonian image of duration as a snowball. This occurs during the first scene to show Krug’s intellectual preeminence, when the faculty of his university meet to show support for the dictator. After one colleague describes the political situation with an elaborate metaphor of snowballs and snowmen, someone else suggests that the image comes from something Krug wrote ten years earlier (BS 46). Here Nabokov does more than indicate the stature of his invented philosopher; he has self-consciously displayed the very process of intertextual appropriation by which Nabokov took Bergson’s original snowball metaphor from a

Cultural Mobility and British Modernism

171

philosophical discussion of duration and placed it in this scene from Bend Sinister. Moreover, even as this first example of Krug’s image-making has revealed the general infectiousness of concrete analogies in both abstract thought and literature, its status as a reference to Bergson pays tribute to Nabokov’s ties with French modernism. A second context for imagism emerges from another key passage toward the end of the novel. Despite his troubles, Krug experiences a flash of inspiration and is able to write again, only to be brutally interrupted when the secret police arrive to take his son hostage. But during his moment of creativity, Krug relies on concrete images to express his ideas on the nature and destiny of consciousness. His basic point foreshadows the opening of Speak, Memory, that the long expanse of time before our births parallels the mystery of the hereafter, yet awakens much less fear. When he likens this discrepancy to living in a stocking that is being turned inside out (BS 193), the image recalls The Death of Ivan Ilyich. In his last minutes Tolstoy’s hero stops resisting his fate, lets himself be pushed into a threatening black sack, but to his surprise finds light on the other side. Both the basic sense of enclosure and the disorienting change of perspective reappear in Krug’s stocking metaphor, though Ivan’s life-and-death questioning is shifted to the related issue of the infinite future and past. This Tolstoyan affinity with the imagist element in Krug’s style reveals, once again, Nabokov’s reluctance to dissociate a supposedly classic Russian realist from modernism. At the same time the portrait of Krug’s mind sets up a cross-cultural linkage in the spirit of Nabokov’s previous development, for it has yoked a nineteenthcentury Russian legacy to an innovative trend in early twentieth-century France. But if Krug’s actual writing is defined by a Franco-Russian perspective on the image, an English-language context has also surfaced during the lengthy discussion of Shakespeare in chapter 7. In a respite from the novel’s deepening mood of nightmare and terror, Krug’s translator and friend Ember discusses Hamlet and reads excerpts from his translation-in-progress. The chapter as a whole recalls the Scylla and Charybdis episode in Ulysses, where Stephen Dedalus outlines his theory of Hamlet in the Irish National Library. But near the end specific matters of expression come to the fore, when Ember reads a passage in Nabokov’s invented language from what is evidently the opening scene of Shakespeare’s play, and Krug reflects on the dramatist’s significance. Given Krug’s tendencies as a writer, he naturally thinks of him as an unrivaled image-maker, as someone “who had only to breathe on any particle of his stupendous vocabulary to have that particle live and expand and throw out tremulous tentacles until it became a complex image with a pulsing brain and correlated limbs” (BS 119). Then, after Ember finishes reading, Krug comments in the same spirit on his translation. He tempers his praise by objecting to one image, rendered as “laderod

172

In English

kappe” in Nabokov’s invented language, which must come from Horatio’s description of the sunrise. Krug insists: “I do not like the colour of dawn’s coat—I see ‘russet’ in a less leathery, less proletarian way” (BS 120). Such close attention to sensory specifics, along with Krug’s previous thoughts on style, explains why Shakespeare figured in Sebastian Knight’s library. For Nabokov he is the great precursor in English for the image-making drive that this novel elsewhere finds in the Russian realist classics and in French modernists. At the same time, Krug’s critique of Ember’s translation has evoked another, more explicitly modernist context for Nabokov’s art of memory—an imagist manifesto of Pound’s, which also cited Horatio’s “But, look, the morn, in russet mantle clad.”11 Like Nabokov, Pound wanted to claim Shakespeare for innovative writing in the twentieth century, but he differs on the need to visualize the image. His prewar imagism had come at the same time as Kandinsky’s early nonrepresentational art, and because Pound wished to keep poetry up to date with this rejection of mimesis, he insisted, with some fuzziness of expression (for he refers here not to Kandinsky but to more traditional painting), that Shakespeare’s russet mantel “presents something which the painter does not present.” Krug, on the other hand, emphasizes what the language makes him “see,” an attitude that reflects Nabokov’s disdain for modern abstract painting as well as his consistent position on mnemonic images. Both of these views, incidentally, had recently been reinforced by the meticulous observations, drawings, and descriptions required in Nabokov’s entomological research. Accordingly, even as Nabokov acknowledges a general affinity between Anglo-American imagism and his own Franco-Russian path to the image, he opposes Pound’s attempt to link the image with avant-garde tendencies in the visual arts. In more general terms, meanwhile, chapter 7 has already expressed Nabokov’s rejection of twentieth-century political avant-gardes on both the right and the left. For when the chapter begins by describing, in a mood of incredulous disgust, a new Fascist reading of Hamlet (BS 107–10), its immediate target is the “Communazi” antiliberalism of the novel’s Germano-Slavic dictator—but the polemic could certainly be construed to include the later Pound’s admiration for Mussolini. 1 1 1 Even more emphatically than Sebastian Knight, Bend Sinister splits Joyce off from Pound; yet Nabokov’s later commentary on the novel somewhat obscures the nature and importance of its Joycean references. His 1963 preface, which explains a wide array of inconspicuous intertextual markers, does mention Joyce’s presence in the Hamlet chapter (BS xii). But rather than discuss the thematic parallel with Stephen’s Shakespeare theories, Na-

Cultural Mobility and British Modernism

173

bokov simply points out two incidental allusions to Finnegans Wake (BS 113, 114). Along with Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky,” this culminating work in Joyce’s career may have helped inspire the invented language in Bend Sinister, but in general Nabokov judged it inferior to Ulysses. Nabokov’s neglect of “Scylla and Charybdis,” however, is not fundamentally misleading. When lecturing on Joyce, he would dismiss the episode as “one of those things that is more amusing for a writer to write than for a reader to read” (LL 326), a judgment that fits some Hamlet passages in chapter 7 as well. So the preface’s main oversight lies elsewhere, in its failure to mention the novel’s truly illuminating Ulysses references. Consistent with Nabokov’s critique of Joyce’s broad “mythic” imitation of the Odyssey, they do not deploy large-scale parallels; instead, they briefly evoke key stylistic innovations in Joyce’s novel while simultaneously commenting on the family drama that dominates Bend Sinister. This drama begins with the premature death of Krug’s wife Olga, continues by showing the conflict between his grief and his reviving sexuality, and ends when his son David dies in an insane asylum after being taken hostage by the regime. Nabokov’s arresting statement about the father-son relationship—that it is the real center of the novel, since it shows “the beating of Krug’s loving heart” (BS viii)—applies as well to the earlier phases of the family drama. The corresponding Joycean styles are the stream-of-consciousness technique in the first third of Ulysses but not in Molly’s soliloquy, the elaborate parodies in middle chapters like “Nausicaa,” and the dreamlike fantasy of the Circe episode. In the first stage of the family drama, where Krug’s reactions to his wife’s death allow Nabokov to evaluate the Joycean stream-of-consciousness technique, Bend Sinister moves beyond the sweeping rejections of Sebastian Knight and “Spring in Fialta.” After the innovative first chapter, where Krug’s fictional world arises from the view out of the author’s window, the novel describes Krug’s trip home from the hospital after Olga’s death. Here Nabokov repeatedly uses the more radical stream-of-consciousness style which Dorrit Cohn calls “quoted monologue” and which is a hallmark of Ulysses. This minute-by-minute presentation of a character’s mental processes moves unobtrusively from the third-person past of omniscient narration to the first-person present, and is further characterized by various disruptions of standard written syntax.12 The last trait, in particular, corresponds to what Nabokov later called the “incomplete, rapid, broken wording” of Joyce’s stream-of-consciousness style (LL 289). Yet despite Nabokov’s new openness to quoted monologue, its appearance in chapter 2 of Bend Sinister is limited to short, scattered passages. Thus a third-person account of Krug’s farcical meeting with some revolutionary soldiers can modulate to a first-person presentation of his thoughts (BS 6–7, 12–13), or a companion’s idle chatter is punctuated by his unspoken comments to

174

In English

himself (BS 17–21). Such techniques recall early chapters in Ulysses where, as Nabokov put it, traditional narration is “interrupted, or better say annotated” by a character’s “stream of inner thought” (LL 298). This approach, he felt, was superior to the more systematic use of the method in Molly Bloom’s final “Penelope” chapter. Along with acting out Nabokov’s limited acceptance of stream-of-consciousness writing, chapter 2 implies that quoted monologue conflicts with the basic aim of an artist of memory—the creation of mnemonic images. In the abstract, of course, no such discrepancy would seem to exist, since the free flow of stream-of-consciousness writing suggests an easy interplay between present perceptions and memories. What literary technique could be better suited for vivid flashbacks to the distant past? But for Nabokov, who later criticized Joyce for overlooking the difference between words and images (LL 289), the issue was not so simple. The moment of hallucinatory recall might be instantaneous, but repeated scrutiny was needed to decipher the details and translate them into language; the apparent spontaneity of stream-of-consciousness writing therefore failed to do justice to what was actually a more elaborate process. As a result, when he portrays Krug’s agony of grief for his wife, whom he desperately wants to keep in memory, Nabokov must take pains to distinguish between his character’s quoted monologue and the moments when Olga’s image actually appears to him. On one occasion, in a passage that amounts to a catalogue of momentary free associations, Olga comes to mind while Krug is remembering their shared dislikes. But then the style has to change; it can only record her image by moving from the quoted litany back to omniscient third-person narration, which then suggests the concreteness of the vision by focusing on one hyperspecific detail that emerges after several more general items: “ . . . The thrifty peasant. The booming politician. Her relatives—her dreadful humourless relatives. Suddenly, with the vividness of a praedormital image, . . . she drifted across his retina, in profile, carrying something—a book, a child, or just letting the cherry paint on her fingernails dry—. . . ” (BS 11). On another occasion, Krug carefully touches one spot on a bridge as he tries to give an image-like immediacy to the present. His experience appears in the broken, first-person, present-tense sentences of quoted monologue: “This moment of conscious contact holds a drop of solace. The emergency brake of time. Whatever the present moment is, I have stopped it. Too late. In the course of our, let me see, twelve, twelve and three months, years of life together, I ought to have immobilized by this simple method millions of moments” (BS 12). This passage, which ironically deals with preserving one’s memories, may verbalize Krug’s thoughts in the present, but it does not evoke the images of the past he so ardently desires. Much later, when the novel does depict his two most vivid memories of Olga, it will have to avoid the stream-of-consciousness style. In chapter 9, where Krug thinks of her as a young woman, the scene does not appear as quoted monologue but

Cultural Mobility and British Modernism

175

as a letter his hero writes while drunk (BS 133–35). Then, at the end of chapter 17, where he remembers Olga swerving off the road to avoid a deer, the past does not surface in Krug’s consciousness but in the discourse of the narrator (BS 225–26). As the family drama shifts in its middle stage to a conflict of remembered love and sexuality, Nabokov turns from stream-of-consciousness style to Joycean parody. Despite his grief for his wife, Krug is still a vigorous man, and he finds in spite of himself that he is beginning to feel attracted to Mariette, the artist’s model who has conveniently showed up to be his son’s nursemaid. But Mariette is not the first object of Krug’s reviving desires. Before her was the young Miss Bachofen, who arrived with the secret police to arrest Ember in the Hamlet chapter. In the nightmarishly connected world of Bend Sinister, she will turn out to be Mariette’s sister; and when Krug accuses her of pocketing a keepsake that Olga had given Ember, his angry suspicion masks a transfer of erotic feeling from the dead woman to the living one. To describe this key psychological shift, which occurs while Miss Bachofen is denying Krug’s accusation, Nabokov mimics Joyce: “‘Professor, we are not thieves,’ she said very quietly, and he must have had a heart of stone who would not have felt ashamed of his evil thought as she stood there, a narrow-hipped blonde with a pair of symmetrical breasts moistly heaving among the frills of her white silk blouse” (BS 126). The words that record Krug’s dawning attraction echo the “heaving embonpoint” and “costliest frillies” of Sweets of Sin, the erotic novel Leopold Bloom buys for Molly in “Wandering Rocks.”13 And the “heart of stone” and “evil thought” of Miss Bachofen’s indignant disavowal recall Gerty McDowell’s cliché-ridden monologue in “Nausicaa.” Nabokov has chosen to spotlight Joyce’s skill in parodying subliterary genres rather than the masterpieces of high culture (and thereby adumbrates his approach to American popular culture in Lolita); but in Bend Sinister the point of the allusion is to evoke Ulysses, and so the basic frame of reference remains European modernism. In addition to recalling Joyce’s style, this turning point in Krug’s emotional life also resonates with the love triangle in “Nausicaa.” Though Krug’s and Bloom’s marriages and sexual personalities differ greatly, both characters are shown in situations that acknowledge the vagaries of desire yet end by stressing a certain fidelity in love. Thus Krug “betrays” Olga first with Miss Bachofen, then with Mariette; but even if his reviving sexuality clashes with a widower’s wish to remain true to his wife’s memory, still Krug recognizes, when he finally gives in to Mariette, that his “bestial explosion” of passion has no connection with love (BS 197). In contrast to the cold sensuality of the Bachofen sisters, moreover, his final memory of Olga in the car accident stresses her capacity for empathy: she identifies with the deer despite the danger to herself. Indeed, from Nabokov’s preface (BS xiii) the reader learns that Olga’s loving soul, in the form of a moth, continues to

176

In English

influence the last words of Bend Sinister. Bloom’s wife Molly is no Olga, but when Bloom responds to her infidelity with the sexual fantasies that Gerty condones in “Nausicaa,” his adventure has a similar outcome. It has no real impact on his marriage, which for Nabokov at least was reaffirmed by the novel’s final “Yes” (LL 370). In the last stage of the family drama, Krug’s evolving bereavement gives way to parental tragedy. With the detention and death of his son David, the nightmarish mood of the novel becomes almost unbearable for the reader, and Krug himself mercifully goes insane. The two parts of the family drama are joined by a hideous coincidence, since the doctor who oversees David’s death is a third Bachofen sister, whose appearance at the end twists Krug’s free-floating sexual fantasies into a betrayal of his son. To describe the moment when Krug is shown the boy’s body, Nabokov again turns to Joyce, this time to the hallucinatory style of the “Circe” episode: “The murdered child had a crimson and gold turban around its head; its face was skillfully painted and powdered: a mauve blanket, exquisitely smooth, came up to its chin. What looked like a fluffy piebald dog was prettily placed at the foot of the bed” (BS 224). This tableau recalls the very end of “Circe,” when Bloom sees the apparition of his dead son Rudy, imagined as a garishly dressed child stolen by Irish fairies. In Nabokov the situation is literally that of death after kidnapping; and the boy’s clothing has a similar grotesque refinement, he is accompanied by a similar emblematic animal, and the same mauve coloring dominates the scene.14 This culminating adaptation of Ulysses results in a rich array of intertextual meanings. Most obvious is the more direct parallel between Krug and Bloom, for by shifting from the marital to the parental side of his character’s “loving heart,” Nabokov brings out Krug’s affinities with the crucial fatherson theme in Joyce. But because the parallel rests on Krug’s and Bloom’s responses to traumatic experiences, it also pinpoints a revealing contrast in how the two novels handle extreme, limiting cases in which mnemonic images are distorted or repressed. In Ulysses Bloom’s hallucinatory glimpse of Rudy, though a replay of more prosaic thoughts presented through his stream-of-consciousness style, is his single most moving confrontation with the buried pain of losing his son in infancy. It is a vivid image that, heightened by appearing at the end of an imagined dramatic performance, eloquently captures the basic tenor of Bloom’s experience despite its distance from any actual memory. In Bend Sinister, however, Krug’s similar vision of David masks the intolerable pain of having to picture his murder, which is never directly narrated. Instead, Krug sees a movie of the psychological experiment that, by the time of viewing, has already caused his son’s death. The method of presentation corresponds to Nabokov’s sense that images have priority over words, but because the film stops almost immediately, the tragedy itself is never shown.

Cultural Mobility and British Modernism

177

The elision fits with Nabokov’s often-stated preference for happy, even buoyant images of the past, and, since Krug never sees more than the quoted description of David’s grotesquely prepared body, this adaptation of Joyce actually reverses the emotional impact of Bloom’s concluding vision of Rudy. Rather than feeling an odd sense of revelation, Krug is faced with a horribly botched cover-up. As a result, if Bend Sinister does succeed in communicating the pain of this son’s early death, it does so only mutely, as an authorially induced projection by the reader beyond the words on the page. Chapter 9 of Speak, Memory, where Nabokov writes about a father’s untimely death from the son’s perspective, will follow the same drastically understated approach. Properly speaking, therefore, Nabokov’s hallucinatory style takes him beyond the art of memory. It evokes a Joycean image with no definite status in Bloom’s past, while in Bend Sinister the style suggests an inability to envision, much less articulate, the particulars of a nightmarish experience. Apart from this Circean passage, Nabokov’s many variations on the hallucinatory style account for the grotesque, absurd, or disorienting effect of much of the novel, which in this respect develops the fantastic inspiration of Invitation to a Beheading. At the same time, however, Bend Sinister also occupies a transitional position between “Mademoiselle O” and Speak, Memory. If, as Nabokov turns to English, Joyce’s hallucinatory style suggests a possible literature beyond memory, both his stream-of-consciousness writing and the parodic style open up a broader modernist context for Nabokov’s two-tiered art of memory. At the level of personal memory, Nabokov uncovers an irresolvable conflict between the technical conditions of quoted monologue and the creation of images from one’s past. But at the level of literary reminiscence, Joyce moves from his background position in Despair to be acknowledged and emulated as the master parodist who could make any sentence a palimpsest of intertextual memories. In Glory, at the beginning of the 1930s, Nabokov signaled his own move toward European modernism by portraying a young émigré writer who was reading both Proust and Joyce. Later in the 1930s, during his rapid development from Kamera Obskura to “Mademoiselle O” and the fictive autobiographies, he revealed what he was learning from the Recherche and from French modernism. Only in the mid-1940s with Bend Sinister, however, when Nabokov has firmly committed himself to authorship in English, does he give his considered verdict on Joyce. Ulysses may be the greatest achievement of British modernism, but Nabokov’s memory-writing takes relatively little from Joyce’s new styles that sought to capture the flux of mental life. Instead, by the brilliance with which Ulysses mimics and reconfigures previous styles, this novel strongly reinforced the major role of literary and cultural reminiscences within Nabokov’s art of memory.

CHAPTER

9

1

Autobiographical Images THE SHAPING OF SPEAK, MEMORY (1946–1967)

AFTER FINISHING Bend Sinister in May 1946, Nabokov went back to the project begun with “Mademoiselle O” a decade earlier. From January 1948 to January 1951 he published fourteen more autobiographical sketches, mostly in The New Yorker, which concentrated on his boyhood and youth in Russia and then moved more quickly through his European years. In 1951, after making various revisions, he put the sketches together— minus their original titles—to make a fifteen-chapter autobiography called Conclusive Evidence, soon to be renamed Speak, Memory.1 Nabokov would later emphasize the “erratic sequence” in which he wrote the book (SM 10), but actually the chapters follow the same general order as the original essays, with four major changes. “Mademoiselle O,” of course, loses its leadoff position to become chapter 5; and three other sketches came out markedly later than one would expect from their position in Speak, Memory, perhaps because of their special significance within the project as a whole. Thus chapter 1 and chapter 2, on Nabokov’s parents and those early memories that make up his self-defined origins, were twelfth and eighth in order of publication. By the same token, chapter 8, with the account of Nabokov’s “supreme achievement of memory” (SM 170), which will be discussed below, appeared about a year and a half after its adjoining chapters, in February 1950. No such disruption of normal sequence marks either chapter 4 or chapter 13, however, even though both sketches draw on English memories that presumably go back to the 1930s and the unpublished essay “England and Me.” Recent publication of Nabokov’s Selected Letters allows us to follow his plans for Speak, Memory from an early prospectus in 1946 to the first booklength version in 1951. As might be expected, “Mademoiselle O” often seems to be his model for both the cross-cultural subject matter and the autobiographical method. In the September 1946 prospectus, which apparently assumes an all-encompassing, “anthropological” conception of culture, Nabokov envisions a book that would “involve the picturing of many different lands and peoples and modes of living” (SL 69). This aim recalls the Franco-Russian interactions in the original sketch, but it now makes room for the full international range of Nabokov’s experience. A prospectus

Autobiographical Images

179

from December 1948, however, suggests a more specialized notion of culture, for it describes the book as “an inquiry into the elements that have gone to form my personality as a writer” (SL 88). Obviously this narrower literary set of interests, itself already apparent in “Mademoiselle O,” would also require an international approach. Along with this varying emphasis on multiculturalism, Nabokov’s prospectuses show his continued fascination with the complex interplay of art and memory that he experienced in writing his first memoir. In the 1946 prospectus he boldly speaks of beginning “a new kind of autobiography,” then defines this novelty not by claiming to outdo Rousseau in showing the absolute individuality of the individual, nor by stressing his writerly sophistication in breaking with strict chronological order,2 nor even by spotlighting that determined quest for the mnemonic image which, together with the multiculturalism, probably represents his true claim to originality. Instead, the novelty of his project will lie in its calculated use of fictional elements, so that it will not be pure autobiography but “rather a new hybrid between that and a novel” (SL 69). But this resolution of the art-memory problematic is only temporary, for in a May 1947 letter to Edmund Wilson he chooses the opposite tack. Owing to his scrupulous accuracy in researching the foundations of his present self, his autobiography will be “a scientific attempt to unravel and trace back all the tangled threads of one’s personality” (NWL 188). Yet here again Nabokov seems to overstate the point, perhaps as a reaction against Wilson’s praise of “Mademoiselle O” for being “beautifully written” (NWL 93). The 1948 prospectus, at any rate, steers a middle course by describing his art of memory as “the blending of perfect personal truth with strict artistic selection” (SL 88). Eventually, in the “Author’s Note” to Conclusive Evidence, Nabokov will maintain that any failures in accuracy about his past “are due to the frailty of memory, not to the trickery of art” (CE vii). This formula, like the implication of sworn testimony in the title, gives priority to exactness of recollection. Yet it concludes with a denial whose very force suggests a nagging awareness that artistic motives may well continue to shape this account of the author’s past. 1 1 1 In Nabokov’s various plans for Speak, Memory, his artistic concerns become especially obvious whenever he discusses revising the essays to produce a more satisfactory book-length autobiography. Two separate problems stand out: that of continuity from chapter to chapter, and that of providing an adequate conclusion. Both illuminate the final structure of Speak, Memory. Lack of continuity was recognized as a danger even before Nabokov began magazine publication, for the 1946 prospectus could refer to the autobiography as “a sequence of short essay-like bits” (SL 69). By the 1948

180

In English

prospectus, which acknowledges “a somewhat jerky development of the theme,” he proposes to undertake “various alterations” that would make “the flow of the book I contemplate . . . more ample and sustained” (SL 88). Yet beyond some interweaving of characters and situations among the chapters, few of these revisions ever took place. In part Nabokov must have felt that the way he experienced memory justified some discontinuity of treatment, but he probably also realized that the book as written had a flow of its own. This flow is apparent even when the magazine essays are considered as single units, for their position in the autobiography gives them a new topical-chronological resonance. Each chapter centers on a particular topic such as Nabokov’s passionate interest in butterflies or his awkward relations with his uncle Ruka. Within the limits set by the topic, the chapter is free to move back and forth through time, and can produce striking violations of chronological order like the ones already noted in “Mademoiselle O”; thus, Nabokov can jump past his end point of 1940 to mention his scientific research on butterflies in America, or in the chapter on his uncle can eventually go back to the fifteenth century as successive versions keep adding material on earlier relations and ancestors. Yet despite these temporal dislocations, the overall development from chapter to chapter is ultimately linear. For example, if we disregard the most daring chronological leaps, chapter 4 describes Nabokov’s encounters with English culture from 1903 to 1908, chapter 5 his Swiss governess from 1905 to 1912, chapter 6 his peak experiences as a butterfly collector from 1906 to 1910, and chapter 7 his trip to France and boyhood love for the French girl Colette in 1909. The progression from the second half of chapter 10 to chapter 13 is even clearer, for after some love episodes in 1910 and 1911, Nabokov describes his first poem in 1914, moves to his love for Tamara from 1915 to 1919, and ends with the years of exile at Cambridge University from 1919 to 1922. On a broader scale, the chapters fall into four groups that selectively cover the main themes of Nabokov’s life up to age forty. Though the topics are interwoven with a density that resists summary, it is possible to characterize their general progression. The first three chapters and parts of chapters 9 and 10 show the family circle that surrounded Nabokov as a boy and adolescent; it includes his parents, his uncle, and his cousin Yuri, but leaves out his surviving siblings at midcentury as well as his brother Sergei, who perished in a Nazi concentration camp. Chapters 4, 5, 8, and 13 along with the remainder of chapter 9 cover the English, French, and Russian strands in Nabokov’s multicultural education as he begins with in-house governesses and tutors and later attends secondary school and university. This education then leads to his vocational interests, which, after an initial detour through painting, come to focus on literature and science; these interests are discussed in greatest detail in chapters 6, 11, and 14, but were anticipated in

Autobiographical Images

181

chapters 2, 4, and 5. Finally we get the growth of Nabokov’s affective life outside his family, beginning with his early loves in chapters 7, part of 10, and 12, and then jumping to marriage and fatherhood in chapter 15.3 If the latent topical-chronological development from essay to essay allows Nabokov to resolve the problem of flow, the question of how to end Speak, Memory suggests an overall structure like that of Sebastian Knight or Bend Sinister. As he saw it in 1946, closure would be achieved through an abrupt change of perspective, so that the serialized fragments “suddenly gathering momentum will form into something very weird and dynamic” (SL 69). Still another prospectus, in a November 1949 letter to his editor at The New Yorker, Katharine White, mentions a planned sixteenth chapter that seems to develop this notion. The chapter would be called “Third Person” because it would drop the first-person autobiographical narrator and discuss the book from the point of view of a fictitious reviewer. Yet its purpose, far from being parodic or polemical, would be to emphasize the basic structure: it would identify and analyze “the various themes running through the book— all the intricate threads I have been at pains to follow through each piece” (SL 95). This chapter was eventually written,4 but even as Nabokov sent it to his editor for the book-length autobiography, he could remark that “for some reasons I still hesitate to include it” (SL 105). These unspecified doubts prevailed so that, like the plans for a smoother flow among the chapters, the idea of giving Speak, Memory a well-rounded conclusion never materialized. The final shape of the book suggests that Nabokov had good reasons for this decision. Surely an imaginary review, for all its alluring freshness, must have come to seem overly explicit, confining, and ultimately flat; in the upshot, he chooses to end the text proper on a note that self-consciously avoids closure. We see the Nabokov family as they approach the steamer that will take them from France to the United States, but nothing is said about the voyage, their future, or even the act of embarking. In fact, they cannot even see the ship clearly, as if this final scene were a trick illustration in a children’s book, with the caption “Find What the Sailor Has Hidden” (SM 310). Within the text these words are addressed to Nabokov’s small son, but as a comment to his readers, they have the force of a challenge: you must disentangle the themes of this book. In the 1967 version of the autobiography, Nabokov qualifies this reticence by adding an index that has some of the functions he planned for the review. But only some, for if it gives the reader useful hints, as we saw in Chapter 2 with the colored-glass theme, it avoids an overly detailed analysis that might cut off further thought. Beyond the specific question of closure, however, Nabokov must have realized that the published essays had already upstaged several major effects intended for the sixteenth chapter. Thus sudden changes of momentum

182

In English

come near the end of most chapters, where Nabokov voices important new insights about his art of memory and writes some of the most vivid, poetically charged sentences in his career. And a play of perspective as striking as the shift from first-person to third occurs whenever he exercises the autobiographer’s privilege of moving abruptly from the narrated to the authorial self. Rather than building to an all-encompassing grand finale, therefore, Speak, Memory creates a more diffuse pattern that works through cumulative detail and scattered moments of illumination. Crucial to this pattern is Nabokov’s intense absorption with pictorial images fashioned by memory, images that recapture his past so vividly that they seem to transcend time. A book that ends by placing Nabokov and his family in a trick illustration had begun, after all, with an equally self-conscious appeal to pictures, with the account of the man who sees a home movie filmed before his birth. And other such clearly visualized images abound in the autobiography, ranging from set pieces like the description of his mother sorting mushrooms (SM 44) or the portrait of Polenka, the coachman’s daughter, standing in a doorway (SM 209) to the brief moments of vision in which Nabokov recalls an old waffleman in Biarritz (SM 147–48) or a misplaced scarf at the end of an unpleasant dinner with Bunin (SM 286). He can even treat the Russian revolution itself in this manner, either with the motif of the family jewels or with the description of a cane made of rare wood, gold, and coral that crystallizes his complex attitudes and confused loyalties while fleeing Petrograd in November 1917 (SM 243). In the context of these many mnemonic images, the twenty or so photographs, pictures, and charts that were added to the final edition of Speak, Memory are simply a more literal variant of the text’s repeated attempts to visualize the past.5 Nabokov’s initial goal of “picturing” his earlier life thus takes on a very concrete meaning as his autobiography develops. We have already explored two key aspects of this image-making project. In the first two chapters, when Nabokov pores over his earliest memories, he tries to discover the origins of that gift of hallucinatory recall which, beginning in the visual arts, crossed over into literature to become his colored-hearing creativity. Meanwhile, in the memoir of his governess that launched him into autobiography, he does more than rescue her image from novel-writing and personal forgetfulness. He also explores the complex way in which sensuous particulars can oscillate between art and memory or curl back to become metaphors for the remembering mind. Within the completed autobiography, however, neither Nabokov’s earliest memories nor the Swiss governess can equal two other, even more compelling images: the butterflies and moths of chapter 6 and the pictures of Nabokov’s father in chapters 1, 8, and 9. Nabokov had already combined these two sets of images in the wonderful second chapter of The Gift, in

Autobiographical Images

183

Fyodor’s imagined account of his naturalist father as he hunted lepidoptera in Central Asia. But now, as he develops them with an eloquence that rivals poetry, he creates the two culminating expressions of his art of memory. The chapter on butterflies is Nabokov’s single most sustained evocation of that triumphant state beyond time which memory can apparently summon up; in that respect it is his fullest answer to Ganin’s doubts about the value of recalling the past. But the passages on his father, though more loosely organized, are ultimately more searching and lead even further into the image-making imperative of Speak, Memory. As a further source of interest, both chapters 6 and 9 underwent almost as many revisions as “Mademoiselle O” and therefore help illuminate Nabokov’s evolving autobiographical intentions from the late 1940s to 1967. This chapter will deal with each of these crowning achievements of his art of memory, while Chapter 10 will turn to the main cross-cultural issue in Speak, Memory—Nabokov’s need to integrate his path-breaking response to French modernism in “Mademoiselle O” into a multicultural European panorama that will also allow for key motifs from his Russian past. 1 1 1 From a boyhood hobby butterflies and moths had become a scientific vocation by the time Nabokov wrote his autobiography.6 But entomology is not a separate, “cognitive” activity in his life, for many strands of association link it to his art of memory and its origins in synesthesia. Simply on intuitive grounds, Nabokov’s pursuit of these elusive but vivid creatures would seem to parallel the retrieval of mnemonic images, while their colorful wings could be viewed as an emblem of colored hearing. A more explicit analogy surfaces in the Tamara chapter, where Nabokov’s inability to recall their last farewell becomes “a bothersome defocalization” that cannot be corrected by adjusting “the screws of memory” (SM 240). This conceit assimilates personal memory to his entomological research during these years, which involved taking great pains to pick out details through a microscope. In a similar spirit, Nabokov’s evocation of Polenka’s “haunting image” in chapter 10 emphasizes a chance encounter that aptly coincided with his pursuit of Parnassius mnemosyne, a butterfly whose name allusively combines artistic inspiration with memory (SM 206). By an even more remarkable analogy, two main interests among the “intertwinkling facets” (SM 126) of his boyish love for butterflies parallel the dual rhythm of imitation and originality at the second, intertextual level in his art of memory. Nabokov’s fascination with mimicry in nature, with its “subtlety, exuberance, and luxury far in excess of a predator’s power of appreciation” (SM 125), anticipates his own carefully honed allusions to other authors, which are no doubt unappreciated by “predatory” readers who es-

184

In English

pouse a more single-minded utilitarian literature. On the other hand, the young Nabokov’s obsession with discovering a new species corresponds to that urge for literary modernity which impels him to revise or even attack the author being imitated. An anecdote added to the final edition of Speak, Memory sharpens this correspondence between new knowledge in science and intertextual one-upmanship in literature. When Nabokov translated Kamera Obskura as Laughter in the Dark, he reveals, he changed the art dealer’s original name to Kretschmar, after the man who had the priority in identifying a moth Nabokov thought he had discovered as a boy. By giving the proper name a new significance as he recycles it for his own literary purposes, he regains the initiative he had lost as an entomologist (SM 134). Nabokov points up links between the synesthetic narrative of his artistic origins and his love of butterflies only when he consolidates that narrative in the final version of Speak, Memory. Chapter 6 ends with the vivid account of a fabulous bog, where the boy expects to find “quite special arctic butterflies whose picture, or, still better, nonillustrated description I had worshiped for several seasons” (SM 138). In indicating how Nabokov acquired his passion for butterflies, this passage stresses a dual apprenticeship to pictures and language; and this duality, also shown earlier when he devours the nature books found in the attic (SM 121–23), recapitulates the verbal-visual interaction of colored hearing. In fact, just as the portrait of the Swiss governess in the previous chapter shifted from pictorial to literary image-making, so Nabokov’s detailed account of the bog acts out his preference for “nonillustrated description,” with the autobiographical writing of the adult now replacing his boyhood scientific texts. Elsewhere in Speak, Memory Nabokov underlines the relevance of lepidoptera to the synesthetic themes cross-referenced in the index. In chapter 11, he revises the story of his first poem to comment on etymology: beyond the tacit resemblance of the rainbow-windowed pavilion to a butterfly’s wing, the Latin words for pavilion and butterfly are in fact closely related (SM 216). Another telling association involves Ustin, the servant who caught the swallowtail that fired Nabokov’s boyhood interest in butterflies (SM 120). We later learn that this man would help Soviet authorities confiscate some of his mother’s jewels, prompting the observation that “the tiaras of colored fire . . . formed an adequate recompense for the Swallowtail” (SM 188). Even as Nabokov affirms his intellectual gifts over his lost wealth, he integrates his love for butterflies into a personal etymology that leads back through the pavilion and jewel motifs to focus on the basic creative principle of colored hearing. Chapter 6 describes some twenty butterflies or moths, in passages that range from choice epithets like “rose-margined” (SM 138) to elaborately crafted sentences. If our criterion for image-making is what Nabokov calls “genuinely sensuous quality” (SM 128), these passages compare favorably

Autobiographical Images

185

with his citations from Russian, French, and English poetry (SM 128–29). But sensuous precision is just the necessary basis for the chapter’s most notable autobiographical images, all of which go beyond nuances of color, shape, or smell to address issues of time and memory. Most immediately impressive are the temporal glides marking the descriptions of Nabokov’s first swallowtail near the beginning and the bog teeming with butterflies near the end. Less striking but ultimately more suggestive are the remembered vision of his first moth that ends the first section, and the radically fractured account of discovering a new species that gradually emerges in revisions after 1951. In addition to their affinities with the swallowtail and the bog, these two episodes bring out several other facets of Nabokov’s art of memory: a self-conscious pictorialism in his mnemonic images, a fascination with shifts between concrete sense impressions and figures of speech, and his evolving vision for the overall structure of Speak, Memory. All four images revel in the autobiographer’s freedom in handling retrospective time. As shown by Nabokov’s peroration at the end of the chapter, this freedom results in an ecstatic release from the minute-by-minute continuum of direct experience. “I confess I do not believe in time,” he exclaims. “I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another” (SM 139). Memory, this passage implies, allows everyone to set out on magic-carpet journeys through time, while autobiography, like a folded rug, can put distant moments in contact to create new patterns other than those woven into the fabric. Within chapter 6 Nabokov best expresses this outlook through his complex mnemonic images, which, by blending remote periods in his life, try to communicate his ecstasy to the reader. Their violation of linear continuity, which is relatively straightforward with the swallowtail and the bog and more intricate with the first moth and the new species, reenacts Nabokov’s refusal to believe in time. The images of the swallowtail and the bog stand out for the verve with which they jump between the Russo-European past chronicled in Speak, Memory and the author’s American milieu in the late 1940s. Even at the beginning, when chapter 6 opens by noting the “blue of extraordinary intensity” that good days in northern Russia share with the Colorado mountains (SM 119), we already sense the final note of ecstatic transcendence. And this joy resurfaces in the third section, when Nabokov compares his “incredibly happy memories” of entomological research in America with similar feelings about his boyhood hobby (SM 125). But with the swallowtail this delighted sense of continuity across two continents and two ages of man broadens to suggest the enrichment of Nabokov’s mood in maturity. For after its capture the initial butterfly escaped, and in a single sentence Nabokov imagines its flight across Siberia and Alaska to the Rocky Mountains. It is there, forty years later, that he finally succeeds in catching it for good

186

In English

(SM 120). In a similar spirit of repetition with a bonus, the northern Russian bog he enters as an eager young entomologist at the start of a paragraph dissolves into a marvelous vista on Longs Peak when he leaves at the end (SM 139). Strictly speaking, neither event is autobiographical; each of them artfully combines two widely separated memories. But their very impossibility as actual experience does express the autobiographer’s power to move at will through remembered time. And Nabokov reinforces the ensuing sense of freedom by embedding these startling glides in a single sentence or paragraph. The writer is limited to one sustained stylistic gesture, yet triumphantly encompasses long stretches of an unusually varied life. Both because these images contrast with the general linear flow of Speak, Memory and because they refer to American experiences normally outside the frame of the book, they strike the reader as exceptionally vivid. The manipulation of chronology epitomizes what Nabokov’s foreword called his “sallies into later space-time” (SM 9), while the abruptly gliding style creates an effect of “special—how shall I put it—sinuosity.” As this tentative comment to Katharine White suggests, Nabokov only realized the full expressive effect of his autobiographical style when The New Yorker tried to edit his English sentences (SL 77). Though the swallowtail and bog both push the reader abruptly into the future, they create a much richer temporal perspective than the futurism of the open air and the unfinished building in Mary. All four images convey a jaunty mood of expanded horizons, but because the ones in Speak, Memory hinge on unanticipated fulfillment, they differ from Ganin’s confident hopes of meeting some girl. And yet, unlike the radical uncertainty of the novel’s open ending, the swallowtail and bog look forward to a relative future that is known to the autobiographical narrator despite its inaccessibility to his boyish self. The images in Speak, Memory thus project a vision of life that is at once more unpredictable and more patterned than in Mary. This more complex vision perhaps reflects Nabokov’s persona in this chapter, which unites a butterfly collector’s awareness of metamorphic change with the disciplined objectivity of a research scientist. But since the autobiography consistently views life in a longer temporal perspective than the novel, it is hardly surprising that the fabric of time should have become more elaborate. The metaphysics of memory suggested by these autobiographical images has changed markedly as well. Instead of Ganin’s anguish at the irreversible passage of time, we have a more serene awareness of long-term patterns beyond the day-to-day processes of existence, patterns that in this sense are beyond time. For Nabokov at the end of chapter 6, the ultimate source of these patterns is deliberately left unclear. Though they may suggest “tender ghosts humoring a lucky mortal,” another hypothesis, at once

Autobiographical Images

187

more impersonal and less spiritual, involves the “contrapuntal genius of human fate” (SM 139).7 Soon after the boy Nabokov loses the Russian swallowtail, he catches a colorful moth in the vestibule of his family’s country home. His account of this event traces an elaborate temporal arabesque that rounds out the first section of chapter 6. Rather than returning directly to his boyhood, Nabokov begins this image by remembering how often the moment of capture came back to him later, whenever a whiff of ether evoked the ether-soaked cotton he had used to kill the moth. One especially vivid memory occurred when he was given anesthetic before an operation: in a dream of extraordinary clarity, he suddenly saw himself, his mother, and the captured insect. Indeed, only by remembering this moment of total recall, when “it was all there, brilliantly reproduced in my dream” (SM 121), does Nabokov recover the data to continue recounting his early experiences with lepidoptera. Readers are thus brought full circle in a single paragraph. After being projected forward in time, as with the swallowtail and the bog, they are thrown back to the original experience as rendered in the dream. The second movement of temporal recoil, which encloses memories within memories, gives the moth image its distinctiveness within chapter 6. For such recoil implies the endlessly receding vistas of a special retrospective experience that fascinated Nabokov; it seemed to replace an evanescent past with a perennial one that, at least rhetorically, could be made to suggest permanence. An especially haunting expression of this motif had appeared as early as chapter 3, the first one published after he resumed his autobiography in 1946. In one of those end-of-chapter passages that are so important for Speak, Memory, Nabokov begins by remembering himself as a five-yearold visiting Europe. At that time he was already devoted to nostalgic memories of his family’s country home and the northern Russian landscape, memories that, the reader realizes, have now entered the autobiography to form a receding series. Then, in a related passage, he talks of rereading Madame de Ségur only to find that along with recovering his own childish responses to her book he also remembers Uncle Ruka recalling his past in exactly the same way (SM 75–77). Faced with these vertiginously interlocking memories, Nabokov feels lifted out of time, and he ends chapter 3 exclaiming, “nothing will ever change, nobody will ever die” (SM 77). Similarly, when he remembers the moment of total recall in chapter 6, he again summons up an incipient logic of infinite regress that suggests the uncanny, atemporal presence of the past. But here the moth’s association with a whole series of flashbacks touched off by the ether heightens the impression of approaching a permanence beyond time. In addition to its special temporal qualities, the remembered moth is the most explicitly pictorial image in chapter 6. Not only is Nabokov’s dream

188

In English

introduced as having “the vividness of a decalcomania picture” (a forerunner of contemporary decals), but he then describes it in a vivid set piece that attempts to re-create its special distinctness. His method combines a carefully controlled narrowing of focus, an increasing hyperspecificity of visual detail, and an expert manipulation of sentence rhythm. Thus, after a first memory of the boy and his mother, Nabokov zeroes in on the killing and mounting of the moth, which are shown in a single, elaborate sentence made up of five parallel clauses that unfold with step-by-step precision: It was all there, brilliantly reproduced in my dream, while my own vitals were being exposed: the soaking, ice-cold absorbent cotton pressed to the insect’s lemurian head; the subsiding spasms of its body; the satisfying crackle produced by the pin penetrating the hard crust of its thorax; the careful insertion of the point of the pin in the cork-bottomed groove of the spreading board; the symmetrical adjustment of the thick, strong-veined wings under neatly affixed strips of semitransparent paper. (SM 121)

Except for a first, transitional clause that is quite long, the pace of the sentence gradually slackens as it moves from short phrases to a more leisurely treatment that in turn prepares for the moment of frozen time at the very end. First, the steadily increasing detail implies an asymptotic approach to an ideally full but unrealizable description. Then, once the boy has prepared the moth for display in the collector’s showcase, its “thick, strong-veined wings under neatly affixed strips of semitransparent paper” assume a suitably pictorial repose. In the Russian version, which handles the whole passage somewhat differently, Nabokov goes even further. For when he emphasizes the moth’s “broad, thick, heavily dusted wings, with dull spots and a wavy brush-stroke of orchid-like colors” (DB 113), the last clause makes his pictorial aims explicit. In the 1967 Speak, Memory this passage comes still closer to Nabokov’s full conception of the mnemonic image. By artfully reworking his comment on the memories released by the whiff of ether, Nabokov treats the moth both as a trope and as a set of concrete sensations. A similar ambivalence had already surfaced in the sixth section of this chapter in 1951, when he remembers the grounds of his family’s country house. After noting that the park was always on the verge of reverting to nature, Nabokov points out that “The disintegrating process continues still, in a different sense” (CE 89/SM 136), meaning that the park is falling into oblivion in his mind. In a brief demonstration of the duality of mnemonic images, he shows how a concrete impression of the past can become a metaphor for some aspect of memory, in this case forgetfulness. Similarly, when Nabokov rewrites the scene of his first moth, his earlier statement that the smell of ether “would always cause the door of the past to fly open” (CE 80) becomes more elaborate: the ether “would always cause the porch of the past to light up and attract that blun-

Autobiographical Images

189

dering beauty” (SM 121). The revision explains how the moth might have entered the vestibule where the boy found it, but at the same time it enriches the original “door of the past” by treating the mesmerized insect as a vivid metaphor for how a special smell like ether can speed the act of remembering. Like the park reverting to nature, the moth now functions as both a remembered image and an image of how memory works. 1 1 1 As a picture in words, Nabokov’s discovery of a new moth, the socalled Nabokov’s Pug, cannot compare with the other lepidoptera he describes. But it does show his intense engagement with two other images, and particularly with a crucial metaphor for understanding both the manipulation of time in chapter 6 and the larger structure of Speak, Memory. At the same time, the discontinuous manner in which it is presented breaks with sequential narrative more daringly than either Nabokov’s abrupt glides forward or the dizzying prospect of memories within memories. And because his account of the discovery goes through two preliminary versions, it allows us to follow Nabokov as he refines both the narrative itself and his major autobiographical images. At first, in Conclusive Evidence in 1951, Nabokov downplays his actual discovery of the moth in favor of its antecedents in his Russian past. Just before the fabulous bog in the sixth section, in a scene that remains largely unchanged, he tells of wandering through a nearby forest while pursuing his boyhood dream of adding “some remarkable new species to the long list of Pugs already named by others” (CE 90/SM 136). Despite a vignette of these moths as “delicate little creatures” with “flat wings and turned up abdomens,” the most vivid images center on Nabokov himself. He remembers moving among the trees—“at the bottom of that sea of sunshot greenery, I slowly spun round the great boles”—and, in an even more striking instance of his powers of visualization, he becomes obsessed with the “hallucinatory samples of small print” that would announce his discovery to the world: “the only specimen so far known . . .” “. . . the only specimen known of Eupithecia petropolitanata was taken by a Russian schoolboy . . .” “. . . by a young Russian collector . . .” “. . . by myself in the Government of St. Petersburg, Tsarskoe Selo District, in 1910 . . . 1911 . . . 1912 . . . 1913 . . . ”

By contrast, the eventual realization of his dream merits only a parenthetical aside, to the effect that imagination and desire were “coolly planning the most distant events of my destiny.” So vague a gesture toward the future cannot compare with his leap through time, from Russia to Colorado, on leaving the bog.

190

In English

Only in the 1954 Russian version, where Nabokov adds a passage about finding “his” Pug in the Utah mountains, does the nature of his “distant” destiny become clear. By specifying the moth’s scientific name (Eupithecia nabokovi McDunnough), he shows that he has indeed made his mark in “small print,” while by inserting the discovery right after the description of the bog, he aligns it with that autobiographical image and its pattern of repetition with a bonus. Indeed, when Nabokov observes that the Pug “mysteriously completes the thematic series which began in a Petersburg forest” (DB 128), he offers an explicit rationale for his swoops through space and time with the swallowtail and the bog. From this perspective, both of these images may be seen as partial inventions that express Nabokov’s mood of triumph at discovering the moth with far more vividness than his understated account of the actual experience. Yet the Russian version of the event still handles time in a rather conventional way, for despite the break with close contiguity, it continues to follow chronological order. Within a few pages in the sixth section, readers learn about Nabokov’s boyhood quest for a new moth, follow him into a Russian bog, come out in America, and are told that he achieved his goal in Utah. In the 1967 Speak, Memory, however, Nabokov shifts the Utah incident back to the third section with his overwhelmingly happy American memories. Not only does he narrate the events in reverse order, but by widening the temporal gap between them he creates a more graphic demonstration of his animus against linear time. For if the new sequence of events loops back into the past like the ether dream, the gap goes further still: it flouts our habit of looking back at the past and ahead to the future. Thus, though the third section anticipates the boyhood quest by connecting the Pug and the Utah mountains in 1943 with “a wood on the Oredezh around 1910” (SM 126), readers cannot understand this hint until the sixth section. At such a remove memory no longer functions as a spontaneous short-term activity but only as a conscious effort of synthetic understanding; and, since spotting the link between the two episodes amounts to recalling Nabokov’s future, the reader’s experience reinforces the compositional paradox of treating an event from later life as a textual past. The paradox becomes especially striking when Nabokov rounds out the boyhood scene with the added comment, “And then, thirty years later, that blessed black night in the Wasatch Range” (SM 136). The very sentence that effects an abrupt shift forward to the moment of discovery requires that readers think back to connect the Wasatch Mountains and the 1913 of this scene with Utah and the fateful date of 1943. Along with this further twist in Nabokov’s treatment of time, the 1967 account of his discovery generates a crucial metaphor. For in the third section of chapter 6, while reflecting on how his discovery completed his boyhood quest, Nabokov replaces his comment on a “thematic series” with the

Autobiographical Images

191

more resonant formula of a “thematic spiral.” This revision chimes with his goal of stylistic sinuosity as announced to Katharine White and with the sinuous evasion of linear time that marks this version of the incident. But, since spirals—or, properly speaking, helices—move forward while they circle back, Nabokov’s metaphor also emphasizes the notion of repetition with a bonus that is central to chapter 6. Indeed, the spiral is itself an example of this process, for it reactivates Nabokov’s vivid memory of “spinning” around the tree trunks in boyhood, and gives it a larger significance. A spiral/helix, after all, curls upward along an axis, and thus combines the two elements of circular motion and upright trees that remained separate in the memory. By 1967, accordingly, Nabokov has succeeded in righting the discrepancy that in 1951 had made the actual discovery of the Pug so much less vivid than the two other images. After he realizes his hallucinatory vision of small print in the Russian version, his spiral-like wanderings in the forest coalesce to create a metaphor for his eventual scientific discovery in the final English version, which also sets both of these more vivid images within a narrative structure of reversed time. Within Speak, Memory as a whole, moreover, Nabokov’s notion of a thematic spiral combines and clarifies two notable statements about the goals of autobiography, one concerned with spirals and the other with themes. Near the end of the book, as a prelude to describing his life in exile, he discusses the image in enough detail to merit an entry under “Spirals” in the index. Nabokov begins by invoking patterns of repetition with a bonus, noting that “in spiral form, the circle, uncoiled, unwound, has ceased to be vicious” (SM 275). He can even speak of “the essential spirality of all things in their relation to time.” But when Nabokov goes on to call his entire life a spiral, with four arcs that move from Russia to Europe to America and back to Europe, he oversimplifies—as he himself concedes when he says that he is merely considering “the simplest spiral.” A freer, less schematic treatment of the image is required. And so, during Nabokov’s revisions of chapter 6, the thematic spiral emerges as truer to the real shape of his autobiography. Instead of a rigid geographical progression, Speak, Memory relies on a more complex, somewhat scattered structure that allows a multitude of themes to follow various spirals to fulfillment. Nabokov’s abortive plan of calling the book The Anthemion, after the “honeysuckle ornament, consisting of elaborate interlacements and expanding clusters” (SM 11), would seem to fit this richer sense of life’s essential sinuosity. In the same spirit chapter 7 ends with his first love Colette playing with a hoop which she rolls around a fountain while she is herself encircled by “the interlaced arches of a low looped fence”; the boyish Nabokov as he watches is reminded in turn of “the rainbow spiral of a glass marble” (SM 152). Yet despite the dizzying array of arcs in this finale, which dates back to July 1948,8 the autobiographer confesses to “not knowing where to fit” his

192

In English

vision of the spiral. Only with the 1967 account of discovering his new moth does Nabokov reach full self-consciousness about the significance of this image for his life story. As for autobiographical “themes,” Nabokov had stressed their importance as early as chapter 1. To illustrate the essential nonlinearity of retrospective time, he tells two anecdotes about a casual family friend named General Kuropatkin. Once, as a boy, Nabokov had watched the general perform a simple trick with matches; then, years later, he learned that while both men were fleeing the revolution in disguise, Kuropatkin happened to approach Nabokov’s father and ask him for a light. The repeated concern with matches despite an interval of thirteen years leads Nabokov to announce that “the following of such thematic designs . . . is the true purpose of autobiography” (SM 27). But to the extent that his example juxtaposes the onetime general with the fugitive to suggest how “everything had fallen through” for Kuropatkin, it is misleading. For it implies a descending spiral/ helix of tragic historical experience that contradicts the ecstatic upward tendency of chapter 6. Nabokov’s autobiographical vision in Speak, Memory is basically buoyant, as suggested by another American flash-forward, from chapter 10, in which he looks back at his life with “a sense of undeserved attainments and rewards” (SM 196). Nabokov’s quintessential thematic spiral does not lead Kuropatkin-like from glory to dispossession; it runs from search to delayed fulfillment in circumstances far surpassing the initial circle of expectation. 1 1 1 Yet there are limits to Nabokov’s buoyancy, even among the ecstatic images of chapter 6. His good-humored account of losing a prize catch through a hole in his butterfly net hardly counts (SM 132–33), for more is involved than a confessional revelation of embarrassing foibles. At certain points Nabokov turns on himself to question the very basis of his enthusiasm. Thus he remembers his “shame and disgust” when, during a friend’s visit after a family tragedy, he left him to spend a morning hunting butterflies (SM 126–27). In the Russian version, this incident yields a sharper moral conflict, since the bereaved friend is also the victim of bullying at school while Nabokov feels that his behavior has been actively cruel (DB 119). The ether-induced memory of his first moth is accompanied by an even more striking revelation. For just as Nabokov launches the imagistic set piece from his boyhood, he briefly alludes to the operation where “my own vitals were being exposed” (SM 121). The ironic parallel between himself under the scalpel and the moth pierced by pins wakens a momentary identification between himself and the creatures he pursued while also suggesting the existence of some larger world where the hunter himself might be

Autobiographical Images

193

the prey. Even as the image of the moth, by triumphantly outwitting time, opens vistas on eternity, it does not exclude radical doubts about the validity of Nabokovian ecstasy. Within Speak, Memory as whole, this countervision comes to the fore when Nabokov describes his own later experience of his neglected schoolmate’s suffering—the shock of suddenly losing his father. Other tragedies and near-tragedies certainly marked Nabokov’s life: the death of his cousin Yuri in the Russian Civil War, the Nazi menace for his wife and son, his inability to join his dying mother in German-controlled Prague, and the fate of his brother Sergei, who stayed in Paris in 1940 and ended up in a concentration camp. But none of these experiences yields a complex, multifaceted autobiographical image. Perhaps because Nabokov could not be present for his mother’s and brother’s deaths, he cannot do more than simply mention them and, in his brother’s case, emphasize his sense of hopeless incapacity (SM 258).9 And Bend Sinister, as a work of fiction, was better suited for a nightmarish vision of what might have happened to his wife and son. In his cousin’s case, Yuri does result in one image that spirals through time, when his adolescent game of lying below a swing that swoops down just above his forehead predicts the volley of bullets that shattered the front of his skull (SM 199–200). But Nabokov’s brief valediction to his cousin, however phrased,10 does not approach the rich amalgam of conflicting emotions he feels in remembering his father, whose murder in 1922 offers the single greatest challenge to the buoyancy of Speak, Memory. Even the poignant tribute to his aging mother in Prague ends with “the double gleam on her fourth finger” where she wears both her own and her husband’s wedding ring (SM 50), thereby circling back to the elder Nabokov’s untimely death, which his son memorializes with equal fidelity. Nabokov’s correspondence shows that he hesitated before proceeding with his current fragmented treatment of his father. In his November 1949 prospectus for Katharine White, which proposes separate chapters for both his mother and his uncle Ruka, he mentions the possibility of a similar “special chapter on my father” (SL 95). But he foresees problems gathering the necessary factual information, and in January 1950 he tells Katharine White that “since various material concerning his activities finds adequate niches here and there in my book” (SL 96), he might not write the chapter after all. When Conclusive Evidence appeared, it followed this more scattered approach, which includes vignettes of his father in almost every chapter. Indeed, Nabokov was so pleased with the results that he left the basic pattern unchanged in the 1967 Speak, Memory; though by then he had done the needed research, he merely used this material for the short biography at the beginning of chapter 9 rather than creating the entirely new chapter he had once planned. Within this deliberately dispersed structure, three “niches” stand out as expressions of Nabokov’s richly divided response to his

194

In English

father’s memory. Beginning with several vivid mnemonic images in chapter 1, he then jumps to chapter 8, with its elaborate digressive structure and crowning tribute to memory; and both of these chapters lay the basis for the complex treatment of his father’s death that follows in chapter 9. In fact, since chapters 1 and 8 came out so late in The New Yorker, Nabokov was able to finish them with a precise knowledge of what chapter 9 held in store. Chapter 1 forms the prelude to this complex commemoration of Nabokov’s father. After the memory of both parents that awakened his consciousness of time, and after the examples of his unusual sensitivity to images, the last two sections focus on the elder Nabokov. As in Mary, however, where Ganin deliberately postponed the main memory, the narrative digresses before coming to the point: it begins with a portrait of Nabokov’s first Russian teacher, the village schoolmaster Zhernosekov, who was specially chosen by his father. As the first of many tutors and governesses to be described in detail, Zhernosekov has a key role in Speak, Memory. Not only does he teach Nabokov with the very alphabet blocks that would later reveal his colored hearing, but as a non-Communist radical he shows the father’s basic solidarity with the Russian intelligentsia, not with the aristocracy. And the transitional passage that introduces Zhernosekov already reveals the attention to sensory detail, the witty use of metaphor, and the exuberant high spirits that typify Nabokov’s mnemonic art: “With a sharp and merry blast from the whistle that was part of my first sailor suit, my childhood calls me back into that distant past to have me shake hands again with my delightful teacher” (SM 28). When Nabokov completes the portrait, moreover, he comments that “to him, in a way, I owe the ability to continue for another stretch along my private footpath” (SM 29); Zhernosekov is explicitly seen as a preparatory figure within a larger, step-by-step structure of recollection like Ganin’s. Thus in this chapter, where the schoolmaster organizes a village festival for the elder Nabokov, he acts as the bridge to the first of two vivid images involving the father, the moment of his homecoming from imprisonment for signing the Vyborg Manifesto. As with the swallowtail and the first moth in chapter 6, Nabokov presents this image in one elaborate sentence. He makes its pictorial quality evident at once, since he begins by commenting, “I see with the utmost clarity” (SM 30). The ensuing description suggests this clarity through Nabokov’s careful control of focus and pacing. Despite the semicolons, which mark off seven clauses, the basic structure of the sentence consists of five parts, each of which brings the reader closer to the village with steadily increasing detail. Thus we begin by glimpsing the river, see more of the bridge and the hill, survey the road and the village in three clauses that form a single unit, and end with a close-up of the dog that comes to chase the Nabokov family’s carriage:

Autobiographical Images

195

the sun-spangled river; the bridge, the dazzling tin of a can left by a fisherman on its wooden railing; the linden-treed hill with its rosy-red church and marble mausoleum where my mother’s dead reposed; the dusty road to the village; the strip of short, pastel-green grass, with bald patches of sandy soil, between the road and the lilac bushes behind which walleyed, mossy log cabins stood in a rickety row; the stone building of the new schoolhouse near the wooden old one; and, as we swiftly drove by, the little black dog with very white teeth that dashed out from among the cottages at a terrific pace but in absolute silence, saving his voice for a brief outburst he would enjoy when his muted sprint would at last bring him close to the speeding carriage. (SM 30)

Hyperspecific details like a tin can on the bridge, the roadside vegetation, and especially the dog enhance the vividness of the scene. But even more important in creating a “pictorial” impression of meticulous accuracy is Nabokov’s willingness to show the contrast between his family’s “marble mausoleum” on the hill and the “rickety row” of “walleyed mossy log cabins” in the village. Still, the image as a whole is deliberately left incomplete. On one level Nabokov plays with the reader’s sense that no sounds are possible in a tableau of this kind, so he ends the description just before the dog starts to bark. On another level, this refusal of closure corresponds to Nabokov’s larger strategy with memories of his father. Relying on the eloquence of understatement, he stops with the family still on the way and does not show the moment of reunion. Just as readers must imagine the excited barking of the dog, so they must continue this scene in their minds if they are to feel the ebullience of the autobiographer’s emotions. The second image of the father comes as the grand finale to chapter 1. Though it does not deal with his homecoming, it places the father at the center of a celebratory ritual that answers the earlier moment and guides it to a more complex emotional resolution. Several times every summer, after the peasants had consulted with their “master,” they would show their gratitude by forming a circle and tossing him three times into the air. At first Nabokov creates a resplendent image of his father in a single instant of time, “in his wind-rippled white summer suit . . . gloriously sprawling in midair . . . his handsome, imperturbable features turned to the sky” (SM 31). But then he shifts to a more varied tripartite image, which again unfolds in one elaborate sentence. First comes a series of loosely additive clauses that evoke each of the three upward tosses, after which Nabokov modulates to a self-consciously pictorial simile that focuses on the instant of poise between up and down. He sees his father “reclining, as if for good, like one of those paradisiac personages who comfortably soar, with such a wealth of folds in their garments, on the vaulted ceiling of a church” (SM 32). In the last part

196

In English

of the sentence, the reference point continues to be this figurative church ceiling; but now the moment of poise yields to the pull of gravity, with readers looking to the floor below where they see a mysterious funeral service. Though “lilies conceal the face of whoever lies there . . . in the open coffin,” vignettes of the father in later chapters eventually make it clear that this passage alludes to his death.11 So the picture on the painted ceiling, which can evoke both the tossing scene and the funeral, has spanned more than a decade in the father’s life. In this sense it has succeeded in transcending time, and assumes the character of a “paradisiac” image that, picture-like, can freeze a single instant and make it last indefinitely. And, though the two descriptions of the father in triumph and defeat recall the downward thematic spiral of the Kuropatkin anecdote earlier in chapter 1, the middle part of the sentence creates a more ambiguous effect. Crucial here is its balance of kinetic sensations between up and down, which concretizes the complex mingling of triumph and tragedy in the sentence as a whole and recomposes as a simultaneous order what had been a succession in his father’s life. In contrast to chapter 6, however, which was written almost two years earlier, this moment of poise also serves to qualify Nabokov’s dominant mood of retrospective ecstasy. For into a chapter whose New Yorker title had been “Perfect Past,” and thus wittily evoked a similar exuberant outlook, this closing sentence has introduced one of those sudden changes of momentum Nabokov prized so highly. Alongside the gusto of his father’s homecoming and the peasant celebration, the reader is made to feel a chilling undercurrent. The final impression is more complex and multifaceted than either the butterflies or the Kuropatkin anecdote. 1 1 1 Chapters 8 and 9 together repeat the mnemonic structure of chapter 1 on a grander scale. They begin with an elaborate series of preparatory images, move to a vivid remembered scene that is linked with an incomplete homecoming, and build to an even more complex resolution. Most of chapter 8 consists of portraits of the half-dozen Russian tutors Nabokov’s father chose for his sons between 1906 and 1915. Nabokov makes the pictorialism of his procedure explicit, for not only does he use the metaphor of a magiclantern show to organize the sequence of character sketches, but one such show is the subject of the chapter’s most detailed episode, on the tutor Lenski’s illustrated reading of a Lermontov poem. And the ethnic, social, and religious diversity of the tutors, which seems to typify “all the winds that swept over the Russian Empire” (SM 153), obliquely suggests the father’s open-mindedness and freedom from prejudice. But their portraits,

Autobiographical Images

197

like Zhernosekov’s, are also intended as a mnemonic warm-up for remembering the father himself. Hence Nabokov can begin chapter 8 by recalling another, much later image of the “admirable and unforgettable village schoolmaster” (SM 154), which then leads to a vignette of Nabokov’s father and of his grandmother as well. Indeed, his memories of Zhernosekov here and in chapter 1 combine to bracket the entire period of his education by tutors. By a kind of temporal framing effect, the schoolmaster can sum up the ensuing portrait gallery that in itself also mimes a process of mnemonic image-making that lingers on the periphery before darting to the center. Or, as Nabokov explains the relationship, even if the schoolmaster “does not really belong to the present series,” he does help “to join its beginning and end” (SM 154). Later in chapter 8, in a digressive comment that nonetheless applies to the interplay between the leisurely description of all these educators and his understated treatment of his father, Nabokov speaks of “diminishing large things and enlarging small ones” to strike a balance “that is intrinsically artistic” (SM 167). The transition from small to great occurs near the end of chapter 8, when Nabokov shifts from the long series of tutors to a brief composite picture of his family circle that represents “the supreme achievement of memory.” In thus moving from “the suspended and wandering tonalities of the past” to a “consummation and resolution of those jangling chords” (SM 170–71), Nabokov emphasizes that the chapter has crossed a major psychological threshold. From this new vantage point, the colorful group of tutors coalesces to form a special “changeful image, a succession of fade-ins and fadeouts” (SM 171). On three other occasions in Speak, Memory, Nabokov mentions images with a similar kaleidoscopic multiplicity. He did so first when he discussed the “bewildering sequence of English nurses and governesses” (SM 86) who make way for Mademoiselle in chapter 5. He will do so again when he reviews all the early infatuations that he expected “would merge to form somebody I did not know” and who prepare the way for Tamara (SM 212– 13). And he does so yet again when he evokes the “changeful girl in a series of simultaneous or overlapping love affairs” whom he pursued in the eight years between Tamara and his marriage (SM 240). But with the governesses and the love affairs the digressive treatment is not nearly so detailed, while the account of his early infatuations is scattered over several chapters. Chapter 8, however, has actually portrayed the whole series of tutors in succession and then evokes them again in a final vibrating vision that “turns Ordo into Max and Max into Lenski and Lenski into the schoolmaster,” at which point “the whole array of trembling transformations is repeated.” Here Nabokov’s endlessly circling phraseology does not simply describe his

198

In English

own experience; by evoking earlier images that have now entered the memories of his readers, it induces a similar kaleidoscopic effect in his audience. Thanks to this ingenious manipulation of the textual past, the transition to the homecoming scene at the very end of chapter 8 acquires an exceptional immediacy. In this case the homecoming is Nabokov’s own, but unlike his father returning from prison, he travels back through time: he obeys an impulse of “impassioned commemoration, of ceaseless return” that impels him to go back in imagination to his family’s country home. He can perform this act of memory, he insists, only if he approaches the house from the outside, only if he comes through the park “with the silent steps of a prodigal.” In search of an image with an “essential stability and completeness” denied his tutors, he chooses to remember a perennial moment in family history, the celebration of anniversaries around a long table placed outdoors at the edge of the trees. The ensuing description brilliantly interweaves the familiar motifs of soundlessness and exuberance with techniques of hyperspecificity, pictorialism, and understated emotion. At first, as in the memory of his father’s return from prison, everything occurs in total silence; and, though Nabokov does mention “the faces of seated people sharing in the animation of light and shade beneath a moving, a fabulous foliage,” the scene becomes especially vivid when he abandons portraiture to concentrate on gradually sharpening the peripheral details. Glancing first at the hot chocolate and blueberry tarts on the table, he then notices “the small helicopter of a revolving samara,” and finally gazes at “an adolescent girl’s bare arm . . . with its turquoise-veined underside turned up to the flaky sunlight, the palm open in lazy expectancy of something—perhaps the nutcracker” (SM 171). As a tribute to the effectiveness of such oblique image-making, Nabokov’s 1967 foreword to Speak, Memory recalls the impact of the last, most strikingly hyperspecific detail on Harold Ross, editor of The New Yorker: “Were the Nabokovs a one-nutcracker family?” (SM 10). A little later, after evoking the kaleidoscopic image of the tutors, Nabokov becomes self-consciously pictorial. First, as the scene comes into sharper focus and “its colors and outlines settle at last to their various duties,” he stresses its analogies with the lantern slides that have dominated the body of the chapter. Then, by abruptly ending the initial impression of silence, Nabokov broadens the metaphor to suggest a cinematic fullness of representation: “some knob is touched and a torrent of sounds comes to life.” At this point, moving beyond the moment of calm before the father’s homecoming in chapter 1, Nabokov tries to convey his first real upsurge of feeling. While listening to the sounds of people talking and a walnut being cracked, he suddenly stops observing the remembered scene: he becomes a participant and seems to hear “thirty human hearts drowning mine with their regular beats” (SM 171). Dissolving the gap between present and past to rival life

Autobiographical Images

199

itself, this hallucinatory image embodies the tenderness and love that still bind Nabokov to the family circle. After this brief flash of emotion, the description then modulates to a quick fade-out, and chapter 8 ends with the enthusiastic shouts of swimming children, which form “a background of wild applause” (SM 172) that not only honors Nabokov’s commemoration of his family but conveys its essential high spirits. As a self-styled “supreme achievement of memory,” this family picture depends upon an artistic-psychological technique that assembles random memories and transforms them into vivid images. The carefully ordered process involves repeated scrutiny and meditation, but is also suffused with deep feeling. To use the Nabokovian terms cited above, if commemoratation demands “ceaseless return” to the past, it also assumes an “impassioned” desire to remember. The resulting pictures transcend the shifting kaleidoscope of time-bound memories; rather, to stress two other phrases from this passage, Nabokov sees such pictures as a “consummation and resolution” of the temporal process, as something that has become “enduring, in retrospect” (SM 170–71). As at the end of chapter 1, Nabokov has once again achieved a seemingly atemporal outlook by fusing disparate moments of remembered experience to form a single image. 1 1 1 Even the elaborate picture of the family beneath the trees, however, does not focus directly on the father, nor does its euphoric final note do justice to the emotional complexity at the end of chapter 1. But its more intimate tone does set the stage for chapter 9, originally called “My Russian Education,” which returns to the digressive method of chapter 8 but combines an account of the boy’s secondary schooling with a series of vivid images of the elder Nabokov. The resulting counterpoint of peripheral precision and filial emotion decisively sharpens the reader’s sense of the father, but it also does much more. As this chapter builds to its sudden revelation of his untimely death, it epitomizes the rich emotional balance and understated eloquence of his son’s autobiographical writing, along with its interplay of art and memory and its free handling of time. Such is the power and the originality of Nabokov’s approach that he understandably rejected a publisher’s blurb that simply spoke of “good humored detachment” in this complex valedictory image (SL 104). After the short, relatively impersonal biography of Nabokov’s father added in 1967, chapter 9 follows the son’s routine at the progressive Tenishev School, then concludes with memories of one special day. The chapter’s pictures of the father emphasize his unusually active life, but though Nabokov mentions his achievements as a criminologist, political leader, journalist, and philanthropist, his detailed impressions lie elsewhere. Thus

200

In English

all he actually shows of his father’s public life is the sound of pencils being sharpened before committee meetings; much more vivid is the boy’s ritual of greeting his father every morning in the library. This room, which doubled as a gymnasium and which can inspire thoughts of both books and boxing (SM 181–82), embodies in and by itself the elder Nabokov’s capacity for widely varied activity. There the boy would find him at his fencing lessons, and this spectacle of disciplined energy—later saluted as “the beloved, the familiar, the richly alive image of my father” (SM 190)—comes to typify his father in his prime. Yet the splendid vitality of his swordplay has its reverse side, which is revealed later in chapter 9. For once Nabokov learns at school of an impending duel between his father and a political enemy, he suddenly feels with atrocious clarity “the ripeness and nakedness of a madly pulsating heart about to be pierced” (SM 190). Echoing the emotional complexity of the father poised in midair, the fencing lessons no longer arouse just admiration but fear. During the last portion of chapter 9, Nabokov introduces several other images that further develop this duality. On the one hand, during his agonizingly slow trip home for more news, the boy has ample time to imagine the upshot of a duel with pistols. But though Nabokov says he felt “even deeper distress,” and mentions the “almost hallucinatory state” in which he recalled various literary, operatic, and real-life duels, none of these images seems as threatening as that first stabbing sensation of empathy for his father. On the other hand, thoughts of his “tender friendship” with his father and the sense of belonging to a happy family keep him from total despair. Nabokov gives several brief examples of what he means, but only in the 1967 autobiography does he add two images that are detailed enough to balance the earlier expressions of fear. During the memory of the boy’s trip home, both of them surface as recollections of a past “which already then seemed long ago”; like the ether vision in chapter 6, with its incipient logic of infinite regress, both images dimly suggest a condition beyond time. And both return to his father’s wide-ranging prowess in action, as shown by interests he shared with his son—his alertness in catching a certain rare butterfly, and his dexterity in mounting a bicycle (SM 192–93). By this point, not just the boy’s conflicting feelings but the reversal of the original vibrant image followed by a countermovement to that reversal have set the stage for Nabokov’s complex closing response to his father. In the last paragraph Nabokov reaches home only to learn that the duel had never taken place. But though his father is safe, Speak, Memory avoids picturing him at this happy moment. Instead, the autobiographer’s eye moves from an incidental object (a statue in the entry), to the delight of the family friend who would have been his father’s second in the duel and then to “my mother’s serene everyday face,” but finally stops: “I could not look at my father” (SM 193). All that remains is the memory of bursting into tears

Autobiographical Images

201

and the tactile sensation of his father’s “large, cool hand resting on my head.” By contrast, the one visual image he does have of the father suddenly propels the reader ahead ten years to a very different scene. At a lecture in Berlin in 1922, the elder Nabokov intervened to protect a friend from “the bullets of two Russian Fascists and, while vigorously knocking down one of the assassins, was fatally shot by the other” (SM 193). Much of the emotional power of this laconic statement depends upon Nabokovian strategies of understatement and audience involvement in completing the text. Thus the boy’s fears before the duel should be seen as a dim foretaste of the adult’s grief after the assassination, a grief never evoked in Speak, Memory except when Nabokov mentions “my last and saddest spring” at Cambridge, just after the assassination (SM 270). In similar fashion, the painful imaginary death by sword must stand for the actual death by pistol that he envisioned at greater length but not so vividly. At the same time, as with earlier moments of emotional complexity involving his father, this final image unites elation and radical doubt. Not only does unexpected deliverance from tragedy coalesce with an equally unexpected negation of that deliverance, but triumph and defeat mingle in Nabokov’s elaborate simile for his tears, which evokes the successful maneuver of two Russian warships during a disastrous naval battle. Even more important is the kinesthetic poise of this simile, which harks back to the sensation of reaching a zenith at the end of chapter 1: “my heart welled in me like that wave on which the Buynïy rose.” A similar moment of poise marks the description of the two attackers during the assassination, where Nabokov balances the father’s active gesture of “vigorously knocking down” one assailant with the passivity of being “fatally shot by the other.” Along with its intense emotion, Nabokov’s valedictory tribute combines two other major elements of his mnemonic image-making. Recalling the interplay of art and memory in “Mademoiselle O,” the reunion with his father resists visualization even though it appears to be an actual memory, but the opposite holds for the assassination. It is vividly pictorial, but though consistent with earlier images of the father’s vigor in action, Speak, Memory has already made it clear that Nabokov did not witness his father’s death.12 When he creates this final image of his father’s character as he wishes to preserve it, invention has supplemented memory. Meanwhile, the 1967 version of this passage emulates the sudden temporal glides of the peasant celebration in chapter 1 and the swallowtail in chapter 6. Earlier versions had been divided into two paragraphs, with a clean break between the reunion scene and the assassination.13 But now, by a process Nabokov described in another context as having “those drawbridges lowered which I have taken such pains to lift” (SL 77), he juxtaposes the two levels of time in a single sentence. When he writes, “And then it happened: my heart welled in me . . . and I had no handkerchief, and ten years were to pass

202

In English

before a certain night in 1922 [emphasis added],” the deceptive parallelism of the three “ands” clashes with a change of scale from seconds to years. The resulting temporal glide not only sharpens the conflict between unexpected joy and sudden grief but once again conjures up the relatively timeless realm of the mnemonic image. From this vantage point, the autobiographer who surveys life’s thematic spirals might identify them with a metaphysical entity behind the scenes. Thus when chapter 9 closes by shifting back to Nabokov’s reunion with his father, it refers to his later fate as an ontological chess puzzle whose “several lines of play . . . were not blended yet on the board.” Just like the last words of chapter 6, this metaphor hints at a hidden presence—the final, ever-sohypothetical implication of Nabokov’s gestures toward timelessness. But whereas his point with the butterflies and moths was unexpected fulfillment, here the unknown puzzle-maker contrives his father’s absurd and tragic death. Nonetheless, chapter 9 does not end with utter fatalism or despair. Because memory is free to rearrange chronology, it need not focus on the bleak outcome at the expense of earlier, more fortunate moments. Nabokov’s portrait of his father therefore ends by circling back to the triumphant moment of danger surmounted, a moment that might express the hope of an otherworldly reunion, but that at any rate reaffirms buoyancy within a larger awareness of tragic as well as ecstatic patterns. Hence the intricate equilibrium of Nabokov’s words as he takes his leave. Though when he rejoined his father “no shadow was cast by that future event,” this darker outlook does of course affect the autobiographer, who is writing after the assassination. Despite his foreknowledge, however, he can still return in spirit to “the bright stairs” of the family home, while the firm pressure of his father’s hand on his head still seems to touch the very seat of memory. That pressure survives, like the trace of Nina’s violets in the very name Fialta, as the last memorial of his life.

CHAPTER

10

1

The Cultural Self-Consciousness of Speak, Memory

TRUE TO Nabokov’s initial plan of portraying “many different lands and peoples,” Speak, Memory covers a much wider range of cultural experiences than “Mademoiselle O.” Simply because it records so many aspects of Nabokov’s passage from Russia through Europe to the United States, it must give much more attention to situations of multiplicity. Gone is the relatively straightforward dualism of the memoir, where the tributes to French modernism shaded into a more complex Franco-Russian awareness; at least five variables interact in this autobiography, which emphasizes three separate European cultures along with Nabokov’s Russian origins and his American destination. Nabokov’s basic motives in chronicling his involvements with Europe have shifted as well, for unlike the original “Mademoiselle O,” Speak, Memory was not written to explore the possibility of transplanting himself to another literature. From his new home across the Atlantic, Nabokov now looks back at his various Russian, English, French, and German contacts and proudly affirms his multicultural background and development. His title for the 1954 Russian version of his autobiography— Drugie Berega or Other Shores—communicates this sense of no longer seeing Europe as either an immediate environment or a potential audience. But greater distance from an experience can also create perspective on it. After the fictional treatments of cultural mobility in Sebastian Knight and Bend Sinister, Nabokov’s resumption of the autobiography allowed him to reassess his complex cultural heritage. Above and beyond documenting his various Russian and European selves, he could also attempt to fit them into a larger whole, to show how the “elements” combine to form a “personality” in the language of his 1948 prospectus. For a small-scale model of this effort at cross-cultural integration, we might consider Nabokov’s account of the different national influences on his love for butterfly collecting. In boyhood, as we have seen, his interests came to focus on the dream of finding a new Russian species, yet he stresses that his goal was nourished by a small library of books in German, French, and English. And if he shared his passion for butterflies with his father, who acquired it from a German tutor, he was also influenced by his mother, who had been taught by a Russian zoologist. Later, his ambitions as a collector are sharpened by two vacations in France,

204

In English

then gain further impetus from an English classification system.1 Evident here is Nabokov’s strong sense of Europe as a multicultural system, and this outlook carries over to the autobiography’s account of his literary personality, especially in the pivotal eighth chapter, which ends with his supreme achievement of remembering the family anniversary. Only when the chronicle of Nabokov’s cosmopolitan life becomes self-conscious, only when it reflexively addresses the varied cultural contexts of its own approach to the past, does Speak, Memory cast important new light on how his art of memory connects with European modernism. 1 1 1 In moving from “Mademoiselle O” to Speak, Memory, Nabokov decisively broadens the range of intertextual reference. Returning to his earlier quarrels with German thought, he now sharpens the polemics with Freud, and gives them a new prominence in characterizing his own general approach. Nabokov also rethinks his more recent quest for an English literary identity, and opts for a more reserved attitude toward his Anglophile upbringing that does not, however, deny its existence or a certain underlying influence. Both in Speak, Memory, finally, and in his intervening work on Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, Nabokov suggests various Russo-European accommodations based on provocative syntheses of classic Russian literature and European modernism. Even in this broadened cultural setting, however, he continues to stress the French connection. As noted in Chapter 6, the evolution of “Mademoiselle O” suggests as much: not only does it develop the original tributes to Proust and Baudelaire, but it adds a crucial new allusion linking Flaubert with Nabokovian colored hearing. By 1967 Nabokov’s portrait of his Swiss governess defines the modernity of modern French literature by stressing memory, the mnemonic image, and temporal flux even more clearly than in 1936. Moreover, as if to counter the demotion of “Mademoiselle O” to chapter 5, Nabokov reaffirms the importance of French modernism in several other key chapters. Thus the other two chapters that refer extensively to France include important Proustian resonances. In chapter 3, which was probably the first one Nabokov wrote after resuming the autobiography, the portrait of his Francophile uncle Ruka raises issues of inheritance and ancestry. Not only does Nabokov reveal that he inherited his uncle’s fortune, but he eventually conceives of the chapter as a general family history leading up to his uncle as the most influential personality after his parents. Given this emphasis on familial transmission, it is noteworthy that Ruka’s belle époque affluence, his poor health, and his homosexuality all recall Proust, and in the Russian version of the autobiography, Nabokov even states that his uncle looked like him (DB 63). Ruka is also the one poet in the family, and when

Cultural Self-Consciousness of Speak, Memory

205

he writes, he does so in French, driven by what is called “a Proustian excoriation of the senses” (SM 74). Thus, when Nabokov ends chapter 3 by comparing his childhood memories of reading Madame de Ségur with his uncle’s similar memories, this fusion of French cultural interests with an act of memory spotlights the main affinity between the Proustian uncle and the young writer in the making. Significantly, when this chapter discusses the keenness of the entire Nabokov family’s “retrospective faculty,” it speaks of “vividly recalling a patch of the past” (SM 75), a phrase that echoes the reference to a Proustian pan, or patch, in the French version of “Mademoiselle O.” In chapter 7, part of which deals with his childish love for the French girl Colette, Nabokov refers to Proust in a more general way. Though the episode is highly individualized, it is set at a French seaside resort and in a park in Paris, both of which recall Proustian scenes of awakening love—the Balbec where Marcel meets Albertine and the park in the Champs-Elysées where he plays with Gilberte. In this context, Nabokov’s final uncertainty about the rainbow spiral in the marble appears to have cultural as well as autobiographical implications. As an image of repetition with a bonus, it reflects back on the intertextual recycling and personal adaptation of materials associated with Colette, including Carmen, the early cinema, and tourist-trade souvenirs along with Proust. Then as Nabokov moves from chapter 7 to his supreme experience of memory in chapter 8, his dialogue with French modernism will deepen, with the playful parallels in setting giving way to basic issues of method. With its portraits of Nabokov’s varied tutors, chapter 8 emphasizes a specifically Russian element in his multicultural past. But it approaches this subject by way of more recent cultural experiences, beginning with an appeal to its original New Yorker audience. “I am going to show a few slides” (SM 153), Nabokov remarks, just like a midcentury, middle-class American back from a vacation. Then, after some introductory comments on his tutors, he circles back to the initial comparison, which is now rephrased in terms of French modernism: “the images of those tutors appear within memory’s luminous disc as so many magic-lantern projections” (SM 154). In this keynote sentence, Nabokov brilliantly captures that dual potential of the image, as both a trope and a record of sensations, which so struck him in Proust’s and Bergson’s accounts of memory. Thus “luminous disc” is a metaphor that serves to define memory, while the magic-lantern projections of the tutors are the pictures to be seen when the past returns with hallucinatory intensity. Indeed, not only the function but even the subject matter of these images recall Proust and Bergson. Most obvious is the allusion to the magic-lantern show of Golo and Geneviève de Brabant, which was the source of that luminous patch originally emphasized in “Mademoiselle O.”2 But Nabokov gives the lantern slides a new resonance when he makes them

206

In English

a metaphor for memory, and not just a remembered picture. Here he alludes more subtly to Bergson, who at times drew on optical metaphors in his definitions of memory. For example, Nabokov’s luminous disc belongs to the same family of images as the “focusing of a photographic apparatus” that describes the effort to remember in Matter and Memory.3 In the end, however, Nabokov presses still further and engineers an intertextual spiral that transforms Proust even as it echoes him. Continuing in the spirit of “Mademoiselle O,” he questions the value of Proust’s distinction between two kinds of memory. Thus once again, but with even more emphasis, this sentence directs attention to the opening scene of the goodnight kiss, which stood outside the dichotomy of voluntary and involuntary memory, and which had begun with the magic-lantern show. Nabokov thereby reiterates his greater faith in conscious awareness and even effort as the key to recapturing the past, and when he likens memory to the luminous disc of a well-focused projector, he makes this attitude even more explicit. The carefully controlled digressions of chapter 8, its elaborate pictorialism, and its studied emotional understatement all suggest how much this revisionary attitude has contributed to Nabokov’s supreme achievement of memory. Though the actual scenes are Russian, the method of description involves a deliberate departure from French modernism, an affiliation that Nabokov acknowledged when calling the original New Yorker sketch “Lantern Slides” and that still survives as the dominant image in chapter 8. From this perspective it is clear why he rejected as “irrelevant” a publisher’s blurb that proposed to advertise his book by quoting some words from the madeleine episode (SL 104).4 Nabokov did not mean to deny Proust’s importance for Speak, Memory, but he could not accept such obtuseness concerning his critical attitude toward involuntary memory. 1 1 1 Meanwhile, in the German-language sphere, Speak, Memory brings earlier polemics with psychoanalysis to a new level of satiric intensity. During the mnemonic kaleidoscope in chapter 8, Nabokov reactivates the Franco-German polarity of his Russian fiction when he interrupts the portrait of his first tutor to mention one Sigismond Lejoyeux, a balloonist in Biarritz who is presumably an expert on hot air (SM 156). Nabokov has chided critics for missing this “vicious snap” at Freud (SM 15), which rounds out a passage about how this tutor made a declaration of love to his mother. Nabokov admits that his memories of this scene are vague, that they may have been affected by later stories, and that they include details that must have come from other incidents. Still, rather than subordinate the remembered images to a theory that would reinterpret them as a mere screen for repressed oedipal material, he caricatures psychoanalysis as a “big

Cultural Self-Consciousness of Speak, Memory

207

custard-colored balloon.” If chapter 8 began by sidestepping Proust’s involuntary memory in favor of a more deliberate lucidity, it now draws the consequences of this position by harshly rejecting the Freudian unconscious. Elsewhere in Speak, Memory Nabokov’s polemics move beyond the Franco-German orbit of “Sigismond Lejoyeux.” He was undoubtedly struck by Freud’s prestige in the English-speaking world: Sebastian Knight had already warned against an Anglo-German entente in speculative psychology, and now he lived in the United States, where Freudian terminology was entering everyday speech. Late in the autobiography, in a mood of exasperated recoil, this refugee from Lenin and Hitler could even warn against “the police state of sexual myth,” and propose (SM 300–301) that dictators had missed a great chance in not exploiting psychoanalysis! Here Nabokov’s hostility to abstract thought betrays him, for he mistakenly conflates ideology and theory, overlooks the critical uses of psychoanalysis, and fails to respect Freud’s own flight from Hitler. More significant for his cultural self-definition as an artist of memory is the attack launched at the outset of chapter 1. The placement of this passage shows Nabokov’s realization that if there was an automatic reference point for modern autobiography in English at midcentury, it was Freud rather than Proust. As a result, when he looks back for his first distinct memories, he must dismiss the doctrine of the primal scene as totally inapplicable to his own experience of learning his parents’ ages and thereby gaining self-consciousness and an awareness of time. Freud’s repressed realm of “bitter little embryos, spying from their natural nooks, upon the love life of their parents” (SM 20) cannot be reconciled with his own sense of early childhood as a “perfect past” available for conscious celebration. Nabokov’s other charges against Freud, that his outlook is “fundamentally medieval” and that he indulges in symbol mongering,5 highlight the contrasting qualities in his own approach to memory, which aims to be truly modern in spirit and to respect the mnemonic image in every detail. In the 1960s, when the prefaces to his translated Russian novels repeatedly warn against the “Viennese quack,” Nabokov is still fighting to keep Englishspeaking audiences from finding psychoanalytic meanings in his European past. This introductory passage in Speak, Memory is thus the first of many quixotic campaigns claiming not merely that modern art is conceivable without Freud but that he should be banished from the modernist canon. In contrast to this emphatic dismissal, the eloquent family picture in chapter 8 inconspicuously expresses Nabokov’s changed attitude toward another German thinker. When translating the “impassioned commemoration” passage for the Russian version (DB 162), Nabokov rendered “ceaseless return” with the same phrase he had used in Mary almost thirty years earlier to refer to Nietzschean eternal recurrence.6 Yet its basic meaning has changed drastically. It is already significant that the term no longer appears

208

In English

in chapter 12, with the Tamara episode that rewrites the summer-of-love story from Mary. And, except for chapter 8’s insistence on the enduring nature of the family picture, which answers Ganin’s anxiety about the problematic status of memory, its only continuity with Mary lies in the wording. “Ceaseless return” refers primarily to Nabokov’s deliberate cultivation of his memories, to the repeated scrutiny that molds fluctuating and incomplete traces of the past into a vivid, convincing image. So thoroughly has this mnemonic technique supplanted the metaphysical implications of Nietzsche’s slogan that in Russian Nabokov does not treat the words as a citation, while in English even the tenuous verbal link with eternal recurrence has vanished. Speak, Memory assimilates Zarathustra’s enigmatic phrase to its own purposes, and no longer pursues a head-on polemic with Nietzsche as a herald of German-language modernism. In Nabokov’s midcentury English-speaking world, the Freudian unconscious and the primal scene held the dominant position that Dionysus, the superman, and the ring of recurrence occupied in Russian artistic and intellectual circles of his youth.7 1 1 1 The autobiography conveys a highly divided response to England. Although Nabokov still acknowledges basic affinities, he has moved beyond the detailed testing of the British literary scene that occurred in Sebastian Knight and Bend Sinister. Two main factors combine to blunt his recent English orientation, one of them being the growth of a transatlantic perspective on the English language. When Nabokov first wrote Speak, Memory, he had already begun Lolita, with its much stronger commitment to an American subject matter; by the time he revised his autobiography in the mid-1960s, he had been accepted as a major American novelist. Once he recognized that changing languages had placed him in the United States rather than England, the Anglo-European framework of Sebastian Knight lost much of its significance. At the same time, however, because Speak, Memory involves a retrospective synthesis of Nabokov’s entire European past, his reaffirmation of the French modernists tends to produce a more distanced, qualified attitude toward the English. This complex position underlies Nabokov’s vignette of his uncle Konstantin, which appears with the family history in chapter 3 but only acquires its full cultural meaning in 1967. As an Anglophile who published two books in England, Konstantin serves both as a distant role model for his nephew’s English authorship and as an anticipation of the detailed treatment of the whole family’s Anglophilia in chapter 4, the first of Speak, Memory’s specifically cultural chapters. Because he had been a diplomat stationed in London, it is Konstantin who welcomed the family when they arrived in En-

Cultural Self-Consciousness of Speak, Memory

209

gland after fleeing Russia in 1919. Yet this gesture misfires, for when Nabokov’s father tries to greet his brother with Russian effusiveness, the uncle backs off with the embarrassed excuse, “We are in England” (SM 60). This moment prefigures later disappointments with their new home, briefly mentioned in chapter 13, where we learn that the Nabokovs soon departed for Berlin, with its large émigré community (SM 254–56). Within chapter 3, however, uncle Konstantin’s English option soon yields to American and French possibilities. The vignette itself ends by juxtaposing Nabokov’s memory of Konstantin at Victoria Station with a visit more than two decades later to the American Museum of Natural History, where he unexpectedly saw his uncle’s portrait in a mural devoted to Theodore Roosevelt and the end of the Russo-Japanese War. This disconcerting swoop from one English-speaking culture to another, which parallels Ember’s experience in Bend Sinister, suggests transatlantic opportunities that compensate for the disappointing welcome to London. The chapter then returns to Nabokov’s European past, where it evades England in another sense; by offering a much more detailed portrait of Konstantin’s counterpart, the Proustian uncle Ruka, it tilts toward France. But if Ruka’s priority among the uncles reaffirms the role of French modernism, chapter 4 offers an important corrective. For as Nabokov describes some early formative experiences, well before any real literary contacts, he allows for a crucial English influence. Most obvious is the revelation that he learned to read English before any other language, including Russian; more subtle, but crucial for his art of memory because Proust dismisses visual imagery in reflecting on involuntary memory,8 is the English source he identifies for his fascination with mnemonic pictures. Nabokov first raises this point when he recalls with delight both the text and illustrations of his first children’s books in English (SM 82–83). Then, toward the end of chapter 4, when he describes his childhood drawing lessons, he develops the issue. The cultural framework here is no longer purely English, since he praises the Russian artist Dobuzhinski for teaching him to “depict from memory, in the greatest possible detail, objects I had certainly seen thousands of times without visualizing them properly” (SM 92). Still, despite the pertinence of such training for Nabokov’s autobiographical images, he insists that even more credit belongs to his first drawing master, the Englishman Mr. Cummings, who seems to have doubled as a language teacher. Not only did he lay the foundation for later training in precise mnemonic imagery, but, by virtue of having been his mother’s art teacher, he is closely linked with Nabokov’s colored-hearing creativity. Indeed, because Cummings taught both language and art, he reenacts the verbal-visual duality of this originary synesthetic experience. Even more resonant is the cultural interplay in an episode that rounds out Nabokov’s account of childhood bedtime rituals. When his mother comes

210

In English

to give him a good-night kiss, the situation recalls the Proustian scene that contributed its patch of light, its vanished staircase, and its lantern slides to chapters 3, 5, and 8. But here, instead of the obvious French echo, Nabokov emphasizes an Anglo-Russian amalgam; he thereby reveals another side of his complex heritage while giving a new specificity to the culturally vague icon scene in Mary. At first, in the spirit of his English children’s stories, Nabokov’s mother has him recite a prayer in English; then, in “an innocent association” with the words, Nabokov glimpses an icon on the wall (SM 85–86). Finally, he focuses on another English motif that again posits an origin for his interest in pictorial image-making. Above the icon hangs the painting of a path through “one of those eerily dense European beechwoods,” and this picture reminds the young Nabokov of an English fairy tale about a boy who stepped into just such a painting. When the adult autobiographer ends the episode by declaring that he finally did enter that beechwood, his portentous remark looks ahead to the chapter’s concluding flourish, added in 1967, where Nabokov rejoins Dobuzhinski in a beech forest in Vermont (SM 94). But even in earlier versions, which lack this afterthought, the statement has important implications. For it suggests nothing less than Nabokov’s career as an artist of memory, which led through a European cultural landscape and mobilized mnemonic images as haunting as the picture of the woodland path. Above all, however, this scene reminds the reader of Martin’s path at the end of Glory; but whereas that path led back to Russia, the one in Speak, Memory highlights the English inspiration for Nabokov’s pictorialism. For the English tale of entering a picture not only distinguishes his art of memory from Proust’s distrust of visual images, but it also outweighs various Russian influences—it displaces the icon in this scene while laying the groundwork for Nabokov’s later responsiveness to Dobuzhinski. Ultimately, though Nabokov does not draw the connection, this quest for the precise, even hallucinatory detail is no doubt conditioned by an Anglophile sympathy for the concrete particulars of British empiricism. Not that this empiricism should be taken as a full explanation for his art of memory; it merely functions as an early framework or point of departure, just as the “genuinely sensuous quality” of Nabokov’s butterflies was only a first step in their complex elaboration as images. Thus, although the picture is English, the alluring woodland path it depicts is European; hence, this picture suggests the cross-cultural complexity of his overall development.9 After this emphasis on English roots in the midst of a Russian childhood, Speak, Memory comes back to England in chapter 13, which covers Nabokov’s Cambridge education during the peak years of British modernism. Developing the motif of disappointment associated with Uncle Konstantin, Nabokov focuses on the contrast between his youthful Anglophilia and his

Cultural Self-Consciousness of Speak, Memory

211

present inability or refusal to adjust to England. Thus when he calls on his tutor after arriving in Cambridge, the visit begins inauspiciously—he trips over the tea things laid casually on the floor (SM 259). The faux pas is repeated at the end of the chapter, when Nabokov returns to Cambridge seventeen years later, at the time of Sebastian Knight and his futile attempt to reposition himself as an English writer (SM 273). His cultural estrangement becomes even clearer when he makes goalie on the soccer team, but in memory at least sees himself standing alone, while all the action takes place at the other end of the field (SM 267–68). Nabokov goes so far as to insist on the drabness and conformity of Cambridge, in effect questioning whether his own Anglophile tolerance for quirkiness had any basis in reality. Like Sebastian Knight, but with sharper ironies about an outsider’s sense of cultural affiliation, his solitude at Cambridge suggests a misdirected attempt to out-English the English. With regard to contemporary high culture, Nabokov’s passing reference to “the goalie’s eccentric art” implies a parallel between his soccer experiences and his off-center attitude toward the English modernist canon. Thus, though Pound and Eliot were making their reputations at a time when Nabokov was especially interested in poetry, he insists that he was devoting all his energies to “trying to become a Russian writer” (SM 261). Even when he does concede the influence of “various contemporaneous . . . English verse patterns,” they are “Georgian” rather than modernist (SM 266). Even more telling is the stylistic tour de force that comes just before his second mishap with the tea things. On returning to Cambridge in 1939, Nabokov observes, all he recalled of the period from 1919 to 1922 were “fragmentary little pictures” that could not compare with his “ecstatically reminiscent mood” toward childhood and youth. At this point the style mimes Nabokov’s unsatisfactory effort to remember, for instead of creating elaborate set pieces like those of his father or the butterflies, he rushes through ten isolated vignettes that peter out in a chain of free associations (SM 272–73). Because this passage names A. E. Housman and Lewis Carroll instead of Eliot and Virginia Woolf, it again spotlights Nabokov’s distance from the modernist breakthroughs of the early 1920s. But because the style freely parodies the stream-of-consciousness technique, it sums up Nabokov’s divided attitude toward Ulysses, whose recent publication figures in the vignette of “P. M. storming into my room with a copy of Ulysses freshly smuggled from Paris” (SM 272). For if the satiric bite of this passage registers Nabokov’s conviction that interior monologue could not express the peak experiences of memory, the very act of parody pays tribute to Joyce’s brilliance as an intertextualist. As a result, even as chapter 13 ends by stressing Nabokov’s eccentricity by English standards, it has shown he was not totally deaf to British modernism in the early 1920s.

212

In English

Nabokov’s alienation at Cambridge sets limits to the English side of his European identity, but its significance should not be exaggerated. For one thing, he cultivated an off-center stance toward every European country he lived in. Thus, though his memories were no doubt darkened by the poisonous anti-Semitism of the 1930s, he could insist that on the Continent he did not have “among the sprinkling of Germans and Frenchmen I knew . . . more than two good friends” (SM 277). Butterfly collecting becomes his badge of unconventionality in any culture, as chapter 6 indicates by showing how it violated standard ideas about outdoor recreation in Russia, France, and America (SM 130–31). For another thing, Nabokov balances his alienation with a renewed declaration of basic affinities. Hence his tribute to a certain spirit of place at Cambridge, which he defines as “the constant awareness . . . of an untrammeled extension of time” (SM 269). Nabokov laughs at himself as a “solemn alumnus,” yet this sense of temporal depth is just as vital for his art of memory as the respect for empirical detail evoked in chapter 4. Once again, however, this English affinity stands apart from contemporary British modernism. Not only does Nabokov’s Cambridge lack a Bloomsbury mystique of intellectual fellowship, but his sense of time bears no relation to the mythic depths of Cambridge anthropology. By the time of Speak, Memory, Nabokov’s English option of the late 1930s has become an episode. Though he obviously still identifies with the English language, he does so as an American writer, while to the extent that his literary outlook remains European, he reaffirms the French modernists who helped inspire his fictive autobiographies of the mid-1930s as well as his first autobiographical writing. At the same time, however, Speak, Memory is careful to integrate the French into a larger European landscape. Thus Proust’s lantern slides polemically counter the psychoanalytic approach to memory, which seemed even more influential in America than in Europe, and which stressed symbolism, the unconscious, and theoretical generalization at the expense of imagism, the conscious mind, and individual particularity. By contrast, Nabokov offers a more nuanced view of England: he realizes that in spite of disappointments with the country, a disregard for most British modernists, and even his reservations about Joyce, he shares basic English attitudes that reinforce, perhaps in some embryonic manner even underlie, his commitment to a French modernism of memory. On balance, therefore, Speak, Memory has broadened and enriched the cultural framework of “Spring in Fialta.” If, on the one hand, it continues the strong Franco-German opposition that marked that story, it does work to demystify the figure of the English traveler who seems to determine Nina’s fate. The fascination of a certain enigmatic cultural prestige may have vanished, but at least Nabokov has gained fuller insight into how his Anglophile background might have contributed to his fascination with time and the mnemonic image.

Cultural Self-Consciousness of Speak, Memory

213

1 1 1 All but the last three chapters of Speak, Memory deal with Nabokov’s life before he had to flee Russia in 1919. As a result, even with his foreign-language teachers, his trips to Western Europe, and his vignettes of adult experience abroad, the fact remains that much of the book focuses on a boy in prerevolutionary Russia. To what extent, one then asks, does the actual locale of these memories affect the basic approach of an artist of memory who matured many years later among émigrés in Western Europe? The issue of massive unacknowledged or subconscious influence would demand separate treatment, and should be left to students of the Russian Nabokov. But on the self-consciously intertextual level, Speak, Memory (as well as his intervening work on Eugene Onegin) seeks to integrate the author’s Russian literary heritage into a career that at the time of writing had passed through European modernism. Certainly Nabokov makes no obvious attempt to deny his roots in Russian literature. Thus, though chapter 3 focuses on his two Europeanized uncles, it also details important family contacts with Pushkin (SM 62), Chekhov (SM 67), and even Dostoevsky (SM 53),10 which in a chapter about legacies from the past amounts to an admission of literary indebtedness. Even more striking are his warm memories of his first Russian tutor, who we have seen is closely linked with his father and who embodies all that Nabokov admired in the non-Communist intelligentsia. But in the Russian autobiography, where Nabokov introduces him by mentioning his “broadnosed face of the Tolstoyan type” (DB 20), Zhernosekov also evokes a major Russian alternative to the French modernism personified by Uncle Ruka. Indeed, because Speak, Memory actually includes a vignette of Nabokov’s parents discussing Tolstoy’s death (SM 207), this supposed epitome of nineteenth-century fiction gains a contemporaneity shared only by Alexander Blok, whose poetry Nabokov was reading to his mother when they learned of his father’s death (SM 49). Within chapter 8, however, as Nabokov lays the groundwork for his supreme achievement of memory, he slyly undermines conventional national divisions in literature by linking Zhernosekov with both Tolstoy and a Western European figure. While recalling that last visit with the schoolmaster that rounds out his portrait gallery of Russian tutors, Nabokov mentions a “typographical” portrait of Tolstoy that hung in Zhernosekov’s living room. Made up of the minutely printed text of “Master and Man,” it resembles a similar illustration of a mouse’s tail in Alice in Wonderland (SM 154).11 This juxtaposition of a classic “realist” and a fantasy writer no doubt seems farfetched, and it certainly subverts the simplified didactic view of Tolstoy that Zhernosekov probably held; but the passage involves much

214

In English

more than a spirited squib. For one thing, Nabokov points up the synchronicity of two writers he saw as major unacknowledged forerunners of modernism, both of whom produced their best work in the 1860s and 1870s. For another, the typographical portrait represents an extreme, tangential approach to the basic Nabokovian problem of creating mnemonic pictures in words. To the extent that Nabokov’s normal response emphasized the understated eloquence of peripheral details, his great model was in fact Tolstoy, whose power in creating superbly vivid word pictures he freely praised.12 This trait, though not relevant to Carroll, does coincide with Nabokov’s Anglophile grounding in empiricism and in that sense justifies the Anglo-Russian synthesis proposed in this reference. Just as Dobuzhinski’s pictorialism depended on the drawing master Cummings, so the Tolstoyan detail coexists with the English stories of Nabokov’s boyhood. Another nineteenth-century Russian writer, the poet and novelist Mihail Lermontov, plays an even more important role in chapter 8. In a scene Nabokov tells us contains “the main theme of the chapter” (SM 162) despite its eventual displacement by the family portrait at the end, his current tutor Lenski reads Lermontov’s long poem “The Novice” while showing slides that illustrate the text. Since Lenski is a Francophobe who feels his pupils are entirely too cosmopolitan and also the very person whose quarrel with the Swiss governess caused her to leave the household, this scene holds obvious potential for cultural conflict. To some extent Nabokov’s European side goes into abeyance: the Proustian motif of the magic-lantern show now appears in a thoroughly Russian setting, and it is Lermontov who presides over the interaction of picture and word. Indeed, the boy’s final impression of the poem, given special treatment in the Russian autobiography,13 seems to link his colored-hearing creativity with the description of a rainbow in the Caucasus: “Blue, green and orange, wonderstruck / With its own loveliness and luck” (SM 165). Yet in the final analysis Nabokov dispels any exclusively Russian interpretation of this key experience. By this point in the show all the young viewers are openly rebellious, and Nabokov himself only notices the mountain rainbow because it reminds him of the Swiss Alps. His European side, and even a vague survival of Mademoiselle’s beloved Switzerland, have resurfaced. In contrast to “Spring in Fialta,” then, with its unresolved duality of Russia and Europe, here Nabokov envisions a personal synthesis based on cross-cultural correspondences. Without denying the importance of Lenski, Zhernosekov, or Dobuzhinski, he insists on an accompanying, even underlying European tendency in his life that helped channel his response to these varied Russian educators. Pushkin also appears in chapter 8, but even though he legitimated Nabokov’s art of memory in Mary, and even though he coined the phrase “drugie berega,” which became the title for the Russian version of the auto-

Cultural Self-Consciousness of Speak, Memory

215

biography,14 now his role seems minor alongside Tolstoy’s or Lermontov’s. If his poem “The Bronze Horseman” is mentioned as the subject of another slide show, and if the very choice of Lenski as this tutor’s pseudonym recalls the doomed young poet in Eugene Onegin, these parallels are not developed. Even in chapter 9, where Nabokov remembers Pushkin’s own duel and the one in the Onegin opera during his anxious trip home, these memories play a secondary role. Only in Nabokov’s Onegin translation and massive commentary, which were his main concession to the Russian past in the years between Conclusive Evidence and Speak, Memory, did he address Pushkin’s current relevance to his modernism of memory. Showing particular enthusiasm for the novel’s mnemonic images, Nabokov focused on a passage that, like Tolstoy’s affinities with Joyce and Proust, prefigured a major innovation in early twentieth-century European writing. Indeed, this passage not only flouted standard cultural categories by juxtaposing Pushkin and the French modernists; it also reflected other leading concerns in Nabokov’s art of memory. Oddly enough, though his commentary does cover the Onegin passage from which he took the epigraph for Mary, Nabokov says nothing important about memory at this point. Instead, he simply compares this episode of reverie to a famous scene near the end, identified in his general introduction as “the greatest in the entire novel” (EO 1:57). In the later passage, Onegin is spending the winter in St. Petersburg, now helplessly in love with the heroine Tatyana, whose innocent love for him he had previously spurned. He shuts himself up in his house and reads listlessly, but keeps thinking back to the Tatyana who had loved him and to the duel in which he had killed his young friend Lenski. Pushkin’s description of these memories reads as follows in Nabokov’s own translation: And by degrees into a lethargy of both feelings and thoughts he falls, while before him Imagination deals out her motley faro hand. Either he sees: on melted snow as at a night’s encampment sleeping, stirless, a youth is lying, and hears a voice: “Well, what—he’s dead!” Or he sees foes forgotten, slanderers and wicked cowards, and a swarm of young traitresses, and a circle of despicable comrades; or else a country house, and by the window sits she . . . and ever she! (EO 1:302)

216

In English

What explains Nabokov’s enthusiasm? Though most readers would agree that the stanza is remarkable, he draws attention to one feature in particular, Pushkin’s creation of “one of the most original images” in a novel that usually reflects neoclassical and romantic conventions. In other words, rather than conforming to what Nabokov calls “the déjà dit,” the stanza goes beyond the cultural norms of its period (EO 3:228, 227). The image that strikes Nabokov as so original is the metaphor that likens Onegin’s memories to a game of cards. Here he does hark back to Mary, where in a similar comparison Ganin had referred to his past as a complicated game of patience. And no doubt Nabokov found the whole passage congenial because it describes his memory technique in rudimentary form: Onegin’s constant sifting of the same memories leads, when he thinks of Tatyana, to an imagined picture of a loved person. Indeed, by speaking of imagination rather than memory at this point, Pushkin seems to address Nabokov’s own interest in the necessarily fictive side of even the most factual record of the past. Nonetheless, the basic tenor of the image does not fully coincide with his view of memory. Faro—as Nabokov notes in great detail elsewhere in his commentary (EO 2:257–66)—involves impulse and guesswork, the fever of gambling for high stakes, and the possibility of selfdeception and cheating; but patience, which depends on methodically teasing out an implicit symmetry from a random deck of cards, suggests a much higher level of lucidity and deliberation. Nabokov’s praise for Pushkin’s image depends rather on its special double nature, which anticipates French modernism and in that sense justifies his claim that it transcends the conventions of its epoch. The faro game can seem so brilliant because it encapsulates the peculiar interchange between remembered images and images of memory that he had found in Proust and Bergson. As we have seen in Kamera Obskura and in later, more elaborate examples, that interchange fascinated Nabokov because it treated images both as tropes and as direct sensations. In the first case, the faro game functions as a metaphorical definition of memory; it offers an analogy for how the past takes shape in the mind that is no less striking than Bergson’s focused camera or the luminous disc of Nabokov’s magic-lantern show. In the second case, meanwhile, it makes it clear that the most important memories are themselves images. Some cards, after all, are pictorial and appeal to the eye as much as Proust’s or Nabokov’s magic-lantern projections. Pushkin himself develops this aspect of his image, for as Onegin broods over his past, the character of his memories shifts from the verbal to the visual. In an earlier stanza, when his reverie begins, he is absentmindedly trying to read; he mainly remembers things whose normal medium is words, things such as legends, threats, rumors, tales, and letters (EO 1:301). But when his reverie deepens after the faro game metaphor, Pushkin specifies twice that Onegin sees his memories. Two of them, moreover, are presented in enough detail

Cultural Self-Consciousness of Speak, Memory

217

for the reader to respond to them as word pictures: thus the haunting descriptions of a younger Tatyana seated by the window of a country house and of Lenski’s body lying in the snow. Nabokov’s discussion of Lenski in the commentary merits special notice. In a litany of “forevers” that perhaps echoes Pushkin’s “ever she,” he voices his characteristic interest in vivid images that seem to transcend time: “The dead youth is forever encamped in Onegin’s mind, forever Zaretski’s casual croak reverberates there, and forever the snow of that frosty morning melts under shed blood and scalding tears of remorse” (EO 3:229). Equally notable is Nabokov’s metaphorical extension of Pushkin’s language, which draws an analogy between the melting snow and Onegin’s unexpressed, even “lethargic” feelings of remorse. In thus combining precise sensual detail and silent emotion, this analogy mirrors both the text’s and Nabokov’s own understated eloquence in presenting tragedy. So impressive is the artistry of the faro-dealer image, in fact, that it makes Nabokov go against his normal bent as an autobiographer. Unlike the Onegin invoked in Mary, this Onegin does not experience memory as the joyous vision of a cherished image, but as the enduring consciousness of irremediable disaster. No outlook could be further from Nabokov’s ecstasy in recapturing a “perfect past” during much of Speak, Memory, while even in portraying his father, he deliberately elided and postponed the tragedy of his death so as to display bright pictures of fulfillment. Still, Nabokov’s excited response to this moment of memory in Onegin serves to confirm his basic intentions as an autobiographer and an imagemaker. Even as the commentary voices his characteristic effort to transcend time, the passage itself strikingly expresses his interest in interchanges between memory and imagination, his quest for pictorial effects so intense that they border on trance, and his desire to commemorate tenderness and love in a cruel and violent world—to preserve Tatyana’s lingering image despite the tragedy of Lenski’s early death. Beyond all these concerns, however, Nabokov stresses the originality of this passage because it highlights his own lucid deliberation in remembering the past and, even more pointedly, his self-conscious oscillation in treating the image as both a sensation and a trope. These last two responses suggest an audacious cross-cultural link between Pushkin and Nabokov’s interpretation of French modernism. And yet, though the appeal to Onegin circles back to his official point of departure as an artist of memory, it no longer conveys the same impression. Rather than speaking as an émigré neophyte who piously invokes a Russian classic, Nabokov now appears as an experienced writer so well versed in the high culture of early twentieth-century Europe that he can pinpoint a special modernist moment within Pushkin’s general adherence to neoclassical and romantic conventions. Thus just as the American Nabokov was about to

218

In English

emerge in full force with Lolita, and just as Speak, Memory offered a fuller, more probing treatment of various French, German, and English contributions to his modernism of memory, Nabokov carried his retrospective pursuit of cultural synthesis two steps further. By examining the major linkages that Tolstoy, Lermontov, and later Pushkin revealed between his Russian literary heritage and his European interests, he achieved fuller insight into the multicultural foundations of his art of memory. At the same time, this Russo-European synthesis in effect defended the potential modernism of nineteenth-century Russian literature against two distortions—against the Western Dostoevsky cult that ignored other precursors among Nabokov’s compatriots and against the Soviet dogma of socialist realism that sought to eliminate modernism from Russian culture.

EPILOGUE 1

Proust over T. S. Eliot in Pale Fire (1962)

IN THE FIFTEEN YEARS between the two English versions of his autobiography, Nabokov finally confronted the rival vision of modern literature he had avoided at Cambridge in the early 1920s. His growing awareness of key differences between his own art of memory and T. S. Eliot’s high modernism, by then dominant in the Anglo-American literary world, would culminate with some carefully calibrated allusions, parodies, and adaptations in his novel Pale Fire. Not only are these passages unusually specific in accounting for Nabokov’s impatience with Eliot, but by emphasizing Proust’s importance as an alternative, they hark back to his long involvement with French modernism and offer a final new twist on his sense of its significance. To the extent that this episode ratifies the return to France in Speak, Memory after the English interlude in Sebastian Knight and Bend Sinister, it will serve as a fitting epilogue both for the complex cultural synthesis of the autobiography and for the entire European side of Nabokov’s career. Nabokov first conjoined Eliot and Proust in 1948, in the spirited postscript of a letter to Edmund Wilson. The two men were still close friends who, as Nabokov put it in recalling their relationship, took great pleasure in sharing the “constant excitement of art and intellectual discovery” (NWL 332). Among their common interests was early twentieth-century modernism, the subject of Wilson’s pioneering treatment in Axel’s Castle (1931).1 “Symbolism” was the term he used, and his final evaluation was qualified; but the book did highlight affinities among six writers now usually seen as modernists, including Joyce, Yeats, Valéry, and Gertrude Stein, along with Proust and the earlier Eliot. This list of great names undoubtedly helped inspire Nabokov’s own lists of top favorites in his interviews of the mid1960s, as discussed in Chapter 1. But in 1948, in Nabokov’s postscript to Wilson, he responded more subversively to the idea of a modernist canon, for without making any discriminations he aggressively mocked the automatic prestige of both modernist masters. Mimicking some scurrilous wordplay directed at Pound in Wilson’s recent Night Thoughts,2 Nabokov subjected Proust and T. S. Eliot to the deflating observation that their names are anagrams of “stupor” and “toilets” (NWL 214). This irreverence may make perfect sense in light of Nabokov’s present reputation as a postmodernist. But the evidence of his fiction between 1951

220

Epilogue

and 1967 suggests a more complex, divided attitude toward the modernist canon. For if Nabokov still pairs the two writers, he now treats them as contrasting counterparts. Alongside a readiness to criticize Eliot that aligns him with a postmodern sensibility in poetry that was then emerging in the United States, he voices his continued admiration for Proust and thus reaffirms the importance of modernist fiction. This revisionary stance surfaces in Lolita, written in the early 1950s, whose hero Humbert Humbert is introduced as an itinerant scholar with two publications to his credit: a pastiche of “Gerontion” and an article on the “Proustian theme” in one of Keats’s letters (L 18). Later in the novel, when Humbert condemns his rival Clare Quilty, he does so by making him recite an absurd parody of “Ash Wednesday” (L 301–2); but at the same time he thinks of calling part 2 of his confession Dolorès disparue (L 255), thereby placing his beloved Lolita in the role of Proust’s Albertine.3 Humbert’s predilection for Proust is clear, but his extreme unreliability as a narrator prevents him from offering searching insights into his author’s current sense of modernism. Pale Fire is more valuable in this regard, for with this novel, published in 1962, Nabokov would later identify quite closely with the literary opinions of the two main characters. This flagrantly unconventional work has its origin in a poem of four cantos by the American academic poet John Shade, but after his sudden death his “drab and unhappy” colleague (PF 238), the Russian scholar V. Botkin, decides to add a much longer critical apparatus, including a preface, a commentary, and an index. Botkin lives in a world of double delusion, where he first reverses his colorless personality to become the flamboyant campus personality Charles Kinbote (whose name actually dominates the text), then transforms himself again into the even more brilliant Charles II, the deposed king of “a distant northern land” known as Zembla (PF 315).4 Botkin’s need to share these fantasies with his readers quickly overwhelms the critical apparatus, which turns into “the monstrous semblance of a novel” (PF 86). As Pale Fire develops, both Botkin and Shade reveal their strong opinions about Eliot and Proust. Nabokov has thus created still another fictional vehicle for airing his views on the modernist canon; but with this novel, unlike Lolita, he would later intervene in his own person to single out two key statements by Shade and Botkin. These statements disclose the rich complexity of Nabokov’s intertextual response to modernism at this stage in his career. For their manifest content, whether favorable or not, matters less than their function within the intricate structure of Pale Fire. And this structure, which links the statements with polemical adaptations of Eliot and Proust in canto 2 of John Shade’s poem, is much more expressive than the sweeping generalities of Nabokov’s criticism. Indeed, both adaptations turn on specific artistic practices that reveal several of Nabokov’s basic assumptions, as a writer, about these two modernists.

Proust over Eliot in Pale Fire

221

1 1 1 Shade’s poem, also called “Pale Fire,” is autobiographical in content, defiantly old-fashioned in its reliance on heroic couplets, and metaphysical in theme like much of Nabokov’s own poetry.5 In canto 2 Shade recalls his daughter Hazel, an unhappy social outcast who experiments with the occult and eventually commits suicide in college. One vignette shows her reading a literature assignment that Shade dismisses as “some phony modern poem” (PF 46, l. 377), but that Botkin defends in his commentary as the work of one of “the most distinguished poets of his day” (PF 194). Here is the scene: Or she’d be reading in her bedroom, next To my fluorescent lair, and you would be In your own study, twice removed from me, And I would hear both voices now and then: “Mother, what’s grimpen?” “What is what?” “Grim Pen.” Pause, and your guarded scholium. Then again: “Mother, what’s chtonic?” That, too, you’d explain, Appending: “Would you like a tangerine?” “No. Yes. And what does sempiternal mean?” You’d hesitate. And lustily I’d roar The answer from my desk through the closed door. (PF 46, ll. 364–74)

This key passage meant a lot to Nabokov, for in a published response to some early essays on his work, he praised Peter Lubin for “absolutely dazzling” scholarship in tracing all three words to Four Quartets.6 But much more is at stake than simply noting that Shade’s phony modern poet is T. S. Eliot and that Nabokov is willing to endorse his character’s verdict. For the story of Hazel Shade radically transforms all three words so as to pinpoint some key reasons for Nabokov’s resistance to Eliot.7 An important point of departure for the poetry-reading scene was Edmund Wilson. In 1958, or just before he started Pale Fire, Nabokov read Wilson’s “T.S. Eliot and the Church of England.”8 Though their friendship was waning, he was so impressed with the essay that he wrote to call it “absolutely wonderful,” and insisted that “Eliot’s image will never be the same” (NWL 326). Actually Wilson says little about Eliot’s poetry, but he does sharply criticize the basic tendency of his later career, as crystallized by his declaration for classicism in literature, royalism in politics, and AngloCatholicism in religion. For Nabokov, given his father’s anti-tsarist politics and his death from the gun of a Russian monarchist, even Eliot’s royalism

222

Epilogue

probably wakened conflicting feelings; but in Pale Fire he concentrates on the religious and literary facets of Eliot’s image. In line with the metaphysical slant of John Shade’s poem, every word mentioned by Hazel evokes the Anglo-Catholic spirituality of Four Quartets. But her story as a whole pointedly transforms the meaning of the words, so that they convey a different metaphysics while at the same time contesting Eliot’s original literary methods. Eliot’s Anglo-Catholic spirit is particularly striking in “grimpen,” a local topographical term that suitably anglicizes Dante’s journey through a dark wood. Referring to a swamp in the west of England, the word appears in “East Coker,” the second of the four quartets, whose title comes from a village in the same region: In the middle, not only in the middle of the way But all the way, in a dark wood, in a bramble On the edge of a grimpen, where is no secure foothold.9

“Chtonic,” Hazel’s mispronunciation of “chthonic,” appears in the next quartet, “The Dry Salvages.” It establishes a more broadly Catholic context by evoking the soul’s alienation from an Aristotelian and scholastic God, the unmoved mover: . . . action were otherwise movement Of that which is only moved And has in it no source of movement— Driven by daemonic, chthonic Powers.10

“Sempiternal” is used in “Little Gidding,” the last quartet, to describe an unusual day of thaw in midwinter. It launches an even broader religious conceit, which likens this disruption of the natural cycle to a transcendence of time attained through spiritual insight: Midwinter spring is its own season Sempiternal though sodden toward sundown, Suspended in time, between pole and tropic. When the short day is brightest, with frost and fire, The brief sun flames the ice, on pond and ditches, . . . . . . . . And glow more intense than blaze of branch, or brazier Stirs the dumb spirit: no wind, but pentecostal fire.11

In “Pale Fire,” as Nabokov cannibalizes Eliot’s language by ingeniously making it serve his own purposes, this Anglo-Catholic metaphysics yields to a teasingly mysterious aura of fatality. In contrast to the commentary, where Botkin vainly looks for an omen of Hazel’s death among her ambiguous

Proust over Eliot in Pale Fire

223

notes on spiritualist phenomena (PF 188–89),12 Shade’s poem reveals that omen through Eliot’s language, whose most literal meanings in Four Quartets tell the where, when, and why of Hazel’s suicide. “Grimpen” predicts the swamp in which she will drown herself, “sempiternal” the unseasonable thaw that makes it possible for her to fall through the ice, and “chthonic” the state of psychological distress that led her to take her life. Moreover, when “grimpen” is repeated as “Grim Pen,” the motive behind Shade’s transformation of Eliot becomes evident, for now the word suggests a preestablished pattern that moves relentlessly toward a tragic outcome. But, since no first reader of the poem could be expected to grasp this point, the grimness of fate remains an interpretation after the fact. The ultimate sources of meaning are inscrutable before anything else, or as Shade says at one point in his poem, they are “aloof and mute” (PF 63, l. 318). Even as Nabokov’s poet uses Eliot’s words to suggest a fatalistic metaphysics, he implies that the pattern of fate is radically unknowable except in retrospect. Closely associated with these metaphysical differences are differences in language use that have a direct bearing on Nabokov’s attitude toward AngloAmerican high modernism as represented by Eliot. Thus Nabokov’s strong sense that ultimate meanings are inscrutable accounts for his decision to make Eliot’s words more concrete. Where so little is truly certain, at least the immediate and the specific can be trusted. Hence Nabokov’s techniques of characterization and description focus on the individual and the empirical, in contrast to Eliot’s more generalized and symbolic approach. “Chthonic” typifies the presentation of character in the Four Quartets, which depends on first principles and discounts individuality: before Eliot even uses this adjective, which does not apply to any particular person, he must refer to the whole system of thought based on Aristotle’s unmoved mover. Nabokov, on the other hand, makes “chthonic” an attribute of Hazel Shade’s unique personality. By the time he introduces this term as a possible name for her distress, she already exists as a definite character, with a pained smile and swollen feet, with academic prizes and dateless football weekends. Nabokov has substituted a character study grounded in specifics for Eliot’s broad typology derived from scholasticism. This empirical approach carries over to Nabokov’s descriptions, which focus on natural particulars instead of symbols. In Eliot’s picture of a midwinter thaw, “sempiternal” is the crucial word. It turns the natural scene into a spiritual intuition, thus fulfilling the symbolist’s aim of evoking an enduring realm of meaning beyond this world. But in Nabokov, if “sempiternal” is to say when Hazel’s death will occur, Eliot’s intention must be reversed. Not the movement toward spiritual insight but the original description of spring in midwinter is the real point, as the scene of Hazel’s death makes clear:

224

Epilogue It was a night of thaw, a night of blow With great excitement in the air. Black spring Stood just around the corner, shivering In the wet starlight and on the wet ground. The lake lay in the mist, its ice half drowned. (PF 50–51, ll. 494–98)

The natural scene in itself has replaced what had been an occasion for symbolist transcendence. Finally, and most important, the differences in Eliot’s and Nabokov’s metaphysics correspond to a sharp contrast in basic literary strategies. Implicit in Eliot’s Anglo-Catholicism is a heightened sense of cultural continuities, especially religious and theological ones, and this sense of continuity also explains his long-standing interest in myth as a principle of literary organization. At the time of The Waste Land, in a comment on Joyce’s Ulysses that influenced many later definitions of modernism in the Englishspeaking world, Eliot announced, “Instead of narrative method, we may now use the mythical method.”13 Even in the generally less modernist Four Quartets, this method is still crucial, with “grimpen” a case in point as a west-of-England restatement of Dante’s Christian metaphor from centuries before. Nabokov, however, viewed the systematic, all-embracing use of myth as an artistic mistake, and, as already noted in discussing the Joyce echoes in The Gift, his Lectures on Literature in the mid-1950s had contested Eliot’s position by sharply criticizing the Homeric references in Ulysses. Pale Fire continues the attack on another front by showing the expressive power of narrative method, the very approach Eliot had rejected forty years before. An ingenious story line serves to convey the mysteriousness of destiny, the “Grim Pen” of fate that encloses Hazel Shade. The poem thereby seeks to create a fictional world of “correlated pattern” (PF 63, l. 813), as Shade calls it, in which Hazel’s story will move forward with gathering momentum to a point where the reader can look back and recognize Eliot’s words as an omen. In a classic demonstration of those two aspects of plot that Peter Brooks has called action and enigma,14 the unfolding events and the moment of retrospective knowledge have joined to act out a fatalistic metaphysics. Because it depends so closely on an intricate plot that questions the value of Eliot’s “mythical method,” the peculiar retrospective fatalism of Hazel’s story deserves to be called a narrative metaphysics. Within the poem “Pale Fire,” of course, this narrative metaphysics coexists with Shade’s muchquoted poetic metaphysics of combinational delight. For Shade, rhyme and meter are cosmic universals, giving him a euphoric feeling of “fantastically planned,/ Richly rhymed life” where “if my private universe scans right,/ So does the verse of galaxies divine/ Which I suspect is an iambic line” (PF

Proust over Eliot in Pale Fire

225

68–69, ll. 969–70, 974–76). But in the end a more all-embracing narrative structure prevails over the poetry. Shade links his poetic faith to the reasonable certainty that he will waken the next day, but the preceding evening he repeats his daughter’s encounter with a grimmer pattern. Just as in his first premonition of death as a child, described in canto 1 of the poem (PF 38, l. 144), he sees a gardener with a wheelbarrow (PF 69, ll. 998–99). Shortly afterwards he is mistakenly murdered by Jack Grey, an escaped convict who believes Shade is the judge who sent him to prison. As a reworking of Eliot, the Hazel Shade episode has shuttled between basic metaphysical assumptions and corresponding issues of literary technique. In general outlook her story has changed the Anglo-Catholic spiritual quest of the Four Quartets to a fatalism tinged with uncertainty, and this awareness of uncertainty accounts for the element of intense empiricism in Nabokov’s approach. In technique, the empiricism results in natural descriptions instead of symbols, in individualized portraits instead of Eliot’s generalized psychology. Meanwhile Nabokov conveys his muted fatalism through an expressive use of plot that stresses narrative over poetry, and that embodies Nabokov’s outlook at the level of technique, just as Eliot’s “mythical method” corresponded to that author’s religious faith. Not all of these polemics apply to the earlier, more strikingly modernist Eliot, whose spiritual quest was less rooted in a specific culture and whose images, for all their symbolic power, could be intensely concrete. Still, his central characters from Prufrock to Gerontion to Tiresias do become steadily less individualized, while the mythic elements of The Waste Land are there, no matter how late they appeared during composition of the poem. On balance, though Nabokov spotlights a later, more English Eliot, his varied reinterpretations of his vocabulary do express his sense of a major rift within modernism. Eliot’s Anglo-American option, a depersonalized mythico-symbolic religious art that would call itself “classical,” contrasts sharply with Nabokov’s more European outlook, which English-speaking critics usually identify with the militant aestheticism of his famous afterword to Lolita, with its demand that literature provide “what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss” (L 316). But the polemical reworking of Eliot in canto 2 has made it clear that this aestheticism involves much more than the narrow and exclusive reverence for art that it is usually taken to mean. It covers a wide, even somewhat contradictory array of values and beliefs reaching from Nabokov’s obvious love for elaborate and original literary form, through his sense of a patterned cosmos that is itself aesthetic, to a playful skepticism regarding absolutes. In the special emphasis it places on retrospective insight, moreover, this broad defense of art shows continued affinities with Nabokov’s earlier art of memory. But by this point in his career the emphases on individuality and on concrete particulars, which also guide the Eliot critique, raise special prob-

226

Epilogue

lems. For despite their apparently obvious connection with personal memory and the mnemonic image, Nabokov’s response to Proust will show the troubles he faced in squaring these two motifs with his basic choice of an aesthetic position. 1 1 1 Even as canto 2 of “Pale Fire” indicates why Nabokov rejected Eliot, it also affirms the centrality of Proust. Thus Shade hopes for an afterlife that would include “talks/ With Socrates and Proust in cypress walks” (PF 41, ll. 223–24). Meanwhile, in the commentary, Botkin discusses Proust in much more detail, in a note singled out by Nabokov himself. This seemingly fictional passage, he once told J. E. Rivers in an interview, was the best summary of his real opinion of the novelist.15 But the critic must be wary of interpreting Botkin’s attitudes out of context. Though his note calls Proust’s novel a “rough masterpiece” (PF 162), thus suggesting more ambivalence about its worth than Shade, his commentary functions in a crucial favorable sense within Pale Fire. As we shall see, it initiates a play of references that, exploiting to the fullest this novel’s potential for creating a nonlinear reading experience, moves back and forth between commentary and poem. In the end, this web of allusions clarifies Proust’s role as a model for Nabokov’s aestheticism. Botkin’s long note, which describes his response to an imagined social slight by Shade’s wife, cannot be quoted in full. In essence, it makes three points. First, as Botkin gives Mrs. Shade a volume of Proust, marked at a passage that tellingly satirizes a snobbish hostess, he shows uncertainty about the implications of Proust’s art as art. Does it create a purely aesthetic world, “a fairy tale . . . totally unconnected with any possible people,” or does the satire of snobbery reveal a broader concern, “the capacity of evoking ‘human interest’” (PF 162)? Then, as Botkin elaborates on this dilemma of narrow aestheticism, he uses two striking images to point up the contrast between pure fiction and everyday human concerns, for he opposes the “asparagus dream” of art to the “spider” of snobbery (PF 162). And, finally, as he hands the Proust volume to Mrs. Shade, he turns “spider” into an evocative palindrome, for he tells her to “dip or redip, spider, into this book.” Back in canto 2 Shade had himself already mentioned “spider, redips” as an example of his daughter’s fondness for twisting words (PF 45, ll. 347–48). Answering in the commentary, Botkin had been quick to set the record straight: “I am quite sure it was I who . . . observed . . . that ‘spider’ in reverse is ‘redips,’ and ‘T.S. Eliot,’ ‘toilest.’ But then it is also true that Hazel Shade resembled me in certain respects” (PF 193). As in Nabokov’s letter to Wilson, Proust and Eliot have met again in expressive wordplay. But here

Proust over Eliot in Pale Fire

227

the wordplay takes two distinct forms. While “toilest” rearranges Eliot’s name to produce new meaning, and thus parallels the polemical reworking of his language in canto 2, the “spider” palindrome does not relate so directly or aggressively to Proust. Rather than a proper name, we have a vivid image that Nabokov did associate with Proust,16 and that implies a freer strategy of appropriation tied to characteristic Proustian themes involved with snobbery. This freer strategy does not depend on Botkin’s rather obscure marked passage, taken from the Albertine story in the last half of the Recherche. Instead, the main motifs in his note point to some famous revelations midway through the early “Combray” section.17 There the narrator begins by observing the odd behavior of Legrandin, a local gentleman who manages to overlook the narrator’s middle-class family whenever he is in the company of nobility; like Botkin, the narrator has discovered the existence of snobbery. Then he sees the ferocity with which the family’s cook Françoise kills a chicken, and learns that she has also been subtly torturing a kitchen maid. The method of torture undercuts Botkin’s “asparagus dream” image, since Françoise has been forcing the kitchen maid to prepare asparagus, even though she is allergic to it. Finally, while reflecting on this behavior in a characteristic extended simile, Proust likens Françoise’s tactics to the instinctive ruthlessness of insects. There is a species of hymenoptera observed by Fabre, the burrowing wasp, which in order to provide for her offspring after her own decease, calls in the science of anatomy to amplify the resources of her instinctive cruelty, and, having made a collection of weevils and spiders, proceeds with marvellous knowledge and skill to pierce the nerve-centre on which their power of locomotion (but none of their other vital functions) depends, so that the paralyzed insect, beside which she lays her eggs, will furnish the larvae, when hatched, with a docile, inoffensive quarry, incapable either of flight or of resistance, but perfectly fresh for the larder; in the same way Françoise. . . .18

The predator in this case is a wasp, rather than the spider of the palindrome, but Proust’s scientific precision must have delighted Nabokov, both as a professional entomologist and as a partisan of natural particulars in literature. In building to this conclusion, moreover, Proust’s passage has gone far beyond snobbery, which is treated as a special instance of the inborn cruelty of human nature. As developed throughout the Recherche, of course, this Proustian “law” of cruelty accounts for much more than the pursuit of social prestige: it includes professional behavior, racist politics, and especially love. In this context the actual motifs highlighted in Kinbote’s note undermine

228

Epilogue

his stated dilemma about Proust. Since the asparagus dream unavoidably expresses matters of “human interest,” his view of Proust’s art must be too limited. If Kinbote’s commentary has, at least tacitly, illuminated a central theme in Proust, we must again return to Shade’s story of his daughter Hazel, with whom Botkin says he has an affinity, for Nabokov’s most brilliant adaptations of that theme. As an eccentric individual, she undergoes social exclusions whose cruelty Shade senses in a peculiarly intense memory on the night of her suicide. Reminded of a visit to the Riviera about nine months before Hazel’s birth, he suddenly pictures the birds flocking on the beach: “The crowding gulls insufferably loud,/ And one dark pigeon waddling in the crowd” (PF 48, ll. 441–42). This metaphor from yet another area of natural history seems to prefigure Hazel’s fate as a misfit. In a particularly striking adaptation that glides from France to America, canto 2 replaces the elitist system of Proust’s snobbish Paris with the more casual exclusions engendered by the stereotypes of mass culture. Just before Hazel’s suicide, as the poem interweaves an account of her disastrous blind date with vignettes of her parents watching television at home, the picture of a movie star appears on the screen. As Botkin comments in a note, Shade’s method throughout the television segment is self-consciously modernist, for it parallels both Flaubert’s and Joyce’s use of “synchronous arrangement” (PF 196). But at this particular juncture the narrative foregrounds another of Nabokov’s masters of modern fiction. By implying a causal connection between the two story lines, it links Hazel’s social failure to the attitudes created by the star’s alluring image: The famous face flowed in, fair and inane: The parted lips, the swimming eyes, the grain Of beauty on the cheek, odd gallicism, And the soft form dissolving in the prism Of corporate desire. (PF 49, ll. 453–57)

“Odd gallicism” signals the presence of French analogies, while “corporate desire” suggests several things: the actual sponsors of advertising, the needs and impulses of the body, and the coercive power of like-minded groups. The last two meanings dominate, since the movie star’s “soft form” appeals to the audience’s sexuality, while her face, “fair and inane,” promotes a standardized notion of beauty. As a mass-media icon of feminine prestige, she presides over Hazel’s midcentury American milieu just as, in Proust’s more hierarchical world, the noble name of Guermantes crystallizes social ambition. Social cruelty in Proust surfaced as prejudice when the Recherche treated the anti-Semitism unleashed by the Dreyfus Affair, an event Nabokov

Proust over Eliot in Pale Fire

229

would discuss in his Cornell lectures on Proust. In “Pale Fire” Shade’s wife introduces a similar theme when she protests against her daughter’s social failures, “But this is prejudice!” (PF 44, l. 320). In the commentary Botkin chimes in by citing John Shade on the same subject: “he loathed Vulgarity and Brutality, and . . . found these two ideally united in racial prejudice” (PF 217). His note is inspired by Shade’s description of a black musician who, significantly, appears on television at the very moment of Hazel’s death: A jovial Negro raised his trumpet. Trk. Your ruby ring made life and laid the law. Oh, switch it off! And as life snapped we saw A pinhead light dwindle and die in black Infinity. (PF 49–50, ll. 470–74)

Just as snobbery and anti-Semitism intersect as forms of cruelty in Proust, so do mass stereotypes of beauty and American racial issues in Nabokov. In a further parallel, Botkin’s note on the vulgarity and brutality of prejudice practically echoes Nabokov’s interpretation of Françoise and the kitchen maid, which he called a revelation of “vulgar cruelty” (LL 232). Hazel Shade’s story has thus enacted a cluster of attitudes that confirms Botkin’s grudging “human interest” view of Proust. That the intricate trail of references linking commentary and poem should lead to this result may seem paradoxical given Nabokov’s well-known disdain for literature with social or moral messages. But as David Rampton has suggested in pioneering remarks on Nabokov’s literary opinions, his writing practice is often less restrictive than his strident theoretical pronouncements.19 In the case of Nabokov’s intertextual response to modernism in Pale Fire, his practice has replaced Botkin’s limited interpretation of Proust with a broader one that acknowledges the relevance of the Recherche to an aestheticism that affirms individuality. At stake is a modernist attitude that surfaced three decades earlier in Kamera Obskura and that I have called aesthetic individualism. Due precisely to Eliot’s great authority among Anglo-American critics, particularly with the doctrine of poetic impersonality in “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” the role of individualism in the modernist movement has been slighted. But even in England, as Michael Levenson has recently shown in A Genealogy of Modernism, this view is mistaken: though true of the “high modernism” of the 1920s, it overlooks the very different, strongly individualistic attitudes that prevailed during the movement’s opening phase, from 1908 to 1914. Thus the first Blast manifesto (June 1914) could choose to defend art as “an apotheosis of individualism,” while it is no accident that Pound first published Joyce and Eliot together in a small magazine called The Egoist.20

230

Epilogue

Nabokov almost certainly did not know this history; but through Proust, whose prominence in the 1920s should not obscure the prewar origins of the Recherche, which began to take its present shape around 1908 and whose first volume was published in 1913, he encountered a vastly more sophisticated and compelling expression of this individualistic phase of modernism. At the end of Proust’s novel, when his narrator Marcel decides to become a writer, his choice is more than an obvious victory for art: it is also a triumph of individuality. For the decision caps a long struggle with worldly distractions that finally becomes heroic, as this confirmed social climber and jealous lover learns to recognize his unique talent and to make it prevail. Such a choice for art, far from lacking all connection with any possible people as Botkin insists, reaches down to the very roots of personality, for it affirms creative impulses whose stubborn singularity can surmount instinctive cruelty and the dehumanizing system of prejudice and prestige. Similarly, in Pale Fire, Nabokov repeatedly stresses art’s power to make individuality prevail in a demonic world of social cruelty. The black man who appears on television during Hazel Shade’s suicide—probably meant to be Louis Armstrong—is an inspiring musician and not, as Botkin’s note suggests, a hapless victim of prejudice.21 Likewise, Hazel’s unhappy life mirrors her father’s boyhood as a “cloutish freak,” except that he has been sustained by his artistic gift (PF 37, l. 134). Or, at the end of Pale Fire, as Botkin struggles with his own isolation and misery, he reworks the bleak vision of Shakespeare’s exiled Jaques to picture himself as a displaced writer lacking all but one redeeming gift: “sans fame, sans future, sans audience, sans anything but his art” (PF 300–301).22 In each of these examples, art has strengthened the personality against social exclusion, first in American worlds of racial prejudice and social stereotyping aligned (in an “odd gallicism”) with Proust, then in a radical extension of aesthetic individualism that moves beyond Proust to evoke Nabokov’s own wrenching experiences of exile. 1 1 1 Aesthetic individualism alone does not account for all that Nabokov admired in the Recherche, but unlike Eliot’s depersonalized mythic outlook, at least it did not exclude the very possibility of an art of personal memory. In Kamera Obskura this approach to individuality had guided Nabokov’s initial response to Proust, and in the late 1930s it reappeared as part of Sebastian Knight’s reaction to the English literary scene, again in a Proustian context. As a background assumption in Pale Fire, it should be seen as a corollary to Nabokov’s mid-1950s credo of aesthetic bliss, defined in the afterword to Lolita as a sense of connection “with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm” (L

Proust over Eliot in Pale Fire

231

317). The parenthetical gloss linking art with tenderness and kindness clashes with dominant notions of the aesthetic, as expressed, for example, in Yeats’s warning that those who “consider beauty a sufficient end,/ Lose natural kindness.”23 Such a dilemma is unthinkable for Nabokov, whose credo implies that only an artistic “curiosity” for concrete particulars allows one to perceive individuality in the first place and thus permits true kindness toward others. But the upheavals of modern history had taught Nabokov that at times when kindness and tenderness were not the norm, the directive “always individualize” must have a second meaning. When turned inward rather than toward others, aesthetic individualism could act to fortify the self against social cruelty. In this spirit John Shade’s story of his daughter’s suicide updates and Americanizes Proust’s analysis of prestige and prejudice in order to restate the French novelist’s artistic affirmation of the unique personality.24 It is unlikely that the Proustian criterion of aesthetic individualism will persuade critics to strike Eliot from the modernist canon. Though he no longer towers over the Anglo-American literary scene as he once did, Eliot has now become almost as indispensable for target-seeking postmodernists. In any case, moreover, even Nabokov’s polemics manage to miss the heart of Eliot’s image. Except for a brief, rather episodic parody of the nervous woman scene in “A Game of Chess” (PF 57, ll. 653–61), Pale Fire does not comment in detail on The Waste Land, a work much closer to canonical views of modernism than Four Quartets. Still, this belated expression of Nabokov’s Anglo-French oscillations from the late 1930s to the early 1950s has pinpointed a key contrast between two major figures in early twentiethcentury English and French literature. Although Proust and Eliot have been compared as postsymbolists, as practitioners of spatial form, or as writers concerned with the complex interaction of different levels of time,25 John Shade’s polemical adaptations in “Pale Fire” have treated them as models for two distinct versions of modernism. For Nabokov in these passages, far more clearly than in explicit critical statements, Proustian aestheticism replaces Eliot’s emphasis on poetic impersonality and the universals of myth and symbol with a narrative art, devoted to specificities of character and situation, whose commitment to individuality defies social cruelty. Pale Fire is often viewed as a masterpiece of emerging postmodernism in fiction. Thus Matei Calinescu contends that it furthered the process by which the term “postmodern” shifted from its original narrowly American application to the broad international meaning it holds today. Yet although the novel’s Botkin/Kinbote/Charles II ascent into delusion suggests another, more fantastic side of Nabokov’s gift, Pale Fire still preserves, in its convoluted textual memory, the special cultural conjuncture that nourished his art of personal memory. Rather than launching a wholesale critique of the modernist canon, accordingly, it proposes a revisionary modernism. Substi-

232

Epilogue

tuting a somewhat earlier Proustian moment in French literature for Eliot’s Anglo-American high modernism, it privileges the great innovators of early twentieth-century fiction over their contemporaries in poetry, leading to a position that appears postmodern only if we focus on Nabokov’s blistering exclusions.26 Where Pale Fire itself belongs, apart from these intertextual maneuvers, would require a cultural biography of the American Nabokov. But its tribute to an Americanized Proust harks back to the European side of Nabokov’s career, which built on fragmentary initiatives in his early fiction, gathered momentum during his breakthrough years in the 1930s, and culminated in Speak, Memory, whose final version would come after Pale Fire itself. As a last echo of this development, Pale Fire’s defense of aesthetic individualism against Eliot’s high modernism continues to express Nabokov’s main motives throughout his dealings with European modernism—to present memory as simultaneously personal and intertextual, to detach it from influential doctrines of the unconscious and the mythic, and to uphold the essential modernity of an art devoted to recapturing the mnemonic image.

NOTES 1

CHAPTER 1

1. For a 1960s view of Nabokov as an innovator in American fiction, see Tony Tanner, City of Words: American Fiction, 1950–1970 (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), pp. 33–39. Matei Calinescu discusses how Nabokov came to be seen as a postmodernist in “On Postmodernism,” in Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism (Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 1987), pp. 265–312, esp. pp. 296–302. 2. Three indicators of growing interest in Speak, Memory are Elizabeth W. Bruss, Autobiographical Acts: The Changing Situation of a Literary Genre (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1976); Dabney Stuart, Nabokov: The Dimensions of Parody (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1978); and Paul John Eakin, Fictions in Autobiography: Studies in the Art of Self-Invention (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1985). Ellen Pifer makes the strongest case for a more traditional side to Nabokov’s fiction in Nabokov and the Novel (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1980). 3. For these five photographs, see Andrew Field, VN: The Life and Art of Vladimir Nabokov (New York: Crown, 1986), facing p. 262; Speak, Memory (SM), facing p. 256; Alfred Appel, Jr., and Charles Newman, eds., Nabokov: Criticism, Reminiscences, Translations, and Tributes (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1970), seventh page following p. 256; Gisèle Freund and V. B. Carleton, James Joyce in Paris, with a preface by Simone de Beauvoir (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1965), pp. 44–45; and Alfred Appel, Jr., Nabokov’s Dark Cinema (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1974), p. 186. 4. Though Nabokov has denied the connection, he nonetheless mentions it in a coyly roundabout way that suggests some underlying desire to attach his nom de plume to this early phase of literary ferment in Russia: “circa 1910 there had appeared literary collections under the editorial title Sirin devoted to the so-called ‘symbolist’ movement, and I remember how tickled I was to discover in 1952 when browsing in the Houghton Library at Harvard that its catalogue listed me as actively publishing Blok, Bely, and Bryusov at the age of ten” (SO 161). For a stimulating overview of Nabokov’s relationship to early twentieth-century Russian culture, see Vladimir E. Alexandrov, “Nabokov and the Silver Age of Russian Culture,” Nabokov’s Otherworld (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1991), pp. 213–34. Alexandrov agrees (p. 215) on the twentieth-century cultural implications of Nabokov’s pseudonym. 5. This comment, which only appears in the Russian version of the autobiography, speaks of Cambridge friends who “made such exquisite judgments of Donne and Hopkins, who understood so well various charming details in a just published chapter about the ordeal of Leopold Bloom.” 6. See also similar comments in SO (49, 294), and in SM (275–76).

234

Notes to Chapter 1

7. Issued by the League of Nations, the Nansen passport was designed as a stopgap measure for people, like the émigrés from the Soviet Union, who had lost their citizenship; but in the end it lasted throughout the entire interwar period. Its holders experienced special difficulties in obtaining visas and in crossing frontiers, making international travel particularly onerous. 8. Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1990), pp. 429–31. 9. Edward James Brown, Russian Literature since the Revolution, revised and expanded edition (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1982), pp. 231–33. 10. Georgij Adamovich, “Vladimir Nabokov,” in Twentieth-Century Russian Literary Criticism, ed. Victor Erlich (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1975), p. 227. Nina Berberova, The Italics Are Mine, authorized translation by Philippe Radley (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1969), p. 321. 11. Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, Cryptonymie: Le Verbier de l’Homme aux Loups (Paris: Aubier-Flammarion, 1976). This book has been translated by Nicholas Rand as The Wolf Man’s Magic Word, with a foreword by Jacques Derrida, Theory and History of Literature, vol. 37 (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1986). 12. In Russian Years, pp. 428–29, Boyd assigns relatively little significance to these French works. But in examining Nabokov as a polyglot writer in Alien Tongues: Bilingual Russian Writers of the “First” Emigration (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1989), Elizabeth Klosty Beaujour supports the view taken here. She even suggests that Nabokov might have succeeded as a French writer (p. 91), and her book treats several Russian writers who did develop careers in France. 13. Andrew Field mentions this memoir in VN: The Life and Art of Vladimir Nabokov, p. 160. See also Boyd, Russian Years, pp. 428–29, where he suggests that it may have taken the form of a small book, written in mid-1936. It was preceded by the sketch “It Is Me,” written in 1935 (Russian Years, pp. 420–21). 14. For details on Nabokov’s slow literary assimilation of the American environment, see Appel’s “The Road to Lolita,” in Nabokov’s Dark Cinema, pp. 61–86. 15. Raymond Williams, Keywords (London: Fontana, 1976), p. 76. 16. Vladimir Nabokov, Nikolai Gogol (New York: New Directions, 1944), pp. 63– 74. “Poshlust” is Nabokov’s Americanization of the Russian word poshlost’, which means self-satisfied mediocrity. 17. Nabokov told another interviewer that he specified the first half of the Recherche because Proust’s death had prevented final revisions of the second half. Presumably he prefers Die Verwandlung over The Trial or The Castle because they too were published posthumously on the basis of manuscripts even more incomplete than Proust’s. For the comment on Proust, see J. E. Rivers, “Proust, Nabokov, and Ada,” in Critical Essays on Vladimir Nabokov, ed. Phyllis A. Roth (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1984), p. 137 and p. 155, n. 18. 18. For more on Nabokov’s interests in popular adventure fiction, see Paul Barolsky, “Nabokov’s Childhood Heroes—and Ours,” in Walter Pater’s Renaissance (University Park: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 1987), pp. 77–90. 19. Boyd, Russian Years, p. 178, note at the bottom of the page. 20. For comments on the Russian context of Nabokov’s dislike of Dostoevsky, see Simon Karlinsky, “Dostoevsky as Rorschach Test,” in Feodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, ed. George Gibian (1964; rev. ed. New York: Norton, 1975), pp. 629–36. 21. For the Acmeists and Bergson, see Elaine Rusinko, “Acmeism, Post-Symbol-

Notes to Chapter 1

235

ism, and Henri Bergson,” Slavic Review 41, no. 3 (1982): 494–510. For the formalists and Bergson, see James M. Curtis, “Bergson and Russian Formalism,” Comparative Literature 28, no. 2 (1976): 109–21. 22. For a useful recent account of modernism and postmodernism from this more skeptical French perspective, see Susan Rubin Suleiman, “Naming and Difference: Reflections on ‘Modernism versus Postmodernism’ in Literature,” in Approaching Postmodernism, ed. Douwe Fokkema and Hans Bertens (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1986), pp. 255–70. 23. Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, trans. Michael Henry Heim (New York: Knopf, 1980), p. 157. 24. For more on Nabokov and Kafka, see Margaret Byrd Boegeman, “Invitation to a Beheading and the Many Shades of Kafka,” in Nabokov’s Fifth Arc: Nabokov and Others on his Life’s Work, ed. J. E. Rivers and Charles Nicol (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1982), pp. 105–21. A chronology of Kafka translations in French is given on p. 120, n. 7. Brian Boyd (Russian Years, p. 415) essentially accepts Nabokov’s later dating, but does not consider the possibility of a French route to Kafka. 25. D. Barton Johnson, Worlds in Regression: Some Novels of Vladimir Nabokov (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis, 1985). 26. On the concept of the avant-garde as it assumes this meaning see Calinescu’s Five Faces of Modernity, whose comments on the topic date back to the first edition, published in 1977 as Faces of Modernity: Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch. See also Charles Russell, Poets, Prophets, and Revolutionaries: The Literary Avant-Garde from Rimbaud through Postmodernism (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1985). 27. This archive has recently been acquired by the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library and should become available after cataloguing. 28. The two biographies are Andrew Field, Nabokov: His Life in Part (New York: Viking, 1977) and VN: The Life and Art of Vladimir Nabokov. 29. Jane Greyson documents many of these revisions in her Nabokov Translated: A Comparison of Nabokov’s Russian and English Prose (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1977). But she does not consider their cultural significance in any detail. 30. Boris Eikhenbaum, The Young Tolstoy, trans. Gary Kern et al. (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis, 1972), p. 3. 31. M. M. Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1981), p. 284. This formulation directly follows Bakhtin’s use of Eikhenbaum in a discussion of Tolstoy. 32. See especially Tynianov’s essay “Dostoevsky and Gogol’: Toward a Theory of Parody,” the first section of which appears in Dostoevsky and Gogol: Texts and Criticism, ed. Priscilla Meyer and Stephen Rudy (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis, 1979), pp. 101–17, and the second section of which appears in Twentieth-Century Russian Criticism, ed. Erlich, pp. 102–16. For more on Nabokov’s relation to Bakhtin and Tynianov, see Chapter 5 of this study. 33. For the first two volumes of Eikhenbaum’s projected five-volume work, which remained incomplete because of political obstacles and World War II, see Boris Eikhenbaum, Lev Tolstoy (1928–1931; rpt. Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1968). There is a recent translation of the second and third volumes as Tolstoi in the Sixties, trans. Duffield White (Ann Arbor, Mich: Ardis, 1982) and Tolstoi in the Seventies, trans. Albert Kaspin (Ann Arbor, Mich: Ardis, 1982).

236

Notes to Chapter 2

34. Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: The Seeds of Revolt, 1821–1849 (vol. 1); Dostoevsky: The Years of Ordeal, 1850–1859 (vol. 2); Dostoevsky: The Stir of Liberation, 1860– 1865 (vol. 3) (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1976, 1983, 1986). For Frank’s comments on Eikhenbaum see 2:xii–xiii; on Notes from Underground, 1:xi; on the intrinsic approach, 1:xii. 35. Ian Watt, Conrad in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1979). For the specific points mentioned, see pp. 169–200, 50– 55, and 169–72.

CHAPTER 2

1. For a general discussion of Nabokov’s synesthesia, see D. Barton Johnson’s “The Alphabetic Rainbows of Speak, Memory,” in Worlds in Regression, pp. 10–27. Johnson mentions the link between synesthesia and memory, but does not consider the growing ramifications of the colored-letter motif throughout Nabokov’s entire career or its bearing on problems of memory and modernism. 2. Here Nabokov’s English version diverges from the original Russian, where the language is less pointed: “shto bylo deistvitel’no im, polnost’iu i bez primesi,” or “what was really his, fully and without mixture.” 3. Martin first sees the lights while traveling as a child in the south of France (Pod 28–29/Gl 21), then remembers them as a young man in Yalta (Pod 27–28/Gl 20), and finally encounters them once more in France, just before his ill-fated attempt to cross the Soviet border (Pod 181/Gl 157). 4. For an interpretation of the index oriented toward chapter 11, rather than chapters 5 and 12, see Stuart, Dimensions of Parody, pp. 186–90. 5. For both a biographical and a literary account of this period in Nabokov’s life, see Boyd, Russian Years, pp. 107–22. 6. The line evoking Chateaubriand comes from the song “Le Montagnard émigré,” in Les Aventures du dernier Abencérage. For a discussion of this song’s role in Ada, which includes a pastiche of Baudelaire as well, see Annapaola Cancogni, “ ‘My Sister, Do You Still Recall?’: Chateaubriand/Nabokov,” Comparative Literature 35, no. 2 (Spring 1983): 140–66. 7. For this information on the initial composition of “Mademoiselle O,” see Zinaida Shakhovskaia, V Poiskakh Nabokova (Paris: La Presse Libre, 1979), p. 19. 8. Gérard Genette, “Métonymie chez Proust,” in Figures III (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1972), p. 50. Paul de Man draws attention to this discussion in his “Autobiography as De-Facement,” in The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1984), pp. 68–70. 9. See J. E. Rivers’ report of an interview with Nabokov on this subject in “Proust, Nabokov, and Ada,” p. 141. 10. de Man, “Autobiography as De-Facement,” p. 70. 11. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, aphorisms 1062–66. 12. Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal, Nietzsche in Russia (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1987). Nabokov probably read Nietzsche during the year he lived in the Crimea, just before fleeing Russia. See Boyd, Russian Years, p. 150. 13. Hal H. Rennert, “Literary Revenge: Nabokov’s Mademoiselle O and Kleist’s

Notes to Chapter 2

237

Die Marquise von O,” Germano-Slavica 4, no. 6 (Fall 1984): 331–37. This German connection seems to have entered the memoir in the 1960s. 14. For “involution,” see Appel’s analysis of Lolita (L xv–lxxi). 15. Nabokov had translated this poem in 1924. See entry 1279 in Andrew Field, Nabokov: A Bibliography (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1973). 16. See the fuller discussion of these changes in Chapter 10, pp. 207–8, for eternal return, and in Chapter 6, pp. 127–28, for the swan. 17. Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987), pp. 8–11, 93, 96. 18. Ibid., pp. 91, 125–26. In general, Habermas’s position reflects the importance that his account of modernity assigns to Horkheimer and Adorno’s dialectic of myth and enlightenment. 19. Paul de Man, “Literary History and Literary Modernity,” in his Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1971), pp. 142–65. 20. Ibid., p. 157. 21. Jacques Derrida, “The Art of Mémoires,” in Mémoires for Paul de Man, trans. Jonathan Culler (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1986), p. 48. 22. In a similar spirit, Elizabeth Beaujour notes sharp contrasts between Nabokov and Samuel Beckett, the two greatest bilingual authors of the twentieth century. In particular, the latter’s “obsessive concern with problems of being, the identity of the self, and the ‘deep existential anguish that is the keynote of Beckett’s work’ ” have no necessary connection with bilingualism as such, as shown by Nabokov’s very different approach to problems of self-definition. See the appendix on Beckett in Alien Tongues, pp. 162–76. 23. de Man, “Literary History and Literary Modernity,” pp. 147, 152. 24. Nabokov uses these terms in the early 1940s, in the English version of “Spring in Fialta” (ND 34) and in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (SK 28). For further discussion, see Chapter 7, pp. 144–45. 25. Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity, pp. 87–89. 26. Ibid., pp. 51–52. 27. Ricardo J. Quinones, Mapping Literary Modernism: Time and Development (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1985), pp. 14–15. 28. Russell, Poets, Prophets, and Revolutionaries; and Marjorie Perloff, The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant Guerre, and the Language of Rupture (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1986). 29. Marinetti: Selected Writings, ed. R. W. Flint, trans. R. W. Flint and Arthur A. Coppotelli (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971, 1972), p. 83. 30. Charles Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life,” in Selected Writings on Art and Artists, trans. P. E. Charvet (Harmondsworth, Engl.: Penguin Books, 1972), pp. 390, 403, 402. 31. Ibid., p. 397. Compare to de Man, “Literary History and Literary Modernity,” p. 157, who seems to mistake the force of this analogy, when he speaks of “a past that, in the case of convalescence, is so threatening that it has to be forgotten.” 32. Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life,” p. 408. 33. Friedrich Nietzsche, “Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie für das Leben,” in Werke in drei Bänden, ed. Karl Schlechta (Munich: Hanser, 1966), 1:220.

238 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

Notes to Chapter 3 Ibid., p. 228. Ibid., p. 281. de Man, “Literary History and Literary Modernity,” p. 163. Nietzsche, Also Sprach Zarathustra, in Werke 2:410. Ibid., p. 408. Ibid., p. 409.

CHAPTER 3

1. Greyson, Nabokov Translated, pp. 227–31. 2. Brian Boyd has informed me by letter that when Nabokov tutored Sergey Kaplan in English and French from 1925 to 1927, Nabokov “included an introduction to Proust” among the assigned readings. Presumably Nabokov’s own first reading of Proust came even earlier, but for my purposes discussing his first contacts matters less than evaluating how and when Proust becomes an explicit factor among the varied cultural contexts Nabokov establishes for his art of memory. 3. Rivers, “Proust, Nabokov, and Ada,” p. 141. According to Brian Boyd, however, in May 1930 Nabokov was already telling his friend Nicholas Raevsky that he adored Proust and had read the entire Recherche through twice (Russian Years, p. 354). 4. EO 1:115. The quotations here and later in the paragraph all come from chapter 1: first, st. 46, ll. 6–7; then, st. 47, ll. 6–7; and finally, st. 47, ll. 8, 14. 5. In “Practicing Nostalgia: Time and Memory in Nabokov’s Early Russian Fiction,” Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature 11, no. 2 (Spring 1987): 253–70, Philip Sicker focuses on Nabokov’s short fiction from 1925 to the later 1930s, including “The Return of Chorb,” “A Guide to Berlin,” “Torpid Smoke,” and “Cloud, Castle, Lake,” but not “Spring in Fialta.” His findings are generally consistent with my treatment of the novels and are particularly suggestive in relating memory to issues of personal identity. But Sicker does not consider futurist motifs in the early Nabokov, and therefore does not separate anticipatory memory from future retrospection, both of which he sees as methods for intensifying the act of recollection. Because Sicker also assumes that Nabokov was interested in Proust from the beginning of his career, he does not allow for the kind of developing involvement shown in Chapter 4 of this study. 6. In an exceptionally wide-ranging study of the early twentieth-century avantgarde, Renato Poggioli contends that imagism as an international tendency was much broader than the Anglo-American movement known as imagism. He also observes that imagism should be considered second only to futurism in general fruitfulness; see his The Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Gerald Fitzgerald (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1968), pp. 143, 145, 196–97, 228. 7. For a discussion of Pushkin’s art of memory in his lyric poetry, see Michael M. Naydan, “Pushkin’s Lyric Memory,” Slavic and East European Journal 28, no. 1 (1984): 1–14. 8. Marinetti: Selected Writings, pp. 81–82, cited in Perloff, The Futurist Moment, p. 102. 9. D. Barton Johnson points out that Turati practices the contemporary hypermodern school of chess, whose prime exponent was the Hungarian Richard Réti.

Notes to Chapter 4

239

Nabokov’s substitution of an Italian for a Hungarian may reflect his awareness of the literary analogies with futurism. See Worlds in Regression, p. 89. 10. Marcel Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu, ed. Pierre Clarac and André Ferré (Paris: Gallimard-Pléiade, 1954), 1:28. 11. See Carol Anschuetz, “Belyj’s Petersburg and the End of the Russian Novel,” in The Russian Novel from Pushkin to Pasternak, ed. John Garrard (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1983), pp. 125–53, for an approach to Petersburg that stresses both the role of Nietzsche and of a transformed Russian tradition. 12. The Russian phrase is obitatel’ budushchikh koshmarov. 13. See Brian Boyd, “Nabokov at Cornell,” in The Achievements of Vladimir Nabokov: Essays, Studies, Reminiscences, and Stories, ed. George Gibian and Stephen Jan Parker (Ithaca, N.Y.: Center for International Studies, Cornell University, 1984), p. 134. In strict chronological terms, of course, the late Tolstoy overlaps with the rise of modernism from 1890 to 1910, while his posthumously published masterpiece Hadji Murat appeared as late as 1912, or just before Nabokov’s decade of twentiethcentury classics running from 1913 to 1922. As a gauge of Nabokov’s readiness to take these facts for granted, it is notable that both Tolstoy’s death (SM 207) and an early movie version of Hadji Murat (SM 247) appear in his autobiography as part of the ordinary fabric of his youthful experience. 14. See Chapter 10, p. 210. 15. Derrida emphasizes a similar distinction between the personal and the technical, which builds on Paul de Man’s discussion of Verinnerung and Gedaechtnis in Hegel. See Mémoires for Paul de Man, pp. 35–39. 16. The shift in Russian is from “vozvrashchenie” to “nepovtorim.” 17. See Geoffrey Green, Freud and Nabokov (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1988) for the fullest discussion of Nabokov’s tense relationship with Freud. Other useful accounts are provided by Phyllis A. Roth, “Toward the Man behind the Mystification,” in Nabokov’s Fifth Arc, pp. 43–59; by J. P. Shute, “Nabokov and Freud: The Play of Power,” Modern Fiction Studies 30, no. 4 (Winter 1984): 637–50; and by Alan C. Elms, “Cloud, Castle, Claustrum: Nabokov as a Freudian in Spite of Himself,” in Russian Literature and Psychoanalysis, ed. Daniel Rancour-Laferriere (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1989), pp. 353–68. Though sympathetic to efforts to move the discussion beyond Nabokov’s own valuation of Freud, I think Freudians tend to oversimplify Nabokov’s complex methods of expression, especially with images and parodic passages. I also think it useful to pay more attention to the cultural circumstances in which Nabokov encountered Freud, here as the continuator of a German psycho-philosophical discourse for which his predecessor had been Nietzsche, later (in Speak, Memory) as a crucial, even hegemonic, figure in American intellectual life. 18. See Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, “Why I Write Such Good Books: Thus Spoke Zarathustra,” in Werke 2:1128.

CHAPTER 4

1. Field, Life in Part, pp. 265, 86. Marcel Cornis-Pope informs me that similar questionnaires, making similar assumptions about Proust, circulated in other parts of

240

Notes to Chapter 4

central and Eastern Europe at the time; for example, a whole “Proustian school” emerged in the late 1920s and early 1930s in Romania. For an account of this journal, with comments on its role in promoting Proust among émigré writers, see Roger Hagglund, “Numbers and the Russian Émigrés in the 1930s,” Slavic and East European Journal 29, no. 1 (1985): 39–51. Hagglund also mentions this journal’s harsh critique of Nabokov’s fiction, written by Georgij Ivanov. Nabokov responded to this review in 1932 with the short story “Lips to Lips,” a spoof at the expense of Numbers which he only published in 1956. 2. In his lectures at Cornell, Nabokov could warn his students against equating Marcel with Proust (LL 210); but this pedagogic maneuver does not rule out a fascination with more subtle exchanges between the fictional and the autobiographical. 3. References to pastiche in this discussion follow Gérard Genette’s definition in Palimpsestes: La littérature au second degré (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1982), pp. 33– 39. But when treating the seriously intended reworking of prior texts that Genette calls “transposition,” with Mann’s Doctor Faustus as a case in point, I prefer the term “critical adaptation” or “serious parody.” This usage responds to the broader sense of parody in the Russian tradition, which is neither exclusively satiric nor simply comic and which Tynianov illustrates in his analysis of the Dostoevsky-Gogol relationship, taking Poor Folk and The Double as his main examples. As discussed in Chapter 5, Nabokov himself follows this tradition when he speaks of his intertextual practices in terms of “parody.” When Fredric Jameson distinguishes between modernist parody and postmodern pastiche, he does not take this more general Russian sense of parody into account. See Jameson’s “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” in The AntiAesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Port Townsend, Wash.: Bay Press, 1983), p. 114. 4. Proust, Recherche 1:372. 5. Ibid., pp. 356, 359–63. 6. Compare ibid., pp. 222–23. 7. Compare ibid., pp. 222, 224. 8. Wladimir Weidlé, “The Poison of Modernism,” in Russian Modernism: Culture and the Avant-Garde, 1900–1930, ed. George Gibian and H. W. Tjalsma (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1976), pp. 20–21. 9. Roger Shattuck, Marcel Proust (New York: Viking, 1974), pp. 94–109. 10. Lionel Trilling, “The Function of the Little Magazine,” in his The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society (New York: Viking, 1951), p. 98. This essay was originally published in 1946 as the introduction to an anthology of writings from The Partisan Review. 11. Henri Bergson, An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. T. E. Hulme (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1949), p. 28. 12. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1976), p. 67. 13. Henri Bergson, Mémoire et vie, ed. Gilles Deleuze (1957; rpt. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1975), p. 8. In Nabokov: The Mystery of Literary Structures (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1989), p. 122, Leona Toker also links this image with Bergson, but emphasizes its presence in his essay “Laughter.” Bergson’s ideas on time and memory, I would argue, are even more relevant to Nabokov’s career. 14. Bergson, Mémoire et vie, p. 69.

Notes to Chapter 5

241

15. Proust, Recherche 1:46. Nabokov gave special attention to this image for Marcel’s experience of involuntary memory, as shown by his attempts to improve the English translation of Swann’s Way, illustrated in LL (223). 16. Bergson, Mémoire et vie, pp. 45–46. 17. Walter Benjamin, “The Image of Proust,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), p. 201. 18. Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” in Illuminations, p. 157. 19. Benjamin, “Image of Proust,” p. 201. 20. Ibid., pp. 208, 210. 21. Ibid., p. 205. 22. In the Baudelaire project, Benjamin comments on Proust’s “great familiarity with the problem of the aura” (“Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” p. 188). Eugene Lunn goes further, suggesting “a startling ‘constellation’ of Proust and Marx” based on involuntary memory and utopian hope; see his Marxism and Modernism: An Historical Study of Lukács, Brecht, Benjamin, and Adorno (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1982), p. 247. 23. Benjamin, “Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” pp. 160–62. 24. Ibid., pp. 158–59. 25. Benjamin, “Image of Proust,” p. 214. Benjamin later discusses the mnemonic image in a similar way in “Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” pp. 184, 186. In these comments he makes the further point of aligning the visual images created by photography with Proustian voluntary memory. 26. Proust, Recherche, pp. 44, 46–48.

CHAPTER 5

1. For these three incidents, see O 67, 120/Des 79, 134; O 36, 155/Des 47, 173; and O 30, 137/Des 40, 153. 2. All these Russian formalist essays have been collected and translated into English by Priscilla Meyer and Stephen Rudy in Dostoevsky and Gogol. 3. LRL 100, 104. Subsequent quotations from the Dostoevsky lecture in this paragraph appear on p. 104. 4. In taking this approach to Dostoevsky’s presence in Despair, I agree with Julian Connolly on the importance of Notes from Underground and Crime and Punishment, but disagree with his sense that The Double is less significant. Also, since I view Nabokov in a European context in which he moved toward France at the same time that French writers like Malraux, Camus, and Sartre were strongly attracted to Dostoevsky, his basic intentions in Despair seem much more polemical. As a result, the novel does not in the end seek to endorse “Dostoevski’s vision of human aspirations and failings” nor “the continued importance of Dostoevski’s legacy in modern Russian literature.” See “Dostoevski and Vladimir Nabokov: The Case of Despair,” in Dostoevski and the Human Condition after a Century, ed. Alexej Ugrinsky, Frank S. Lambasa, and Valija K. Ozolins (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986), pp. 155–62, esp. p. 160 and p. 161, n. 3. In an earlier discussion of Despair, Connolly does not try to identify Nabokov quite so closely with Dostoevsky; he also includes useful commentary on the book’s links with Pushkin and Gogol. See “The Function of Literary

242

Notes to Chapter 5

Allusion in Nabokov’s Despair,” Slavic and East European Journal 26, no. 3 (1982): 302–13. 5. For “manner” and “matter,” see LRL 116, 119; for the allusion to “creative impulse,” see LRL 117. 6. Nabokov quotes the relevant description in Lectures on Russian Literature. For the original scene, see part 3, chapter 6, section 1 of The Possessed. 7. Nabokov states that this reading took place when he was twenty-eight, which would be several years before Despair; but often, when looking back on events after several decades, he could be inaccurate in the matter of dates. For the comments on Crime and Punishment cited in the paragraph, see LRL 110–11. 8. I shall argue in Chapter 9 that Nabokov’s response to this event results in several of the most eloquent mnemonic images in Speak, Memory. It should also be recalled that the mistaken shooting of John Shade in Pale Fire also alludes to the elder Nabokov’s assassination in the place of his friend Miliukov. 9. Sergei Davydov, “Dostoevsky and Nabokov: The Morality of Structure in Crime and Punishment and Despair,” Dostoevsky Studies 3 (1982): 157–70. The textual parallel discussed below is mentioned on p. 159. Julian Connolly independently considers the same parallel in “The Function of Literary Allusion,” pp. 308–10, but Davydov proposes a more complex structure of allusion. 10. Sartre sees Hermann’s own wrestling with parody, but not the overarching parody fashioned by Nabokov. As a result, he views Nabokov as merely an imitator of the old, not as an innovator who combines repetition and difference to project himself into the new. Sartre, “La Méprise,” in Situations (Paris: Gallimard, 1947), 1:58– 61. 11. Nabokov mentions that according to Sartre the composer was a Jew from Brooklyn and the singer an African-American woman, but “I have ascertained that in reality the song is a Sophie Tucker one written by the Canadian Shelton Brooks” (SO 229). 12. For more on Dostoevsky and this modern fiction of ideas, especially in the case of Malraux, see my “Dostoevsky versus Nietzsche in Modernist Fiction: Lawrence’s Kangaroo and Malraux’s La condition humaine,” Stanford Literature Review 2 (Spring 1985): 47–83, esp. pp. 52–57 and 65–79. 13. Robert L. Belknap, “Memory in The Brothers Karamazov,” in American Contributions to the Eighth International Congress of Slavists, Zagreb and Ljubljana, ed. Victor Terras (Columbus, Ohio: Slavica, 1978), 2:21–40. 14. Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson, with an introduction by Wayne C. Booth (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. 15. 15. Ibid., p. 49. 16. Ibid., p. 211. 17. Ibid., p. 199. 18. Julia Kristeva, “Bakhtine, le mot, le dialogue et le roman,” Critique 23 (1967): 440–41. 19. Bakhtin, Dostoevsky’s Poetics, p. 78. 20. Ibid., pp. 89–90. 21. Ibid., p. 91. 22. Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” p. 333.

Notes to Chapter 6

243

CHAPTER 6

1. For a broad theoretical and historical discussion of this issue as it pertains to other twentieth-century autobiographies, see Eakin, Fictions in Autobiography. Eakin focuses on figures like Henry James, Sartre, and Mary McCarthy, but concludes (pp. 277, 278) by invoking Nabokov as the “best” exponent of the mysterious “presence of fiction in autobiography” and of “the counterpoint of discovery and invention” that occurs in life writing. 2. Readers are reminded that the following system will be used to distinguish these versions of “Mademoiselle O” in parenthetical page references: MO 1936 French version in Mesures. At 1943 English version in The Atlantic Monthly. CE 1951 English version in Conclusive Evidence, as well as the 1947 version in Nine Stories. DB 1954 Russian version in Drugie Berega. SM 1967 English version in Speak, Memory. Unless otherwise indicated, translations from Nabokov’s French and Russian are my own. 3. Nabokov did not separate the initial French version into parts. Since segment 5 was not published until 1947, the 1943 Atlantic version moves directly from segment 4 to segment 6, which it combines to produce a five-part variant. In Drugie Berega, part 5 is split between segments 8 and 9 to create an eight-part version. 4. Vladimir Nabokoff-Sirine, “Pouchkine, ou le vrai et le vraisemblable,” Nouvelle Revue Française 48 (March 1937): 368. Translation by Dmitri Nabokov, “Pushkin, or the Real and the Plausible,” The New York Review of Books, 31 March 1988, p. 40. 5. Leona Toker, using a method of “indirect commentary” that takes passages from one Nabokov work to illuminate others, singles out this one as especially important for understanding Nabokovian characterization in general. See her Nabokov, p. 58. 6. The 1943 version is quite emphatic, for it places the question, “Have I really salvaged her from fiction?” at the end of a paragraph (At 73). The two English autobiographies, where it appears in the middle of a paragraph (CE 78/SM 117), are less forceful. The Russian version relegates the question to a parenthetical aside (DB 110). 7. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1983), 1:305. No doubt Nabokov would have appreciated the irony that this book itself takes the form of a literary autobiography. 8. Ihab Hassan has used this very cultural genealogy to distinguish Western European modernists from the avant-garde: “Modernism, however, proved more stable, aloof, hieratic, like the French symbolism from which it derived.” See Hassan, “The Culture of Postmodernism,” in Modernism: Challenges and Perspectives, ed. Monique Chefdor, Ricardo Quinones, and Albert Wachtel (Urbana and Chicago: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1986), p. 311.

244

Notes to Chapter 6

9. Section 5 of the Russian version ends with an attack on “pseudoclassicism” (DB 98). Nabokov’s notes to Eugene Onegin also use the term, but there he seems to admire Racine while reserving “pseudoclassicism” for epigones and for codifiers of neoclassicism like Boileau. See EO 4:32–37. 10. I prefer “patch,” instead of the more usual “panel” or “piece of wall,” because Nabokov eventually used this word in a related English passage in Speak, Memory (SM 75). See the discussion in Chapter 10, section 1. 11. Proust, Recherche 1:9, 43, 47. 12. Ibid., p. 186. 13. Ibid., p. 37. Readers who have visited the Proust house in Illiers should perhaps be reminded that this detail refers to the other Proust house in Auteuil, which was torn down in the 1890s and where Proust’s own drama of the good-night kiss actually took place. See George Painter, Marcel Proust: A Biography (1959; rpt. New York: Vintage, 1978), 1:11. 14. Ibid., p. 4. 15. Ibid., p. 186. 16. Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary: Ébauches et fragments inédits, ed. Gabrielle Leleu (Paris: Louis Conard, 1936), pp. 235–36. The passage was then reprinted in Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary: Nouvelle version précédée de scénarios inédits, ed. Jean Pommier and Gabrielle Leleu (Paris: Jose Corti, 1949), pp. 215–17. A translation by Paul de Man may be found in Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, ed. Paul de Man (New York: Norton, 1965), pp. 268–70. 17. This scene appears at the end of part 1, chapter 7, p. 32 in the de Man edition of the novel. One of Flaubert’s editors even connects the scene with a passage in Flaubert’s letters that speaks of spending the previous day looking at the countryside through panes of stained glass, a statement that applies more directly to the Vaubyessard draft. See Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, ed. Edouard Maynial (Paris: Garnier, 1961), p. 416, n. 168. 18. This analysis of the evolving veranda passage suggests that Nabokov discovered the parallel between his own memories of colored windows and Flaubert’s colored-window draft at some point after the initial composition of “Mademoiselle O.” Only in the 1943 English version did he begin to exploit the opportunity for intertextual appropriation and comment. As for the circumstances in which he encountered the Flaubert passage, both the Leleu and the Pommier-Leleu editions of Flaubert’s drafts were major scholarly projects, certain to attract the attention of someone with Nabokov’s intense interest in Madame Bovary, particularly since he made a long visit to Paris in 1936, the year the Leleu edition was published. I also think it possible that he first read the coloredwindow draft in a prepublication excerpt in some journal. I am unable to verify this hypothesis, but since research on Flaubert’s drafts was strongly encouraged by Albert Thibaudet, a leading French critic of the time and a regular contributor to the Nouvelle Revue Française, it does not seem unlikely that such excerpts were published. Perhaps they even appeared in the Nouvelle Revue Française itself, which it is known that Nabokov often read. It should be emphasized that Nabokov never makes the link between the veranda scene and Flaubert explicit. But in the Drugie Berega version he does tease the reader

Notes to Chapter 7

245

with the possibility of direct textual parallels. In this version of “Mademoiselle O,” the estrangement segment (segment 11) begins with a description of arriving guests that echoes Emma’s wedding day in Madame Bovary (DB 103). When Nabokov asks whether readers noticed that “this paragraph is built on the intonations of Flaubert,” his remark reflects back on the richer imitation of Flaubert in the veranda segment. 19. For a recent study that argues for close affinities between Flaubert and Proust without, however, mentioning Nabokov, see Beryl Schlossman, The Orient of Style: Modernist Allegories of Conversion (Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 1991). In a move that strikingly parallels the intertextual references in “Mademoiselle O,” Schlossman connects the rejected draft of Emma gazing through the colored panes of glass with the magic-lantern passage in Proust and with the motif of a “pan lumineux” (pp. 17–24). Ultimately the “pan” ties in with Bergotte’s much later vision of the “little panel of yellow wall” in Vermeer’s View of Delft. 20. In the Atlantic version, where Nabokov refers to the swan as a dreamlike apparition that would cause viewers to wake “with a shudder” (At 73), the self-reflexivity is explicit. Later English versions change “shudder” to “start” (CE 78/SM 117), thereby obscuring the link between the tripartite image and the previous description. The Russian version has “lodka, lebed’, volna” (boat, swan, wave) (DB 110), which keeps the alliteration but omits the subjective “shudder” in favor of an image focused exclusively on the swan trying to climb into the boat.

CHAPTER 7

1. Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1991), pp. 204, 221, 265. Publication of the two Russian books took place with Ford Foundation money under the auspices of Chekhov Publishing, in 1952 and 1956. “Spring in Fialta” appeared as the title story in the collection of stories Vesna v Fial’ta. 2. For a discussion of various conjunctions between life-writing on the one hand and Nabokov’s novels on the other, see H. Grabes, Fictitious Biographies: Vladimir Nabokov’s English Novels (The Hague: Mouton, 1977). Despite the promising title, however, this book is not particularly helpful for understanding Nabokov’s art of memory. It deals only with the English-language fiction and thus avoids the late 1930s entirely, it does not consider Speak, Memory at all, and it avoids any real theoretical or historical examination of “fictitious biography” as a literary form. 3. The term is Andrew Field’s in VN: The Life and Art of Vladimir Nabokov, p. 164. 4. The original Russian version of this sentence is somewhat longer; though it omits the reference to personal truth, it ends with a phrase that emphasizes irrationalism and intuition: “were I a writer, I should only allow my heart to have imagination, and for the rest rely upon memory, that long evening shadow of the truth, but on no account would I haul reason along to masquerades.” 5. The large-scale temporal structure of the story, as it shuttles between drama and chronicle, may be schematized as follows; page references are to the English version of the story:

246

Notes to Chapter 7 Drama

Chronicle

Meeting Nina in Fialta, 13–17 First Meeting in Russia, 17–19 Shopping in Fialta, 19–20 Encounters in Berlin and Paris, 20–27 Joining Ferdinand and Segur, 27–29 Quick Vignettes of Later Meetings, 29–32 The Car and Lunch, 32–36 Last Meeting in Paris, 36–37 On the Terrace, 37–38 6. In context, the term appears in the following passage: “I could not have celebrated the occasion with greater art, could not have adorned with brighter vignettes the list of fate’s former services, even if I had known that this was to be the last one.” The same pictorial image is used in the Russian version. 7. Nabokov should not be understood as making a blanket condemnation of Joyce here. He thought the portrayal of Leopold Bloom in Ulysses was superb, but cautioned that the stream-of-consciousness technique was an illusion in that it implied that the main vehicle of thought was words rather than images. As an explanation for this particular revision, we might speculate that in the Continental context of the 1930s, stream-of-consciousness fiction did not occupy the leading position it held in Anglo-American fiction of the 1940s, after Joyce, Woolf, and Faulkner. We see a transition in this passage from the French to the Anglo-American side of the European Nabokov. 8. The Russian version of the story is careful to specify the Roman Z or zet; the Cyrillic Z has an entirely different shape. 9. The Russian version is more specific on this point, since it has Victor hesitate between “friendship” and “romantic love.” 10. This linkage with the past is particularly clear in the Russian version, where Victor’s declaration to Nina, “A shto, esli ia vas liubliu” (VF 34), is echoed in his opening statement about Fialta, “Ia etot gorodok liubliu” (VF 8). 11. See Lev Tolstoy, War and Peace, ed. George Gibian (New York: Norton, 1966), pp. 301–2. 12. There are at least six of these sightings, at VF 8, 9, 14, 24, 29, 32/ND 14, 15, 20, 28, 33, 36. 13. The early comment on The Magic Mountain occurs in “Podlets,” in Vozvrashchenie Chorba (1929; rpt. Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis, 1976), p. 122, translated as “An Affair of Honor,” RB 100. 14. On Death in Venice, see SO 57, 101. On poshlost’ and a “German” penchant for myth, see Nikolai Gogol, p. 66. 15. Thomas Mann, Death in Venice and Seven Other Stories, trans. H. T. LowePorter (New York: Vintage, 1954), p. 33. 16. For more on Nabokov’s vocabulary of modernity in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, see Chapter 8, pp. 167–70. 17. Compare these motifs with Aschenbach’s decision to consult the English travel agent (Death in Venice, p. 63), and with the crossed legs of several members of his series of sinister strangers (pp. 4, 59).

Notes to Chapter 8

247

18. At the time of Ada, however, Nabokov could make Rimbaud’s poem, “Mémoire,” an important intertextual element of the novel. See Brian Boyd, Nabokov’s “Ada: The Place of Consciousness” (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis, 1985), pp. 34– 42. 19. For example, Chernyshevsky’s project of compiling “a critical dictionary of ideas and facts” is fortuitously caricatured by Flaubert’s satiric Dictionnaire des idées reçues (Dar 262/G 246). Fyodor also points out that Dobrolyubov, Chernyshevsky’s close associate as a radical critic, sports side-whiskers of a kind that Flaubert found “symptomatic,” presumably of nothing good (Dar 289/G 271). Or, when Fyodor notices that the London and Paris exhibitions of 1862 and 1889 coincided with fateful dates in his subject’s life, he ironically reports on Bouvard and Pécuchet’s amazement at the role of bridges in the life of the Duke of Angouleme (Dar 256/G 240). Chernyshevky’s obtuseness as a literary critic becomes apparent when, on actually reading Flaubert in prison, he misspells his name with an “o” and rates him below Spielhagen and Sacher-Masoch (Dar 283/G 265). 20. Proust, Recherche 1:8. 21. For the scene with Stephen’s poem, see James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ed. Chester G. Anderson (New York: Viking, 1968), pp. 217–24. 22. Ibid., p. 222; Dar 166/G 159. 23. Joyce, Portrait, p. 217. 24. Ibid., p. 217. 25. Compare Hugh Kenner’s arguments in “The Portrait in Perspective,” defending an essentially ironic portrayal of Stephen, with those of Robert Scholes in “Stephen Dedalus, Poet or Esthete?” in Portrait, pp. 416–39, 468–80. Scholes considers him to be a genuine poet in this scene. 26. T. S. Eliot, “Ulysses, Order, and Myth,” in Selected Prose, ed. Frank Kermode (London: Faber and Faber, 1975), p. 178.

CHAPTER 8

1. Mayne Reid was Irish rather than English, and thus serves to highlight a terminological equivocation that proved necessary in this chapter, namely, the need for a broader term than “English” for Anglophone writers associated with the British Isles. That is because in the late 1930s, when Nabokov looked to England from across the Channel, his perspective was more than English because it gave so much authority to Joyce. Hence “British,” despite its limitations when applied to an Irish expatriate, seems the preferable term. It conveys both the challenge to Nabokov of starting to write in English and the need to adjust to a new variety of European modernism that he loosely identified with the British Isles. “British modernism” should also be viewed as a temporary, rather limited stop on the way to the Anglo-American high modernism Nabokov attacked in his interviews in the 1960s, as discussed in Chapter 1 and again in the Epilogue. But that transition comes only years later, once Nabokov has himself adjusted to America and has discovered the importance of Eliot and Pound as Joyce’s supposed comrades-in-arms. From that transatlantic perspective, however, neither Eliot nor Pound strikes Nabokov as primarily American. Instead, as expatriates with an apparent inside track on

248

Notes to Chapter 8

old-world culture, they pose a direct threat to Nabokov’s long involvement in interpreting, promoting, and continuing European modernism. Within his cultural biography, therefore, they function as European figures, even though they are frequently taught as American writers. 2. If Sebastian Knight foregrounds the adventurous creativity of modern art, Bend Sinister highlights the disasters of twentieth-century European history. Both novels do give a major place to familial ties, but brotherhood in the first counterpoints fatherhood in the other, while as stories of misery in love, one shows a bachelor ensnared by a vulgar femme fatale, the other a husband mourning the untimely death of a beloved wife. Even the settings differ, with Sebastian Knight’s realistic vignettes of tsarist Russia and postwar England and France contrasting with the nightmarish “antirealistic” composite of communism, fascism, and modern mass culture in Bend Sinister. 3. At one point in his confused trip to see his dying half-brother, V. notices the slogan “Death to the Jews” scrawled in a Paris phone booth (SK 197). Even after moving from Nazi Germany to France, Nabokov had not succeeded in escaping the virulent anti-Semitism of the 1930s. 4. The misunderstanding arose because of the discrepancy between the old-style Julian calendar, still used in Russia when Nabokov was born, and the Western Gregorian calendar. The gap between the two calendars increased by one day every century, but when Nabokov westernized his 1899 birthdate, he made the wrong adjustment. The error was natural for someone who could only remember celebrating his birthday when the twentieth-century difference was already in effect. See SM 13–14. 5. For more details on Nabokov’s nonmodernist English interests, see Nina Berberova, “Angliiskie Predki Vladimira Nabokova,” Novyi Zhurnal 167 (1987): 191–205. 6. It should be noted, however, that like Sebastian Knight’s mother, Yeats died in Roquebrune, and that his death occurred in 1939, at the very time that Nabokov was writing the novel. Given the emphasis that Sebastian Knight puts on possible life stories, Hazard Adams’s recent discussion of Yeats’s poetic oeuvre as a fictive or feigned autobiography may suggest a rationale for this muted tribute. See The Book of Yeats’s Poems (Tallahassee: Florida State Univ. Press, 1990). 7. See the discussion in Chapter 3, p. 54. 8. See the discussion of this point in Chapter 7, in the last section on “Spring in Fialta,” p. 144. 9. For Wells on James, see Boon (1915), as reprinted in The Modern Tradition, ed. Richard Ellmann and Charles Feidelson, Jr. (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1965), p. 327. Wells likens the Jamesian novel to a hippopotamus determined to pick up a pea or to an altar on which has been placed, “intensely there, . . . a dead kitten, an egg-shell, a bit of string.” In Strong Opinions, Nabokov qualified his admiration for Wells along the lines suggested by Goodman’s reformulation of these images: “His sociological cogitations can be safely ignored, of course, but his romances and fantasias are superb” (SO 104). Boyd points out, however, that late in life Nabokov even praised one of Wells’s sociological novels, The Passionate Friends, which he had read as a boy. See Russian Years, p. 91. 10. Stephen Spender, The Struggle of the Modern (Berkeley and Los Angeles:

Notes to Chapter 9

249

Univ. of California Press, 1963), pp. 71–78. H. G. Wells is one of Spender’s prime examples of the contemporary viewpoint in literature. 11. Ezra Pound, “A Retrospect,” in Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot (New York: New Directions, 1968), p. 6. Eliot himself would also discuss this passage, from a different point of view, in “Poetry and Drama,” which was, however, first delivered as a lecture at Harvard in 1951, well after the writing of Bend Sinister. 12. Dorrit Cohn, Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1978), pp. 58–98, esp. pp. 66, 93–95. 13. James Joyce, Ulysses (New York: Random House, 1986), p. 194. 14. The relevant parallels appear in Joyce’s stage directions: “Against the dark wall a figure appears slowly, a fairy boy of eleven, a changeling, kidnapped, dressed in an Eton suit with glass shoes and a little bronze helmet, holding a book in his hand. . . . He has a delicate mauve face. On his suit he has diamond and ruby buttons. In his free left hand he holds a slim ivory cane with a violet bowknot. A white lambkin peeps out of his waistcoat pocket” (Ulysses, p. 497).

CHAPTER 9

1. Nabokov first used this title for the English edition of his autobiography, which was also published in 1951, shortly after the American one. In 1960, when Conclusive Evidence was reissued in the United States, he took the opportunity to change its name; he then kept the new title for the revised version of his autobiography in 1967. 2. According to Philippe Lejeune, who does not mention Nabokov in this regard, his two main rivals would be the autobiographical writings of Michel Leiris and Jean-Paul Sartre’s Les Mots. Lejeune’s point is that autobiography tends overwhelmingly to follow strict chronological order so that any breaks that do occur are vague and half-hearted ones; Leiris and Sartre have the merit of systematically rethinking this approach. See “The Order of Narrative in Sartre’s Les Mots,” in On Autobiography, ed. Paul John Eakin, trans. Katherine Leary (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1989), pp. 70–74. 3. This discussion of the general structure of Speak, Memory differs from the one offered by Elizabeth Bruss, who posits a simpler tripartite division of five chapters each, focusing on ancestry and infancy, then on youth, and finally on maturity. See Autobiographical Acts, pp. 149–51. 4. It is presently in the Library of Congress Nabokov Archive, which will remain closed until 2009; I have been unable to examine it. 5. In particular, the map of Vyra and the other family estates near St. Petersburg might be compared to the numerous sketch-maps in Stendhal’s Vie de Henry Brulard. 6. As Brian Boyd makes clear, Nabokov’s entomological research reached its peak from 1943 to 1948, or just before he returned to Speak, Memory and during the early stages of composition. See American Years, pp. 29, 58–59, 66–68, 82–83, 113–15, 132. 7. For a full account of Nabokov’s metaphysics, both as it appears in Speak, Memory and in novels from The Defense to Pale Fire, see Alexandrov, Nabokov’s Other-

250

Notes to Chapter 10

world. Though largely in agreement with his findings, I give somewhat more scope to the equivocal and the ambivalent in Nabokov’s formulations about a possible transcendental realm. 8. Compare “Colette,” The New Yorker, 31 July 1948, p. 22. 9. For the corresponding passage dealing with his mother, see SM 49. This relative neglect of his mother’s later years, which was dictated by circumstances, contrasts with her major role in Nabokov’s early memories. As discussed in Chapter 2, their synesthetic kinship caused her to encourage his artistic gifts in a major way. 10. Though always preceded by disclaimers that he is not really in a position to judge, Nabokov’s final reactions to Yuri’s death vacillate disconcertingly. In the 1950s, where he emphasizes his cousin’s commitment to “the bellicose and romantic . . . daydream, which absorbed him even more than it did me . . . ” (CE 139), he treats his death as an immature imitation of Mayne Reid’s westerns. But in 1967 his verdict becomes much more positive: “all emotions, all thoughts, were governed in Yuri by one gift: a sense of honor equivalent, morally, to absolute pitch” (SM 200). 11. For a discussion of the specific passages involved, see Alexandrov, Nabokov’s Otherworld, pp. 47–48. 12. In chapter 2 (SM 49) Nabokov had indicated that he was at home reading a poem to his mother when they got the phone call informing them of his father’s death. 13. Compare “My Russian Education,” The New Yorker, 18 September 1948, p. 33; CE 136; and DB 177.

CHAPTER 10

1. See SM 121–24, 173. 2. Proust, Recherche 1:9–10. 3. Bergson, Mémoire et vie, p. 46. 4. According to Dmitri Nabokov and Matthew J. Bruccoli, the editors of the Selected Letters, the phrase proposed was “[they] bear unfaltering, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection” (SL 105). The language comes from the Scott Moncrieff translation of Proust and refers to Marcel’s final reflections after he succeeded in recognizing the childhood memory evoked by the madeleine. 5. By “symbol mongering” Nabokov means the radical simplification of images in the interests of a sexual interpretation, while the medieval quality he sees in Freud may refer either to the creedlike aspects of vulgar Freudianism or to Nabokov’s sense that Freud’s approach to the unconscious lacked rigor and was therefore prescientific. 6. Here, as in Chapter 3, n. 16, the Russian phrase Nabokov uses is “vechnoe vozvrashchenie.” 7. See Rosenthal, Nietzsche in Russia. 8. Proust, Recherche 1:46–47. Proust makes it clear that the taste and smell of the tea-soaked madeleine survive much better than any visual impressions of Combray. 9. Nabokov’s reliance on sensuous particulars thus has a very different function from the more thoroughgoing empiricism that Herbert Lindenberger describes in

Notes to Epilogue

251

Anglo-American critical discourse about the image, and that was attacked by Leo Spitzer in the following terms: “ ‘Imagery’ . . . has always been somewhat overrated by English literary critics, who delight overmuch in that sensuous element which for them makes a poem a poem.” Nabokov, by contrast, not only highlights the fruitfulness of Poggioli’s claim (see Chapter 3, n. 6) that imagism was an international tendency, not just an Anglo-American movement; he also places figures like Tolstoy and Proust, rather than T. S. Eliot and Pound, at the center of his sense of the image. See Herbert Lindenberger, “The Mimetic Bias in Modern Anglo-American Criticism,” in Mimesis in Contemporary Theory, ed. Mihai Spariosu (Philadelphia and Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1984), pp. 1–26, esp. p. 13. 10. A brother of Nabokov’s great-grandfather commanded the Peter-and-Paul fortress where Dostoevsky was imprisoned in 1849 before being sent to Siberia. The early date of this family contact explains the reference to the “author of The Double, etc.,” which nonetheless accurately reflects Nabokov’s actual response to Dostoevsky’s work, as worked out especially in Despair. See the discussion in Chapter 5. 11. For the passage in Alice, see Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland, ed. Donald J. Gray (New York: Norton, 1971), p. 25. 12. Thus Nabokov can praise the “flow of extraordinary imagery” (LRL 147) or “the delightful and unforgettable images” (LRL 200) of Anna Karenina. Of Kitty’s childbirth he remarks that “The whole chapter is magnificent imagery” (LRL 165), and he praises Tolstoy’s “brilliant eye” in describing the peripheral detail of a slippery mushroom during Kitty’s and Lyovin’s reconciliation (LRL 162). 13. Nabokov divides section 3 of the Russian version into two parts, so that the lines from Lermontov come at the end of a section. Their resonance is thus enhanced when compared with the English versions (DB 156). 14. Boyd, American Years, p. 257. The poem is “Vnov’ ya posetil . . . ,” written in 1835, where Pushkin uses the more old-fashioned phrase “inie berega” (l. 18) rather than Nabokov’s “drugie.”

EPILOGUE

1. Edmund Wilson, Axel’s Castle: A Study in the Imaginative Literature of 1870– 1930 (New York: Scribners, 1931). 2. See Edmund Wilson, “Anagrams on Eminent Authors,” in his Night Thoughts (New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1953), pp. 198–99. 3. For an interpretation of the Keats-Proust linkage emphasizing a “lost time of frozen enchantment,” see William Anderson, “Time and Memory in Nabokov’s Lolita,” The Centennial Review 24 (Summer 1980): 366–83, esp. pp. 363–67. In “Dolorès Disparue,” Symposium 20 (Summer 1966): 140, David L. Jones has analyzed that motif. His conclusion that “Lolita often becomes Proustian parallel more than Proustian parody” tends to support my discussion of Proust’s role in Pale Fire. 4. The Kinbote-Botkin identification goes back to Mary McCarthy’s pioneering review of Pale Fire, “A Bolt from the Blue,” The New Republic, 4 June 1962, pp. 21–27. D. Barton Johnson discusses the novel’s various levels of reality more fully in Worlds in Regression, pp. 60–77. On p. 68 Johnson observes that Charles II’s regal title may signify a second layer of fantasy on Botkin’s part.

252

Notes to Epilogue

5. For the classic statement on Nabokov’s metaphysical themes, see Vera Nabokov’s introduction to her husband’s collected poems, Stikhi (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis, 1979), p. 3, which stresses the importance of potustoronnost’, or a concern with the beyond, in his work. For an English synopsis of this introduction, see Alexandrov, Nabokov’s Otherworld, pp. 3–4. 6. Peter Lubin, “Kickshaws and Motley,” in Nabokov, ed. Appel and Newman, p. 205. For Nabokov’s comment, see SO 291. 7. For another discussion of Nabokov and Eliot, see Douglas Fowler, “Eliot, Nabokov, and the First Questions,” Yeats Eliot Review 5, no. 2 (1978): 44–61. Fowler briefly surveys Nabokov’s explicit criticisms (pp. 44–49), emphasizing Eliot’s veiled anti-Semitism and his impersonal theory of art. But the rest of the article deals with broad similarities between the two writers and does not address the question of modernism. 8. Originally written in 1929, when Eliot’s conversion to the Church of England was still quite recent, Wilson’s essay had been reprinted in A Literary Chronicle: 1920–1950 (New York: Random House, 1956), pp. 436–41. 9. T. S. Eliot, Collected Poems, 1909–1962 (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1963), p. 185 (“East Coker,” ii). 10. Ibid., p. 199 (“Dry Salvages,” v). 11. Ibid., p. 200 (“Little Gidding,” i). 12. In Nabokov’s Otherworld, p. 210, Alexandrov reads part of Hazel’s notes as an occult warning, but of her father’s rather than her own death. 13. Eliot, “Ulysses, Order, and Myth,” p. 178. 14. Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (New York: Knopf, 1984), p. 18. Brooks is adapting Roland Barthes’s concepts of the proairetic and hermeneutic codes, as developed in S/Z. 15. J. E. Rivers reports Nabokov’s comment in “Proust, Nabokov, and Ada,” p. 138. This essay includes useful background on Nabokov’s interest in Proust, but focuses on how Botkin’s views illuminate Ada rather than on how they function within Pale Fire. 16. See the lecture on “Combray” in LL (226, 228, 232). Here, however, Nabokov does not associate the spider with snobbery but with the weblike intricacy of Proust’s narrative art. 17. Proust, Recherche 1:119–24. 18. Ibid., pp. 123–24. 19. David Rampton’s recent Vladimir Nabokov: A Critical Study of the Novels (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1984) focuses on this disproportion. Without discussing Proust, he makes it clear that many of Nabokov’s “strong opinions” are “not quite so unequivocal as they first appear” (p. 13). 20. Michael H. Levenson, A Genealogy of Modernism: A Study of English Literary Doctrine 1908–1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1984), pp. 79, 70. 21. See Boyd, American Years, pp. 48–51, for a brief account of Nabokov’s lecture tour through the South in 1942. As a result, he developed a close friendship with Florence Read, the president of Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia, who apparently introduced Nabokov to African-American music. The Nabokov-Wilson Letters (87–89) give several lively vignettes of this trip, including an account of Nabokov’s meeting with W.E.B. DuBois, also in Atlanta.

Notes to Epilogue

253

22. Compare As You Like It, act 2, scene 7: “Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans every thing.” 23. William Butler Yeats, “A Prayer for My Daughter,” ll. 21–22. 24. This analysis stresses different issues than Richard Rorty’s recent contrast between Nabokov and Proust in “The Barber of Kasbeam: Nabokov on Cruelty.” Rorty remarks that “Nabokov’s capacity to pity others was as great as Proust’s capacity to pity himself—a capacity which Proust was, amazingly, able to harness to his attempt at self-creation.” Even if the two writers do differ on the direction of pity, however, both of their positions are grounded in a prior shared awareness of social cruelty. Moreover, the Proustian effort of self-creation that astonishes Rorty was precisely what impressed Nabokov and contributed to his aesthetic individualism, not only in Pale Fire but as early as Kamera Obskura. For the citation from Rorty, see his Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989), p. 155. 25. Wilson’s own Axel’s Castle makes the postsymbolist argument. For spatial form, see Joseph Frank’s “Spatial Form in Modern Literature,” in his The Widening Gyre: Crisis and Mastery in Modern Literature (1963; rpt. Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1968), pp. 3–62. For time, see Quinones, Mapping Literary Modernism. 26. Nabokov’s place on a modern-postmodern boundary becomes especially clear if we set his tendency to contrast Proust and Eliot alongside Frederic Jameson’s view of American high culture at the time of Pale Fire: “Those formerly subversive and embattled styles—Abstract Expressionism; the great modernist poetry of Pound, Eliot, or Wallace Stevens; the International Style (Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies); Stravinsky; Joyce, Proust, and Mann—felt to be scandalous or shocking by our grandparents are, for the generation which arrives at the gate in the 1960s, felt to be the establishment and the enemy—dead, stifling, canonical, the reified monuments one has to destroy to do anything new.” For the emerging postmodern sensibility, in contrast to Nabokov, both Proust and Eliot are obstacles to further cultural innovation. See Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” pp. 111–12.

INDEX 1

Abraham, Nicholas, 8 acmeism, 14 Ada, 15, 34, 60, 82, 84, 236n.6, 247n.18 Adamovich, Georgij, 8 Adams, Hazard, 248n.6 Adorno, Theodor, 237n.18 aesthetics, 14, 30, 86, 92, 99, 100, 104, 108–9, 225–26; aesthetic bliss, 225, 230–31; aesthetic individualism, 17, 80–81, 89, 163, 169–70, 229–30, 231, 232, 238n.5, 253n.24; aesthetic modernity, 24, 44, 47, 50, 141; egoism and social cruelty, 80, 88–89, 227– 30, 231, 253n.24 anticipatory memory, 18, 54–57, 58–65, 68– 69, 74, 117, 126–27, 138, 238n.5; future retrospection, 57 Appel, Alfred, Jr., 9, 11, 116, 160 Aristotle, 222, 223 Armstrong, Louis, 230 Auden, W. H., 144 autobiography, 10, 23, 27, 32, 35–36, 50, 179, 207, 217, 233n.2, 243n.1, 249n.2; autobiographical perspective, 32, 34, 93–94, 113, 119, 124–26, 182, 186; the autobiographical spiral, 189–92, 202; fictive autobiography, 15, 26, 35–36, 76, 130, 133, 137, 142, 152–53, 160, 177, 212, 240n.2, 248n.6; from memoir to autobiography, 9, 34–35, 73, 126 avant-garde, 4, 7, 18, 19, 21, 27, 45–47, 51, 52, 54, 58, 60, 62, 63, 69, 79–80, 81, 89, 140, 144–45, 147, 148, 153, 163, 172, 235n.26, 238n.6, 243n.8 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 22, 50, 92, 106–9 Barth, John, 3 Barthes, Roland, 252n.14 Baudelaire, Charles, 24, 37, 43, 44, 47, 50, 51, 52, 88, 89, 105, 128, 204, 236n.6; “L’Albatros,” 42; “Le Cygne,” 39–40, 41–42, 49, 50, 111, 117, 118, 127; “The Painter of Modern Life,” 44–45, 46, 47–48, 118, 142 Beaujour, Elizabeth, 234n.12, 237n.22 Beckett, Samuel, 237n.22 Belknap, Robert, 105

Bely, Andrey, 4, 11–12, 18, 24, 62 Bem, A. L., 97 Bend Sinister, 9, 15, 84, 159–62, 166, 167, 170–77, 178, 181, 193, 203, 208, 209, 219, 248n.2 Benjamin, Walter, 14, 42, 88–90, 144, 241n.25 Berberova, Nina, 8 Bergson, Henri, 13, 14, 16, 19, 74, 82–87, 88, 89, 104, 118, 124, 170–71, 205–6, 216, 240n.13; Creative Evolution, 84, 86; Introduction to Metaphysics, 83; Matter and Memory, 88, 206 Blok, Alexander, 4, 13, 24, 63, 213 Boileau, Nicholas, 244n.9 Borges, Jorge, 3 Boyd, Brian, 19, 234n.12, 235n.24, 238n.2, 248n.9, 249n.6 Brecht, Bertolt, 144 Briusov, Valeri, 24 Brooke, Rupert, 13, 16, 166 Brooks, Peter, 224 Brown, Edward J., 7 Browning, Robert, 13 Bruss, Elizabeth, 249n.3 Bunin, Ivan, 3, 182 Calinescu, Matei, 46, 231, 233n.1 Camus, Albert, 104–5, 241n.4 Carroll, Lewis, 166, 167, 173, 211, 213–14 Chateaubriand, Francois-René de, 34, 236n.6 Chekhov, Anton, 13, 63, 213; “The Lady with the Dog,” 166 Chernyshevsky, Nikolai, 26, 131, 146, 148, 247n.19 Cohn, Dorrit, 173 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 116 “colored hearing.” See synesthesia and “colored hearing” Conclusive Evidence (the 1951 version of Speak, Memory), 29, 110, 113, 114, 115, 120, 178, 179, 188, 189, 193, 243n.6, 245n.20, 249n.1, 250n.10 Connally, Julian, 241n.4, 242n.9 Conrad, Joseph, 21, 23, 77

256

Index

Corneille, Pierre, 118 Cornis-Pope, Marcel, 239n.1 cubism, 144 cultural biography, 10–11, 19–23, 52 cultural mobility, 7, 133, 161–62, 203; England to America, 159–60, 208–9; France to England, 9, 142, 164–65, 167, 212; Germany to France, 57, 59, 60, 66–67, 75, 86, 88, 140–43, 206–7 cultural multiplicity and multiculturalism, 5, 7–10, 124, 155, 160, 178–79, 203–4; AngloFranco-Russian, 165, 170–72, 180; AngloGerman, 168, 207; Anglo-Russian, 147, 162–64, 209–10, 213–14; Franco-American, 205, 228–30, 231; Franco-Russian, 6, 17, 104–5, 117, 120, 121, 142, 147–49, 154, 161–62, 164–65, 170–71, 172, 178, 203, 217–18, 234n.12; Germano-Slavic, 39, 59, 161, 208; Russo-European, 5–6, 60, 131, 145–46, 183, 204, 214 culture, 6, 10–11, 178–79; high or elite, 11, 211, 217, 253n.26; popular or mass, 11, 79, 133, 175, 228, 248n.2 Cummings, Mr. (Nabokov’s drawing master), 209, 214 Dante Alighieri, 222, 224 Davydov, Sergei, 102 Defense, The (Zashchita Luzhina), 7, 35, 52, 53, 60, 62–64, 65, 68, 76, 78, 91, 111, 113, 114, 124–25, 160 de Man, Paul, 35–36, 44–46, 48, 236n.8, 237n.31, 239n.15 Derrida, Jacques, 14, 44, 45, 83, 239n.15 Despair (Otchajanie), 8, 9, 38, 41, 73, 91–109, 123, 130, 146, 170, 177, 241–42n.4, 251n.9 Dickens, Charles, 152 Diderot, Denis, 117 Dobuzhinski, Mstislav, 209, 210, 214 Donne, John, 4 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 13–14, 21, 22–23, 37, 38, 41, 92, 95–109, 111, 123, 124, 146, 148, 152, 170, 213, 218, 234n.20, 241n.4, 242n.12, 251n.10; Brothers Karamazov, 100, 105; Crime and Punishment, 92, 95, 96, 99, 102–4, 108; The Double, 14, 50, 92, 95, 96, 97–99, 106–9; Notes from the House of the Dead, 95; Notes from Underground, 22, 92, 95, 99–100, 105; Poor Folk, 97; The Possessed, 92, 99, 100–102, 104 Douglas, Norman, 13, 16, 166, 167

Doyle, A. Conan, 13, 99 Dreyfus Affair, 81, 228–29 Drugie Berega (the Russian version of Speak, Memory), 9, 29, 110, 113, 114, 115, 120, 121, 188, 190, 203, 204, 207, 213, 214, 233n.5, 243nn.3 and 6, 244nn.9 and 18, 245n.20, 251nn.13 and 14 Dumas, Alexander, 31, 67, 165 Eakin, Paul John, 243n.1 Eikhenbaum, Boris, 21–22, 23, 235n.31, 236n.34 Eliot, T. S., 11–12, 14, 16, 18, 23, 81, 166, 167, 170, 211, 219–26, 229, 230, 247– 48n.1, 249n.11, 252n.7, 253n.26; “Ash Wednesday,” 220; Four Quartets, 221–25, 231; “Gerontion,” 220; “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” 229; “Ulysses, Order, and Myth,” 151, 224; The Waste Land, 16, 18, 225, 231 Enchanter, The, 32 “England and Me,” 9, 160, 178, 234n.13 Eye, The, 73 Fassbinder, Rainer Maria, 8 Faulkner, William, 246n.7 Fet, Afanasy, 148 Field, Andrew, 19 Flaubert, Gustave, 13–14, 17, 18, 23, 37, 105, 106, 111, 118–19, 121–24, 128, 146, 148, 166, 204, 228, 245n.19, 247n.19; Madame Bovary, 13, 122–23, 166, 167, 244nn.17 and 18 Fowler, Douglas, 252n.7 Frank, Joseph, 21, 22 Freud, Sigmund, 14, 16, 19, 27, 37, 44, 66–67, 69, 89, 144, 168, 206–7, 239n.17; screen memories and the primal scene, 140, 206, 207, 208; sublimation, 66; symbolism, 140, 212, 250n.5; theoretical discourse, 14, 207, 212, 250n.5; the unconscious and repression, 14, 87, 89, 127, 140, 207, 208, 212; the Wolf Man, 8, 17 futurism, 18, 46, 54, 60, 62, 69, 79, 167, 186, 238n.6, 239n.9 Genette, Gérard, 35 Gide, André, 79, 81 Gift, The (Dar), 7, 9, 10, 15, 24–26, 28, 30, 31, 36, 37, 52, 68, 69, 73, 85, 100, 123, 130–31, 146–55, 159, 170, 182–83, 224

Index Glory (Podvig), 7, 31, 52, 53, 62, 64–65, 68, 73, 74, 111, 124, 125, 146, 150, 160, 177, 210 Gogol, Nikolai, 11, 95, 97–98, 106–7, 108, 141, 240n.3 Habermas, Jürgen, 44–45, 47, 141, 237n.18 Hagglund, Roger, 240n.1 Hassan, Ihab, 243n.8 Heidegger, Martin, 42 Hitler, Adolf, 3, 5, 42, 159, 207 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 4, 166 Horkheimer, Max, 237n.18 Housman, A. E., 13, 16, 166, 167, 211 Hughes, Robert, 11, 13, 14, 150 Hugo, Victor, 39, 42 Hulme, T. E., 14 ideology, 14, 50, 81, 92, 103–4, 106, 108–9, 207 image-making, 17, 18, 23, 39, 42, 50, 60, 62, 69, 82, 94, 111, 123, 147, 170–72, 177, 179, 204, 208, 232; empiricism and hyperspecificity, 16, 18, 25–26, 100–101, 105, 132, 136, 140, 145, 152, 169, 172, 174–75, 184– 85, 188, 194, 198, 201, 207, 210, 217, 223, 225, 250n.5, 251n.12; hallucinatory intensity and emotional power, 16, 24, 27, 58– 59, 133, 134, 135–36, 143, 177, 192–93, 194, 196, 198–99, 200; icons, 58, 210; sensation-trope, fact-fiction ambiguities, 16, 30–31, 32, 35, 51, 82–83, 84, 87–88, 113, 119–20, 122, 124, 127–28, 145–46, 152, 160–61, 163, 188–89, 194, 201, 205–6, 216; temporal glides, lost time, and relative timelessness, 59, 68, 124–26, 138, 185–87, 190–92, 195–96, 199, 202, 212, 217; verbalvisual problematic, 16, 26, 28, 45, 55, 77, 89–90, 93, 126, 134, 172, 176, 182, 184, 188, 189, 194–95, 196, 198, 209–10, 214, 216, 241n.25, 246n.7 imagism, 18, 58, 88, 161, 170–72, 238n.6 intertextuality, 19, 20–23, 25, 36–43, 47, 49– 51, 57–62, 63, 66–67, 76–77, 83, 91–92, 94– 98, 100, 102, 104, 106–8, 117–24, 139– 46, 161, 165–77, 183–84, 204–18, 220, 229, 232, 240n.3, 244n.18. See also parody Invitation to a Beheading, 15, 29, 34, 73, 83– 84, 129, 146, 159, 160, 177, 235n.24 Ivanov, Georgij, 240n.1

257 James, Henry, 13, 146, 166, 168–69, 243n.1 Jameson, Fredric, 240n.3, 253n.26 Johnson, D. Barton, 15, 96, 236n.1, 238– 39n.9, 251n.4 Jones, David L., 251n.3 Joyce, James, 11–14, 23, 37, 53, 62, 63, 74, 79, 81, 106, 141, 148, 155, 166, 167, 170, 172, 212, 215, 219, 228, 229, 247n.1; Finnegans Wake, 173; Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 95, 98, 99, 150, 170, 247n.25; Ulysses, 4, 11, 12, 14, 16, 98, 105, 150–51, 161, 167, 173–77, 211, 224, 233n.5, 246n.7, 249n.14. See also myth and the “mythical method”; parody; stream-of-consciousness writing Jung, Carl, 44, 89 Kafka, Franz, 11–12, 13, 15–16, 25, 31, 90, 112, 116, 205, 216 Kamera Obskura, 9, 20, 36, 73–77, 78–82, 84, 86, 87, 88, 89, 91, 102, 104, 111, 119, 121, 143, 144, 147, 168, 169, 177, 184, 216, 229, 230, 253n.24. See also Laughter in the Dark Kandinsky, Wassily, 248 Keats, John, 13, 220, 251n.3 Kenner, Hugh, 247n.25 Kipling, Rudyard, 166 Kleist, Heinrich von, 39 Kristeva, Julia, 107 Kundera, Milan, 15 Laughter in the Dark, 9, 36, 74, 77–78, 146, 184. See also Kamera Obskura Lawrence, D. H., 13, 81 Lectures on Literature, 16, 61, 63, 86, 87, 88, 98, 123, 143, 151, 173, 174, 176, 229, 240n.2 Lectures on Russian Literature, 63, 98, 100, 101, 102, 103, 251n.12 Leiris, Michel, 249n.2 Lejeune, Philippe, 249n.2 Leleu, Gabrielle, 244n.18 Lenin, Vladimir I., 4, 42, 207 Lenski (Filip Zelenski), 112, 196, 197, 214, 215 Lermontov, Mikhail, 20, 196, 214, 218, 251n.13 Levenson, Michael, 229 liberalism, 4, 8, 12, 81, 172 Lindenberger, Herbert, 250–51n.9 Lolita, 3, 9, 11, 20, 32, 175, 208, 218, 220, 225, 230–31, 251n.3

258

Index

Look at the Harlequins! 15, 34 Lubin, Peter, 221 Lunn, Eugene, 241n.22 “Mademoiselle O,” 9, 15, 20, 34–35, 36, 37, 38–42, 43, 44, 47, 52, 53, 66, 73–74, 76, 110–29, 130, 131, 132, 133, 142, 148, 149, 160, 164–65, 167, 177, 178–79, 180, 183, 201, 203–6, 236n.7, 244n.18, 245n.19. See also Speak, Memory, chapter 5 Maeterlinck, Maurice, 118 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 118 Malory, Sir Thomas, 166, 167 Malraux, André, 104, 133, 241n.4, 242n.12 Mann, Thomas, 14, 37, 79, 81, 106, 140, 253n.26; Death in Venice, 141, 145, 151, 246n.17; Doctor Faustus, 240n.3; The Magic Mountain, 140 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, 47, 60, 69 Maritain, Jacques, 133 Marx, Karl, 88 Mary (Mashen’ka), 33–34, 36–37, 39–41, 43– 44, 47, 52–62, 63, 65–66, 68, 69, 76, 78, 84, 85, 86, 88, 91, 111, 113, 124, 126, 127, 128, 139, 142, 154, 170, 186, 194, 207–8, 210, 214, 215, 216, 217 Mayakovsky, Vladimir, 60, 79 Mayne Reid, Captain, 68, 159–60, 247n.1 McCarthy, Mary, 243n.1, 251n.4 memory, 14, 16–17, 29, 45, 47–49, 61–62, 91, 133, 151–53, 236n.1; the art-memory problematic, 25–26, 32–36, 56, 75–77, 110–11, 113–14, 119, 123, 124, 160–61, 179; and digressive structure, 56, 68–69, 126–27, 194, 197–98; and the history-creativity problematic, 30–31, 43, 48, 51; and imagination, 32, 56, 114–17, 132; and literary reminiscences, 39–41, 73, 91, 178; and Mnemosyne, 113, 117, 151–52, 153, 154, 183; and the reading process, 40, 98, 109, 135, 190, 198, 231; and the refusal of closure, 177, 186–87, 195, 201; and retrospective emotion or ecstasy, 58, 128, 134–39, 143, 185–86, 192, 196, 199, 211, 217. See also anticipatory memory and image-making; intertextuality Mill, John Stuart, 81 Mirsky, Dmitri S., 98 modernism, 11, 12, 17–18, 23, 41, 52, 58, 62, 118, 138, 168–69, 183, 203, 235n.22, 253n.26; “British” modernism and AngloAmerican “high” modernism, 4, 11, 12, 13,

16, 98–99, 148, 150–51, 152–53, 166, 167, 170, 171–77, 210–12, 221–26, 247n.1; canons of “great names,” 11, 12–13, 57, 74, 81, 140–41, 166, 219; “French” modernism, 13–15, 17, 52, 74–90, 111, 119–24, 128, 140, 142–43, 148–50, 167, 168, 169, 170– 71, 204–6, 226–31, 245n.19; “German” or Central European modernism, 17, 59, 66– 67, 87, 140–42, 168, 206–8; innovation, originality, and novelty, 12, 25, 36–37, 42, 43, 73, 75, 79, 153–54, 169, 184; modernism vs. the avant-garde, 18, 46, 79–80, 89, 140, 144–45, 148, 243n.8; “Russian” modernism, 4, 17, 24, 62, 63, 104–6, 124, 171, 215–18, 233n.4, 239n.13; ultramodernism and super-modernism, 45, 144, 147, 167 modernity, 43–46, 47–51, 103, 117–18, 142 Mussolini, Benito, 172 myth and the “mythical method,” 12, 14, 16, 17, 18, 39, 44, 46, 47, 98, 138, 141–42, 151, 173, 207, 212, 224, 225, 230, 231 Nabokov, Dmitri V. (Nabokov’s son), 4, 181, 193 Nabokov, Elena I. (Nabokov’s mother), 25, 26–28, 30–31, 69, 182, 184, 187, 188, 193, 200, 203, 206, 209–10, 213, 250nn.9 and 12 Nabokov, Konstantin D. (Nabokov’s uncle), 208–9, 210, 213 Nabokov, Sergei V. (Nabokov’s brother), 115, 180, 193 Nabokov, Vera E. (Nabokov’s wife), 4, 119, 181, 193, 197, 252n.5 Nabokov, Vladimir D. (Nabokov’s father), 4, 13, 30, 42, 81, 101, 102, 148, 160, 177, 182– 83, 192, 193–202, 203, 209, 211, 213, 217, 221 Nabokov-Wilson Letters, The, 104, 134, 138, 140, 145, 159, 179, 219, 221 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 24, 37, 40–44, 47, 50– 52, 59, 61, 62, 66–67, 69, 82, 86, 89, 207–8, 236n.12, 239nn.11 and 17; Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 39, 41, 49, 50; The Use and Abuse of History, 44–45, 46, 48 Pale Fire, 15, 29, 53–54, 64, 82, 138, 152, 219– 32, 242n.8, 249n.6, 251n.4 parody, 22, 74–77, 97, 98, 100, 105, 107–8, 131, 146, 168, 169, 211, 220, 231, 240n.3, 242n.10, 251n.3 Perloff, Marjorie, 46 Pifer, Ellen, 233n.2

Index Pnin, xii, 21, 39 Poe, Edgar Allan, 12 Poggioli, Renato, 238n.6, 251n.9 postmodernism, 3, 18, 20, 46, 219–20, 231, 232, 233n.1, 240n.3, 253n.26 “Pouchkine, ou le vrai et le vraisemblable,” 9, 113, 124 Pound, Ezra, 11–14, 16, 18, 81, 151, 166, 167, 170, 172, 211, 219, 229, 247–48n.1 Proust, Marcel, 17, 18, 23, 37, 52–54, 59, 62, 67, 69, 75, 105, 111, 124, 128, 151, 155, 159, 177, 204–5, 209, 215, 226, 238n.2, 239n.1, 241nn.22 and 25, 251n.3, 252nn.15 and 16; Albertine, 68, 220; aesthetic individualism, 80–81, 169, 170, 229–31, 253n.24; and the avant-garde, 79–80, 89, 144; and fictive autobiography, 35–36, 50, 76, 142, 240n.2; Françoise and social cruelty, 227–28, 229; the good-night kiss and the Proustian “patch,” 119–20, 127, 205, 210, 245n.1; the Guermantes family, 228; linkage with Bergson, 14, 16–17, 84, 86–88, 104; the madeleine episode and involuntary memory, 17, 61, 78, 83, 85, 89–90, 119, 123, 126, 152–53, 154, 206, 207, 209, 250nn.4 and 8; the magic-lantern scene, 205–6, 212, 214, 216; the modernist canon, 11–16, 74, 118, 140–41, 148, 150, 167, 219, 231–32, 234n.17, 253n.26; Odette, 142–43; the strange-bedroom episode, 120–21, 149–50; style and imagery, 63, 75–76, 83, 168; “Swann in Love,” 76–78, 143, 152, 154; Le Temps retrouvé, 54, 166, 167 Pushkin, Alexander, 6, 8, 13, 17, 20, 37, 59, 62, 65–66, 76, 111, 145, 148, 153–54, 166, 213, 214–15, 218, 238n.7, 251n.14; “The Bronze Horseman,” 215; Eugene Onegin, 6, 9, 17, 55, 58–59, 113, 124, 204, 215–17; “The Queen of Spades,” 91 Pynchon, Thomas, 3 Quinones, Ricardo, 46 Racine, Jean, 118, 244n.9 Rampton, David, 229 Rausch von Traubenberg, Iuri (Nabokov’s cousin), 193, 250n.10 realism, 7, 17, 18, 63, 146, 171, 172, 213, 218 Real Life of Sebastian Knight, The, 9, 37, 54, 60, 69, 144, 159, 160–70, 172, 173, 181, 203, 207, 208, 211, 219, 230, 248nn.2 and 6 Rimbaud, Arthur, 13, 17, 18, 25, 27, 36, 43,

259 45, 46, 79–80, 81, 83, 89, 91, 123, 124, 147– 48, 247n.18 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 81 Rivers, J. E., 35–36, 53, 226 Roosevelt, Theodore, 209 Rorty, Richard, 253n.24 Rosenthal, Bernice, 39, 208 Ross, Harold, 198 Rostand, Edmond, 118 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 179 Ruka (Vasiliy Rukavishnikov, Nabokov’s uncle), 6, 180, 187, 193, 204–5, 209, 213 Russell, Charles, 46 Russian formalism, 14, 21, 22, 37, 97–98, 106, 149, 234n.21, 241n.2 Sand, George, 120, 146 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 14, 104, 105, 241n.4, 242nn.10 and 11, 243n.1, 249n.2 Schlossman, Beryl, 245n.19 Scholes, Robert, 247n.25 Ségur, Madame de, 6, 162, 187, 205 Shattuck, Roger, 80 Shklovsky, Viktor, 37 short stories: “The Admiralty Spire,” 57; “An Affair of Honor,” 140; “The Circle,” 33, 84, 85–86, 154; “Cloud, Castle, Lake,” 8, 9, 127, 238n.5; “A Guide to Berlin,” 238n.5; “Lips to Lips,” 240n.1; “The Return of Chorb,” 238n.5; “Reunion,” 33, 84–85, 154; “Spring in Fialta,” 8, 9, 15, 20, 40–41, 73, 74, 89, 130–46, 149, 151, 154, 162, 173, 202, 212, 214, 245n.1, 246n.10; “Torpid Smoke,” 238n.5 Sicker, Phillip, 238n.5 Sirin (Nabokov’s Russian pseudonym), 4, 11, 73, 233n.4 Socrates, 27, 53, 226 Solus Rex, 15, 159 Speak, Memory, 3, 9, 10, 26, 29, 30, 36, 43, 65, 73, 111, 116, 122, 124, 141, 143, 148, 160, 163, 177, 178–215, 218, 219, 232, 233n.2, 239n.17, 242n.8, 245n.2, 249n.3; chapter 1 (“Perfect Past”), 10, 27, 30–31, 128, 140, 171, 178, 192, 194–96, 198, 199, 207; chapter 2 (“Portrait of My Mother”), 26–28, 30, 147, 154, 178, 182, 193, 213, 250nn.9 and 12; chapter 3 (“Portrait of My Uncle”), 6, 162, 180, 187, 204–5, 208–9, 213; chapter 4 (“My English Education”), 10, 64–65, 178, 208, 209–10; chapter 5 (“Mademoiselle O”), 31, 32, 197; chapter 6 (“Butterflies”),

260

Index

Speak, Memory (cont.) 104–5, 126, 180, 182–93, 212; chapter 7 (“Colette”), 7, 10, 84, 110, 182, 191–92, 205; chapter 8 (“Lantern Slides”), 43, 68– 69, 178, 194, 196–99, 205–8, 213–15; chapter 9 (“My Russian Education”), 13, 177, 188, 194, 196, 199–202, 215; chapter 10 (“Curtain-Raiser”), 68, 159–60, 182, 183, 192, 193, 197, 213, 239n.13, 250n.10; chapter 11 (“First Poem”), 20–21, 31, 32, 59, 184; chapter 12 (“Tamara”), 31, 32, 33, 34, 52, 57, 124, 182, 183, 197, 239n.13; chapter 13 (“Lodgings in Trinity Lane”), 8, 97, 178, 193, 201, 209, 210–12; chapter 14 (“Exile”), 7, 14, 73, 182, 191; chapter 15 (“Gardens and Parks”), 181, 207. See also Conclusive Evidence; Drugie Berega; “Mademoiselle O” Spender, Stephen, 169 Spitzer, Leo, 251n.9 “Spring in Fialta.” See short stories Stegner, Page, 101 Stein, Gertrude, 219 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 166, 167 stream-of-consciousness writing, 16, 63, 134, 168, 173–75, 177, 211, 246n.7 Strong Opinions, 5, 11, 12, 13, 15, 18, 20, 27, 81, 105, 109, 116, 117, 119, 141, 150, 166, 233n.4, 246n.14, 248n.9 surrealism, 18, 27, 46, 47, 89, 144 symbolism, 4, 18, 23, 106, 219, 243n.8 synesthesia and “colored hearing,” 23, 25–29, 31, 36, 52, 124, 147, 154–55, 183, 184, 194, 204, 209, 236n.1, 250n.9

Thibaudet, Albert, 244n.18 Toffler, Alvin, 12–13, 14, 15, 16, 18, 52, 166 Toker, Leona, 240n.13, 243n.5 Tolstoy, Lev, 13, 18, 21–22, 23, 213–14, 215, 218; Anna Karenina, 63–64, 251n.12; “The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” 171; Hadji-Murat, 239n.13; “Master and Man,” 213; War and Peace, 138 Torok, Maria, 8 Trilling, Lionel, 81 Turgenev, Ivan, 13, 95 Tynianov, Iuri, 22, 97, 98, 240n.3 Valéry, Paul, 219 Verhaeren, Emile, 118 Verlaine, Paul, 13, 118 Verne, Jules, 13, 31 Vinogradov, Viktor, 97 Voltaire, 14 Watt, Ian, 21, 23 Weidlé, Wladimir, 79 Wells, H. G., 12, 13, 146, 166, 167, 168–69, 248n.9, 249n.10 White, Katharine, 181, 193 Williams, Raymond, 10 Wilson, Edmund, 9, 19, 104, 134, 138, 140, 145, 179, 219, 221, 226, 253n.25 Woolf, Virginia, 166, 211, 246n.7 Yeats, William Butler, 81, 166, 219, 231, 248n.6 Zhernosekov, Vasiliy M., 194, 197, 213, 214