Vladimir Nabokov and the Ideological Aesthetic: A Study of his Novels and Plays, 1926–1939 (Cultural History and Literary Imagination) [New ed.] 9781787072893, 9781787072909, 9781787072916, 9781787072923, 1787072894

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
Acknowledgements
Note on Transliteration and Translation
List of Abbreviations
Introduction: Ideology and the Ideological Aesthetic
Chapter 1: The Ruthless Schemers of Tomsk and Atomsk: The Man from the USSR and The Waltz Invention
Chapter 2: Bits of My Past Litter the Floor: Ideology, Epistemology, and the ‘Modernism of Underdevelopment’ in The Eye and Despair
Chapter 3: ‘Violin in a Void’: Totalitarianism on Trial in Invitation to a Beheading
Chapter 4: My Kingdom: The Formation of the Ideological Aesthetic in The Gift
Chapter 5: The Absolute Solution: The Real Life of Sebastian Knight and the Ideology of Aesthetic Autonomy
Conclusion: Ideology as Aesthetic: The Aesthetic as Ideology
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Vladimir Nabokov and the Ideological Aesthetic A Study of his Novels and Plays, 1926–1939

UDITH DEMATAGODA

Peter Lang

CULTURAL HISTORY AND LITERARY IMAGINATION This book argues that ideology is a prism through which the work of Vladimir Nabokov needs to be considered. It is thus the first attempt to foreground questions of ideology and politics within a field that has historically been resistant to such readings. The perception of Nabokov as an apolitical writer is one which the author encouraged throughout the latter part of his career in his non-fictional writings and in the small number of well-rehearsed interviews that he gave. When questions of ideology and politics have arisen in scholarship, they have only been featured in passing or have merely re-confirmed the author’s self-designation as an ‘old-fashioned liberal’. When we consider that Nabokov lived through some of the most traumatic historical ruptures of the past century then this lack of reference to ideology in the critical literature appears quite revealing. Through the analysis of works which have previously received little attention as well as new perspectives on better known works, this book demonstrates how ideology and politics were ever-present and had an indelible effect on Nabokov's literary aesthetics.

Udith Dematagoda received his PhD in English Literature from the University of Glasgow in 2016. He has taught English and comparative literature at the University of Glasgow and the University of Nice and he was visiting researcher at The Butler Library at Columbia University and The Berg Collection at the New York Public Library. He has written and presented extensively on Vladimir Nabokov in Russia, Europe and North America and is a member of the Société Française Vladimir Nabokov. His wider research focuses on ideology and aesthetics in relation to works of twentieth-century English and European modernist literature, masculinity and fascism, and the emergence and evolution of digital ideologies. He currently lives and works in Vienna.

www.peterlang.com

Vladimir Nabokov and the Ideological Aesthetic

CULTURAL HISTORY AND LITERARY IMAGINATION EDITED BY CHRISTIAN J. EMDEN & DAVID MIDGLEY VOL. 29 EDITORIAL BOARD

RODRIGO CACHO, UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE SARAH COLVIN, UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE KENNETH LOISELLE, TRINITY UNIVERSITY HEATHER WEBB, UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE

PETER LANG

Oxford • Bern • Berlin • Bruxelles • Frankfurt am Main • New York • Wien

Vladimir Nabokov and the Ideological Aesthetic A Study of his Novels and Plays, 1926–1939 Udith Dematagoda

PETER LANG

Oxford • Bern • Berlin • Bruxelles • Frankfurt am Main • New York • Wien

Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Dematagoda, Udith, 1985- author. Title: Vladimir Nabokov and the ideological aesthetic : a study of his novels and plays, 1926-1939 / Udith Dematagoda. Description: New York : Peter Lang, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017028843 | ISBN 9781787072893 (alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Nabokov, Vladimir Vladimirovich, 1899-1977--Criticism and interpretation. | Russian literature--20th century--History and criticism. | Ideology in literature. Classification: LCC PG3476.N3 Z6336 2017 | DDC 891.73/42--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017028843 Cover image: Athena © Augustin Cambau. Reproduced with permission. Cover design: Peter Lang Ltd. ISSN 1660-6205 ISBN 978-1-78707-289-3 (print) • ISBN 978-1-78707-290-9 (ePDF) ISBN 978-1-78707-291-6 (ePub) • ISBN 978-1-78707-292-3 (mobi) © Peter Lang AG 2017 Published by Peter Lang Ltd, International Academic Publishers, 52 St Giles, Oxford, OX1 3LU, United Kingdom [email protected], www.peterlang.com Udith Dematagoda has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this Work. All rights reserved. All parts of this publication are protected by copyright. Any utilisation outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without the permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to prosecution. This applies in particular to reproductions, translations, microfilming, and storage and processing in electronic retrieval systems. This publication has been peer reviewed.

Contents

Acknowledgementsvii Note on Transliteration and Translation

ix

List of Abbreviationsxi Introduction

Ideology and the Ideological Aesthetic

1

Chapter 1

The Ruthless Schemers of Tomsk and Atomsk: The Man from the USSR and The Waltz Invention23 Chapter 2

Bits of My Past Litter the Floor: Ideology, Epistemology, and the ‘Modernism of Underdevelopment’ in The Eye and Despair57 Chapter 3

‘Violin in a Void’: Totalitarianism on Trial in Invitation to a Beheading93 Chapter 4

My Kingdom: The Formation of the Ideological Aesthetic in The Gift123

vi Chapter 5

The Absolute Solution: The Real Life of Sebastian Knight and the Ideology of Aesthetic Autonomy

155

Conclusion

Ideology as Aesthetic: The Aesthetic as Ideology

181

Bibliography

195

Index

201

Acknowledgements

This book derives from my doctoral research into Vladimir Nabokov, completed at the University of Glasgow. Thus, it is incumbent on me to first express my gratitude to my academic mentors John Coyle, Andrei Rogatchevski, and above all to Laurence Davies – who not only imparted to me his boundless wealth of knowledge and expertise on literary and philosophical matters, but with whom I shared so many infinitely stimulating and engaging conversations. Without his patience, encouragement, and guidance this book would have been impossible. I would also like to thank the many people I have encountered during my years in academia who have, in their various ways, contributed to my intellectual development. First among them is Elwira Grossman, who so readily gave me encouragement and support in too many ways to count. To my dear parents, Harry and Manel Dematagoda, and my brothers Susith and Supitha, I owe an immense debt of love and gratitude. During the course of writing this study, my work and research has taken me to St Petersburg, London, Paris, Nice, New York, Strasbourg and Vienna. I am grateful to the vibrant community of international scholars within Nabokov studies who I met at various points in time, and who responded to my work with so much enthusiasm and critical curiosity. Among them are Will Norman, Thomas Karshan, David Rampton, Marijeta Bozovic, Michael Rogers, Leland de la Durantaye, Michael Wood, Eric Naiman, Brian Boyd, Maurice Couturier, whose splendid anecdote about Roland Barthes I shall be recounting for a long time, Jacqueline Hamritt, Sophie Bernard-Leger, Lara Delage-Toriel, Elsa Court, Agnès Edel-Roy, Michael Federspiel, Nathalia Saliba, Julie Loison-Charles, the director of the Nabokov Museum Tatiana Ponomareva, Stephen Blackwell and Roy Groen with whom I experienced the cuisine of St Petersburg for the first time. Special thanks must go to James Bottriell and Genevieve Chevalier who made my time teaching at the University of Nice so enjoyable. I would also like to thank all of the staff at The Berg Collection of English and American

viii Acknowledgements

Literature at the New York Public Library and the Bakhmeteff Collection at Columbia University for assisting me in my archival research, the late Catherine Nepomnyashchy for her correspondence and support, and all of my friends in New York who made me so welcome in their wonderful city. Throughout these years, my sanity has often been maintained by my close friends who have supported and encouraged my intellectual efforts in countless ways, and with excellent humour. My enduring gratitude goes to Stewart McCarthy, Adam Campbell, Joseph Harris, Andrew Grimes, Jamie Sunderland, Euan McCaulay and Christos Asomatos for all of the laughter they have provided through the years, and for the countless good times which are still forthcoming; and also to Augustin Cambau, whose friendship and intellectual stimulation kept me in high spirits during two years of a sometimes tedious self-imposed exile on the French Riviera. To paraphrase Nabokov, the course of one’s life is rarely pre-determined in a world which is often a too rapid succession of funerals and fireworks, and just as the ink was beginning to dry on this work, as the dark clouds of uncertainty were beginning to form – a beam of luminous sunlight could be glimpsed on the horizon. For my darling Sarah Bildstein, whose pictures and stones have given me so much hope for the future.

Note on Transliteration and Translation

For translations of Russian texts, I have adhered mostly to the Library of Congress system without diacritical remarks. To aid readability, I have reverted to the common anglicized spellings of certain Russian names: for example, Dostoevsky and Stanislavsky (instead of Dostoevskii and Stanislavskii) and Meyerhold (instead of Meierkhol’d). In places, the text is given in the original Cyrillic. For English translations of Nabokov’s own works, I have followed the Standard English translations which the author made or authorized himself. All translations from the Russian and from the French which are my own are indicated as such.

Abbreviations

Works by Vladimir Nabokov BS Bend Sinister (London: Penguin, 2001). Dar Dar (New York: Chekov, 1952). Des Despair, trans. Vladimir Nabokov (London: Penguin, 2000). Gift The Gift, trans. Michael Scammell and Dmitri Nabokov (London: Penguin, 2001). IB Invitation to a Beheading, trans. Dmitri Nabokov in collaboration with the author (London: Penguin, 2001). LL  Lectures on Literature, edited by Fredson Bowers (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980). LRL Lectures on Russian Literature, edited by Fredson Bowers (New York: Harcourt, 1981). LTV  Letters to Véra, trans. Olga Voronina, edited by Brian Boyd (London: Penguin, 2014). MUSSR The Man from the USSR and Other Plays, trans. Dmitri Nabokov (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1985). NG Nikolai Gogol (New York: New Directions, 1961). NWL  Vladimir Nabokov & Edmund Wilson, Nabokov-Wilson Letters, edited by Simon Karlinsky (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson). PW  ‘Playwriting’, The Man from the USSR and Other Plays, trans. Dmitri Nabokov (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1985). RLSK The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (London: Penguin, 1964). SL Selected Letters 1940–1977, edited by Dmitri Nabokov and Matthew J. Bruccoli (San Diego: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1989).

xii Abbreviations

SM Speak, Memory (London: Vintage International, 1989). SO Strong Opinions (London: Penguin, 1973). TE The Eye (London: Penguin, 2010). ToT  ‘ The Tragedy of Tragedy’, in The Man from the USSR and Other Plays, trans. Dmitri Nabokov (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1985). VNP The Vladimir Nabokov Papers. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, New York Public Library. Extract from ‘Neskol’ko slov ob ubozhestve sovetskoy bellestristiki i popitka ustanovit’ prichinu onogo’ by Vladimir Nabokov, from the archive of Vladimir Nabokov. Copyright © Vladimir Nabokov, 1926, used by permission of The Wylie Agency (UK) Limited. WI  The Waltz Invention, trans. Dmitri Nabokov (New York: Phaedra, 1966).

Works by Other Authors AY  Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991). IISA Louis Althusser, ‘Ideolog y and Ideological State Apparatuses’, in On Ideology, trans. Ben Brewster (London: Verso, 2008). LOA  Louis Althusser, ‘A Letter on Art in Reply to Andre Daspré’, in On Ideology, trans. Ben Brewster (London: Verso, 2008). MP Frederic Jameson, The Modernist Papers (London: Verso, 2007). PU  Frederic Jameson, The Political Unconscious (London: Routledge, 1983). RY  Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990).

Abbreviations

xiii

TLP  Macherey, Pierre, A Theory of Literary Production, trans. Geoffrey Wall (London: Routledge, 1978). WLMF  Frederic Jameson, Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, The Modernist as Fascist (London: Verso, 2008).

Introduction

Ideology and the Ideological Aesthetic

The internal life of literature takes a form of recurrent flashes and explosions … The spirit of literature is the spirit of eternal explosion and eternal renewal. In these conditions, to preserve the literary tradition is to watch that explosions occur in a rhythmical, purposeful way and do not destroy the mechanism. Thus literary conservatism has nothing to do with reactionism. Its aim is not to put down minor explosions and revolutions by which literature is set into motion but, on the contrary, to maintain the conditions for such explosions to take place with a purpose, freely and uninterruptedly. A literary conservative is an eternal incendiary: a keeper of the fire rather than a fire extinguisher.1 — Vladislav Khodasevich, Literaturnye stat’i i vospominaniia

In a 1927 review, Vladimir Nabokov highlighted a particular aspect of poetry and prose, historically common to Russian literature, towards which he would maintain a consistent hostility for the entire course of his life: ‘the loathsome tint of social intent’ (‘prenepriiatnyi grazhdanski ottenok’).2 Yet in 1926, Nabokov ‘was involved in an anti-Bolshevik society, VIR’. The exact meaning and significance of the acronym has been lost, but we know that the aim of VIR was ‘to combat Bolshevism on an ideological level, on the assumption that other kinds of opposition were best left to those with 1 2

Quoted in Alexander Dolinin, ‘Nabokov as a Russian writer’, in Julian W. Connolly, ed., Cambridge Companion to Vladimir Nabokov (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 57. Quoted in Galya Diment, ‘Uncollected Critical Writings’, in Vladimir E. Alexandrov, ed., The Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov (New York: Garland, 1995), 733–741 (735).

2 Introduction

a more activist bent’ (RY: 260). What is interesting in the first instance is that the society’s exclusive concern was ideological resistance, and that it did not participate in more active forms of opposition. The second is that Nabokov and his wife ‘lost interest because nothing concrete took shape’ (RY: 261). Did this loss of interest signify a permanent withdrawal from political engagement, or rather a realization that there remained other ways to ideologically oppose Bolshevism? Throughout the course of the book, we will attempt to illustrate how his involvement with VIR did not represent his first and only intervention into the sphere of the sociopolitical, but instead marks the beginning of a continuous and transitioning engagement with ideology through the complex aesthetic construction of his literary works. In order to explore the implications of the present study – one which will not only allude to the existence of an Ideological Aesthetic in the works of Vladimir Nabokov, but will also attempt to argue in favour of its prominence among the main thematic concerns, and among the various hermeneutic systems applied to Nabokov’s oeuvre – it is first necessary to address the uneasy consensus which has arisen among Nabokovian scholars who have previously attempted to characterize Nabokov’s ideological position. Such an address must necessarily engage with two diverging, but nonetheless distinct, trends within the extensive body of criticism which is available; the former, an acknowledgement of the existence (accompanied by a wariness towards categorization) of such a position; the latter is an outright denial of such implications and indeed a hostility towards an analysis which privileges those ‘general ideas’ which were so despised by the author, over an analysis of the myriad allusions, acrostics, and word games which, certain critics feel, should be our primary concern. The distinction then is between a purely aesthetic criticism, and one which acknowledges the presence of unfathomable political dimensions while resisting classification. It is only necessary to consider that Nabokov lived through some of the most traumatic historical ruptures of the past century, to understand that both perspectives remain unsatisfactory. Yet this tentative, admittedly reductive, topographical survey is in need of expansion and justification, ignorant, as it most certainly is, of the many subtle divergences of opinion which are undoubtedly present among such

Ideology and the Ideological Aesthetic

3

a large and diverse collection of scholars. It is therefore necessary to briefly describe the different analyses pertaining to the relationship between ideology and aesthetics in Nabokov’s work, in past and recent scholarship, in order to identify certain aspects which are relevant to the present study. The collection Discourse and Ideology in Vladimir Nabokov’s Prose remains the only unambiguous attempt to study ideology in Nabokovian scholarship. In the introduction to this interesting collection of articles the editor David H. J. Larmour expresses the motivation behind its inception as a belief that the ideological underpinnings of Nabokov’s novels are a suitable area of investigation from a perspective which holds that all such texts both embody and promulgate a certain view of the world and how we organize our understanding of it.3

Larmour goes on to describe two hermeneutic positions, the first ‘that ideology is a web of discursive effects in the real world of the reader’s lived experience’ and that such effects are ‘brought about by the operations of power’. What is problematic with these interpretive coordinates? Primarily it is the description of ideology, which has recourse to what would be generally considered an outdated ‘vulgar Marxist’ definition – that of ideology as ‘false consciousness’. The second problem is the unstable conflation of discourse and ideology, which privileges the former over an abbreviated version of the latter. This is evident when Larmour presents us with Roger Fowler’s description of discourse as ‘“ideology” in the neutral, non-pejorative sense’.4 A neutral, non-pejorative ‘sense’ of ideology undermines the importance of its specific relationship to Art. Other past and recent, perhaps less explicit, scholarship has been more concerned with identifying the figurative ‘key’ to Nabokov’s enigmatic works. The persistent question is how Nabokov can teach us anything about morality and ethics. Within these studies there seems to be no contention that Nabokov was an unshakeable aesthete, but there is also an insistence on a transcendence of the socio-political sphere, almost to the extent that he becomes

3 4

David H. J. Larmour, ‘Collusion and Collision’, Discourse and Ideology in Vladimir Nabokov’s Prose, ed. David H. J. Larmour (London: Routledge, 2001), 1–11 (1). Larmour, ‘Collusions and Collision’, 1.

4 Introduction

an apolitical writer. Vladislav Khodasevich maintained that Nabokov’s primary concern was with the position of the artist within society, through a very particular type of literary conservatism – ‘a keeper of the fire rather than a fire extinguisher’.5 Different variations of this particular paradigm, and the various moral and ethical positions which can be inferred from it, dominated scholarship from the 1960s onwards. Vladimir E. Alexandrov’s informative reversal of the trends in previous scholarship, Nabokov’s Otherworld, posits that the meta-literary aspects of Nabokov’s art serves as a ‘camouflage for, and a model of, the metaphysical’.6 For Alexandrov, Nabokov should be considered primarily as a preceptor of ‘other worlds’. More recently, Thomas Karshan’s compelling monograph seeks to present ‘play, rather than art or transcendence, as Nabokov’s signature idea’.7 Karshan maps out a transitional, chronological framework, where he gives an account of how Nabokov progressively sought to eliminate any trace of didacticism from his works, in a movement from Game towards Free Play. Two attempts at non-committal, revisionist readings have been made in Michael Maar’s Speak, Nabokov8 and Eric Naiman’s Nabokov, Perversely.9 Both studies aim to highlight the hidden, often sexual, pathologies which had a direct impact on different aspects of Nabokov’s prose. Maar attempts to articulate what he describes as the ‘horror behind the shimmer’ and the ‘alternation between narcissistic dissolution and horror, between feelings of omnipotence and those of annihilation’ (Maar: 10). Another more recent work of popular criticism is Andrea Pitzer’s The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov,10 which though for the most part well-researched, suffers from a 5 6 7 8 9 10

Quoted in Alexander Dolinin, ‘Nabokov as a Russian writer’, in Julian W. Connolly, ed., Cambridge Companion to Vladimir Nabokov (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 57. Vladimir E. Alexandrov, Nabokov’s Otherworld (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 17–18. Thomas Karshan, Vladimir Nabokov and the Art of Play (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 5. Michael Maar, Speak, Nabokov (London: Verso, 2009). Eric Naiman, Nabokov, Perversely (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010). Andrea Pitzer, The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov (New York: Pegasus Books, 2013).

Ideology and the Ideological Aesthetic

5

lack of rigour in its analytical approach evidenced by its persistent attempts to draw a direct comparison between Nabokov’s work and that of Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Such a comparison, as we shall presently discover, is somewhat questionable given the fundamental differences inherent within their narrative apparatuses. In each of the works mentioned, the impulse to attempt a non-committal reading is admirable, yet is peculiarly underwhelming. This form of analysis, lacking a consistent theoretical approach, succumbs to an urge to provide dramatic or salacious revelations, which ultimately surpass any attempt to provide empirical proof. Even when considering the merit and validity of each of these varying perspectives, the possibility still remains that the fundamental context from which all of these different aspects of Nabokov’s work derive, including morality and ethics, is to be found within ideology. In a 1967 interview for The Paris Review, Herbert Gold asked Nabokov to define his sense of alienation from other ‘White Russian’ refugees within the émigré community. Nabokov remarked that he and his family ‘remained White Russians in the large sense’, but went on to state that these were split into as many social fractions and political factions as was the entire nation before the Bolshevist coup. I do not mix with ‘Black-Hundred’ White Russians and do not mix with the so-called ‘bolshevizans’, that is ‘pinks’. On the other hand, I have many friends among intellectual Constitutional Monarchists as well as among intellectual Social Revolutionaries. My father was an old-fashioned liberal, and I do not mind being labelled an old-fashioned liberal, too. (SO: 83)

Three things are of interest in this rare political statement. The first is that he did not associate with the members of the Chernaya Sotnya [Black Hundred] – the proto-fascist counter-revolutionary group noted for their xenophobia, anti-Semitism, and extreme nationalism. It should be noted that Pyotr Shabelsky-Bork, who in 1922 was involved in the assassination of Nabokov’s father, was affiliated with the Chernaya Sotnya. Secondly, that he also did not mix with ‘bolshevizans’ – White Russians with Bolshevik sympathies, which included those who would eventually return to Soviet Russia. Among the ‘bolshevizans’, a term curiously rendered diminutive with the lack of a capital letter, were Alexei Tolstoy and Andrei Bely, whose

6 Introduction

novel Petersburg Nabokov would rank among In Search of Lost Time, Ulysses, and Metamorphosis as a masterpiece of the European novel. Finally, his preference for friends with ‘intellectual’ political ideologies, whether constitutional monarchists or social democrats, seems at first to support his selfidentification as an old-fashioned liberal. Yet there is something else which is implicit in this statement. For Nabokov, fascism is directly equivalent and equal to any level of engagement with the Soviet Union, refusing to mix with fascists was also a refusal to mix with Bolsheviks and Bolshevik sympathizers. Yet even this is not as it would at first appear. Disregarding this attempt to conflate two diametrically opposed ideological positions, his friendship with moderate representatives of both conservative and radical persuasions seems to suggest an openness to ideological dialogue, and an opposition to extremism. In essence it is partial acknowledgment of the concept of ideology as floating signifier. Dana Dragunoui’s article ‘“Invitation to a Beheading” and the Russian Radical Tradition’, and her later book Vladimir Nabokov and the Poetics of Liberalism, are of relevance to the present study because they address the importance of ideology in the works of Nabokov, albeit in a manner which is consistent with Nabokov’s own self-image. She attempts to locate Nabokov’s position within a liberal, idealist framework, in line with his self-identification as an ‘old-fashioned liberal’. For Dragunoui [Invitation to a Beheading’s] larger commitment is to refute the metaphysically materialist and epistemologically realist world view which became the official Ideology of the Soviet State, and to ally itself instead with the idealist systems championed by Russia’s liberal philosophers.11

Dragonoui locates the point of contact between Nabokov and these ‘idealist systems’ as ‘Symbolist writers and Idealist philosophers who championed spirituality over materialism, art over utility, and mysticism or idealism over positivism’ (Dragunoui: 55).

11

Dana Dragunoui, ‘“Invitation to a Beheading” and the Russian Radical Tradition’, Journal of Modern Literature, Vol. 25 (2001), 53–69 (54).

Ideology and the Ideological Aesthetic

7

The associations to which Dragonoui alludes are of course not as clear as is suggested. It is not enough to suggest that Nabokov’s liberalism (whatever its provenance) can be so easily explained as ‘spirituality over materialism’, a notion which appears to derive from a conflation of idealist philosophy and idealism in the political and social reformist sphere. Indeed, ‘spirituality’ is not what immediately comes to mind in connection with writers in the Russian liberal tradition such as Alexander Herzen, Vissarion Belinsky, or Ivan Turgenev. The ‘idealist’ systems which Russian liberals championed were never as uniform as to be grouped together in such a way, nor did they all derive from an opposition to a ‘metaphysically materialist’ epistemology. Nabokov’s self-designation as an ‘old-fashioned liberal’, which is a retrospective designation, must of course be read, as Dragonoui has done, within the context of Russian liberalism, but also within the context of classical liberalism as a wider international political movement which emphasizes civil liberties, representative democracy, the rule of law and economic freedom. Though it is perhaps these specific universal values which Nabokov has in mind when he speaks of his liberalism, we require an awareness of how these values figure within his work. Dragonoui correctly asserts that the young Nabokov maintained a close relationship to Symbolist poetry, and had familial connections with the ‘Russian Religious Philosophical Renaissance’ through his father’s acquaintance with Pavel Novgorodtsev and Pyotr Struve. In a letter to Edmund Wilson, Nabokov states that the ‘“decline” of Russian literature in 1905–1917 is a Soviet invention. […] Blok, Bely and Bunin and others wrote their best stuff in those days. […] I am a product of that period, I was bred in that atmosphere’ (NWL: 220). Such a statement would appear to give credence to Dragunoui’s thesis that Nabokov was the product of the ‘liberal’, ‘idealist’ tradition which surrounded Symbolism. However when one considers that among the Symbolist writers whom Nabokov most admired we have Andrei Bely, who Nabokov met: Once in 1922 or 1921 at a Berlin Restaurant where I was dining with two girls. I happened to be sitting back to back with Andrei Bely who was dining with another writer, Aleksey Tolstoy at the table behind me. Both writers were at the time frankly

8 Introduction pro-soviet (and on the point of returning to Russia), and a White Russian, which I still am in that particular sense, would certainly not wish to speak to a bolshevizan.12

There was also the poet Alexander Blok, whose controversial 1918 poem Dvenadtsat [The Twelve], with its depiction of a band of Bolshevik soldiers as the Twelve Apostles and the figure of Christ heading the march of revolution, cannot possibly be conceived as being completely in opposition to the ideology of the Soviet State. Dmitry Merezhkovsky was one of the main ideologues of the Symbolist movement, and the author of one of its main manifestos. Even before Nabokov was born, the proclamations in Merezhkovsky’s 1893 manifesto are strikingly similar to Nabokov’s own opinion of the role of the artist: The highest moral meaning of art does not lie in affecting moral tendencies, but in the selfless, incorruptible veracity of the artist, in his fearless sincerity.13

Yet Merezhkovsky, to borrow a phrase from Ernst Bloch, ‘ended up in Fascism’.14 It would be impossible to imagine a situation where Nabokov would have allied himself ideologically with Bely, Blok or Merezhkovsky, unless we are prepared to accept that even Dragunoui’s conception of ideology, while far from Larmour’s abbreviated outline of ideology as a ‘neutral’ and ‘non-pejorative’ form of discourse, also takes recourse to a reductive definition of ideology as merely ‘false consciousness’. In order to construct an appropriate theoretical framework to approach this study, we need to look towards a possible designation of ideology as a floating signifier, one which paradoxically possesses both a degree of semi-autonomy, but is also always present in full at any given point.

Interview with Alfred Appel Jr, Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, Vol. 8, No. 2 (1967), 147. My italics. 13 Dmitri Merezhkovsky, On the Causes of the Present Decline and the New Currents of Contemporary Russian Literature (St Petersburg, 1893), in Ralph E. Matlaw, trans., ‘The Manifesto of Russian Symbolism’, The Slavic and East European Journal, Vol. 1, No. 3 (1957), 177–191. 14 Ernst Bloch, ‘Discussing Expressionism’, Aesthetics and Politics (London: Verso, 1977), 16. 12

Ideology and the Ideological Aesthetic

9

On 14 November 1974, Nabokov sent a short congenial letter to the recently exiled Soviet writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn, congratulating him on his ‘passage to the free world, from our dreadful homeland’.15 He continues, noting that ‘ever since the vile times of Lenin, I have not ceased to mock the philistinism of Sovietized Russia and to thunder against the very kind of vicious cruelty of which you write and of which you will continue to write freely’ (SL: 528). Privately, Nabokov did not consider Solzhenitsyn to be a ‘great writer’, but felt compelled to break his rule of not making official political statements in order to offer this note of welcome. When confronted with the work of a writer such as Solzhenitsyn, whose narratives thrive on binary distinctions and clear delineations between moral and ethical propositions, it is permissible to simply take as a corollary Louis Althusser’s brief insight into the processes through which Art uses ideology to communicate the material conditions in which it was produced: What Art makes us see, and therefore gives us in the form of ‘seeing’, ‘perceiving’ and ‘feeling’ (which is not the form of knowing) is the ideology from which it is born, in which it bathes, from which it detaches itself as art, and to which it alludes. (LoA: 174)

Althusser maintains that writers such Solzhenitsyn and Balzac do not give us ‘any knowledge of the world they describe’ (LoA: 223) but instead make us ‘see’, ‘perceive’ and ‘feel’, ‘the reality of the ideology of that world’ (LoA: 175). Yet, it is clear, that the same form of analysis cannot be wholly applied to a writer such as Nabokov without some additional conditions. For Althusser, it is impossible to be outside of ideology: ‘Ideology has no outside (for itself )’ yet it is also ‘nothing but outside’ (IISA: 36). This

15

It is worth noting that Vera Nabokov wrote that ‘Although he does not consider Solzhenitsyn a great writer, he would never have “cackled” over the misfortunes of that heroic man’, an example of the beneficent sympathy, perhaps rightly, afforded Solzhenitsyn by individuals of various different political persuasions, who tended to politely overlook his lack of talent as a writer. It is also worth noting, as Slavoj Žižek has, that in contemporary Russia – Varlam Shalamov’s ‘Kolyma Tales’, which suffers less from the sentimentality and mystical moralizing of Solzhenitsyn, is the work which is most widely disseminated in the classroom to teach the history of the Gulags; see Selected Letters 1940–1977, 527–528.

10 Introduction

comprehensive definition of ideology does not seemingly allow for the realm of artistic endeavour to exist as an autonomous transcendental sphere, it ‘slides into all human activity’ and is ‘identical with the “lived” experience of human existence itself ’ (LoA: 175). This concept of ideology, as a ‘representation’ which also has an ahistorical ‘material existence’ was hinted at by one of Nabokov’s erstwhile countrymen, a member of the Bakhtin circle, the Russian/Soviet linguist Valentin Voloshinov in his Marxism and the Philosophy of Language.16 For Voloshinov, Any ideological product is not only itself a part of a reality (natural or social), just as is any physical body, any instrument of production, or any product for consumption, it also, in contradistinction to these other phenomena, reflects and refracts another reality outside itself.17

This process of ‘reflection’ and ‘refraction’ is interesting, and seems to be a more refined version of Georg Lukács’ somewhat reductive theory of the relationship between ideology and aesthetics,18 wherein art merely reflects the ideology of its material conditions of production. What is relevant for this study is that only ‘real art’, in Althusserian terms, is capable of transcending ideologies, while still maintaining a specific ‘relationship with ideology’ (LoA: 173). The exact definition of what constitutes ‘real art’ is unclear. Perhaps it is defined by the artists’ resistance to alienation from artistic labour in general, or by a specific resistance to the reification of the cultural artefact which is a product of such labour. In either case, we can insist that the works of Vladimir Nabokov be included within this category of ‘Real Art’. Yet the aim of this book is not to establish whether

Valentin Nikolaevich Voloshinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, trans. Ladislav Matejka and I. R. Titunik (New York: Seminar Press, 1973). I am aware of the debate which surrounds the authorship of some of Voloshinov’s work. While I am prepared to accept the obvious influence of Mikhail Bakhtin, I am sceptical of the possibility that this particular work represents anything other than Voloshinov’s own thought. 17 Voloshinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, 9. 18 Georg Lukács, ‘Realism in Balance’, in Theodor Adorno et al., Aesthetics and Politics (London: New Left Books, 1977). 16

Ideology and the Ideological Aesthetic

11

or not we may be permitted to consider Nabokov’s work in such a category. Since any transcendence of ideologies is contingent upon the work of art retaining a specific relation to ideology, it is vital to explore the transitional nature of this specific relationship. What shall become evident as we progress through our analyses of Nabokov’s oeuvre is a distinct shift in the way in which Nabokov’s ideology and his aesthetics are framed. Such a shift is distinctive insomuch as it simultaneously confirms Althusser’s tentative theory in his Letter on Art, whilst also suggesting a further elaboration of this same theory, which only becomes evident in works written at the conclusion of his career in the Russian Language such as Invitation to a Beheading and The Gift. In doing so, this book will attempt to give account of how the relationship between ideology and aesthetics is dialectically related and mutually constitutive; of how Nabokov’s class position and his political outlook informed his aesthetics, whilst also demonstrating how aesthetics became for Nabokov an ideology in and of itself. Althusser’s insistence on the epistemological break within the works of Marx, can be read as a rejection of totality; an attempt to purge Marxist dialectical materialism of Hegelian idealism. Yet Althusser’s was a rejection of totality only in part. What is relevant for the present study is that there remains an implicit attempt at mediation. In spite of the ‘semi-autonomous’ character of the Superstructure in his proposed schema, the Economic Base, in the last instance, ultimately determines the topographical sphere of culture and indeed of ideologies; ‘particular ideologies […] whatever their form’, he maintained, ‘always express class positions’(IISA: 33; emphasis in original). This trace of the dialectical approach, this attempt to reconcile a traditional Marxism rooted in Hegelian ‘totality’ with Althusser’s own anti-teleological definition of history,19 is vital to the present study. After all, Nabokov himself may not have been so averse to such a dialectical mediation, as is evident when we consider his conception of the temporal spiral in ‘Hegel’s triadic series […] (so popular in old Russia)’, where ‘twirl follows twirl, and every synthesis is the thesis of the next series’ (SM: 25). 19

‘History is a process without a subject or a telos’; see Louis Althusser, ‘A Reply to John Lewis’, Essays in Self Criticism, trans. Graham Lock (London: New Left Books, 1976), 99.

12 Introduction

The Althusserian elaboration and re-definition of ideology (not merely as ‘false consciousness’) will serve as the starting point, and will provide the impetus for ‘seeing’, ‘perceiving’ and ‘feeling’, the origination and development of the ‘ideological aesthetic’ in Nabokov’s oeuvre. Yet the inherent difficulty of this prose, the virtuoso and often ostentatious use of style, the complex and ambiguous allusions, its transitional elusiveness, its vast transnational frame of reference, and the opaque ethical and moral implications of such a corpus make it necessary to insist upon an additional approach, one which will further place Nabokov in company which he would have found distasteful. When one examines the voluminous scholarship on Nabokov, there appears to be a very strange and possibly unique tendency, which in a sense has restricted the paradigmatic and hermeneutic approaches that have been applied to the texts. This tendency, by no means completely uniform, is difficult to define, but seems to be related to a form of etiquette and politeness; a conscious effort not to inflict upon the author theories and philosophies which he publicly dismissed or despised. This has been the case with Marx, and perhaps more so with Freud. According to Richard Rorty, Nabokov resented Freud ‘in the same obsessive and intense way that Heidegger resented Nietzsche. In both cases, it was resentment of the precursor who may already have written all one’s best lines’.20 Yet in Freudian Psychoanalysis in general, and within the works of Jacques Lacan in particular, we are presented with a more stable and properly dialectical mediation between the Althusserian ‘semi-autonomy’ and Hegelian ‘totality’. This mediation was proposed by Frederic Jameson in his essay ‘Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan’,21 and expanded in his work The Political Unconscious. Lacan’s conceptual triumvirate of the operations of the human psyche, the categories of the ‘Imaginary’, ‘Symbolic’ and the ‘Real’, Jameson proposes, are of vital importance for Marxist criticism:

20 Richard Rorty, ‘The Barber of Kasbeam: Nabokov and Cruelty’, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 154. 21 Frederic Jameson, ‘Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan: Marxism, Psychoanalytic Criticism, and the Problem of the Subject’, Yale French Studies, No. 55/56, Literature and Psychoanalysis. The Question of Reading (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977), 338–395.

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[T]he distinction between the Imaginary and the Symbolic, and the requirement that a given analysis be able to do justice to the qualitative gap between them, may prove to be an invaluable instrument for measuring the range and limitations of a particular way of thinking. (IT: 99)

For Jameson, the purpose of a criticism which analyses a given text on its accumulation of ‘imageries’ is not to illustrate the ‘production of imagery’, but rather to illustrate its ‘mastery’ and ‘control’: Only by grasping images […] in this way, as that trace of the Imaginary, of sheer private or physiological experience, which has undergone the sea-change of the Symbolic, can criticism of this kind recover a vital and hermeneutic relationship to the literary text. (IT: 99)

The Lacanian ‘Imaginary’ is equivalent in this case to a refinement and elaboration of the Freudian ‘Id’, and is represented by the imagery of a given text – which, though subject to mastery and some degree of authorial control, nevertheless exists in a liminal stage within the symbolic order. Althusser’s seminal definition of ideology as a ‘representation’ of the ‘imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence’ (IISA: 36) is therefore significant in our analysis of the Ideological Aesthetic in the works of Vladimir Nabokov. If ideology is a ‘representation’ of the ‘imaginary’ relationship to the Lacanian real, we can make the tentative connection that an analysis of the ‘production’, ‘mastery’ or ‘control’ of imagery within a given text may yield a sense of ideological motivation. This is significant when we consider Nabokov’s resistance to political readings or the literature of ‘social intent’. In a letter to Edmund Wilson written in 1956, Nabokov criticizes Wilson’s preface to the collected works of Chekhov which emphasized their political and social significance. Nabokov argues that ‘a critic’s duty should be to draw attention to the specific detail, to the unique image without which […] there can be no art, no genius’ (NWL: 298). The significance of the interaction between ideology and aesthetics can only be obtained through an examination of what Jameson defines as the ‘sheer private or physiological experience’ of imagery and texture – rather than through an exclusive analysis of the

14 Introduction

few obvious, often misleading, instances of ideological engagement in Nabokov’s works, which have already featured prominently in past studies. The Althusserian definition of ideology also informs Jameson’s study of the novels of Wyndham Lewis.22 The present study similarly aims to consider works by a writer whose perceived political position seems to preclude an engagement with a diametrically opposed theoretical framework. The subtitle of Jameson’s work ‘The Modernist as Fascist’, in no way applies to Nabokov, whose only discernible political commitment was to anti-fascism and anti-Bolshevism respectively, which, despite various attempts to conflate the two terms, will remain distinct in this study. Jameson’s study on Lewis is a ‘practical exploration’ of Althusser’s definition, wherein [i]deology must always be necessarily narrative in its structure, inasmuch as it not only involves a mapping of the real, but also the essentially narrative or fantasy attempt of the subject to invent a place for himself/herself in a collective and historical process which excludes him or her and which is itself basically nonrepresentable and nonnarrative. (WLMF: 12)

Nabokov, as an émigré novelist, needs to be considered as the product of political and geographical exile; his work as a literature which is written outside of, but always referent to, the centre of its national culture. It is perhaps for this reason that Nabokov’s works, even those of the later periods, retain for some a sense of innate Russianness. One is reminded of a stanza in the 1908 poem Rossiya by Alexander Blok, where Blok expresses feelings that his country, with its traditions and dreary landscapes are an inseparable part of himself: Россия, нищая Россия, Мне избы серые Твои Твои мне песни ветровые Как слезы первые любви23

22 Frederic Jameson, Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, The Modernist as Fascist (London: Verso, 2008). 23 Alexander Blok, ‘Rossyia’ (1908), Sobranie Sochinenii v Dvenadtsati Tomakh (Moskva: Progress-Pleiada), Vol. III, 40. The translation is my own.

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[Russia, poor Russia, / To me your log huts of grey/ To me your songs born of the wind/ Are as the tears of first love.]

Perhaps for Nabokov, a sentimentalized version of ‘Old’ Russia plays a similar role, as a fixed point of reference for his writing. Perhaps an attempt to recreate a place for himself within this imagined country may be one of the main motivations behind his art. Such a perspective will not only allow us to assess the importance of the aesthetic use of ‘fantasy’ for Nabokov in opposing the processes of historical and cultural exclusion. It will also afford us the opportunity to analyse the ways in which sentimentality informs the structure of these fantasy narratives, and will ultimately allow us to ‘see’, ‘perceive’ and ‘feel’ its relationship to the Real. For Jameson, the Lacanian ‘real’ is history itself, and it will always resist symbolization in Art and indeed in human consciousness. Much like a subjective notion of the world outside of individual consciousness, it can never be fully grasped, as it is always contingent upon a number of different factors which refract the reality of material conditions. Jameson maintains that ‘Althusser’s anti-teleological formula for history (neither subject nor telos)’ is related to ‘Lacan’s notion of the Real as that which “resists symbolization altogether”’ (PU: 34–35). Thus, if the Real is history itself, and in psychoanalysis this history is that of the subject, ‘a confrontation between this particular materialism and the historical materialism of Marx can no longer be postponed’ (ISL: 384). If the act of literary production is a way of mediating, through fantasy and symbolization, the sentimental sphere of the imaginary in an attempt at representation of the real of historical material conditions, then it follows that there will remain a specific version of history within any given text. Through an analysis of this particular version of history, of the disparity between the ‘real’ and ‘imagined’ self, an insight into the relationship between ideology and aesthetics in Nabokov’s works may be obtained. If we are at least willing to entertain the possibility that certain facets of Vladimir Nabokov’s aesthetics retain latent political characteristics, that it possesses a natural propensity towards liberalism, an unlikely Marxist sympathy, or even conservatism in Khodasevich’s generous terms (both literal and/or political), then the proposed critique of the Nabokovian Aesthetic, which like all carefully constructed aesthetic systems is inherently

16 Introduction

ideological, may be attempted. Such possibilities need not denigrate the aesthetic value of the works, nor should it detrimentally affect its moral, ethical or metaphysical depths. For example, it is an accepted proposition even in Marxist historiography that the initial critiques of capitalism have originated on the right (WLMF: 18), identifying symptomatic conditions of societal alienation, commodification and, perhaps most significantly, the reification of artistic labour. Yet the inevitable failings of such critiques can be attributed to the reactionary disposition of such a flawed perspective, inflected with sentimental nostalgia in opposition only to the nature of modernity (and the resultant decline in standards of morality, ethics, community, etc.), ignoring, or indeed tacitly accepting, the material hegemonic conditions, class divisions and ‘Ideological’ and ‘Repressive’ state apparatuses24 which constitute, and sustain, this very nature. It is with regard to the ways in which the artist can oppose the reification of artistic labour, and capitalist hegemony, that is the specific site of the divergence of Marxist literary criticism itself. In The Theory of the Novel (1916) Georg Lukács posited that the nineteenth-century realist novel was the formal embodiment of the fragmented reified existence of contemporaneous lived experience, while satisfying the demands of his totalizing vision of history. Disregarding his resistance to subjective forms of interpretation which were offered within the fields of psychoanalysis, and his much noted opposition to the perceived decadence of modernist aesthetics, it is worth noting Georg Lukács was perhaps the first dialectical materialist to expand and elaborate the Marxist concept of reification, and to extend its application systematically into the sphere of culture. For Jameson, Lukács’s initial insistence on the importance of form over content cannot be abandoned when attempting to construct a properly Marxist hermeneutic. For Theodor Adorno, Lukács’s dismissal of modernism as a symptomatic reflex of reified Capitalist society – bore resemblance to the opinions expressed in reactionary media: Newspapers and magazines of the radical Right constantly stir up indignation against what is unnatural, over-intellectual, morbid and decadent: they know their readers.

24 The terms, of course, belong to Louis Althusser.

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The insights of social psychology into the authoritarian personality confirm them. The basic features of this type include conformism, respect for a petrified façade of opinion and society […]. This hostility to anything alien or alienating can accommodate itself much more easily to literary realism of any provenance, even if it proclaims itself critical or socialist, than to works which swear allegiance to no political slogans, but whose mere guise is enough to disrupt the whole system […].25

Lukács’s teleological analysis of modernism as symptomatic decadence ignores the aesthetic value of the atonal music of Arnold Schoenberg, or the similarly atonal literature of Samuel Beckett. For Adorno, the aesthetic value of a work of art is to be found in its ability to formally resist reification. Lukács’s denunciation of modernist aesthetics is problematic in several ways. His initial insistence on the importance of form within the nineteenth-century novel, would suggest an ability to recognize that the formal repudiation of reification present in modernist narratives would also bestow upon them the aesthetic value which he so readily conferred upon the realist novel. Yet his rejection of modernism is itself a symptomatic result of his reductive conception of ideology, as Jameson notes: What is really wrong with Lukacs’s analyses is not too frequent and facile a reference to social class, but rather too incomplete and intermittent a sense of the relationship of class to ideology. A case in point is one of the more notorious of Lukács’s basic concepts, that of ‘decadence’ – which he often associates with fascism, but even more persistently with modern art and literature in general. The concept of decadence is the equivalent in the aesthetic realm of that of ‘false consciousness’ in the domain of traditional ideological analysis. Both suffer from the same defect – the common presupposition that in the world of culture and society such a thing as pure error is possible.26

Lukács’s proposed hermeneutic, reliant on the definition of ideology as merely ‘false consciousnesses’, cannot conceive of a literature which possesses aesthetic value through the practice of formal innovation, irrespective of its

Theodor Adorno, ‘Commitment’, Aesthetics and Politics, trans. Francis McDonagh (London: New Left Books, 1977), 179. 26 Frederic Jameson, ‘Reflections in Conclusion’, Aesthetics and Politics, trans. Francis McDonagh (London: New Left Books, 1977), 201. 25

18 Introduction

purported ideological motivation. This conception of ideology, which is not unrelated to those proposed by Larmour and Dragunoui, is incompatible with the study of the works of a writer such as Nabokov where form is afforded an equal, if not greater, position of importance than content. In this respect, Pierre Macherey’s A Theory of Literary Production, which elaborated upon some of the tentative insights provided by Althusser in his Letter on Art is particularly relevant: What can be said of the work can never be confused with what the work itself is saying, because two distinct kinds of discourse which differ in both form and content are being superimposed. Thus, between the writer and the critic, an irreducible difference must be posited right from the beginning: not the difference between two points of view on the same object, but the exclusion separating two forms of discourse that have nothing in common. (TLP: 7)

The overarching aim of this book is to read these texts in a way in which they have not so far been read, and in doing so, to reveal the fundamental and irreconcilable tension which exists between what Nabokov wished to convey through his writing and what he was ideologically compelled to express instead. It is only through an examination of the gaps and inconsistencies within a work that we may be permitted to assess how ideology contorts and distorts the symbolic order of the text, thus allowing a greater understanding of what constitutes this ideology. If such an analysis is to be attempted, however, then it is then necessary to insist upon Macherey’s ‘irreducible difference’ between the critic and the author. It must also be noted that the majority of scholarly criticism of Nabokov has failed to uphold this necessity. Such a failure derives from a deferential conviction that the most significant aspects of Nabokov’s fiction coincide almost entirely with the aesthetic, philosophical, and political opinions expressed in various interviews, lectures, essays, and aphorisms – and that these in themselves form a moral, metaphysical, and ethical framework with which to approach the work itself. For David Rampton, the theories Frederic Jameson proposes as to how academics should approach literature are anathema to ‘the notions

Ideology and the Ideological Aesthetic

19

of reading and authorship so widespread in Nabokov Studies’.27 He identifies within a homogeneous body of criticism an adherence to Nabokov’s own indefinable idea of ‘aesthetic bliss’ which is, by definition, at odds with Jameson’s ‘aggressive materialist critique of the idea of a unitary self ’ (Rampton: 3). Opposition to materialist or psychoanalytic critiques within Nabokovian scholarship, for the reasons detailed before, are partly responsible for such homogeneity. Yet such a resistance can never be unidirectional, and in this sense, much of the responsibility lies with Marxist criticism. In studying the works of Wyndham Lewis in 1979, Jameson sought to delve into uncomfortable territory for Marxist scholarship. Jameson sought to convey how a literature seemingly written in the service of an abhorrent political ideology, could contain elements of repressed historical anxiety and trauma. Lewis’s stylistically impressive prose contains within it pockets of resistance to capitalist hegemony, denunciations of the corruption of liberal societies, of the reification of artistic labour and the commoditization of the cultural artefact. Lewis was a notably antagonistic writer with questionable political affiliations, but he was also a unique and very gifted stylist. His style functions in a particular way, as the ‘registering apparatus for forces which he means to record, beyond any whitewashing and liberal revisionism, in all their primal ugliness’ (WMLF: 21). If we disregard, if only momentarily, Nabokov the aesthete, the collector of rare and beautiful lepidoptera and the proponent of ‘aesthetic bliss’, what remains is a collection of works which contain more conscious – and unconscious – images of ‘primal ugliness’ than we can even count; innumerable suicides, murder, racism, xenophobia, anti-Semitism, child abuse and cruelty in all of its conceivable manifestations. Moreover, all too often it is a cruelty which is a product of the societies which Nabokov’s characters inhabit. Yet for Jameson, Nabokov’s books only ‘seem constantly on the point of urging us to make up a private list of our own favorite sentences’ (MP: 373). The dismissive remarks which Jameson made regarding Nabokov amount to about a handful of sentences in all. Jameson found more interest in the works of the Quebecois writer Hubert Aquin, as opposed to his ‘one 27 David Rampton, ‘As We Like It: Nabokov and the Passions of Reading’, Cycnos, Vol. 24, No.1, 3.

20 Introduction

identifiable forebear and literary alter ego: Nabokov, whose exile literature, peopled with doubles and indulgent autoreflexivity, presents many instructive parallels with Aquin’s own books’ (MP: 372). He finds Nabokov’s ‘ingenuities’ comparable to those of ‘any professional detective-story novelist’ (MP: 373). The justification which Jameson provides for his study of the novels of Wyndham Lewis, or those of any other writer whose formal inventiveness and style has piqued his interest, should be sufficient to warrant an engagement with Nabokov’s works according to his supposed adherence to an ‘immanent critique’. The belief that such an engagement is long overdue is the primary motivation behind this present study. This book follows a specific analytical course through Nabokov’s oeuvre in the years 1926 to 1939, which roughly corresponds with the year in which he published his first Russian novel to when he wrote his first in English. With the exception of the first chapter – which considers works from the beginning and the end – it is effectively chronological. It also omits entirely the works of the American and Swiss periods and, perhaps most surprisingly of all, merely lingers momentarily (and in passing) on his most famous and totemic work: Lolita. These omissions are not the result of self-conscious contrarianism, and the decision to forgo contributing to the voluminous criticism already extant on the subject was, as shall become evident, unavoidable due to the underlying theoretical logic of this present study, which holds the political and biographical events of Nabokov’s formative years as a writer as the most germane to his ideological aesthetic. The first chapter begins with an analysis of two plays: The Man from the USSR and The Waltz Invention. The analyses of these two works is supplemented by an engagement with Nabokov’s own lectures on theatre, and attempts to consider his limited dramatic output within the context of contemporary Russian and European theatre. The decision to begin this study not with Nabokov’s first attempts at prose fiction but with his little-known, and largely overlooked, plays was wholly intentional. The two plays, the first written at the beginning of his career as a Russian writer, the second before his transition into English, are relevant to questions of politics and ideology – and my analysis is focused on the conflict which arises when a novelist who holds a belief in the singularity of artistic genius, is compelled to work within an unfamiliar medium which relies on collaboration.

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The second chapter considers how Nabokov responded to the ideological and artistic conflicts of the early 1930s, through an examination of two works from that period: The Eye (1930) and Despair (1932). Using both the historical and artistic contexts in which these works were written as an impetus, we will to explore Nabokov’s complex attitude to Russian modernism through a consideration of his relationship to Russian Symbolism and contemporary Soviet fiction. In the course of these analyses, we will elaborate on various issues relating to mythology, sexual politics, the emergent theories of Freud, and Marxist political economy, in order to determine the philosophical underpinnings of a nascent ideological position. The third chapter examines a novel which is often considered to be Nabokov’s most politically charged: Invitation to a Beheading (1934). Taking account of the circumstances of its composition, in the midst of his last and longest Russian novel The Gift, the analysis of this chapter focuses upon Nabokov’s resistance to materialist epistemology as exemplified by Russia’s radical critics of the 1860s and their influence on the contemporary cultural politics of the Soviet Union. Through a close examination of the many allusions and textual subtleties of the work, supplemented by Nabokov’s own critical writings and correspondence, I shall argue how this work represents a further elaboration of Nabokov’s ideological aesthetic, and sets the stage for the complex interventions into the socio-political sphere which are present within his next novel, The Gift. The fourth chapter of the book analyses Nabokov’s longest novel, which was also the last which he wrote in Russian: The Gift. Through extended textual analysis, we will examine further the antagonism between subjective and universal values which are present through all of the preceding works and will attempt to highlight the possible philosophical influences on Nabokov’s emergent sense of ideology. This chapter will also examine the tension between the personal and the political, not only in his fictionalized biography of Nikolai Chernyshevsky, but also through considering how the life of The Gift’s protagonist Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev so closely resembles an idealized version of his own. The fifth and final chapter of this work takes into consideration his first English novel, a work which is rarely given prominence among Nabokov’s many celebrated novels in English: The Real Life of Sebastian Knight.

22 Introduction

Continuing the examination of the tension between the personal and the political which is present in The Gift, we will have cause to observe how this work represents a speculative biography – a distorted mirror image to Nabokov’s own. Through a consideration of the tumultuous and polarizing political and aesthetic context in which the work was completed, in addition to a close textual analysis, I intend to demonstrate how, through the complex aesthetic construction of this work; Nabokov sought to champion an ideological position which had at its centre an uncompromising commitment to individualism and aesthetic autonomy.

Chapter 1

The Ruthless Schemers of Tomsk and Atomsk: The Man from the USSR and The Waltz Invention

I wish to point out most emphatically that not only is there in my play no political ‘message’ […] but that publication of its English version today has no topical import; nor would I have attempted to invent my poor Waltz today lest any part of me, even my shadow, even one shoulder of my shadow, might seem thereby to join in those ‘peace’ demonstrations conducted by old knaves and young fools, the only result of which is to give the necessary peace of mind to the ruthless schemers in Tomsk and Atomsk. — Foreword, The Waltz Invention

‘The one and only stage convention I accept’, Nabokov maintained, is that the ‘people you see or hear can under no circumstances see or hear you’ (PW: 315). This quote, rendered in his customarily perfunctory manner, taken from one of only a handful of theoretical lectures Nabokov produced on theatre, summarizes his attitude towards the dramatic art. A ‘closer analogy’, he continues, ‘is the relation between an individual and outside nature’. The reasons why the dramatic form, and its performance, seemed so inimical to Nabokov’s aesthetic sensibilities may appear, on first glance at least, to be self-evident. For a writer who possessed such a degree of confidence in his own abilities, and who had such indefatigable belief in the singularity of his artistic vision, the theatre’s emphasis on collaboration and mutual artistic synergy must have seemed opposed to his aesthetic vision. ‘By nature I am no dramatist’1 is the well-known confession from the foreword to his screenplay of Lolita, and given the fact that 1

Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita: A Screenplay (New York: Vintage, 1997), ix.

24

Chapter 1

his entire theatrical output consists of four plays and a smattering of closet dramas, it would be easy enough for us to concede that, compared to the multifaceted virtuosity of his prose; his dramatic works seem at best to be merely competent. Yet the reasons behind Nabokov’s somewhat hostile, generally ambivalent, opinions are perhaps far more complex than would at first appear. As we shall see, an analysis of the dramatic apparatus of two plays written at different stages during his émigré period reveal, far more conspicuously than in his fiction, a developing engagement with the transitioning political landscapes of Europe and Soviet Russia. Nabokov’s vast novelistic output is, of course, the central object of study within Nabokovian scholarship and as such, within the negligible amount of criticism which exists on Nabokov’s plays there is a general tendency to read the plays as literary texts – which, if we are to take his theoretical writings on dramaturgy at face value, exactly coincides with the author’s stated intention. Siggy Frank, in her study of Nabokov’s dramatic output (the first book dedicated solely to this subject) perceptively notes the tone of previous scholarship on the subject: The first critic to turn to Nabokov’s plays was Simon Karlinsky. His analysis of Russian subtexts in the plays seems to have set the tone for subsequent studies in that it treats the dramas as literary texts in dramatic form. Subsequent criticism related to Nabokov’s dramatic oeuvre also tends to concentrate on characterisation, ethical and metaphysical problems, and dramatic and literary subtexts – in short on mimetic rather than performative features of the play.2

It is perhaps this emphasis on text over performance which has led to the obfuscation of the ideological aspects of Nabokov’s plays. After all performance is, in essence, an intrinsic part of ideology insomuch as the individual, although perhaps not fully aware of yet being a subject of ideology, nevertheless performs in a way which is consistent with a certain political position which has yet to be given a specific designation. Individuals are always ideological subjects, even if unaware of their position as such, and the process of ideological self-identification is achieved through an action 2

Siggy Frank, Nabokov’s Theatrical Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 2. Further references are given in parentheses.

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which Althusser defines as ‘interpellation’, or ‘hailing’. ‘Ideology’, Althusser maintained, ‘interpellates individuals as subjects’ (IISA: 44). It is therefore only with this external impetus, that an individual awakens to their status as existing within ideology. What is significant is that a subject may attempt to self-interpellate, in much the same way as the subject may attempt to symbolize the Lacanian Real – but such a task will inevitably be unsuccessful without the presence of this external call, or ‘hail’. The focus on the textual aspects of Nabokov’s plays in past scholarship remains unsatisfactory partly because of the concentration on the mimetic over the performative which Frank highlights. The plays which Nabokov produced, largely due to financial constraints, were often commissioned and – despite the opinions expressed later in his dramatic lectures – they were in fact written to be performed. Therefore, through the simultaneous analysis of the mimetic and performative aspects of the plays, we may be able to identify Nabokov’s unconscious ‘attempts’ at interpellation. The specific coordinates of this ideological position, which is the perennial concern of the present study, are unsurprisingly opaque. However, Nabokov’s theoretical and practical ideas towards drama and theatrical production may provide us with the basis for further exposition. As Frank notes, Nabokov’s dramatic principles sound singularly old-fashioned for the 1940s, especially when seen in the context of his formally and stylistically innovative novels. His advocacy of a realist stage in the manner of Stanislavsky favours a theatrical tradition which had already come of age during Russia’s Silver Age several decades earlier. (Frank: 66)

Nabokov’s theatrical sensibilities were indeed steeped in the realist tradition of the Russian Silver Age, and the theatre of the Russian emigration of the 1920s, like much of its literature, was inherently suspicious of formal experimentation due to its perceived association with radical leftist politics and the Soviet Union. Nabokov was aware of the associations which avant-garde theatre had with the communist politics which he despised. His theatrical influences, Shakespeare, Gogol, Chekov and Ibsen (with ‘reservations’), seem an amalgamation of recognized classics of the Russian and European tradition. Yet, when Nabokov wrote his first play ‘The Tragedy

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of Mr. Morn’ in 1923–1924, the European dramatic tradition was already beginning to seismically shift politically. Nabokov expressed a reserved admiration for a production of The Government Inspector by Vsevolod Meyerhold which he saw in Berlin in 1930. He recalled that ‘Meyerhold, in spite of all his additions and distortions, offered a stage version […] which conveyed something of the real Gogol’ (NG: 38). Nabokov’s appreciation of this production, which was widely celebrated across Europe, could perhaps be attributed to the fact that it was, in comparison to the experimental nature of most of Meyerhold’s corpus, unconventional but formally standard. This, of course, reinforces Nabokov’s conventional preference for realist drama, but also suggests that the qualities which he tended to admire within drama were interchangeable with those which he admired in literary fiction. Yet there is perhaps another reason why Nabokov’s praise of Meyerhold’s Government Inspector was so muted. The previous year, Meyerhold – one of the first Russian theatre practitioners to embrace the Bolshevik revolution – published an essay entitled ‘The Reconstruction of the Theatre’. In this landmark essay, Meyerhold presents his vision of the unrealized political potential of the theatre: Today’s aesthetics must take account of the new standards which have been created by new social conditions. The art of today is different from the art of feudal or bourgeois society. We must understand clearly what we mean by beauty and reject all beauty that is not utilitarian. We need beauty today as much as we ever did in order to counteract the effects of ‘oblomovism’ whose roots are spreading rapidly through our society.3

By 1929, Meyerhold’s innovative aesthetics had evolved a great deal since 1905, when Stanislavsky invited the former to present his experiments to the prestigious Moscow Art Theatre Studio. While his early work demonstrated a distinctly realist tendency, Symbolism was the most obvious influence on his productions in the intervening period before the Russian 3

Vsevolod Meyerhold, ‘The Reconstruction of the Theatre’, in Vassiliki Kolocotroni, Jane Goldman and Olga Taxidou, eds, Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press), 242.

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Revolution of 1917. However, having joined the Communist Party in 1918, and having established the State Experimental Theatrical Studio in 1923, Meyerhold began to produce some of his most acclaimed and politically charged productions, such as Mayakovsky’s The Bedbug. Meyerhold’s influence was felt most poignantly in Germany, and the experimental techniques such as ‘Biomechanics’ which he propagated were taken up by a new generation of radical dramatists such as Erwin Piscator and Bertolt Brecht, who incorporated and expanded them into their emergent concept of epic theatre. For Brecht, the work of the Playwright was only one component within the collective collaboration of the theatrical spectacle, which he envisioned to be a unified ‘total work of art’ (Gesamtkunstwerk), consistent with his ideological adherence to the Marxist concept of totality: Once the content becomes, technically speaking, an independent component, to which text, music and setting ‘adopt attitudes’; once illusion is sacrificed to free discussion, and once the spectator, instead of being enabled to have an experience, is forced as it were to cast his vote; then a change has been launched which goes far beyond formal matters and begins for the first time to affect the theatre’s social function.4

The notion of the spectator being compelled to rise from his passive state in order to ‘cast his vote’ is completely at odds with Nabokov’s ‘only’ stage convention, where the ‘people you see or hear can under no circumstances see or hear you’. Making the spectators participate in the spectacle, to make them ‘play, too’, Nabokov maintained, was one of those ‘collectivist and mass-loving notions that are a blight in regard to all art’ (ToT: 315). In the final part of the lecture ‘Playwriting’, Nabokov links his only dramatic convention to a distinctly individualistic philosophy of existence where ‘in life, too, any attempt at tampering with the world or any attempt by the world to tamper with me is risky business even if in both cases the best intentions are implied’ (PW: 322). For Erwin Piscator, whose productions of Shakespeare Nabokov deemed ‘nauseating’, ‘trashy concoctions’ (ToT: 327), any form of theatre which emphasized individualism over the 4

Bertolt Brecht, ‘The Modern Theatre is the Epic Theatre’ (1930), in Vassiliki Kolocotroni, Jane Goldman and Olga Taxidou, eds, Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press), 468.

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collective effort of dramatic production, was manifestly reactionary. He maintained that the Great War had finally buried bourgeois individualism under a hail of steel and a holocaust of fire. Man, the individual, existing as an isolated being, independent (at least seemingly) of social connections, revolving egocentrically around the concept of the self, in fact lies buried beneath a marble slab inscribed ‘The Unknown Soldier’.5

If we are to take Brecht and Piscator’s view that attitudes towards dramaturgy and dramatic performance should be politicized, then Nabokov’s insistence on the centrality of the playwright, and of the importance of the dramatic text, can then be viewed as an ideological act; in this case, if unconsciously, in opposition to totality. The uneasiness which Nabokov felt towards theatre stemmed from an initial aversion, and later hatred of collaboration or any type of collective action, and for individualism above all else: [A] play will be created by the management, the actors, the stagehands – and a couple of meek scriptwriters whom nobody heeds; it will be based on collaboration, and collaboration will certainly never produce anything as permanent as can be the work of one man because however much talent the collaborators may individually possess the final result will unavoidably be a compromise between talents, a certain average, a trimming and clipping, a rational number distilled out of a fusion of irrational ones. (ToT: 315)

Heroism and Self-Delusion in The Man from the USSR Written as a commission in the autumn of 1926, the first act of The Man from the USSR was published in the émigré journal Rul [The Rudder] on 1 January 1927, and was first staged by Yuri Ofrosimov’s theatrical troupe Gruppa at the Grotrian-Steinweg music hall in Berlin on 1 April the same 5

Erwin Piscator, ‘Basic Principles of Sociological Drama’, in Vassiliki Kolocotroni, Jane Goldman and Olga Taxidou, eds, Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press), 242.

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year. The play consists of four acts set in the Russian émigré community in Berlin of the 1920s. As a result of the formulation of the Novaya Ekonomicheskaya Politika (NEP) in the USSR, for seven years, until the advent of Stalin’s first ‘Five Year Plan’ in 1928, a policy of limited ‘state capitalism’ was enacted whereby small private entrepreneurial ventures were permitted in Russia. The central character Alexei Kuznetsov is an émigré entrepreneur who, using his business activities as a cover, is acting to set up an anti-Bolshevik resistance network in the USSR. The action centres around ten frenzied days which Kuznetsov spends back in émigré Berlin before returning to Russia and (we are to presume) his certain death. It was in the summer of 1926, before he began work on The Man from the USSR, that Nabokov had a brief involvement in an anti-Bolshevik society organized by Nikolay Yakovlev and his wife called VIR, whose aim, as Boyd has stated, was to ‘combat Bolshevism on an ideological level’ (RY: 261). Boyd gives an account of the reasons why Nabokov may have chosen to join such a society: To understand the Nabokovs’ readiness to join this secret society, one needs to realize how active Soviet agents were even in the emigration’s literary circles. One of Nabokov’s own pupils had been a GPU agent who infiltrated the Union of Russian Writer’s in Berlin. Other instances of infiltration abounded in the late 1920s […]. Nabokov’s voluble friend Ivan Lukash later turned out to have been regularly though unwittingly pumped by the famous cabaret singer Nadezhda Plevitskaya and her husband General Skoblin, unmasked in 1938 as Soviet agents. Marina Tsvetaeva, many in the emigration thought, could not have been ignorant of the fact that her husband, Sergey Efron […] had murdered for the GPU. (RY: 261)

Thus it was in a climate of hysterical paranoia that this play, which captures this collective unease about Soviet infiltration among émigré ranks, was written and staged. The theme of espionage and betrayal, and in particular the story of General Skoblin, is one which Nabokov would return to in his short story The Assistant Producer (1943), which in turn acted as inspiration for the Nouvelle Vague director Eric Rohmer’s penultimate film Triple Agent (2004). Given Nabokov’s hopes for some form of substantial financial return from his first theatrical commission, it is of course no coincidence that this play has such a populist and accessible theme, and one which would resonate with the everyday experiences of its intended

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audience. Writing with an audience in mind is a practice which Nabokov would never allow to affect his prose. Yet despite his retrospective insistence that the ‘only audience that a playwright must imagine is the ideal one […], himself ’ (ToT: 342) – his lack of interest in being considered a playwright, coupled with financial necessity, meant that in this case he was willing to compromise his otherwise stringent aesthetic principles. This is significant insomuch as a portrayal of the prevalent émigré political attitudes requires one not only to have an awareness of such attitudes, but also to engage with them. Yet, as we shall see, Nabokov does not merely address his émigré audience’s concerns from a completely sympathetic perspective but also subtly critiques their lives and opinions. We referred earlier to the fact that Nabokov and his wife lost interest in Yakovlev’s secret society due to its lack of concrete progress and attributed this loss of interest to a possible belief that there remained other ways to ‘ideologically’ oppose Bolshevism. This play perhaps represents the first of such attempts. The central themes of the play are love and sacrifice. Kuznetsov, fearing potential blackmail from the Soviets if he were to be found out, has separated from his wife Olga, whom he secretly continues to love, and is loved by her in return. In order to distract Olga from his true feelings, and to protect her from any physical and emotional harm, he conducts various frivolous affairs – one in particular with the conceited and superficial Russian film actress Marianna Tal. Olga, however, is fully aware of her husband’s feelings and she herself affects indifference towards him in order that his emotions do not interfere with his important revolutionary work. The play ends with a fated exchange before Kuznetsov is to return to the USSR, where both husband and wife in turn reveal their true feelings for each other. Superficially, it is a storyline which in many ways reflects the melodramatic notions of sacrifice and duty present in the tritest of Socialist Realist literature. It should be noted that in 1926, in preparation for a speech entitled ‘A few words on the wretchedness of Soviet literature and an attempt to determine its cause’ (RY: 260), Nabokov had spent his time ‘reading so intensely in Soviet fiction (Leonov, Seyfulina) that when someone shouted in the yard he wondered where this German voice could have come from’ (RY: 260). It is then, through this exposure to what he thought to be the ‘wretchedness’ of Soviet literature, that Nabokov sought

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to present a work which simultaneously adheres to this vulgar profundity, of whatever political persuasion (something which, years later, he would famously term poshlust), but also seeks to question this innate human desire for such straightforward deterministic moralizing. He observed this tendency even within his émigré contemporaries and their desire for ‘bourgeois theatre’: The Soviet tragedies are in fact the last word in the cause-and-effect pattern, plus something that the bourgeois stage is helplessly groping for: a good machine god that will do away with the need to search for a plausible final effect. The god, coming inevitably at the end of Soviet tragedy and indeed regulating the whole play, is none other than the idea of the perfect state as understood by communists. I do not wish to imply that what irritates me here is propaganda. In fact, I don’t see why if, say, one type of theatre may indulge in patriotic propaganda or democratic propaganda another cannot indulge in communist propaganda. I don’t see any difference because, perhaps, all kinds of propaganda leave me perfectly cold whether their subject appeals to me or not. But what I do mean is that whenever propaganda is contained in a play the determinist chain is drawn still tighter around the throat of the tragic muse. (ToT: 338–339)

However, it must be said that the task of subverting the ‘deterministic’ form is not something which Nabokov accomplishes successfully, and the work in its entirety has many weak points. Much like his debut novel, Mary, Nabokov depicts the dreary everyday circumstances of émigré life; poverty, uncertainty and alienation. Yet, given Nabokov’s natural uneasiness with the medium, these themes are represented in a very plain straightforward manner, which at times borders on naïve melodramatic candour. The protagonist, Kuznetsov, who all the characters admire and love for his wit, generosity and charm, is in no way endearing – his wife Olga’s devotion to him seems inauthentic and all too predictable. Of the other characters in the play there is very little to say; half-formed vignettes, or clichéd composites of émigré characters who only function as vehicles for prevalent opinions. What is most interesting, however, is that in spite of Nabokov’s purported indifference to propaganda, the play has some very glaring propagandistic elements. Defending the play, Boyd maintains that due to his preference for ‘a language that could escape the limiting moment of impromptu speech’ he ‘chose dialogue barer and more realistic than Pinter’s, quite shorn of

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imagery and rhetorical effects, and found substitutes for everything that these constraints ruled out in new resources of theatrical construction he had to discover for himself ’ (RY: 263). This analysis, aside from giving a prime example of Boyd’s unwavering generosity towards his subject, is unsatisfactory on several different levels. The language does not strike one as particularly ‘bare’ or ‘realistic’ and, as we shall see when examining the dialogue in more detail, an emphasis on the production of ‘imagery’ and ‘rhetorical effects’ and their significance within the sphere of the political, and indeed propaganda, is perhaps one of the main features of this play in particular, and in Nabokov’s dramatic output in general. Another interesting facet of the play, as many contemporary critics noted, is that there is a distinct lack of dramatic action. Dmitri Nabokov notes in an introductory essay on his father’s dramatic works that Nabokov creates the illusion […] that the real action is taking place elsewhere. This is true in a general sense: one has the feeling that the interpersonal relations around which the play itself revolves are overshadowed by much larger events occurring outside the stage, outside the theatre, outside the country.6

Events which occur outside of the character’s immediate surroundings are a characteristic of Nabokov’s work of this period; but the presence of the external national cultural referent, Russia, would later go on to be a pervasive influence in most, if not all, of Nabokov works of both periods, with the possible exception of Lolita. In The Man from The USSR, two versions of Russia are present, and constantly in conflict with each other. On one level, Russia is represented as an irrevocably lost idyllic, noble and tender homeland defiled and debased by philistine Soviet tyranny. Conversely, the faults of the cast of émigré characters – their unpleasant prejudices, false principles and vulgar materialism – seems to paint an entirely different picture of pre-revolutionary Russian society. However, the gentle and compassionate way in which the characters are portrayed seems to suggest that in 1926 Nabokov too was guilty of sentimentalizing the virtues of

6

Dmitri Nabokov, ‘Nabokov and the Theatre’, The Man from the USSR and Other Plays (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1985), 7.

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his lost country. It is this specific aspect of the play, along with its subject matter, which imbues it with a conspicuously tendentious quality which is far better concealed in his fiction of the time. The Man from the USSR contains extensively detailed and thoughtful stage directions, which further evidences that this play was, indeed, written to be performed. The play begins in media res, at Viktor Ivanovich Oshivesnky’s down-at-heel basement tavern, lackadaisically decorated in the fashion of a Tsarist-era restaurant: Small tavern in a basement. In the back, a narrow horizontal window – a strip of glass spanning almost the entire length of the room. Since the window is at sidewalk level, only the legs of the passerby are visible. On the left, a door, curtained with blue cloth; its threshold is level with the bottom edge of the window, and a visitor must descend six blue steps to reach the basement. To the right of the window, an obliquely situated bar; behind it, along the right wall, shelves with bottles and, downstage of them, a low door leading into the cellar. The proprietor has evidently attempted to give the tavern a Russian atmosphere by means of blue babas and peacocks painted on the rear wall above the strip of window, but his imagination has stopped there. (MUSSR: 35)

The first thing that we notice is that it would be difficult to imagine how the ‘narrow horizontal window’ would have been portrayed on stage, without relying on the ‘trashy concoctions’ of Erwin Piscator, who pioneered the use of cinematic projection on the stage. The cinematic representation of the ‘legs of passerby’ (ноги прохожих) outside of the tavern, from the outset establishes the atmosphere of alienation which characterized Russian émigré life. The play, though set in Berlin, has no significant German characters, and those which are present – voices offstage mainly – are denied more than two dimensions, both physically and psychologically. Nabokov’s later hatred of Germans is of course well known,7 but in this particular instance, still in his late twenties, it has more to do with portraying the growing distance he perceived between the émigré community and the people of their host

7

‘It is useless looking at a hyena and hoping that one day domestication or a benevolent gene will turn the creature into a great soft purring tortoiseshell cat … Let us chloroform it – and forget’ (SL: 47).

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countries. By 1924, the Western European powers had begun to recognize the legitimacy of the Soviet Union, and the state of exile which millions of people had hoped would be an ephemeral measure, was slowly becoming an enduring reality. This feeling is expressed in the dingy atmosphere of Oshivenski’s tavern – relegated to the subterranean recesses of a presumably out-of-the-way street, in a forgotten enclave of Berlin. The proprietor’s vain attempts to recreate some of the familiar characteristics of an old Russian restaurant are significant in two ways. Primarily, and most obviously, in highlighting the air of desperate delusion with which many émigrés, perhaps Nabokov included, attempted to cling onto a cultural tradition which had already began to recede. Secondly, less obviously, the description of kitschy ‘blue babas’ and ‘peacocks’ which the proprietor Oshivenski has painted on the walls, reads as a mocking patrician indictment of the vulgar clichéd imagination of the predominance of Nabokov’s fellow émigrés. Throughout the play, this mocking judgement of the self-delusionary and inauthentic reality which defines émigré life is measured, subtle and affected with an air of melancholy humour and tenderness. Nonetheless, at various points in the narrative, Nabokov scrutinizes and critiques émigré attitudes, implying that a great many of those who purported to have emigrated in support of their principles, because of their ideological and moral outrage at Bolshevism are, in most cases, very hypocritical. This becomes evident when we examine an exchange between Marianna, Kuznetsov’s frivolous mistress, and his devoted estranged wife Olga: MARIANNA: I hope you don’t mind me asking – I believe that, in spite of everything, you’re still friends – but there’s something I did want to ask. […] He isn’t a Bolshevik, is he? OLGA PAVLOVNA:

Do you hate Bolsheviks a lot, Marianna Sergeyevna?

MARIANNA: I despise them. Art is above politics. […] But they debase art. They burn down marvellous Russian country houses. (MUSSR: 66)

The notion of ‘Art’ transcending the sphere of politics would be one of Nabokov’s most repeated refrains. This fact, coupled with his consistent refusal to see any value in works of Soviet art and literature, seem to suggest

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that his views have been fairly consistent throughout his career. Yet the juxtaposition of Marianna’s statement that ‘Art is above politics’, and that the Bolsheviks ‘debase art’, with the slightly absurd and philistine sounding regret that ‘they burn down marvellous Russian country houses’ gives us pause. Through the mouth of Marianna, a superficial and self-obsessed character, we are to presume that such a statement is intended to seem crude. Yet, it does not seem completely convincing. Why should Russian country houses not be considered art? After all, in 1916, as a seventeen-year-old boy, Nabokov himself had inherited from his uncle, Vasily Rukanishnikov, the grandiose mansion of Rozhdestveno near Siverskaya in the Gatchinsky District. It was a place which held many fond memories. Of course, what is important is not whether they exist as works of art (which they do, on some level) but what these estates represented; the epicentres of a cruel centuries-old feudal system, and the history of serfdom and exploitation which were implicit in their very existence. It is difficult to judge whether the regret that the Bolsheviks burned down Russian country houses is intended to be genuine, or indeed ironic. However we know that later in life, Nabokov often maintained that the one thing which he treasured from his Russian childhood was his memories and his language. Regret for material possessions was not becoming of an artist. Here, it seems that he is attempting to tentatively form an individual philosophy of aesthetic autonomy, which exists outside of what he views – again tentatively – as the hypocritical materialism of his fellow émigrés, who longed not for a lost culture and language, but for lost property and prestige. Although it was certainly contrary to his intentions, no other character in the work comes across as more deluded and hypocritical than the purported hero Kuznetsov. Nabokov has affectionately endowed his protagonist with too much humour, selflessness and valour for us to consider him as one of the many flawed anti-heroes which populated his later novels. There is little to suggest that Nabokov intended us to think of Kuznetsov as anything other than a lone courageous idealist – but there are many facets to his character which are markedly ambivalent, and leave the reader feeling a little uneasy. ‘For me he isn’t a leader at all’, his wife Olga declares, ‘I simply love him, his manner of speaking, walking, raising his eyebrows at something he finds funny’ (MUSSR: 86). The truth

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is that Kuznetsov, however much Nabokov would have liked his readers and audience to embrace him, is not a particularly agreeable character. Of course, we are given to believe that his emotional coldness, boorishness and rudeness are all part of the clandestine role he is playing, which requires subterfuge and misdirection. Indeed, aside from those who are privy to his real work as an anti-Bolshevik revolutionary, he manages to deceive all of the other characters whom he comes into contact with. At a significant point in the course of the play Oshivenski, owing to his dire financial situation, asks Kuznetsov about the possibility of returning to Russia, and, believing that Kuznetsov is a Soviet agent, he asks him to use his influence in order to secure a visa: OSHIVENSKI: I’m fed up with the accursed existence I’ve been leading here. I’m fed up with perpetual indigence, Berlin back alleys, the repulsive rasp of a foreign tongue, this furniture, these newspapers, all these trashy trappings of émigré life. I am a former landowner. I was ruined right at the start. But I want you to understand: I don’t need my land back. I need the Russian land. And if I were given the chance to set foot on it for no other reason than to dig my own grave, I would accept. KUZNETSOFF: Let’s put it all simply, without metaphors. So you’d like to come to the USSR, that is, to Russia? OSHIVENSKI: I know you are a Communist – that’s why I can be candid with you. I renounce the émigré pipe dream. I recognise the Soviet Government. I ask you to intercede on my behalf. KUZNETSOFF:

Are you being serious?

OSHIVENSKI: I have no intention of joking at a time like this. I have the feeling that with your protection they would pardon me, give me a passport, let me into Russia. KUZNETSOFF: First of all, get out of the habit of saying ‘Russia’. The country has a different name now. Secondly, I must inform you of the following: people like you do not get pardoned by the Soviet Government. I can perfectly well believe that you have a desire to go home. But everything else you say is claptrap. You reek

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of the old regime from over a thousand miles away. It may not be your fault, but it’s so. (MUSSR: 115–116)

Oshivenski’s sentimental need for the ‘Russian land’, to return to his country in order to ‘dig my own grave’ seems decidedly inauthentic to the audience, given his earlier declaration that he was a ‘former landowner’. Nabokov does well to capture the pervasive sense of fatigue and dejection which many émigrés felt at that particular time. Some of these émigrés, eminent figures in pre-revolutionary letters such as Andrei Bely and Count Aleksey Tolstoy, Nabokov noted with bitterness – would return to Russia to live out their final years. In 1922, in the pro-soviet émigré journal Nakanune in the midst of his return to Russia, Aleksey Tolstoy had written a farewell article, declaring that I am leaving with my family for the homeland forever. If there are people here abroad close to me, my words are addressed to them. Do I go to happiness? Oh, no: Russia is going through hard times. Once again she is enveloped by a wave of hatred. […] I am going home to a hard life.8

The conservative British historian Nikolai Tolstoy, who is a distant relative of Aleksey Tolstoy, claimed that his return to Russia was motivated more by a need for financial security and a quiet life than to aid his motherland in difficult times. Nikolai Tolstoy wrote, rather contemptuously, that there ‘was no lie, betrayal, or indignity which he would not hasten to commit in order to fill those empty pockets, and in Stalin he found a worthy master’.9 Aleksey Tolstoy became actively involved in Soviet literary and political life. During the Nuremburg trials in 1946, Tolstoy’s significant role within the Extraordinary State Commission in identifying the use of gas vans in the Nazis’ systematic genocide was acknowledged by the Soviet prosecution. Tolstoy’s friend, Ilya Ehrenburg, gave an account of how the author may have felt that his literary craft was stagnating in emigration:

Quoted in Nikolai Tolstoy, The Tolstoys: twenty-four generations of Russian History (New York: William Morrow & Co., 1983), 298. 9 Tolstoy, The Tolstoys: Twenty-Four Generations of Russian History, 320. 8

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Chapter 1 Alexey Tolstoy sat in silent gloom puffing at his pipe, then, suddenly appeased; he would break into a smile. He once said to me, ‘You’ll see, no literature will come out of the emigration. Emigration can kill any author within two or three years’. He knew that he would soon be going home.10

Nabokov could not have been unaware of the declarations of writers such as Tolstoy, and he would often vehemently refer to such individuals as bolshevizans or ‘pinks’ – White Russians with Bolshevik sympathies. In presenting Oshivenski’s dilemma of a return to Russia, Nabokov sought to pose a choice to his fellow émigrés. If, like him, their hostility towards Bolshevism was a matter of ethical, moral and ideological opposition, then all material, cultural and psychological privations must be endured at all costs. This notion of sacrifice is reinforced when Kuznetsov rebukes Oshivenski’s request, and replies that he should ‘get out of the habit of saying “Russia”’, because such a country no longer exists. Perhaps the impossibility of his returning to the USSR had already occurred to Nabokov even in 1926. Indeed, Kuznetsov’s admonishment to Oshivenski, that the latter reeks of ‘the old regime from over a thousand miles away’ takes on a mildly prophetic air, when we consider the fate of some émigré writers and poets who did return to the USSR, only to become victims of the Great Purge. In this sense, there is perhaps an element of altruism in Kuznetsov’s offhand reproach to Oshivenski. However, even conceding that Kuznetsov’s unpleasantness derives from the necessarily deceptive nature of his work, there are still some instances which betray a definite moral ambiguousness. It is no coincidence that Kuznetsov is acting alone in his quixotic mission. Nabokov, for whom collaboration was an unthinkable compromise, could not conceive even of revolutionary activity as anything other than the work of a single-minded genius. Yet, the moral implications of Kuznetsov’s role as lone and resolute hero are very unsettling – as is evident in the final exchange between the hero and his wife: KUZNETSOFF: Last year, when I was in Russia, the following incident occurred. The Soviet sleuths got wind of something. I sensed that if I did not take resolute action they would eventually get to the

10

Ilya Ehrenburg, Memoirs 1921–1941 (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1966), 25.

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bottom of it. And you know what I did? I deliberately let three people, minor pawns in my organization, go before the firing squad. Don’t start thinking I regret it one bit. I don’t. That gambit saved the whole project. I knew perfectly well that those people would accept the entire guilt, rather than betray the least detail of our work. And the trail vanished into thin air. OLGA PAVLOVNA: That’s all very frightening. But I fail to see how it can change anything. Even if you really began forging bank notes, that wouldn’t change anything. Really Alyosha, let’s talk like humans. (MUSSR: 120)

What is disturbing about Kuznetsov’s boast that he let ‘minor pawns’ in his organization go before the firing squad is that it betrays the type of profoundly callous outlook which Nabokov would rail against in his later life, where ‘Beauty plus pity’ was ‘the closest we can get to a definition of art’ (LL: 251). Here, it seems that Nabokov is advocating the same methods as his Soviet enemies would use, where the ‘end’ justifies the ‘means’, and where, by his reckoning, the ultimate goal of liberating Russia was more important than the lives of individuals. This has not escaped the notice of some scholars. Galya Diment perceptively highlights that the apparent callousness with which Kuznetsov comes to regard flesh-and-blood human beings as mere ‘minor pawns’ in his struggle is not totally unlike the sentiment that many of his Soviet counterparts held about ‘minor pawns’ in theirs.11

Present in the closing part of this work is an antagonism which is apparent throughout the play – when Nabokov cynically highlights the hypocrisy and materialism of his fellow émigrés, while lamenting, to some extent, the material wealth that Bolshevism has deprived them of, and when he mocks the philistine tastes and opinions of his contemporaries, while at the same time engaging in them himself. It is an antagonism, in short, between Nabokov’s patriotic inclinations as a White Russian, and his emergent sense

11

Galya Diment, ‘Plays’, The Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov (New York: Garland, 1995), 590.

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of individualism. It is in this play, more than any other later work, that the inconsistent thoughts of a young man undergoing a political awakening are so apparent. Siggy Frank concludes that though the play is presented in a realist form, there is a subtle subversion of the ‘conventions of illusionist theatre’ through the use of ‘meta-theatrical devices’; that there is a pervasive sense of the ‘artificiality of the exile existence and the character’s lives’ (Frank: 77). Yet, perhaps this ‘artificiality’ to which she refers, is not so much the product of a conscious artistic act on Nabokov’s part, but the inevitable result of an unconscious uneasiness with the ideological views of those who surrounded him, and a need to establish a political outlook which was more suited to his emergent individualist impulses. Brian Boyd argues that at the end of the The Man from the USSR we are left with the hopeful feeling that despite all that may seem bleak or dubious in the emigration, in the age, in human life itself, there are things like kindness and courage and love that make apparently sordid circumstances heroic, and connect somehow with an elsewhere beyond the margins of our stage, beyond our last farewells. (RY: 267)

Yet, in the end, the audience and reader are left feeling distinctly uncomfortable. Olga’s reply to Kuznetsov that his action cannot change anything, her plea that they ‘talk like humans’ seems to suggest that Nabokov has, in the end, acknowledged what he views as the futility of political engagement and decided upon individualism over patriotism – ultimately placing human relationships, warmth and intimacy over politics. However, Kuznetsov does not listen to his wife. In the end, he chooses not to stay with her. The play ends with a story which Kuznetsov recounts of an artillery officer who lived in Toulon, which cuts off as he and his wife leave the stage. That very same officer would go on to be crowned Emperor Napoleon I, and his epic, and inevitably disastrous, invasion of Russia would lead to his eventual downfall. The play ends thus, not with a celebration of ‘courage and love’, as Boyd suggests, but with an arrogant celebration of the individual heroism of a man of superhuman ‘greatness’. After The Man from The USSR Nabokov did not complete another play until 1938 when, due to his worsening financial circumstances, he was compelled to supplement his meagre literary income by writing two plays

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for publication in the Paris-based Russkie Zapiski [Russian Annals]. Of the two plays, produced within the space of a few months, only The Event was staged prior to Nabokov’s emigration to America. The Russian Theatre’s production of The Event was, within the context of émigré theatre, a success, and it enjoyed four performances in total. This was a difficult period in Nabokov’s life. The memory of an affair with Irina Guadanini which had almost ended his marriage was still fresh in his mind, and his financial circumstances had reduced him and his family to destitution. The Event reflects this air of uncertainty, and a sense of dissatisfaction at his lack of recognition is reflected in the portrayal of the cowardly portrait painter Troshcheykin, and his irrational fear of dying at the hands of his wife’s jilted ex-lover, who has been released from prison after a previous attempt on his life many years before. This play, a highly entertaining farcical comedy which has many parallels with Gogol’s The Government Inspector, expresses useful self-reflexive views on the nature of artistry. However, unlike The Man from the USSR, the action of the play occurs outside of any discernible temporal or historical context. Produced after what was arguably his most significant novel, The Gift, the tendentiousness which was so glaring in The Man from the USSR, is markedly absent from this play. Already apparent is a move away from the unconscious ideological didacticism which was present in his previous works towards the conscious auto-reflexivity and purported aesthetic autonomy which would epitomize his later English works. In a letter to Professor George Noyes of the University of California, Berkeley in 1945, Nabokov wrote of how he viewed morality in Gogol’s works: As to Gogol I do not think that your point of view is so widely divergent from my own. I never meant to deny the moral impact of art which is certainly inherent in every genuine work of art. What I do deny and am prepared to fight to the last drop of my ink is the deliberate moralizing which to me kills every vestige of art in a work however skilfully written. […] though you may be right that Gogol did not object to serfdom, the interior moral standards of the book bristle against it. (SL: 57)

Here we see evidence of a highly developed and convinced ideological aesthetic attitude, which was in 1938 in the process of germinating. It is interesting to note that the ‘deliberate moralizing’ to which he so dismissively refers, is an important aspect of his novel The Gift. As we shall discover later

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in this study, The Gift had a very definite ideological purpose, and as such its ‘moral standards’ were not merely ‘interior’ and ‘inherent’, but overt. The most cautious and orthodox of Nabokovian scholarship insists upon the improbable view that Nabokov maintained a consistent aesthetic and ideological position throughout his career, and indeed this has proved thus far to be a convenient paradigm in the analysis of a varied body of work. While there are perhaps some, often vague, concepts of human freedom which are consistent within the Nabokovian corpus, insomuch as they are present in varying degrees in any work of literature, such scholarship is in its own way deferring to the ‘general ideas’ which Nabokov so vociferously professed to reject. Indeed, as Richard Rorty notes, ‘Nabokov’s best novels are the ones which exhibit his inability to believe his own general ideas’.12 In fact, the transition from the aesthetic expression of explicit morality, to morality as implicit within the aesthetic interiority of a given work, was neither an immediate nor consistent process. In The Event, Nabokov largely succeeds in denying the audience and the reader any external reference to outside reality by omitting historical and temporal contexts. However, as we shall see, the same strategy does not seem to work in the second play which he wrote in 1938, The Waltz Invention, where a significant amount of engagement with tangible political issues is present, albeit in a seemingly impenetrable form.

The Waltz Invention and ‘False Consciousness’ The original Russian title Izobretenie Val’sa (Изобретение bальса), has a dual meaning in that the addition of the ‘a’ in the second word, renders it in the genitive: ‘The Invention of Waltz’, but can also equally be translated as ‘The Invention of the Waltz’. This twofold meaning of the title sets the

12

Richard Rorty, ‘The Barber of Kasbeam: Nabokov and Cruelty’, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 168.

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tone for a play which has many layers of ambiguity. At the very outset of The Waltz Invention, indeed at the Dramatis Personae, Nabokov refers to his hero Salvator Waltz as ‘a haggard inventor; a fellow author’ (WI: 3) – a dual distinction which is of vital significance. The action of the play centres on the mysterious hero-inventor, who approaches the Minister of War in an unnamed fantastical totalitarian regime in order to present his new invention – a ‘Telethanasia’ device the size of a radio – which is capable from any distance ‘of annihilating and turning into a spread of smooth, glistening dust an entire city, an entire country, an entire continent’ (WI: 14). The Minister, taking him for a madman, is understandably dismissive of Waltz’s fantastic claims. As a demonstration of the terrible power of his device, Waltz informs the Minister that at precisely twelve noon, the magnificent blue mountain which can be observed from his window will have its summit blown clean off. After the explosion occurs just as Waltz had predicted, various experts are unable to find a plausible explanation for this horrifying event. They order Waltz to give them several more demonstrations of the Telethenasia’s power, which he does in order to provide incontestable proof. As the leaders of the regime are summoned, they first propose to buy the device which would give them power over their foreign enemies. Waltz of course refuses. The only price which he will accept is to be made the benevolent absolute ruler of the entire country, and eventually the whole world. The political and military leaders of the unnamed country have no choice but to accept. After a period of rule, dissatisfied by his power and the tedium of everyday issues – and having survived an assassination attempt – the country is heading towards ruin. Furthermore, unable to convince other countries of his policy of universal disarmament, Waltz callously destroys an entire city of 600,000 people. Now, all Waltz desires is to retire to an island to build a grandiose palace and live out his life peacefully, with a harem of beautiful women, as ruler of the world. At the end of the play, it transpires that the entire preceding story was merely Waltz’s demented fantasy. We return to Waltz, who is waiting outside the Minister of War’s office, from which he is subsequently unceremoniously ejected and bundled off to an asylum. Once again the saviour of this particular world is a solitary idealist, but also a ‘fellow author’. In the preface to this play, written many years

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later in 1966 upon its first publication (it was never staged in his lifetime), Nabokov reiterates his now familiar warning to those that may seek to psychoanalyse his novels. Yet this particular attack, more detailed than the others, is interesting in a number of ways: Why is he such a tragic figure? What upsets him so atrociously when he sees a toy on a table? Does it bring back his own childhood? Some bitter phase of that childhood? Not his childhood perhaps, but that of a child he has lost? What misfortunes, besides banal poverty, has he endured? What is the macabre and mysterious memory linked with Siberia, which a convict’s dirge sung by a whore so strangely evokes. Who am I to propose such questions? After the dreadful frustrations Freudians have experienced with my other books, I am sure they will refrain from inflicting upon Waltz a sublimation of the pushbutton power-feeling such as the manipulation of an elevator, up (erection!) and down (revenge suicide!). (WI: ii–iii)

Nabokov begins by perceptively highlighting some of the aspects of Waltz’s character which would be of particular interest to Freudians, then proceeds to dismiss them in a humorous manner. Such a mocking attitude towards the libidinal processes of sublimation however, simultaneously confirms an awareness of Freudian psychoanalytic theory, while also demonstrating how it manifests itself in praxis. Freud writes in his seminal work Civilization and Its Discontents of how the act of artistic creation is an attempt to lessen a human suffering, which is essentially irreducible. Irrespective of artistic talent, he maintained, art ‘cannot give complete protection from suffering. It creates no impenetrable armour against the arrows of fortune’.13 Art, Freud continues, produces in us a narcotic effect, a palliative, which ultimately ‘is not strong enough to make us forget real misery’.14 One can tell why such theories were inimical to Nabokov’s way of thinking, yet Freud’s theory has particular relevance to Nabokov’s preface, and to the play itself. Sublimation is the unconscious’ defence facility, that which transforms socially unacceptable impulses into socially acceptable

Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1966), 27. 14 Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, 28. 13

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actions and thoughts, such as literature and art. The act of sublimation has therefore been essential in our transition from a state of nature to culture. There exists the possibility that The Waltz Invention is an auto-reflexive examination, a sublimation of Nabokov’s own megalomaniacal fantasy – however uncomfortable such a notion might be. It is, of course, not out with the realms of possibility. At the time that this play was conceived and written, Nabokov had already fled with his family from Nazi Germany, and was desperately searching for an exit out of a Europe on the brink of war. Blighted by personal and financial misfortune, and surrounded by societies that were becoming increasingly polarized by ideologies which he felt alienated by; he perhaps decided to resort to his art, in order to indulge in the fantasies of control which he could not attain in his real life. As Waltz first presents his weapon to the Minister, he attempts to give an account of his intentions: WALTZ: I assure you that, despite the apparent cruelty of my weapon, I am a humane man, much more humane than you can ever imagine. You say that you have endured many things in your lifetime. Allow me to say that my life has consisted of such material privations, of such mental torments that now, when everything is about to change, I still feel behind my back the raw cold of the past as, after a stormy night, one still feels an ominous chill in the morning shadows of the glistening garden. I feel sorry for you, I sympathize with the stabbing pain that every man experiences when his habitual world, the familiar order of life, crumbles around him. (WI: 28–29)

This ‘stabbing pain’ is particularly poignant, when we consider Nabokov’s personal circumstances at the time. We assume, initially at least, that Waltz is a tragic figure because the author’s life at the time was equally tragic and miserable. Yet, despite the fact that Waltz is designated as a ‘fellow author’, does his eventual fate not dispel for us any notion that he may completely represent the author’s own views and fantasies? What is distinctive in the play is that regardless of Nabokov’s ostensible hostility towards deterministic theatre, the resolution is profoundly deterministic: tyrants, whatever their idealistic intentions, never succeed. At the beginning of Nabokov’s preface, he insists ‘there is in my play no political “message” […] but that

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publication of its English version today has no topical import’. Of course, we know now that such instances of denial are never so strident than when there is something important to conceal. He acknowledges that ‘certain passages […] sound a prophetic, even doubly prophetic, forenote […] of the later atomystique’, but then emphatically insists that he would never have written such a story ‘lest any part of me […] might seem thereby to join in those “peace” demonstrations’ which give peace of mind to ‘the ruthless schemers in Tomsk and Atomsk’ (WI: i). The narrative is, of course, prophetic – written seven years before the Trinity device was exploded in the middle of the New Mexico desert. Yet, Nabokov’s insistence that this play does not support an anti-war message seems a little suspect. It ‘is hard’, he wrote, to loathe bloodshed, including war, more than I do, but it is still harder to exceed my loathing of the very nature of totalitarian states in which massacre is only an administrative detail. (WI: i)

Nabokov was right to be concerned that his play would be misinterpreted to have a peaceful message. The Waltz Invention is not an anti-war play. Although the play’s hero acts from a ‘love of mankind’, its author acts instead from a love of freedom and a hatred of totalitarianism. The incredibly surprising fact is that the corrupt state which Waltz conquers and rules over with his benevolent will, despite some misleading characteristics, does not represent a totalitarian Soviet-style state, but acts as a proxy for a Western capitalist democracy. Boyd correctly notes that in the character of Waltz, Nabokov ‘evokes not only the tragic dreamer in us all, but also the infantile madman history so often lets loose on our world’ (RY: 492). While it is difficult here to completely disagree with Boyd’s assessment, this analysis remains unsatisfactory because of two significant omissions. Primarily, there is the possibility that the character of Salvator Waltz may also represent a sublimation of Nabokov’s own megalomaniacal fantasies. Secondly, Boyd ascribes to the play a humanistic and universalistic message which ignores its profound ideological tendentiousness. In an interview with Alvin Toffler in 1964, Nabokov provided a rare insight into his political views, which he maintains had been consistent throughout his life:

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since my youth – I was 19 when I left Russia – my political creed has remained as bleak and changeless as an old grey rock. It is classical to the point of triteness. Freedom of speech, freedom of thought, freedom of art. The social or economic structure of the ideal state is of little concern to me. My desires are modest. Portraits of the head of the government should not exceed a postage stamp in size. No torture and no executions. No music, except coming through earphones, or played in theatres. (SO: 34–35)

Referring to E. M. Forster’s remark that he often found that some of his literary characters tended to dictate the course of a narrative, Herbert Gold asked Nabokov whether he was in complete command of the characters of his novels. Nabokov replied that he did not subscribe to ‘that trite little whimsy about characters getting out of hand’, which is ‘as old as the quills’. ‘My characters’, he affirmed, ‘are galley slaves’ (SO: 95). David Andrews has posited that the Nabokovian aesthetic, rather than being anti-deterministic, is in fact a variation of determinism, similar in many ways to other determinisms such as those of Freud and Sartre. For Andrews, Nabokov’s remark to Herbert Gold was of peculiar interest: The fact that Nabokov, who describes his political creed as ‘[f ]reedom of speech, freedom of thought, freedom of art’ […] routinely refers to his characters as slaves is interesting given, first, the resemblance he sees between art and nature, and second, his individualism and hopeful belief in self-determination. What Nabokov never explains for his reader is how a person can simultaneously be a free agent in relation to himself and a happy galley slave in regard to his ‘author’.15

The paradox of personal free agency and literary bondage which Andrews identifies is important as it brings into question the extent to which Nabokov’s characters represent views contradictory to his own. Nabokov’s ‘galley slaves’, after all, seemingly lack the necessary autonomy to invent ideas which had not occurred to their author first. In this sense, The Waltz Invention can be read not only as a cautionary tale of how idealism is corrupted by power and degenerates into tyranny; but also as an auto-reflexive examination of the consequences of those same impulses within the author’s

15

David Andrews, ‘Varieties of Determinism: Nabokov among Rorty, Freud and Sartre’, Nabokov Studies, Vol. 6 (2000/2001), 1–33 (11).

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own thoughts. As with many of his heroes and villains, Nabokov shares with Waltz many opinions. Given Nabokov’s marked hostility towards the Soviet Union, our natural inclination is to regard the unnamed State in The Waltz Invention as a totalitarian regime. The State is composed of a president, a Minister of War, and a governing council which resembles a military Junta, with thirteen generals who participate in the decision making process. We are to presume, since there is a passing reference to the assassination of the ‘king’, that it was at one point in its history a monarchy. Initially, the parallels to Soviet Russia seem incontrovertible. However, references to the presence of certain democratic institutions in the following extract seem to disperse our initial perceptions: MINISTER: However, there is one condition I must make, gentleman. Everything that has been said here is a top military secret – not a word must reach the public. TRANCE: Oh, all right. My paper will keep mum. At least until just a few hours before other papers publish the glad news. MINISTER: How nastily you put it […], what a rascal you are […]. Listen Colonel – what about those two other reporters we caught in here? COLONEL: Locked up. But I venture to observe that it’s impossible to hold them for long. It’s against the law. There will be questions in Parliament, and you know what a bother that is. (WI: 34–35)

The Minister of War is discussing with his attaché, and a reporter, the best course of action to take after Waltz has given an initial demonstration of the power of his device. At different points in the play, the texture of the narrative thins and we are given subtle hints that everything which is occurring on stage is taking place in a dream. Indeed, the reporter Trance’s name in the original Russian, ‘Son’, means ‘dream’. Previous to the exchange above, two reporters were found to be hiding in the Minister’s office as the explosion occurred. They were both swiftly despatched to prison. However, the Colonel’s reference to the legality of their detention, which

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is arbitrary and extra-judicial, is significant. As is the fact that questions regarding the journalists’ detention would be asked in ‘Parliament’. In the USSR at the time, in the midst of the Great Purge, arbitrary imprisonment, detention, and indeed execution often occurred outside of the legal system. The American legal scholar Harold Berman observed in his analysis of Soviet legal culture that ‘evidence tends to show a surprising degree of official compartmentalization of the legal and the extralegal’.16 As such, it would be unthinkable for the legality of arbitrary imprisonment to be questioned in public – as these practices often took place within the extralegal sphere. Furthermore the Minister’s concern that news of the explosion would reach the public via the papers suggests a level of press freedom and plurality which did not exist in the Soviet Union. The State which is described is, without a doubt, a democratic republic – a fact which is reinforced through these references to elections, protests and elements of free speech. Waltz’s increasing despotism and cruelty after he is declared ruler is further evidence that the State which he has usurped through his ‘love’ for humanity is one which, despite its inherent corruption and farcical absurdity, is proposed as infinitely better than the one which he has replaced it with. This is evident in an exchange between Waltz and the Colonel: COLONEL: Nonsense? Bedlam in Parliament and battles in the streets? That’s nonsense? Millions unemployed – in result of your wonderful decree ‘Every rich man shares his wealth with nine beggars’ Why nine, for goodness’ sake, and where are your rich people? In their caves? In America? Entire detachments from the neighbouring kingdom quite calmly cross our border here and there to see for themselves what exactly is going on. Good thing, at least, that they do not quite know yet how to react, and are only sniffling in the wind, evidently puzzled by the fact that a strong and happy country should suddenly begin destroying its own military might’. (WI: 75)

16

Harold. J. Berman, Justice in the USSR: An Interpretation of Soviet Law (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963), 8.

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Nabokov’s assertion that ‘the social or economic structure of the ideal state’ was of little concern to him, is brought into question here. Initially, the collapse in law and order and the mass unemployment described provides a very interesting insight. The reader and audience are compelled to share the belief that a decree which supports wealth distribution is absurd and unfair. Indeed the description also suggests the consequent flight of the rich to their ‘caves’ or ‘America’ as a result of Waltz’s unfair decree. To modern ears, this reflects the perennial argument against the higher taxation of wealth – that the rich would leave for more economically hospitable countries. The description of the decline in the State’s defence capabilities under Waltz’s dictatorship, which conflates happiness with ‘military might’ is conspicuous, as it seems to suggest that despite his loathing for ‘bloodshed, including war’ (WI: i), Nabokov appreciated the value of a strong military. Of course, the issue of whether Waltz represents a critical sublimation of universal, and personal, fantasies of control or a parody of the absurd unreality of ‘utopian’ dictatorships such as Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia is once again raised. Siggy Frank posits that the play is concerned with ‘the relationship between different realities and the tension between different perceptions and depictions of the world’ (Frank: 112). Frank maintains that Despite its political overtones, the play does not work as a mere satire on Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia. The ultimate exposing of the drama’s absurd reality as a dream in the last act makes it difficult to read the play as a serious moral condemnation of totalitarian systems. (Frank: 111)

This argument is, of course, valid to some extent. Salvator Waltz represents, as Boyd asserted, the potential tyrant that is present in every man; in every man’s conception of utopia, and Nabokov’s own as well. Yet it fails to recognize the specific details which are present in the play, the descriptions of the political and military institutions which the country possessed before Waltz’s coup d’état. Implicit, therefore, in the exposing of the play’s reality as the demented dream of a would-be tyrant, is also the assertion that however corrupt and ineffective democratic governments are, they are considerably better than totalitarian regimes. As Simon Karlinsky noted,

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The madman Waltz is a genuine idealist who believes his own humanitarian speeches; but, since he also resorts to brutal and autocratic methods to achieve his high-minded goals, he ends up being no better than any other tyrant, and even the corrupt but human and flexible government he has replaced seems preferable by comparison.17

In The Waltz Invention there is a consistent antagonism between universal humanist values, as Frank and Karlinsky have noted, and the championing of a very specific ideological system. Nabokov was right to fear that his play’s message would be misconstrued as in favour of ‘peace’, but wrong to suggest that it has no political message. Despite stating that all kinds of propaganda left him indifferent, Nabokov’s preface to this play functions to deny any ‘peace of mind’ to ‘ruthless schemers’ in ‘Tomsk and Atomsk’, a word play on the name of the city which housed the major centre for uranium enrichment and nuclear weapons development in the USSR. The inclusion of such a preface is unnecessary; on many levels, the text of the play itself functions as propaganda for Western-style democracy. In the previous analysis we have seen how each of these two plays, written more than ten years apart, in their specific way represent an ‘attempt’ by the author at ‘interpellation’. It is necessary to acknowledge the polysemy dwelling within different modes of performance; in the first instance that the mimetic act of writing always involves an element of performance, the second which is to be found within the contrast between reading a script and bringing it into production, the third in the need to collaborate with other people involved in theatrical production, and finally the Brechtian (and Meyerholdian) challenge of constructing the very process of performance as a dialectical challenge to mimetic codes and practices. Having observed in passing Nabokov’s attitude to each of these elements of performance, we are able to discern the presence of an ideological tendency. Yet ideology, while always a consistent presence, is by measures approached in a tentative manner. As Fredric Jameson maintains, ‘the approach to the Real is at best fitful, the retreat from it into this or that form of intellectual

17

Simon Karlinsky, ‘Illusion, Reality, and Parody in Nabokov’s Play’s’, Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, Vol. 8, No. 2 (Madison: Wisconsin University Press, 1967), 268–279 (278).

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comfort perpetual’ (PU: 274). Such a retreat is evident in his later dramaturgical lectures, where we see an attempt to censure the presence of uncertainty, by maintaining an avowedly anti-determinist theory of drama which belies the dramatic apparatus of his own plays, which represent instead a specific ‘variety’ of determinism. As we have observed, there exists a marked uneasiness within these works, an antagonism between a self-image which purports to be in favour of passive universal humanist values which transcend the political, and the almost aggressive (unconscious) assertion of the primacy of a particular ideological system. In The Man from the USSR, this antagonism is most apparent in the way which Nabokov portrays his fellow émigrés, and in the heroic fate which he ascribes to his protagonist. Acknowledging that his contemporaries are in their own way philistine, corrupt, bigoted, disingenuous and materialistic, he nonetheless ends the play with Kuznetsov returning to the USSR, so that his fellow émigrés may ‘be able to come to Russia’ (MUSSR: 122). That Kuznetsov returns to the USSR to fight against totalitarianism, in favour (presumably) of democracy, negates all of the subtle affirmations of the primacy of human values and love above all else, and instead advocates political action. In The Waltz Invention, Nabokov examines the consequences of any individual, however idealistic and noble their aims, asserting their personal vision of utopia on the outside world. Nabokov describes Salvator Waltz as a ‘fellow author’, and embedded in such a seemingly inconsequential detail is an acknowledgement of the author’s own fantasies of omnipotence. Of greater significance however, is the defence of liberal parliamentary democracy implicit in the play’s depiction of the unnamed state. While acknowledging the extent to which such states are corrupt, ineffective, cruel and hegemonic – ultimately we are left with the overwhelming sense that such an ideological system is the best of all such systems, or in the very least: the lesser of all evils. At a panel arranged by Wellesley University’s Emergency Service Committee in 1942 during the Second World War, Nabokov spoke on the meaning of faith to ‘resisting people’. It remains one of the most telling of his rare political statements, and provides an invaluable insight into his attitude towards democracy:

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The splendid paradox of democracy is that while stress is laid on the rule of all and equality of rights, it is the individual that derives from it his special and uncommon benefit. Ethically, the members of a democracy are equals; spiritually, each has the right to be as different from his neighbours as he pleases; and taken all in all, it is not perhaps an organization or a government or a community that we really have in mind when we say ‘democracy’ but the subtle balance between the boundless privileges of every individual and the strictly equal rights of all men. Life is a state of harmony – and that is why I think that the spirit of democracy is the most natural human condition […]. Democracy is humanity at its best, not because we happen to think that a republic is better than a king and a king is better than nothing and nothing is better than a dictator, but because it is the natural condition of every man ever since the human mind became conscious not only of the world but of itself. Morally, democracy is invincible.18

When examining the above extract, it is clear that Nabokov values ‘democracy’ not just because of its emphasis on egalitarianism, but more because it furnishes the individual with ‘boundless privileges’. Politically, notions of ‘government’ or ‘community’ were as alien to Nabokov’s ideological perspective as were concepts of collaboration and collective artistic synergy to his artistic vision. Once again, we must acknowledge the paradox implicit in Nabokov’s stated belief in the ‘rule of all and equality of rights’, and his own aesthetic vision which places emphasis on the tyrannical will of the individual artist. Nabokov once reflected on how he would have conducted himself, had he chose to pursue a career as a dramatist instead of an author. He proposed that he would have advocated and applied a system of total tyranny, directing the play or the picture myself, choosing settings and costumes, terrorizing the actors, mingling with them in the bit part of guest, or ghost, prompting them, and, in a word, pervading the entire show with the will and art of one individual – for there is nothing in the world that I loathe more than group activity.19

18 19

Vladimir Nabokov, ‘What Faith Means to a Resisting People’, Panel Arranged by the Emergency Service Committee, Wellesley Magazine, Vol. 26, No. 4 (April 1942), VN Berg Collection, New York Public Library. Vladimir Nabokov, Novels 1955–1962 (New York: Library of America, 1996), 673.

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To ‘loathe’ group activity, at least within the artistic sphere, reinforces the apprehension we feel towards his purported political belief in the ‘equality of rights’ and the ‘rule of all’. Such a contradiction of perspective goes some way to explain his inability to recognize some of the most glaring practical inequities of democratic systems. In later life, Nabokov felt most at home in America because he valued the society’s ostensible balance between egalitarianism and individualism. Though briefly acknowledging certain problems with this model which were evident in issues such as the presence of capital punishment, a growing class divide, segregation, racism and a vulgar materialistic culture, these issues were never important enough to raise his concern. He once declared that ‘In foreign policy, I am definitely on the government’s side. And when in doubt, I always follow the simple method of choosing that line of conduct which may be the most displeasing to the Reds and the Russells’ (SO: 98). Indeed, the specific value of American democracy was something Nabokov was aware of even prior to emigration, as he expressed in a letter to his American literary agent Altagarcia de Janelli: [W]hat charms me personally about American civilisation is exactly that old world touch, that old-fashioned something which clings to it despite the hard glitter, and hectic night-life, and up-to-date bathrooms, and lurid advertisements, and all the rest of it. Bright children, you know, are always conservative. (SL: 28)

What is evident in the opinions which he expressed on American politics is equally present, though less consistently, in the plays which we have examined. The notion of ideology as ‘false consciousness’ is unsatisfactory here because it tends to suggest, following Jameson’s observation, that such a thing as pure error is possible within the field of politics and everyday life. What is evident within The Man from the USSR and The Waltz Invention is ideology as cognitive dissonance – an acknowledgement of the shortcomings of a particular ideological system, namely democracy, while triumphantly championing its value over all others. Taken in this context, his observation that ‘bright children’ are always ‘conservative’ should not merely be discarded as a throwaway remark. Perhaps conservatism, in some form, figures heavily in Nabokov’s political outlook – and even, perhaps, in his literary aesthetics. Nabokov’s émigré contemporary,

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Vladislav Khodasevich, once wrote that a ‘literary conservative is an eternal incendiary: a keeper of the fire rather than a fire extinguisher’.20 If such a political outlook most accurately describes the Nabokovian Ideological Aesthetic then it is clear, given the unrelenting tension which exists between universal and subjective values in the plays which we have examined, that such an outlook may be equally present, albeit in a far more imperceptible form, in his novels.

20 Quoted in Alexander Dolinin, ‘Nabokov as a Russian writer’, in Julian W. Connolly, ed., Cambridge Companion to Vladimir Nabokov (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 57.

Chapter 2

Bits of My Past Litter the Floor: Ideology, Epistemology, and the ‘Modernism of Underdevelopment’ in The Eye and Despair

I have grown much too used to an outside view of myself, to being both painter and model, so no wonder my style is denied the blessed grace of spontaneity. Try as I may I do not succeed in getting back into my original envelope, let alone making myself comfortable in my old self; the disorder there is far too great; things have been moved, the lamp is black and dead, bits of my past litter the floor. (Des: 22)

In All that is Solid Melts into Air, which examines the historical experience of modernity across various European cultures, the political philosopher Marshall Berman attempted to elucidate the peculiar development of Russian modernity, which he defined as the ‘Modernism of Underdevelopment’. Berman posited that Russians of the nineteenth century experienced modernization mainly as something that was not happening; or else as something that was happening far away, in realms that Russians, even when they travelled there, experienced more as fantastic antiworlds than as social actualities […].1

The modernist impulse in the main cultures of Western Europe adhered to a metastatic development which, though by no means uniform, tended to

1

Marshall Berman, All that is Solid Melts into Air (New York: Penguin, 1982), 175. Further references are given in parentheses.

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utilize similar political, economic and social impetuses. In Russia, with its stagnating economy, autocratic monarchy and moribund political sphere – these same impetuses were notable for the greater part of the nineteenth century by their absence. Yet throughout the nineteenth century, within barely three generations, in spite of these conditions of ‘underdevelopment’, it had managed to produce some of the world’s most original literature. This same literary culture advanced through its evolution with uncommon rapidity, utilizing Western thought which it glimpsed like refracted light through its window onto Europe, St Petersburg, and ultimately through its own specific cultural referents and their inherently contradictory nature. Russian modernism was a battleground of ideas, impulses, as well as formal and political ideologies. Nabokov was the product of such an environment. Within past and recent criticism, it is a widely held assumption that Nabokov should be regarded as a direct descendant of the Russian Symbolist tradition. It is a critical assumption which ascribes to Nabokov an epistemology which has its roots in the transcendence of everyday reality, a metaphysical idealism which, though ostensibly camouflaged, is purported to be consistent throughout the Nabokovian corpus and, perhaps most significantly, retains a very distinct historical subjectivity. With the publication of Vladimir Alexandrov’s Otherworld, this burgeoning critical tendency became ubiquitous. Yet there are two important aspects of this assumption which have heretofore been overlooked and remain problematic; primarily whether such an assumption is entirely justified, and secondly the nature of its ideological significance. The often acerbic opposition between Symbolism and Formalism in early twentieth-century Russian literature was tainted by class politics; it was, in essence, as equally ideological as it was aesthetic. The most noted trait of the Nabokovian aesthetic is the mnemonic image, and an interest in speculating about the psychological significance of such images, outside of what he viewed as a fallacious and prescriptive Freudian psychoanalytical discourse. Such an epistemological aesthetic has a very specific genealogy in Western philosophy, most notably in the work of Henri Bergson, who in turn was a significant influence upon various modernist writers. Yet it would be erroneous to presume that such an aesthetic was consistent and unfaltering. Due to his linguistic plasticity,

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and the events which displaced him to various geographical spaces on the continent, Nabokov offers a unique perspective on European modernisms. John Burt Foster has proposed that behind the Nabokovian aesthetic there is a tension, an ‘almost paradoxical juxtaposition – the modernist urge to “make it new” recoiling into the past to become an art of personal memory’.2 The preceding chapter outlined the tensions and oscillations between universal and subjective values which characterized Nabokov’s early dramatic works, and this is a feature which is also present, to a large extent, in his prose work. Nabokov’s work of the émigré period up to The Gift involves a series of aesthetic vacillations and evolutions which were influenced by his engagement with a changing political and ideological landscape. Furthermore, these aesthetic developments also derive from an attempted negotiation between two contrasting strands of the Russian ‘Modernism of Underdevelopment’: Symbolism and Formalism. Of particular note, is the ways in which this negotiation manifests itself in two works written within two years of each other The Eye (1930) and Despair (1932).

The ‘Mythproof ’ Myth in The Eye The Eye occupies a unique position within the Nabokovian oeuvre, insomuch as it acts as a point of origin for two devices which would come to characterize Nabokov’s later works. The use of unreliable narration conducted in the first-person which acts to obfuscate the boundary between delusional fantasy and reality, and the peculiar use of fictional ‘doubles’. In the foreword to The Eye, Nabokov once more takes the opportunity to display his contempt for Freud. ‘As is well known’, Nabokov asserts haughtily, ‘my books are not only blessed by a total lack of social significance, but

2

John Burt Foster Jr, Nabokov’s Art of Memory and European Modernism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 23. Further references are given in parentheses.

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are also mythproof ’ (TE: 3). One is tempted at this stage, as ever, to take such an insistent denial to be evidence of the contrary: Freudians flutter around them avidly, approach with itching oviducts, stop, sniff and recoil. A serious psychologist, on the other hand, may distinguish through my rain-sparkling crystograms a world of soul dissolution where poor Smurov only exists insofar as he is reflected in other brains, which in their turn are placed in the same strange, specular predicament as his. (TE: 3–4)

In this particular instance, however, there appears to be some truth in Nabokov’s assertion of the essentially ‘mythproof ’ character of this particular work, and its attempt to construct a form of psychologism which exists outside of the Freudian paradigm. What is equally clear, conversely, is that the purported lack of social and political significance of such a process is manifestly false. A recurrent concern of Nabokov’s literary output was the issue of psychopathology and the everyday and atypical ways in which the human mind tended towards delusion. Early novels such as Mary and King, Queen, Knave portray characters which possess an inability to fully apprehend their actual material reality. Yet the characters portrayed in those works, though suffering from forms of psychological delusion, are neither hysterics nor psychopaths. These acute, abnormal, forms of psychopathology form the central concern of The Eye and Despair. Madmen of the Nabokovian cast are not, however, merely psychopathic in a medico-diagnostic sense – their psychopathologies tend toward selfidentification with artistic impulses; philosophical rationalizations which are supported by distinct epistemological (and ideological) systems. In short, their actions do not merely belong in the realm of everyday insanity. In this sense, the ways in which such characters are constructed and portrayed, and the attitude which the author compels the reader to take towards them is noteworthy: The theme of The Eye is the pursuit of an investigation which leads the protagonist through a hell of mirrors and ends in the merging of twin images. I do not know if the keen pleasure I derived thirty-five years ago from adjusting in a certain mysterious pattern the various phases of the narrator’s quest will be shared by modern readers, but in any case the stress is not on the mystery but on the pattern. (TE: 4)

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The Eye begins with a young unnamed émigré narrator, a live-in tutor for a Russian family, who is subjected to an abjectly humiliating incident. Kashmarin, the husband of the woman with whom he is conducting an affair, on discovering his wife’s infidelity, confronts the narrator and proceeds to give him a thorough beating while his two young pupils look on. Unable to tolerate the shame and humiliation of this unfortunate incident, he resolves to commit suicide by shooting himself. With the act completed, the narrator is surprised to find that death – or more accurately the afterlife – consists of no more than continuing to be present in one’s previous life as an observer. The narrator is convinced that the power of his own imagination has allowed him to continue in such a way, and delights in his new existence. As the story continues, the narrator finds new lodgings and a job in a Russian bookstore owned by a paranoid Jewish mystic, and begins socially frequenting an aristocratic émigré family who lives in his building. He is particularly drawn to their attractive youngest daughter Vanya. Through his frequent visits to this household, he becomes interested in another new acquaintance of the family: an enigmatic young man named Smurov. The narrator is fascinated by Smurov, and suspects that his quiet and unassuming manner belies a fascinating personal history and passion. Smurov is noticed too by other acquaintances of the family, such as the White Russian colonel Mukhin, who points to some glaring inconsistencies in Smurov’s account of heroism in the Civil War. Keen to observe what he perceives to be the growing attraction between Smurov and Vanya, the narrator becomes increasingly obsessed with finding out the truth about Smurov. He gauges the reaction of others to him, interrogates them directly, searches their rooms, and finally intercepts a letter which contains a less than glowing description. A certain turn of events leads the narrator to believe that Vanya is in love with Smurov, but this is subsequently revealed to be a mistake: Vanya is engaged to Colonel Mukhin and by all accounts is happy with him. From this point on, the narrator seems to lose interest in Smurov. After a brief passage of time, we find the narrator confronting Vanya in her apartment and declaring his love to her: only to be unequivocally spurned. Humiliated once more, the narrator returns to examine his previous lodgings, and on finding the bullet hole in the wall – once more

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convinces himself of the unreality of his current existence. It is not until the narrator is confronted on the street by Kashmarin, who hails him as Gospodin Smurov [Mr Smurov], that we finally discover the truth. Smurov is one of the first in a line of peculiarly Nabokovian madmen. The narrative apparatus of The Eye, on the whole, is far from sophisticated – all but the most inattentive of readers quickly comprehend the situation that the narrator and Smurov are, in fact, the same person. Yet as Nabokov notes in the foreword, ‘the stress is not on the mystery but on the pattern’ (TE: 4). When we consider that the pattern in question is the merging of ‘twin images’, through a ‘hell of mirrors’, we can be assured that this investigation is very much psychological in nature. Nabokov’s hatred of Freud is well documented; it constitutes a significant aspect of the personal mythology which the author constructed, and which some scholars have gladly maintained. The fact that a great deal of his works engage with Freudian Psychoanalysis is something which has been consistently overlooked. Nabokov confessed to having, by his own admission, a ‘bookish familiarity’ (SO: 20) with Freud; his wife Vera also admitted that Nabokov had read a great deal of Freud. Bearing the title ‘Freud’, an undated and unpublished index card – perhaps written in the 1960s – concedes that ‘Ever since I read him in the Twenties he seemed wrong, absurd, and vulgar to me’.3 It is evident that, while not averse to personal mythologizing, the mythological character of Freudian psychoanalysis was something which Nabokov found distasteful. In an interview with one of his acolytes, Alfred Appel Jr, he was asked to comment on ‘which of Freud’s works or theories you were most offended by and why’. Nabokov responded that [h]e is not worthy of more attention than I have granted him in novels […]. Let the credulous and vulgar continue to believe that all mental woes can be cured by a daily application of old Greek myths to their private parts. (SO: 56)

3

Quoted in Leland de la Durantaye, Style is Matter: The Moral Art of Vladimir Nabokov (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007), 121.

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This comment serves as an acknowledgment of the attention which he has granted Freud in his novels, which function (in places) as responses to Freudian psychoanalysis. This fact is reasserted when he emphatically refers to The Eye (and all his novels) as ‘mythproof ’. There are many ways in which we could interpret this professed opposition to ‘myth’, but one in particular is the most plausible. In myth, Freud found the deterministic psychological link between modern societies and their ancestors – the accentuation of common desires, drives and psychopathologies. The peculiar form of Freudian mythologizing was contrary to Nabokov’s aesthetic sensibilities in two significant ways. The first, and most obvious, is that it contravenes his preference for an aesthetics which emphasizes specificity and detail. The second is that it confers prominence on collective experience, by affirming that human psychology and behaviour is homogeneous and predictable. What he loathed was not only the substance of the ideas (in particular Freud’s theories on human sexuality), but also their popular democratic appeal. The Eye is an attempt to examine a certain form of psychopathology, outside of what Nabokov viewed as ‘vulgar’ Freudian psychoanalysis. In The Eye, Smurov appears in some ways to share Nabokov’s own passion for the artistry of everyday life. Brian Boyd has proposed that ‘the very force of Smurov’s attempt to escape the conditions of life […] testifies to a soul operating at full intensity’, concluding that Nabokov thus implies that ‘Impatience with the limits of life […] may be one of the surest signs of being fully alive’ (RY: 349). Indeed, Susan Fromberg Schaeffer also found in Smurov and Nabokov a certain aesthetic kinship. Both perspectives attempt to search for an optimistic exegesis which adheres to their magnanimous image of the author, and thus willingly ignores the fundamentally abject world which The Eye depicts. Furthermore, abjection and cruelty are not merely present in a neutral form; rather, they are deployed with such force and purpose that it remains difficult not to recognize their polemical nature. Schaeffer’s is an interesting, if somewhat overzealous, paradigmatic analysis which takes into account two literary allusions in The Eye. The first is Chekov’s short story ‘The Double Bass Romance’, which the hapless Smurov is reading to his young charges just as the brutish Kashmarin bursts in to exact his revenge. The second is Maurice Maeterlinck’s Mona Vanna, which is explicitly stated as the inspiration for Vanya’s seemingly

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incongruous masculinized diminutive. Schaeffer maintains that Smurov ‘proves his theory about the autonomy of the imaginary world is more than empty rationalizing; he proves that he has in fact discovered a fundamental truth of existence’, ultimately suggesting that Smurov’s story ends happily because imagination is powerful enough to create ‘events’ of its own, events which then become part of the viable past and help create a worthwhile present and future.4

Yet it is perfectly obvious, given his miserable fate, that Smurov is viewed with nothing but utter contempt by his creator. Smurov is presented to us as a failed artist, a mediocre petty criminal and narcissistic hysteric. This is made clear in several ways. It is likely that both Smurov, and his love interest Vanya, are named after Vanya Smurov – the homosexual protagonist of the novella Wings5 by the Symbolist poet Mikhail Kuzmin. Nabokov’s persistent, and largely unreconstructed, homophobia is something which may leave contemporary readers more than a little uneasy. Despite the tragic, and indeed heroic, death of his gay brother Sergei in a Nazi concentration camp, Nabokov’s attitude to homosexuality, though a little softened, remained unchanged throughout his life. He would admit to finding it extraordinarily ‘difficult’ to talk about his brother Sergei.6 In his otherwise extensively detailed and evocative auto-biography Speak Memory, there is only a short section devoted to his younger brother: We attended different schools; he went to my father’s former gimnaziya and wore the regulation black uniform to which, at fifteen, he added an illegal touch: mouse-gray spats. About that time, a page from his diary that I found on his desk and read, and in stupid wonder showed it to my tutor, who promptly showed it to my father, abruptly providing a retroactive clarification of certain oddities of behaviour on his part.

4 5 6

Susan Fromberg Schaeffer, ‘The Editing Blinks of Vladimir Nabokov’s The Eye’, University of Windsor Review, Vol. 8 (1972–1973), 28. Mikhail Kuzmin, Wings (London: Hesperus Press, 2007). In a letter to Edmund Wilson in September 1945, Nabokov spoke about his brother’s arrest for subversive activities and subsequent death in a concentration camp – expressing surprise because his brother was ‘a harmless, indolent, pathetic person who spent his life vaguely shuttling between the Quartier Latin and a castle in Austria’ (NWL: 175).

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The only game we both liked was tennis. We played a lot of it together, especially in England, on an erratic grass court in Kensington, on a good clay court in Cambridge. He was left-handed. He had a bad stammer that hampered discussion of doubtful points. (SM: 258; my italics)

In 1930–1932, the period in which both The Eye and Despair were completed, Nabokov was still rather ill at ease when meeting with his brother. Sergei had moved to Paris after he had completed his studies at Cambridge; he was good friends with Jean Cocteau and was well known in the sexually liberated and political leftist milieu of La Rive Gauche cafe society. Boyd notes that Nabokov ‘disliked the unhealthy atmosphere of Montparnasse, the drugs, the homosexuality, and above all the currying and bestowing of favour that destroyed disinterested literary judgement’ (RY: 344). Nabokov lunched with his brother and his lover, the Austrian aristocrat Hermann Thien, at the Jardin du Luxembourg and wrote to his wife of the meeting in 1932: The husband, I must admit, is very pleasant, quiet, not at all the pederast type, attractive face and manner. All the same I felt rather uncomfortable, especially when one of their friends came up, red-lipped and curled. (RY: 396)

That the protagonists of The Eye (Smurov) and Despair (Hermann Hermann) are perhaps named after homosexuals from literature, or his own personal acquaintance, is significant in a number of ways. Both protagonists are referred to, either subtly or explicitly, as having homosexual tendencies. We shall deal with how this relates to Despair, particularly in Hermann Hermann’s association with Felix (his ‘left-handed’ victim) in the following section. The ‘merging of twin images’ which Nabokov refers to in his preface is particularly interesting, when we consider that the protagonist and his love interest each share half of the name of Kuzmin’s homosexual hero. The main psychopathology which Nabokov ascribes to Smurov is delusion; an inability to apprehend material reality: an unpardonable aesthetic crime in Nabokov’s eyes. Yet implicit in such an accusation is also a judgement upon the unnatural ‘oddity’ of homosexuality as a psychopathology, which for Nabokov, represents a transgression of

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equal severity.7 For Nabokov, homosexuality was in essence a symptom of aesthetic delusion, an inherent characteristic of the pseudo-artistic frauds which would come to feature in his later works. Bearing this in mind, it’s useful to consider the diary entry of the comically absurd character Roman Bogdanovich, which Smurov intercepts and reads: I have the impression, dear friend, that I have already written you of the fact that Smurov belongs to that curious class of people I once called ‘sexual lefties’. Smurov’s entire appearance, his frailness, his decadence, his mincing gestures, his fondness for Eau de Cologne, and, in particular, those furtive, passionate glances that he constantly directs toward your humble servant – all this has long since confirmed this conjecture of mine. It is remarkable that these sexually unfortunate individuals, while yearning physically for some handsome specimen of mature virility, often choose for the object of their (perfectly platonic) admiration – a woman – a woman they know, well, slightly, or not at all. And so Smurov, notwithstanding his perversion, has chosen Varvara as his ideal. This comely but rather stupid lass is engaged to a certain M. M. Mukhin, one of the youngest colonels in the White Army, so Smurov has full assurance that he will not be compelled to perform that which he is neither capable nor desirous of performing with any lady, even if she were Cleopatra herself. Furthermore, the ‘sexual lefty’ – I admit I find the expression exceptionally apt – frequently nurtures a tendency to break the law, which infraction is further facilitated for him by the fact that an infraction of the law of nature is already there. (TE: 73)

The self-important and grandiose prose style of Roman Bogdanonovich, which is intended to amuse, doesn’t obscure some points of interest in the section. Bogdanovich’s enumeration of Smurov’s homosexual characteristics (his ‘frailness’, ‘decadence’, ‘mincing gestures’ and ‘fondness for Eau de Cologne’) immediately focuses the reader’s attention: the Smurov which the narrator had previously described was quite different. Thus the intervention of objective reality into Smurov’s deluded narcissistic narrative serves to reinforce the notion of The Eye as a ‘cautionary’ tale against the separation of imagination from reality. Roman Bogdanovich’s comment on Smurov’s chaste attraction towards Vanya is also of interest, insomuch as it makes clear what was hinted at in their names. It is evident that Nabokov

7

Indeed, many of the ‘deluded artist’ villains in Nabokov’s works (perhaps most famously Charles Kinbote in Pale Fire), also exhibit homosexual tendencies.

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views Smurov’s love for Vanya as inauthentic, and in the end nothing more than a narcissistic love of self. Taking this into consideration – the fact the Vanya possesses a masculine diminutive for her given name no longer seems incongruous. The designation of Smurov as a ‘sexual lefty’ is also significant. Perhaps for Nabokov, whose ‘left-handed’, ‘stammering’, homosexual brother lived a life quite different from his own on the Parisian left bank, homosexuality and leftist politics were inseparably intertwined.8 In addition, the allusion to the Symbolist Mikhail Kuzmin’s Wings has some further significance. Olga Skonechnaia has perceptively noted that The Eye seeks to parody Kuzmin’s work by playing upon its depiction of homosexuality as a higher, more pure and spiritual form of love: Kuzmin’s Wings offers an opposition of heterosexual animal passion and the higher, ‘inspired’ homosexual love that is deconstructed in The Eye by juxtaposing Smurov’s amorous intrigues with ordinary women with his strange, ethereal passion for Vanya. The squalid relationship with the Petersburg seamstress, the banal episode with Matilda, the furtive visits to the housemaid have nothing in common with the idealized, unreciprocated feeling Smurov has for a woman with a man’s name.9

What then is the purpose of the double themes of ‘delusion’ and ‘perversion’ in The Eye? They function as caricatures of the mystification of homosexuality within Symbolist thought. Russian Symbolism strived towards a spiritual rebirth and enlightenment – homosexuality, in Kuzmin’s novel, is viewed as a higher expression of love that rejects the animalistic act of procreation. Thus, the theme of ‘perversion’ does not merely demonstrate Nabokov’s prejudice towards homosexuality, but also evidences a changing attitude towards Russian Symbolism. It is of course well known that Sirin, the pseudonym under which Nabokov chose to publish his works of the émigré period, represents a mythical phoenix-like bird in Russian folklore. It was also, however, the name of the publishing house which was associated with the two main 8 9

Andrew Field noted that Nabokov thought homosexuality to be a hereditary illness in his family. Olga Skonechnaia, ‘“People of the Moonlight”: Silver Age Parodies in Nabokov’s The Eye and The Gift’, Nabokov Studies, Vol. 3 (1996), 33–52 (38).

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figures of Silver-Age literature; Alexander Blok and Andrei Bely. It is clear that such self-conscious association suggests that Nabokov, initially at least, viewed himself as an heir to the Symbolist tradition. Although different in certain aspects, Russian Symbolism, in kinship with its French counterpart, represented a reaction to the prevailing current of rationalism, materialism and utilitarian aesthetics. The movement eschewed the traditionalist tendencies which had historically characterized reactionary aesthetic movements – and instead was, in many ways, in the avant-garde. This was perhaps one aspect which attracted the young Nabokov to the Symbolist cause. The second was, unsurprisingly, that the Symbolists tended to belong to the same aristocratic and haute bourgeois political class as himself. In his Yeats, Eliot, Pound and the Politics of Poetry, Cairns Craig posited that these three right-wing poets who were primarily interested in aesthetics were ‘driven to politics in order to maintain the institutions and the patterns of society which preserved and promulgated the kinds of memory on which their poetry relied’.10 A not dissimilar motivation can be attributed to Nabokov’s initial self-identification with the Symbolist movement. Speaking of the Russian Silver Age, Nabokov had confided to Edmund Wilson that he was a ‘product of that period’, and was ‘bred in that atmosphere’ (NWL: 220). What is clear, however, is that having established himself as a new voice within émigré letters, Nabokov sought to distance himself from Symbolism. Dmitri Merezhkovsky and his wife Zinaida Gippius, the founders of The ‘St. Petersburg Religious and Philosophical Society’, and the main ideologues of the Symbolist movement, disapproved of Nabokov’s work from the very beginning. In the emigration this disapproval had evolved into a flagrant hostility. In Speak, Memory Nabokov invokes a thinly veiled critique of Merezhkovsky and Gippius, when he speaks of certain critics’ hostility towards Sirin: Just as Marxist publicists of the eighties in old Russia would have denounced his lack of concern with the economic structure of society, so the mystagogues of émigré letters deplored his lack of religious insight and of moral preoccupation. (SM: 287)

10 Cairns Craig, Yeats, Eliot, Pound and the Politics of Poetry: Richest to the Richest (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1982), 71.

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It is worthwhile to note Nabokov’s conflation here of the opinions of two diametrically opposed modes of criticism towards his work. By reflecting on the similarities between these two ideologically conflicting modes of criticism, Nabokov thereby sought to affirm, ex post facto, the consistency of his ostensible political apathy. Such a conflation is interesting insomuch as it hints at the similarity which Nabokov perceived between supposedly materialist and idealist ideological systems: both are reliant upon myth. It is clear that despite his early aesthetic self-identification with the movement, Nabokov no longer felt the same ideological connection with Symbolism that he had felt previously. David Glynn has attempted to overturn the critical orthodoxy surrounding the purported Symbolist genealogy of Nabokov’s aesthetics. In his study on Formalist and Bergsonian influences in Nabokov’s work, Glynn posits that ‘Nabokov’s epistemology was in fact anti-Symbolist’, and that ‘this aligned him with both Bergsonism and Russian Formalism: intellectual systems that were themselves hostile to a Symbolist mode of cognition’.11 Glynn maintains that Nabokov’s purported affinity with a Symbolist epistemology is unstable, given his constant insistence on the value of material reality for itself, as opposed to what Alexandrov proposes as a mere ‘camouflage’ for the metaphysical. Glynn maintains that [a] Symbolist epistemology may be seen to devalue material reality by positioning it as a mere adumbration of a higher realm. Nabokov’s own epistemology was antithetical to this. Nabokov valued the immediate material world and was creatively engaged by the pernicious tendency of the deluded mind to manifest a degree of obliviousness to material reality or even to efface that reality altogether. (Glynn: 2)

It is of course evident that, in the final analysis, everything tends to return to the fact of material reality in the Nabokovian universe. Nabokov’s first work Mary recounts a young émigré’s idealized yearning for his first love, and seemingly celebrates the transcendent quality of personal memory. However at the novella’s denouement, the protagonist Ganin concedes 11

Michael Glynn, Vladimir Nabokov: Bergsonian and Russian Formalist Influences in His Novels (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 2. Further references are given in parentheses.

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that although the past four days had been ‘the happiest days of his life’, he had nonetheless ‘exhausted his memories’, and that the ‘image of Mary […] now remained in the house of ghosts, which itself was already a memory’ (Mary: 135). From this point onwards, material realities (however unwelcome or unpleasant) always affect the course of the narrative apparatus. It is a pattern we can also recognize in later works of the American period, such as Lolita, where the deluded poet Humbert Humbert’s idealized ‘love’, but in reality his transference of deep-seeded psychological trauma, leads him to defile and ruin a young girl’s childhood. Or indeed, in Pale Fire – where Charles Kinbote’s deluded narcissism leads him to appropriate John Shade’s very real and tangible grief. Although we may concede that Nabokov’s materialism was somewhat peculiar, we must equally insist upon the fact of its existence. In The Eye, Smurov purports to be a materialist, yet from the outset his perspective is portrayed as flawed. The initial fact that he refuses to recognize the failure of his own suicide attempt is the first of his many acts of deluded materialism: I became aware now that I had decided all this not today but long ago, at various times, when I used to imagine light-heartedly how people went about shooting themselves. Thus a confirmed city dweller who receives an unexpected invitation from the country friend begins by acquiring a flask and a sturdy pair of boots, not because they might actually be needed, but unconsciously, as a consequence of certain former, untested thoughts about the countryside with its long walks through the woods and mountains. But when he arrives, there are no woods and no mountains, nothing but farmland, and no one wants to stride along the highway in the heat. I saw now, as no one sees a real turnip field instead of the picture-postcard glens and glades, how conventional were my former ideas on pre-suicidal occupations; a man who has decided upon self-destruction is far removed from mundane affairs, and to sit-down and write his will would be, at that moment, an act just as absurd as winding up one’s watch, since, together with the man, the whole world is destroyed; the last letter is instantly reduced to dust and, with it, all the postmen; and like smoke, vanishes the estate bequeathed to a nonexistent progeny. (TE: 19)

Smurov attempts suicide to escape humiliation but is unable to accept that he has failed. He chooses instead to indulge in narcissistic fantasy, abandoning objective material reality in favour of delusional mythology. In this sense Smurov can be seen as the first in a long line of Nabokovian

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pseudo-artists, who use art not to better understand the uniqueness of reality, but to perpetuate delusion. The contrast between the reality which an individual experiences when visiting the country and the myth of the bucolic, pastoral idyll which he may have imagined strengthens the ‘antimyth’ character of this work. Towards the end of his life, in a scathing response to William Rowe’s study12 of his novels, Nabokov wrote that he objected to Rowe manipulating ‘my most innocent words so as to introduce sexual “symbols” into them’. He continues, stating emphatically that the ‘notion of symbol itself has always been abhorrent to me […]. The symbolism racket in schools attracts computerized minds but destroys plain intelligence as well as poetical sense. It bleaches the soul. It numbs all capacity to enjoy the fun and enchantment of art’ (SO: 264; my italics). It is clear that the professed anti-Symbolism of the later Nabokov evidently has its origins in earlier works such as The Eye. Vladimir Alexandrov’s Otherworld makes a compelling case for the importance of Russian Symbolism in Nabokov’s practice, maintaining that it is ‘Symbolism that cultivated the kind of metaphysical dualism – or division between visible phenomena and a “higher” spiritual reality – that underlies Nabokov’s depictions of phenomena in this world’.13 Acknowledging that such an epistemology was in essence contrary to Nabokov’s stated and actual aesthetic practices, Alexandrov posits that another Formalist movement, Achmeism, has equal importance in shaping the Nabokovian aesthetic – providing the antecedents for Nabokov’s celebration of ‘sensual details’ and ‘perceptual acuity’. For Alexandrov, Nabokov’s art ‘constitutes a unique fusion of distinctive features from both these movements, and belies the superficial conception of them as simply and inevitably antithetical’ (Alexandrov: 215). Alexandrov’s scholarship is rigorous and exacting, and there is much to admire in the range of supporting evidence which he provides for his thesis. However, it is difficult to conceive how Nabokov could successfully combine two such disparate aesthetic systems which were 12 13

William Woodin Rowe, Nabokov’s Deceptive World (New York: New York University Press, 1971). Vladimir E. Alexandrov, Nabokov’s Otherworld (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 215. Further references are given in parentheses.

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so vehemently opposed to one another. To suggest such is to simply wish away their fundamental differences. These differences were irreconcilable, as Boris Eichenbaum wrote in his Theory of the Formal Method: We knew that all compromises would have to be avoided, that history demanded of us a really revolutionary attitude – a categorical thesis, merciless irony, and bold rejections of whatever could not be reconciled with our position. We had to oppose the subjective aesthetic principles espoused by the Symbolists with an objective consideration of the facts. Hence our Formalist movement was characterized by a new passion for scientific positivism – a rejection of philosophical assumptions, of psychological and aesthetic interpretations, etc. Art, considered apart from philosophical aesthetics and ideological theories, dictated its own position on things.14

Note the convergence here of the Formalists’ opposition to ‘psychological’ interpretations or simple ‘aesthetic’ interpretations, of their wish to consider art outside of systems of ‘philosophical aesthetics’ and ‘ideological theories’ – with Nabokov’s own stated aims. Surprisingly there are in fact many more points of convergence between Nabokov’s epistemology and aesthetic theories of Russian Formalism, than between Nabokov and Symbolism. A little later in The Eye, the narrator attempts to explain the new philosophy of his ‘afterlife’, of how it is absurd to apply signs, systems or symbolic myths to human society: It is silly to seek a basic law, even sillier to find it. Some mean spirited little man decides that the whole course of humanity can be explained in terms of insidiously revolving signs of the zodiac or as a struggle between an empty and stuffed belly; he hires a punctilious Philistine to act as Clio’s clerk, and begins a wholesale trade in epochs and masses; and then woe to the private individuum, with his two poor u’s, hallooing hopelessly amid the dense growth of economic causes. Luckily no such law exists: a toothache will cost a battle, a drizzle cancel an insurrection. Everything is fluid, everything depends on chance, and all in vain were the efforts of that crabbed bourgeois in Victorian checkered trousers, author of Das Kapital, the fruit of insomnia and migraine. (TE: 27)

14

Boris Eichenbaum, ‘The Theory of the Formal Method’, Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, trans. Lee T. Lemon (Lincoln: University of Nebraska press, 1965), 106.

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Vladimir Alexandrov’s contention that Nabokov’s aesthetic practice functions to provide glimpses of a metaphysical ‘otherworld’ seems somewhat improbable when faced with such clear, and not infrequent, statements in Nabokov’s prose. When they appear, such statements often seem at odds with the narrative logic of the text, appearing incongruous, insomuch as the ideas and concepts expressed go beyond the intellectual and critical abilities which the author has conferred upon his character. It almost appears as if the author is speaking plainly and directly to his reader. Initially, it is unclear why Nabokov uses his deluded protagonist to express these ideas, given how close this statement is to Nabokov’s own perspective. It would, at first glance, appear to confirm Boyd and Schaeffer’s argument that Nabokov and Smurov share certain aesthetic and philosophical opinions. Yet, it is clear as the narrative progresses that quite the opposite is true. The aesthetic platitudes which Smurov pronounces are numerous; reliant heavily upon received opinion and cliché, they ultimately demonstrate his inability to remain consistent with his own professed philosophy: ‘Do you play?’ Roman Bogdanovich politely asked Smurov, with a meaningful look at the piano. ‘I used to play once’, Smurov calmly replied. He opened the lid, glanced dreamily at the bared teeth of the keyboard, and brought the lid back down. ‘I love music’, Roman Bogdanovich observed confidentially. ‘I recall, in my student days –’ ‘Music’, said Smurov in a louder tone, ‘good music at least, expresses that which is inexpressible in words. Therein lie the meaning and the mystery of music’. (TE: 57)

Nabokov’s mocking indictment of Smurov is, in a larger sense, an indictment of the Russian Symbolist movement, of how a movement which initially championed the cause of individual artistry and perception has itself become mired in the same myth-making which characterized those ideologies to which Nabokov was so naturally opposed. Nowhere is this clearer than in the very last pages of the work. It occurs after the narrator is ‘outed’ as Smurov, when he encounters Kashmarin with ‘an embarrassed expression on his face’ (TE: 86) on the street. Kasmarin has recently discovered that Smurov was not his wife’s last, nor only, lover – and has come to feel a great sense of guilt for having beaten Smurov so badly. He has been searching for Smurov all over Berlin in order to apologise to him. Kashmarin informs Smurov that he has divorced his wife, and offers him

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a job which will make him ‘three times as much’ as he is currently earning. We are led to believe that Smurov agrees. He remarks that ‘Kashmarin had borne away yet another image of Smurov’, and that it really does not matter ‘which’ (TE: 88). On the following page, after he has taken his leave of Kashmarin, Smurov has cause to contemplate his existence: For I do not exist: there exist but thousands of mirrors that reflect me. With every acquaintance I make, the population of phantoms resembling me increases. Somewhere they live, somewhere they multiply. I alone do not exist […]. And then will come the day when the last person who remembers me will die. A fetus in reverse, my image, too, will dwindle and die within that last witness of the crime I committed by the mere fact of living. Perhaps a chance story about me, a simple anecdote in which I figure, will pass on from him to his son or grandson, and so my name and my ghost will appear fleetingly here and there for some time still. Then will come the end. And yet I am happy. Yes, happy. I swear, I swear I am happy. I have realized that the only happiness in this world is to observe, to spy, to watch, to scrutinize oneself and others, to be nothing but a big, slightly vitreous, somewhat bloodshot, unblinking eye. (TE: 88)

The rejection of Symbolism was, of course, an ideological act; Nabokov regarded Symbolism as too inconsistent in its ideological goals, and that its practitioners offered little serious ideological opposition to Bolshevism. This attitude derived from a realization that some Symbolists, amongst whom were his heroes Bely and Blok, welcomed and embraced the Bolshevik revolution (some, such as Valery Bryusov for personal gain) and that others, such as Merezhkovsky and Gippius, in their absurd metaphysical mysticism and celebration of fascist dictators, could not articulate the viable ideological alternative which he himself was beginning to realize. Nabokov’s disenchantment with Symbolism was perhaps also due to the similarities he perceived between Symbolist epistemology and other, putatively more rational, epistemological systems such as Freudian psychoanalysis, or even Marxism. The fact that one professes to be idealist and the others to be materialist; that one was initially motivated by celebrating the solipsistic insight of a certain privileged class of artist, the other in universalizing the concept of shared psychological motivations, or in analysing the political economic nature of class relations, appears to have been of little importance to the author. For Nabokov, all three relied upon a recognizable

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determinism which he would often dismiss as ‘general ideas’; all tended to overemphasize ready-made myths over individual experience: the general over the particular. Such ideas, Nabokov writes in his preface, lead to a ‘world of soul dissolution where poor Smurov only exists insofar as he is reflected in others brains, which in their turn are placed in the same strange, specular predicament as his’ (TE: 4). As we shall see, this theme of aesthetic delusion is expanded, and supplemented, in the novel Despair, where, in addition to continuing his parody of Symbolism, he would focus more closely on Marxism and Freud.

The Indivisible Double in Despair Where in The Eye Smurov’s deluded fantasies lead to petty criminality, in Despair this same delusion leads the protagonist Hermann Hermann to commit murder – murder conceived as an artistic act, and justified through philosophical consideration. Further, the philosophical and aesthetic theories which are expounded by the protagonist reveal sympathies with leftist politics, and as Alexander Dolinin has noted ‘mimic the pose and the prose of Soviet modernists’.15 This, and many other themes, are hinted at in Nabokov’s foreword to Despair, written in 1965. Among all of the introductions which Nabokov wrote to his English translations, this one for Despair is perhaps the most vociferous, insistent, detailed, and thus inevitably one of the most revealing: Despair, in kinship with the rest of my books, has no social comment to make, no message to bring in its teeth. It does not uplift the spiritual organ of man, nor does it show humanity the right exit. It contains far fewer ‘ideas’ than do those rich

15

Alexander Dolinin, ‘Caning of the Modernist Profaners: Parody in Despair’, Cycnos, Vol. 12, No. 2, Nabokov: At the Crossroads of Modernism and Postmodernism (Nice: Université de Nice-Sophia Antipolis, Department d’Etudes Anglophones, 1995) 43–54 (44). Further references are given in parentheses.

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Through examining this extract we are able to discern, counter-intuitively, several themes which Nabokov was perhaps keen to obscure. Primarily, the comment on ‘rich vulgar novels’ of ideas, and the ‘leftist propaganda of the thirties’ is significant as it confirms the presence of the parody of contemporary Russian modernist fiction: the customary derision of Freud, the presence of engagement with theories of speculative psychology. It is worthwhile to examine each of these elements in detail. In Despair, the narcissistic émigré protagonist Hermann Hermann recounts in a dark and comically idiosyncratic manner how he happened to come across an itinerant vagrant named Felix, who he believes to be his exact double. Hermann conspires to murder this individual in order to fake his own death and claim a valuable insurance policy which he has taken out on his own life. The narrative abounds in dark humour and misdirection, as the narrator recounts how the plan formed in his head, the means by which he carried out the act, and the pseudo-philosophical justifications for his action. The reader is given to believe, from the very outset, that they cannot trust anything which Hermann Hermann writes. Unsurprisingly then, after he has tricked Felix into swapping clothes with him and subsequently shoots him in the back – we later learn that there is in fact no resemblance between victim and murderer. The breadth of literary allusion in Despair is noteworthy. The main target of parody in this novel is purported by many to be Fyodor Dostoevsky, a writer whom Nabokov notably disliked. Yet, as Alexander Dolinin has perceptively noted, there is a great deal to suggest that the Russian original sought not to simply

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parody Dostoevsky, but also to parody ‘a strong Dostoevskian strain in contemporary Russian literature from Symbolists to the post-revolutionary modernists – shop-worn criminal plots, threadbare themes and images, self-conscious psychopathic characters modelled on Raskol’nikov or the Man from the Underground, trite moral and psychological paradoxes’ (Dolinin: 43).16 The theme of aesthetic ‘delusion’, and ‘perversion’, which we encountered in The Eye is also expanded in Despair to include several glaringly political and psychological elements. Despair is the first of Nabokov’s works where there is a greater emphasis on inter-textuality. There are several possible origins for the name of the Russified German protagonist, Hermann Karlovich Hermann. One possibility suggested by John Burt Foster is that of the ethnic German officer Herman, protagonist of Alexander Pushkin’s supernatural short story The Queen of Spades. This is also a work which is deeply concerned with the criminal mind, and contains very little romanticism in its view towards madness. Indeed, as Gary Rosenshield has suggested, ‘Madness in “The Queen of Spades,” as in Hoffmann, is precipitated and aggravated not by the absence of imagination, but by imaginative failure’.17 Another possible inspiration, as I have suggested earlier, is Sergei Nabokov’s homosexual lover Hermann Thien, whom Nabokov met in the midst of finishing and revising his manuscript for Despair. In my opinion, an amalgamation of both sources appears to be valid. The first reinforces Nabokov’s attitude towards his psychopathic protagonist, who is an imaginative ‘failure’ – the second, evidenced by stark instances of homoeroticism in the narrative, continues the association of homosexual ‘perversion’ with aesthetic delusion. ‘My position in regard to Dostoevsky’, Nabokov wrote in one of his lectures, ‘is a curious and difficult one’ (LRL: 98). Despite the reserved admiration which he expressed towards The Double, he generally tended to disparage

16

Dolinin notes that there is a shift in the English translation: ‘the reorientation from the progeny to the progenitor, from the modernist “dostoevshcina” to Dostoevsky proper’. 17 Gary Rosenshield, ‘Choosing the Right Card: Madness, Gambling, and the Imagination in Pushkin’s “The Queen of Spades”’, PMLA, Vol. 109, No. 5 (1994), 995–1008 (998).

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Dostoevsky at any given opportunity. In Despair, Dostoevsky is sardonically referred to as ‘that famous writer of Russian thrillers’, and ‘our national expert in soul ague and the aberrations of human self respect’ (Des: 80). Nabokov continues in his lecture to elaborate upon a distinction from his own writing which is written ‘from the only point of view that literature interests me – namely the point of view of enduring art and individual genius’. Within this context, Nabokov maintains, ‘Dostoevsky is not a great writer, but rather a mediocre one – with flashes of excellent humor, but, alas, with wastelands of literary platitudes in between’ (LRL: 98). In the same lecture, Nabokov finds that the origins of Dostoevsky’s messianic mysticism can be found in the period following his implication in the Petrashevsky circle for subversive activities, his death sentence, last minute reprieve, and subsequent exile in Siberia: Not to go completely mad in those surroundings, Dostoevsky had to find some sort of escape. This he found in a neurotic Christianism. It is only natural that some of the convicts among whom he lived showed, besides dreadful bestiality, an occasional human trait. Dostoevsky gathered these manifestations and built upon them a kind of very artificial and completely pathological idealization of the simple Russian folk. […] His attitude towards the Government had completely changed since the days of his youthful radicalism. […] The theories of socialism and Western Liberalism became for him the embodiments of Western contamination and of satanic sin bent upon the destruction of a Slavic and Greek-Catholic world. It is the same attitude that one sees in Fascism or in Communism – universal salvation. (LRL: 101)

Nabokov’s conflation here of Dostoevsky’s later reactionary ‘Slavophile’ ideology with fascism and communism is noteworthy. All three, to Nabokov’s mind, were embroiled in a pointless quest for ‘universal salvation’. It is worthwhile also to note that Nabokov considers the ‘idealization’ of ‘simple Russian folk’ as pathological, hinting at further similarities between Dostoevsky and the later aesthetics of Socialist Realism. He reportedly confided to Andrew Field ‘that not all Russians love Dostoevsky as much as Americans do, and that most of those Russians who do, venerate him as a mystic and not as an artist. […] his sensitive murderers and soulful prostitutes are not to be endured for one moment – by this reader anyway’.18 It is

18

Cited by Andrew Field, Nabokov: His Life in Art (Boston: Little Brown, 1967), 261.

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unsurprising then, that Russian Symbolism’s fascination with Dostoevsky was something which he felt more than a little uneasy with. As we have already noted, another target of parody in Despair is the Symbolist fiction which derives from the works of Dostoevsky. Of these, the works of Valery Bryusov are of particular interest. Bryusov, a leading Symbolist, welcomed the Bolshevik revolution and as a result was given a position in the Soviet Ministry of Culture: a fact which undoubtedly did not endear him to Nabokov. The lack of ideological coherency within the Symbolist movement, typified by writers such as Bryusov and Andrei Bely (who would eventually return to the USSR), evidently contributed to Nabokov’s rejection of Symbolism. A short story by Bryusov named Poslednie stranitzy iz dnenika zhenshchiny [The Last Pages from a Woman’s Diary] similarly recounts the story of an artist/murderer named Modest, who explains away his crime as a mere quirk of his artistic temperament. The narrator of the work is Modest’s lover, who, as Dolinin has noted, absolves and vindicates the murderer with the help of the same argument Hermann uses to justify and vindicate himself: a great artist stands above ordinary people, ‘the rabble’. (Dolinin: 45)

Another story, which encompasses the same themes, is the Symbolist Leonid Andreyev’s Mysl [The Thought], published in 1902. The narrator of this story enacts the ‘perfect crime’ by murdering his friend, and proceeds to give credibility to the intellectual and philosophical motivations behind his act by writing a memoir. Dolinin astutely notes that there are several glaring parallels between The Thought and Despair, noting that both works ‘reproduce the narrative structure and intonations of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground’ (Dolinin: 46). Nabokov, in his characteristically irreverent manner, humorously suggested that this particular novel should in fact be called ‘Memoirs from a Mousehole’ and in his lecture on Dostoevsky, he maintains that the first part of the work is a ‘soliloquy that presupposes the presence of a phantom audience’. ‘The mouseman, the narrator’, Nabokov wrote, ‘keeps turning to an audience of persons who seem to be amateur philosophers, newspaper readers, and what he calls normal people’ (LRL: 115–116). Such a description can, of course,

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be equally applied to Hermann in Despair: a ‘philosopher’ writing for the benefit of his fellow ‘amateurs’. Both tales, as with many works of the period, reflect a crude Symbolist fascination with Dostoevskian themes such as Raskolnikov’s ‘Napoleon theory’ explored in works such as Crime and Punishment, but also with the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. The Nietzschean concept of the Übermensch was, as a result of the philosophical engagements of Vladimir Solovyov, very much in vogue within Symbolist circles. These works also often featured psychopathic, painfully narcissistic, characters such as Nabokov’s Hermann Hermann, who commit acts of murder or violence – ultimately justifying their base crimes by claiming their status as ‘artists’ who stand above ordinary human society. Nietzschean philosophy was well known within Symbolist circles, yet it was the philosopher Vladimir Solovyov, whose ‘A Short Tale of the Antichrist’, published in 1900, reconciled his own concept of the Christian sverkhchelovecheskoe [superhuman] with the avowedly atheistic concept of Nietzsche’s Übermensch. Solovyov was a close friend of Dostoevsky (purportedly acting as inspiration for the character of Alyosha Karamazov), and his philosophy had a profound effect upon the Symbolist movement – serving as a source of inspiration to writers such as Valery Bryusov, Leonid Andreyev, and even Andrei Bely and Alexander Blok. In Nietzsche’s concept of the Übermensch, Solovyov found a doubtful connection to his own ideological project of Theocracy, writing in 1897: Isn’t the unfortunate Nietzsche right, after all, when he maintains that all the virtue, all the value, of a man is in the fact that he is more than a man, that he is a transition to some kind of other, higher being?19

Here, Solovyov entirely misinterprets Nietzsche’s Übermensch, endowing it with a certain idealism concerned with the perfection and apotheosis of the human, a will to reflect the image of God in a higher form of humanity – when, in actual fact, Nietzsche’s atheistic philosophy was not concerned with the perfection, but the overcoming of humanity itself. It was exactly

19

Vladimir Sergeyevich Solovyov, Politics, Law, and Morality: Essays, trans. Vladimir Wozniuk (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 87.

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this type of unstable ‘amateur’ philosophy, present in Dostoevsky, and in the works of Symbolist writers such as Bryusov and Andreyev, which Nabokov sought to parody in Despair. Furthermore, Nabokov could not have failed to notice that crudely pseudo-Nietzschean themes were also apparent in the works of contemporary Soviet novelists such as Ilya Ehrenburg,20 whose fictional first-person memoir Leto 1925 goda [The Summer of 1925], which, aside from sharing a similar subject matter, also contains many other instructive parallels with Despair: The very mode and tone of discourse chosen by Ehrenburg bears a close resemblance to Hermann’s self-conscious memoir: both narrators interweave their stories with similar meta-literary digressions, auto-commentary, direct appeals to the readers, anticipations of their reactions, shifts from the narrated past to the present, and other ‘defamiliarizing’ devices. (Dolinin: 53)

It is evident that Nabokov thought very little of the pseudo-Nietzschean posturing of contemporary Symbolist writers, and to a lesser extent those of the Soviets. It is strange then, that there has been an attempt within contemporary scholarship to assert that the philosophical motivations which underpin Nabokov’s aesthetics were inspired by Nietzsche. In his monograph Nabokov, le nietzschéen,21 Anatoly Livry attempts to analyse the Nabokovian oeuvre through the prism of Nietzschean philosophy. The connections are at times painfully tenuous, but more often the conclusions which Livry draws are nothing more than speculative; evidencing more the author’s overwhelming desire to cast Nabokov as a Nietzschean than any attempt at serious scholarship: Nous pouvons donc conclure que, malgré de nombreux efforts, les petits hommes, les ‘mauvais Européens’, les monstres, les reptiles et autres qui entourent le héros de Nabokov n’ont pas la force d’entraver sa création. Devenant un guerrier nietzschéen victorieux et donc un détracteur idéal de Socrate, il leur oppose le rire, la légèreté et

20 A letter to The Times, published in 1962, about his falsely advertised participation in the Edinburgh Book Festival, reveals Nabokov’s hatred of Ehrenburg whom, with Bertrand Russell and Jean-Paul Sartre, he ‘would not consent to participate in any festival or conference whatsoever’ (SL: 336). 21 Anatoly Livry, Nabokov le nietzschéen (Paris: Hermann Editeurs, 2010).

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The reference to ‘les mauvais Européens’ who attempt to hinder Nabokov’s creativity, should inform us immediately of the kind of ideological wishful thinking which Livry is attempting to impose upon Nabokov.23 What is apparent for anyone who cares to read works such as Despair with any degree of attention is that the type of ‘reptile’, ‘monster’ and ‘small man’ which Nabokov opposes with ‘laughter, lightness and blows’, whom he ‘humiliates without pity’, is in fact the absurd Nietzschean warrior (guerrier nietzschéen) which Livry erroneously supposes Nabokov to be. Ultimately, despite Nabokov’s evident contempt towards Symbolism’s pseudo-Nietzschean aesthetics, Despair reserves the bulk of its mocking parody for Marxist epistemology and political thought; which Nabokov attempts to associate with the same philosophical ‘amateurism’ that influenced those poor imitations of Dostoevsky. Nabokov is not, however, as successful in this endeavour as in the previous. The leftist sympathies which Hermann Hermann expresses are caricatures, and reveal, at this point in time, a very naive understanding of Marxism on Nabokov’s part. What is of interest for this present study is that Nabokov, at this stage in time, attempts to judge Marxism aesthetically, and Hermann Hermann’s aesthetic delusion is linked to his ostensibly ‘Marxist’ ideology. Hermann’s inability – and lack of desire – to recognize the difference between two individual faces, and indeed between two individuals, is reductively attributed to his belief in socialist equality. In the following scene, Hermann, his wife and her cousin Ardalion have driven out into the country. Ardalion, a comically bad artist, is attempting to sketch Hermann but experiences some difficulty, commenting that Hermann has a ‘tricky face’. Hermann replies that he has always thought that he has the most ‘ordinary of faces’: ‘Every face is unique’, pronounces Ardalion. ‘Lord, I’m roasting’, moaned Lydia, but did not move. 22 Livry, Nabokov le nietzschéen, 283. 23 It is interesting to note that there are a number of interviews with Livry on various far-right websites.

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‘Well, now, really – unique! Isn’t that going too far? Take for instance the definite types of human faces that exist in the world; say, zoological types. There are people with features of apes; there are also the rat type, the swine type. Then take the resemblance to celebrities – Napoleons among men, Queen Victorias among women. People have told me I reminded them of Amundsen. I have frequently come across noses à la Leo Tolstoy. Then, too, there is the type of face that makes you think of some particular picture. Ikon-like faces, madonnas! And what about the kind of resemblance due to some fashion of life or profession? […] ‘You’ll say next that all Chinamen are alike. You forget, my good man, that what the artist perceives is, primarily, the difference between things. It is the vulgar who note their resemblance. (Des: 43–44)

Hermann’s strong desire to see a perfect resemblance to another individual, in spite of objective material reality, is a thinly veiled critique of his supposedly ‘Marxist’ beliefs. What Nabokov attempts to portray, from the outset, is the absurdity of Hermann holding such views. Hermann owns a manufacturing business, he owns a flat in Berlin, a car, and concedes that it may appear that he belongs ‘to the cream of the smug middle class’ (Des: 26) were it not for the fact that ‘certain Bohemian tastes were not entirely foreign to my nature’), and that he believes that ‘Communism in the long run was a great and necessary thing’ (Des: 26–27). It is evident from the contrast between Hermann’s comfortable middle-class life and his professed political sympathies, that Nabokov wishes us to pass judgement upon what he considered to be the essentially vulgar and bourgeois nature of communism and its Western fellow travellers and sympathizers. In his lecture on Madame Bovary, Nabokov provides a very distinct and instructive insight into his conception of ‘bourgeois’, maintaining that ‘in communist Russia, Soviet literature, Soviet art, Soviet music, Soviet aspirations are fundamentally and smugly bourgeois’. ‘It is’, he continued, ‘the lace curtain behind the iron’. For Nabokov ‘A Soviet official, small or big, is the perfect example of bourgeois mind, of a philistine […] Let me add for double clarity that Marx would have called Flaubert a bourgeois in the politico-economic sense, and Flaubert would have called Marx a bourgeois in the spiritual sense; and both would have been right, since Flaubert was a well-to-do gentleman in physical life and Marx was a philistine in his attitude towards the arts’ (LL: 127).

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Hermann, it is suggested, is a bourgeois in both senses – his comfortable material life and his philistine attitude towards art evidenced by his crass imitations of Russian literature, his amateur philosophical cogitations, and the poorly conceived murder he commits purely for financial gain. His perspective is consistently portrayed to be contradictory; he is a manufacturer of chocolate, a frivolous luxury item which stands in stark contrast to the ‘asceticism’ which he purports to admire in the ‘new Russia’ (Des: 27). Ultimately, the root of all Hermann’s political and philosophical delusions can be traced back to his flawed sense of aesthetics. Hermann states that he is perceptive enough to understand the values which the Soviet Union represents, the values which ‘Western minds’ and ‘embittered and destitute exiles’ cannot possibly comprehend: ‘the impending sameness of us all’ (Des: 27). Evidently for Nabokov, Hermann’s crime is an inevitable consequence of his deluded belief in flawed egalitarian principles, his faith in the fundamental ‘sameness’ between individuals: aesthetic and ideological delusion are inextricably linked here. In order to make sure that this reductive judgement is not overlooked by the reader at the beginning of the narrative, Nabokov reintroduces it towards the end. Before Hermann sets off to enact his murderous plan, he contemplates a bright future for his memoir when it is published. He resolves to send his work, when finished, to an émigré novelist (Nabokov), but laments that because of this decision – his work may not then be accepted for publication in the USSR. This, however, leads him to contemplate the ideological significance of his work, and how an exception may be made because of its congruence with the aims of Soviet politics. The passage remains the most revealing in the entire narrative: As I am far from being an enemy of Soviet rule, I am sure to have unwittingly expressed certain notions in my book, which correspond perfectly to the dialectical demands of the current moment. It even seems to me sometimes that my basic theme, the resemblance between two persons, has a profound allegorical meaning. This remarkable physical likeness probably appealed to me (subconsciously!) as the promise of that sameness which is to unite people in a classless society of the future; and by striving to make use of an isolated case, I was, though still blind to social truths, fulfilling, nevertheless, a certain social function. And then there is something else; the fact of my not being wholly successful when putting that resemblance of ours to practical use can be explained away by purely social-economic causes, that is to say, by the fact

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that Felix and I belonged to different, sharply defined classes, the fusion of which none can hope to achieve single-handed, especially nowadays, when the conflict of classes has reached a stage where compromise is out of the question. True, my mother was of low birth and my father’s father herded geese in his youth, which explains where, exactly, a man of my stamp and habits could have got that strong, though still incompletely expressed leaning towards General Consciousness. In fancy, I visualize a new world, where all men will resemble one another as Hermann and Felix did; a world of Helixes and Fermanns; a world where the worker fallen dead at the feet of his machine will be at once replaced by his perfect double smiling the serene smile of perfect socialism. Therefore I do think that Soviet youths of today should derive considerable benefit from a study of my book under the supervision of an experienced Marxist who would help them to follow through its pages the rudimentary wriggles of the social message it contains. (Des: 133–134)

The first thing which confronts us in this passage is the ease with which Hermann arrives at the conclusion that because he holds self-identified ‘Marxist’ opinions, his work would not only be welcome within the USSR, but would also correspond ‘perfectly with the dialectical demands of the current moment’. Nabokov perhaps intends here to implicate certain White Russians and erstwhile Symbolists, such as Aleksey Tolstoy or Andrei Bely, whom he thought held naive and misguided Bolshevik sympathies and who would return to the Soviet Union; or writers such as Valery Bryusov who were absorbed into the cultural apparatus. It is a judgement upon what he considers to be their hypocrisy – that they were motivated by a desire for material comfort, rather than any supposedly ideological affinities that they felt. The reference to the ‘profound allegorical meaning’ of his ‘theme’ hints once more at what Nabokov views as the mythological character of Soviet communism, with its easily digestible, democratic meaning. This idea is expanded when Hermann writes of why his endeavour was bound to fail. He attributes his failure to put the remarkable resemblance between himself and Felix ‘to practical use’ to ‘purely social-economic causes’. Nabokov here seeks to mock Marxism for what he views to be its reductive and absurd interpretation of the material world, where even a murderer and base criminal can claim the ‘conflict of classes’, or hegemony, or economic causes as a justification for why his actions failed. Nabokov is attempting to highlight the absurdity of an ideological system which considers every human action from the point of view of political economy only – which

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he attempts to link to the Marxist concept of ‘General Consciousness’, or more accurately: ‘General Intellect’. In the famous quote from Grundrisse, the ‘Fragment on Machines’, Marx meant by ‘General Intellect’ the social, technological and collective intelligence of society in different historical periods: Nature builds no machines, no locomotives, railways, electric telegraphs, self-acting mules etc. These are products of human industry: natural material transformed into organs of the human will over nature, or of human participation in nature. They are organs of the human brain, created by the human hand: the power of knowledge, objectified.24

It must be noted that Nabokov was writing seven years before the initial publication of Grundrisse in 1939 by the Marx-Engels-Lenin institute of Moscow. He could not, therefore, have been fully aware of the concept other than through second-hand sources. Despite the fact that the manuscript for Grundrisse remained unpublished for a long time, there is a possibility that some of its more notable concepts were widely known among Marxists and Marxologists, and were often referred to in passing, particularly within the contemporary Soviet publications which Nabokov read as research for his lecture on Soviet literature in 1926. Nabokov, undoubtedly not in full possession of its meaning or context, is attempting to suggest that at its very basis the term means a mediocre collective intelligence which extends from the realm of economics to that of aesthetics. The tenuous grasp which Nabokov had of Marxist theory is telling. Though it is probable that Nabokov read Marx, it is also difficult to determine the extent of his reading. Yet we may infer that his abhorrence for any form of didactic style had the inevitable result that any such readings were selective and hostile. In contemporary philosophy, Slavoj Žižek quite correctly notes that ‘the entire discussion of “general intellect” from Grundrisse belongs to an unpublished fragmentary manuscript – it is an experimental line of development which Marx immediately afterwards discarded’.25 This did not, however, prevent it from becoming one of many totemic concepts 24 Karl Marx, Grundrisse, Notebook VII (London: Penguin, 2005), 706. 25 Slavoj Žižek, Living in the End Times (London: Verso, 2010), 192.

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misattributed to Marxist philosophy by its detractors. No doubt the very notion of a ‘collective’ or ‘general’ intelligence was repugnant to Nabokov – and thus perfectly suits the character of Hermann Hermann. The fact that Hermann attributes his understanding of ‘General consciousness’ to his lowly birth, suggests that Nabokov feels it is no different to Dostoevsky’s pathological idealization of ‘simple Russian folk’. The reference to a future world where ‘all men will resemble one another as Hermann and Felix did’, simply confirms the superficial assertion that aesthetic delusion is a symptom of political ideologies which were inimical to his own. The reference to a world of ‘Helixes and Fermans’, interchangeable ideal socialist workers ready to take up the role of comrades who have died at their machines, furthers Nabokov’s interpretation of ‘General Consciousness’ as an adoption of mechanistic and technological myths to human beings, thereby denying them individuality. Finally, the brief aside on how the ‘remarkable physical likeness probably appealed to me (subconsciously!) as the promise of that sameness which is to unite people in a classless society of the future’, hints at a further dimension of Nabokov’s critique of ‘leftist’ ideology, and another discipline which Nabokov considered to belong also to ‘General Consciousness’. In an interview with Nicholas Garnham in 1968, Nabokov elaborated upon what he considered to be a dangerous ethical consequence of ‘Freudian faith’: ‘when a filthy murderer with the brain of a tapeworm is given a lighter sentence because his mother spanked him too much or too little’ (SO: 99). To Nabokov’s mind, there was also very little that separated Freudianism from Marxism. Freud’s thought, he proclaimed, represented the ‘police state of sexual myth’, and concluded that it was indeed a ‘great mistake on the part of dictators to ignore psychoanalysis – a whole generation might easily have been corrupted that way!’ (SM: 300–301). In an interview with Anne Guérin in 1961, Nabokov admitted that he found in psychoanalysis something distinctly ‘Bolshevik’, that symbols kill the ‘individual dream’, ‘the thing itself ’ (‘le psychoanalyse a quelque chose de bolchévik […] les symboles tuent la chose, le rêve individuel’).26 It is strange,

26 Anne Guérin, Interview, L’Express (26 January 1961).

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however, that in attacking the generalizing tendencies of certain modes of thinking in interviews: he himself was never particularly specific. Perhaps we may attribute this lapse to the fact that he believed he had given it sufficient attention within his novels. What is clear is that Nabokov’s hostility towards Freudianism and Marxism was not simply the result of a natural opposition dictated by his class origins, or even the logical opposition of a philosophically idealist, metaphysical outlook towards those which were avowedly materialist. On the contrary, we must concede, Nabokov was himself a materialist. His was a particular form of materialism which opposed other antithetical materialisms. Thus his opposition to Freudian psychoanalysis was not a metaphysical nor idealist one, but rather one which sought to suggest a materialist alternative – what he refers to in his foreword as ‘serious psychology’. What exactly constitutes ‘serious’ psychology is somewhat opaque at this stage in time – but it may be instructive to exam why he considered Freud to be lacking in seriousness. We have already established that the aspect of psychoanalysis which Nabokov found most inimical to his own sense of human psychology was Freud’s insistence on the importance of myth in our collective psychology. In Despair, what Nabokov aims to highlight is that the use of myth in Freudian psychoanalysis is arbitrary, that it overemphasizes exceptional cases of individual psychopathology, of deviancy, and holds them to be indicative of human behaviour in general. It was to this claim of false universalism that Nabokov objected. Thus, Nabokov created a derisive ‘mirage’ to entrap the Freudians. Nabokov takes a great deal of care not to induce any semblance of sympathy with Hermann, his ‘filthy murderer, with the brain of a tapeworm’. No account of past childhood trauma is given, no strained parental relationship: ‘Quite a happy past, I dare say’ (Des: 26). His criminal tendencies are given to be entirely rooted in his all-encompassing narcissism – a criminal narcissism which, Nabokov feels, Freudianism indulges. The way in which Hermann analyses events and his surroundings seems at times to be a caricatured version of psychoanalytic discourse. Stephen Blackwell has noted that the narrative apparatus of Despair is largely orientated towards anti-Freudian polemic, and there are complex and deliberately misleading sets of mythological references within the text itself which act to ‘entrap and expose Freudian interpretation as false

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and destructive application of general ideas to specific circumstances’.27 Yet it is difficult to accept that such visceral opposition can be attributed to Nabokov merely disagreeing with Freudianism’s prevailing theory of human psychology. It is evident that it was a great deal more personal. The answer may lie in the fact that, much like Symbolist thought, Freudian psychoanalysis tended to mystify and accept sexual practices which Nabokov considered unnatural ‘oddities’. The theme of homosexual ‘perversion’ as a symptom of Hermann’s ideological and aesthetic delusion is barely concealed in Despair. Hermann’s wife is described to be unattractive: ‘plump, short, rather formless, but then pudgy women alone aroused me’. He unequivocally states that he is indifferent to conventionally attractive women. The reason why he is fixated by his unattractive wife is telling. He is sexually obsessed by his ability to ‘dissociate’ himself while making love to his wife – his ability to split into two, and to voyeuristically watch the act instead of taking part. He describes how the ‘dissociation’ reaches ‘its perfect phase’ when he was sat ‘half a dozen paces away from the bed’, taking specific delight in watching the ‘ripples running and plunging along my muscular back’ (Des: 33). His relations with Felix are highly homoerotic; watching the latter undress with great attention (and arousal) on two occasions – and at one point even sharing a hotel bed. Felix’s own misogynistic views towards women and his prizing of male friendship perhaps also suggest a tentative homosexuality. This notion may be confirmed by the fact that he is, much like Nabokov’s brother Sergei, ‘left-handed’ – and also the victim of the ‘perversion’ of a man named Hermann. If the reader fails to notice these not too subtle references to homosexuality, Nabokov makes them explicit when Hermann proclaims that in the reading of his memoir ‘the French’ would ‘discern mirages of sodomy in my partiality for a vagabond’ (Des: 134). Indeed, among many other things, Nabokov could not have failed to object to Freud’s view that humans were in essence bisexual, and attracted to both sexes, and specifically on homosexuality, which he famously wrote is ‘no vice, no degradation’, that ‘it cannot be classified as an illness’, and 27 Stephen H. Blackwell, ‘Nabokov’s Wiener-schnitzel Dreams: Despair and AntiFreudian Poetics’, Nabokov Studies, Vol. 7 (2002/2003), 129–150 (129).

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that it ‘is a great injustice to persecute homosexuality as a crime – and a cruelty, too’.28 Freud’s views on homosexuality were contrary to those of Nabokov – who tended to view it as a ‘perversion’, an unnatural ‘oddity’ and a narcissistic delusion which should not be indulged. Furthermore, Nabokov evidently perceived in Freudian theories on human psychology the generally prescriptive and mechanistic forms of myth which he had identified in Marx’s ephemeral notion of ‘General Intellect’. This connection was, of course, questionable; one only has to read Freud’s discourse on the character of religious practice in The Future of an Illusion,29 to comprehend that he, unlike Marx, had little belief in collective action. Nevertheless, the conflation of Marxism and Freudianism in Nabokov’s mind was vital to the formation of his burgeoning sense of ideology. In the preceding analyses, we have seen how in works such as The Eye and Despair, Nabokov has begun to engage more fully with the prevalent ideological currents of the early 1930s. We have seen how, contrary to the critical orthodoxy which holds Nabokov’s literary craft as a continuation of the Russian Symbolist tradition, he parodies the work of Symbolist writers, and in turn questions their ideological and philosophical motivations. Indeed, what we can deduce from such a break is a growing desire to seek an ideological position which more closely matches his own emerging sense of materialist aesthetics which had become, in essence, antithetical to Symbolism. They were in fact more, as we have observed, in line with the aims of the Russian Formalists. His break with Symbolism was perhaps furthered by a realization that contemporary Symbolist literature and polemics shared the same mythological determinism which he (mis)attributed to the ideologies of Freudianism and Marxism. Since, according to Althusser, one cannot be outside of ideology, we must acknowledge that implicit in such opposition to specific aspects of the aforementioned ideologies, is the kernel of a developing sense of ideology. An ideology which would remain true to the peculiar sense of materialism which he possessed at that time; a political materialism which places a greater emphasis on individual rights Sigmund Freud, ‘Letter to an American mother’ (1935), American Journal of Psychiatry, Vol. 107, No. 10 (1951), 787. 29 Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion (London: Penguin, 2008). 28

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and artistic freedom than Marxism, and a more conservative psychological materialism conducive to his own tentative thoughts on the importance of individual and personal memory and less concerned with what he considered to be aberrant libidinal impulses. When asked to define what he meant by his insistence that he was philosophically an ‘indivisible monist’, Nabokov gave a reply which provides a rare clue to what constituted his personal philosophy: Monism, which implies a oneness of basic reality, is to be seen divisible when, say, ‘mind’ sneakily splits away from ‘matter’ in the reasoning of a muddled monist or half hearted materialist. (SO: 106)

This formulation, which on first glance appears to be a typically cryptic Nabokovian riddle, becomes clearer when we consider it in relation to Arthur Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation (1818). One need only consider Nabokov’s formulation of his ‘indivisible monism’ alongside the following: A single thought, however comprehensive, must preserve the most perfect unity. If, all the same, it can be split up into parts for the purpose of being communicated, then the connexion of these parts must […] be organic, i.e. of such a kind that every part supports the whole just as much as it is supported by the whole.30

Indeed, the philosophy of Schopenhauer is perhaps the most germane to Nabokov’s own sense of aesthetics, insomuch as it was Schopenhauer’s attitude to aesthetics which held that objects derive their aesthetic value through experiencing them in a state of detachment from conceptualized individual desires. Considered in this sense, Nabokov’s philosophy is opposed to the characters which he depicts in The Eye and Despair who seek to compartmentalize mind and matter within their Cartesian duality, and is in favour of a ‘oneness of basic reality’. In his fictional world: the double cannot be divided. In a broader sense, this evidences his antipathy to the psychologism of Freud which gives insufficient attention to individual material

30 Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, Vol. I (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1958), xii.

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reality; and to the materialism of Marx which is equally guilty of ignoring the uniqueness of individual human psychology. It is this philosophical problem, one so vital to the formation of his sense of ideology, which Nabokov attempts to resolve in his next novel Invitation to a Beheading.

Chapter 3

‘Violin in a Void’: Totalitarianism on Trial in Invitation to a Beheading

An ironic reader confronted with Lenin’s remark about the fox he did not shoot because he was ‘beautiful’ might retort: pity that Russia was homely […]. That bluff geniality, that screwing up of eyes (s prishchurinkoy), that boyish laugh, etc., on which his biographers dwell so lovingly, form something particularly distasteful to me. It is this atmosphere of joviality, this pail of milk of human kindness with a dead rat at the bottom, that I have used in my Invitation to a Beheading. — Letter to Edmund Wilson, December 1940 (NWL: 33)

Invitation to a Beheading1 (Priglashenie na kazn) remains one the most fascinating of the Russian works, and among its author’s personal favourites. The circumstances of its conception and composition are almost as noteworthy as its content. Nabokov began writing it on 24 June 1934. The first draft was reportedly completed within a fortnight, during a period of sustained inspiration which had struck Nabokov as he was working on The Gift – the novel which was to become his last in Russian. At the time Nabokov was researching and writing the most divisive chapter of his greatest and longest Russian work: the Life of Chernyshevsky. As we shall discover, this seemingly inconsequential fact is permeated with significance. On 24 July, after he had completed the first draft of Invitation to a Beheading, Nabokov wrote a letter in response to a column published by his friend Vladislav Khodasevich in the Parisian émigré newspaper

1

Vladimir Nabokov, Invitation to a Beheading, trans. Dmitri Nabokov (London: Penguin, 2001). Further references are given in parentheses.

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Vozrozhdenie [Renaissance]. The subject was ideology. It was Nabokov’s contention that writers should occupy themselves only with their own meaningless, innocent, intoxicating business and justify only in passing all that in reality does not even need justification: the strangeness of such an existence, the discomfort, the solitude […] and a certain quiet inner gaiety. For that reason I find unbearable any talk – intelligent or not, it’s all the same to me – about ‘the modern era’, ‘inquietude’, ‘religious renaissance’, or any sentence at all with the word ‘postwar’. I sense in this ‘ideology’ the same herd instinct, the ‘altogether-now’ of say, yesterday’s or last century’s enthusiasm for world’s fairs. […] I am writing my novel. I do not read the papers. (RY: 49)

Once more, Nabokov takes issue with the politicized nature of contemporary émigré discourse – seeking, in his recognisably patrician manner, to set himself apart from such discussions. His artistry, it is implied, is above such paltry concerns. The appearance of maintaining a consistent and comprehensive opposition to the ‘herd instinct’ was a perennial concern for Nabokov. It is necessary to point out once more that Nabokov’s objections to political matters are primarily motivated by aesthetics; in this case an ‘ideology’ represented by lazy journalistic buzzwords that offended his literary sensibilities. He would later return to this topic in his first novel in English: The Real Life of Sebastian Knight. The way in which Nabokov is apprehending the political is becoming, at this point in time, more and more aestheticized. Nevertheless, his distaste for the hackneyed lexicon of journalistic cliché notwithstanding, Nabokov’s supposed indifference to current affairs is perhaps overstated for the sake of appearance, evidenced, with an irony which could not have escaped his attention, by a letter sent to a daily newspaper. Indeed, Nabokov was keenly aware of the brutal purges now occurring in his erstwhile homeland, and had a prescient dread of that new malignant barbarism infecting the streets just outside his door. It was this unhappy material, the rumblings of an ideological endgame which would eventually plunge the European continent into unimaginable carnage, which in part served as the inspiration for the nightmarish world depicted in Invitation to a Beheading. The novel sits rather uncomfortably within what we now refer to as dystopian fiction. It is often very amusing, sometimes gentle, and surprisingly

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lacking in the abject despair which often characterized other masterpieces of the genre such as Yvgeny Zamyatin’s We or Franz Kafka’s The Trial. In terms of how the work is generally received, it is variously considered a celebration of artistry over philistinism, an attack upon the barbarity of capital punishment, and a profoundly humanistic vindication of individualism over conformity. Of course it goes without saying that all such interpretations are in some way valid, if somewhat trite and lacking in curiosity. If we are to search for a more plausible hermeneutic it is necessary to first acknowledge that Invitation to a Beheading is, above all things, a political novel. The world which Cincinnatus C. inhabits views him as impenetrable, ‘a lone dark obstacle’ in a world of ‘souls transparent to one another’ (IB: 21). The citizens of this fictional world are obliged at all times to be perceptible, diaphanous, and unequivocal in their actions. In spite of his efforts to ‘feign translucence’ (IB: 21), he possesses a certain ‘opacity’ that is irreconcilable with the doctrines of this society. As a result, he is denounced by his colleagues in the school where he teaches: Almost immediately after he had assumed his new duties (consisting of keeping busy little children who were lame, hunchbacked or crosseyed) an important personage made a second-degree complaint against him. Cautiously, in the form of a conjecture, there was expressed the suggestion of Cincinnatus’s basic illegality. Together with this memorandum the city fathers also examined the old complaint that had been made from time to time by the more perceptive of his colleagues at the workshop. The chairman of the education committee and certain other official figures took turns locking themselves up with him and making on him the tests prescribed by law. For several days in a row he was not allowed to sleep, and was compelled to keep up rapid senseless small-talk until it bordered on delirium, to write letters to various objects and natural phenomena, enact everyday scenes, and to imitate various animals, trades, maladies. (IB: 27)

The initial suspicion of Cincinnatus’s ‘basic illegality’, the possibility that he apprehends the world artistically, is only confirmed by the various torturous experiments which the ‘city fathers’ inflict upon him. These are nothing more than exercises to test the extent of his mimetic aptitude; epistolary correspondence with inanimate and natural phenomena, the ability to anthropomorphize, the poetic rendering of everyday scenes, and the imitation of ‘trades’, ‘maladies’, etc. A litany of attributes, in short, customarily

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associated with artistic expression in a society which is hostile to artists. He is eventually found guilty of the indefinable crime of ‘Gnostical turpitude’ – a transgression deemed so rare, terrible, and grave by the regime that they are scarcely able to refer to it without the use of circumlocutions. The sentence is death by beheading. The novel recounts the nineteen days which Cincinnatus spends imprisoned in a fortress awaiting the date of his execution. During this period he is surrounded by a variety of absurd characters, sometimes physically interchangeable with each other, including Rodrig the prison director, Rodion the jailer, Roman the lawyer and Emmie – the prison director’s pre-pubescent daughter. The descriptions of setting, the physical appearance of characters, objects and animals are vague and ambiguous; often inconsistent, and sometimes absurd, in order, we gather, to highlight the cheap artifice of the world which is depicted. Along the course of the narrative, in one painfully comic scene, the prisoner is visited by his ridiculously promiscuous wife Martha, accompanied by her most recent lover, her extended family and his mentally, and physically, handicapped illegitimate children. In another he is visited by his mother, whom he has never previously met. In the adjoining cell there is another prisoner, Monsieur Pierre, the headsman, who farcically impersonates a fellow inmate in order to establish the paternalistic bond between executioners and condemned dictated by the macabre traditions of the State. Cincinnatus contemplates his fate when left alone in his cell by writing, reading and recounting his memories. After many cruel, absurd and torturous tricks, the day of his execution finally arrives. At the very end, just as he is about to have his head cut off, he simply rises from the execution block and walks away – observing the nonsensical world around him dissolve into the ether. The ending is thus intentionally ambiguous, neither confirming nor denying whether the protagonist’s fate is a result of his death, his ascension into a spiritual plane, or an authorial intervention. Nevertheless, for scholars who consider Nabokov to be a seer of mystical realms, of otherworldly phenomena, Invitation to a Beheading is regarded as his most transcendental novel. It is a view that is so prevalent that it has become something of a critical orthodoxy. The crime for which the protagonist Cincinnatus C. is condemned to be beheaded is ‘Gnostical turpitude’.

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This somewhat nebulous term, perhaps tangentially related to some vague notion of heresy, which fundamentally resists plausible definition, has been taken literally by certain scholars. The general view is that Cincinnatus’s incarceration and overwhelming desire for freedom, for liberation, represents a wish for metaphysical transcendence. Sergej Davydov2 makes a compelling case for the importance of Gnostic themes in Invitation to a Beheading. Davydov posits that the epigraph which begins the work, a quote attributed to a thinker of Nabokov’s own invention called Pierre Delalande, holds the interpretive key to the spiritual dimensions implicit in the texture of the novel: ‘Comme un fou se croit Dieu, nous nous croyons mortels’ [Like a madman who believes himself to be God, we believe ourselves to be mortal]. Davydov alludes to the fact that Nabokov translates the original Russian phrase gnoseologicheskaia gnusnost, which describes Cincinnatus’s crime, into ‘Gnostical turpitude’ in the English version, thereby confirming the novel’s deep engagement with Gnosticism. Davydov makes a link between Nabokov’s ‘metaphysics’ and his ‘metafiction’ to an undefined spiritual element which pervades the entire oeuvre, and Invitation to a Beheading in particular. Davydov is careful not to fully ‘implicate’ Nabokov in Gnosticism, but rather seeks to demonstrate how ‘Cincinnatus’s life is modelled on Gnostic Topoi and how Invitation re-enacts the cosmic drama of Gnostic redemption’ (Davydov: 193). He proceeds to offer analyses of the various ways in which the text reflects specific aspects of the Gnostic scriptures, how Cincinnatus’s struggles reflects the dualism of spirit and flesh which is central to the creed. This dualism, Davydov maintains, accounts for the many instances of Cincinnatus’s own ‘duality’, of how ‘Inside the physical, submissive prisoner lives another, “additional Cincinnatus”’, one that ‘represents the Gnostic “internal man”’. ‘The more spiritually animated Cincinnatus becomes’, Davydov writes, ‘the less tangible are the manifestations of his physical self ’ (Davydov: 193). He goes on to highlight other similarities in the text and Gnostic Topoi, all the while linking the idea that ‘gnosis is the cognition of an unknowable and ineffable God’, and of 2

Sergej Davydov, ‘Invitation to a Beheading’, The Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov, ed. Vladimir E. Alexandrov (New York: Garland, 1995), 188–203. Further references are given in parentheses.

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how God is ‘revealed in the failure of reason and speech’ (Davydov: 195) to Cincinnatus’s often repeated claim to ‘know’ something which he is unable to express. At the end of the novel, Davydov claims, the ‘soul of the last Gnostic has left the terrestrial world and returned to its celestial origin, which exists outside of the confines of the mortal life into which the hero happened to fall at the beginning of the novel’ (Davydov: 196). Davydov concludes that Nabokov ‘translated the metaphysics of the ancient Gnostics into his own metafiction’ and that it is in this ‘mystical link’ that we may find the secret of ‘Nabokov’s “theology”’ (Davydov: 200). In a similar vein Vladimir Alexandrov has posited that the work is characterized by ‘a strong faith in an otherworldly dimension, in the light of which the seemingly purposeless suffering of the protagonist in his apparently absurdist world are transformed into a recapitulation of Gnosticism’s cosmic drama of redemption’.3 Alexandrov rejects both the view that Invitation to a Beheading is simply a ‘condemnation of political oppression’ and that it is a ‘celebration of Cincinnatus’s purely imaginative freedom in the face of death’ (Alexandrov: 84). For Alexandrov, the narrative apparatus of the work encourages a very specific reading, one which like Davydov, is closely connected to the Gnostic theology. Alexandrov draws a link between ‘ethics’ and ‘metaphysics’, which he believes to be relatively straightforward in Invitation to a Beheading. ‘Good’, Alexandrov writes, ‘is firmly attached to Cincinnatus because he is the only character […] who has intimations of, and spiritual links to, a transcendental realm’ (Alexandrov: 106). It is Alexandrov’s contention that these ‘links’ allow him to see the reality of the physical world in all of its supposed inauthenticity. The overriding concept which pervades these interpretations is that of Invitation as a treatise on spirituality which holds the world of physical phenomena to be essentially and irrevocably corrupt, and that a better life awaits us in the otherworld for those who suffer on earth. Not dissimilar, then, to the basic tenets of Christian dogma, or for that matter, any other monotheistic religion. What is equally in evidence through what is some fairly impressive if wishful scholarship, is an overwhelming desire to ascribe 3

Vladimir E. Alexandrov, Nabokov’s Otherworld (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 84. Further references are given in parentheses.

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a moral purpose to Nabokov’s work – and such a desire does not come as a logical conclusion to the available evidence. Such a tendency is particularly rife within Nabokovian scholarship, which is unduly protective and deferential towards its subject, whom they believe to be beyond reproach ethically and morally. Nabokov did nothing to dispel such tendencies; indeed he actively encouraged it by his own tendency to self-mythologize himself as a champion of universal values. While there are doubtless many deliberate references to religious themes in this and other of his works – these, like many other facets, will always remain no more than devices. In his work Nabokov attempted a claim to universalism but he is never convincing, and on this point we must insist strongly – for within it lies one of the keys to understanding his ideological motivations. With regards to this one point however, Alexandrov is quite correct – if only tangentially. He maintains that since ‘gnosis is the preserve of the few’, and that it is an esoteric system of belief, ‘the values embodied in Invitation to a Beheading, as in all of Nabokov’s other works, emerge as inflexibly elitist’ (Alexandrov: 106). The evidence which both Davydov and Alexandrov utilize to support their respective theses are, in sum, quite convincing, but remain unsatisfactory due to one important factor which cannot simply be ignored. As Don Barton Johnson correctly observes, the original Russian phrase is gnoseologicheskaia (gnoseological) as opposed to gnosticheskaia (Gnostic). This is, as Johnson writes, a very important distinction – gnoseological is a word often used synonymously with the word ‘epistemology’, whereas Gnostic refers exclusively to a particular religious system.4 The fact that Nabokov agreed upon the word ‘Gnostic’ for the English translation should therefore not be taken at face value. It appears to be either a conscious ploy on the author’s part to obfuscate potential interpretations, or perhaps even an oversight made while translating a work which had been written thirty years before. The crime for which Cincinnatus is being judged is, I maintain, a philosophical and ideological one as opposed to a spiritual one. 4

Don Barton Johnson, ‘The Alpha and Omega of Invitation to a Beheading’, in Julian Connolly, ed., Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading: A Critical Companion (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1997), 135.

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It is my contention that, consistent with novels such The Eye and Despair, the aesthetic construction of Invitation to a Beheading, in particular the depiction of the circumstances surrounding the protagonist Cincinnatus’s arrest and imprisonment, ultimately suggest an affirmation of the importance of tangible materiality over metaphysical transcendence. The reason why this work has so frequently been misinterpreted requires some further explanation. At the conclusion of the novel the protagonist Cincinnatus C. does not die: All around there was a strange confusion. Through the headsman’s still swinging hips the railing showed. On the steps the pale librarian sat doubled up, vomiting. The spectators were quite transparent, and quite useless, and they all kept surging and moving away – only the back rows, being painted rows, remained in place. Cincinnatus slowly descended from the platform and walked off through the shifting debris. He was overtaken by Roman, who was now many times smaller and who was at the same time Rodrig: ‘What are you doing?’ he croaked, jumping up and down. ‘You can’t, you can’t! It’s dishonest towards him, towards everybody. […] Come back, lie down – after all, you were lying down, everything was ready, everything was finished!’ Cincinnatus brushed him aside and he, with a bleak cry, ran off, already thinking only of his own safety. Little was left of the square. The platform had long since collapsed in a cloud of reddish dust. The last to rush past was a woman in a black shawl, carrying the tiny executioner like a larva in her arms. The fallen trees lay flat and reliefless, while those that were still standing, also two dimensional, with lateral shading of the trunk to suggest roundness, barely held on with their branches to the ripping mesh of the sky. Everything was coming apart. Everything was falling. A spinning was picking up and whirling: dust, rags, chips of painted wood, bits of gilded plaster, pasteboard bricks, posters; an arid gloom fleeted; and amidst the dust, Cincinnatus made his way in that direction where, to judge by the voices, stood beings akin to him. (IB: 189)

Much has been written about this particular scene. In the collapsing of the stage apparatus we are given a glimpse into a crumbling world of cheap artifice, where crowds are ‘painted’, and the figures which once commanded such authority melt away or are reduced to harmless little animals. In this scene, Cincinnatus appears somehow to transcend the cruel and absurd reality in which he has thus far been forced to live into a realm where there exist ‘beings akin to him’ (IB: 191). Indeed, to assume that this higher realm exists within the metaphysical plane would appear logical, given the way in

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which the narrative has so far progressed. To do so, however, would be all too facile and predictable. The true nature of this supposed transcendence is far more complex. Indeed, the critical tendency to seek the transcendental within this work is related to a misapprehension of what Nabokov contemptuously referred to as ‘average reality’: To be sure, there is an average reality, perceived by us all, but that is not true reality: it is only the reality of general ideas, conventional forms of humdrummery, current editorials. Now if you mean by ‘old reality’ the so called ‘realism’ of old novels, the easy platitudes of Balzac or Somerset Maugham or D. H. Lawrence – to take some especially depressing examples – then you are right in suggesting that the reality faked by a mediocre performer is boring, and that imaginary worlds acquire by contrast a dreamy and unreal aspect. Paradoxically, the only real, authentic worlds are, of course, those that seem unusual. When my fancies will have been sufficiently imitated, they, too, will enter the common domain of average reality, which will be false, too, but within a new context which we cannot yet guess. Average reality begins to rot and stink as soon as the act of individual creation ceases to animate a subjectively perceived texture. (SO: 102)

For Nabokov, ‘average reality’ is comprehensive. It is that which exists outside of the realm of an exceptional novelist such as himself. It is the world of political affiliations, political parties, transnational ideologies, religion, religious observances, religious denominations, social problems, financial worries, economic crises, petty personal matters, psychopathologies; contemporary intellectual thought influenced by journalists, academics, economists, philosophers, politicians, psychoanalysts and propagandists. Whether on a personal or societal level, despite the effect which they may have had on the lives of everyday people, these phenomena represented a ‘reality’ which was inferior to that which he sought to depict in his work. Average reality is inferior, quite simply, because it is the domain of average consciousness, of the average man and woman. Writers who sought to somehow depict the world of ‘average reality’, of the average consciousness of the average man, are simply denigrated and unceremoniously dismissed. Such a reality has no significance for a writer such as Nabokov, and by extension Cincinnatus, who, by virtue of their artistic abilities, belong to an aristocracy which communes with a reality which is somehow truer. Thus, when Cincinnatus C. escapes the executioner’s axe and strides towards

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freedom, he is not escaping from his corporeal existence into a higher spiritual realm. He is transcending one material reality, one ruled by artifice, second-rate artistry, a world authored by fake writers of trite ‘realist’ fiction into a realm where material reality is celebrated in its most authentic form, where the freedom of the writer to depict this world is unhindered, where no restrictions are placed on creativity: where the aesthetic realm exists in an autonomous sphere. However, the question remains – which particular form of ‘average reality’ did Nabokov wish to attack? In the foreword to Invitation to a Beheading, which he wrote in 1959, Nabokov attempts to dissuade the reader from connecting the central themes of the narrative with some fairly logical historical parallels, stating that it was composed ‘some fifteen years after escaping from the Bolshevist regime, and just before the Nazi regime had reached its full volume of welcome’ (IB: 7). A significant number of critics have been willing to accept this assertion. Alfred Appel Jr once said that Invitation to a Beheading is a ‘mock anti-utopian novel’ with its ‘ideological centre removed’, that within the work the totalitarian state becomes an ‘extreme and fantastic metaphor for the imprisonment of the mind, thus making consciousness, rather than politics the subject’ (SO: 56). In a similar vein, Brian Boyd maintained that the ‘novel attacks not so much a political system as a state of mind possible under any regime’, adding that such a ‘state of mind’ is most apparent in ‘ideological dictatorships, past or present, religious or political, left or right’ (RY: 412). While Boyd is correct in positing that Invitation to a Beheading is concerned with how human communication and words function on different levels, in ‘average reality’ and in ‘Nabokovian reality’, and about how language is so often misused in the nightmarish world which Cincinnatus inhabits to disseminate received opinion and ‘prior assumptions’ – it would be inaccurate to suggest that the novel does not attack a specific political system. To ascertain which political system, of the two obvious contenders, we require some historical context. Although both the Reichstag Fire and the election of Adolf Hitler had occurred the previous year, the totalitarian regime which is depicted in Invitation to a Beheading is primarily influenced by the contemporary political situation in the Soviet Union. To suggest otherwise is to essentially wish away the importance of such events not only to the USSR and to the

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Russian emigration, but also to the world at large. Indeed, despite what he had written in his foreword in 1959, Nabokov would later make a significant admission in an interview with Allene Tammey of Vogue Magazine in 1969. When asked how he maintained an ‘esthetic distance’ to major historical events, Nabokov replied that [m]y aloofness is an illusion resulting from my never having belonged to any literary, political, or social coterie. I am a lone lamb. Let me submit, however, that I have ‘bridged’ the ‘esthetic distance’ in my own way by means of such absolutely final indictments of Russian and German Totalitarianism as my novels Invitation to a Beheading and Bend Sinister. (SO: 132)

Evidently, even for a writer who claimed not to ‘read the papers’; the Soviet Writers Congress of August 1934, and the subsequent implementation of ‘Socialist Realism’ as the only acceptable aesthetic in cultural production, was impossible to ignore. Although he had reportedly finished the first draft of the work towards end of July 1934, the subsequent revisions and re-drafting took significantly longer. Indeed, as Boyd states, the finishing touches were not made until the beginning of 1935 – which provides ample time for Nabokov to process the events of August 1934 and respond accordingly. It is, of course, unsurprising that it was an aesthetic issue which prompted Nabokov to write Invitation to a Beheading. The notion of ‘esthetic distance’ in Nabokov’s work of this period is a conspicuous fallacy – one which easily falters when presented with a work such as this. Undoubtedly for Nabokov the aesthetic sphere is of primary importance, it is the lens through which he interpreted phenomena which existed inside and outside of his own consciousness. However the aesthetic act was also his primary weapon against those things to which he was opposed. For Nabokov, everything, including ideology, could be judged by its aesthetic quality. In the following analysis, I wish to illustrate how Nabokov used Invitation to a Beheading as an opportunity to respond to these significant socio-political events, and to further elaborate his own emerging sense of ideology by pitching it against the debasement of artistic expression in a totalitarian regime such as Stalinist Russia.

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On Cincinnatus and ‘The Object of Art’ In order to better understand how Invitation to a Beheading represents an aesthetic challenge to an ideological problem, we must be prepared to acknowledge that the fundamental correlation between an ideological system and a philosophical system takes the form of an inextricable codependency, wherein it is impossible for one to exist without the other. Outside the realm of ‘Art’, this relation can, if in fairly reductive terms, be perceived in a straightforward manner – a materialist ideological perspective is often supported by a philosophical materialism, and in much the same way an idealist philosophy tends to favour ideologies which have their basis in idealism. In such cases, an aesthetic acts merely as an appendage to a broader ideological and philosophical body. ‘Authentic Art’, in Althusser’s terms, does not belong within the realm of ‘ideologies’ because it does not make claims upon scientific knowledge (whilst maintaining a relationship to a form of scientific knowledge), but rather allows us to ‘see’, ‘perceive’ and ‘feel’ the ideology and philosophy from which it derives. I maintain that this is easy enough to comprehend when we are dealing with writers who, whether actively or passively, betray their philosophical and ideological tendencies – thus rendering their art a logical extension of such tendencies. This, however, was not the case for Nabokov – a writer who stridently resisted categorization, and claimed repeatedly not to adhere to any ideological system. This resistance was predicated upon an insistence on the primacy of a very specific aesthetic system, and the freedom to express and practise this system free from ideological influence. If we are to insist upon Althusser’s conception that it will forever remain impossible to be outside of ideology, then we must equally insist upon the fact that aesthetics for Nabokov constituted an ideology in and of itself, and therefore took a more prominent role than was proposed by Althusser. For Nabokov, ‘Art’ could never be a mere appendage of an ideology or a philosophy because it was equal to both; it formed their basis, and dictated their characteristics. Therefore, if we are to better understand the character of Nabokov’s ideology, which has thus far remained elusive, we need to examine the influence of philosophy.

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In the previous chapter we briefly touched upon the possible philosophical influence of Schopenhauer in Nabokov’s writing. It will be useful at this point to provide some further elaboration, given that Invitation to a Beheading is perhaps the most Schopenhauerian work of the Nabokovian oeuvre. We observed how Nabokov’s seemingly cryptic formulation of his philosophical outlook as an ‘indivisible monist’ bore a striking resemblance to Schopenhauer’s conception of the unity of the ‘single thought’. The affinity which Nabokov evidently felt for Schopenhauer’s philosophy can be attributed to the latter’s theory of art and aesthetic experience which is, in many ways, close to Nabokov’s own. In The World as Will and Representation, Schopenhauer attempted to give account of how we perceive aesthetic pleasure, positing that it consists ‘to a large extent, in the fact that, when we enter the state of pure contemplation, we are raised for the moment above all willing, above all desires and cares; we are, so to speak, rid of ourselves’.5 It is precisely this type of attempted escape, through aesthetic experience, from the world of ‘willing’, ‘desires’ and ‘cares’ that Nabokov attempts to portray in Invitation to a Beheading. The escapism which Schopenhauer, an avowed atheist, describes as the purpose of aesthetic experience, the ‘object of art’, is thus far removed from any notion of metaphysical transcendence: it is wholly rooted in material reality. There is, of course, reason to contend that the pessimistic philosophy of Schopenhauer has little relation to Nabokov. That is, if one accepts the general narrative that the author existed in a permanent state of contented happiness and exhilarating curiosity, immune to the vicissitudes of historical experience. It has, I hope, become clear at this point that such a notion is patently fallacious. Nevertheless, it is self-evident that Nabokov did not wholly subscribe to the philosophical system which Schopenhauer puts forward. For Schopenhauer no absolute good existed; for Nabokov, an ideology which placed the rights of the individual, or more precisely the individual artist genius, at its centre was something approaching absolute good. Yet Nabokov was slowly becoming aware that such a world could only really exist within the fantasy narratives of that very same artist. In 5

Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, Vol. I (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1958), 390.

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Schopenhauer’s world, the act of willing is never satiated, it has no purpose in and of itself, and it inevitably leads to suffering – the existence of which precludes any notion of absolute good. Nabokov was of course aware of such suffering, both in the tragedies which occurred in his own life, and those of his erstwhile compatriots. The protagonist of Invitation to a Beheading may have been given a reprieve at the eleventh hour by his benevolent creator, but had he existed in real life and not within a fantasy narrative, he would undoubtedly be another corpse on the floor of a Lubyanka interrogation cell, if not toiling excruciatingly towards an almost inevitable death in a Siberian gulag. It is not until the Third Book of The World as Will and Representation that we begin to fully understand why the philosophy of Schopenhauer is perhaps the most relevant to Nabokov’s own position. Having detailed the ways in which the world as Will works to consistently undermine every facet of human endeavour, making existence itself a constant state of dissatisfaction and anxiety, the third book provides something of a reprieve. Schopenhauer ascribes to aesthetic experience the ability to cease the operations of Will, if only temporarily. It makes us momentarily free from the constant agitations of Will and the suffering to which it inevitably leads – it provides an ephemeral respite from the constant torment of willing. In addition, it allows us to experience a level of consciousness which is ‘higher’ than the everyday operations of cognition, and permits a glimpse of an objective reality which is unaffected by the operation of willing. According to Schopenhauer, the value of the genuine artist lies in his ability to present ideas that are independent of will, of ordinary consciousness, and thus of ordinary existence. This is precisely what Nabokov sought to convey in Invitation to a Beheading, where Cincinnatus C. attempts throughout the course of the narrative to become a ‘pure subject of knowing’, a status which lifts both the artist and the subject of aesthetic experience above the general run: above the world as Will in Schopenhauer’s terms, above ‘average reality’ in Nabokov’s. This purpose is highlighted in several different ways. From the very outset we are forced to confront the relevance of the protagonist’s name, and to ask whether it possesses any significance. Cincinnatus C.’s historical forebear is Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus: a legendary figure in the history of early Rome. Lucius Quinctius was an

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aristocratic enemy of the plebeians who was compelled to give up his lands and titles to pay a fine for the political infractions of his son. After his departure from Rome, Lucius Quinctius was forced to subsist as a small-holder. This is where, while he was ploughing his field, the envoys of the Roman Senate came in desperation at the invasion of their lands by the Aequians, to beg him to lead their armies as Magister Populi. Having vanquished his opponents, and now possessing absolute power, he then immediately resigned as dictator and returned to work on his modest farm. For these actions he is widely regarded as a paragon of civic virtue, selflessness and modesty. Whether we are to believe this legend or simply acknowledge, as John Ruskin6 did, that it is merely a convenient cultural myth is irrelevant. The literal definition of ‘Aristocracy’, etymologically derived from the Greek aristokratia, is the ‘rule of the best’. As a warrior and statesman – Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus was certainly one of the best. Yet Cincinnatus C. is neither a statesman nor a warrior – he is a rather timid, meek artist. His claim to aristocracy, like that of his author who had ceased to be an actual one in 1917, is through his artistic talent, his intellect, his desire to become a ‘pure subject of knowing’. The decision that Nabokov made to associate these two figures was thus wholly deliberate. The artist Cincinnatus, who is alone in a world of aesthetic mediocrity, ‘average reality’, and second-rate artifice, has the potential to save society if only given the opportunity. But unlike his historical forebear, he is not called upon by the Plebeian State to save it from imminent destruction. On the contrary, they wish to destroy him. What better parable then for the disastrous Zhdanovite dictates of 6

‘Cincinnatus might actually have been found ploughing beside the Tiber fifty times over; and it might have signified little to any one – least of all to you or me. But if Cincinnatus never was so found, nor even existed at all in flesh and blood; but the great Roman nation, in its strength of conviction that manual labour in tilling the ground was good and honourable, invented a quite bodiless Cincinnatus; and set him, according to its fancy, in furrows of the field, and put its own words into his mouth, and gave the honour of its ancient deeds into his ghostly hand; this fable, which has no foundation; – this precious coinage of the brain and conscience of a mighty people, you and I – believe me – had better read, and know, and take to heart, diligently’.; see John Ruskin, ‘Letter XXI’, Fors Clavigera: Letters to the Workmen and Labourers of Great Britain, Vol. II (Orpington: George Allen, 1872), 7–8.

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1934, which denigrated the power of the artist in society by means of a sudden decapitation, a symbolic castration of aesthetic ambition – thereby reducing him to a mere tool of propaganda? Gene Bell-Villada, a critic who has been particularly scathing towards Nabokov, chiefly in regard to his professed politics, wrote that ‘Nabokov’s absolute aestheticism, his alleged rejection of ideas in literature, and his cult of inhuman, perfectly crafted works of art all add up to an ideology as dogmatic and extreme as were the official, “Zhdanovite” dictates of Socialist Realism’.7 There is, of course, a great deal of truth in such an analysis, but not in the exact way in which Bell-Villada perhaps imagined. The Nabokovian Aesthetic was itself an ideology, and it was in works such as Invitation to a Beheading and The Gift that it finally began to find its true expression in opposition to other ideological aesthetics such as Socialist Realism. Indeed, Socialist Realism did not simply come from nowhere in 1934 – it was something which possessed a very precise genealogy in the history of Russian literature. It was, indeed, a history which Nabokov was well aware of and vehemently opposed to. The unique role that literature played in Russian culture in the nineteenth century can be attributed to the peculiarities of its development. Russian literature was accorded a transformative societal function from its very inception, and its greatest writers were regarded as moralists as well as artists. This was no doubt due to the oppressive and draconian nature of Tsarist censorship, undoubtedly one the most restrictive in Europe at the time. This had the effect of making literature one of the only spaces where there could be any form of public discourse on political and social problems. The social and moral cause of Russian literature was taken up by early critics such as Vissarion Belinsky, and other liberals, who believed it the duty of writers to aid their readers to become more politically aware citizens. As a result of the severity of the censorship system, the cause of social change, moral and philosophical problems, whatever their provenance, came to be imbued in the novels, plays and poetry of nineteenth-century Russia. 7

Gene H. L. Bell-Villada, ‘Nabokov and Rand: Ideological Kindred Spirits, Divergent Literary Aims’, The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, Vol. 3, No. 1 (Autumn 2001), 181–193 (186).

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Thus Russian literature was to become intimately connected to an emerging national consciousness, taken to another level of revolutionary fervour by the generation of radical critics who came immediately after Belinsky such as Nikolai Chernyshevsky. The radical circle which centred around Chernyshevsky called upon writers to involve themselves more directly in inspiring and propagating revolution, and this inevitably led to conflict with writers who believed in the freedom of artistic expression and aesthetic distance. Frustrated by the lack of interest of his contemporaries in producing the type of publicist fiction which he was advocating, Chernyshevsky decided to write a novel himself in 1863: Chto Delat: iz rasskazov o novykh lyudyakh [What is to be Done? Tales of the New People]. This work, which served as an inspiration to a new generation of Russian revolutionaries, was to become the model of Socialist Realist literature to come. Chernyshevsky’s novel, as literature, is turgid melodrama; awash with clichés and permeated with sentimental aphorisms, its narrative arc and structure is loose and weak. As propaganda, however, it was without precedent. The story is held up by the presence of the heroic revolutionary ‘New Man’ – Rakhmetov – who singularly dominates the narrative. Rakhmetov’s selfless dedication to the cause of revolution caught the imagination of many young readers who sought to emulate his fictional example. One such young revolutionary, as is well known, was Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, who held such affection for the work that he would read it as many as five times throughout the course of his life; a copy would take pride of place next to his books on Marx, Engels and Plekhanov during his Siberian exile. Through Lenin, Chernyshevsky’s work would go on to influence proletarian literature in early revolutionary Russia, and would have an effect on the aesthetic of Socialist Realism formalized in 1934. Nabokov was fully aware of Lenin’s predilection for the melodramatic fiction of Chernyshevsky, and was keen to expose the insidious consequences of such bad taste. There can be no other explanation for why Nabokov was compelled to write a fictional biography of Chernyshevsky in his novel The Gift. Flawed aesthetic judgement, in Nabokov’s value system, is equivalent to a flawed ethics, a flawed morality and a flawed ideology. This is of course what he refers to when he wrote to Edmund Wilson of the ‘bluff geniality’ surrounding biographical accounts of Lenin, the ‘pail of milk of human kindness with

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a dead rat at the bottom’ which he sought to illustrate in Invitation to a Beheading. The implication is, evidently, that behind the philistine preference for mediocre aesthetics lies a contempt not just for artistic freedom, but for freedom itself. ‘The paradox which explodes Marxism and other dreams of the Ideal State’, Nabokov wrote to Wilson in 1940, ‘is that the first author is potentially the first tyrant of that state’ (NWL: 31). It is clear Nabokov believed that Chernyshevsky, through Lenin, became just such an author. In this particular belief, it must be acknowledged, he was very right. Lenin’s preference for the traditional ‘realism’ of Chernyshevsky manifested itself in an increasingly intransigent view towards literature and culture which first found expression in an homage which also bore the name Chto Delat? published in 1902, and an article of 1905 entitled ‘Party Organization and Party Literature’.8 Together, these two works set out the principles of partynost, ideinost and narodnost which would govern official Soviet Culture for several decades; adherence to party orthodoxy, recognizable ideological content, and ease of accessibility to the ordinary people. In these tracts, Lenin first expressed the pernicious desire for all of the organs of mass culture, publishers, newspapers, bookshops and libraries to be under party control – in order to regulate cultural production in such a way that it not be governed by the aspirations of individual artists: What is this principle of party literature? It is not simply that, for the socialist proletariat, literature cannot be a means of enriching individuals or groups: it cannot, in fact, be an individual undertaking, independent of the common cause of the proletariat. Down with non-partisan writers! Down with literary supermen! Literature must become part of the common cause of the proletariat, ‘a cog and a screw’ of one single great Social-Democratic mechanism set in motion by the entire politicallyconscious vanguard of the entire working class. Literature must become a component of organized, planned and integrated Social-Democratic Party work.9

These proclamations, which bore such resemblance to the fiery rhetoric of Chernyshevky, considered in retrospect, sound a prophetic note when

8 9

V. I. Lenin, ‘Party Organization and Party Literature’, Lenin Collected Works, Vol. 10 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1965), 44–49.  Lenin, ‘Party Organization and Party Literature’, 45.

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one considers the murky depths to which Soviet literary censorship would eventually descend, and the often tragic fate of those writers that would come into conflict with it. It was, after all, Lenin who would reintroduce the censorship which had declined in severity in the years after 1905, and had been abolished by the provisional government in 1917. These documents formed the basis of the aesthetic principle of Socialist Realism and appeared in countless university textbooks, periodicals and anthologies. It permeated every aspect of Soviet literary culture. It also served as a rallying call for the formation of the Soviet Writer’s Union, with its insistence on the idea that ‘Everyone is free to write and say whatever he likes, without any restrictions. But every voluntary association (including the party) is also free to expel members who use the name of the party to advocate antiparty views’.10 Following Lenin’s death in 1924, there was a period of relative freedom for writers as a result of the policies of the NEP during which various artistic groups and writer’s associations sprang up. This lasted until about 1932, when the Communist Party’s Central Committee, spurred on by Joseph Stalin, made moves to re-structure literary and artistic organizations in the service of a ‘hegemony of proletarian culture’, which eventually led to the Writer’s Congress of 1934. It is evident that Nabokov recognized the proscriptive potential of Socialist Realism in 1934 and felt the need to immediately respond through his own work. Nabokov was on the side of ‘literary supermen’ such as himself. One of the main speeches of the Soviet Writer’s Congress of 1934 was given by an aged Maxim Gorky. In his report he gave an extensive analysis of historical literary currents in Russian and European literature, and speculated on what may constitute a truly Soviet literature – its ideological characteristics, and the ways in which it may differ from the literature of the bourgeoisie. In one part, Gorky also touched upon the subject of the freedom of artistic expression: The liberty of art, the freedom of creative thought have been upheld with passionate redundance; all sorts of arguments have been produced to show that literature can exist and develop without reference to classes, that it is not dependent on social

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Lenin, ‘Party Organization and Party Literature, 47.

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Chapter 3 politics. This was bad policy, for it imperceptibly impelled many men of letters to constrict their observations of real life, within narrow bounds, to abstain from a broad and many-sided study of life, to shut themselves up ‘in the solitude of their soul’, to confine themselves to a fruitless form of ‘self-cognition’ by way of introspection and arbitrary thought, altogether detached from life.11

Indeed, Gorky’s reference to the ‘redundancy’ of artistic freedom as bad policy, of how it impels writers to ‘constrict their observations of real life’ subtly hinted at what was the main aim of the Congress: to impose a systematic literary establishment based upon an aesthetic principle and to exclude those that did not adhere to its tenets. Needless to say, such views were anathema to Nabokov’s own. Of Gorky’s role in the development of Socialist Realism Nabokov was fairly unambiguous in his Lectures on Russian Literature. Nabokov briefly analyses Gorky’s short story On the Rafts, focusing mainly on the trite, cliché ridden and unsophisticated nature of many of its narrative devices which mimic dramatic monologues, and which unsubtly inform the audience of context ‘like the opening scene of some faded old play with the valet and the maid dusting the furniture and talking about their masters’ (LRL: 304). The rest of the story is filled with familiar tropes; ‘the good old Russian soul’, the ‘vigorous and colourful old man’, and the alluring female who ‘twists her body with the movement of that much quoted animal, the cat’ (LRL: 305). The setting, a raft steering across the Volga, is cause for much derision on Nabokov’s part: [T]he author is trying to make it all less improbable […] for otherwise the author might expect the reader to wonder why on earth it was necessary to place two couples on a raft in the middle of the Volga to talk of their conflicts. On the other hand, if the constant repetition of such conversation is accepted, one cannot help wondering whether the raft ever got anywhere. People do not talk very much when they steer in fog across a wide and powerful river – but this, I suppose, is what is called stark realism. (LRL: 305)

The last comment, the scornful juxtaposition of a professed ‘stark realism’ which in actual fact depicts a profoundly unrealistic situation is of particular 11

Maxim Gorky, ‘Soviet Literature’, Marxist Internet Archive accessed 24 February 2014.

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interest. It indicts ‘realists’ such as Gorky in a mediocre, second-rate artistry which is concerned with depicting a compromised ‘average reality’ for ideological purposes. In Gorky’s work, Nabokov concluded, there is not a single ‘live word’, ‘not a single sentence that is not ready-made; it is all pink candy with just that amount of soot clinging to it to make it attractive. From here on there is but one single step to so-called Soviet Literature’ (LRL: 306). The fact that Nabokov so explicitly held the view that Maxim Gorky was a foundational author in the establishment of a Soviet literature is telling, given that it was Gorky’s speech which formed the centrepiece of the Writer’s Congress of 1934. In Invitation to a Beheading, Nabokov takes the idea of a ‘stark realism’ which is so incapable of describing reality in itself, the foundation of the Socialist Realist aesthetic exemplified by writers such as Gorky, and parodies it in various instances in the novel. As we have already observed, the descriptions of setting, characters and events have a fantastic quality to them which renders the work absurdist. This particular conceit has the very specific purpose of drawing the reader’s attention to the second-rate artistry which authors a world which condemns a man to death for being a genuine artist. The ‘stark realism’ of this world is an inconsistent, carelessly constructed artifice – the work of mediocre artists whose purported ‘realism’ is only capable of approximating an ‘average reality’ because they have sacrificed their artistic integrity to ideological conformity. The inconsistency of this ‘realism’, the lack of talent of the authors of this particular world, is highlighted from the very outset when we are presented with the entrance of the prison director Rodrig: He was dressed as always in a frock coat and held himself exquisitely straight, chest out, one hand in his bosom, the other behind his back. A perfect toupee, black as pitch, and with a waxy parting, smoothly covered his head. His face, selected without love, with its thick sallow cheeks and somewhat obsolete system of wrinkles, was enlivened in a sense by two, and only by two, bulging eyes. Moving his legs evenly in his columnar trousers, he strode from the wall to the table, almost to the cot – but, in spite of his majestic solidity, he calmly vanished, dissolving into the air. A minute later, however, the door opened once again, this time with the familiar grating sound, and dressed as always in a frock coat, his chest out, in came the same person. (IB: 14)

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In evidence in the above extract are the forms of weakened ‘stark realism’ which Nabokov mocked in Gorky, taken to their very extremes of absurdity: the banal descriptions of dress, posture (‘chest out’) and physical affectations (‘one hand in his bosom’), the predictable descriptions of colour (‘black as pitch’), the equally hackneyed tendency to focus on physical appearance as a means to convey emotional depth (‘thick sallow cheeks’, a ‘face, selected without love’) which the comment on the presence of ‘only’ two ‘eyes’ highlights. Finally, the absurdity and inconsistency of this trite realism is alluded to by the fact that the character disappears, only to reappear a moment later, once more with the repeated description of having his ‘chest out’. In the remainder of the narrative, various other instances alert the reader’s attention to the absurd second-rate artifice which rules Cincinnatus’s world. The absurd legal protocol which requires the death sentence to be announced in a ‘whisper’, that both defence and prosecution must have come from same womb, that the executioner must befriend his victim before the act; the farcical fortress which stands high above a village like a medieval fairy tale castle, the spider in the cell which turns out to be a mechanical device, surroundings which resemble cheap stage scenery, characters who are at pains to convey their adherence to familiar tropes – all of this suggests a parasitic literary culture, one which has been sutured from the various conventions of other literary cultures. Such is the way that realist fiction, and in a more specific sense Socialist Realism, functions: through the accumulation of devices which are easily recognizable and easily digestible. In Invitation to a Beheading, these devices are over-saturated deliberately, like over-leavened bread which becomes hideously deformed in the baking process. This is made clear in the intermittent moments when we are given a direct view into the thought process of Cincinnatus: I want to share with you some conclusions I have reached. I am surrounded by some sort of wretched spectres, not by people. They torment me as can torment only senseless visions, bad dreams, dregs of delirium, the drivel of nightmares and everything that passes down here for real life. In theory one would wish to wake up, but wake up I cannot without outside help, and yet I fear this help terribly, and my very soul has grown lazy and accustomed to its snug swaddling clothes. (IB: 32)

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The ‘wretched spectres’ which surround Cincinnatus are a product of an insubstantial and inconsistent realism which purports to be human, but in reality produces a dehumanizing effect because of the weakness of their artfulness, and the compromised ideological aesthetic system from which they derive. The irony is that the world which ‘stark realism’ depicts, merely ‘passes’ for real life – and never comes close to authentic depiction. On the basis of these subtle reference points which pervade the narrative Nabokov later affects a more overt and less ambiguous attack upon the form of realism that was being championed in Russia at the time. A novel which Cincinnatus reads entitled Quercus, ‘considered to be the acme of modern thought’ (IB: 104), functions as a fairly obvious parody of Socialist Realism. This ‘contemporary novel’ which is representative of the apex of the regime’s cultural achievements is described as a 3000-page ‘biography’ of an oak, which exhaustively describes all the history it has witnessed throughout its life. In his speech to the Soviet Writer’s Congress, Maxim Gorky offered an interesting analysis of the value of folktales and folklore. He maintained rather optimistically that, in direct contrast to the literature of the Chivalric Age and Christian narratives, ‘pessimism is entirely foreign to folklore’. He posited that despite the abject economic and social conditions that the creators and disseminators of folklore lived in – ‘their bitter drudgery robbed of all meaning by their exploiters’, ‘defenceless’ and ‘disenfranchised’ in their private lives – their ‘collective body’ nonetheless was ‘distinguished by a consciousness of its own immortality and an assurance of its triumph over all hostile forces’.12 It was this particular analysis, the grand narrative of historical materialism favouring the eventual triumph of the toilers and labourers, which Nabokov perhaps had in mind when presenting us with his Quercus: Employing the gradual development of the tree […] the author unfolded all of the historic events – or shadows of events – of which the oak could have been a witness; now it was a dialogue between two warriors dismounted from their steeds – one dappled, the other dun – so as to rest under the cool ceil of its noble foliage; now

12

Maxim Gorky, ‘Soviet Literature’, Marxist Internet Archive, accessed 24 February 2014.

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Chapter 3 highwaymen stopping and the song of a fugitive damsel; now, beneath the storm’s blue zigzag, the hasty passage of a lord escaping from royal wrath […]. It seemed as though the author were sitting with his camera somewhere among the topmost branches of the Quercus, spying out and catching his prey. Various images of life would come and go, pausing among the green macules of light. The normal periods of inaction were filled with scientific descriptions of the oak itself, from the viewpoints of dendrology, ornithology, coleopterology, mythology – or popular descriptions, with touches of folk humor. […] And, finally, no little attention was devoted to the music of waters, the palette of sunsets, and the behaviour of the weather. (IB: 104–105)

This description represents Socialist Realism taken to its most absurd, but logical, conclusion. It is, in essence, a realism which is completely bereft of its art – a form which replaces the power of individual artistic creativity with a comprehensive and tedious adherence to historical facts, imbued with the same predictable grand narratives which Gorky misattributed to folklore. The novel is a litany of objectionable clichés of warriors, damsels, highwaymen, feudal conflicts and strife; its descriptions of the ‘music of waters’, the ‘palette of sunsets’ are as contrived as its predictable touches of ‘folk humour’. It furthermore attempts to compensate for its lack of artistry by resorting to explanations of scientific phenomena through ‘dendrology’, ‘ornithology’, ‘coleopterology’. It sounds a prophetic note of the Soviet literature of the near future, of the novels of writers such as Vera Panova whose prose adhered so slavishly to the tenets of Socialist Realism, and similarly delved into exhaustive descriptions of manufacturing processes in factories or the agronomical problems faced by collective farmers in order to bolster the often predictable and contrived narratives. Quercus is unmistakably an attack upon Soviet literature and Socialist Realism. It is impossible not to notice, once more, that this attack is predicated upon aesthetics – it is a critique of a censorious and repressive literary apparatus on the grounds of its vulgarity and lack of sophistication. Critics who are protective of the idea of Nabokov being a novelist of serious moral fiction may, at this point, question the pettiness of such a critique, the form of which trivializes the seriousness of totalitarianism. In November 1933, seven months before Nabokov began work on his novel, the poet Osip Mandelstam, who had been several years above Nabokov in the prestigious Tenishev School in St Petersburg, read a brief poem on Joseph Stalin

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entitled the ‘The Kremlin Caucasian’ to a small crowd of close friends and acquaintances. He was arrested six months later, and would eventually die in a far-eastern gulag. Nabokov does not trivialize the threat of totalitarianism when he objects to it on aesthetic grounds – after all, his sense of ideology is inextricably bound to aesthetics. Rather, in his parody of the vulgar and trite ‘realism’ of Soviet literature in Invitation to a Beheading, there is a proposition which holds that this same ‘bad taste’ is intrinsic to totalitarianism’s very existence. What we witness in the deliberate shoddy artifice which permeates the novel, and in Nabokov’s invention of Quercus, is precisely the ‘rotting’ of ‘average reality’, or rather the ‘stark realism’ that was prescribed by Socialist Realism. It is beginning ‘to rot and stink’, precisely because there are no individual artists who were not compromised by their adherence to ideological dogma, and are thus unable to use their gift for ‘individual creation’ to ‘animate a subjectively perceived texture’ (SO: 102). As Dale E. Peterson noted, Invitation to a Beheading ‘exposes, in the form of an opaque parable, why writing that purports to respect real life must not seek to reproduce it in verbal duplications’.13 However, Peterson also claims that to read the work as merely a ‘political scenario’ is to accept that Nabokov is ‘irresponsible enough to advocate imaginative escapism as an adequate response to police states’, and that accepting such an interpretation would require us to ‘invent a Nabokov who can make light of totalitarian threats by suggesting that acts of individual imaginative noncompliance and transcendence can dismantle them’ (Peterson: 825). On the contrary – this is, I submit, the very purpose that Nabokov had in mind. It is impossible to conceive of Invitation to a Beheading as anything other than a political allegory. Such a strategy was not however, to Nabokov’s mind, at all naive nor ‘irresponsible’, and in no way made light of ‘totalitarian threats’. Rather, it was the logical response of an artist for whom aesthetics was of primary importance, and for whom ideology would always be a matter of aesthetics. For Nabokov, his conception of the Schopenhauerian ‘Object of Art’ (that the purpose of art is simply to provide a temporary relief from 13

Dale E. Peterson, ‘Nabokov’s Invitation: Literature as Execution’, PMLA, Vol. 96, No. 5 (1981), 824–836 (825). Further references are given in parentheses.

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the unremitting process of willing; that the aim of the artist was to provide such relief and nothing more) had been usurped and compromised by the ideological forces which ruled his former homeland. These ideological forces can be traced back to the peculiar form of materialist utilitarianism which was propagated by Nikolai Chernyshevky. To return to Nabokov’s hostility towards Chernyshevky, and thus to the particular brand of materialism which underpinned his philosophy, is to be confronted once more with the problem of Nabokov’s metaphysics. Does such hostility not confirm, in a manner of speaking, Nabokov’s opposition to a materialist epistemology? Does this not provide ample proof that Invitation is an affirmation of a transcendental idealism over a banal materialism, and all of the attendant mystical and pseudo-religious interpretations that derive from such a proposition? To this I would submit that criticism of a specific type of materialism does not necessary make one any less of a materialist, and neither does a resistance to a radical utilitarianism automatically confirm one’s belief in God. It is my contention that Nabokov, while providing various cryptic phrases which allude to some belief in a higher power (towards the end of his life, when more attuned to one’s own sense of mortality; more readily entertains such frivolous thoughts), was more resistant to credulous religiosity than he was to politics. Asked whether he thought that political ideas could solve the big problems in an individual’s life, Nabokov responded that he had always marvelled at the neatness of such solutions: ardent Stalinists transforming themselves into harmless socialists, Socialists finding a sunset harbor in Conservatism, and so forth. I suppose this must be rather like religious conversion, of which I know very little. I can only explain God’s popularity by an atheist’s panic. (SO: 125)

Nevertheless, if we are to accept the philosophical influence of Schopenhauer on Nabokov’s work, then it is impossible for us not to address the problem of materialism in Schopenhauer’s philosophy. It is a subject of contention among philosophers, and one which is not even remotely close to resolution. On the one hand, we are presented with a philosophical system which seems to have at its centre a subjectively perceived idealism which stands in contrast to its author’s disavowal of mysticism. On the other, there is a persistent notion that the philosophy of Schopenhauer constitutes a very

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specific form of embryonic materialism which informs its whole structure. It is my opinion that Schopenhauer’s philosophical perspective was close to Nabokov’s in one fundamental way. Schopenhauer’s philosophy is problematic primarily because of his absolute insistence on the principles of materialism in regard to the world of physical phenomena on the one hand, and on the other his equal insistence that materialism does not give adequate account of consciousness and knowledge, the world of will, because it can only insist upon the fact that the processes of the brain are material. This places Schopenhauer within Nabokov’s definition of an ‘indivisible monist’, for whom mind and matter remain distinct within their Cartesian dualities, and this makes him in equal parts a materialist with regards to the world of objects, and something else entirely with regard to the world of perception: the fundamental absurdity of materialism consists in the fact that it starts from the objective; it takes an objective something as the ultimate ground of explanation, whether this be matter in the abstract simply as it is thought, or after it has entered into the form empirically given, and hence substance, perhaps the chemical elements together with their primary combinations. Some such thing it takes as existing absolutely and in itself, in order to let organic nature and finally the knowing subject emerge from it, and completely to explain these; whereas in truth everything objective is already conditioned in such manifold ways by the knowing subject with the forms of its knowing, and presupposes these forms; consequently it wholly disappears when the subject is thought away. Materialism is therefore the attempt to explain what is directly given to us from what is given indirectly. Everything objective, extended, active, and hence everything material, is regarded by materialism as so solid a basis for its explanations that a reduction to this (especially if it should ultimately result in thrust and counter-thrust) can leave nothing to be desired.14

Of course, it is from this ‘something else’ that idealism inevitably derives. Yet, this should not be taken as confirmation of a philosophical perspective which negotiates in equal parts between materialism and idealism, while never completely committing to either. The fact that Schopenhauer remained an uncompromising atheist should inform us that this was not 14

Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, Vol. I (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1958), 27.

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the case. It was, rather, an attack upon a form of vulgar materialism which insisted upon the ability of materialism to explain through the ‘objective something as the ultimate ground of explanation’. Schopenhauer, much like Nabokov, is hostile to such a notion because he understood the limitations of the objective human sciences of his time to adequately explain the processes of cognition – something which even our advanced technological age of neuroscience and behavioural psychology has still not sufficiently accomplished. Nabokov’s philosophy, like Schopenhauer’s, did not subscribe to a fundamentalist notion of materialism. Yet it was precisely this particular type of fundamentalist materialism that Nabokov perceived in the philosophy of Chernyshevky, and through him, through Lenin, to the lackeys of the Soviet Writer’s Union, he perceived an unbroken line of succession of inflexible materialism which underpinned an aesthetic system. While researching the life and philosophical opinions of the historical Chernyshevsky for his parodic biography in The Gift, Nabokov identified a certain strain of materialist epistemology, which he viewed unsurprisingly as philistine. Furthermore, he seems to have made a direct link from the so-called ‘men of the sixties’ to the contemporary situation in the Soviet Union; drawing a parallel between the materialist aesthetic dictates of Chernyshevsky and his critical circle, one the one hand, and those of Zhdanov, Gorky and the Soviet Writer’s Union, on the other. Regarded in this context, the significance of the name Cincinnatus takes on another interesting dimension. In the preceding chapter, we briefly noted how Nabokov attempted to critique the putatively Marxist concept of ‘General Intellect’ through Hermann Hermann’s deranged ravings in Despair. It was Nabokov’s contention that leftist materialist philosophy imposes mechanistic and technological myths, purportedly based on scientific fact, upon human existence thereby demeaning the value of individual human agency, and, more importantly, of artistic creation. Nabokov stated that his work on Chernyshevsky was ‘based on longer and deeper research’ than his critical biography of Gogol, and that ‘the plain truth of documents’ (SO: 133) was on his side. It was not clear in Despair to what extent Nabokov had read Marx’s philosophy, however his basic grasp and subsequent parody of some notable concepts seemed to suggest a familiarity. It is not inconceivable then, given the depth of engagement there is

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in The Gift with a wide variety of nineteenth-century radical philosophy, that his reading at this time included Marx. The following extract, taken from the beginning of Chapter 7 of Marx’s Das Kapital, could provide a hint as to what provoked that first jolt of inspiration which led Nabokov to suddenly set aside his work on The Gift in order to work on Invitation to a Beheading: The labour-process, resolved as above into its simple elementary factors, is human action with a view to the production of use-values, appropriation of natural substances to human requirements; it is the necessary condition for effecting exchange of matter between man and Nature; it is the everlasting Nature-imposed condition of human existence, and therefore is independent of every social phase of that existence, or rather, is common to every such phase. It was, therefore, not necessary to represent our labourer in connexion with other labourers; man and his labour on one side, Nature and its materials on the other, sufficed. As the taste of the porridge does not tell you who grew the oats, no more does this simple process tell you of itself what are the social conditions under which it is taking place, whether under the slave-owner’s brutal lash, or the anxious eye of the capitalist, whether Cincinnatus carries it on in tilling his modest farm or a savage in killing wild animals with stones.15

When Ruskin wrote of Rome’s invention of the fable of Cincinnatus, of how it was motivated by the ‘strength of conviction that manual labour in tilling the ground’ was ‘good’ and ‘honourable’; he was essentially identifying how easily such cultural myths can be appropriated into the service of propaganda. Taken in this sense, Marx’s allusion to the plight of Cincinnatus is incredibly important to further understand Nabokov’s motivation in writing Invitation to a Beheading. When he would return to The Gift, Nabokov would reverse this tendency by himself appropriating the historical figure of Chernyshevsky in a fictional representation, but subverted these propagandistic aims by rendering them purely aesthetic. That is to say, in their own way, they were themselves ideological. It was in the service of a new found purpose, the championing of what I will term the ideology of aesthetic autonomy.

15

Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2011), 204–205.

Chapter 4

My Kingdom: The Formation of the Ideological Aesthetic in The Gift

Longer, longer, and for as long as possible, shall I be in a strange country. And although my thoughts, my name, my works will belong to Russia, I myself, my mortal organism, will be removed from it. (The Gift: 202)

The Gift inhabits an important space within Nabokov’s oeuvre. He described it as ‘the last novel I ever wrote, or ever shall write, in Russian’ (The Gift: viii) and spoke of his detachment from the émigré world which it renders in such atomistic detail; and ultimately of how it had become by 1962 ‘as much of a phantasm as most of my other worlds’. Yet this lengthy work written at the beginning of a linguistic transition, the last and perhaps most personal of his Russian period, has many instructive parallels with his first work in English, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight. Both works are concerned with literary biography and the life of the artist, and contain allusions both to lived experience and, with the completed transition into English, a speculative projection of imagined self. The interplay between real and imaginary experience is consistently present, in various forms, throughout these two texts. The merging of actual and fictional biographical details, the imagined biographies of Nikolai Chernyshevsky and Sebastian Knight and the didactic views on literary aesthetics and artistic development, all seem to suggest the concealed presence of ideological engagement. In The Gift, the opinions expressed by the protagonist Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev are perhaps the most accurate fictional representation of Nabokov’s own views on art and literature. As David Rampton noted, ‘Nabokov makes no sustained attempt at maintaining a fixed distance

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between himself and his creation, and we need not pretend that he has done’.1 Similarly, Vladimir Alexandrov maintained that ‘the young Russian émigré writer living in Berlin in the 1920s who is both the novel’s protagonist and its ostensible author, shares with his creator virtually identical views on a number of important topics’ (Alexandrov: 108). Douglas Fowler, taking into account the similarities between the opinions expressed in The Gift and Nabokov’s own critical works on other authors, concluded that ‘Fyodor’s voice is almost perfectly equivalent to Nabokov’s own’.2 Indeed, despite Nabokov’s assertion that ‘I am not, and never was Fyodor GodunovCherdyntsev’ (The Gift: vii), there appears to be a consensus that the views of the protagonist are almost interchangeable with those of his creator. The Gift serves as a point of both arrival and departure for the present study, as the location where there exists something which resembles an ideological aesthetic. This is not to suggest that the works which preceded The Gift were entirely free from ideology (indeed, as we have already observed, this is entirely impossible) but rather that this particular work, of all those written during the Russian period, contains within it the unambiguous presence of ideological purpose. The central conflict of this work is one which is present to a greater or lesser extent in all of Nabokov’s works; it is presented as a dialogue, and ultimately a question – whether Art should only exist for its own sake, or whether it should be compelled to serve a social function or purpose? The terms of the debate and the arguments which Nabokov deploys are, perhaps unsurprisingly, biased towards the former. However, by seeking to refute what he perceived to be the epistemologically materialist philosophies which had encroached upon the sphere of artistic creativity, and by rejecting the effect of social intent on aesthetic appreciation, Nabokov makes a very conspicuous ideological commitment. This is by no means a revelation. Rampton noted this tendency within Nabokov’s criticism of Russian authors in The Gift:

1 2

David Rampton, ‘The Gift’, A Critical Study of the Novels (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 70. Douglas Fowler, Rereading Nabokov (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1974), 167.

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Nabokov, with his impetuous and undiscriminating condemnation of socially relevant literature, commits his own to all the things that are supposed to characterize the ‘other tradition’, to ‘sweeping conclusions’, ‘generalizations’, even ‘ideological purpose’, if campaigning against those with an ideology is itself an ideological commitment. (Rampton: 90)

Rampton’s insight here is cautious and tentative, but nonetheless very perceptive. The central thesis of Louis Althusser’s Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses is that ‘Ideology interpellates individuals as subjects’ (IISA: 44). A further reminder of the process of ‘interpellation’ is useful here, in order to unpack the significance of the point which Rampton makes. Althusser’s thesis is largely consistent with his insistence upon the ahistoricity of ideology, and this is evident when he posits that ‘there is no Ideology except by the subject and for subjects’ (IISA: 44), a point which contains the next logical development that individuals are ‘always already subjects, and as such constantly practise the rituals of ideological recognition’ (IISA: 46). The process of ‘ideological recognition’ is partly what is at work within Nabokov’s critique of materialist epistemology through his biography of Chernyshevsky, or his hostility towards works of ‘social intent’. Yet it is not only the recognition of an antagonistic ideology, but also the construction of an ideological position which can be deployed to oppose the first. Althusser notes that Ideology ‘acts’ or ‘functions’ in such a way that it ‘recruits’ subjects among the individuals (it recruits them all), or ‘transforms’ the individuals into ‘subjects’ (it transforms them all) by that very precise operation which I have called interpellation (IISA: 48).

The apparent contradiction between the theories of the individual as always already a ‘subject’ on the one hand, and their ‘recruitment’ or ‘transformation’ into ideological subjects on the other, is easily resolved. Individuals are always already ideological subjects, but it is only through the process of interpellation that they become aware of their status as such. The Gift, which contains such unequivocal opposition to materialist philosophy and the literature of ‘social intent’, acts, as we shall see, as the point of ‘interpellation’ – as the site where Nabokov is ‘recruited’ or ‘transformed’ into a subject of ideology.

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Walter Benjamin famously proposed that ‘there has never been a document of culture which was not at one and the same time a document of barbarism’.3 The attempt to reverse Benjamin’s dictum forms the main thesis of Jameson’s Political Unconscious. He outlines the terms of the question in a traditional Marxian formulation: how is it possible for a cultural text which fulfils a demonstrably ideological function, as a hegemonic work whose formal categories as well as its content secure the legitimation of this or that form of class domination – how is it possible for such a text to embody a properly Utopian impulse, or to resonate a universal value inconsistent with the narrower limits of class privilege which inform its more immediate ideological vocation? (PU: 279)

In response Jameson proposed the idea that ‘the effectively ideological is also, at the same time, necessarily Utopian’ (PU: 276), a thesis which has drawn the opprobrium of various critics for reasons which are not too difficult to comprehend. Yet it is a solution which may prove instructive in our analyses of Nabokov. According to Jameson, ‘all class consciousnessor in other words, all ideology […] is in its very nature Utopian’. As was mentioned previously, Nabokov’s interpellation as a subject of ideology involves the process of ideological recognition, but also the construction of an ideological position which can be utilized to resist opposing ideologies. This can be redefined as the antagonism between differing perspectives on utopia (i.e. utopia versus counter-utopia). The presence of the ‘Utopian impulse’ within the narrative apparatus of The Gift is something which is carefully hidden, in plain sight, within the realm of the Imaginary. The Gift begins peculiarly on April Fool’s Day, and the last digit of the year has been omitted in ‘keeping with the honesty peculiar to our literature’ (The Gift: 1). Sergei Davydov notes that ‘Pushkin began his Novel at Caucasian Spa’ with a similar omission of the last digit, and ‘arranged

3

Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zorn (London: Pimlico, 1999), 248.

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the birth of the “late” I. P. Belkin on April 1st’.4 Davydov maintains that Chernyshevsky’s novel ‘does not pass this test of honesty’ (Davydov: 360), as he begins his novel with the last digit of the date 1856. It is a very interesting and peculiar reference and one which defines, from the outset, the central concern of the novel. The evocation of April Fool’s Day acts as an injunction to the reader to desist in seeking out any parallels to real life. Yet the ostensible subject of this work, while in content a Kűnstlerroman detailing the aesthetic education of the protagonist, is the ideological and aesthetic development of Russian literature.5 We are thus confronted with a peculiar form of ‘honesty’, which Nabokov feels is absent from the literature of ‘social intent’. It would at first appear that the act of withholding information, of denying the reader the privilege of temporal context, is in some ways dishonest. April Fool’s Day perhaps hints at an implicit understanding of the dishonesty of such a sentence. Yet the ‘test of honesty’, which Chernyshevsky’s novel fails, is of particular significance to our understanding of the essentially ideological opposition which Nabokov felt toward the literature of ‘social intent’. Nabokov, like Pushkin before him, omits the final digit in order to proclaim the primacy of aesthetic autonomy, of how art does not, or should not exist within the sphere of lived experience. However, when we consider the consensus among scholars 4 5

Sergei Davydov, ‘The Gift: Nabokov’s Aesthetic Exorcism of Chernyshevskii’, Canadian-American Slavic Studies, Vol. 19, No. 3 (Boston: Brill Publishing, 1985), 357–374. Further references are given in parentheses. In this particular vein, the thesis proposed by the critic Pascale Casanova in her study of world literature is particularly apt. Casanova suggests that different national literatures since the beginning of the modern period have been in a constant competition for recognition, with French, English and Spanish beginning in the sixteenth century by subsuming the traditions of classical Greek and Latin; the emergence of German into prominence in the eighteenth century onwards; and Russian literature, arriving late to this literary Great Game, only beginning to assert itself in the mid- to late nineteenth century – and arguably came to prominence in the twentieth century with a new found enthusiasm for works in the United States before, during and after the Second World War. In this sense, Nabokov was a ceaseless advocate and played a not insignificant role in popularizing Russian literature (albeit of a certain tradition) within the Casanovian marketplace of world literatures. See: Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005).

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of the parallels between the lives of Godunov-Cherdyntsev and Nabokov, it is possible to identify an inherent ‘dishonesty’, or perhaps artifice, in this tiny cryptic flourish. Indeed, as we shall see, the attempt to counter the ideology of ‘social intent’, with the ideology of ‘aesthetic autonomy’ suffers from a similar kind of inconsistency. In the very first part of the narrative, which occurs on Tannenberg Street, we are presented with a very interesting scene. The name ‘Tannenberg’, of course, has particular significance for Slavs and Germans. The initial battle of 1410 saw the defeat of the Teutonic Knights at the hands of a combined Polish, Lithuanian and Tatar force; the second in 1914, saw the complete destruction of the Russian 2nd Army in the Great War. After recording in brilliant and perplexing detail the scene of a couple who are collecting their belongings from a removal truck, Nabokov once more reiterates his insistence on the fictional nature of this scene: Some day, he thought, I must use such a scene to start a good thick old-fashioned novel. The fleeting thought was touched with a careless irony; an irony, however, that was quite unnecessary, because somebody within him, on his behalf, independently from him, had absorbed all this, recorded it, and filed it away. (The Gift: 2) ‘вот так бы по старинке начать когда-нибудь толстую штуку’ – подумалось мельком с беспечной ироней-соврешенно, впрочем, излишнею, потому что кто-то внутри него, за него, помимо него, всё это уже принял, записал и прирятал.6

There are several points of interest in this particular scene. At first glance, it may appear that there is a certain consistency to the sentiments expressed here, where the author ab initio exerts his control over his own creation, the irony of which is known to the protagonist, and as such is deemed ‘unnecessary’. However, if this is simply an exertion of authorial control, and hence an insistence upon the ideology of ‘aesthetic autonomy’, then the inclusion of the image of the author existing ‘within’ the character seems somewhat out of place. A character which comes from ‘within’ an author would have been more consistent with a work which purports to 6

Vladimir Nabokov, Dar (New York: Chekov Press, 1952), 10.

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pass the ‘test of honesty’. An author who exists ‘within’ the protagonist, however, seems to suggest an implicit acknowledgement of the autobiographical intent of the work. This was, of course, clear to Nabokov. Thus, in order to divert attention from this seemingly inconsequential point, he lists two conflicting variations with the author writing ‘on his behalf ’ and ‘independently’ from him. In the Russian original, the use of the Russian word Tolsti, ‘thick’, invites us to draw obvious parallels between not just the physical but also the moral, ethical (and perhaps ideological) weightiness of a Tolstoyan tome and the book which Fyodor thinks of writing, and which Nabokov has already written. Indeed, the lack of a suitable adjective in English to render the double meaning of ‘thick’, and ‘Tolstoyan’, would have made it easy for Nabokov to conceal such associations and connotations which would perhaps have convinced the astute reader of the work’s wider ideological commitment. No doubt Nabokov would have defined this as an ‘attractive but ultimately preposterous’ conclusion (SO: 156). Indeed, there is in fact very little evidence which suggests that such a pun is widely acknowledged within Russian culture. Brian Boyd suggests Nabokov’s admiration for Tolstoy was often complex, that although ‘Nabokov was in some ways especially close to Tolstoy’ (RY: 92), insomuch as they both ‘probe oblique and fleeting movements of the mind with the same supple touch’, and both possessed a similar sense of ‘visual clarity’ and ‘sensory imagination’, they were in many ways quite far apart: [T]he massive pride and massive dissatisfaction with himself that drove Tolstoy on, the untroubled self-assurance of Nabokov; Tolstoy’s deep distrust of art, Nabokov’s equally deep distrustfulness of the artfulness of the world; Tolstoy’s craving for a life free of the burden of consciousness, Nabokov’s vigilant reluctance to relinquish consciousness. (RY: 92)

Whether Nabokov intended to use the scene on Tannenberg Street to begin a thick/Tolstoyan novel is of course unverifiable, yet for an author who thrived on the use of such word play and puns, it is difficult to imagine that such associations would have escaped his notice while giving his final stamp of approval to Michael Scammel’s English translation. Whether this was the case or not is of course irrelevant, for Nabokov’s insistence on the ideology of aesthetic autonomy, and his distrust for ‘the artfulness of the

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world’, is not as stable as Boyd suggests. Indeed, Nabokov’s ‘self-assurance’ was perhaps not so untroubled. Sergei Davydov astutely observed that Fyodor’s biography of Chernyshevsky within The Gift ostensibly functions, according to Mikhail Bakhtin’s definition, as a Menippean Satire.7 This insight will prove invaluable to our analysis of the concealed ideological valences of the work in its entirety, as it is not only Fyodor’s biography which functions as Menippean Satire, but the entirety of the work itself – which shares more similarities with this genre than with the conventional ‘novel’. When we consider its fragmented narrative structure, serio-comic aspects and its rapid transition between stylistic forms; the ‘extreme Ideologism’,8 of which Bakhtin wrote is but one of the many facets of The Gift which may confirm this. Of course, this would effectively place Nabokov a little closer to Dostoevsky than he would have been comfortable with. It must be said, however, that the ‘ideologism’ of Nabokov was not as extreme as that of Doestoevsky. As Northrop Frye succinctly noted, ‘The novelist sees evil and folly as social diseases, but the Menippean satirist sees them as diseases of the intellect’,9 and such an insight goes some way to describing the subtlety of Nabokov’s ideological engagement. Nabokov’s opposition to the literature of ‘social intent’ was motivated by a belief that the authors of such works suffered from ‘diseased intellects’. According to Davydov, ‘Nabokov views Chernyshevskii’s political radicalism and conservative aesthetics as direct antecedents of Lenin’s political tyranny and of the aesthetic doctrine of Socialist Realism’ (Davydov: 357). The Gift, as with Invitation to a Beheading, was an ideological (and aesthetic) response to the doctrine of Socialist Realism espoused by the Soviet Union 7

8 9

Sergei Davydov, ‘The Gift: Nabokov’s Aesthetic Exorcism of Chernyshevskii’, Canadian-American Slavic Studies, Vol. 19, No. 3 (Boston: Brill Publishing, 1985). As Davydov notes that ‘all fourteen points which Bakhtin lists as characteristics of the genre are relevant to Fyodor’s text, in particular points 4 – “extreme and crude naturalism”, 5 – “extraordinary philosophical universalism and extreme Ideologism”’ My italics. Mikhail Bakhtin, Problemy poetiki Dostoevskogo (Moscow: I. Kh. L., 1972). Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957), 309.

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of Writers in 1934. It maps out an alternative path for the aesthetic and ideological development of Russian literature, one which insists heavily upon the autonomy of literature from the sphere of ‘social intent’. This may have been his aim, but it goes without saying that he did not succeed in implementing it. In Either/Or, Søren Kierkegaard stated that it is necessary to choose between living ‘aesthetically’ or living ‘ethically’.10 Nabokov perhaps wished to live (and write) according to the former, but inevitably he could not ignore the latter. The Menippean satirist may perceive ‘evil’ and ‘folly’ as diseases of the intellect, resisting a historicist approach which would perhaps find them to be problems of the corrupt structure of society. They are often perceptive and incredibly skilful in diagnosing diseases of the intellect, but their proposed treatments often amount to quackery. The reactionary Dostoevsky, who Nietzsche once declared to be ‘the only person who has ever taught me anything about psychology’ proposed as a solution to the ills of a backward and moribund Russian society a return to absolute feudalism and extreme religiosity. In this particular respect, Nabokov was not a writer in the satirical form which Bakhtin associated with Dostoevsky. Nabokov certainly despised Dostoevsky, for reasons which we have already observed. Although both writers are equally skilled as negative diagnosticians of intellectual disease, within Nabokov’s work we find a marked absence of proposed solutions. Yet it would be misguided for us to presume that Nabokov’s sole concern was with the problem of individual or collective intellectual disease. There is also an often hidden, yet very sophisticated, awareness of the ideological problems of capitalist society. The term poshlust, which Nabokov coined as a definition of an aesthetic model which was directly opposed to his own, has featured heavily in previous scholarship. He defined the term as ‘not only the obviously trashy but also the falsely important, the falsely beautiful, the falsely clever, the falsely attractive’.11 It is a concept which has some importance for any analysis which aims to consider the importance of ideology, for it not 10 11

Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or: A Fragment of Life, trans. Alastair Hannay (London: Penguin, 1992). Vladimir Nabokov, Nikolai Gogol (New York: New Directions, 1961), 70.

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only defines in fairly unequivocal terms Nabokov’s aesthetic model; but also hints at the ideology which underpins such a model. Like much else in Nabokov, the concept of poshlust is far from consistent, is often contradictory; and it is only through deciding the ways in which Nabokov’s oeuvre differs from poshlust that it is possible to ‘see’, ‘perceive’ and ‘feel’ Nabokov’s ‘ideological esthetic’, which may be, in Theodor Adorno’s terms, a Negative Dialectical12 model. The theory which I wish to posit at this present juncture is that poshlust is similar, if not equal, to the Marxist concept of reification – wherein Nabokov’s resistance to poshlust is an implicit resistance to commoditization, reified form and existence. It is only through such an analysis that we may be able to enact the ‘simultaneous recognition of the ideological and utopian functions of the artistic text’ which Jameson proposes: [A] Marxist negative hermeneutic, a Marxist practice of ideological analysis proper, must in practical work of reading and interpretation be exercised simultaneously with a Marxist positive hermeneutic, or a decipherment of the Utopian impulses of these same still ideological cultural texts. (PU: 286)

Working within these coordinates, it will be useful initially to look once more at the first scene on Tannenberg Street, where Fyodor ponders on the position of three shops: On Tannenberg Street these three were dissociated, occurring on different corners; perhaps however, the rhythmic swarming had not yet established itself, and in future, yielding to that counterpoint (as proprietors either went broke or moved) they would gradually begin to gather over its shoulder, would cross the street, so as to be first seven and then three doors away from the pharmacy – in somewhat the same way as the jumbled letters find their places in a film commercial; and at the end there is always one that does a kind of flip, and then hastily assumes its position (a comic character, the inevitable Jack the Sack among the new recruits); and thus they wait until an adjacent place becomes vacant, whereupon they will both wink across at the tobacco shop, as if to say: ‘Quick, over here’; and before you know it they are all in a row, forming a typical line. God how I hate it all – the things in

12

Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. Dennis Redmond (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1970).

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the shop windows, the obtuse face of merchandize, and, above all, the ceremonial of transaction, the exchange of cloying compliments before and after! And those lowered lashes of modest price […] the nobility of the discount […] the altruism of advertisements […] all of this nasty imitation of good, which has a strange way of drawing in good people. (The Gift: 3)

As Fyodor contemplates his new neighbourhood, he is struck by the inconvenient distance between the three shops which he would tend to frequent. Thus begins a surreal and humorous account of how this awkward distribution of shops may resolve itself in the future, consequently easing his consumption. The brief aside in parentheses acknowledges certain realities of the hegemonic market forces which govern his environment. Such forces, through causing certain proprietors to go ‘broke’, would further his convenience of consumption. The first two lines appear, on first glance, to legitimize a certain ideological class position. His stated desire for convenience, which was and is a driving force in the evolution of market capital, implicates Fyodor (and Nabokov) in the role of willing consumer. The reference to proprietors going broke, functions in two ways. Primarily as an acknowledgement of the economic conditions which had existed in Germany at that particular time; the effects of hyperinflation (1922–1923) and currency de-valuation had caused the financial ruin of many people. There also appears to be a simultaneous recognition of the necessity of such destruction and regeneration, and a willing deference to the alleged selfcorrection of market forces, insomuch as the ease of Fyodor’s consumption would be improved, without being affected in any significant way. In addition to this negative hermeneutic, we must enact another simultaneously. It must be said that these lines also constitute a certain type of utopian impulse. Fyodor imagines a more ordered distribution of shops, which would improve the convenience his consumption. He communicates this urge by resorting to the utopian language of advertising, a comical and amusing charade wherein the shops are given a sentient existence; where the Market, alive and aware of its allegiance to the consumer, does everything to fulfil the selfish needs of individual desire. Yet as the passage progresses, we become aware that there is something far more sophisticated at work here. Nabokov, always one step ahead, acknowledges, pre-empts and counters the absurdity of Fyodor’s desires. At first, this is done explicitly (‘God,

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how I hate it all’), then by listing the absurdity of the conventions which sustain the practice of trade. There appears to be some parallels here, in the language which is invoked, to a meaningless sexual act; the ‘lowered lashes’ of modest price invokes the idea of seduction, the ‘ceremonial transaction’ referring to the act itself and finally the post-coital exchange of ‘cloying compliments’. Indeed, these sexualized descriptions, bring to mind Marx’s notion of ‘commodity fetishism’ and there is also a clear, if covert, reference to the libidinal gratification which is attached to the act of purchase. Nabokov then goes on to subvert the utopian language of advertising which was invoked to communicate Fyodor’s earlier desires – ‘the altruism of advertisements’, for example, mocks the notion that their primary aim is to improve the life of the consumer. The passage concludes with a very perceptive analysis, which simultaneously confirms the absurdity of Fyodor’s initial desire, but also acknowledges the fact that this does not reflect badly upon his character, when Nabokov writes of the ‘nasty imitation of good, which has a strange way of drawing in good people’. This ‘nasty imitation’, refers to the ways in which people are drawn into functioning subjects of capitalist society, and the hegemonic hold which draws in ‘good people’ by praying upon their selfish desires, by fetishizing or sexualizing the transaction – and by imitating humanistic traits such as ‘nobility’, ‘modesty’ and ‘altruism’. The Russian language, Nabokov wrote, ‘is able to express by means of one pitiless word the idea of a certain widespread defect for which the other three European languages I happen to know possess no special term’ (NG: 63). The Russian word is of course poshlost, which Nabokov altered to poshlust; preferring the connotations that a sexual desire for ‘poshness’ invokes in English to the idea of its absence. Nabokov reserved a marked distaste for the reified form of advertisements. In his critical writings he attempted to articulate this antipathy which is, as we have already noted, directed towards the concept of reification. However, perhaps fully aware of the potential similarities, there appears to be an attempt to distance his definition of poshlust, with any associations it may have, from Marxist thought: The rich poshlust emanating from advertisements […] their exaggerating (or inventing) the glory of this or that serviceable article […] suggesting that the acme of human

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happiness is purchasable and that its purchase somehow ennobles the purchaser. Of course, the world they create is pretty harmless in itself because everybody knows that it is made up by the seller with the understanding that the buyer will join in the world of make believe. The amusing part is not that it is a world where nothing spiritual remains except the ecstatic smiles of people serving or eating celestial cereals or a world where the game of the senses is played according to bourgeois rules (‘bourgeois’ in the Flaubertian sense, not in the Marxist sense) but that it is a kind of satellite shadow world in the actual existence of which neither sellers nor buyers really believe in their heart of hearts in this wise quiet country. (NG: 67)

What is evident in this passage is something which is common to Nabokov’s critical writing, but which is mostly absent in his fiction. The opinions which are usually expressed (strictly aesthetic and apolitical) act as a smoke screen which conceals their ideological nature. Here, Nabokov, writing in America in 1944, the first country where he truly felt at home, was careful not to insult too explicitly what he clearly considered to be the vulgarity of its consumerist culture. He mitigates his attack on advertising with the suggestion that such a thing is ‘pretty harmless’, a world of ‘make believe’ – and finally that no one in that ‘wise quiet country’, really believes in this ‘satellite shadow world’. In comparison to this, the description of the shops on Tannenberg Street seems vitriolic. It is evident that Nabokov is aware to what extent he, as a Russian émigré, must hold his tongue on certain matters. Once again, there is also his insistence on the rather tenuous distinction between ‘bourgeois’ in the ‘Flaubertian’ sense and the Marxist sense. The implied difference is between the economic and the cultural, which suggests a division which is non-existent – it is only economic privilege, after all, which allows the propagation of bourgeois cultural values. Indeed, such a distinction only exists for an individual who self-consciously wishes to distance himself from a particular ideology. This is a conscious aspect of Nabokov’s critical writing, yet there is also something which is manifestly unconscious at work here, a type of cognitive dissonance, something which occurs when the subject attempts to symbolize imaginary experience, in an attempt at representation of the Lacanian Real. This cognitive dissonance (not, therefore, merely ‘false consciousnesses’) is of course, according to Althusser, the essential definition of what constitutes ideology. Frederic

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Jameson goes further, describing how this works within the praxis of literary production, wherein the Real acts as an asymptotic phenomena, an outer limit, which the subject approaches in the anxiety of the moment of truth – moments of personal crisis and of the agonizing political polarization of revolutionary situations; and from such an approach to the Real the subject then tends to retreat again, at best in possession of abstract and purely intellectual schemata when not of personally charged narrative representations. (WLMF: 13)

The perceptive diagnosis of the reified form of advertising is mitigated by Nabokov’s ‘personally charged’ intervention, supported by his growing affection for the freedom which he enjoyed in his adopted country. This insistence on the non-existent apolitical ‘Flaubertian’ definition of ‘bourgeois’, is significant insofar as it amounts to a declaration of being free from any recognizable ideological position (in this case Marxist) – a self-conscious assertion that he is free from ideology (‘I am not ideological’). At this point, it would be useful to turn once more to Althusser to elucidate the significance of this point: What really takes place in ideology seems therefore to take place outside it. That is why those who are in ideology believe themselves by definition outside of ideology: one of the effects of ideology is the practical denegation of the ideological character of ideology by ideology: ideology never says, ‘I am ideological’. (IISA: 49)

It is clear therefore that when such seemingly apolitical statements are invoked by Nabokov, within the critical writings in particular, that what is actually at work is something profoundly ideological. What constitutes this ideological position, however, is a great deal more perplexing. We have seen how Nabokov’s prose functions as a sophisticated recording apparatus for the objectionable forces of advertising, consumerism and market capital, yet when dealing with similar subjects, his non-fictional and critical writings work to suppress, revise and mitigate the sentiments expressed within their fictional counterparts. As we shall see, Nabokov does not only take issue with the reified form of advertisements, but also with the notion of ‘clock time’, or reified time, its effect on artistic production

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and the critiques of the practices of an emergent business society which we can infer within its representation. At the beginning of chapter two, while looking upon what he thinks to be an archetypal German, Fyodor begins to enumerate a number of national characteristics which he finds unpleasant – until the lean gentleman ‘took a copy of Vasiliev’s newspaper from his pocket and coughed unconcernedly with a Russian intonation’ (The Gift: 79). This remains one of the most fascinating passages in the entire work, as it functions simultaneously as an expression of Nabokov’s own (well-noted) distaste for German culture, while at the same time subverting the absurdity of his irrational prejudices and in a wider sense of racism itself. However, among the various negative and often humorous traits which he lists, the reference to the ‘cult of the office’ (The Gift: 79) seems to stand distinct as a sombre and accusatory indictment. According to Thomas Karshan, The Gift expresses ‘the explicit view that utilitarianism destroyed Russian literature and led to Soviet despotism’ – and that this utilitarianism is ‘itself expressed in the vision of work’.13 The protagonist of The Gift is an idler, who in-between irregular employment giving lessons, sits round in his room waiting for some form of impetus to create, as Karshan notes, for Fyodor the ‘complex, happy devout work’ of writing is ‘energetic idleness (everything is here in this combination’ and ‘lofty truancy’. The Gift is built on the contrast between Chernyshevsky, who thinks of literature and life as work, and Pushkin, who thinks of the writer as someone who strolls rather than labours, whose more profound understanding of freedom is really more useful to people, and whose legacy Fyodor is trying to reclaim. (Karshan: 138)

What is significant within this particular insight is something which is central to any investigation of Nabokov’s ideology. In this vein, his championing of Pushkin, the idle nobleman over the petit-bourgeois Chernyshevsky whose ‘capacity for work was monstrous’ (The Gift: 228), is instructive. Furthermore, Nabokov’s more ‘profound understanding of freedom’ was in fact of little use to the Russian peasantry living in conditions of near 13

Thomas Karshan, Vladimir Nabokov and the Art of Play (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 137. Further references are given in parentheses.

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starvation. In Das Kapital, Marx asserted that ‘the true realm of freedom […] can blossom forth only with the realm of necessity as its basis’,14 in essence that genuine freedom is based on the attainment, or absence, of necessity. Nabokov’s idyllic childhood and aristocratic upbringing had, disregarding the liberal cosmopolitan tendencies of his politician father, instilled within him an inherently patrician and elitist view on those who were compelled to work out of necessity. This view informed his ideology to a great extent. In 1922, after Nabokov graduated from Cambridge, his family had managed to procure for him a position as a clerk in a German Bank, in which he lasted a mere three hours. As Boyd remarked, Nabokov ‘could never be an Eliot or a Wallace Stevens, chained to the office bench in order to be free at his own writing desk’ (RY: 196). By all accounts, Nabokov’s life was not as idle as that of Fyodor, and even within the text there is an implicit recognition of the needs of subsistence, when Fyodor remarks that he is ‘simply a poor young Russian selling the surplus from a gentleman’s upbringing, while scribbling verses in my spare time, that’s the total of my little immortality’ (The Gift: 162). It is a rare acknowledgment of the ‘real’ conditions under which Nabokov was composing his literary works in the early period. Yet perhaps he did not see any virtue in poverty, nor found it conducive to the ‘devout work’ of ‘earnest idleness’. In The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Nabokov’s imagined speculative biography, the titular protagonist inherits a great deal of money – thereby negating the needs of subsistence, and allowing him to devote his time exclusively to the aesthetic craft. We find then, that what Karshan describes as Nabokov’s ‘praise of idleness’ is primarily a concern with identifying himself with the privileged position of the cultured aristocrat, who asserts the primacy of aesthetic autonomy, because his education, wealth and class has insulated and alienated him from the conditions of poverty, degradation and destitution – conditions which undoubtedly made the literature of ‘social intent’ necessary in the first place. The conscious motivation of Nabokov’s 14

Karl Marx, ‘The Trinity Formula’, Capital, Vol. III, chap. 48 accessed June 2014.

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insistence on ‘lived time’, was perhaps not egalitarian, and its function is, in Jameson’s terms, to ‘secure the legitimation of this or that form of class domination’ (PU: 279), in other words the right of the (former) aristocrat to his ‘earnest idleness’. How, therefore, does such an insistence embody a properly utopian impulse? Jameson maintains that ‘reification may be seen as a fragmentation of the psyche and of its world that opens up the semi-autonomous and henceforth compartmentalized spaces of lived time over and against clock time’ (WLMF: 14). From this we can infer that the subjective rhythms of the body have been superseded by the compartmentalized rhythms of mechanized time, according to the requirements of an emergent business society. ‘Lived time’, à propos the ability to rise when one has had sufficient sleep, to eat when one is hungry and to sleep when one is tired, or indeed the freedom to engage in ‘earnest idleness’, has been replaced by another, reified time: ‘clock time’. In his real life, Nabokov could not reconcile himself to the strictness of ‘clock time’, the subscribed patterns of action and inaction imposed upon an employee of a bank. Similarly Fyodor, who stays up into the early hours writing and rises late, resists the compartmentalized order of capitalist society, and with some material poverty, is able to enact a specifically utopian artistic existence. This is in essence an incredibly effective critique of capitalist hegemony. That such an existence is not universalized by Nabokov; is not proposed as a ‘solution’ to those who are not themselves cultured (or aristocratic) artists – or are restricted by the constraints of necessity – is somewhat conspicuous. It is doubtful whether Nabokov and Fyodor refused to live by the limitations of ‘clock time’ as a revolutionary act in support of the labouring proletariat. His reasons were no doubt motivated by selfish concerns and Nabokov is fully aware of this. What follows in the main body of The Gift, is an attempt to formalize an ideological and aesthetic position which can be deployed to oppose Socialist Realism and what he believed to be its direct antecedent: the works of Chernyshevsky. The chapter on The Life of Chernyshevsky within The Gift is distinctive for its irreverent treatment of one of the most lionized martyrs of the Russian liberal tradition. The strength of feeling towards Chernyshevsky was still apparent, even within the relative freedom of the emigration, where the character of the publisher Vasiliev’s refusal to publish

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Fyodor’s work, is mirrored by the social revolutionary editors of the Parisbased Sovremennye zapiski [Contemporary Annals] – who published The Gift, minus the offending chapter. A ‘pretty example’, Nabokov gleefully noted, ‘of life finding itself obliged to imitate art’ (The Gift: 9). According to Boyd, Fyodor’s treatment of Chernyshevsky is such as would be afforded to ‘an intellectual buffoon whose ideas do not deserve the compliment of rational opposition’ (RY: 457). Although at pains to stress the minor differences between the protagonist and author, Boyd also maintained that The Gift ‘not only drew on his private life and on the progress of his art but also on the public world around him’, and that The most unexpected, the most un-Nabokovian of all of Fyodor’s works is his Life of Chernyshevsky. But the very remoteness of this sample of Fyodor’s work from everything else his maker had ever written should itself put us on our guard, for Nabokov never resorts to camouflage more assiduously than when he has something especially valuable to hide. (RY: 464)

Much has been written of the ‘humanizing’ nature of Fyodor’s (and Nabokov’s) Life of Chernyshevsky, of how it makes its subject worthy of sympathy and pity and rescues the life of the man from the realm of political hagiography. Yet what this chapter represents is a selective portrait, one which resists psychological subtlety, ambiguity, or nuance, in order to achieve its specific parodic and aesthetic aims. In essence, it offers only the limited sympathy habitually offered to the unfortunate and hapless fool, buffoon, or clown; and one cannot help but wonder if this sympathy is imbued with a polemical sense of class superiority. Nabokov achieves this through the use of the Bakhtinian dialogic discourse, wherein the words of the author (slovo avtora) and the words of the extraneous interlocutor (chuzhoe slovo) interact to produce a certain reality. Fyodor wished to ‘keep everything as it were on the brink of parody. […] I must make my way along this narrow ridge between my own truth and a caricature of it’ (The Gift: 197). There is little question as to the authenticity of the facts of Chernyshevsky’s life contained within Fyodor’s account – Sergei Davydov posited that even ‘the most extravagant information, which one would be tempted to take as a pure figment of Fёdor’s imagination, can be found

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in the existing literature’.15 Yet the veracity of the details which Nabokov skilfully includes disguises the shrewd and extensive omissions. Nowhere is this more apparent than when Nabokov writes of Chernyshevsky’s attitude towards Pushkin, and makes explicit his views on the ideological development of Russian literature and of the role of criticism: Now we are approaching his most vulnerable spot; for it has long become customary to measure the degree of flair, intelligence and talent of a Russian critic by his attitude to Pushkin. And this is how it will remain until Russian literary criticism discards its sociological, religious, philosophical and other textbooks, which only help mediocrity admire itself. (The Gift: 252)

Nabokov’s aim in his portrayal of Chernyshevsky, and other ‘materialists’, is to demonstrate that a zealous interest in social affairs, and a desire to view artistic endeavour through a perspective which takes into account its ‘social intent’ is incapable, essentially, of judging the true aesthetic value of a work of art. This is achieved, as has already been noted, by a very skilful process of selective inclusion and omission. As a general rule, radical criticism of Chernyshevsky’s time did have a tendency to denigrate anything which it perceived to be frivolous, decadent, or purely concerned with aesthetics during a period of immense political and social upheaval. Yet what Nabokov omits, quite conspicuously, is that among the contemporary radical critics which Fyodor mocks in his Life of Chernyshevsky, there was significant divergence of opinion with regards to literary aesthetics, and even more so in the assessment of individual writers. Nabokov posits that the autonomy of aesthetics must be maintained within critical appreciation; that the formal aspects of Pushkin should be the only thing of interest to the critic. Yet, as Rampton has noted, Chernyshevsky’s attitude towards Pushkin was a little more nuanced than Nabokov suggests: In discussing the importance of Pushkin in the history of the development of our literature and society, one must not examine to what extent various strivings met with

15

Sergei Davydov, ‘The Gift: Nabokov’s Aesthetic Exorcism of Chernyshevskii’, Canadian-American Slavic Studies, Vol. 19, No. 3 (Boston: Brill Publishing, 1985), 370.

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Indeed Chernyshevsky, with a few notable exceptions which Nabokov shrewdly highlights, expressed a reserved admiration for Pushkin. What Nabokov is guilty of in his satirical portrayal of the Russian radicals such as Chernyshevsky is inconsistency. Many of the generalizations which he makes, often dismissed as a mere ‘exercises in writing’, nonetheless seek to be regarded as historical fact – the depth of historical research conducted, which Nabokov admitted (SO: 133), attests to this. The fundamental problem is with one generalization in particular. Nabokov makes a somewhat flawed assumption, perhaps based on Lenin’s admiration for Chernyshevsky, that the ideas espoused by ‘men of the sixties’ and other Russian radicals and ‘materialists’ were directly antecedent to the Soviet aesthetic doctrine of Socialist Realism. While this may be true to some extent, as we have observed in the previous chapter, it does not give a full account of the problem. This over-simplification of the non-linear development of the Russian radical tradition seemingly reveals Nabokov’s tenuous grasp of political history, which stems, as most critics would prefer to argue, from a distinct lack of interest in ideology, or more specifically the ideology of ‘social intent’. However the apolitical Nabokov, which critics are all too ready to accept, serves as a convenient obfuscating valence for his complex and multifaceted understanding of the philosophical underpinnings of Russian radicalism. In order to demonstrate how this understanding functions, it is necessary to return to the very outset of the chapter on The Life of Chernyshevsky, which begins with a sonnet: Alas! In vain historians pry and probe: The same wind blows, and in the same live robe Truth bends her head to fingers curved cupwise;

16

Quoted in David Rampton, ‘The Gift’, A Critical Study of the Novels (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 70.

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And with a woman’s smile and a child’s care Examines something she is holding there Concealed by her own shoulder from our eyes. (The Gift: 209)

Fyodor writes that this sonnet is ‘apparently barring the way, but perhaps, on the contrary, providing a secret link which would explain everything – if only man’s mind could withstand that explanation’ (The Gift: 209). The sonnet makes use of the Russian word istina for ‘truth’, instead of the far more common pravda, and is in essence an affirmation of a fundamentally agnostic perspective on the impossibility of discovering ‘truth’. Similarly, Fyodor’s work on Chernyshevsky ends with another sonnet, this time an octave, which questions Chernyshevsky’s historical legacy: What will it say, your far descendant’s voice – Lauding your life or blasting it outright: That it was dreadful? That another might Have been less bitter? That it was your choice? That your high deed prevailed, and did ignite Your dry work with the poetry of Good, And drowned the white brow of chained martyrhood With a closed circle of ethereal light? (The Gift: 298)

Both sonnets provide a closed cyclical structure to The Life, which is present within the entire structure of The Gift. It would be more accurate, in fact, to describe this structure as a ‘spiral’. Davydov maintains that the ‘circular principle applies to the entire novel. Each chapter of The Gift goes through an analogous cyclical motion until the various circles become integrated into the spiral of the novel’ (Davydov: 369). The temporal spiral is a leitmotif which is prevalent within Nabokovian fiction, and in The Gift, it is perhaps indicative of an adherence to the Hegelian concept of ‘totality’, wherein there exists a spiral like version of History, one which returns not to its point of origin, but rather to a higher variation of harmony. Indeed the attempt to engage with Hegelian philosophy is a consistent, and barely concealed, presence within the entire narrative course of The Gift. Initially, there is Mme Chernyshevky’s brief conversation with a telephone operator, where her tone adds a ‘special rhythm in her pronunciation of the figures – as if

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48 was the thesis and 31 the antithesis-adding in the shape of a synthesis: ja wohl’ (The Gift: 138). This cryptic use of the Hegelian dialectic, gives way later in the Chernyshevsky section to a humorous reference to how ‘In those days Andrey Ivanovich Feuerbach was preferred to Egor Fydorovich Hegel’ (The Gift: 240). In the next page, however, there is a noticeable shift of tone in Fyodor’s discussion of Hegel, when he remarks that the time for hearty Russian Hegelianism was now past. The moulders of opinion were incapable of understanding Hegel’s vital truth: a truth that was not stagnant, like shallow water, but flowed like blood, through the very process of cognition. The simpleton Feuerbach was much more to Chernyshevski’s taste. (The Gift: 241)

The influence of Hegel’s philosophy in Russia became apparent in the 1830s, where it had an indelible effect upon the development of most fields of scholarly enquiry. As with the rest of Europe, Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of History significantly changed the way in which Russians approached the complex geographical and cultural history of their nation, and affected this approach with a distinctly teleological quality – one which nominated Western occidental nations as the only ‘historical’ states which were capable of furthering the progress of Absolute Spirit. It is arguably at this point that Russia began to consolidate the process begun by Peter the Great, confirming its status as a Western-looking power. Hegel condemned the ‘unhistorical’, predominantly Oriental nations, to stagnate in the ‘childhood’17 stage of history. Such chauvinistic sentiments are to some extent reflected in Nabokov’s introduction to Bend Sinister, where he lists ‘the entire Orient’ as one of the many things which leave him ‘supremely indifferent’ (BS: xii). It is perhaps this ‘idealist’ Hegel which Nabokov has in mind when he writes of ‘vital truth’, and from this it is even possible to infer all of the attendant interpretations which are indivisible from this particular branch of ‘Hegelianism’, such as a belief in the ‘End of History’, ‘concrete universality’ and the world historical individual or ‘great man’. The only other attempt to engage with Nabokov’s relationship to Hegelian

17

G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of History, trans. B. H. Nesbit (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 130.

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philosophy was made by Will Norman in his Nabokov, History, and The Texture of Time18 Norman maintains that ‘Nabokov’s vehemently ahistorical model of literary evolution can be traced through his reception of Russian nineteenth-century critical debates to the belief that Hegel was disastrously misappropriated in the 1840s, and the conviction that an alternative, “pure” dialectic of literary form could still be salvaged’ (Norman: 13). Norman perceptively notes that Nabokov traced this ‘disastrous misappropriation’ to Vissarion Belinsky’s first introduction to Hegel through Mikhail Bakunin in 1838, and of how this conception of Hegelian philosophy informed the work of later radical critics such as Chernyshevsky. Though Norman appears to insist upon Nabokov’s conception of Hegel as suggestive of a ‘vehement ahistoricism’, he later goes on to state that the experience of reading the work itself conveys a ‘battlefield in which literary and historical temporalities are continually in conflict, threatening to efface each other’ (Norman: 29). Indeed, given Nabokov’s putative belief in liberalism and Western-style democracy as the best of all possible systems, it is clear that far from suggesting a vehement ahistoricism, Nabokov’s Hegelianism perhaps maintained a distinctly teleological character. Yet the debate on Hegel’s philosophical legacy is, however, something which continues to occupy contemporary philosophers and theorists. It is interesting to recall that the significance of Hegelian philosophy was re-established following the Second World War through the efforts of a Russian philosopher. Alexander Kojève completed his doctoral thesis at the University of Heidelberg, under the direction of Karl Jaspers, on the religious philosophy of the Slavophil philosopher Vladimir Solovyov – a philosopher who, as we have observed, had a profound effect upon the Symbolist movement in general and the works of Bely and Blok in particular. Kojève’s seminars19 on Hegel were ostensibly the means by which Hegelian thought was disseminated throughout Western Europe and North 18 19

Will Norman, Nabokov, History and the Texture of Time (London: Routledge, 2012). Further references are given in parentheses. Alexander Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on Phenomenology of Spirit, ed. Allan Bloom, trans. James H. Nicols Jr (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980).

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America in the post-war period. The Russian émigré Kojève (Kojevnikov), held many positions within the French Ministry of Economic Affairs and was instrumental in the formation of the European Union. The attendees of Kojève’s seminars now constitute the pantheon of post-war continental philosophy and literature; Jean-Paul Sartre, André Breton, Jacques Derrida, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Georges Bataille and Jacques Lacan, among many others. Kojève’s writings on Hegel also proved popular within the American Academy, in particular on the American theorists such as Allan Bloom, who was a noted teacher and mentor to Paul Wolfowitz and Francis Fukuyama, the financial and philosophical ideologues of the American Neo-Conservative movement. It is interesting to note that Louis Althusser was not, however, so easily taken in. There is a particularly humorous and poignant moment in his autobiography L’Avenir dure longtemps where he recalls meeting Kojève, who was ‘full of infantile and mischievous remarks about theory’,20 remarking that having ‘read everything he wrote’, he rapidly came to the conclusion ‘that he understood absolutely nothing about Hegel and Marx’. For Kojève, Althusser maintained, ‘everything centred on the life and death struggle and the End of History to which he ascribed a stupefyingly bureaucratic content’, and that his theories ‘enabled him to bring together his desires as a philosopher and his professional role as a high bureaucrat’ (Althusser: 177). Such comments were not motivated merely by disapproval of Kojève’s function within the French Government, but were consistent with his insistence upon the anti-teleological character of history. Althusser’s anti-teleological theory of history is what Frederic Jameson perhaps had in mind in his reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit,21 wherein he proposes the consideration of Absolute Spirit ‘as a symptom rather than a prophecy’ as the only way in which we may go beyond stereotypical readings which confers upon the work an ‘out of date teleology’ (HV: 4). This is perhaps a passing reference to the historical multiplicity in 20 Louis Althusser, The Future Lasts a Long Time (London: Chatto & Windus, 1993), 176. 21 Fredric Jameson, The Hegel Variations: On the Phenomenology of Spirit (London: Verso, 2011).

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the study of Hegelian philosophy and the attendant interpretations which stand distinct as ‘Hegelianism’. Jameson proceeds to attempt to ‘disengage’ the ‘Hegelian ethic’, which he identifies as one of the centers of gravity of Hegel’s philosophical thinking (they are multiple), and is certainly susceptible to systematization in the form of a codified and ultimately metaphysical system. Indeed, such provisional centers account for the way in which Hegel can be drawn in a number of incompatible ideological directions: this one left-wing and loosely Marxian, others (such as the alleged conservatism of his commitment to immanence) in some more right-wing directions. (HV: 51)

When Nabokov writes of Hegel’s ‘vital truth’, vis-à-vis his own attempt to characterize the ‘Hegelian ethic’, it is a definitive affirmation of a specific ideological interpretation/systemization of Hegel. In some ways, Nabokov’s specific interpretation of Hegelian philosophy is vaguely idealist, and in some ways it is consistent with the ‘out of date teleology’ of Kojève. What remains unclear; however, are the specific ideological and aesthetic implications of Nabokov’s interpretation of Hegel. For example, although Nabokov writes of the ‘vital truth’ of Hegel from a perspective which implies prior knowledge, the sonnets which begin and end The Life are ultimately inflected with the impossibility of attaining ‘truth’. In order to shed some light on this apparent contradiction, we must turn to Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics, through which Nabokov’s conception of ‘vital truth’ gains a specifically aesthetic dimension. For Hegel, the work of art had ceased to satisfy its original spiritual or divine purpose: What is now aroused in us by works of art is not just our immediate enjoyment but our judgement also, since we subject to our intellectual consideration (i) the content of art, and (ii) the work of art’s means of presentation, and the appropriateness or inappropriateness of both to one another. The philosophy of art is therefore a greater need in our day than it was in the days when art by itself as art yielded full satisfaction. Art invites us to intellectual consideration, and that not for the purpose of creating art again, but for knowing philosophically what art is. […] [A]rt acquires its real ratification only in philosophy.22

22

G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, Volume 1, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 11–13.

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It is clear then, that when Nabokov mock’s Chernyshevsky’s inability to understand Hegel’s ‘vital truth’, he refers to Chernyshevsky’s perceived failure to enact an aesthetic judgement which is based on purely philosophical consideration, and not upon utility or ‘social intent’ – Nabokov also resents what he perceives to be Chernyshevsky’s dilettantism, his contempt for specialization and any notion of aesthetic autonomy. In The Life Nabokov suggests that Chernyshevky’s theory of knowledge is interchangeable with Marxist-Leninist epistemology, suggesting that they are both based on the theory of reflection, vis-à-vis human cognition as the reflection of objective reality. It would be useful at this point to examine a section in the Life of Chernyshevsky which offers a straightforward philosophical critique on the perceived connection between Chernyshevskian and Soviet epistemology: Today it seems only Marxists are still capable of being interested by the ghostly ethics contained in this dead little book. To follow easily and freely the categorical imperative of the general good, here is the ‘rational egoism’ which researchers have found in What to do? […] Chernyshevski’s ethical structures are in their own way an attempt to construct the same old ‘perpetual motion’ machine, where matter moves other matter. We would very much like this to revolve: egoism-altruism-egoism-altruism … but the wheel stops from friction, What to do? Live, read, think. What to do? Work at one’s own development in order to achieve the aim of life, which is happiness. What to do? (But Chernyshevski’s own fate changed the businesslike question to an ironic exclamation). (The Gift: 279)

The first point of interest is in the ‘ghostly ethics’ of Chernyshevsky’s ‘dead little book’. The invocation of ‘dead’ and ‘ghostly’ suggests that, in spite of the revolutionary character of Chernyshevky’s ‘materialist’ ideology, it represents a past historical moment – one which is impossible to revive. The categorical imperative of the ‘general good’ and ‘rational egoism’ which constitute Chernyshevsky’s ‘ethical structures’ are compared to the perpetual motion machine which he had attempted to unsuccessfully construct. Here, Nabokov is not only parodying the fact that Chernyshevsky’s ideological position may be based on a failed scientific experiment, but also firmly establishes his own position of individualist subjectivity over the ‘general good’, by suggesting that ethical structures are constituted, not by a process whereby ‘matter moves other matter’; but rather where ‘matter’, or the corporeal human being, is perhaps guided by some transcendental

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force. Nabokov’s teleological view of history does not recognize the constant oscillation between the egoism/altruism of Chernyshevky’s perpetual motion ‘ethics’. Despite the fact that the revolving wheel of terms stops ‘from friction’ on ‘altruism’ – it is clear which imperative Nabokov prefers. To work on individual artistic ‘development’ and to have personal ‘happiness’ as one’s sole aim in life, does not leave much room for altruism. The fatalistic view which Nabokov has of Chernyshevsky seems to suggest a belief that a life lived in the service of altruism can bring nothing but unhappiness. What Nabokov is advocating here is a form of ethical egoism, one which maintains that morality need not be concerned solely with the needs of the ‘greater good’. This is made explicit when we examine the afterword to the Lectures on Literature, where Nabokov states that ‘commonsense is fundamentally immoral, for the natural morals of mankind are as irrational as the magic rites that they evolved since the immemorial dimness of time’.23 We are presented here with a moral and ethical system, which places individual ego at the centre of an ideology of ‘aesthetic autonomy’. Yet, as we are all too well aware, ideology cannot be exclusively concerned with morality and ethics. Was Nabokov’s aversion to this particular brand of ‘materialist’ philosophy, morality and ethics informed by ‘class consciousnesses’, or perhaps – in more reductive terms – by ‘class hatred’. Nabokov’s attitude to Chernyshevsky does not make this completely clear, for there are several notable points within The Life which demonstrate a gratitude for the struggles which the ‘men of the sixties’ were forced to endure. Fyodor writes that the ‘uncompromising radicals’ were ‘no matter how you looked at it, real heroes’, and that their oppositionists, the liberals, Slavophils and other dissenting groups who did not tend to take such great risks were ‘worth less than these iron squabblers’ (The Gift: 200). Conversely, the tone with which Nabokov mocks Chernyshevsky’s aesthetic opinions and practices is essentially, and unmistakably, patrician. In the Soviet Chess magazine 8 X 8, which serves as Fyodor’s main inspiration for his Life of Chernyshevsky, the

23

Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Literature, ed. Fredson Bowers (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980), 372.

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details of a Soviet chess problem cause him to bemoan the contemporary situation in his former homeland: Suddenly he felt a bitter pang – why had everything in Russian become so shoddy, so crabbed and grey, how could she have been so befooled and befuddled? Or had the old urge ‘toward the light’ concealed a fatal flaw, which in the course of progress toward the objective had grown more and more evident, until it was revealed that this light was burning in the window of a prison overseer, and that was all? (The Gift: 172–173)

The ‘old urge “toward the light”’, is evidently something which Nabokov personally identifies with – an acknowledgement of the need for reform and justice, consistent with his self-identification as an ‘old-fashioned liberal’ (SO: 96). Yet, having established his desire for justice, Nabokov then goes on to describe the objective of achieving a fair and just society as merely a ‘light burning in the window of a prison overseer’. The term ‘light’, whether analysed through a Christian or Humanist context (which, in this instance, amounts to the same thing), suggests a belief in the power of the collective to effect change to material conditions. In suggesting that collective action leads only to imprisonment, Nabokov is effectively asserting the rights of the individual over the collective. Indeed, ‘class consciousnesses’ must necessarily figure in such an assertion – one which not only seeks to assert the rights of the individual, but rather of individual ‘intelligence’ against the perceived threat of collective mediocrity. These are political aspects of Nabokov’s ideology of ‘aesthetic autonomy’, and it is indeed an ideology which has a very specific and distinct genealogy within various European modernisms. The anti-egalitarian nature of Nabokov’s ideological position, which first became apparent in The Gift, is outlined by one very interesting and surprisingly candid passage which occurs towards the end of the work, when Fyodor describes a march through a Berlin street: It was some kind of national holiday. Three kinds of flags were sticking out of the house windows: black-yellow-red, black-white-red, and plain red; each one meant something, and funniest of all, this something was able to excite pride or hatred in someone. There were large flags and small flags, on short poles and on long poles, but none of this exhibitionism of civic excitement made the city any more attractive. On the Tauentzienstrasse the bus was held up by a gloomy procession; policemen in black leggings brought up the rear in a slow truck and among the banners there

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was one with a Russian inscription containing two mistakes: serb instead of serp (sickle) and molt instead of molot (hammer). Suddenly he imagined official festivals in Russia, soldiers in long-skirted overcoats, the cult of firm jaws, a gigantic placard with a vociferous cliché clad in Lenin’s jacket and cap, and amidst the thunder of stupidities, the kettle-drums of boredom and slave-pleasing splendours – a little squeak of cheap truth. […] Oh, let everything pass and be forgotten – and again in two hundred years’ time an ambitious failure will vent his frustration on the simpletons dreaming of a good life (that is if there does not come my kingdom, where everyone keeps to himself and there is no equality and no authorities – but if you don’t want it, I don’t insist and don’t care). (The Gift: 356–357)

From the description of the colours of the three flags, we can determine the presence of three distinct groups across the political spectrum. The first, ‘black-yellow-red’, represents the flag of Weimar Germany, and the tradition of centrist republican/democratic principles; ‘black-white-red’ of course represents the monarchist and reactionary German National People’s Party (Deutschnationale Volkspartei), which before the rise of NSDAP, was the main nationalist party in Germany – and finally the ‘plain red’ of radical leftist parties such as the Communist Party of Germany (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands). Fyodor’s mocking indifference toward the ability to ‘excite pride or hatred’ in people, firmly establishes his libertarian-individualist convictions. Yet the narrator reserves the greater part of his contempt for the ‘gloomy procession’ of communists on Tauentzienstrasse, with the words ‘hammer’ and ‘sickle’ misspelled on their banners. The act of focusing on the spelling mistakes on the banners is significant in two very important ways; primarily, in portraying Nabokov’s distrust of what he perceives to be the philistinism of radical leftists – and ultimately demonstrating his rejection of what he perceives to be the basis of their ‘materialist’ epistemology. Here, Nabokov is suggesting that a theory of knowledge which is based simply upon the reflection of objective reality is misleading and fundamentally inaccurate. This notion is built upon in the imagined description of similar processions in Russia. The description of ‘the long skirted overcoats’ and ‘the cult of the firm jaw’ hints at Nabokov’s conviction in the confluence between fascism and Marxism, which also suggest that both ideologies share interchangeable epistemological perspectives. Nabokov associates both such perspectives with ‘cheap truth’, which stands

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in opposition to his more profound understanding of ‘vital truth’. The passage ends with perhaps the most straightforward expression of ideology which exists within Nabokovian fiction. In the alternative utopian ‘kingdom’ which Nabokov envisions to oppose that of the ‘simpletons’ there is no ‘equality’, no ‘authorities’, and ‘everyone keeps to themselves’. In the works which preceded The Gift, the aesthetic devices which Nabokov deployed had only traces of the nascent ideological intent which characterize this work. Nabokov began to formalize his own sense of ideological purpose only thorough discovering and researching the work of ‘materialist’ writers such as Chernyshevsky. It is apparent that this process of disassembling what he perceived to be the contradictions within radical nineteenth ‘materialism’ led Nabokov to make a very firm connection between the philosophies of those such as Chernyshevsky and the contemporary situation in Soviet Russia. It is no coincidence, then, that he felt compelled to set aside his work on The Gift to write Invitation to a Beheading – which as we have observed in the preceding chapter – approaches the problem from a different perspective. In a letter which Nabokov wrote to a friend in 1938, he remarks that in The Gift ‘I have in my own way reflected things and moods which are in direct connection with the times we live in’.24 By making such a connection, through the process of interpellation, Nabokov became a subject of ideology. According to the cultural anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu, once a subject has undergone the process of interpellation – they are not immediately subject to a set of rigid directions and rules, but are rather imbued with a certain sensitivity, a new found social awareness. Bourdieu describes it as a ‘cultivated disposition, inscribed in the body schema and the schemas of thought, which enables each agent to engender all the practices consistent with the logic of challenge and riposte’.25 Such a perspective will enable us to enumerate the

24 Quoted in Brian Boyd, ‘“Welcome to the Block”: Priglashenie na kazn’/Invitation to a Beheading, A Documentary Record’, in Julian W. Connolly, ed., Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading: A Critical Companion (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1997), 149. 25 Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practise, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 15.

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various facets of Nabokov’s emergent sense of ideology, which are to some extent dialectically related. It is an ideological position which emphasizes the centrality of individual ego, of the importance of aesthetic autonomy above all else, is affected with anti-egalitarian sentiments insomuch as it places individual intelligence over collective mediocrity, is putatively anti-authoritarian, retains a relationship to materialist epistemology, yet conversely maintains a certain indefinable connection with idealism in its philosophical outlook. Having established the vague coordinates of an ideology, Nabokov would go on to substantiate this position in his first English novel. Contrary to previous scholarship which holds this work to be a playful work of artifice, it is in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, his debut in English prose, I propose, that we are to find Nabokov at his most ideological.

Chapter 5

The Absolute Solution: The Real Life of Sebastian Knight and the Ideology of Aesthetic Autonomy

The answer to all questions of life and death, ‘the absolute solution’ was written all over the world he had known: it was like a traveller realizing that the wild country he surveys is not an accidental assembly of natural phenomena, but the page in a book where these mountains and forests, and fields, and rivers are disposed in such a way as to form a coherent sentence; the vowel of a lake fusing with the consonant of a sibilant slope; the windings of a road writing its message in a round hand, as clear as that of one’s father; trees conversing in dumb-show, making sense to one who has learnt the gestures of their language. (RLSK: 150)

In 1950, towards the end of his life, Wyndham Lewis, a man much changed by exile and disgrace – blind and in failing health – was given the opportunity to reflect upon the course of his fascinating and tumultuous career. In his autobiography he finds cause to question the role of the intellectual in Western society, and to explore some of its effects in the recent carnage on the world historical stage. He does so in a peculiar fashion, through an examination of two works of inter-war French polemics; La Trahison des clercs by Julien Benda, and Les Méfaits des intellectuels by Edouard Berthe. These two books, Lewis maintains, were in dialogue with each other (Benda’s work, of 1928, was written in response to Berthe’s of 1914), and present two opposing perspectives on the role of the intellectual, the artist and the man of letters in contemporary society. Edouard Berthe was a disciple of Georges Sorel whose most famous work, Reflexions sur la violence, with its justification of violence in the cause of political revolution and the power of myth in society, is often cited as the main point of confluence

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between revolutionary Marxism and fascism. Berthe’s work was a call to arms, dismissive of the intellectuals who did not embrace the coming conflict of The Great War. Benda’s, on the other hand, is a retrospective – a damning indictment of those intellectuals who so gladly embraced the call to war, and the senseless bloodshed which resulted. After an extended critique and analysis of each work, Lewis comes to the conclusion that [t]he definition of ‘intellectual’ would be no easy task. […] Julien Benda – deliberately ignoring all who did not fit in – would have defined it as a learned man prostituting his high function and inciting others to violence. His polemical opposites would say (scowling at Benda) that it denoted a democrat in an Ivory Tower, preaching peace and plenty – in contrast to war and want. All I need say, as my final word on this subject, is that few intellectuals are to be found who are prepared to oppose the Zeitgeist. The latter is committed to courses which, if pursued to their logical ends, will wipe out all that the human intellect has contrived, distinguishing us from cattle and pigs, and still more from bees and centipedes.1

Lewis, mindful of his own controversial dalliances with fascism, proposes that intellectuals who wish to inflict their views of change and advancement on wider society often compromise their principles, and find themselves at odds with the result of their actions. What is also implied is that these artists and intellectuals almost always respond to and engage with the current issues of their day, and that there are few who oppose or indeed refuse entirely to engage with the wider world. Yet Vladimir Nabokov was ostensibly one of those rare artists for whom the literature of ‘engagement’ signified nothing but a weakening of artistic integrity, a compromise of artistic genius. It must be said, however, that contrary to the logic of previous scholarship, this was not a rigid and unchanging attribute of his work which was consistent throughout his literary career. What we have observed in the preceding chapters is a sophisticated evolution that betrays, at certain points, facets of an ideological tendency, whilst seemingly obscuring any recognizable traces of such a position through the development of a complex aesthetic style. The Real Life of Sebastian Knight is often held

1

Wyndham Lewis, Rude Assignment: An Intellectual Biography (Santa Barbara, CA: Black Sparrow Press, 1984), 45–46.

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to be completely devoid of any political content. Charles Nicol wrote of how the work ‘exists in a non-politicized world’;2 Stacy Schiff, in her biography of Nabokov’s wife, wrote of the work that it ‘bears no hints of the gathering clouds of war; it is one of Nabokov’s most playful books’.3 Yet, it is my contention that this novel – Nabokov’s first in English – contains within it the clearest indication of an ideological purpose out of all of Nabokov’s works, where there exists a confluence between the realms of the ideological and the aesthetic. The work was completed in January 1939, at one of the most important periods in European history, and during a time of immense personal upheaval. Having escaped with his Jewish wife and son from Nazi Germany, Nabokov resided in Paris in conditions of destitution, desperately seeking an exit to an English speaking country where there might be hope of finding an academic job. It was there, in the bathroom of a cramped onebedroom flat, on a makeshift desk of a suitcase placed on top of a bidet, that he wrote his first work in English. Nabokov described his transition into English as perhaps the most difficult of his life, but it must have been made even more difficult by a great many other factors; destitution and poverty, the painful memory of a disastrous affair with Irina Guadanini which came close to ending his marriage, and a seriously ill mother living in a Czechoslovakia which was in the process of being sacrificed to the expanding Nazi state. In the history of European literature the era of high modernism was coming to an end, while the rise of militarized fascism had begun to question the aesthetic autonomy of art from the socio-political sphere. In 1934 the inaugural Congress of the Union of Soviet Writers catastrophically espoused ‘Socialist Realism’ as the only acceptable aesthetic, implicitly rejecting experimental forms and artistic innovation as degenerate. As we have seen in our analysis of Invitation to a Beheading, Nabokov was all too aware of these developments, and was under no illusions as to what they represented. It is only many years later, in his lectures

2 3

Charles Nicol, ‘The Mirrors of Sebastian Knight’, in L. S. Dembo, ed., Nabokov: The Man and His Work (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press), 85–94. Stacy Schiff, Vera: Mrs Vladimir Nabokov (New York: Random House, 1999), 98.

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on Russian literature at Cornell, that we are allowed a retrospective glimpse of his opinion on these ideological developments: Lenin was in art a philistine, a bourgeois, and from the very start the Soviet government was laying the grounds for a primitive, regional, political, police-controlled, utterly conservative and conventional literature. The Soviet government, with admirable frankness very different from the sheepish, half-hearted, muddled attempts of the old administration, proclaimed that literature was a tool of the state; and for the last forty years this happy agreement between the poet and the policeman has been carried out most intelligently. Its result is the so-called Soviet literature, a literature conventionally bourgeois in its style and hopelessly monotonous in its meek interpretation of this or that governmental idea. (LRL: 7)

It is impossible to even consider that during a period of such significant social and political ruptures throughout Europe, when artistic views which were so anathema to his own were being disseminated in Russia, Nabokov could hold onto his conviction that the artistic sphere should exist in a state of autonomy from any external societal influences. Yet, by all accounts, whether through belligerent inflexibility or heroic idealism, this is precisely what he did. Without placing too much emphasis on the aggrandizing tendencies of past scholarship – with its implicit belief in the heroism of genius, and a stubbornness to maintain a critical distance out of admiration or etiquette – let us consider the significance of Nabokov’s commitment to aesthetic autonomy. It is, of course, an ideological commitment. The importance of what Frederic Jameson termed ‘fantasy structures’ but what I shall designate in Nabokov’s case as ‘sentimentality’ cannot be overstated, because it is through this avenue that Nabokov was able to resist, on the level of ideology, exclusion from collective and historical processes. By his own vociferous insistence, Nabokov’s childhood memories of Russia were idyllic and perfect. But as David Rampton noted, ‘For all the memorable portraits of Russian people that Nabokov created, what he remembers here is a Russia with no people in it’.4 His view of Russia was small, a view which existed outside of poverty, degradation, and misery. It

4

David Rampton, ‘The Gift’, A Critical Study of the Novels (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 90.

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was an aristocratic world with ‘A road here, a few trees there, a sky’, a ‘treasure chest to which one returns again and again’ (Rampton: 90). Nabokov was forced into exile from a life of wealth and comfort, of the contemplation of nature and the composition of poetry, into one in which the needs of subsistence could no longer be taken for granted, and where the proliferation of transnational ideologies had resulted in their presence being felt in all aspects of everyday existence. In such circumstances, maintaining a conviction in aesthetic autonomy is neither inflexibility nor heroic idealism: it is an inherently political commitment. This is similar to what Jameson described as an attempt to approach the Lacanian Real, the reality of the material conditions of existence, yet retreating at the ‘moment of truth’, only in possession of ‘abstract and purely intellectual schemata when not of personally charged narrative representations’ (WLMF: 13). Indeed, what we encounter when faced with a work such as The Real Life of Sebastian Knight is the ‘personal’ mobilized to oppose the political. The novel recounts the story of an attempt by a Russian émigré, referred to only as ‘V’, to write the biography of his recently deceased half-brother – an English novelist named Sebastian Knight. The two brothers, who shared a father, are estranged and have had very little contact since they escaped from Russia following the revolution. Sebastian Knight, whose mother was English, goes on to study at Cambridge and ‘V’ goes to the Sorbonne in Paris. We learn that, even when they were children, their relationship was not particularly close, owing to Sebastian’s ‘aloofness’ and the fact that he was ‘not young enough to be my companion and not old enough to be my guide’ (RLSK: 15). In adulthood they grow further apart, meeting only a handful of times – with Sebastian pursuing a career as a novelist in London after his studies at Cambridge, and ‘V’ staying on in Paris to work in some undefined commercial capacity. Thus, on learning of Sebastian’s demise, ‘V’, who has greatly admired his brother’s published works from afar, sets out to discover the truth about his life, of which he knows so very little. The meandering structure of the work reflects the nature of V’s research into his brother’s life and encompasses several facets such as family background and parentage, the chronology of his life from childhood in Russia, through his university education, to the years he worked as a novelist up until his death. In amongst these different strands of the narrative, there

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are extended analyses of Sebastian Knight’s published works, interviews with his few friends and acquaintances, conjecture about his personal life and an extended and often caustic dismantling of a previous biography written by his erstwhile literary agent, Mr Goodman. At the conclusion of the novel, we are in possession of a significant amount of concise information which purports to be fact. Sebastian Knight was born in 1899 in St Petersburg to a Russian father, an aristocratic army officer who would distinguish himself in the Russo-Japanese war, and an English mother, who is the heiress to an industrial fortune. His mother leaves the family to run off with another man when Sebastian is four years old, and dies five years later of a heart condition known as Lehmann’s disease. His father remarries a Russian woman, and has a child (the narrator, ‘V’). When Sebastian is thirteen years old, his father discovers the name of the man with whom his first wife had an affair, and subsequently challenges him to a duel. He is wounded in the duel, and while recovering, dies of a bad cold which his wounded lungs could not cope with. Following the revolution, the fortune and estates of the family are nationalized. At eighteen years old, Sebastian escapes with his step-mother and half-brother across the border to Finland. From there, having been left a significant amount of money as an inheritance from his mother, Sebastian goes on to study at Trinity College, Cambridge. After achieving a first-class honours in English Literature, Knight moves to London and starts a relationship with a young woman named Clare Bishop. He publishes his first novel, The Prismatic Bezel, in 1925. The book is not particularly well received. The following year, before publishing his second novel, Success, he is diagnosed with Lehmann’s disease: the heart condition from which his mother died. His second book receives a great deal of acclaim, and brings him some degree of fame as a novelist. However, in spite of this, there is a distinct change in his temperament as he becomes fixated by his own mortality. This leads to a straining in his relationship with Clare Bishop. He writes three short stories: ‘The Funny Mountain’, ‘Albinos in Black’, and ‘The Back of the Moon’. In 1929 he visits a German spa town called Blauberg in Alsace, in order to be treated for his heart condition. While there, he meets a Russian woman, Nina de Rechnoy, with whom he begins an affair. On

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his return to London, he breaks off his relationship with Clare Bishop. He begins writing Lost Property, a mixture of fiction and autobiography, and travels often around Europe pursuing his mistress. During this time his health steadily deteriorates. He publishes his final work, The Doubtful Asphodel, in 1935, and in 1936 his mistress leaves him. In grave health, he is admitted to a hospital outside of Paris called St Damier. From hospital, he writes to his half-brother ‘V’, asking him to come to visit. ‘V’, who is on business in the South, makes his way frantically back to Paris, driven forward by the notion that his brother has something secret to impart to him. He struggles to make it back, but eventually arrives. He is informed that his brother is asleep in a darkened room which he is not permitted to enter, but from which he is able to hear his breathing. He joyfully makes a promise not to be too far away from Sebastian if he ever recovers. However, it eventually transpires that there has been a mix-up between himself and the nurse. The patient in the room is not his brother. Sebastian Knight has died the day before. The work ends with V’s enigmatic closing remarks: [T]ry as I may, I cannot get out of my part: Sebastian’s mask clings to my face, the likeness will not be washed off. I am Sebastian, or Sebastian is I, or perhaps we both are someone who neither of us knows.

Past scholarship, no doubt heavily influenced by this cryptic ending, has tended to separate into three separate strands of interpretation. According to the first, it is Sebastian Knight who is the author of the text and it is he who has invented the character of ‘V’, in addition to the other characters which appear in the narrative. The second holds ‘V’ to be the author not only of The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, but also of the extracts which appear as examples of the fictional Sebastian’s work – making the work, in its entirety, a work of autobiography. The third and final interpretation posits that both ‘V’ and Sebastian are separate people – where the deceased author, Sebastian Knight, influences and guides his half-brother’s journey and influences its outcome from beyond the grave. In addition to these, there are several other more non-committal interpretations which come from further leftfield such as Gerard de Vrie’s ‘The True life of Sebastian

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Knight’,5 which makes the somewhat convincing, if a little preposterous, claim that the entire narrative can be unlocked through understanding that Sebastian Knight was secretly a homosexual. In addition to this, very recently, there has been Andrew Caulton’s rather rambling account6 of the ‘covert level’ of the work, wherein Sebastian Knight is thought to perhaps be an agent of the British Secret Service. Needless to say, not a single one of these interpretations can be proven definitively. Instead, I suggest that the exhaustive nature of the specific biographical details which are provided in the narrative are intrinsic to our understanding of what the novel in its entirety represents. Nabokov’s primary aesthetic preoccupation during the mid-1930s, as we have observed in his work The Gift, was as Julian Connolly has perceptively noted ‘the problem of verisimilitude and narrative accuracy which arises during the process of biographical and autobiographical writing’.7 To this end, I would like to suggest that the third person referred to as the ‘someone’ who neither ‘V’ nor Sebastian ‘knows’ – is, of course, Nabokov himself. The central discourse of the narrative, as we have touched upon, is what Nabokov viewed as the fundamental incompatibility of historical processes and events with personal narratives and experience. Indeed, this specific conceit is apparent from the outset of the novel, and is exemplified in the opening paragraph: Sebastian Knight was born on the thirty-first of December 1899, in the former capital of my country. An old Russian lady who has for some obscure reason begged me not to divulge her name, happened to show me in Paris the diary she had kept in the past. So uneventful had those years been (apparently) that the collecting of daily details (which is always a poor method of self-preservation) barely surpassed

5 6 7

Gerard de Vries, ‘The True Life of Sebastian Knight’, Zemblarchive accessed January 2013. Andrew Caulton, The Absolute Solution: Nabokov’s Response to Tyranny, 1938 (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2013). Julian Connolly, ‘From Biography to Autobiography and Back: The Fictionalization of The Narrated Self in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight’, Cycnos, Vol. 10, No. 1, Nabokov: Autobiography, Biography and Fiction (Nice: Université de Nice-Sophia Antipolis, Department d’Etudes Anglophones, 1993), 39.

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a short description of the day’s weather; and it is curious to note in this respect that the personal diaries of sovereigns – no matter what troubles beset their realms – are mainly concerned with the same subject. (RLSK: 5)

There are several aspects of the above passage which are of interest. The first is the close proximity to Nabokov’s own birthday. The year of birth is the same. The month and date, however, differ; Nabokov was born on 22 April, or according to the ‘Old Style’, on 10 April. For the date of his eponymous hero Sebastian Knight, Nabokov chose 31 December. On the eve of not only a new year, but a new century – and, by implication, we are led to infer: the dawn of a new era. The second detail of note is the seemingly minor aside relating to the old woman who kept the mundane diary which merely describes the weather on the date of Sebastian’s birth. It is noted also, that the ‘diaries of sovereigns’ were similarly banal and tedious in regard to descriptions of the everyday – ‘no matter’, we are told, ‘what troubles beset their realms’. It is, of course, within this seemingly inconsequential afterthought that the political texture of the work in its entirety can be perceived – attempting to hide behind a semi-transparent valence. By describing how a king or ruler is concerned not for the wars, the plagues and the famines which afflicted their countries, but the uneventful and humdrum life which surrounds them – Nabokov asserts from the very beginning his belief in the primacy of individual subjective experience, over the collective experience of history; of how the history of the subject will always surpass that of history itself: [T]he reason of his discomfort was not that he was moral in an immoral age, or immoral in a moral one, neither was it the cramped feeling of his youth not blowing naturally enough in a world which was too rapid a succession of funerals and fireworks; it was simply his becoming aware that the rhythm of his inner being was so much richer than that of other souls. (RLSK: 56)

We can quite legitimately infer that to believe that ‘the rhythm’ of one’s ‘inner being’ was ‘richer’ than that of others asserts a markedly anti-egalitarian sentiment. This is no mistake, and is entirely consistent with the ideological character of this novel. The various attributes of Sebastian Knight’s temperament, his aesthetic sense, his artistic talent, his upbringing and

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education are held to be superior to others simply because they are almost interchangeable with those of his author. Vladimir Alexandrov noted that ‘Sebastian embodies a number of characteristically Nabokovian talents and interests’ and that although ‘He may differ from Fyodor in The Gift by temperament, age, or degree of public success’ it is certainly plausible that ‘his conception of art and the artist makes him Fyodor’s (and thus Nabokov’s) first cousin’.8 Thus, if we acknowledge that in some sense The Gift can be viewed as an autobiographical Künstlerroman, then Sebastian Knight can be viewed, in some way, as a speculative autobiography. This is evident in the many ways in which Nabokov merges lived experience and personal philosophy to produce a work which is a composite of sentimental fantasy and biography. The point of departure between The Gift and Sebastian Knight, which were written almost consecutively, derives from the distinction between the past and the future, of tributes to past happiness, pains and sorrows; and the hopes and aspirations for the future which are apparent within actual and fictional representations of self, and, on the unconscious level, between the Real and the Imaginary. European society in the 1930s was intensely polarized, and its literary culture was not exempted from this pernicious influence. The rise of fascism in Italy and Germany, the purges occurring in the Soviet Union, the Civil War in Spain, the effects of economic crises, unemployment, and disillusion had done much to convince many writers and artists that it was impossible to operate outside of ideological influence. In France, where Nabokov resided at the time, the literary scene was dominated by writers of what he termed ‘publicist’ fiction, of various political persuasions. Leftist writers such as André Gide, Jean-Paul Sartre, André Malraux, André Breton, and Louis Aragon faced up to their polemical opposites in right-wing writers of fascist, royalist, reactionary and conservative persuasions such as Charles Maurras, Robert Brasillach, Pierre Drieu La Rochelle and Louis-Ferdinand Céline. Given Nabokov’s strongly held views on the autonomy of Art from the sphere of ‘social intent’, it is easy to sense the feeling of overwhelming alienation which such an atmosphere undoubtedly invoked in him. 8

Vladimir E. Alexandrov, Nabokov’s Otherworld (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 138.

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Indeed, the era of the rarefied aestheticism and formal experimentation which characterized high modernism almost seemed a distant memory. It seems that if we are to retrospectively consider Nabokov, according to Fredric Jameson, as a by-product of the modernist tradition who operated at its peripheries – then it would be tempting to consider the formal and thematic aspects of Sebastian Knight as having many instructive parallels with modernism. In his excellent and probing study, Will Norman presents the highly convincing thesis that the structure of this novel can be viewed as an attempt to resuscitate ‘the autonomous, experimental tradition’, in order to ensure its ‘survival of historical contingency’.9 Nabokov responds to the ‘impasse’ of alienation he felt from the contemporary European literary discourse, Norman suggests, through an ingenious formal construction, which, far from avoiding history, actually brings the tradition and aesthetic of experimental autonomy into conflict with it. Sebastian the novelist is not simply, as some critics have suggested, a distorted reflection of his creator, but a composite writer moulded out of the fragments of the autonomous tradition, including Flaubert, Proust and Joyce. In contrast to Sebastian’s historydefying composition and aesthetic, however, there remains the jarring narrative of his awkward existence within a time-bound, historical moment. (Norman: 36)

One of the central points of Norman’s chapter on Sebastian Knight, and the wider work, is that the critical perception of Nabokov has been too heavily influenced by the author’s own carefully managed attempts to define his own legacy. These attempts are exemplified in his criticism of the American period, his lectures at Cornell and the interviews which form Strong Opinions. These belletristic writings have done much to insulate Nabokov from the realities which he lived and worked through, and portray him as somehow untouched by the vicissitudes of historical circumstance. On this point, I must agree unequivocally. However, according to Norman, the character of Sebastian Knight in no way reflects certain autobiographical details of Nabokov’s own life. Sebastian, Norman posits, is not a ‘person’ but 9

Will Norman, Nabokov, History and the Texture of Time (London: Routledge, 2012), 36. Further references are given in parentheses.

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While I am prepared to accept this particular interpretation, my own must diverge on one single, yet highly significant, point. There can really be no question, given the numerous parallels to Nabokov’s own life which are present, that Sebastian Knight represents anything other than a speculatively autobiographical work. Sebastian Knight is, at one and the same time, a composite of literary fragments drawn from the modernist ‘autonomous’ tradition and a reflection of the anxieties and personal history of his creator. It is difficult to achieve the objective of composing a work which opposes the encroachment of ideological and historical processes into art, one which places individual subjective experience in direct opposition to deterministic ideologies and collective political processes, without utilizing the complex narrative of one’s own life – which, as Nabokov was well aware by this point, was what constituted the essence of his own sense of ideology. This ideology, a variant of a Libertarian Individualism, is, as we shall observe, a defiant presence throughout this work. The content of the other biography mentioned often in this novel, The Tragedy of Sebastian Knight, which was written by Sebastian’s former literary agent Mr Goodman, is central to our understanding of the essentially ideological character of the novel. The desire to counteract the effects of what he considers to be an erroneous and disingenuous work is what propels the narrator ‘V’ forward in his ultimately foolhardy quest. From what we can gather, Mr Goodman’s work is flawed in many ways. The author did not know Sebastian Knight as well as he claims; there are various inconsistencies in fact, certain biographical details recounted to the author in jest by Knight are held to be true, and on the whole the work is riddled with inconsistencies and suppositions. Yet, the main offence which Mr Goodman commits is far graver in Nabokov’s eyes. The Tragedy of Sebastian Knight does not highlight the primacy of the novelist’s artistic achievements, and instead speculates on the reasons why the author refused to engage with the social and political climate of his epoch. It is, of course, no coincidence

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that this was a charge to which Nabokov himself had been compelled to answer throughout the course of his émigré literary career. The way in which he responds to such an accusation, however, reveals a man who is in the midst of a profound personal and artistic crisis, but nevertheless ultimately remains unfaltering in his ideological commitment.

Saint Sebastian Knight, the Martyr What Nabokov found in his deep and extensive research into the Russian radical tradition was that the life of men such as Nikolai Chernyshevsky, in spite of their personal flaws and failings, had become part of an emergent hagiography of radical politics. It was, he perceived, a tendency which was heavily reliant upon the creation of a distinct mythology, not dissimilar to the accounts of the martyrdom of saints, which served the purpose of reducing the complexity of an individual life to suit the aims of an ideology. In awareness of this particular tendency, whether to mock it or to use it for his own ends, a similar strategy is employed in Sebastian Knight. It is perhaps no mistake that the name of Nabokov’s titular character is also that of Saint Sebastian, whose martyrdom is open to such a multiplicity of different interpretations, and stands distinct among the myriad of Christian hagiographies as a Saint who has meant, and continues to mean, many different things to many different people. Indeed, the only reference which confirms our suspicions also refers to the innate unknowability of the life of any man. The narrator ‘V’, frustrated in his efforts to extract information from the hotel concierge at Blauberg, regrets that his biography will remain an ‘unfinished picture – uncoloured limbs of the martyr with the arrows in his side’ (RLSK: 103). Saint Sebastian was the patron saint of soldiers and athletes in the early years of Christianity, to plague sufferers during the Black Death, and from the Renaissance to the modern era – the subject of various works of literature, painting, theatre and film, and a recurring icon of homoerotic desire. What unifies all of these disparate forms of depiction is that they

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all tended to obfuscate the facts of the life, and the death, of the man himself. The iconography of Saint Sebastian’s martyrdom is arguably one of the most recognizable in Christian art – the image of the pure, supple youth, with a full head of long cascading curls, writhing with an almost ecstatic pain while tied to a post, his muscular and pristine torso pierced by arrows. In reality, Saint Sebastian was most probably middle-aged and a brawny, battle-hardened captain of the Praetorian Guard. He survived his attempted execution by arrows, only to be condemned to be beaten to death by clubs for personally insulting the Emperor Diocletian. His body, presumably brutalized and disfigured by such a barbaric method of execution, was thrown into an open sewer. Indeed, Nabokov could have found no better parallel for his tragic hero – whose own life was defined by a perpetual process of misunderstanding at the hands of his family, friends, lovers and critics – and was ultimately martyred in the cause of Art. Yet, ever present in spite of this self-conscious literary device, is the figure of the author who created the work out of the material of his own personal life. As Brian Boyd has noted: ‘Nabokov has projected onto Sebastian a stylized alternative continuation of his own recent past’ (RY: 501). The question remains, however: what were the aspects of his ‘recent past’10 that he wished to explore and imagine to have lived had he chosen the doomed path of martyrdom which he ascribed to his unfortunate hero? Towards the close of the year 1936, Sergei Tarboritsky, one of men responsible for the assassination of Nabokov’s father in 1922, having previously served a brief prison sentence for the murder, was given a prominent position in Hitler’s Nazi regime as deputy head of émigré affairs. This was sufficient reason for Nabokov’s wife Vera, who herself had already been banned from working owing to her Jewish background, to insist that her husband leave Germany in order to find a new home for the family in France or England. As the recently published correspondence attests, with 10

The relevance of Nabokov’s personal life to the novel is discussed, with some interesting inter-textual suggestions, in Priscilla Meyer, ‘Life as Annotation: Sebastian Knight, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Vladimir Nabokov’, Cycnos, Vol. 24, No. 1 (Nice: Université de Nice-Sophia Antipolis, Department d’Etudes Anglophones, 2007), 193–202.

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the exception of lecturing and reading tours, Nabokov was rarely separated from his wife for any significant period of time. The time which he spent making literary contacts and searching out employment prospects in France, and England, from the beginning of 1937 to when they were eventually reunited in the Czech spa town of Marienbad (now Mariánské Lázně) in the summer, was the longest they were ever apart during their entire fiftytwo-year marriage. It was also during this time that the biggest obstacle to what he often described as a ‘cloudless’ marriage was to emerge, in the affair that Nabokov conducted with a Paris-based Russian émigré woman named Irina Guadinini. Nabokov first encountered Guadinini at a literary event at which he was reading on 24 January. At this event, organized by Ilya Fondaminsky (the editor of Sovremennye zapiski), Nabokov read excerpts from his unfinished novel The Gift. Although he had had some dalliances in the past, this affair, which was intense and passionate, was the only one which seriously threatened his marriage. His wife soon came to hear second-hand reports of the affair, and confronted Nabokov with these accusations. Though there exists no actual record of her feelings at the time (Vera, an intensely private person, destroyed all of her letters), we can gauge from the fragmentary references amongst Nabokov’s own letters the underlying feelings of tension and mistrust. On 20 February 1937, Nabokov writes: ‘My dear love, all the Irinas in the world are powerless […]. The eastern side of every minute of mine is already colored by the light of our impending meeting. All the rest is dark, boring, you-less. I want to hold you and kiss you. I adore you’ (SL: 19). Again, on 19 March: ‘My darling, my life, my dear love. I forbid you to be miserable. I love you and … there’s no power in the world that could take away or spoil even an inch of this endless love. And if I miss a letter for a day it’s only because I absolutely can’t cope with the crookedness and twists of time I’m living in now. I love you’ (LTV: 326). Nabokov was perhaps prompted to write such heartfelt declarations to his wife by the intensity of feeling which his affair with Guadinini had brought up. The need to keep his affair secret, despite his wife’s suspicions, caused Nabokov such acute anxiety that he suffered a violent and persistent attack of psoriasis. On 15 May 1937, shortly before they were reunited, Nabokov wrote of the effects of these attacks to his wife:

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It could not only have been the unpleasant symptoms of a skin condition which pushed Nabokov to the brink of suicide. It was also the overwhelming guilt he felt in deceiving his wife. After Nabokov was reunited with his family in Czechoslovakia, they lived briefly in Cannes in the south of France. Shortly after their arrival, Nabokov confessed everything of his affair with Guadinini to his wife, admitting – with great difficulty – that he was still in love with her. To this revelation, Véra is reported to have told him to go to her in Paris if he was still in love with her. Nabokov rejected this suggestion. Later, Guadinini would come to Cannes in order to plead with Nabokov to continue their affair. He was to reject her entreaties, and the affair ended definitively. It is of course no mistake that the tone of Nabokov’s letters to his wife during his affair, and the events that transpired, have found their way into the narrative of Sebastian Knight in the relationship between Sebastian, Clare Bishop and Nina de Rechnoy. When the narrator ‘V’ is searching for the secret mistress who had a relationship with his brother during his final years, he is brought to the apartment of Pahl Pahlitch Rechnoy – the ex-husband of Nina. Although he is soon to meet Nina, who deceives him into believing that she is someone else, the description which her ex-husband gives is noteworthy: Her idea of life was drinking cock-tails, and eating a large supper at four o’clock in the morning, and then dancing the shimmy or whatever it was called, and inspecting brothels because that was fashionable among Parisian snobs, and buying expensive clothes, and raising hell in hotels when she thought a maid had stolen her small change which she afterwards found in her bathroom. […] Oh, and all the rest of it – you may find her in any cheap novel, she’s a type, a type. (RLSK: 121)

Boyd describes Irina Guadinini as ‘an attractive blond with the strikingly regular features of classical statuary’ and a ‘cultured woman’ who was ‘playfully derisive’ (RY: 433). We know that in pre-revolutionary Russia her family moved in the same circles as the Nabokovs, and that she was previously married and subsequently divorced. We know that she wrote poetry, but at the time was working as a groomer of poodles. Indeed, it is difficult

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to say for sure whether the description which Nina’s husband provides corresponds exactly to Irina. Yet, one seemingly minor detail which ‘V’ notes should alert us to the fact that Guadinini was no doubt the main inspiration. When ‘V’ is given a list containing the names of the women whose stay at Blauberg coincided with that of Sebastian, he notes that Madame ‘de’ Rechnoy ‘denoted, I knew, a certain type of Russian who likes to accent gentility, though really the French particule before a Russian name is not only absurd but illegal. She might have been an adventuress: she might have been the wife of a snob’ (RSLK: 109). The use of this affected continental flourish by Nina, and Irina’s similarly cosmopolitan sounding surname, which seems equally at odds with her Russian heritage, suggest a parallel which cannot be disregarded. In stark contrast to the suggested character of Irina Guadinini in the figure of Nina Rechnoy, we have that of Clare Bishop who is a thinly disguised simulacrum of Véra Nabokov. In opposition to Nina de Rechnoy’s ‘exquisite face’ with its gleaming ‘full dark lips’ and an expression which seems a ‘strange mixture of dreaminess and cunning’ (RLSK: 126), we have Clare who is ‘pretty in a quiet sort of way with a pale faintly freckled complexion, slightly hollowed cheeks, blue-grey near-sighted eyes, a thin mouth’ (RLSK: 60). When we are also informed that Clare, ‘who had not composed a single line of imaginative prose or poetry in her life, understood so well (and that was her private miracle) every detail of Sebastian’s struggle’, it is clear that the similarities are more than mere supposition. Various scholars have noted that Nabokov would have been hopelessly adrift had it not been for the assistance which his wife provided in his literary efforts. She was known to type his manuscripts, check drafts, translations, and offer criticism and ideas. The fact that Nabokov gives the character of Clare Bishop an almost identical role in the life of Sebastian Knight cannot simply, therefore, be a matter of coincidence. In addition to this, we need only compare the texture and tone of the letters which Nabokov sent his wife in the midst of his affair, and the fictitious letter in Lost Property which ‘V’ feels is written by Sebastian to Clare: I have not stopped loving you, but because I cannot go on kissing your dim dear face, we must part, we must part. Why is it so? What is this mysterious exclusiveness?

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Chapter 5 […] For if I say ‘two’ I have started to count and there is no end to it. There is only one real number: One. And love, apparently, is the best exponent of this singularity. […] I shall never forget you and never replace you. It would be absurd of me to try and persuade you that you were the pure love, and that this other passion is but a comedy of flesh. All is flesh and all is purity. But one thing is certain: I have been happy with you and now I am miserable with another. (RLSK: 94)

In this extract, we can see how his affair with Guadinini continued to have a profound effect upon Nabokov’s conscience, even after two years – and one can almost sense the colour of the highly emotional conversation he must have had with his wife when he eventually confessed his betrayal. But we must bear in mind that, despite the fact that he was in love, Nabokov chose to remain with his wife – since it is only with this knowledge in mind that we can continue to unpack the ways in which this work represents a ‘speculative’ autobiography. Unlike The Gift, which was completed after his affair, and which is, amongst other things, a celebration of marriage and fidelity, Sebastian Knight is decidedly darker in tone and relies heavily on personal trauma and subjective experience in the production of its imagery. It is useful to bear in mind that immediately before beginning work on his first English novel Nabokov had written The Waltz Invention – which we had occasion to examine in detail in the first chapter. We found that within the depiction of Salvatore Waltz (who Nabokov is at pains to describe as a ‘fellow author’) there is a visible strand of despair which we speculated reflects the sublimated rage and frustration Nabokov must have felt at the time: I feel sorry for you, I sympathize with the stabbing pain that every man experiences when his habitual world, the familiar order of life, crumbles around him. (WI: 28–29)

The problems which he had recently experienced in his marriage were not, sadly, the only ones which assailed him at this point. The need to switch to English if he was to have any hope of attaining an academic position, or continuing as a novelist in England or America, was a particularly painful experience for Nabokov. After he had finished his studies at Cambridge, he chose Berlin as his base for the simple fact that he could, amongst the numerous émigrés that populated the city, perfect his Russian style in

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isolation from any external contaminants. By 1939, he was already considered to be the pre-eminent novelist of the emigration. He considered The Gift to be his crowning achievement. It is no wonder then, that he felt as if ‘the familiar order of life’ was crumbling all around him. The requirement to abandon his supple mastery of Russian prose in favour of a language in which, though he knew it well, he could not hope to have the same degree of confidence – must have been a particularly bitter pill to swallow. Of course, it must also be acknowledged that he was forced into this decision by the relentless march of ideological forces which were dragging the entire continent inexorably towards war. The profound sense of loss of his own culture permeates the entire narrative texture of Sebastian Knight, and it is imbued with a far more palpable sense of bitterness and betrayal than the melancholic and poignant reflections in The Gift: What can I tell you of my past, gentlemen [he is saying]. I was born in a land where the ideas of freedom, the notion of right, the habit of human kindness were things coldly despised and brutally outlawed. Now and then, in the course of history, a hypocrite government would paint the walls of the nation’s prison a comelier shade of yellow and loudly proclaim the granting of rights familiar to happier states; but either these rights were solely enjoyed by the jailers or else they contained some secret flaw which made them even more bitter than the decrees of frank tyranny. […] Every man in the land was a slave, if he was not a bully; since the soul and everything pertaining to it were denied to man, the infliction of physical pain came to be considered as sufficient to govern and guide human nature. […] From time to time a thing called revolution would occur, turning slaves into bullies and vice versa. […] A dark country, a hellish place, gentlemen, and if there is anything of which I am certain in life it is that I shall never exchange the liberty of my exile for the vile parody of home. (RLSK: 22–23)

The extract is from Knight’s work The Doubtful Asphodel. Where it appears in the text, the narrator ‘V’ informs us that Mr Goodman has taken this description to surmise Knight’s attitude to Russia. This, ‘V’ maintains, is a ‘grotesque misconception’ (RLSK: 23). The narrator suggests that, rather than representing Knight’s own feelings about his former homeland, it refers to ‘a fanciful amalgamation of tyrannic iniquities than to any particular nation or historical reality’ (RLSK: 23). In this particular case, we are compelled to side with Mr Goodman. At points like this, we cannot

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help but perceive the unadulterated opinion of Sebastian Knight’s creator behind an inadequately disguised narrative conceit. Such vitriol directed at specific aspects of the Soviet regime, the country that robbed him of his home, his wealth, his family, and even his beloved language, must inevitably be the subject of such reproach. It is primarily of Russia that Sebastian, and thus Nabokov, is speaking. To be condemned to abandon one’s culture and language, Nabokov felt, is a martyrdom worse than death. Yet, there is an undeniable feeling of defiance in the face of this fate, and it is a defiance which is concealed within what is, in the final analysis, a story of tragedy. Almost immediately after this excerpt, the narrator alludes to another, from the work Lost Property, which he suggests is far more representative of Knight’s feelings about his past: One of the purest emotions is that of the banished man pining after the land of his birth. I would have liked to show him straining his memory to the utmost in a continuous effort to keep alive and bright the vision of his past: the blue remembered hills and the happy highways, the hedge with its unofficial rose and the field with its rabbits, the distant spire and the near bluebell. […] But because the theme has already been treated by my betters and also because I have an innate distrust of what I feel easy to express, no sentimental wanderer will ever be allowed to land on the rock of my unfriendly prose. (RLSK: 23)

On first glance, we are able to notice the exquisite impressionistic beauty of the descriptions, which abound in a colourful green and light blueness in texture – contrasting with the ‘dark’, ‘hellish’ and decidedly dark brown and grey of the other excerpt. The final remark which alludes to his unwillingness to write of such things because it has already been done by his ‘betters’ is intended to be misleading. We are at first to assume that in this short virtuoso excerpt, he has already made something to equal his ‘betters’. Who are these writers whose capacity for sentimentality so exceeds his own? Later in the narrative, Sebastian writes of how he was ‘deeply in love with the country which was my home (as far as my nature could afford the notion of home); I had my Kipling moods, and my Rupert Brooke moods, and my Housman moods’ (RLSK: 58). A cursory cross-examination of the above excerpt reveals that the image of the ‘unofficial rose’ can be found in a poem by Rupert Brooke (The Old Vicarage, Grantchester), and ‘the blue

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remembered hills’ is, of course, from ‘Into my heart on air that kills’, the fortieth poem of A. E. Housman’s A Shropshire Lad.11 It seems odd, then, that a writer who is speaking of his lost Russian homeland should so readily invoke the imagery of pastoral English poetry without reaching first for the poetry of his own culture. It appears that the ultimate message, which taps into a deep pathos through a rich strain of sentimentality, appears to speak of an almost humanistic universality – where the power of memory is sufficient to keep alive the ‘bright vision of the past’. However, the close proximity of these two sections is not fully explained by the narrative logic of the work, which holds them both to be varying perspectives of the fictional Sebastian’s feelings towards the country of his birth. The first is unrelenting and accurate in describing the oppressive atmosphere of Soviet society, yet it is suggested that this is not specifically meant to describe Russia. The second, ‘V’ suggests, more accurately describes Sebastian’s (and thus Nabokov’s) feelings towards Russia, yet utilizes the poetry of a foreign idiom in order to invoke these feelings. This ambivalence is not merely coincidental, and is, I would like to suggest, entirely intentional. It is not as simple as the hapless narrator ‘V’ would have us believe. Rather, it attests to something far more complex, something which hints at the ideological character of this work. The first is a depiction of the bitterness which Nabokov feels towards his former homeland, and the ideological forces which have come to define it – it speaks of a definite historical reality. The second, through the careful stylistic invocation of the power of memory, and the power of art through memory, suggests that the ‘absolute solution’ to the overwhelming effects of an undesired historical reality is to be found within the defiant practice of one’s individual artistic autonomy. Furthermore, it is not merely an artistic autonomy which thrives only on the regurgitation and pastiche of one’s ‘betters’, but one which constantly strives to attain an uncompromising uniqueness of style and expression.

11

Into my heart on air that kills/From yon far country blows: What are those blue remembered hills,/What spires, what farms are those?/That is the land of lost content/ I see it shining plain,/The happy highways where I went/ And cannot come again.

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Taken in this context, the presence of such intimate and traumatic details from Nabokov’s own life begins to seem more logical. We must therefore acknowledge that the decision to write a work which is so intensely personal at such a historical impasse, when the majority of writers and artists were swept up in the political conflicts of the era, can be nothing other than an ideological act: an ideology which had the practice of an unrelenting individualism at its very core. It was not, however, a universal individualism which held all individuals to be of equal worth. When Nabokov writes of the ‘inner being’ of his creation being richer than that of others – we cannot help but recall the passage from The Gift where in his ‘kingdom’ there exists no ‘equality’ and no ‘authorities’. The bulk of Mr Goodman’s reproach to the work of Sebastian Knight is that it exists in a timeless vacuum, untouched by history and society. Goodman believes, not without cause, that Sebastian Knight’s ostensible indifference to anything other than the practice of his aesthetic craft is, in some ways, a pose. The ‘tragedy’ of Sebastian Knight, Goodman believes, was that he was incapable of answering the call of history – and was content to remain in his artistic isolation: Aloofness is a cardinal sin in an age when a perplexed humanity eagerly turns to its writers and thinkers, and demands of them attention to, if not the cure of, its woes and wounds. … The ‘ivory tower’ cannot be suffered unless it is transformed into a lighthouse or a broadcasting station. … In such an age … brimming with burning problems when … economic depression … dumped … cheated … the man in the street … the growth of totalitarian … unemployment … the next super-great war … new aspects of family life … sex … structure of the universe. (RLSK: 97)

The breakdown of Goodman’s description into its basic elements, a litany of journalistic buzz words and clichés which no doubt filled many column inches at the time Nabokov was writing, alerts us to the attitude which the author is compelling us to take. ‘Time and space’, ‘V’ forthrightly notes elsewhere, were to Sebastian Knight ‘measures of the same eternity, so that the very idea of his reacting in any special ‘modern’ way to what Mr Goodman calls the ‘atmosphere of Post-War Europe’ is utterly preposterous (RLSK: 56).

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In retrospect, when such numerous examples of the futility of artists and intellectuals entering the political sphere abound throughout this period, it appears that Nabokov managed to successfully avoid the ‘loathsome tint of social intent’ by avoiding, in Wyndham Lewis’s words, the Zeitgeist. Yet the reference to the ‘Ivory Tower’ in Goodman’s rebuke to Sebastian Knight retains its acerbic power – it is an accusation for which Nabokov has no adequate response, and hints at the underlying contempt Nabokov felt for those who were not sensitive to the subtleties of his art, and were outside of his ideology of aesthetic autonomy. In this sense, the nostalgia which Nabokov felt for the disappearance of his native culture and language was not benign; when he speaks of a certain tradition within European and Russian literature which represents the idea of ‘Art for Art’s sake’ and holds it in opposition to the art of ‘social intent’ in Russia and Europe, he is speaking from a position that is mired in class conflict. According to Fredson Bowers, ‘In aesthetics, artistic is, of course, not far from aristocratic’ (LRL: ix) – and this inevitably lies at that back of what Nabokov found so ‘loathsome’ about the literature of ‘social intent’; its vulgar aesthetic quality, its proletarian style, its easily assimilated morality, concerns for everyday social and political issues, ultimately left him indifferent because it was an ‘average reality’ which he felt himself superior to. What we are witnessing in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight is the creation of a model which opposes the literature of ‘social intent’, that is, the nineteenth-century Russian novels of ‘ideas’, the literary culture of ‘Socialist Realism’ and the publicist fiction of writers contemporaneous to Nabokov. For Sebastian Knight, and thus Nabokov, [n]ewspaper headlines, political theories, fashionable ideas meant to him no more than the loquacious printed notice (in three languages, with mistakes in at least two) on the wrapper of some soap or toothpaste. The lather may be thick and the notice convincing – but that was an end of it. (RLSK: 56)

The mere fact that contemporary social and political thought left him indifferent does not explain fully what is at work here, and in this particular instance the designation of ‘ideas’ as fashionable should give us pause. For although there is an acknowledgement that such things inevitably exist in the world – and that it remains the duty of the genuine artist to resist such

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influences; the notion that such ‘ideas’ present themselves in a similar way to the reified and inauthentic language of advertising, and that these ideas are flawed and riddled with ‘mistakes’, should convince us entirely that Nabokov himself is in possession of other ideas which he believes to be more authentic. There is a great deal of confluence between the moral and ethical codes of Sebastian Knight and Nabokov. The narrator ‘V’ remarks quite assuredly that ‘There was nothing of your advanced prejudice be damned stuff about Sebastian’, stating that he knew that to flaunt one’s contempt for a moral code was but the smuggled smugness of prejudice turned inside out. He usually chose the easiest ethical path (just as he chose the thorniest aesthetic one) merely because it happened to be the shortest cut to his chosen object; he was far too lazy in everyday life (just as he was far too hardworking in his artistic life) to be bothered by problems set and solved by others. (RLSK: 69)

Indeed, in this respect, we can perceive that the facets of such a ‘moral code’ were perhaps as staid, conventional, conservative, and reactionary as that of any writer who professes an indifference to political thought. Such writers tend, with little exception, to choose the type of political environment which is the most unobtrusive with regards to their art. It was only in America, and later Switzerland, that he was to find such a society. Through the construction of this self-reflexive work, with its uncompromising martyr/hero who resists all attempts to compromise his aesthetic autonomy, Nabokov assumed, as Will Norman has also suggested, the role of protector of the ‘autonomous’ literary tradition, but as a consequence becomes the subject of an ideology which places an uncompromising individualism at its very centre. Is the central conceit of the novel, then, so staggeringly simple? To suggest how an author may enact a commitment to aesthetic autonomy even in the face of the most turbulent political atmosphere imaginable? This may have been the intention, but it cannot be said to have been the result. For all of its ingenuous narrative devices, beauty, and conviction, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight is mired in unreality and delusion. It is, in the final analysis, a fantasy; the literary apex of an unbroken line of sentimentality for a lost culture and country that is present, in one form or another, in every novel which Nabokov wrote since his flight from Russia.

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It is a sentimentality which responded directly to history with conviction, and untroubled defiance – yet ultimately it is a sentimentality which, from this point on, would begin to progressively disappear from his works of the American and Swiss periods. In this tendency, we can perceive that having come to the realization of his own ideological position through his work on The Gift and The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, it would be senseless to continue along the path of didacticism, since his own position, which assumes an innate sense of superiority to those around him, precludes any need to convince others. When one assumes greatness for oneself, there is little need to convince others. It is only necessary to show them. In order to set the agenda for our conclusion, which will explore more explicitly the specific nuances of the Nabokovian ideology and enumerate its effects, it is necessary to return to our discussions of Hegel in the preceding chapter on The Gift. What we found, through examining the various references to Hegel in the text, and specifically in the Life of Chernyshevsky, was that Nabokov believed that the progenitors of the literature of ‘social intent’ in Russia were ignorant of what he considered to be the ‘vital truth’ implicit in Hegelian philosophy. In this vein it is useful to consider the following, from Nabokov’s lectures on Russian literature at Cornell: [W]ith all of their virtues, these radical critics were as great a nuisance in regard to art as was the government. Government and revolution, the Tsar and the Radicals, were both philistines in art. The radical critics fought despotism, but they evolved a despotism of their own. The claims, the promptings, the theories that they tried to enforce were in themselves just as irrelevant to art as was the conventionalism of the administration. What they demanded of an author was a social message and no nonsense, and from their point of view a book was good only insofar as it was of practical use to the welfare of the people. There was a disastrous flaw in their fervour. Sincerely and boldly they advocated freedom and equality but they contradicted their own creed by wishing to subjugate the arts to current politics. If in the opinion of the Tsars authors were to be servants of the state, in the opinion of the radical critics they were to be servants of the masses. The two lines of thought were bound to meet and join forces when at last, in our times, a new kind of regime, the synthesis of a Hegelian triad, combined the idea of the masses with the idea of the state. (LRL: 5)

These sentiments, written retrospectively from the safety of an American College Campus, are present in an equally explicit form in The Real Life

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of Sebastian Knight. It takes as its basic premise the misappropriation of Hegel’s philosophy – where the idea of the ‘masses’ is combined with the ‘idea of the state’ to produce not only a system of aesthetic culture, but also of society, which he felt was anathema to his own. For Nabokov, Hegel’s ‘vital truth’ was something different entirely, and it is clear that he held the idea of the ‘masses’ in utter contempt. It was such contempt, I shall proceed to argue, that acted as the driving force behind his individualist ideology.

Conclusion

Ideology as Aesthetic: The Aesthetic as Ideology

[S]ince my youth – I was 19 when I left Russia – my political creed has remained as bleak and changeless as an old gray rock. It is classical to the point of triteness. Freedom of speech, freedom of thought, freedom of art. The social and economic structure of the ideal state is of little concern to me. (SO: 29)

Any attempt to discuss the relations between literary aesthetics and ideology will inevitably be confronted with numerous, often very complex, epistemological problems. The work of a writer such as Nabokov does not, as we have observed, merely reproduce the constituent elements of its ideology; it does not do so in such a way as to reveal its own contradictions unambiguously – and these same contradictions do not exactly reflect those of historical processes. What we have observed is a continuing tension throughout the evolution of his work, an internal dissonance which is never close to being resolved. This ‘dissonance’, which is as I have earlier proposed ‘cognitive’, can best be described in terms of vacillation, irresolution, an inability to project an ideological position which is consistent with self-image – and in the process projecting one which is at odds with the first. It is clear from the ‘revelatory’ pronouncements which Nabokov made from his Swiss Parnassus (recorded and repeated for posterity by scholars, journalists and fellow authors) that Nabokov would have liked to be remembered as a champion of universal humanist values which were entirely consistent with his changeless and ‘classical’ political ideology. Yet we are all too aware that there exists a yawning chasm between what one wishes to convey, and that which is actually conveyed.

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What one wants to say is often transfigured and distorted by ideology, and in attempting to articulate a particular position through one’s work – the work itself is ideologically compelled to reflect something else entirely. There is, on the one hand, what a text (through its author) is attempting to say, and on the other, what it cannot help but say instead. Literature inhabits a transitional space between the empirical certainty which is provided by science and the linguistic realm of ideology. Its regulated forms, internal systems and structures resemble that of a science – whilst its raw materials exist within the lexicon of everyday phenomena. It thus possesses the dual properties of a form of theoretical knowledge, in addition to a form of ideology. The Nabokovian aesthetic, in this sense, does not merely ‘reproduce’ an already extant ideology, but produces an ideology of its own. This ideology – in common with other ideologies – is replete with its own gaps, inconsistencies, contradictions, and limitations which have revealed themselves throughout the preceding analyses. This is, of course, unsurprising: any ideology inevitably has nothing more than an imprecise relationship to real history. The Real, after all, resists symbolization altogether. Yet it is equally apparent from the preceding analysis, that this ideology does maintain some relation to historical reality, one which is refracted by subjectivity and, as we have observed, is further mediated through a dismantling of the boundary between the personal and the political. It is necessary to be reminded of these vital conditions. Without affording full consideration to these subtleties, any analysis of a writer’s ideological motivations will be no more than supposition. Indeed, even cursory knowledge of Nabokov’s biography would allow one to make such facile inferences. We could, for example, note that his father Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov, the ‘old-fashioned liberal’ whom Nabokov claimed to resemble in political character, was very much on the right wing of the constitutional democrats – a party composed entirely of land-owners and upper-middleclass university professors. We could further discern from the not infrequent judgements upon social class which have appeared within the texts, and in his near pathological hatred of the proletarian aesthetic forms emanating from the Soviet Union, the air of elitism and aristocratic privilege from which such judgements inevitably derive. We could note also that Nabokov’s support for the Vietnam War, in fact the entirety of an often bellicose American foreign

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policy, was unshakeable. In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson had ordered operation ‘Rolling Thunder’ which would drop 864,000 tonnes of explosives onto North Vietnam leading to the deaths of an estimated 72,000 civilians. In the midst of this campaign, the president underwent a gall-bladder operation. Nabokov sent a brief telegram, wishing him ‘a perfect recovery and a speedy return to the admirable work you are accomplishing’ (SL: 378). In the same vein, the Nabokovs were supporters of Richard Nixon’s presidential campaign in 1972. Though he was quick to deny the accusation, it is now acknowledged that one of the reasons for the Nabokovs’ relocation to Switzerland was to reduce the tax burden from what was a substantial international income. Further, Switzerland’s historical neutrality, its socially and politically conservative society, and its tradition of cordiality to wealth and privilege must have been as attractive as its alpine climate and plenitude of lepidoptera. It has been noted that, while maintaining friendships in Switzerland with ‘federalists’ such as Peter Ustinov and Denis de Rougement, Zionists such as George Weidenfeld, and conservatives such as William F. Buckley; they shunned the company of figures such as Charlie Chaplin and Noel Coward. Chaplin, almost certainly due to his politics, and Coward presumably because of his sexuality. Something which resembles a caricature emerges from this trickle of biographical information. It is a picture of a thoroughly conservative reactionary writer who is hostile to any form of socialistic politics, is fiscally libertarian, is suspicious of non-traditional forms of sexuality, places a high value on class privilege, is unashamed of seeking to protect that privilege, is somewhat hypocritical in his attitude to violence when it is in the service of the politics he supports, and someone who, ultimately, supports a patrician attitude towards the outside world as much as he does towards literature and art. Yet even if we had accepted the veracity of these assumptions, which are in some way justified, it would have done little to further our knowledge of the ways in which Nabokov’s ideology manifested itself in his works of this particular period. Thus, it is necessary to insist that the problem that I have addressed in the preceding chapters cannot merely be a single question, and to this effect it is useful to refer back to Pierre Macherey:

184 Conclusion A speculative activity is not neatly organised around a single problem, though we may have been led to think so by the projected image of a specific doctrine. On the contrary, a real history of questions reveals that they are scattered and intermittent. The present state of a question, if we are using the expression in its true sense rather than to denote an inert, definitive, supra-historical vagueness, is actually the conjunction of several questions. There is no definitive question, and probably there has never been an isolated question. (TLP: 9)

Throughout the course of this study, the presence of Nabokov’s hostility to communism, Soviet literature and culture has manifested itself in various ways, the most pronounced of which is a philosophical opposition that is inflected with class conflict. This opposition is based upon an assumption that the literature of ‘social intent’ was the synthesis of a Hegelian triad which took as its thesis and anti-thesis the idea of the ‘masses’ and the idea of the ‘state’. From the novels and the critical writings, there remains the persistent sense that the ideology of the Russian literature of ‘social intent’ fails to grasp the ‘vital truth’ of Hegel – a ‘truth’ which, we can surmise, Nabokov is fully aware of. In Chapter 4, we speculated on how Nabokov’s concept of Hegel’s ‘vital truth’ resembled an ideological interpretation/ systemization of Hegel’s philosophy. If this particular interpretation is thus opposed to one which synthesizes the ideas of the state and the idea of the masses – then when Nabokov spoke to Wellesely’s Emergency Service Committee during the Second World War, it was perhaps with a sense of irony of which even he himself was unaware: The splendid paradox of democracy is that while stress is laid on the rule of all and equality of rights, it is the individual that derives from it his special and uncommon benefit. Ethically, the members of a democracy are equals; spiritually, each has the right to be as different from his neighbours as he pleases; and taken all in all, it is not perhaps an organization or a government or a community that we really have in mind when we say ‘democracy’ but the subtle balance between the boundless privileges of every individual and the strictly equal rights of all men.1

1

Vladimir Nabokov, ‘What Faith Means to a Resisting People’, Panel Arranged by the Emergency Service Committee, Wellesley Magazine, Vol. 26, No. 4 (April 1942), VN Berg Collection, New York Public Library.

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It is evident from the parade of madmen, narcissistic criminals, deluded murderers, perverts, publicist hacks, philistines, and vulgarians which populate the works we have examined that he did not in fact believe that members of a democracy are ‘ethically’ equal. It is also self-evident that neither were they equal ‘aesthetically’. Nabokov’s belief in democracy was inherently paradoxical. His championing of a totemic democracy in the Western model provided a convenient opportunity to oppose, on the level of his self-identification with ‘liberalism’, the ideology of communism: an ideology to which he was perhaps naturally opposed as a result of his class origins. For Nabokov, democracy was merely an ideal towards which people should show allegiance, and to seek to change it was tantamount to attacking the foundations of his conception of civilization. Implicit in such a belief is the notion that democracy, in its Western European liberal incarnation, is the pinnacle of human development, the end point of a historical dialectic. Nabokov’s focus on occidental culture and society, his indifference to the ‘entire orient’ (BS: xii) (which manifested itself in a thinking that the bombing of oriental peoples can be regarded as ‘admirable work’) is entirely consistent with a conservative statist ‘Hegelian’ philosophical outlook. Nabokov putatively believed in the rationality of Western democracy, that it was the best of all possible systems of government. Western democracy was for Nabokov what constituted Hegel’s ‘vital truth’, the end result of a dialectical triad which combined the idea of the ‘State’, not with the idea of the ‘masses’, but with the idea of the ‘individual’. Is the end result not, then, as some will no doubt argue, the ideology of a ‘classical liberalism’ which holds the individual as integral to the functioning of society? Was this not the ideology which he has always professed to hold? Is it not consistent with the politics which were inculcated by his Father and by his liberal upbringing? ‘My aversion to groups’, Nabokov once wrote, ‘is rather a matter of temperament than the fruit of information and thought. I was born that way and have despised ideological coercion instinctively all of my life’ (SO: 55). If liberalism constitutes a ‘vital truth’ to which any form of ‘ideological coercion’ is ineffective, then it was a truth to which Nabokov has shown little allegiance – it existed in an abstract sense, one which had little effect upon his actions, and less upon his aesthetics. His primary concern was, as our analyses of the works

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have shown, the ‘boundless’ privileges of the individual – and it is necessary to state that such an uncompromising insistence upon individualism was antithetical to the egalitarian tenets of the liberalism which Nabokov supposedly adhered to. That Nabokov was fundamentally concerned with individual subjectivity perhaps confirms his place among a pantheon of writers which held a quasi-mystical fealty towards the concept of unrestricted individual freedom. Indeed, it is perhaps no coincidence that it was in America, a country which so enthusiastically and predictably embraced the turgid amateur philosophy of Ayn Rand’s ‘Objectivism’, that Nabokov found his most enthusiastic and receptive readers. One dismantles the claims of universalism to which the author lays claim in his work by reading, as we have attempted to do, the gaps and inconsistencies which betray a tendentious ideology. What has eventually become apparent is that any claim of universality should be treated with suspicion, especially one which simultaneously lays claim to an autonomous aestheticism which is free from ‘coercive’ ideological influence. Yet it is precisely to this false universalism that Dana Dragunoiu’s Vladimir Nabokov and the Poetics of Liberalism2 alludes. Its title, perhaps unsurprisingly, hints at the conclusion at which Dragunoiu arrives. The study claims to disrupt the prevalent narrative of Nabokov’s lack of interest in political advocacy, yet merely affirms what previous scholarship has always subtly implied: that Nabokov’s aesthetics represent the most noble and admirable tenets of liberal democratic discourse. It is Dragunoiu’s contention that Nabokov’s identification with his father’s liberalism was not simply a general attitude of mind, but a coherent and historically specific view about the legitimate boundaries of human knowledge, the proper functions of government, and the unconditional value of the right to self-determination.

According to Dragunoiu, Nabokov’s ideology coincides almost exactly with that of his father – the liberal Russian Statesman whose unfaltering

2

Dana Dragunoiu, Vladimir Nabokov and the Poetics of Liberalism (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2011).

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adherence to the rule of law and idealist (‘Neo-Kantian’) legal principles were in the end insufficient in opposing the barbarism and duplicity of the Bolshevik insurgents. Dragunoiu argues that Nabokov’s moral and ethical systems derive from the legal debates which the elder V. D. Nabokov was engaged in amongst his Constitutional Democrat (Kadet) Party contemporaries prior to the revolution. In support of this particular proposition, she provides an exhaustive array of references from articles, debates, and discourses – sometimes interspersed with some textual analysis of Nabokov’s novels; but more often with assumptions and coincidences that would give credence to her overall thesis. The analysis becomes particularly laboured and uncomfortable when Dragunoiu approaches Nabokov’s fraught attitude to McCarthyism, and attempts to re-construct the narrative of Lolita as a parable for this period in American History. According to Dragunoiu, Nabokov’s comment that Humbert Humbert was a ‘foreigner’ and an ‘anarchist’ is an admission that he is a communist infiltrator, and that his act of paedophiliac abuse is a parable for the possible corruption of the ideals of American Democracy by agitators in their midst. If we are to accept the plausibility of this theory, then there is a central flaw which becomes impossible to reconcile with the magnanimous liberalism which Dragunoiu has ascribed. How could Nabokov’s obdurate commitment to the tenets of liberalism be so easily compromised by the mass hysteria surrounding the McCarthyite witch hunts? These were events, after all, in which he to some extent actively participated. In 1957, Nabokov wrote to the émigré literary theorist Roman Jakobson who was at the time teaching at Harvard. Nabokov was perhaps spurred on by Jakobson’s emphatic refusal to support his bid for the position of Professor of Russian Literature. Jakobson is reported to have said to the search committee at Harvard: ‘Gentlemen, even if one allows that he is an important writer, are we next to invite an elephant to be Professor of Zoology?’ (AY: 303) The two Russians, along with Nabokov’s Cornell colleague Marc Szeftel, were to work on an English language study of the Russian epic The Song of Igor’s Campaign. In his letter, Nabokov refers to this project: ‘After careful examination of my conscience, I have come to the conclusion that I cannot collaborate with you […]. Frankly, I am unable to stomach your little trips

188 Conclusion

to totalitarian countries, even if these trips are prompted merely by scientific considerations’ (SL: 216). In writing such a letter in the midst of such anti-communist hysteria, when there remained pervasive clandestine surveillance operations against potential ‘enemy aliens’, Nabokov was wilfully and maliciously endangering Jakobson’s liberty, and possibly even his life. If this letter was not enough, it has also been reported that he often referred to Jakobson as a ‘Bolshevik agent’ when speaking of him in public.3 To such an act of denunciation, which is in some small way comparable to those by party apparatchiks during the Great Purge, Dragunoiu merely ascribes an ‘anxiety that his adoptive country’s commitment to liberal values collided with its national interests’.4 Such a perspective is overly generous, and obfuscates the fundamental incompatibility of Nabokov’s self-proclaimed adherence to the ethical and moral principles of liberalism. The unambiguous sense which one derives from Dragunoiu’s tautological study is that Nabokov’s aesthetic use of fantasy, his emphasis on the power of individual artistry, memory and subjectivity ultimately reflect his liberal democratic convictions. Yet such assumptions sit uncomfortably next to lines that Nabokov, in an act of literary ventriloquism, gives his character Fyodor5 in The Gift where in his ‘kingdom’ there exists no ‘equality’, ‘no authorities’ and ‘everyone keeps to themselves’. What was apparent in our analysis of the works in the main body of this book were the gaps between the universal values of freedom and liberty which Nabokov sought to express, and the distinctly tendentious 3 4 5

Galya Diment, Pniniad: Vladimir Nabokov and Marc Szeftel (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997), 40. Ibid. 136. The hermeneutic question of how and when one can take the opinions of a character and that of its creator as homologous is of course a very difficult one. There is justifiable resistance against an automatic connection between the author and the character as conduit for his/her views. Indeed, the connections which I have made go against the prevailing consensus established by Roland Barthes in his 1967 essay La mort de l’auteur. Yet, as I have argued in pp. 150–153, and in Chapter 2, specific instances can often be argued when statements appear to be extraneous to the narrative logic of the text.

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anti-egalitarian emphasis on an uncompromising individualism which only seeks to support the forms of government and society most conducive to the self-preservation which is inherent to the ideology of aesthetic autonomy. Such a need for self-preservation led, I submit, to a certain degree of hypocrisy. For example, Nabokov was at pains to make the distinction between the ‘ruthless imperialism of the USSR’ and the ‘earnest and unselfish assistance extended by the USA to nations in distress’ (SO: 42). A writer who sought to be a ‘rigid moralist’ who ridicules the ‘vulgar and cruel’ (SO: 164) could not have been ignorant of the fact that, in his own lifetime, such ‘earnest assistance’ took the form of supporting military coups, the subversion of democratic elections, support for dictators, the use of torture and rape and numerous assassinations and executions in various nations in ‘distress’, such as Greece, Italy, North Korea, Iran, Guatemala, Laos, Haiti, Cuba, Congo, The Dominican Republic, Brazil, Indonesia, Uruguay, Cambodia, Chile and Angola. A classical liberalism, if it takes as its central principle the inviolability of ‘self-determination’, could never countenance such contemptuous attempts to restrict the freedom of others. Indeed, it is not ‘classical’ liberalism which underpins the uncompromising individualism of the Nabokovian ideology of aesthetic autonomy. It is an ideology more comparable to a prescient form of the reactionary conservatism which liberal democracy would eventually become in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, after it had been deprived of its most obvious ideological antagonist. Perhaps it was a conservatism in aesthetic matters, exemplified by Nabokov’s Cornell lectures, which have found their best expression in the polemical theories of Allan Bloom in his Closing of the American Mind6 – a work which champions a prescriptive course of canonical European classics as a panacea for the nascent radicalism which had taken hold of American universities. Perhaps it was also a political conservatism similar to that which took root among the small coterie of ‘Neo-Conservative’ philosopher bureaucrats whom Bloom, along with Leo Strauss, taught at the University of Chicago. For them too, a supposed liberal democracy in the American 6

Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987).

190 Conclusion

model which promulgated the idea that an uncompromising individualism was the best of all possible ideological systems, the best representation of the ‘vital truth’ of Hegel – and served as a justification for the many questionable aspects of an often bellicose American foreign policy. Such theories on real world effects are not unnecessary, but we must ultimately acknowledge that they will only ever really be a matter of speculation and, in balance, have revealed themselves to be unnecessary, as the texts themselves are constitutive of the Nabokovian Ideological Aesthetic. The key to understanding the hidden ideology of Nabokov’s work was all too evident when reading the gaps and inconsistencies, the distance between the Symbolic order of the text and its relationship to the Real of material conditions. These distances have revealed that for Nabokov the Aesthetic is always ideological, and that Ideology is always a matter of aesthetics. With this in mind, it is to Fredric Jameson’s injunction to ‘always historicize’ that we should return. On 11 June 1926, around the time of his involvement with the ‘antiBolshevik’ society VIR, Nabokov wrote a short lecture entitled ‘A few words on the poverty of Soviet Literature and an attempt to determine its cause’. This lecture, which was neither translated nor published, consists of a mocking and contemptuous analysis of several contemporary Soviet novelists such as Vsevolod Ivanov, Fyodor Gladkov, Boris Pilnyak and Mikhail Zoshchenko. The tone of this lecture is similar to that of his Cornell lectures – but since it is written for an audience of fellow White Russian émigrés, the comments he makes are unguarded and thus are of significant interest. At the conclusion of the lecture, Nabokov highlights several reasons why Soviet literature is so ‘wretched’ and ‘impoverished’. Among these are an over-reliance on a class perception of the world, a narrow field of vision, a lack of literary culture, the belief in historical cataclysms and the existence of censorship. A lack of literary culture is the reason for the ‘naivety of their careless style’, their ‘extraordinary verbal monotony’ – ‘I am sure’, Nabokov wrote, ‘that 99% of them have not read Balzac or Flaubert’ and that most of them have not read Chekov, Saltykov-Shchedrin and Ivan Bunin. It was not just a lack of ‘literary refinement’, but ‘culture in general’, ‘knowledge of world history’ and ‘human nature’ – they ‘simply do not have a lot of education’ (VNP: 26–27). Underlying these judgements

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is a sense of contempt for the proletarian accessibility of Socialist Realist literature – and with it a sense that the far more profound and belletristic world of Russian literature, which Nabokov feels he represents, has been sullied and corrupted. It is a judgement that is steeped in class conflict, and one which confirms for us Althusser’s important insight that ideologies, irrespective of their form, ‘always express class positions’ (IISA: 33): It is unlikely that our descendants will read Izvestia and Pravda – all these organs of communism. And most importantly, it is unlikely any of these names I have mentioned throughout this lecture will last through these dark early days. For each year, Russia produces more greyish literature. All of these writers come from the point of view that the revolution is some apocalyptic event that will change the world – a world which has already been changed in some way by the World War. From the point of view of the artist, I see this as a tragedy and an eclipse. These writers have lost a sense of man, and replaced it with a sense of class. In other words – man is now driven, not by the everyday strangeness of ordinary human life, but by the stray judgements of the class-conscious masses which castrate creativity. (VNP: 24–25)7

It is not difficult to perceive the level of vitriol that pervades this lecture, and indeed the defiant belief that Soviet literature has replaced a ‘sense of man’ with a ‘sense of class’, and that this atmosphere of class-conscious mass literature has ‘castrated’ creativity sounds a prophetic note when we consider the eventual fate of Soviet literature under the hegemony of Socialist Realism. Yet, underlying such judgements is the sense that in order for an artist or writer to thrive, in order for him to create great literature, in order to protect his individual genius from mass mediocrity, he must ignore all forms of mass consensus and social engagement. In seeking to map out a possible course for Nabokov’s ideological development, this work has taken in a wide range of work, and has sought to ask several questions. We have proceeded from his attempts at writing for the stage, through the major and minor Russian works – to his debut as an English novelist. Though it is my contention that the fundamental ideological and aesthetic character of the entire corpus remains consistent throughout, the shift away from the didacticism of the works of the

7

The translation is my own.

192 Conclusion

European period certainly resulted in variations of the position which I extrapolated, and manifested themselves in other subtle ways within the American and Swiss Periods. Though we have briefly taken in the various forewords to his English translations written in these periods, a fuller examination of the socio-political contexts in which they were written would certainly be an interesting avenue for further exploration. These topics warrant further research, and it is unfortunate that such issues are not within the scope of this present book. This study, which is by no means definitive, has hopefully contributed to the unravelling of the pernicious myth which holds Nabokov to be a writer who transcends the quotidian language of ideology and politics, and uses his aesthetics to uphold universal moral and ethical precepts. At the very least, these works, about which so much has been written, can now be approached from a different perspective – one which does not hold its formal qualities to exist in historical isolation, and acknowledges the dialectical relationship between aesthetics and ideology. The overwhelming impression which we have received is that the consideration of Nabokov as a political writer is a field of enquiry which was yet to be fully explored and that, if it is to be exploited, then a shift is required within Nabokov studies – away from the moribund, rarefied and obsessive study of the workings of ‘genius’ which has elevated the life and work of an interesting and gifted twentieth-century novelist to that of a sage. Underpinning such a tendency is the remarkably inexplicable assumption that the writer’s intentions, and opinions, should be considered as sacrosanct in any reading of his work. The attachment which scholars and general readers alike feel towards Nabokov’s body of work is striking. The investment is, it seems, very much personal – and as such the infrequent attempts at addressing the vital issue of ideology have been received with polite disapproval, much in the manner of a minor personal affront. The legacy of this late modernist Russian émigré has become, for most readers, a conduit for a variety of humanistic ideals: kindness, beauty, vague universalistic notions of freedom, the struggle against tyranny – things which are often at odds with the profoundly subjective and tendentious character of the work itself. In the decade which followed Nabokov’s death in 1977, his works found an enthusiastic audience in the Russia he had fled as a teenager. The popularity of his work was immense, and intimately connected

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to the opening up of political discourse during the era of Glasnost. Brian Boyd humorously notes that Nabokov was referred to as ‘the writer of perestroika’ (AY: 662). The near mythological narrative of Nabokov’s life seems, at this point, to assume a certain heroic pathos. The Russian people, brutalized and oppressed for so long under the tyranny of communism, were finally ready to welcome back the errant son who had, with his magical aesthetic gift, spent his life extolling the virtues of a freedom which they had never experienced, but were now ready to embrace whole-heartedly.8 Following the breakup of the Soviet Union a programme of ‘shock-therapy’ free-market reforms was enthusiastically prescribed by the US, its economists and the international financial institutions which they controlled. Almost overnight, the immense assets owned by the state and its citizens were placed in the hands of private individuals, who, in turn, were quick to establish a form of government which is indistinguishable from gangsterism. Between the years 1991 and 2000, it is now estimated that a million working-age men died; there was an exponential increase in the death rate due to widespread unemployment, a direct result of mass privatization.9 Contemporary Russian society is one where democracy is ‘managed’, elections are bought, the organs of mass-media are owned and controlled by the state, journalists and leaders of the political opposition are murdered and imprisoned with the collusion of state security services, and one which

8

9

As a brief aside, it is interesting to note Nina Kurscheva, Imagining Nabokov: Russian Between Art and Politics (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007). A work written by a scion of the Soviet Establishment who has re-invented herself as a peculiarly Russian-American neo-liberal, it purports to be a treatise on how Nabokov can be ‘a literary manual for our everyday life on the road from the impractical Russian intellectual to the efficient, pragmatic, Western individual’. The work itself proceeds along the lines of how Nabokov (‘a model for international success’) can teach contemporary Russians to be less backward, and to put ‘literature to practical use’ in the post-communist era. Its own ideological wishful thinking is self-evident, and indicative of one of the many ways in which Nabokov has been received in contemporary Russia. David Stuckler et al., ‘Mass privatisation and the post-communist mortality crisis: A cross-national analysis’, The Lancet, Vol. 373, No. 9661 (2009), 399–407.

194 Conclusion

is ruled over by a leader whose own ‘cult of personality’ matches that of his communist forbearers. Had Vladimir Nabokov lived to see his erstwhile homeland liberated from the communism he so despised, and had he witnessed the effects of embracing the Western model of democracy which he championed – then perhaps he would have had cause to reconsider his indifference to the social and economic structure of his ‘ideal state’. The Russian people who so enthusiastically embraced Nabokov, as one old regime was collapsing around them, no doubt sought in his work the promise of a new world – one in which a ‘rigid’ moralism assigns ‘sovereign power to tenderness, talent and pride’ (SO: 164). Yet such vagaries of human freedom are seldom enough to oppose the monolithic power of ideology, and their own power has proved to be merely illusory. Perhaps, then, the time has come for us to finally unburden ourselves of the illusion that the aesthetic consideration of literature, deprived of its ideological context, is capable of teaching us about much of the world and our place within it.

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196 Bibliography Blackwell, Stephen H., ‘Nabokov’s Wiener-schnitzel Dreams: Despair and AntiFreudian Poetics’, Nabokov Studies, Vol. 7 (2002/2003) (Davidson: International Vladimir Nabokov Society and Davidson College), 129–150. Bloch, Ernst, ‘Discussing Expressionism’, in Aesthetics and Politics, trans. Ronald Taylor (London: Verso, 1977). Blok, Alexander, ‘Rossyia’ (1908), Sobranie Sochinenii v Dvenadtsati Tomakh (Moskva:  Progress-Pleiada). Bourdieu, Pierre, Outline of a Theory of Practise, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 15. Boyd, Brian, ‘“Welcome to the Block”: Priglashenie na kazn’/Invitation to a Beheading, A Documentary Record’, in Julian Connolly, ed., Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading: A Critical Companion (Evanston, IL Northwestern University Press, 1997), 140–179. Brecht, Bertolt, ‘The Modern Theatre is the Epic Theatre’ (1930), ín Vassiliki Kolocotroni, Jane Goldman and Olga Taxidou, eds, Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998), 465–470. Brooke, Rupert, ‘The Old Vicarage, Grantchester’ (1914), The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke (New York: John Lane, 1916). Casanova, Pascale, The World Republic of Letters (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005). Caulton, Andrew, The Absolute Solution: Nabokov’s Response to Tyranny, 1938 (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2013). Connolly, Julian W., ‘From Biography to Autobiography and Back: The Fictionalization of The Narrated Self in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight’, Cycnos, Vol. 10, No. 1, Nabokov: Autobiography, Biography and Fiction (Nice: Université de NiceSophia Antipolis, Department d’Etudes Anglophones, 1993), 39–46. Couturier, Maurice, Nabokov’s Eros and the Poetics of Desire (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). Craig, Cairns, Yeats, Eliot, Pound and the Politics of Poetry: Richest to the Richest (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1982). Davydov, Sergei, ‘The Gift: Nabokov’s Aesthetic Exorcism of Chernyshevskii’, in Canadian-American Slavic Studies, Vol. 19, No.3 (Boston: Brill Publishing, 1985), 357–374. , ‘Invitation to a Beheading’, in Vladimir E. Alexandrov, ed., The Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov (New York: Garland, 1995). Diment, Galya, ‘Plays’, in Vladimir E. Alexandrov, ed., The Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov (New York: Garland, 1995), 586–599. , Pniniad: Vladimir Nabokov and Marc Szeftel (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997).

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Index

Adorno, Theodor  16–17, 132 aesthetic autonomy  22, 41, 121, 127–129, 149–150, 157–159, 189 Althusser, Louis  9–18, 25, 90, 104, 125, 135, 136, 146, 191 America  78, 135, 165, 178–179, 182, 186–18, 190 anti-Semitism  5, 19 Bakhtin, Mikhail  10, 130–131, 140 Beckett, Samuel  17 Bely, Andrei  5, 7, 8, 37, 68, 74, 79–80, 87, 145, 168 Benda, Julien  155–156 Benjamin, Walter  126 Berlin  7, 26, 28–29, 33, 34, 73, 83, 124, 150, 172 Berman, Harold  49 Berman, Marshall  57 Berthe, Edouard  155–156 Black Hundred  5 Bloch, Ernst  8 Blok, Alexander  7–8, 14, 68, 74, 80, 145 Bloom, Allan  189 Bolshevism  1, 2, 14, 29–30, 34, 38, 39, 74, 102 Bourdieu, Pierre  152 Brecht, Bertolt  27–28, 51 Chernyshevsky, Nikolai  21, 93, 109, 110, 120, 121, 123, 125, 127, 130, 137, 139–145, 148–149, 167 Cincinnatus, Lucius Quinctius conservative  6, 37, 54, 55, 91, 130, 146, 158, 164, 178, 183, 189 Cornell University  158, 165, 179, 187

Dostoevsky, Fyodor  76–82, 87, 130–131 England  65, 168, 169, 172 epic theatre  27 epistemology  7, 11, 21, 57–58, 69, 71–72, 82, 99, 118, 120, 148, 151 ‘false consciousness’  3, 8, 12, 17, 42, 54, 135 fascism  6, 8, 14, 17, 74, 78, 151, 156–157, 164 Flaubert, Gustave  83, 145, 136, 165, 190 Fondaminsky, Ilya  169 see also Sovremennye zapiski foreign policy  54, 190 Freud, Sigmund  12–13, 21, 41, 47, 58 – 60, 62–63, 74, 75–76, 87–91 ‘General Intellect’  85–87, 90, 120 Gesamtkunstwerk  27 Gnosticism 96–99 Gorky, Maxim  111–116, 120 Hegel, G. W. F  11–12, 143, 144–148, 179–180, 184–185, 190 historiography 16 homosexuality  64–67, 77, 89–90, 162 ideology  90, 117, 121, 125–126, 128, 136, 152, 158, 166 in previous scholarship  3, 6 in Marxist theory  9–19 interpellation  25, 51, 125, 126, 152 Jameson, Fredric  12, 13, 14–17

202 Index Kafka, Franz  95 Khodasevich, Vladislav  1, 4, 15, 55, 93 Kojève, Alexander  145–147 Lacan, Jacques  12–13, 15, 25, 135, 146, 159, 165, 190 Lenin, Vladimir  9, 86, 93, 109–111, 120, 130, 142, 148, 151, 158 Lewis, Wyndham  14, 19–20, 155–156, 177 Lolita  20, 23, 32, 70, 187 Lukacs, Georg  10, 16–20, 51, 126, 132, 136, 139, 146, 158–159 Macherey, Pierre  18, 183 Madame Bovary see Flaubert, Gustave Mandelstam, Osip  116 Marx, Karl  3, 10–11, 12, 15–16, 19, 21, 27, 68, 74–75, 82–88 Mayakovsky, Vladimir  27 memory  59, 68–70, 90, 157, 165, 174–175, 188 Merezhkovsky, Dmitry  8, 68, 74 Meyerhold, Vsevolod  26–27, 51 mythology  21, 59–60, 62–63, 69, 70–73, 87–90, 120–121, 155 Nabokov, Dmitri (son)  32 Nabokov, Sergei (brother)  77, 89 Nabokov, Véra (wife)  168–171 Nabokov, Vladimir Dmitrievich (father)  5, 7, 64, 138, 182, 185–186 Nietzsche, Friedrich  12, 80–82, 131 Nouvelle Vague  29 Novaya Ekonomischeskaya Politika (NEP)  29, 111 otherworld, the  4, 58, 71, 73, 96–98 Panova, Vera  116 Paris  140, 157, 159, 161–162, 169–170

perestroika 193 Piscator, Erwin  27–28, 33 poetry  8, 19, 116, 174–175 poshlust  31, 131–132, 134 psychopathology  60, 63, 65, 88 reification  10, 16, 17, 19, 132, 134, 139 Russian Symbolism  7, 21, 26, 58–59, 67–69, 71–72, 79, 82, 90 see also Silver Age Schoenberg, Arnold  17 Schopenhauer, Arthur  91, 105–106, 117–120 Second World War, the  52, 127, 145, 184, 191 sentimentality  15, 158, 174–175, 178–179 Silver Age  25, 68 Sirin  67–68 Socialist Realism  78, 103, 108–109, 111–112, 114–117, 130, 139, 142, 157, 177, 191 Solovyov, Vladimir  80, 145 Solzhenitsyn, Alexander  5, 9 Sorel, Georges  155 Soviet fiction  21, 30, 83, 111, 113, 116–117, 190–191 Sovremennye zapiski  140, 169 Stalin, Joseph  29, 37, 50, 103, 111, 116, 118 Stanislavsky, Konstantin  25–26 Switzerland  20, 178–179, 181, 183, 192 Tarboritsky, Sergei  168 Tolstoy, Count Alexei  5, 7, 37–38, 85 Tolstoy, Leo  38, 83, 129 ‘totality’, concept of  11–12, 27–28, 143 Trinity device  46 Tsar  33, 108, 179

203

Index universalism  88, 99, 186 utopia  50, 52, 102, 126, 132, 133, 134, 139, 152

Wilson, Edmund  7, 13, 64, 68, 93, 109–110

Voloshinov, Valentin  10

Zamyatin, Yvgeny  95 Zhdanov, Andrei  107–108, 120 Žižek, Slavoj  9, 86

White Russian  5, 8, 38–39, 61, 76, 85, 190

CULTURAL HISTORY AND LITERARY IMAGINATION EDITED BY CHRISTIAN J. EMDEN & DAVID MIDGLEY EDITORIAL BOARD: RODRIGO CACHO, SARAH COLVIN, KENNETH LOISELLE AND HEATHER WEBB This series promotes critical inquiry into the relationship between the literary imagination and its cultural, intellectual or political contexts. The series encourages the investigation of the role of the literary imagination in cultural history and the interpretation of cultural history through literature, visual culture and the performing arts. Contributions of a comparative or interdisciplinary nature are particularly welcome. Individual volumes might, for example, be concerned with any of the following: •

The mediation of cultural and historical memory,

•

The material conditions of particular cultural manifestations,

•

The construction of cultural and political meaning,

•

Intellectual culture and the impact of scientific thought,

•

The methodology of cultural inquiry,

• Intermediality, •

Intercultural relations and practices.

Acceptance is subject to advice from our editorial board, and all proposals and manuscripts undergo a rigorous peer review assessment prior to publication. The usual language of publication is English, but proposals in the other languages shown below will also be considered.

For French studies, contact Kenneth Loiselle



For German studies, contact Sarah Colvin



For Hispanic studies, contact Rodrigo Cacho



For Italian studies, contact Heather Webb

Vol. 1 Christian Emden & David Midgley (eds): Cultural Memory and Historical Consciousness in the German-Speaking World Since 1500. Papers from the C­ onference ‘The Fragile Tradition’, Cambridge 2002. Vol. 1. 316 pp., 2004. ISBN 3-03910-160-9 / US-ISBN 0-8204-6970-X Vol. 2 Christian Emden & David Midgley (eds): German Literature, History and the Nation. Papers from the C­ onference ‘The Fragile Tradition’, Cambridge 2002. Vol. 2. 393 pp., 2004. ISBN 3-03910-169-2 / US-ISBN 0-8204-6979-3 Vol. 3 Christian Emden & David Midgley (eds): Science, Technology and the German Cultural Imagination. Papers from the C­ onference ‘The Fragile Tradition’, ­Cambridge 2002. Vol. 3. 319 pp., 2005. ISBN 3-03910-170-6 / US-ISBN 0-8204-6980-7 Vol. 4 Anthony Fothergill: Secret Sharers. Joseph Conrad’s Cultural Reception in Germany. 274 pp., 2006. ISBN 3-03910-271-0 / US-ISBN 0-8204-7200-X Vol. 5 Silke Arnold-de Simine (ed.): Memory Traces. 1989 and the Question of German Cultural Identity. 343 pp., 2005. ISBN 3-03910-297-4 / US-ISBN 0-8204-7223-9 Vol. 6 Renata Tyszczuk: In Hope of a Better Age. Stanislas Leszczynski in Lorraine 1737-1766. 410 pp., 2007. ISBN 978-3-03910-324-9 Vol. 7 Christian Emden, Catherine Keen & David Midgley (eds): Imagining the City, Volume 1. The Art of Urban Living. 344 pp., 2006. ISBN 3-03910-532-9 / US-ISBN 0-8204-7536-X Vol. 8 Christian Emden, Catherine Keen & David Midgley (eds): Imagining the City, Volume 2. The Politics of Urban Space. 383 pp., 2006. ISBN 3-03910-533-7 / US-ISBN 0-8204-7537-8 Vol. 9 Christian J. Emden and Gabriele Rippl (eds): ImageScapes. Studies in Intermediality. 289 pp., 2010. ISBN 978-3-03910-573-1 Vol. 10 Alasdair King: Hans Magnus Enzensberger. Writing, Media, Democracy. 357 pp., 2007. ISBN 978-3-03910-902-9 Vol. 11 Ulrike Zitzlsperger: ZeitGeschichten: Die Berliner Übergangsjahre. Zur Verortung der Stadt nach der Mauer. 241 pp., 2007. ISBN 978-3-03911-087-2

Vol. 12 Alexandra Kolb: Performing Femininity. Dance and Literature in German Modernism. 330pp., 2009. ISBN 978-3-03911-351-4 Vol. 13 Carlo Salzani: Constellations of Reading. Walter Benjamin in Figures of Actuality. 388pp., 2009. ISBN 978-3-03911-860-1 Vol. 14 Monique Rinere: Transformations of the German Novel. Simplicissimus in Eighteenth-Century Adaptations. 273pp., 2009. ISBN 978-3-03911-896-0 Vol. 15 Katharina Hall and Kathryn N. Jones (eds): Constructions of Conflict. Transmitting Memories of the Past in European Historiography, Culture and Media. 282pp., 2011. ISBN 978-3-03911-923-3 Vol. 16 Ingo Cornils and Sarah Waters (eds): Memories of 1968. International Perspectives. 396pp., 2010. ISBN 978-3-03911-931-8 Vol. 17 Anna O’ Driscoll: Constructions of Melancholy in Contemporary German and Austrian Literature. 263pp., 2013. ISBN 978-3-0343-0733-8 Vol. 18 Martin Modlinger and Philipp Sonntag (eds): Other People’s Pain. Narratives of Trauma and the Question of Ethics. 252pp., 2011. ISBN 978-3-0343-0260-9 Vol. 19 Ian Cooper and Bernhard F. Malkmus (eds): Dialectic and Paradox. Configurations of the Third in Modernity. 265pp., 2013. ISBN 978-3-0343-0714-7 Vol. 20 Kristina Mendicino and Betiel Wasihun (eds): Playing False. Representations of Betrayal. 355pp., 2013. ISBN 978-3-0343-0867-0 Vol. 21 Guy Tourlamain: Völkisch Writers and National Socialism. A Study of RightWing Political Culture in Germany, 1890–1960. 394pp., 2014. ISBN 978-3-03911-958-5 Vol. 22 Ricarda Vidal and Ingo Cornils (eds): Alternative Worlds. Blue-Sky Thinking since 1900. 343pp., 2015. ISBN 978-3-0343-1787-0

Vol. 23 Henriette Steiner and Kristin Veel (eds): Invisibility Studies. Surveillance, Transparency and the Hidden in Contemporary Culture. 388pp., 2015. ISBN 978-3-0343-0985-1 Vol. 24 Bernd Fischer and May Mergenthaler (eds): Cultural Transformations of the Public Sphere. Contemporary and Historical Perspectives. 349pp., 2015. ISBN 978-3-0343-0991-2 Vol. 25 Marjorie Gehrhardt: The Men with Broken Faces. Gueules Cassées of the First World War. 309pp., 2015. ISBN 978-3-0343-1869-3 Vol. 26 David Walton and Juan A. Suárez (eds): Contemporary Writing and the Politics of Space. Borders, Networks, Escape Lines. 302pp., 2017. ISBN 978-3-0343-2205-8 Vol. 27 Robert Craig and Ina Linge (eds): Biological Discourses. The Language of Science and Literature Around 1900. 448pp., 2017. ISBN 978-1-906165-78-9 Vol. 28 Rebecca Waese: When Novels Perform History. Dramatizing the Past in Australian and Canadian Literature. 272pp., 2017. ISBN 978-1-906165-84-0 Vol. 29 Udith Dematagoda: Vladimir Nabokov and the Ideological Aesthetic. A Study of his Novels and Plays, 1926–1939. 222pp., 2017. ISBN 978-1-78707-289-3