Natasha's Dance (90 page)

    publication of his first great novel,
The Luzhin Defence,
in 1930, ‘a great Russian writer had been born, like a phoenix from the ashes of the Revolution and exile. Our existence acquired a new meaning. All my generation were justified. We were saved.’
⁵⁰

    Exile was Nabokov’s omnipresent theme, though he discovered the ‘sorrows and delights of nostalgia’ long before the Revolution had removed the scenery of his early years.
⁵¹
Nabokov was born in 1899, the elder son of a highly cultured and prominently liberal aristocratic family from St Petersburg who fled Russia in 1919. His grandfather, Dmitry Nabokov, had been Minister of Justice in the final years of Alexander II’s reign, when the Emperor had considered the adoption of a liberal constitution in the European mould. Until his dismissal in 1885, he had opposed the attempts by Alexander III to overturn the liberal judicial reforms of 1864. The writer’s father, V. D. Nabokov, was a well-known liberal lawyer and an influential member of the Kadet (Constitutional Democratic) Party in the First Duma of 1906. He had drafted the abdication manifesto of the Grand Duke Mikhail, briefly invited to assume the throne in the February Revolution of 1917, which brought the monarchy to an official end. He had also been head of the Chancellery in the Provisional Government, a sort of executive secretary to the cabinet, and had played a leading role in formulating the electoral system of the Constituent Assembly. The Bolshevik seizure of power forced the Nabokovs to leave Russia, moving first to London and then to Berlin, where the writer’s father was the editor of the newspaper
Rul’
until his assassination by a Russian monarchist in 1922. Throughout his career as a Russian writer in Europe Nabokov kept the pen name ‘Sirin’ (the name of a legendary bird of paradise in Russian mythology) to set himself apart from his famous father in the emigre community.

    The Nabokov family was strongly Anglophile. Its
mansion in St Petersburg was filled with ‘the comfortable products of Anglo-Saxon civilization’, Nabokov wrote in
Speak, Memory:

    Pears’ soap, tar-black when dry, topaz-like when held to the light between wet fingers, took care of one’s morning bath. Pleasant was the decreasing weight of the English collapsible tub when it was made to protrude a rubber underlip and disgorge its frothy contents into the slop pail. ‘We could not improve the

    cream, so we improved the tube,’ said the English toothpaste. At breakfast, Golden Syrup imported from London would entwist with its glowing coils the revolving spoon from which enough of it had slithered on to a piece of Russian bread and butter. All sorts of snug, mellow things came in a steady procession from the English shop on Nevski Avenue: fruitcakes, smelling salts, playing cards, picture puzzles, striped blazers, talcum-white tennis balls.
⁵²

    Nabokov was taught to read English before he could read his native tongue. He and his brother and sister were looked after by ‘a bewildering sequence of English nurses and governesses’, who read them
Little Lord Fauntleroy;
and later by a mademoiselle who read to the children
Les Malbeurs de Sophie, Le Tour du Monde en Quatre-vingts Jours
and
Le Comte de Monte Cristo.
In a sense Nabokov was brought up as an emigre. As a schoolboy he would set himself apart, imagining himself as an ‘exiled poet who longed for a remote, sad and - unquenchable Russia’.
⁵³
Pushkin was Nabokov’s inspiration. Many of the heroes in his novels were meant to be the poet in disguise. Nabokov saw himself as Pushkin’s heir. So much so, in fact, that when, at the age of eighteen, Nabokov found himself a refugee in the Crimea, where his family had fled the Bolsheviks, he took inspiration from the image of himself as a romantic exile, wandering in the footsteps of Pushkin, who had been sent into exile a hundred years before. His first published collections of poems,
The Empyrean Path
(1923),contains an epigraph from Pushkin’s poem ‘Anon’ on the title page.

    From the Crimea the family sailed to England, where Nabokov completed his education at Trinity College, Cambridge, between 1919 and 1922. The reality of post-war England was a long way from the Anglo-Saxon dreamworld of the Nabokov mansion in St Petersburg. The rooms at Trinity were cold and damp, the food unspeakable, and the student clubs were full of naive socialists, like the pipe-smoking ‘Nesbit’ in
Speak, Memory
who saw only bad in Russia’s past and only good in the Bolsheviks.* Nabokov grew homesick. ‘The story of my college years in England is really the story of my trying to become

    * Nabokov later identified R. A. (‘Rab’) Butler, the future Tory Deputy Prime Minister and ‘a frightful bore’, as the man behind the mask of R. Nesbit Bain in
Speak, Memory
(B. Boyd,
Nabokov: The Russian Years
(London, 1990), p. 1 68).

    a Russian writer’, he recalled. ‘I had the feeling that Cambridge and all its famed features - venerable elms, blazoned windows, loquacious tower clocks - were of no consequence in themselves but existed merely to frame and support my rich nostalgia.’
⁵⁴

    The focus of Nabokov’s longing for Russia was the family estate at Vyra, near St Petersburg. It contained his childhood memories. In
Speak, Memory
he claimed to have felt his first pangs of nostalgia at the tender age of five, when, on holiday in Europe, ‘I would draw with my forefinger on my pillow the carriage road sweeping up to our Vyra house.’
⁵⁵
The pain of losing Vyra was acute - perhaps more acute than the loss of much of the family wealth or the loss of his homeland, which Nabokov hardly knew, apart from Vyra and St Petersburg. In
Speak, Memory
he emphasizes the point.

    The following passage is not for the general reader, but for the particular idiot who, because he lost a fortune in some crash, thinks he understands me.

    My old (since 1917) quarrel with the Soviet dictatorship is wholly unrelated to any question of property. My contempt for the emigre who ‘hates the Reds’ because they ‘stole’ his money and land is complete. The nostalgia I have been cherishing all these years is a hypertrophied sense of lost childhood, not sorrow for lost banknotes.

    And finally: I reserve for myself the right to yearn after an ecological niche:

    … Beneath the sky Of my America to sigh For
one
locality in Russia.

    The general reader may now resume.
⁵⁶

    From the gloom of Cambridge - where the porridge at breakfast in Trinity College was ‘as grey and dull as the sky above Great Court’ -he wrote to his mother, who had settled in Berlin, in October 1920:

    Mother, dear, yesterday I woke up in the middle of the night and asked someone
-
I don’t know whom - the night, the stars, God: will I really never return, is it really all finished, wiped out, destroyed? Mother, we must return, mustn’t we, it cannot be that all this has died, turned to dust - such an idea could drive one mad. I would like to describe every little bush, every stalk in our

    divine park at Vyra - but no one can understand this. How little we valued our paradise! - we should have loved it more pointedly, more consciously.
⁵⁷

    This nostalgia for Vyra was the inspiration for
Speak, Memory,
in which he lovingly describes its ‘every little bush’ in an effort to recover his childhood memories and desires. It was a sort of Proustian discourse on the sinuosity of time and consciousness. Nabokov’s ‘memory’ was a creative act, a reanimation of the past which blended with the present through association, and was then transfigured into personality and art. He once wrote that the exile has a sharper sense of time. His extraordinary capacity to re-create through words the sensations of the past was surely his own exile’s dividend.

    Exile is a leitmotif throughout Nabokov’s works.
Mary,
his first novel, published in Berlin in 1926, was intended as a portrait of the emigre condition, even if Nabokov, in his introduction to the English version in 1970, stressed its autobiographical nature. Ganin, the hero, in yearning for Mary, becomes an emblem of the exile’s dream: the hope of retrieving and reliving the lost happiness of his youth in Russia. In
Glory
(1932) the hero, Martin Edelweiss, a Russian emigre from the Crimea who is studying at Cambridge University, dreams of returning to Russia. His fantasies take shape as he travels to Berlin and ventures through the woods to cross the Russian border, never to return. The subject of
The Gift
(1938) is equally the ‘gloom and glory of exile’.
⁵⁸
It is the theme of all Nabokov’s Russian-language novels (of which there are nine). Their tragic characters are emigres, lost and isolated in a foreign world or haunted by a past which is irretrievable except through the creative memory of fantasy or art. In
The Gift
its hero, the writer Fedor Godunov-Cherdyntsev, re-creates the literary life of Russia through his poetry. In
Glory
and
Pale Fire
(written in English in 1962) the hero lives in a dreamworld Russia to escape the misery of his exile. Nabokov’s thoughts about the ‘distant Northern land’ he called Zembla in
Pale Fire
reveal the writer’s response to exile:

    1. The image of Zembla must creep up on the reader very gradually… 4. Nobody knows, nobody should know - even Kinbote hardly knows - if Zembla really exists.

    5. Zembla and its characters should remain in a fluid misty condition…

    6. We do not even know whether Zembla is pure invention or a kind of lyrical simile of Russia (Zembla:
Zemlya
[the Russian word for ‘land’]).
⁵⁹

    In the first of Nabokov’s English-language novels,
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
(1941), the exile theme appears in a different form: the split identity. The hero, Sebastian, is the subject of a biography, ostensibly written by his brother, who gradually emerges as the real Sebastian. This sense of confusion and inner division was experienced by many emigres. Khodasevich writes very movingly about it in ‘Sorrento Photographs’ (in his collection of poems
European Nights
(1922-7)), in which he compares the exile’s divided consciousness, the confusion in his mind of images from his two lives at home and abroad, to the double exposure of a film.

    Nabokov’s switch from writing in Russian to writing in English is a complicated story intimately linked with his adoption of a new (American) identity. It must have been a painful switch, as Nabokov, who was famous for his showmanship, always liked to stress. It was, he said, ‘like learning to handle things after losing seven or eight fingers in an explosion’.
⁶⁰
Throughout his life Nabokov complained about the handicap of writing in English - perhaps too often to be totally believed (he once confessed in a letter to a friend that his ‘best work was written in English’).
⁶¹
Even at the height of his literary prowess he argues, in his 1956 afterword to
Lolita,
that it had been his ‘private tragedy’ to

    abandon my natural idiom, my untrammelled, rich and infinitely docile Russian tongue for a second-rate brand of English, devoid of any of those apparatuses - the baffling mirror, the black velvet backdrop, the implied associations and traditions - which the native illusionist, frac-tails flying, can magically use to transcend the heritage in his own way.
⁶²

    But even if such claims were a form of affectation, his achievement is undeniable. It is extraordinary that a writer who has been hailed as the supreme stylist of the modern English language should have written it as a foreigner. As his wife Vera put it, not only had he ‘switched from a very special and complex brand of Russian, all his own, which he had perfected over the years into something unique and peculiar to

    him’, but he had embraced ‘an English which he then proceeded to wield and bend to his will until it, too, became under his pen something it had never been before in its melody and flexibility’. She came to the conclusion that what he had done was substitute for his passionate affair with the Russian language
un manage de raison
which ‘as it sometimes happens with a
manage de raison
- became in turn a tender love affair’.
⁶³

    Until the Revolution destroyed his plans, Nabokov had set out to become the next Pushkin. In later life he played upon this image of the stymied genius, even if in fact his English writing style, which he had developed since the age of five, had always been as good as, if not better than, his Russian one. But once he was in exile Nabokov had a sense of writing in a void. Liberated from the Soviet regime, he began to feel that the freedom he enjoyed was due to his working
in vacuo
- without readers or a public context in which to write - so that ‘the whole thing acquired a certain air of fragile unreality’.
⁶⁴
(Tsvetaeva expressed a similar despair - although in her case, without another language to fall back on, it signalled a more profound private tragedy: ‘From a world where my poems were as necessary as bread I came into a world where no one needs poems, neither my poems nor any poems, where poems are needed like - dessert: if anyone - needs - dessert…’)
⁶⁵

    The need for an audience was the fundamental motive of Nabokov’s switch. As he himself explained, a writer ‘needs some reverberation, if not a response’.
⁶⁶
His Russian-language reading public was reduced in size with every passing year, as the children of the emigres became assimilated into the culture in which they lived. It was virtually impossible for a young Russian writer like Nabokov to make a living from writing alone, and the competition was intense. ‘To get into literature is like squeezing into an overcrowded trolley car. And once inside, you do your best to push off any new arrival who tries to hang on’, complained another writer, Georgy Ivanov.
⁶⁷