Secret Lolita: The Confessions of Victor X (16 page)

Secondly, for all its terseness and the evident speed with which it was put together, this is work that gives a unique insight into Russian morals and mores in the late nineteenth-century. As a contribution to European culture the Russian novel of the nineteenth-century is rivalled only by Russian autobiography: whether Tolstoy's (fictionalised) childhood, or Herzen's, Aksakov's or Gorky's, Russian autobiography gives a more graphic picture of childhood and adolescence than that of any other nation. Victor's confessions have the clarity, the touch of detail, the reflective power of greater writers: they add, or rather they are obsessed with, what is only alluded to in respectable Russian literature - an almost Tahitian sexuality that permeated the childhood of the Russian gentry. Victor's record stands alone. There are, to my knowledge, no similar confessions and no scientific research into Russian sexual behaviour. All the more reason to piece together what we can infer from Victor with the rare insights we can find among other writers, historians and memoirists.

Thirdly, Victor's confessions did make their impact, for all their lying tucked away in an obscure appendix. Not long after the Russian novelist Vladimir Nabokov arrived in the United States and began to transform himself into an American novelist, Edmund Wilson drew his attention to the discovery he had made in the New York Public Library. There are several references to Victor's confessions in Nabokov's work, and a number of preoccupations as well as their common fate as exiles from a lost Russia made it inevitable that Victor should affect Nabokov's own work. Undoubtedly we are most indebted to Victor for his contribution to the theme and plot of
Lolita
and the strange sensuous and intellectual character of Humbert Humbert, the hero of Nabokov's finest English-language novel. This interaction casts an interesting light on Nabokov's own preoccupations with childhood and sexuality, which we can briefly explore.

If we take the confessions first of all as a human document, we realize that there is not a lot about Victor which he himself is not aware of. Both the child and the middle-aged writer share certain traits which underlie everything that happens to him. First of all, Victor is a supremely intellectual animal: curiosity not sensuality prompts him to his precocious sexual activity. His chance reading in a roomful of discarded books forces him to overcome his distaste and to test his theories by experiment. So convinced is he that the mind dominates the body that he asserts that all excessive sexuality stems from an over-active mind and that sexual education stimulates, rather than regulates. As he grows older, his imagination grows more tyrannical until, in the end, sexual intercourse is only grist to his mind to chew over and relish in post-coital masturbation. The second thread that runs through his character is his passivity, so unexpected in a roll-call of male sexual exploits. Victor undertakes almost none of his adventures. He allows, even encourages them to happen by a stance, at first genuine, later feigned, of disbelief and reluctance which provokes the girls and women he encounters to seduce him. Victor becomes trapped in a strange inversion of the usual male-female roles and his passive surrender to circumstances becomes the chief determining force in his tragic life. The central pathos of his account lies in his discovery of freedom and hope when, at the age of nineteen, he moves to Italy, is compelled by the unavailability of clean Italian women to remain chaste and for thirteen years leads what he regards as a normal life. For this respite is a mere trick of fate; the same inertia that allows Victor, so unenterprising, to be chaste and mentally alert for thirteen years leads him back into his slough of despond after just one chance encounter with a pimp in Naples.

There is a real human character built out of these two elements. But there is also something specifically Russian about this characterization, a quality the Russians call
oblomovshchina
after the lethargic hero of Goncharov's great novel,
Oblomov
. Like Victor, Oblomov is shaped by a childhood full of sensual pleasure; like Victor, Oblomov appears to be saved by a sensible fiancée and, like Victor, cannot summon up the energy to shake off his vices and marry her, sinking back instead to a lazy, despairing sensuality. To most Russians
oblomovshchina
is both a dream of happiness and a national vice which they cannot help discerning in themselves.

Together with the cerebration and passivity, Victor shows a strange mixture of ruthlessness and gentleness. He is ruthless in the usual pornographer's way: human beings other than himself barely exist as sentient beings. The women, girls and children he goes to bed with arouse almost no affection, sympathy or even interest beyond that of their physiological reactions. Even the extraordinary Nadya who follows her lover to Siberia or his foster sister Olga who ends up as a convict stir only a few ironic reflections from Victor. He is emotionally handicapped: hence his lukewarm feelings which sometimes make him incapable of love and sometimes incapable of resentment. The lack of resentment makes for surprising gentleness. Victor understates what must have been a traumatic childhood. To grow up the only survivor of eight children may have been less uncommon a hundred years ago than now, but its effects must have been more devastating than Victor admits. He says on several occasions that his parents, however benevolent, took only a casual interest in his welfare; but this observation is, however, surprisingly without rancour. He responds with an equally casual affection that enables him to pass over the death of both mother and father as minor incidents in his life. His freedom is a remarkable loneliness in which other people exist only as shadows. Just as Imperial China had no ministry for Foreign Affairs because it could not conceive of other nations having equal status, so Victor has no channels for friends, lovers or even kinship, unique as he feels himself to be in his existential sexual world.

The isolation is complete. Victor is just as detached from his nationality as from his family. His very facility with foreign languages testifies to his rootlessness. He is ironical, and tellingly so, about Russian national characteristics - the intellectual muddle, the messy egalitarianism - as though he were a foreign visitor; and yet his ambivalence has none of the love-hate intensity that shook so many Russian exiles. He is equally detached about Italy and England. His politics are neither establishment nor radical; he reacts with neither approval nor indignation to the injustices he sees suffered by the Russian peasant girls or Italian working girls. Apart from the physiology and psychology of sex, he becomes animated only by almost scholastic topics such as the mediaeval question of whether the mind dominates the body or vice versa: on academic topics such as the heredity of morals he can become quite excited.

One cannot say about Victor that he would have been nice to know; yet like many such characters he appeals on paper in a way that would be unlikely in real life. Why? Simply because his life is presented as tragedy and it fills us with pity, as well as morbid curiosity and surprise. Victor's story has the necessary fearful symmetry. It has the traditional pattern of the victim running away from fate, only to be overtaken by it in a distant land, of the afflictions that the hero most fears and shuns - gonorrhoea and onanism - catching relentlessly up with him. It has the sense of life prematurely cut short: the confessions have the tone of a suicide note (and in fact there is no trace of Victor after the move to Spain he announces at the end of his story).

Like Greek tragedy, Victor's confessions are not a morality tale. There is no moment of wrong choice or deliberate preference for evil over good. Victor has no absolutes such as good and evil: he has only more primitive values, such as pain or pleasure, peace or turmoil. His 'Brer Rabbit' attitude to life is essentially Euripidean in its despair. Even a vision of possible normal contented marriage that he could have had, if only gonorrhoea had not forced him to renounce his fiancée, is only a a very pallid prospect. The story line is one of involuntary self-destruction, of a beautiful, indulged and brilliant child turned by fate into a diseased exile exposing himself from public urinals. It has in common with pornography only this: it is an attack on sex, which Victor understands to be the agent of the forces that destroy him. And yet the curiosity, the intellectual speculation that drives him to write these confessions stays buoyant right to the end. That allows one to admire as well as feel sorry for Victor. It also entitles one to assert without fear of over-exaggerating that Victor's confessions deserve to stand with such fictional exercises in the genre as Camus'
Fall
.

In its second role as a social and historical document, Victor's confessions are all the more valuable for the absence of anything comparable in literature about Russia. There is no shortage of traveller's accounts, usually stings of scorpion-like ingratitude, of everyday life in Tsarist Russia; equally numerous are Russian memoirs and autobiographies. These give a varied but consistent picture of economic, political, geographical and intellectual life. But the travellers were unable and the memoirists unwilling to give us any picture of intimate life comparable even to the limited scope of Victor's narrative.

Victor was certainly aware of his uniqueness and rather relishes demolishing his west European readers' view of Russia. He points out quite rightly that the western intellectual's view of Russia is coloured by his reading of great writers and thinkers such as Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky; thus Russia is assumed to be a country preoccupied by Christian questions of the purpose of life, the existence of God, the need for personal salvation. As Victor asserts, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky are exceptional, not typical and, as his life proves, there is a terrible vacuum (or an exhilarating freedom) in the outlook of the educated Russian, in contrast to the prejudices, sense of duty and religious values which form the basis of a westerner's outlook. This is what Joseph Conrad, with virulent hostility, called the 'cynicism' of Russia - both in its establishment and in its radicals. Christianity, above all, played almost no part in the outlook of most Russians of Victor and Victor's parents' background. Hence their openmindedness and susceptibility (or vulnerability) to wholly alien ways of thinking and acting.

The Russians, especially the nationalist Slavophile thinkers, had an explanation for this emptiness. Their interpretation of Russian history was that Peter the Great, in the beginning of the eighteenth century, had destroyed one culture without creating another when he dragged Russia out of the middle ages, without a renaissance, into modern times. The church was emasculated and reduced to a department of the state. Private ethics were disregarded and political expediency became the only arbiter. Western attributes - clothes, alcoholic drinks, women's social freedom, attitudes to love between the sexes, to honour etc. - were borrowed and grafted without any thought to their real undertones or their incompatibility with the old attitudes they ousted. Not just the church, but any ordered system of values was discarded. The educated Russian gentry latched on to the luminaries of the new century with eagerness bordering on despair for certainty. Hence the views of Voltaire, with their strange mixture of scepticism, charity, cynicism and rationalism, became the formative basis of several generations of Russian intellectuals: Voltaire's principles of non-interference and non-competence still shine out in Victor's father's forbearance when confronted with his son's debauchery.

As Victor tries to show, the class from which he sprung was not to be compared with anything superficially similar in western Europe. On the one hand, it was a nobility (the
dvoryanstvo
); but unlike the aristocracy of the west, it had no great self-esteem, and certainly no code of conduct such as honour or chivalry to inculcate in its offspring. On the other hand, many from this class were professional people - bank directors, government officials, scientists as in Victor's family - as well as landowners; but unlike the middle classes, the bourgeoisie of the west, they had no strong economic or religious motives for a strict morality and respect for heredity and paternity. It was from this class, as well as the déclassés, that much of the Russian intelligentsia sprang.

If in England, as W. H. Auden put it, 'to the man in the street… the word intellectual… suggests a man who's untrue to his wife', the Russians took a rather loftier view of the term. The title 'intellectual' was the base for all sorts of extensions - 'bearers of ideas', 'life teachers' - which made its owner proud to be one. It automatically denoted someone who questioned established rules and order, to whom any scientifically unproven belief was a prejudice to be extirpated. The result, as Victor and Russian history both show, was contradictory and destructive. The Russian intellectual gentry disowned the social structure on which they depended for their own prosperity and freedom of thought and action. Historically, they wrote themselves off as surely as did Victor. There is irony in Victor's father and mother both hoping for Russian to be defeated in the Russo-Turkish war of 1877, espousing fiercely liberal principles, while relying at the same time on income from their landholdings and the cheap services of peasantry, who were still little better than serfs, to maintain their status and bring up their children.

There are many factors that determine the sexual morality of a country: climate, life expectancy, religion, laws of inheritance, technology, communications, patterns of settlement (nomad or arable). But one powerful factor is the class structure. The availability of cheap prostitutes in England, slavery in the southern United States and serfdom in Russia all affected very markedly the sexual morality of both oppressors and the oppressed. In Victor's day the peasantry had been nominally free human beings for a generation, but in practice the dependency of the country people on the powers of the nobility (now as employers or officials instead of their owners) was all-embracing. Though they were no longer vassals, they were servants, often not free to leave their village, liable unlike the gentry to corporal punishment and conscription.