Secret Lolita: The Confessions of Victor X (18 page)

There is certainly a natural fastidiousness among the great Russian novelists. Turgenev, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy are all concerned with sexual passion but, like their English contemporaries and unlike their French contemporaries, they were able to deal with sexual love without ever describing sexual intercourse. This was not because they felt such a description would have been forbidden, but because it had become a cliché in the French novels which were widely read in the original and in Russian translation, and the Russian novel had its own fields to clear and conquer. Nor was it because the Russian novelists ignored sex: sex is the bugbear of Tolstoy and his heroes in his later work of the 1880s and 1890s, and both his stories and his essays on morality are obsessed with the need to overcome and suppress the sexual instinct.

In Victor's youth the traditions of Russian licentious literature (pornography is perhaps too severe a term) were only dormant. Pushkin and Lermontov were notorious for a number of narrative poems full of erotic and blasphemous burlesque which complement a canon of literature starting with the eighteenth-century Barkov, whose work does not compare unfavourably with
Eskimo Nell
. It was the sense of humour, rather than the interest in the erotic which had disappeared.

As he writes, Victor remarks that Russian writers such as Artsybashev are now producing work to rival the eroticism of the French. But Victor, cut off from his homeland in Italy, does not seem to have noticed that he was not the only one of his contemporaries in Russia to be obsessed by sex. Nor does he notice that in Dostoyevsky, too, there is a recurrent motif of the man driven to suicide by memories of his sexual abuse of a child: Svidrigaylov in
Crime and Punishment
, Stavrogin in
The Devils
. (Whether he would have been consoled by these literary precedents is, of course, open to doubt.) But two of Victor's contemporaries, both heavily influenced by Dostoyevsky, stand out. One is the poet, playwright and inspector of schools, the 'decadent' Sologub, whose poetry is full of sado-masochistic fantasy and whose best novel,
The Petty Demon
, suppurates with paedophilia. The other is a still little known giant of Russian prose, Rozanov, a diarist, essayist, prose-poet, whose notoriety as a political journalist was just beginning to turn into respect for a great melancholic as Victor was finishing his confessions.

Rozanov, like Victor, had a sexual baptism of fire, though he began, rather then ended, with onanism. After a short and horrible marriage to Dostoyevsky's former mistress Apollinaria Suslova (Rozanov's tribute to Dostoyevsky's memory), he settled into a relatively happy common-law marriage. Instead of Victor's mediaeval despair at the damage to spirit and vitality caused by sexual debilitation, Rozanov dreamt of ways of revaluing sexuality. It is noticeable that he could find no Russian literature on the subject. Rozanov's writings on inversion and bisexuality are all drawn from German and Austrian sources. Rozanov fantasized of a patriarchal, but tolerant world in which homosexuals would be recognised as a sort of creative monastic community, in which prostitution would be reorganised into an idyllic, almost religious evening ritual and in which the onanist would find a way out of his isolation and melancholy.

It must be said that Victor is unusually out of sympathy with his homeland and compatriots: his position as an outsider often makes him a better observer. Certainly in his Pauline view of sex, in his fear of perversion (other than paedophilia) he is not typically Russian. Even in mediaeval times, Russian moralists were less keen to distinguish normal from abnormal sexual behaviour. In the nineteenth century we find (in Tolstoy's diaries, for example) many incidents of bi-sexual behaviour that do not seem to make those involved anxious about their normality. Tchaikovsky's homosexual unhappiness and the terrible end which, as the latest evidence suggests, it led to, stands out as an anomaly in nineteenth-century Russia. Only in the 1900s, when fashionable cults of decadence and inversion were borrowed from Pierre Louÿs and Oscar Wilde did homosexuality emerge as a distinct cult and culture in Russia. Among most Russians there was a laissez-faire attitude to sexuality that made such cases as Victor's relatively unusual.

Not that Victor's paedophilia ever becomes a cult, such as Sologub's novels tend towards. Victor is alone even in his preferences, he does not attribute any superior beauty, purity or interest to his young girls; they merely spare him the grossness and carnality which he finds frightening in adult women. Had Victor stayed in Russia he might have found in the decadent movement a way to justify and poeticize his sexual predilections.

But Victor is more than a relic of a bygone age. He may provide us with a window into the back room of a house which we used to know only by its façade, but some of his observations hold true for Russia today. There is more continuity between Tsarist Russia and Soviet Russia than is generally allowed. The peasantry is often just as demoralized and just as beholden to their rulers on the collective farm as on the great landholdings of the nineteenth century. There is arguably just as great a gap between the oligarchs and technocrats of Soviet society on the one hand and the masses of manual workers on the other hand as there was in Victor's time, with the same disparate enjoyment of privilege of living space, and of freedom of movement and the same exploitation. The same overcrowding and lack of privacy, primitive medical facilities, the same rivers of vodka undo any orderly model of sexuality.

In one important respect, the revolution changed a great deal: the intellectual ferment which brought Victor's contemporaries into an anarchic moral world of their own, antagonistic to that of the authorities, is quite inconceivable in today's Soviet schools. No longer are pupils' private lives their own. Typical Russian parents may affect the same tolerance as Victor's parents, but the state now regiments the pupils' holidays, evenings and week-ends so that the formation of a spontaneous peer group of boys and girls to work out their own relationships is impossible. Even in the universities, free association amounts to dissidence. The sexuality of a Soviet university hostel is often a bestial snatching of brief opportunities which makes the affairs of Victor and his schoolfriends seem courtly by comparison.

In other ways the lack of progress and change are amazing. Abortion may be available on demand in the Soviet Union, but under such painful and dangerous conditions that only the reckless or desperate would choose it. Nor is there any effort to provide acceptable contraception, so that the separation of procreation and sexuality has still to be achieved in the Soviet Union. The ease of divorce and remarriage in modern Russia does little to make it seem less bleak than Victor's world.

After the revolution the exiled Russian communities of Berlin, Paris and Prague recollected their childhood with all the more intensity. The memoirs of the 1920s and 1930s, or fictionalized childhood such as those of Nabokov's Russian novels turn their lost worlds into drawn-out idylls, full of a summery Oblomov-like sensuality. It is inevitable that such memories should jar violently with the rather more demonic world that Victor recalls.

The first and almost the last reaction to Victor's confessions was that of Vladimir Nabokov. It is ironic that an American critic and novelist Edmund Wilson should be the man who drew Nabokov's attention to a document that echoed so many of his own themes of exile and irretrievable childhood pleasures. In his correspondence with Edmund Wilson, Nabokov remarked with gentle irony that Victor seemed to be lucky in finding girls 'blessed with unusually quick reactions'. But the effect of this chance discovery went far deeper. In his own childhood reminiscences,
Conclusive Evidence
, written in the late 1940s, he begins to wonder at the disparity between his own experience and Victor's. (I translate from the rather fuller Russian version,
Other Shores
):

"… Worn out by our adventures in the Vyry Chaparral, we would lie down on the grass and talk about women. Our innocence now seems almost monstrous to me, in the light of various confessions for those years cited by Havelock Ellis, where the subjects are children of all possible sexes busy with all the Greek and Roman vices, at every time and every place, from Anglo-Saxon industrial centres to the Ukraine (from where there comes a particularly Babylonian contribution by a landowner). Houses of ill repute were unknown to us. Making me sign an oath of silence on parchment in blood (got from my thumb with a pen-knife), thirteen-year-old Yurik told me of his secret passion for a married lady in Warsaw (he became her lover only much later - at the age of fifteen)."

But even before he came across Victor's 'Babylonian contribution' the theme of the tormented paedophile had begun to interest Nabokov. In the greatest of his Russian novels,
The Gift
, the step-father of the hero's fiancée muses with ill-hidden relevance to his own situation (my translation):

"Now imagine something like this: an old dog, but still in his prime, fire in his blood, longing for happiness, gets to know a widow who has a daughter still a little girl - you know, there's nothing to see yet, but the way she walks is enough to drive you mad. Pale, frail, bluish under the eyes and, of course, she doesn't even look at the old wreck. What can he do? So, you see, he doesn't hang about: he marries the widow. Right then. They set up house all three of them. There's no end to what you could write about: the temptation, the eternal torture, the itch, mad hopes…"

Just before he switched from Russian to English, Nabokov wrote a story
The Magician
whose hero kills himself after half violating the little girl entrusted to him. Thus, Victor's confessions provided the final push in the birth of
Lolita
's central theme.

Lolita
is, of course, a novel about love as well as lust, while Victor's confessions never involve us in anything so complex or transcendental as Humbert Humbert's passion. But the disastrous inability to find sexual arousal and satisfaction in anything but young girls is not the only common factor between Victor and Nabokov's hero. The basic structure of
Lolita
and the confessions is similar: the contrast between the homeland (Russia or France) and the attempt to recreate lost experience in exile (Italy or America). Both Victor and Humbert Humbert are prisoners of their first childhood sexual experiences. To a certain extent this is a Russian theme which can be traced back to many of the stories and one of the novels of Turgenev, where disaster overtakes the middle-aged man who attempts to recapture the romantic ethos of his childhood in alien parts (for instance, the novel
Smoke
).

Even in detail, there are points of contact between Nabokov and Victor. For instance, Victor is apparently extracted from his miserable failure in Russia:

"A lucky chance gave me a way out. At that very moment an uncle whom we had not seen for years came to Kiev and told my father that he was willing to take me to Italy and bring me into his business."

In chapter eight of
Lolita
, finding Valeria, his wife, to be not the little girl he had imagined but a big-breasted
baba
, Humbert Humbert is saved by the same
deus ex machina
:

"In the summer of 1939
mon oncle d'Amérique
died bequeathing me an annual income of a few thousand dollars on condition I came to live in the States and showed some interest in his business."

Humbert Humbert is reduced to despair in a far grander and more tortuous way, but the progression from false hope to the prospect of death through degradation has its parallels.

As a character, one must admit, Victor lacks the qualities adequate to a hero of a tragic novel. He has no humour, he cannot find repartees as ironic as fate's judgements on him. But the basic traits are there in Humbert Humbert: the immense culture and the exhibitionist pedantry, the fastidiousness and snobbery, the inability to align himself with any nationality - a fatal cosmopolitanism. The traits that Victor develops - an ability to watch himself in action, to record the minutest detail to savour and dwell on until the recollection becomes more exciting than the act: this is a quality central to Humbert, as it was for so many of Nabokov's heroes, who are themselves writers and have their author's lepidopterist coldbloodedness. Yet in their detachment there is a certain proud conceit: Victor writing for Havelock Ellis, like Humbert Humbert writing for the gentlemen of the jury, relishes his superior intelligence, his self-assurance that what he has to tell his audience will surpass anything in their experience and leave them dumbfounded.

Donald Rayfield