Stalking Nabokov (34 page)

Let us turn to Nabokov’s “present[ing] himself as a born cosmopolitan genius” (53), in Dolinin’s words. Did he
not
present himself as a Russian, in every major work he wrote except
Lolita
, where he intended to hide his authorship? Asked by an interviewer in 1962, by which time the persona was supposed to be in place, “Do you still feel Russian, in spite of so many years in America?” Nabokov answered without hesitation, “I do feel Russian and I think that my Russian works, the various novels and poems and short stories that I have written during these years, are a kind of tribute to Russia….I have just finished revising a good translation of my novel,
The Gift
, which I wrote about thirty years ago. It is the longest, I think the best, and the most nostalgic of my Russian novels” (
SO
13).

Still on this same Dolinin sentence: Nabokov would present himself as someone “who has never been attached to anything but his autonomous imagination and personal memory” (53). Not true. As always, Nabokov insisted on his independence and distanced himself from any group response or period perspective, but he “presented himself” eloquently and intensely as attached to Russia, the Russian liberal tradition, the Russian literary tradition (including particular writers of his youth like Blok, Bely, Gumilyov, and Voloshin), the Russian emigration as a continuer of both, to his family and to figures in the literary world like the critic Aykhenvald, the poet Khodasevich, and the patron and editor Fondaminsky. He kept out of the public gaze individuals he knew only in a private capacity, but the intensity of his affection for friends like his schoolmate Samuil Rosov, Georgy Hessen, the companion of his early manhood, and later Russian friends in France and America like the Marinel sisters saturates his letters. Why does Dolinin distort and insult Nabokov so?

Alexander Dolinin is a major scholar, to whom all who read Nabokov carefully now owe a great deal. Why does someone with his fund of exact knowledge overlook so much of what he knows and fall so stubbornly short by making a case for which he so rarely cites evidence but for which counterevidence lies so readily at hand?

This has genuinely puzzled me ever since I first read Dolinin’s piece. One answer can be glimpsed in the essay’s recurrent irritation at the critical stress on Nabokov’s English oeuvre at the expense of his Russian. Sometimes his irritation may be justified, although it also seems perfectly natural that scholars without Russian, like Maurice Couturier and Michael Wood, should focus primarily on Nabokov’s English works rather than his Russian, and since the proportion of the academic world that is Anglophone greatly exceeds the Russophone portion, that imbalance is likely to persist. Still, that should leave rich opportunities for Russian scholars. To the best of my recollection I have not published on Nabokov’s Russian work, except for material I have edited, since I have met Sasha because I know I can never compete with his knowledge of Nabokov’s Russian literary contexts. I have been happy to pass the ball to his usually safe hands.

I also agree with Dolinin that Elizabeth Klosty Beaujour is wrong to consider the English versions of Nabokov’s Russian works the definitive replacements of the Russian texts “to all intents and purposes” (cited at 53n. 6). Nabokov did intend the English versions of his Russian texts to be the definitive basis for all “foreign” (non-Russian) editions.
¹⁷
In them he explained matters of Russian culture or émigré life obvious to a Russian émigré (and now to most post-Soviet Russian readers aware of the emigration) and found approximately equivalent allusive effects in Western European culture to those the Russian allusions would have had for the original audience and sometimes, especially in
Despair
,
The Eye
,
King, Queen, Knave
, and
The Waltz Invention
, invented additional effects. Nabokov quite naturally insisted that the new English translations should become the basis for future translations since the same problem of the inaccessibility of recherché Russian allusions and details was common to all non-Russian audiences.

But he did not intend the translations to supplant the Russian originals. When Radio Liberty selected
The Defense
and
Invitation to a Beheading
for publication and clandestine distribution in the Soviet Union, Nabokov did not think of suggesting the novels should incorporate Russian equivalents of the changes he had made in English (see
VNAY
504–5). Except for the revisions in
Laughter in the Dark
and
Despair
, the Russian texts are artistically definitive. As translations, the English versions of Russian originals are inevitably compromises, unable to exploit the phonic, lexical, idiomatic, syntactic, associational, and allusive resources that partly shaped the content of the originals. The more artists make of their medium the more they stand to lose when their works are transposed into another, even the medium of another language. In composing his original texts Nabokov had a consistent system of artistic intentions; in translating them he had to balance what he could retrieve of those intentions against the incommensurate intention of appealing to a different audience—two different audiences, indeed, a specifically Anglophone and a generically non-Russian audience—and whatever new artistic habits, resources, and inclinations he happened to have developed by the time the translation happened to be ready to be tackled.

Dolinin has a legitimate claim, then, when he says that for artistic purposes the Russian originals have priority, although for publishing for non-Russian audiences, the English versions provide the new compromise source. He has another legitimate grievance when he protests against the judgments of non-Russian readers that Nabokov’s English style may be richer than his Russian would have become. Nabokov’s Russian was an extraordinary instrument for at least his last fifteen years as a Russian writer and during those years became ever more so, and there is no reason to suppose that he would not have continued to develop it in ways we cannot now know. Here I have to agree with Dolinin (54–55) against Michael Wood. There may have been gains from Nabokov’s being so ready to pick up the crutch of English, but there is no reason to think they more than compensated for the loss of his natural Russian gait.

I have suggested one partial reason for Dolinin’s advancing a thesis that contradicts evidence he knows: his frustration, as a Russian scholar, and despite his own background as an Americanist, with Anglophonocentric scholarship. I will suggest two more.

Dolinin often seems to construe Nabokov’s situation in terms of his own. He moved from Russia to the United States and started writing in English, but he also returns to Russia and continues to write in Russian and to write about the Russian literary tradition in both places and both languages. Dolinin writes that “Nabokov led his English readers into believing that the switch to English was a necessity, an unavoidable stage of…evolution rather than a free choice (‘I
had
to’)” (54). But Nabokov’s supposedly “free” first choice was either to stay in Europe, where he had almost no income and fewer prospects and would risk the lives at least of his wife and son, or to escape from Europe. Once in America, his supposedly “free” second choice was either to become a writer of English, supporting his family that way, or to remain a writer of Russian, with no income, or to take a job that made nothing of his singular talents and inclinations. The one way he knew to earn a living was through writing, and he could not earn a living by writing for a Russophone audience in the United States. He looked for university positions but could not find a permanent academic job until 1948, by which time he was writing his sixth book in English and at last making good money from doing so. For a man in his situation and with his gifts, there was no choice.

A third reason for Dolinin’s misreading lies in his belief that as Sirin, Nabokov’s theme was “the life of Russian literature and the life of genres, styles, and themes within its framework” (59). He thinks that Nabokov’s engagement with the Russian literary tradition was the core of his work, shaping his theory and his practice, his form and his content, his themes and his techniques. A Nabokov who underplayed the Russian subtexts when translating Sirin into English, who criticized his Russian work, and who no longer in his English work focused overwhelmingly on the Russian tradition could only be betraying his old self.

But the fact that there are writers in the background or foreground of much of Sirin’s Russian fiction hardly makes the Russian literary tradition the principal theme of his Russian work, any more than the fact that writers are even more prominent in his English work makes the life of English literature, or literature in general, the principal theme of his English work. When Dolinin asserts Sirin’s theme was “the life of Russian literature,” he creates a Sirin in his own image—and a Sirin of less interest to readers than the work actually offers.

Nevertheless, the fate of Russian literature
did
matter a great deal to Nabokov as a Russian writer, although Dolinin claims that this preoccupation “went more or less unnoticed by…émigré criticism” (59)—hardly surprising, before his last Russian novel,
The Gift
, where it really does become central.

But I would link Nabokov’s concern with the fate of Russian literature with a wider motivation that has been little recognized. Nabokov was deeply concerned with the Russian literary tradition, in his Russian years and, pace Dolinin, in his American years. But we need to see this as part of a much broader motivation that explains far more of his behavior, before and after the transition from Russian to English.

EVOLVING INTO CULTURE

From his father Nabokov imbibed a strong sense of cultural meliorism, a sense that culture had evolved to make humans more humane, that it could continue to evolve much further, and that art had played and could continue to play a key role in this process. V. D. Nabokov grew up in an intellectual climate pervaded by late-nineteenth-century notions of evolution and progress, individual, cultural, and biological. Encouraged by the rapid growth in productivity and in material well-being for unprecedented numbers of people in Europe and North America, intellectual notions of biological evolution and cultural progress that had begun with Lamarck and Hegel early in the century expanded at midcentury through Herbert Spencer, even before Darwin, and at the end of the century took new forms in the work of Ernst Haeckel, William James, and Henri Bergson, all of whom Nabokov read. Both Spencer and Haeckel believed culture evolved through successive stages. Spencer’s ideas in particular seem close to those of the Nabokovs, father and son. His model of cultural evolution contrasted a primitive militaristic state of society, dominated by compulsion, force, and repression and by the collective, the good of the group, with a modern industrial state, where the good of the individual was paramount and individual initiative and independence central to new possibility. Spencer coined the term “survival of the fittest” as a summary of Darwin, but while committed to progressive evolution, he did not accept the relentless competition he thought Darwinism implied. Before Nabokov, Spencer had in a sense snorted, “ ‘Struggle for life’ indeed!”

V. D. Nabokov and his son shared Spencer’s sense of cultural evolution as progress, if without his mid-nineteenth-century confidence in the
inevitability
of progress. Vladimir especially sided with Bergson, who stressed indeterminacy, free will, and the ongoing openness of creative evolution. But both father and son felt the importance of trying to improve one’s own cultural level, partly in the hope that that could help raise the cultural level around one not by compulsion but by the example one set to responsive others.

One of his close political colleagues observed that V. D. Nabokov had entered politics more for cultural reasons than ordinarily political ones.
¹⁸
Nabokov’s father believed that cultural development was an effortful process by which individuals could increase their distance from brute origins and societies could move beyond barbarism. He hoped to help Russia to rise to the level of the West, especially of England, and humanity to rise to higher individual levels of genuine culture (cf.
VNRY
156). As a criminologist, he accepted the claims of the social sciences of his day that there were objective markers of the different levels of cultural development in different societies and that societies and individuals could raise their cultural level through effort and application. He thought that art at its best could raise the level of culture at large, so that in opposing the death penalty he naturally turned not to legal arguments but to the pity aroused by novelists like Hugo, Dickens, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky.
¹⁹
He also took seriously the idea of individual development, responsibility, and freedom. When his politics sent him to prison he followed a physical exercise regime, taught himself Italian, and pursued a rigorous reading schedule in his other four languages. Improving one’s own cultural level might offer an example to others but should never be
imposed
on them as a model. Although he went into politics in the hope that he could help bring Russia to the level of British constitutional monarchy, as a politician he was so averse to compulsion that he even felt qualms about trying to sway voters’ minds during election campaigns (
VNRY
130).

Vladimir Nabokov learned much from his father, most important, perhaps, this sense of cultural development as the effortful striving for a maximal evolution beyond the brutish. Nabokov’s cultural meliorism begins with the free individual. Unfettered individual efforts can open up new possibilities that expand the freedom and scope of culture, offering us better access to the values Nabokov sees in art: creativity and complexity and “curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy” (
Lolita
317). Individuals should preserve and extend the gains of culture to the degree that they can.