The relegation of writers to schools, movements, or social contexts, and the shrouding of their individuality in the mists of “influence” offer a fertile field for futile exercise. Father believed that the point of “comparative” literature was the exaltation of originality, not similarity. What mattered to him were the unique peaks, not the platitudinous plateau.
The hunt for leitmotifs and other echoes within a given author’s oeuvre can also be an engrossing but pedestrian pursuit. Yet, certain special images and themes that flash and reverberate among Nabokov’s peaks do merit comment, because they illuminate key facets of his works.
A fleeting refraction in many of Father’s compositions, and a constant undercurrent in most of his dramatic writing, is the theatricality of all things, the ambiguity of the fictional reality, the deliberate glimpse through the fabric of the fictional world, into its wings, under its surface. The butaforstvo—“proppiness”—of what shows through can be (deliberately) a little shoddy, as the bowels of real theatres tend to be; or comforting, if it allows us respite from some unsettling nightmare being played out onstage; or eerie, when we think that the world may be a stage, but that here the stage becomes a world whose workings are not limited to the progression of the play or novel on its more obvious levels, and where even the reality of unreality comes into doubt.
The plays contain striking instances of such rippled reality: the “alternative” ending of The Waltz Invention, which is, in a sense, the protagonist’s dream self-edited; the key scene of The Event, where for a fragile, magic moment a totally new dimension transforms the secondary characters into painted decorations and Troshcheykin and his wife into what are perhaps their real selves, reinforcing what a reviewer called the “somnambulistic atmosphere”; the last page of The Grand-dad, where the protagonist, the Passerby, suddenly finds himself questioning the authenticity of all that has supposedly occurred; Kuznetsoff who, in The Man From the USSR, is challenged by Marianna’s barely camouflaged entreaty, “Why don’t you say something?” and replies, “Forgot my lines”; Olga Pavlovna saying to Kuznetsoff, “I don’t love you. There was no violin.”—even though we all clearly heard one at the beginning of the act. Indeed, the fourth act’s disordered, jumbled props and the “uneven gaps and apertures” through which peek the klieg lights of reality once removed (the film being shot in the offstage studio demystified by the exposure of its mechanical trappings) in themselves suggest the evanescent fragility of all that transpires before the audience. One is reminded of the haunting vacillations of reality in “A Visit to the Museum” and “Terra Incognita”; of the implication, with which Invitation to a Beheading concludes, that all the previous doings have been but theatrical artifice or someone’s nightmare; and, of course, of the juxtapositions of worlds and realities in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Ada, and Pale Fire.
Closely related to the aura of a double reality is the double character, the so-called Nabokovian doppelgânger. The degree and the nature of the similarity between original and double—in the broad sense—may vary widely. The “pair” may consist of incidental characters with a modicum of physical resemblance, such as Meshaev One and Two in The Event:“...my brother and I were played by the same actor, only in the part of my brother he was good, and in mine he was bad.” Or they may be near-twins in name only and belong to opposing camps within the world of the play, like the intimidating, offstage Barbashin and the farcical Barboshin hired to foil him. The doubles may even exist only in portrait form : "...I painted two versions of him simultaneously on the sly: on one canvas as the dignified elder he wanted, and on the other the way I wanted him—purple mug, bronze belly, surrounded by thunderclouds” (a hint to the perceptive that there is something more to Troshcheykin than the rather unsympathetic façade he displays most of the time). Or there may be a dissimilar doppelg&nger, an unwelcome companion : the executioner who travels by tumbrel with his victim to the scaffold in The Granddad and ominously foreshadows the grotesque M’sieur Pierre of Invitation to a Beheading; or a stand-in whose resemblance to the protagonist exists only in the latter’s fantasy, as in Despair. The phenomenon of the double, in new and ingenious forms, was to play a crucial part in other novels as well:The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, the unfinished Solus Rex and its reincarnation in Pale Fire, and, of course, A da, where the whole world is twinned. Nor let us forget “Scenes From the Life of a Double Monster”—a fragment of a larger, uncompleted work—and, of course, “The Original of Laura,” where Flora’s “exquisite bone structure slipped into a novel—became in fact the secret structure of that novel, besides supporting a number of poems.”1
The voyage, in general; the scientific expedition, in particular; and what is, in a sense, their antithesis—return to Russia—comprise another recurring arpeggio in Father’s plays and other works. The idea of travel had tantalized him since childhood ; the adventures of Phileas Fogg were among his most exciting early reading (as they were the young Luzhin’s in The Defense). Ironically, the circumstances of exile would force him to travel more miles than Verne’s hero had covered by choice, but that travel, too, was often food for inspiration: consider the émigrés of his stories and novels jouncing in their fourth-class compartments, or poor Pnin who does not know that he is on the wrong train, or Humbert’s and Lolita’s crosscountry peregrinations. The conveyances and paraphernalia of travel had a romance all their own for Nabokov: witness the loving descriptions, autobiographical and fictional, of the veneered luxury expresses in their heyday, the lights of passing towns glimpsed upon lifting the leather blind of the Wagon-Lits, the trunks and nécessaires that accompanied the voyager. Witness also the elegant, appetizing, carefully selected baggage that survives Father in Montreux.
But the voyage with a special purpose had even more importance in Father’s works. The thrill of the expedition always enchanted him. He confided to me once, late in life, that his life had been marvellously happy, his ambitions achieved, and most of his dreams realized. Two of his intense yearnings, however, did remain unfulfilled, and both were related to travel.
The first was to return to a non-Bolshevik Russia. Transformed by the kaleidoscope of his art, this idea finds its way, inter alia, into Glory(Martin’s disappearance into the depths of the Soviet Union), “A Visit to the Museum” (until an orthographic detail makes the hero realize that his nightmarish traverse of the museum has transported him spatially but not temporally, and he has exited into contemporary, Soviet Russia), and, of course,The Man From the USSR.
Not only are Kuznetsoffs mysterious trips to the Soviet Union the central theme of the play, they are also the key to its whole atmosphere. Nabokov creates the illusion (as he does, in a different way, with the offstage Barbashin in The Event) 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. Kuznetsoff, in fact, sacrifices his sentiments and his married life in Berlin exile to his dangerous underground activities in Soviet Russia. In a more theatrical sense, as well, there is a curious contrast, in two of the acts, between the visible action and the physically larger, invisible happenings offstage (but which are, in fact, all only a backdrop for the onstage dialogue): the loud applause rewarding an inaudible lecture in the unseen auditorium; and the film set, the thundering megaphone, the repeated takes of the uprising scene beyond the prop-cluttered stage.
These instances of juxtaposition are curiously reminiscent of the conclusion of Carmen(offstage, Escamillo executing the bull to the public’s cheers; onstage, the final, fatal exchange between Carmen and Don José in the deserted square outside the bullring). While Carmen was one of the operas Father liked, I would not go so far as to suggest that the parallel is intentional. Yet, not only is there a kinship between the theatrical tingles this effect generates in the two works, but one’s attention returns to how we perceive, or are meant to perceive, different levels of reality or of illusion, with a new twist. What presumably happens or exists offstage is, in the simplest sense, as much an illusion as what we see played out before us. We know perfectly well that a stage set is not a real room or a real square, and we know just as well that there is no real bullring beyond the operatic plaza, no forest marching on Macbeth, no plunge to the pavement for Tosca from the crenel of the Castel Sant’ Angelo. Yet there is also an intermediate theatrical reality: is the spectator expected to consider offstage structures or events as real as what transpires onstage? Of course the offstage sham may be shattered by the intrusion of real-life proppiness, as when a plumpish Floria Tosca bounces visibly from an overly resilient mattress just beyond the battlement. But it may also be intended to be perceived as nothing more than sham compared to onstage events, or at least to have its credibility questioned. One suspects that Nabokov, while suggesting momentous goings-on elsewhere, tips his hand to the spectator just enough to make him doubt the authenticity of the offstage lecture hall and movie set and of Kuznetsoffs cloak-and-dagger doings; of Barbashin’s murderous intentions; of de Merival’s nightmarish recollection. Why is this done? The purpose—and effect—in these and other works of Nabokov’s is to make the spectator’s, or reader’s, attention rebound from somewhat dubious offstage matters, travel back, and focus with increased intensity on the visible microcosm of the play, causing him to perceive it in a relief that would not otherwise be so vivid.
Theatrical works in general, when adapted to the screen, can cause a blurring of parameters. The cinema can even transport us from a rebuilt Globe Theatre to a realistic Battle of Agincourt, or from the grounds surrounding the Stockholm Opera House to a surreal recreation of Tamino’s trials in a cinematic limbo somewhere beyond the actual stage. Although Nabokov acknowledged that certain works of his had a “cinematic slant,”2 perhaps the Lolita screenplay should not be included in a list of his theatrical works, as it is here, but should instead be the nucleus of a separate essay entitled “Nabokov and the Cinema.”
Related to the “theme” of travel that has led us to the above considerations is that of the impoverished wanderer, a fictional relative of the Russian émigré who moves from place to place and job to job. De Mérival describes his roamings and occupations (in The Grand-dad), after he has escaped from the scaffold:
In dank and melancholy London I
gave lessons in the science of duelling. I
sojourned in Russia, playing the fiddle at
an opulent barbarian’s abode....
In Turkey and in Greece I wandered then,
and in enchanting Italy I starved.
The sights I saw were many; I became
a deckhand, then a chef, a barber, a tailor,
then just a simple tramp.
His words are echoed by Fleming in The Pole:
....I’ve been a ship’s boy and a diver,
hurled my harpoon upon uncharted seas. Oh,
those years of seafaring, of wandering,
of longing....
And, in The Man From the USSR, Fyodor Fyodorovich repeats the theme: “For over two years now I’ve enjoyed the most humble professions—no matter that I was once an artillery captain.” More about the artillery captain later. Meanwhile, lest the reader misconstrue, let me make it clear that the point of these examples is not to spot some hypothetical symbolism or sublimation of the displaced person’s lot. Rather, it is to illustrate ways in which Father’s creative process integrated this element—whose embryo may perfectly well be traceable to one aspect of his own émigré existence—into new and exciting combinations.
Nabokov’s second unfulfilled longing was for a lepidopterological expedition to some exotic, uncharted region. Father had dreamed of the Caucasus, of Mount Elbrus, but, in later years, spoke most often of the Amazon. Again, what is fascinating here is not the simple association of ideas or the romanticizing of an unrealized fantasy, but the poetry of the pattern into which the thoughts were recombined to produce “Terra Incognita,” the elder Godunov-Cherdyntsev’s fantastic entomological journeys in The Gift, the prophetic space adventures of “Lance,” and the touching mini-tragedy of The Pole.
This last work is a deliberately free synthesis of the Scott diaries. Nabokov’s aim is not a precise journalistic reproduction but a rearrangement of elements into a concentrated interpersonal drama. Even the epigraph and its attribution—
“He was a very gallant gentleman”
(from Scott’s notebook)—
are deliberately approximate. Scott did not write those words. They were left at the scene by the rescue expedition of 1912, led by E. L. Atkinson and A. Cherry Gerrard, which found the body. The exact wording was: “Hereabouts died a very gallant gentleman.” This inscription was mentioned in chapter twenty-one of Scott’s Last Expedition, of which Nabokov presumably saw the 1913 or 1915 edition in the South of France. The names, too, went through several generations of change and (except for Scott) never corresponded exactly to those of the actual expedition members. Scott, himself, incidentally, was named “Bering” in an early manuscript version. The passage, near the end of the play, that is purportedly excerpted from Scott’s diary was also deliberately adapted by Nabokov, as were many of the concrete details such as dates and distances. Even “Aurora australis” is changed to “Aurora borealis,” I imagine because only the latter term was current in Russia at the time and had, by extension, come to represent the southern lights as well as their northern analogues. Significantly, the only two passages that retranslate into direct citations from Scott are the most touching lines of all: “.... I may well be some time ... pronounced by Johnson in the play and Oates in Scott’s diaries, while taking leave of the others with the conscious intention of dying in the snow in order to lighten their burden; and Scott’s “I’m very sorry for my loyal companions.” The lines
are the verbatim text of the final sentence of Scott’s diary, except for his signature and the post scriptum, “For God’s sake look after our people.” I returned to the original text for “It seems a pity...” because Father unquestionably had made a literal Russian translation of these lines, even though he has Scott speak them to Fleming rather than read them from his notebook.
What had drawn Nabokov so strongly to these heroic explorers? Robert Falcon Scott was Britain at its best: unflinching in the face of danger, hardship, and pain, ever mindful of his companions’ welfare, and tenacious to the end in his pursuit of a goal that was at once physical exploit and scientific adventure. His pure courage, his passion for the precision and poetry of nature, and his compassion for all that surrounded him were not unlike Father’s own (and were later to be prototypical for the equally doomed Gregson of “Terra Incognita” and, to a degree, for the protagonist of “Lance”); Scott had a sense of humor as well, even in the direst circumstances (he addressed a final letter “To My Widow,” a thought transferred by Nabokov to the fictional Fleming, who says: “Kingsley has a fiancee, almost a widow”). Fleming tries stoically to be—or seem—an optimist, to express a glimmer of hope even when calamity seems certain. Kingsley, in mortal delirium, dreams of bringing his fiancee a penguin who will be “smoo-smoo-smooth.” (How Father loved saying “gla-gla-gladen’kiy ” to me when I was very small, and what a delicious memory I have of those liquid Russian syllables!) Scott and Johnson, in the play, are based on real persons, with a change of name in the second case; Fleming and Kingsley less so (there was a Kinsey, but he was not a member of the final party). But no matter: here, again, the characters and events of the actual Scott expedition are only a point of departure. What counts is how they are refocused and recombined into the world and the poetry of this touchingly human drama. A writer, said Nabokov, must see “the marvels of this century, the little things...[and:] the bag things, like the sublime liberty of thought, and the moon, the moon. I remember with what tingles of delight, of envy, of anguish, I watched on the television screen the first floating footsteps of man in the talcum of our satellite and how I despised those who maintained it was not worth all those dollars to walk in the dust of a dead world.”3 (And I remember with what consternation I heard a writer very popular in some circles announce, at a radical-chic dinner, that he hoped our astronauts would be marooned forever in space.)
Incidentally, Amundsen’s victory in the race to the South Pole was, in a manner of speaking, not permanent. A couple of years ago the pole’s exact locus was found to have shifted so that it had to be “rediscovered” and marked anew. That task was undertaken by the journalist Hugh Downs, with a strong assist from resident cartographer Loreen Utz of the U.S. Geographical Survey, for a segment of the television program 20/20(whose programmers presumably realized that the pole has not lost its magnetism).
If, in The Pole, art in a sense deliberately imitates life, there exists also a perfect case of the inverse process: life (unknowingly) imitating art. Not only was Nabokov’s politico-military premise in The Waltz Invention prophetic of current issues and events, but the play recently had a hauntingly specific echo in the Italian press. We recall how Waltz threatened to explode a substantial and fairly distant mountain if his conditions were not met by the government, and then, in the “preliminary” or “dream” ending, proceeded to do so. Not long ago, a chauffeur appropriately named Antonio Carrus, residing in a village near Genoa, telephoned the major Italian news agency to predict a good-sized telluric tremor in distant Pozzuoli within the following twenty-four hours. After the event had duly occurred, he retelephoned to “claim” his quake, but would give no explanation of his prescience. “It might be a device, a discovery, a system,” he said. “I shall explain only when the government begins to take me seriously.” One can, in translation, almost hear Waltz speaking, so similar are the situation, the manner, and the words.
In addition to those already discussed, certain other Nabokovian themes, or subthemes, make preview appearances in the plays. In The Grand-dad, in particular, we find embryos of images that were to figure prominently in later works of Father’s. I have already mentioned the executioner—the prototype of M’sieur Pierre—whom de Merival, the Passerby, re-encounters in The Grand-dad. The play’s surreal microcosm is curiously paralleled by the burgeoning nightmare of “A Visit to the Museum.” The gradual inklings, the “strange associations” de Merival begins to have as he is told how Grand-dad fondles the stems of lilies, to all of which he has given names “of duchesses, of marquesses,” and how he has hurled Juliette’s juice-incarnadined cherry basket into the stream are a chilling re-evocation of Revolutionary France akin to the protagonist’s hallucinatory progression in “Visit” through the museum’s rooms and into a post-Revolutionary Russia.
The burning scaffold that allows de Merival to escape is a portent of the fires that will flicker or rage in other works. In Lolita, Humbert’s whole destiny is changed by the conflagration that destroys the house where he would have lived. The burning of the “Baronial Barn” is the “contrived coincidence” that sets the scene for the crucial encounter between Van and Ada. Fire in Transparent Things spreads from theme to obsession to resolution.
As de Merival flees from the blaze he plunges amid “torrents of smoke,” “rearing steeds,” “running people.” One recalls Anton Petrovich’s headlong tumble to salvation down the ever steepening, elder-overgrown slope in “An Affair of Honor.” The “falling-through” theme, of course, was also to develop into the metaphysical traversal of solid objects, of levels of time and space, in Pale Fire and Transparent Things.
I stated at the outset of this introduction that particular recurring traits of Father’s plays, as of his other works, merited discussion. Having examined them, however briefly, let us ponder where they lead.
As I suggested, there emerge certain fundamental considérations—two in particular—regarding Nabokov’s work. The first is his fascination with transforming life into art on the chessboard of combinational possibilities. Just as he invented “scientifically possible” butterflies and “a new tree” (at Ardis),4 so he recombined life into a fantastic but plausible reality. “I do not doubt,” said Nabokov, “that there exists an intimate bond between certain images of my prose and the brilliant but obscure chess problems—magical enigmas—each of which is the fruit of a thousand and one nights of insomnia.”5
Nabokov’s point of departure may be pure conjecture (as in Laughter in the Dark, Despair, Lolita, The Waltz Invention), personal experience transformed (as in Mary and The Gift), a deliberate doubling of reality (as in Ada, Pale Fire, and, for a moment, The Event), a refraction of private fantasy (as in The Defense, Glory, The Man from the USSR), the personal adventures of others (as in “Terra Incognita,” “Lance,”The Pole), or history (as in The Grand-dad and, through a lens, in Bend Sinister). But his destination is a recombination of those materials into a kind of Hegelian triad (perceived by Nabokov as a spiral). The thesis of the triad (the basic plot, event, or idea) is dissected under the artist’s microscope and made to reveal its mysteries and ambiguities, in which one perceives the antithesis (the antiterra incognita, the warp of time and space peeking through the fabric of the fiction). When superimposed and melded, the first two elements, or coils, of the triad yield the synthesis (the elements recombined into an original artistic whole).
“I discerned in nature the non-utilitarian delights that I sought in art,” Nabokov said. “Both were a form of magic, both were a game of intricate enchantment and deception.”6 Who but an artist or a deity can rearrange reality? It is a rare creative thrill. But such recombination would be a sterile exercise if performed for its own sake. The doubling, the ambiguity discussed earlier, is not simply a game. In considering the plays included in this volume, we have seen that it appears fleetingly in The Man from the USSR, gives an unexpected twist to The Granddad, and momentarily warps time and stage in The Event. Elsewhere, we are allowed a closer peek. In The Gift, for instance:
The following day [(Alexander) Chernyshevski] died, but before that he had a moment of lucidity, complaining of pains and then saying (it was darkish in the room because of the lowered blinds): “What nonsense. Of course there is nothing afterwards.” He sighed, listened to the trickling and, drumming outside the window and repeated with extreme distinctness: “There is nothing. It is as clear as the fact that it is raining.”
And meanwhile outside the spring sun was playing on the roof tiles, the sky was dreamy and cloudless, the tenant upstairs was watering the flowers on the edge of her balcony and the water trickled down with a drumming sound.
If it is as clear as the fact that it is raining, it is not clear at all, for the rain is an illusion. Does that mean there might be something?
The sensation of fragile, twinned reality is more explicit in Pale Fire. While clinically dead, Shade sees a fountain, rather than the more common tunnel. His fascination with this phenomenon leads him to track down a woman who, according to a newspaper item, has had the same experience. Only it turns out she had seen a mountain, and not a very convincing one at that: “Life Everlasting—based on a misprint.” There follows a curious reversal of the Chernyshevski syllogism:
I’m reasonably sure that we survive
And that my darling somewhere is alive
As I am reasonably sure that I
Shall wake at six tomorrow, on July
The twenty-second, nineteen fifty-nine,
And that the day will probably be fine;
So this alarm clock let me set myself,
Yawn, and put back Shade’s “Poems” on their shelf.
He is killed the same afternoon, shortly after having finished his poem. The reasonable certitude of his daughter’s surviving in an afterworld is therefore just as precarious as that of his being alive the following morning. (The implication for Chernyshevski is: yes, there may be something; for Shade it is: no, chances are there is nothing.)
The deduction in Shade’s case, however, is individual and not conclusive. Nabokov had a profound conviction, revealed in certain poems of his, in passages of The Gift and Transparent Things, and elsewhere, that he carried within him a knowledge of otherworldly truths to which others could not be made privy. It was a conviction that gave him a unique serenity (not unlike that of Scott) in the most trying circumstances, and of which he actually spoke publicly only in one interview. To the question, “Do you believe in God ?” Father replied: “To be quite candid—and what I’m going to say now is something I never said before, and I hope it provokes a salutary little chill—I know more than I can express in words, and the little I can express would not have been expressed, had I not known more.”7
Before he dies Shade does, for a moment, speak for Nabokov the artist. The essence of Shade’s art is, as we have learned in Canto Three,
...Making ornaments
Of accidents and possibilities.
Now, at the end of the fourth and final canto, he goes further:
...I feel I understand
Existence, or at least a minute part
Of my existence, only through my art,
In terms of combinational delight;*
And, if my private universe scans right,
So does the verse of galaxies divine
Which, I suspect, is an iambic line.
The plays open a second, related, Nabokovian vista as well, an aspect of his works even less widely understood than the “combinational delights” just discussed.
To quote Martin Amis, Nabokov depicts his nastier characters with “such plangency ... such moral unease,” writing always more in their expiation, so that “the moral picture is always clear.... But to take the nastiness of the novels and impute it to Nabokov in any way seems to me futile. [It is] just part of what Nabokov is interested in, [this] possible nastiness of Art.”8
There are those who, like the late Edmund Wilson, with his imputations of Schadenfreude, consider Nabokov to have been a heartless puppeteer, aloof and indifferent to the misfortunes of his characters and of the world around him. Those who were closely acquainted with him know that nothing could be further from the truth. And for those who were not, a careful and sensitive reading of Nabokov reveals that he was (as Professor Denis Donoghue puts it) “extraordinarily tender toward broken things, maimed lives, and people who are completely ignorant of themselves.”9
How pathetic are the elderly, evicted, not very pleasant Oshivenskis, in the last act of The Man From the USSR. Some of their attitudes may be suspect, and Oshivenski may detest that violin; but now they are penniless and are about to become homeless. Fyodor Fyodorovich arrives with the news that he has found them quarters at a different address. But the address is in Paradise Street, care of Engel. There is more than parody to “Paradise.”10 There is an echo here of Oshivenski’s line immediately prior to Fyodor’s arrival: “We’ll meet in Paradise, God willing,” and of an exchange that took place between the Oshivenskis a few minutes earlier:
MRS. OSHIVENSKI
And where are we supposed to go now? Oh my dear God....
OSHIVENSKI
We’ll move straight into the Kingdom of Heaven. At least there you don’t have to pay the rent in advance.
These words also foreshadow Kuznetsoff’s penultimate speech: “Olya, I’m going to the USSR so that you will be able to come to Russia. And everybody will be there.... Old Oshivenski living out his days, and Kolya Taubendorf, and that funny Fyodor Fyodorovich. Everybody.” This suggests that they are all going to the same destination; that the Oshivenskis’ new address will in fact be not Paradise Street, but Paradise, care of Angels; and that Kuznetsoff’s voyage to the USSR (which will never again become “Russia”) will be his last. The violin, that pitiful fourth-rate violin, plays again; Kuznetsoff pauses, recognizes the tune, and the tenderness that it has evoked and he has suppressed all through the play swells, on the final page, to the surface.
This whole, delicate work is unique, with its subtle play of nuance set in the special atmosphere of the Berlin emigration that Father knew so well. In addition to the bad violin there is Kuznetsoffs bad German, his colorful Russian, his basically rather amateurish secret agenting. There is the serene, resigned, desperately loving Olga Pavlovna, who is the only person to bring cash to the hopelessly indigent Oshivenskis. There is also the lighthearted Fyodor, whose statement (at the beginning of the play) that he “was once an artillery captain” is curiously echoed by Kuznetsoff in the final two lines:
OLGA PAVLOVNA
(pressing against him)
And you, Alyosha—where will you be?
KUZNETSOFF
(...somewhat mysteriously)
Listen—once upon a time there lived in Toulon an artillery officer, and that very same artillery officer—(They leave.)
Has he made some secret arrangement with Fyodor? Is Fyodor being groomed to march, like Napoleon (who, as an artillery officer, had lived in Toulon), on Russia? Will he be more successful? Or is Kuznetsoff simply confirming the omniscience he has already hinted at (“Everybody will be there....”): I shall be in a place from where I shall know, and perhaps can even pull some strings.
The reactions of some 1985 readers of The Man from the U.S.S.R. compel me to underline an aspect of that play of which those without a frame of reference may be only dimly, if at all, aware. To the characters of the play, however, it is immediate, essential, all-pervasive.
Many of us have lived through crises and upheavals, but more often than not as distant spectators or else only temporary, or marginal, participants. In most cases our outlook is conditioned, no matter how much we may protest about sundry matters, by a security of foundations and a constancy of parameters. We may grow alarmed when the framework creaks or sways, but we seldom if ever truly imagine what it would be like to have our souls and bodies either caged or torn up by the roots, implacably, irrevocably. Yet the microcosm of the stateless Russian émigré in Europe in the twenties and thirties was totally shaky, rootless, and frightening. Nothing was certain and nothing was constant. His Russia was gone, the Europe to which he had fled was heaving with the tremors of imminent cataclysm, his status was spectral, his livelihood and his survival were a matter of wits and luck. The story and the atmosphere of the emigration will, in time, be codified by the imprimatur of perspective, but the events are too recent, and their historical niche too extraordinary.
On this nightmarishly precarious stage the play acquires a very special aura. There is far more here than nostalgia for the Motherland. The real backdrop for the shabby, bittersweet, temporary existence of the characters is one of terror and of doom. After examining other aspects of the play we must return perforce to the tragic realization that the destiny of these people, with all their dreams, their quirks, their foibles, is sealed. And only the less perceptive will fail to understand that the protagonist is not only an anti-Bolshevik, but an ardently courageous one; that his imminent journey to Russia will in all probability be his last; that he is very human, a little pathetic, and has, incidentally, missed his train.
Let us look again, through a different facet of the prism, at The Event. The key scene I have already once discussed may be surreal, but it is rich in very real compassion. The sometimes shrewish Lyubov’ suddenly becomes human, gentle, understanding. Both she and Troshcheykin struggle to hold on to this aberration of space and time. The magic moment begins to slip away from both of them. She pronounces Tatiana’s famous line from Eugene Onegin:
Onegin, I was younger then,
I daresay, and better-looking
and it is over. Money problems, the horrid maid Marfa, the fear of Barbashin all return to haunt them. But Lyubov’ has had time to say (and nobody can take this away): “Our little son broke the mirror with a ball today. Hold me, Alyosha. Don’t lose your grip.” The son is long since dead. The only balls around are those being used as props for the portrait of an extraneous child. And if anyone broke a mirror it was that child. Troshcheykin’s grip loosens. The mad turn-of-the-century chess master Rubenstein preferred to play facing not his adversary but an empty chair and a mirror where he saw “his reflection or, perhaps, the real Rubenstein.”11 The mirror—and the spell—are broken. Which was the real Troshcheykin?
The Pole is a play with a more constant sense of pathos. The noble sportsmen-scientists are doomed. Kingsley (though it is Scott who, in other respects, foreshadows the later Gregson) is delirious. The bleak and unambiguous polar surroundings (subsequently, perhaps, deliberately recombined into the vacillating tropical trappings of “Terra Incognita”) are a background for the sometimes surreal atmosphere created within the human soul. The polar nightmare, incidentally, is somehow reminiscent of the eerie visions and sensations reported by the early Everest mountaineers and even by Whymper, whose party saw fogbows of mysterious pattern on the Matterhorn (was it all caused by lack of oxygen and conditioning, or was it also the newness of the mountain adventure—and the polar one—to the human psyche?).
Finally let us turn again, for a moment, to The Grand-dad. Just as conjecture, adventure, and autobiographical experience were the raw materials for the combinational process elsewhere, here the materia prima is historical, while the central theme is a perennially current moral issue.
In an age when I, for one, find it hard to disapprove of capital punishment as a means of protecting our society from its more ruthless and demonstrably guilty members, Father steadfastly opposed it, as had his father Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov. It was Father’s conviction that the remotest possibility of erroneously destroying even a single human life makes the death penalty fundamentally wrong. (I recall that his first concern upon seeing the bruised Oswald under guard was that he might have been arrested and beaten up unjustly.)
Nabokov makes his point, in The Grand-dad, more effectively than the most socially “involved” contemporary author. Granted that he was interested in the combinational possibilities of whatever subject he chose. But a viewpoint is a viewpoint, and true art is perhaps the most effective medium for its expression.
A condemned man who has escaped the guillotine through pure luck has a chance encounter, many years later, with his executioner. The latter is possessed by his need to complete the interrupted task: society has made him so, for new murderers are generated by the process of execution. He is obsessed by the urge to kill until his final moment. And here the artist takes over to explore the patterns the situation can create.
The creative process revealed in The Grand-dad is the necessary key, perhaps, for those who do not fully understand Nabokov, who criticize him for artistic aloofness, Schadenfreude, sterile gamesmanship, lack of concern, and so forth.
The executioner, so deeply tainted by the society in which he lived, reveals, like the despot Paduk in Bend Sinister, like the invisible manipulators of power in Invitation to a Beheading, a very profound involvement on Father’s part. Who is to say that his involvement is less genuine or less effectual because it is refracted through the artistic prism?
Speaking of what Prof. Donoghue defines as Nabokov’s “aesthetic relation to Russian literature and thè tensions it exerts between art and propaganda,”12 Alfred Kazin has pointed out that Nabokov perpetuates and develops the tradition of certain Russian formalist poets and scholars who were “very much concerned with art in a very special sense.” It was not “art for art’s sake” with the traditional connotations, but rather “the idea of art as a new reality,...an idea Nabokov never lost....He felt—in this he was a prophet—that....Lenin was aiming at something very different from social reform or even social revolution.... [Nabokov] understood that Lenin wanted a separate reality. And we now know, for example, that one of the reasons for the absolute murderousness of totalitarianism is [the insistence].... that communism is a separate reality that has entirely replaced capitalism [and] anyone who even [questions this] becomes an enemy of the system, so that we have an exclusive idea of salvation, which is quite frightful. And Nabokov understood this.”13
It is too bad that the climate of the times and the limitations of Nabokov’s audience prevented his prophecies from affecting the course of events. But if art is indeed reality, and a part of that reality is opinion on public matters, can one justly accuse Nabokov of lacking a social consciousness?
Nabokov identified beauty with pity, with the poetry and patterns of life itself. He detested brutality and injustice, whether toward a group or an individual. He had the same compassion for the victim of a crime as for someone unjustly punished for that crime. The outrage of a didactic tract, whether or not it purports to be literature and whatever its viewpoint, is hollow. The compassion of the true artist is sometimes poignant to the point of discomfort, which may be what bothers certain critics.
In translating the verse plays, I have deliberately tried for an accurate reproduction of the pentameter and the iambic foot wherever it was possible to reconcile them with reasonably natural speech patterns. It is true that Father’s approach to the translation of poetry, as exemplified in his version of Eugene Onegin and other late translations of his own and others’ verse, attained a literal purity wherein meter and (if present) rhyme were abandoned in the search for absolute accuracy of sense, nuance, and connotation. Where possible, however, he did strive for rhythm and alliteration. While Nabokov’s more complex verse, with some of which I am grappling now, does dictate greater sacrifices to literality, I believe that, in the case of these wonderful, youthful verse compositions, the relative straightforwardness of language would have led Nabokov to decide that there was no need, as a rule, to scrap the basic structure. Hence, while precision, of course, received absolute priority, I found it possible to preserve the overall metric scheme and the individual stresses with considerable accuracy (if one accepts, as in the Russian, the ad libitum use of an unaccented final syllable with the resultant feminine ending).
In the two prose plays there are certain deliberate departures from the original texts: in the case of wordplays, references, or special expressions that were untranslatable literally, or that, had they been translated, would have proved meaningless to the English-speaking reader or theatregoer.
In both the prose and the verse plays the possibility of performance has been kept in mind. I have tried to keep transliteration as straightforward as possible. “A” is of course sounded as in “ma,” “e” as in “hey,” “i” as “ee,” “o” as something between “oh” and “aw” when stressed and as “uh” when not, “u” as in “put” with a bit of “boot,” and “y” (except when used alone) is a purely auxiliary symbol denoting a diphthong sound, and is to be passed over as rapidly as possible. The soft-signed letters “1’ ” and “n’,” in Russian, sound like the French “1” and “n” when the latter are followed by the vowel “i.” The soft-signed final “v’ ” of “Lyubov’ ” is almost a French “f ” when the latter is followed by “i.” In addition to a one-time indication of stresses for Russian characters listed in the casts, stresses of diminutives as well as names and patronymics of persons mentioned in the text but not listed in Cast of Characters are indicated (in cases where there might be a doubt) at their first occurrence. The stress and transliteration business is purely utilitarian here, and has therefore been deliberately simplified.
It seems appropriate, in view of the variations that abound, to add that the author’s name is stressed Vladimir Nabokov.
The four plays I have translated for this volume will soon be published by Ardis as part of a collection of Father’s dramatic works in the original Russian.