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The Nabokov Assignment: For more information on this project and Nabokov, click here. Page 1 - Page 2 - Page 3 - Page 4 - Page 5
The Leonardo /
In Memory of L.I.
Shigaev / The Circle /
A Russian Beauty /
Breaking the News / Torpid Smoke
The Leonardo, 1933
[Kinglet†] Excerpt
Here comes the ovate little poplar, all punctuated with
April greenery, and takes its stand where told, namely by the tall brick
wall, imported in one piece from another city. Facing it, there grows up a
dreary and dirty tenement house, with mean little balconies pulled out one
by one like drawers. Other bits of scenery are distributed about the yard: a
barrel, a second barrel, the delicate shade of leaves, an urn of sorts, and
a stone cross propped at the foot of the wall. All this is only sketched and
much has to be added and finished, and yet two live people―Gustav and his
brother Anton―already come out on their tiny balcony, while rolling before
him a little pushcart with a suitcase and a heap of books, Romantovski, the
new lodger, enters the yard. Analysis/Synthesis This story, in Nabokovian fashion, asks more questions than it answers. In that above, the second paragraph of the story, the author draws attention to the fictiveness of his story. Rather than telling his story, Nabokov is painting it for us―summoning it even. In this way he draws a comparison to the elusive protagonist (reflected by the others more than described himself), Romantovski. Romantovski, for the entire tale, evokes pathos from the reader. He is constantly tormented by the two brothers, Gustav and Anton, and what is more, he is a quiet person who eagerly looks forward to his solitary evenings so he can read. Maybe he's even a poet. Toward the end of the story, while returning from a movie with Gustav's fiancé, Anna, Romantovski is overtaken by the two brothers, and eventually succumbs to the sharp steel of a knife blade. As if tormenting the poor soul weren't enough, they have now killed him. What are we supposed to feel other than pity and emptiness for this fallen man? Next, though, before the painter (Nabokov and/or his narrator) gradually retracts his daubs and, eventually, the canvas itself, we learn that Romantovski had been in a gang, a prison, and that he was a counterfeiter, a "Leonardo," as they are called (after the painter). What does this mean? Are we supposed to pity him anymore? We just witnessed his repeated hazing by two heartless individuals, his itchy bedclothes (sprinkled with potato flour), his puddle-soaked books (knocked down by you-know-who), his glued-down toilet seats―how can we not think of him as human, as deserving forgiveness and a second chance? To make an extreme syllogism (a tactic I am infamously known for), what if we extend this situation to a capital offender, a murderer, say, or even an evil dictator like Hitler. "Downfall," a motion picture nominated for a foreign-language Academy Award this year (2005), portrayed Hitler as a human being, as someone who was compassionate one minute and despotic the next, and the movie caused controversy for this. If we see everyone as humans, how could we possibly hate? Hitler's flaw was that he could see all of humanity as humans; should we repeat that flaw?
As a final tidbit of brain candy, the narrator says that
even s/he didn't know about the illegal activities of Romantovski...!
"Harmony and meaning vanish. The world irks me again with its variegated
void." Nabokov, too, is a Leonardo―how should we judge him? Additional Links:
More about this story
here. †This story was never actually titled "Kinglet," but that is the literal translation of its Russian title. Because "Kinglet," in English, doesn't have the counterfeiting connotation that "Leonardo" does (esoterically, of course), the latter was chosen for a title.
In Memory of L. I. Shigaev, 1934 Excerpt
Leonid Ivanovich Shigaev is dead.... The suspension dots,
customary in Russian obituaries, must represent the footprints of words that
have departed on tiptoe, in reverent single file, leaving their tracks on
the marble.... However, I would like to violate this sepulchral silence.
Please allow me to ... Just a few fragmentary, chaotic, basically
uncalled-for ... But no matter. He and I met about eleven years ago, in a
year that for me was disastrous. I was virtually perishing. Picture to
yourself a young, still very young, helpless and lonely person, with a
perpetually inflamed soul (it feared the least contact, it was like raw
flesh) and unable to cope with the pangs of an unhappy love affair.... I
shall take the liberty of dwelling on this point for a moment. Analysis/Synthesis This guy Victor is messed up and drunk and Shigaev helps him out. Now Shigaev is dead and Victor remembers him. I'm old enough to remember this guy Shigaev. I remember him standing and shifting his weight from one foot to the other. He was impatient. I remember that since he was older, his feet would drag a little more in the thick carpet of his two-story house down the street from mine. We were renting; he had bought. In the summers (there were only two) I would walk down and sit with him, me a boy, Shigaev an older man. He would talk to me about his life, his bachelorhood, a state that only seemed to serve the purpose of giving him a void to fill. Let me tell you about Olga, he'd say, or Tatiana, he'd say. Let me tell you about when I was younger, he'd say. He'd drag his feet a bit and bring a plate of cheese from room to room. And here, he'd say, here is where I first realized the key to happiness. He'd walk me all over that stale-smelling house. It was his life, that house. I knew they'd have to pry him out of there if he were ever to die. He'd be holding onto the railing of the staircase as they tried to drag him, I imagined. I saw the people who take the dead and they about nearly gave up on old Shigaev. That was what I imagined, anyway. I was out of school but going back in a couple weeks. Shigaev said we should take a trip somewhere; I said I'd have to ask my parents. Then he said, No, no, not a trip outside, but back in time, son. He pulled out his faded monochrome pictures filled with blurry subjects and dreary settings. This, he said, is Anna. Anna was the one, he said. He could have been crying when he said this―I don't really remember. That was the tone of his voice, though: desperate. He wanted all of those memories back, Shigaev did. When he asked me about my friends or what I did and what I saw, he only listened long enough to spark a memory of his own. Yes, he'd say in a moment of recognition, that's how it is. We spent two summers in that city, that rented house, and then we moved away, not far, but too far for me to see Shigaev by foot. Before I left him for the last time (neither of us knew it would be the last time) he gave me something―just a tiny trinket or a toy he'd had. I didn't think much of it, didn't examine it or pry into his past to find out its significance. I just took the thing (it was small enough to fit into my hand, my pocket) and went away. Then the move. The autumn―it came. I grew up slowly from the inside but quickly to others. I lengthened and matured a bit. One Saturday at the breakfast table my mother said, It's horrible, that man Shigaev is dead. She asked if I'd known him at all, asked if I'd ever been inside of his house. Of course I thought of the smell, the smell of Shigaev's house. I imagined his dead body clutching the railing in a desperate attempt. Surely he'd dropped the cheese plate―cubes scattered making patterns on the rug―and died trying to pull himself upstairs, up where I'd never been, where there was mystery, intrigue. Did you know him? my mother asked. I shook my head. Only as well as anyone, I said. I chewed my cereal. I felt sick. Later in my room after nothing in particular I tried in vain to find what it was Shigaev had given me before we moved. I tried to retrace my steps in reverse―the unpacking, the packing, the setting down in my room, the stuffing into my pocket, the closing of my fingers around it when Shigaev placed it in my hands. The problem, I realized, was that my eyes had been focused entirely on Shigaev and not his hand or the object. I was looking in the wrong direction entirely.
Newspaper fades too quickly anymore. It fades and
crinkles, becomes brittle. It flakes away in shapeless yellow specks―large
dust―and someday even the clipping of his obituary will be as absent as my
memory of the man behind it, and that two story house, and all of his
lovers, and that thing he gave me, whatever it was. Additional Links:
More about this story
here.
The Circle, c.1934 Excerpt
In the second place, because he was possessed by a sudden
mad hankering after Russia. In the third place, finally, because he
regretted those years of youth and everything associated with it―the fierce
resentment, the uncouthness, the ardency, and the dazzlingly green mornings
when the coppice deafened you with its golden orioles. As he sat in the cafe
and kept diluting with syphoned soda the paling sweetness of his cassis, he
recalled the past with a constriction of the heart, with melancholy―what
kind of melancholy?―well, a kind not yet sufficiently investigated. Analysis/Synthesis So begins "The Circle," by Vladimir Nabokov. This story was a sort of tangential thread that spiraled off his Russian masterpiece The Gift, which, incidentally, my mother says is quite a compelling read. You might say to yourself, "That is a peculiar beginning to a story; clearly we've hit the second item in a list of three." This is exactly what you're supposed to say to yourself, and you're not supposed to forget it a few pages later when the story ends with these lines: "He felt that way for several reasons. In the first place, because Tanya had remained as enchanting and as invulnerable as she had been in the past." See―a circle. The story is circular, "serpent-biting-its-tail," as Nabokov described it. He admits to using the same form on the fourth chapter of Dar―sorry, The Gift―and somewhat patronizingly mentions that Joyce's Finnegan's Wake, which has a similar form, was published at least three years after all this Nabokovian genius. I suppose it is always wise to mention, alongside one's self, the author who repeatedly ranks as the greatest author of the twentieth century; I can't fault Nabokov for this. I can, however, fault him for a less-than-stunning story. While the form proves neat, the content remains inexorably linked to The Gift, from which it came. Furthermore, "neat" forms should go hand-in-hand with the content of a work; they should not only enhance a story, but organically grow from it. "The Circle" reads like an ordinary story that was made cyclic. Part of the problem, I think, is that Nabokov did not convey enough of the protagonist's idiosyncrasies (something Nabokov rarely fails to do). Had he done this, I could easily see Innokentiy's own confused state causing this recursive narration. It almost works as it is―almost.
Something I found truly fascinating was this: "and on the
wall above, between two casement windows, a portrait of Leo Tolstoy,
entirely composed of the text of one of his stories printed in microscopic
type." Why is this interesting? Travel back in time ten years to the short
story "Sounds": "On another wall hung a framed chapter from Anna Karenin,
set in such a way that the interplay of dark and light type together with
the clever placement of the lines formed Tolstoy's face." Why is this
fascinating? How many people in the world have noticed this before? I grant
you―I'm definitely not the first person who has noticed it (and Nabokov
himself was most likely intentionally remembering a vivid image from his
earlier writing). But let us assume the number is less than a thousand. It
might even be lower. But let us assume a thousand. How many of those
retained the recognition more than a few seconds?―perhaps half. Five hundred
people got it lodged in their head. How many of those told another person?
Probably not even a tenth―fifty. Has mention of it ever appeared in print?
It's not likely. Try a search for "Tolstoy's face" and Nabokov,
and see what you find. Not even
Barthelme
mentioned it, and he spent a whole illustrated story yapping about Tolstoy's
face. What's special, I think, is this here. This little piece of
information that we are sharing, you and I, together at last. Additional Links:
More about this story
here.
A Russian Beauty, 1934 Excerpt
Olga, of whom we are about to speak, was born in the year
1900, in a wealthy, carefree family of nobles. A pale little girl in a white
sailor suit, with a side parting in her chestnut hair and such merry eyes
that everyone kissed her there, she was deemed a beauty since childhood. The
purity of her profile, the expression of her closed lips, the silkiness of
her tresses that reached to the small of her back―all this was enchanting
indeed. Analysis/Synthesis
The first corner of this story would be Olga's character.
She ages relatively gracefully, I think, but finds herself unmarried at the
ripe old age of thirty. Are we left with a caricature? Ah, the second
corner: Russia. Yes, the country itself is personified in Olga, and as the
beauty of one wanes, so too does the other. Is it that their beauty actually
fades, or that our thoughts of them fade? We see Russia as a country from
the outside and after the revolution things begin to seem quite a bit
different than they were. Eventually, say in the mid 1930s (if we were born
at the turn of the century), our nostalgia having simmered away like
escaping steam from a pot, we might have grown almost adverse to it, not
banishing it outright but definitely not springing for it. No, we'll bring
in a Russified German named Foxtrot―excuse me, Forstmann―for the job. The
third corner is the absent setting, and the fourth is the unknown connection
to Nabokov's life. (Some suggest Olga might refer to the woman of the same
name who happened to be Nabokov's sister, but I'm not sure―as if I were an
expert on this type of thing.) This categorization came to me when my
friend, an ardent Nabokov devotee, read my analysis of "The Circle," and
said to me (I'm paraphrasing) "I don't really understand what you meant by
all that 'cyclic' stuff―maybe you could show me the story." Well,
considering that our world views often fit inside either a television or a
computer monitor, each having, as it were, four corners, and considering
that our lives are lived, for the most part, in rooms, usually square or
rectangular, rooms which comprise houses (shaped the same), and that nine
out of ten people surveyed at the Death Valley Visitor's Center on August
19, 1979 said they could never remember what to call polygons with more than
four corners (as if the Greek/Latin prefixes tetr-, hept-, sept-, octo-,
etc. were so difficult to attribute), I thought that if I were to include,
in my next analysis, say, a sample of that cyclic form, along with a
fourfold classification of the story ("A Russian Beauty," of course), then
it would be of service to him (even though he skips every other entry). So.
The first corner of this story would be Olga's character. She ages... Additional Links:
More about this story
here.
Breaking the News, 1935
[Notification] Excerpt
As she carried the pot of coffee back to her room across
the hallway, she noticed a flutter of a postcard, which, upon having been
pushed by the mailman through a special slit, settled on the floor. It was
from her son, of whose death the Chernobylskis had just learned by more
advanced postal means, in consequence of which the lines (virtually
inexistent) that she now read, standing with the coffeepot in one hand, on
the threshold of her sizable but inept room, could have been compared by an
objective observer to the still visible beams of an already extinguished
star. Analysis/Synthesis The elderly Eugenia Isakovna Mints' son has perished in a mishap in Paris, a fall down an elevator shaft. Meanwhile, news spreads fast; soon all of her friends are aware: she is a bit like the detached, immobile nucleus of an atom surrounded by the cognizant electrons swirling around her at light speed. She, eternally wearing black, mourning perhaps the heat death of the universe (something else of which she was not aware), is deaf without her relatively giant hearing aid―a device I imagine to look like a box with a gramophone-like opening on one end and a tube leading to her ear (when she has it in place) exiting the other. E.I.'s deafness, I think, is one of the crucial elements of this story. The other "crucial element" is a technique of Nabokov's, a mastery of perspective that he uses to move in and out of characters during his omniscient narration.
The point of this story―what it all boils down to―is that
we, the reader (and they, the town), find out something before the
protagonist does. Nabokov's job, then, is to lead us to the point of mutual
recognition. The fear and unwillingness of the townsfolk to reveal the
secret is effectively transferred to us as Eugenia Isakovna walks around
doing errands. We learn of her first dead husband, of her posture and
stance, of her feud with the landlady. Everything, though, is leading up to
the inevitable divulgence: the story is, after all, titled "Breaking the
News." An apt reader will realize, after encountering these mundane aspects
of E.I.'s day, that the story is not truly about breaking the news as much
as it is about the utter impossibility of breaking said news, or even of
comprehending the situation. We find ourselves in control of another's fate,
yet we are completely unable to take charge or make a decision. I imagine
the artist, sequestered for the sake of concentration, as he moves his
fictive figures left and right, up and down, guides them through a thousand
and one meaningful activities for the sake of a grandiose conclusion; now we
move to the side of this power struggle and watch it in profile: this is
Nabokov's tactic. He is able to pull the reader halfway to his table (not
towards him, but to the side) as if saying "See?―see what it is I go through
while doing this?" The strategy unifies us, reader and author, but he still
(since his text is unchangeable but for its context) trumps the reader, an
advantage Nabokov wouldn't likely mention, but would be glad for in the
spare moments, the lepidopterological visits to uncharted Swiss hillsides,
the days spent entertaining his precocious son, whom he was terribly proud
of, the nights of simple candlelit dinners with Véra, only a sparsely
populated chessboard between them, their plates not fitting on the smallish
square table beside the railing on their balcony. Additional Links:
More about this story
here.
Torpid Smoke, 1935 Excerpt
At intervals scraps of indistinct, laconic speech came
from the adjacent parlor (the cavernal centerpiece of one of those bourgeois
flats which Russian émigré families used to rent in Berlin at the time),
separated from his room by sliding doors, through whose ripply matte glass
the tall lamp beyond shone yellow, while lower down there showed through, as
if in deep water, the fuzzy dark back of a chair placed in that position to
foil the propensity of the door leaves to crawl apart in a series of jerks. Analysis/Synthesis How do you have two "y"s touching in a word? I can't even comprehend it. It runs contrary to everything I've ever known in life. I remember the sound of the proprietor's voice when he saw me, at eight years of age, stuffing foreign currency into the video game: "Heyyyyy!!" That I can understand. "Tyazhyolyy"? What's that? And why does Nabokov continue to disclaim any connection between his stories and his life? What is he so afraid of? That we take that languid Grisha to be him, Nabokov, lying there in a misty haze while he transmogrifies into the sleepy city below while his sister and her boyfriend make love in the adjacent parlor? Until he quits saying things like "Only very poor readers..." in his extratextual notes, I'm going to assume that Nabokov's fear began with a feeling of inadequacy, a sense that we, his readers, would discredit his oeuvre because it was too autobiographical, too rooted in his own life, or too connected to that person―in some way, shape or form―Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov. This story is beautiful, though.
It is an exercise in poetics, as all fine writing is. In
fact, we all ought to think of artistic ventures as "exercises," for then we
wouldn't judge them too harshly or dismiss them when they are on the verge
of brilliance. When does an exercise become an art object? That isn't for me
to decide at the stroke of a pen (or key), but for us to decide, together,
as we grow and digest the exercises that have come before us and as we watch
the field of current art bloom around us (however frightening it may be to
think that art still blossoms this very day, and that each morning there
might be someone whose wit and aptitude equals (or, dare I say, surpasses)
our own, someone whose love and appreciation of art makes them deserving of
an attempt of their own). Additional Links:
More about this story
here.
Recruiting, 1935 Excerpt But he was already mine. Presently, with an effort, he got up, straightened, transferred his cane from one hand to the other, took a short, tentative step, and then calmly moved off, forever, if I am not mistaken. Yet he carried off with him, like the plague, an extraordinary disease, for he was sacramentally bound to me, being doomed to appear for a moment in the far end of a certain chapter, at the turning of a certain sentence.
My representative, the man with the Russian newspaper,
was now alone on the bench and, as he had moved over into the shade where
V.I. had just been sitting, the same cool linden pattern that had anointed
his predecessor now rippled across his forehead. Analysis/Synthesis Nabokov, almost in a Borgesian sense, plays with the infinite regression of narrators in "Recruiting." Well, not quite infinite, but fourfold anyhow. I have previously alluded to Nabokov's frequent intrusion into the text―not by the author himself, for that's never the case, but by a narrator whose order is one level higher than previously understood by the reader. An example: I sit here commenting on Nabokov's hijinks, his writing and style and life. You think you know that much. But what you do not really know is that I'm actually an aged Canadian paraplegic who rests, uncomfortably, in my bed, the computer aside humming gently away while I type these entries as if I were this younger, Californian man who has full use of his legs. Whereas Nabokov was the character alone before, the youth has now been added to the mix. You and I, communicating on one constant, stable level may now, together, appreciate these two fictive souls set in a fictive world. But come now: you know as well as I do that I'm neither old nor young; I'm middle-aged, in fact. Thus the characters keep stacking. Nabokov often has a narrator step back within a story. His third person narrator might suddenly betray that the protagonist is actually also the narrator. "Recruiting" is a bit different because the whole story is based on the narrator's obsession with a man he saw exiting a tram and sitting down. (And it is lucky that he doesn't, as Mark did in "Details of a Sunset," actually get flattened by the tram; Nabokov actually clarifies this for us.) The narrator confesses that it was a newspaper clipping that gave this old, ill man his past. We now know that all of the previous story was merely invented―not real at all. Why does this matter when we know that we're picking up a work of fiction to begin with? Still, it somehow seems less of a betrayal than a confession intended to bring the two of us together, narrator and reader. Remember, Nabokov the writer still has not entered the conversation.
Then comes the last paragraph, which begins with "My
representative," (see above), and the narrator is now added to the fictive
world, and we can suddenly imagine the real writer (still not
Nabokov) sitting across from the man who is now sitting where the old, ill
man had been sitting, and who had followed him from the tram to the bench
because he was curious for an unknown reason. The real writer now
constructs the story of a man who constructs a story of another man. Nabokov
wrote about the real writer―in fact, might associate himself with
him―but does not share that identity. The regression of narrators does not,
strangely, distance us from the writer, but brings us closer, unites us
since it mimics the diverse array of perspectives in life. The double does
us no good if it is only a mirror image; we need to step to the side over
and over until we can detect even the faintest whisper of truth whence we
seek it. Additional Links:
More about the narration in this story
here.
A Slice of Life, 1935 Excerpt
All my romances, by some kind of collusion between their
heroes, have invariably followed a prearranged pattern of mediocrity and
tragedy, or more precisely, the tragic slant was imposed by their very
mediocrity. I am ashamed to recall the way they started, and appalled by the
nastiness of their denouements, while the middle part, the part that should
have been the essence and core of this or that affair, has remained in my
mind as a kind of listless shuffle seen through oozy water or sticky fog. Analysis/Synthesis I. (Not the Roman numeral, but the word, the pronoun, the subject, "I.") What weight does the word carry absent of a description or a name? If one were to methodically read these excerpts on Irkland's humble shrine to the body of work that is Nabokov's, the aforesaid "one" would not detect much variance in the structure of the language. Nabokov's writing is more personal here, more poetic there; it is forceful and unrelenting in one story, and then shady and ethereal in another. But his style, his voice―whatever you might take that to mean―is somewhat consistent. It has been from the first story ("The Wood Sprite") to this one, "A Slice of Life." But something is different about the "I" in this story (for it is a first person narrative―as several have been): it is a woman. Am I making too big a deal out of this? That is a rhetorical question. First, the story. Pavel Romanovich, having a tough go of it since his dear wife left him for her lover, goes to visit his friend Nicholas to blow off excess steam, but only finds his sister, Maria Vasilevna, in attendance. Their history is not entirely clear, but it is apparent that she had romantic feelings for him before he was married. Now she finds herself in the position of comforter, and, somewhat surprisingly, isn't at all glad that the couple has split. She might be sensing Pavel's insecurity, jealousy and childishness; that should be enough to turn her off. But she's not completely turned off, for she accompanies Pavel back to his place for a few drinks. It is there he convinces her to call his wife to arrange a meeting under largely false pretenses. The two women enter the bar to meet Pavel, who is nonchalantly offering a "slice of life" to a German patron. Pavel's wife sits down and hands him his eyeglasses, which she had mistakenly taken when she left the house. He then shoots her. Well, it says he "started to shoot at his wife," which is essentially the same thing. He doesn't kill her, of course. The shooting is botched, the bullet striking only her fleshy shoulder. Pavel is taken away, and the buzzed Maria Vasilevna is escorted by the German patron, whose plans may or may not be amorous in nature. It is telling that Nabokov doesn't alter his style to represent a female narrator. He bestows upon her a voice and diction worthy of any of his other narrators, but there is textual evidence that he thinks of her differently. Without launching into a dissertation... When Pavel enters Maria's room, she says nothing―"I said nothing," she says: she is merely flattered by his presence despite the circumstances. Though she doesn't instantly conclude that her chances of romance have increased, she is enamored by Pavel, and continues to see strength in a very, very weak man. Furthermore, that passage I quoted above describes her unusual stance toward relationships. Those statements show an intellectual disgust for her physical actions during a love affair. This particular section isn't very gendered; I think Nabokov is pointing out a universal aspect of memory and experience. After a long passage: "I still said nothing," and later, on going with Pavel to his house: "I could not decline his offer." Maria is largely powerless in the greater elements of plot; she acts as a catalyst, as a stand-in, and a go-between. There is also the curious business of her dress, it being all black, mourning clothes "for my own self, for Russia, for the fetuses scraped out of me."
I would not make a case that Maria should be deeply
analyzed to get to the root of Nabokov's feeling towards women or his mother
or dirt and clay. It is simply interesting that, after 45 short stories
spanning eleven years of his life, Nabokov has not had one female narrator.
I read somewhere else that this is the only story of Nabokov's that utilizes
a female narrator. What of it? Additional Links:
If you thought I went crazy about this topic, look
here.
Spring in Fialta, 1936 Excerpt
And with each new meeting I grew more and more
apprehensive; no―I did not experience any inner emotional collapse, the
shadow of tragedy did not haunt our revels, my married life remained
unimpaired, while on the other hand her eclectic husband ignored her casual
affairs although deriving some profit from them in the way of pleasant and
useful connections. I grew apprehensive because something lovely, delicate,
and unrepeatable was being wasted: something which I abused by snapping off
poor bright bits in gross haste while neglecting the modest but true core
which perhaps it kept offering me in a pitiful whisper. I was apprehensive
because, in the long run, I was somehow accepting Nina's life, the lies, the
futility, the gibberish of that life. Analysis/Synthesis [I can't quite comprehend what it is I'm about to say, but that's never stopped me before.] "Spring in Fialta" starts, in some small way, what Lolita finishes. In this story the narrator's creativity is the driving force behind the love affair whose spurts mirror those in the text. Did that make sense? Nina and Victor are cosmically united from a young age; in some way they revolve around each other as planets do the sun. It is all about the language, the art, the design. [Victor can be read one of two ways: as genuine or delusional. We'd like to think he's the former―to give our hearts sustenance―and the latter―to give our brain intellectual material to digest. My problem, I guess, is that I inherently believe everyone, and I believe in love, so I don't disregard someone who thinks he is in love.] I see parts of Mary in this story. I see Nina as a metaphor for the homeland, and as someone who is not wholly developed (because to develop her seems superfluous to the narrator in each case). Nina and Mary are both so unreal, unnecessary for Victor and Ganin. When Victor first meets Nina outside of Russia (their first of many visits), he recalls this: "[A]t once it became clear to everyone, beginning with her, that we had long been on intimate terms: unquestionably, she had forgotten all about the actual kiss[, the kiss being a nighttime snowfight anomaly between two acquaintances, two people who may have only come together in Victor's mind], but somehow because of that trivial occurrence[, which Victor didn't think trivial at all; in fact it was a sort of fulcrum by which their relationship swung into something else] she found herself recollecting a vague sketch[, vague perhaps because it existed only in the mind of her interlocutor] of a warm, pleasant friendship[, which in reality never existed between them], which in reality never existed between us." This story, a love story, a wanting-love-so-bad-regardless-of-whether-it's-really-love story, is about Victor and Nina and their chance meetings here and there, Russia, Berlin, Paris, Fialta. It's spring in Fialta when the story begins, and Victor then leads us through all of their meetings (most of them anyway). We get meeting after meeting as he's building his case for their relationship. The basis, he says, is these meetings. They are heartwarming from his perspective, but the little he lets Nina speak, the more we understand she might not cling to him as much as he to her. On their last visit he feels torn: both of them being married, he brings up the following notion: "Look here―what if I love you?" and suddenly it all comes crashing down...literally. We realize now that Nina doesn't depend on Victor, that he's been carving this niche for himself when in fact his place as lover―and soul mate―doesn't exist. We can pity the poor man, or we can read Nina's death as his revenge. She does die shortly after his admittance. Her death comes from her rejection of Victor, not from the carelessness of her husband's automobile maneuvering (as Victor would have us believe). Why these narrators who lie to us? Maybe Nabokov is saying that we lie to ourselves, that no story is one story. He gives us events that occur over and over in a slightly different way just so that we can see that something is not what it seems if you step back and look at it from over there. No hero is only heroic, no villain only evil. Nabokov is trying to weave a layer of complexity into our understanding of humans and storytellers: no one in his stories are ever just one; at the least they are a half of a double. Whether you want both or one is completely up to you.
[I found this other passage that I wanted to share
because it interested me; Victor, the narrator, says this of Ferdinand,
Nina's husband, whom he (Victor) is at odds with (obviously) since he is in
love with his (Ferdinand's) wife (Nina)...and Ferdinand is a writer...:
More about this story here.
Cloud, Castle, Lake, 1937 Excerpt
It was a pure, blue lake, with an unusual expression of
its water. In the middle, a large cloud was reflected in its entirety. On
the other side, on a hill thickly covered with verdure (and the darker the
verdure, the more poetic it is), towered, arising from dactyl to dactyl, an
ancient black castle. Of course, there are plenty of such views in Central
Europe, but just this one―in the inexpressible and unique harmoniousness of
its three principal parts, in its smile, in some mysterious innocence it
had, my love! my obedient one!―was something so unique, and so familiar,
and so long-promised, and it so understood the beholder that Vasiliy
Ivanovich even pressed his hand to his heart, as if to see whether his heart
was there in order to give it away. Analysis/Synthesis I once lived life as a scrub jay for one day, sun up to sun down, while everyone in my little city kept doing the things they'd been doing for months before, working and jogging and doing dozens of asinine little chores, dusting and brushing and basting and draping. I was this jay with the vision in each eye exactly the same but still I turned my head to discern what I saw, to map what I could see with one eye alternatively, left-right, up-down. Darting from limb to limb, branch to branch, I flew around the hundred thousand houses, each one elegantly shrouded in a halo of individuality despite its molded exterior, its inkstamped facade. [Vasiliy is an outcast, a pariah, whose primary point in life is to embody the vague term "alienation." He wins an award to go on a trip; he cannot transfer the award. He senses something positive will come of the trip.] I found a park filled with people who ran and danced with merriment and who raised no alarm when I landed gingerly on their bench table (absent of a cloth) and watched them with my left eye, then my right. In truth my wings were tired. Instead of welcoming me, though, they looked at me with no pity or empathy. [They steal the man's thunder after he spots the cloud, the castle, the lake. He spots it all and wants to stay but he cannot stay. He must go back to them and this equals death for the man. It is not so dramatic.] Twenty-four hours was just enough―almost too much, in fact. I had nothing left after that, for the people were so harsh to me. The iridescence of my feathers, the oil of my coat, was lost on them; they saw only a bird and none of my potential. They saw none of this I've created since that day. Maybe they will continue to ignore it, but I will always hold a piece of the scrub jay inside of me, a little scrap of that flitting bird: I would flap my wings and truly fly.
[The Russian version of the words "cloud, castle, lake"
are roughly "озеро замка облака," signifying that Nabokov changed the order
of the words in the title for the English translation. They originally were
ordered: cloud, lake, castle.] More about this story here. NOTE Nabokov may not be my absolute favorite writer of all time, but he is indeed the writer whose work I know the most about. When it comes to motion picture directing, that position would go to Alfred Hitchcock. Though I'm too young to have directly encountered his Presents television show, I have seen all of his major movies (and several of his lesser known pictures). I'm about to spring a wonderful web site on you, so I won't repeat what the author has listed there, but I did want to explain the connection I saw between the two, the writer and the director. Hitchcock loved to work in the studio; he hated locations. Locations, he thought, were pointless since we're already working within the realm of fiction. What he strove for was ultimate control over conditions that affected the filmmaking. But because we're now trained to take for granted that a movie (as they nearly all are today) is shot on location (when the script brings the characters outside, at least), some of Hitch's work looks dated or, dare I say, fake. Yup, there's Cary Grant driving on a sound stage. Wow, is Jimmy Stewart driving Kim Novak down the wrong side of the road? Is there any life in Rear Window? Some literature―most, I would argue―shares this aspect of the creator's vision overstepping the foul line in the author's quest for control and his or her need for connection with an audience. It doesn't necessarily take on the guise of a post-modern, hyper aware text (à la Barth, say), but it might have a large chunk of the author's personality shining through. It's a hard parallel to draw, but think of it this way: the glass mattes or blue screens of a director are in some way analogous to the glaring holes in a text that, rather than existing purposefully, merely come into being because the author was focusing on something else. In the quest for creative control, they slip in and add to rather than subtract from the work's perfection. Check this out.
Tyrants Destroyed, 1938 Excerpt
In the published letters of his "Sunset Years" a
universally acclaimed foreign writer mentions that everything now leaves him
cold, disenchanted, indifferent, everything with one exception: the vital,
romantic thrill that he experiences to this day at the thought of how
squalid his youthful years were compared with the sumptuous fulfillment of
his later life, and of the snowy gleam of its summit, which he has now
reached. That initial insignificance, that penumbra of poetry and pain, in
which the young artist is on par with a million such insignificant fellow
beings, now lures him and fills him with excitement and gratitude―to his
destiny, to his craft―and to his own creative will. Analysis/Synthesis Nabokov rarely made a foray into the realm of politics, and, perhaps just like his very Notes-from-Undergroundish narrator in this story, was not all that interested in it. This story, though, tries to do two things: it tries to make a case for dethroning a national tyrant―this by humanizing and dehumanizing tactics; and it tries tell the story of a maddening middle aged man still haunted by his brother's tragic death (or suicide, or murder). Having had a shared history with the aforementioned tyrant puts the narrator in a unique position to see through the superficial cleanliness of his campaign―a campaign in a land of despotism being that in name only―and so he plots his undoing. That is how the tyrant is referred to, usually: an italicized pronoun. Murdering a well-guarded political figure proves to be tricky for the narrator. He reflects longingly on the day when, armed with his brother's revolver more by accident than on purpose, he could have shot the young tyrant long before he acquired an entourage of supporters and protectors. An alternative, the narrator reasons, is suicide. Killing himself will put an and to this diabolical double that has surfaced (as far as we can tell) only in his mind. In fact, I was even a bit startled that the narrator would so readily admit this slight form of madness. What could have been an added layer of mystery ends up being irresistible ground for Nabokov.
So, with a startling and relatively unprovoked epiphany,
the narrator realizes that none shall lose his life: the humiliation the
tyrant suffered in the story somehow supersedes a real death and all is well
after art triumphs evil. I can accept the notion, but I don't think Nabokov
really proved it with the story. The chronicling could definitely have saved
the life of the narrator, but it would not, on its own, bring down the
tyrant. I thought of Plato while reading this story, of his Republic
and the hilarious but justified suppression of some art forms. To control
people you most certainly need to control their art, but unlike a pesky weed
that will grow regardless of the conditions of its environ, art is more like
a delicate plant, a rare plant, whose necessity is fertile ground, ample
light, gentle breezes, warm temperatures, and only a weekly sprinkling of
water. Art flourishes with culture, but when culture is on the
wane―oppressed somehow―even art has a hard time surviving. More about this story here. Lik,
1939 Excerpt
He reflected that he had been condemned to live on the
outskirts of life, that it had always been thus and always would be, and
that, therefore, if death did not present him with an exit into true
reality, he would simply never come to know life. He also reflected that if
his parents were alive instead of having died at the dawn of émigré
existence, the fifteen years of his adult life might have passed in the
warmth of a family; that, had his destiny been less mobile, he would have
finished on of the three gymnasiums he had happened to attend at random
points of middle, median, mediocre Europe, and would now have a good, solid
job among good, solid people. Analysis/Synthesis This story really starts something. It starts something quite extraordinary, quite magnificent, but it ends up being something different entirely. I wasn't disappointed at all; I don't see an opportunity and get upset at its lack of fulfillment. On the contrary I lap up that potential as a thirsty dog would after a long walk around a park. Nabokov pushes over the stainless steel bowl: I accept it. The refreshment in this case arises from the unique introduction of the protagonist, one Lavrentiy Ivanovich Kruzhevnitsyn―L.I.K. Lik, as he's known to his theatre pals, is an actor in a play titled L'Abime (The Abyss), which appears to be the focus of the story. We're told the sordid, soap operatic plot and then told of this outsider character in the play, an émigré Russian (Lik, who is around Nabokov's age, and, as Nabokov at the time, was living in France) playing, of all things, an émigré Russian. So we pull back from the play and begin to learn of the actor himself. This is good...this has potential. After this, though, everything becomes typically Nabokovian. That is not to say that this story is poorly written, however. I just enjoyed the device. Lik. As in Lick. He was tormented to death (hyperbole) by this bully (and his second cousin) Oleg Petrovich Koldunov (I think cold-enough) when he (Lik) was a child/adolescent, and somehow had, out of self-preservation maybe, considered the poor fool dead. Not so. Touring a Mediterranean city with his troupe, Lik runs into the fellow, drunkard and boor that he is. What's worse than running into a childhood bully? How about having him ask you for money or force you to drink when you have a heart condition prohibiting it? Did I mention that this is a sleazy part of town?
I've left out a host of the plot, but the story is mainly
about Lik's reluctance to break free from his imposed prison, from the
impersonal relationships he has in the theatre. Everything there, you see,
is just a form of fiction, and one that your entire body and mind enter
while in it. In fact, every art form can potentially suck you in, take you
prisoner and disguise your connection to reality. Koldunov's redeeming
gesture―for it can only be seen as such from our perspective―is his
suicide. If anything can free Lik, it's this, this rendezvous with death,
this frightening appearance of a man whose half head is connected to a body
whose feet are wearing Lik's shoes. More about this story here.
Mademoiselle O, 1939 Excerpt
A kerosene lamp is steered into the gloaming. Gently it
floats and comes down; the hand of memory, now in a footman's white cotton
glove, places it in the center of a round table. The flame is nicely
adjusted, and a rosy, silk-flounced lamp shade crowns the light. Revealed: a
warm, bright room in a snow-muffled house―soon to be termed "le chateau"―built
by my great-grandfather, who, being afraid of fires, had the staircase made
of iron, so that when the house did get burnt to the ground, sometime after
the Soviet Revolution, those fretted steps remained standing there, all
alone but still leading up. Analysis/Synthesis The author, dictating this from across the room, miraculously appears as a voice, through a text, via the interpreter, typist, scribe, etc. while you, meanwhile begin to get a feel for how this will work. I talk, he types, you read: we all sort of meet somewhere in the middle. So when I tell you something, know that it is me telling you, not him or her or someone else...me. This Nabokov character (this is still me―yes, I told him to put this bit in parentheses) first caught my attention a half dozen years ago when I read Pale Fire [yes, "put that in italics," I told him]: I happened to note that the whole botched assassination might, in some small way, mirror the death of his own father, and as a result I thought, "Wow, that's really something." I had no way of knowing then that this Nabokov fellow ("from character to fellow," the scribe points out and I say, "sure, put that in there; only make sure my retort accompanies it") would so infamously entwine his personal life with his fiction as no other ever has. I guess what's so funny (this is me telling you this―he called Edmund Wilson "Bunny") is that Nabokov was this art-for-art's sake charioteer (for people who make that claim are all up on their high-horse just a bit (no, I don't know if "high-horse" is two words) since we all eat, and we all bathe, and we all suffer and we all ... add a couple more for effect. But this line between author and narrator and character is rather arbitrary in a Nabokov story. It may seem delicately planned, but the truth is that the big man himself (big only in old age, you understand) often forgot just where he was or who he was or in what voice he was writing―whether his own or another or another's (yes a dash will do fine there). The beauty in this story springs forth (that's a bit high-brow―"springs forth") from the real Nabokov wondering to what all this fictive piracy amounts. Maybe it's not even the real Nabokov; maybe this is a real, 100% (you should spell that out) honest-to-goodness fictional story and has nothing to do with Nabokov except that he dreamed it some cold morning in 1939 (you don't have to spell that out), and just sat down and wrote it: story number fifty―or sixty, or whichever. Regardless, some person (whom we wish to be nameable, to be Nabokov―and our friend) realizes that his past, in miniscule, fragmented details, has been usurped by his art. In fact, he can't tell the difference anymore (is that assertion supported?―I'm not sure it is) or at least can't remember if he has used certain memories from his life in his writing.
I remember (and you don't have to write this) talking to
a friend and not knowing whether I'd told him the good news of the recent
marriage; "have I told you?" I thought to myself: I still couldn't remember.
At that instant the people, all of my friends, began blurring into each other in
some unimaginable way, and the world suddenly became two―and only
two―parts: me and the other...
More about this story
here. Page 1 - Page 2 - Page 3 - Page 4 - Page 5
*when available and appropriate, I'll provide the
original Russian title.
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Irkland
1998-2006