Vladimir Nabokov

Professor Norman Page, Norman Page

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136210044
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This set comprises of 40 volumes covering nineteenth and twentieth century European and American authors. These volumes will be available as a complete set, mini boxed sets (by theme) or as individual volumes.
This second set compliments the first 68 volume set of Critical Heritage published by Routledge in October 1995.

1. GLEB STRUVE IN ‘SLAVONIC AND EAST EUROPEAN REVIEW 1934, 436–44

Gleb Struve (born 1898 in Russia) taught at the University of London and later at the University of California at Berkeley. His publications include a study of Russian literature in exile and an anthology of Russian prose and verse ‘from Pushkin to Nabokov’.

Until some years ago it could have been said with some show of reason that the trouble with Russian literature outside Russia was that it had no undergrowth. Since then the position has changed; in spite of the unfavourable conditions (otherwise unfavourable than in Soviet Russia) several young writers of promise have made their appearance (Vladimir Sirin, Nina Berberova, Gayto Gazdanov, Yury Felzen — to speak only of the novelists), and some of them have already fulfilled that promise. The most original and accomplished among them is doubtless Vladimir Sirin, (this is a nom-de-plume, his real name being Nabokov; he is the eldest son of the late V.D. Nabokov, the well-known jurist and politician assassinated in Berlin in 1922 by a political fanatic of the Right).

Sirin began his literary career as a poet by publishing, in 1921, a book of mediocre youthful verse, slightly reminiscent of Fet and Alexey Tolstoy. His second book of verse (‘Cluster’) [1923] showed a much higher level of craftsmanship and had a strong personal accent; yet it was still very far from foreshadowing his later works in prose or even his later verse, among which there is a delightful long poem about Cambridge, (he was educated at Cambridge, reading simultaneously French literature and zoology; butterflies are his passion, only second to literature).

In 1923 he published translations of Lewis Carroll’s ‘Alice in Wonderland’ and Romain Rolland’s ‘Colas Breugnon’ and after that there began to appear in various Russian periodicals abroad his short stories, which from the very outset revealed a striking ease and assurance of style, a very keen instinct of observation, a predilection for original plots and unexpected climaxes — rather unusual in a Russian writer — and a peculiar care for construction also in contrast with the loose and formless structure of a typical Russian story.

In 1926 appeared his first novel, entitled ‘Mashenka’ [‘Mary’].(1) Though not yet a mature work, it contains already the main elements of Sirin’s technique. Novelists can be divided into several categories according to their attitude to the reality which they have to treat as their artistic material.There are writers who merely tend to reproduce photographically the reality they see; this way of faithful and detailed reproduction can bear not only on external, but on psychological processes. There are those who shun that reality altogether and betake themselves to the realm of pure fantasy. There are those who select from reality and transform it artistically, who re-create life, but hold to its laws and probabilities, giving the illusion of naturalness without being photographic and overfaithful, (this latter category would comprise such writers as Balzac and Tolstoy). It seems hard to include Sirin in any of these categories. He is a realist in the sense that he uses material with which real life provides him and is endowed with an exceptional visual keenness; but what strikes us in him is the mixture of realism and artificiality. He does not content himself with recreating the natural flow of life, he artificially organises his real-life material. His artificiality is deliberate, it is not a defect, it is not due to his inability to hit the mark, so to speak — it is entirely desired, a part of his artistic credo. Art must be artificial. An artist must neither reproduce the reality just as he perceives it, nor even transform it creatively and selectively and yet obeying its laws; he must create on a plane parallel to that of the real life. Real people and real life must be his subject — matter, but he must not loosen his grip on them, he must not let their world, the world of his novels, have an independent verisimilar existence — as do Balzac or Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky or Hardy; his world must obey the laws established by him, its creator and arbitrary master; the reader must be constantly aware of the author’s will directing and shaping the destinies of his characters. Where other writers would deal with probabilities of life, Sirin prefers to choose bare possibilities. It is not accidental that coincidences play such an important part in his novels. He uses them not as one of the many elements of reality, he emphasises and generalises them, makes them a starting-point and a springboard of his novels, deliberately uses them as one of his artistic devices. This gives an aDoearance of artificiality to his novels thoueh they are peopled with real human beings and describe real

Take ‘Mashenka’. It deals with facts of real life, definitely circumscribed in time and place, and that life is described with masterful realism and truthfulness of vision, (the humdrum life of an ordinary Russian boarding-house in Berlin during the first years of the emigration and the pastimes of a well-to-do youth in a pre-revolutionary country house are excellently described) — yet many people, on laying down the book, would probably say: ‘How unreal all this is, how untrue to life!’ Does it mean that Sirin has failed? Not at all, for he was out to describe not a probable course of events, but one that is just barely possible, though not improbable, one that without being unreal is not natural and ordinary. Sirin loves playing a sudden turn upon his readers, springing a surprise on them, winding up his story with a totally unexpected climax. ‘Mashenka’, for instance, ends in a quite unexpected way, and this gives it a peculiar freshness and originality. But those unexpected, and seemingly unnatural, artificial climaxes always have a significance on a different and deeper plane.

It is strange that Sirin’s ‘Mashenka’ passed almost unnoticed; it was fresh and original, very nearly perfect in construction — no looseness whatever about it, a thing rather unusual in Russian literature, reminiscent of Pushkin’s and Lermontov’s prose. One of its critics laid particular stress on the mastery with which the everyday life of a Russian boarding-bouse in Berlin was drawn, and hailed in Sirin the first ‘bytopisatel’ of the Russian emigration, expecting the young author to follow up ‘Mashenka’ with something more in that line. Sirin’ s next novel, however, belied that expectation. It did not contain a single Russian character, its action was set in the German bourgeois milieu, its theme was entirely psychological.

It is called ‘King, Queen, Knave’ . As the title suggests, Sirin chose here a trite, hackneyed subject, the eternal triangle of husband, wife and lover. Yet so original is his handling of this subject, so peculiar the architectonic of the novel and so fresh and striking its verbal texture, that the impression of freshness and originality prevails despite the banal theme. There are only three characters in the novel: Drayer, a wealthy business man: Martha, his young and pretty wife: and Franz, a poor relation of Drayer, a shy, self-conscious young man. Drayer is a most curious, elusive person: outwardly a perfect bourgeois, very sober and matter-of-fact, he hides under this matter-of-factness a poetical imagination, a passion for far-off wanderings, an interest in things out of the ordinary, a subtly ironical (and yet romantic) attitude to life. Martha, who is essentially much more terre a terre than her matter-of-fact husband, has long grown tired of Drayer’s seeming indifference, of his sudden and incomprehensible moods. She falls in love with Franz and makes him fall in love with her. Gradually she conceives the idea of putting Drayer out of the way. The psychological interest of the novel lies in the presentation of the slow maturing of that idea in Martha’s mind, of the way she infects with it Franz, who becomes her passive and involuntary accomplice. She considers different means of achieving her end, studies various methods of poisoning, but they all prove impracticable. Then an opportunity presents itself to Martha. They all go to the seaside. Martha proposes an excursion in a boat, and conceives an elaborate plan which is to end in the drowning of Drayer Though the whole thing does not look very natural, the reader is prepared to see it secceed. But with Sirin one never knows what he has up his sleeve. The climax of the story is again unexpected, though in a way quite usual. Whether consciously or unconsciously (all the time we are left ignorant as to whether he is aware of Martha’s affair with Franz) Draver thwarts Martha’s plan Martha catches a bad cold and dies orpneumonia and Drayer, who was Seemingly so cold and indifferent realises how he loved and still loves her

There is an air of deliberate unreality about Drayer, Martha and Franz, which is further emphasised and enhanced by the introduction of two queer, almost fantastic minor personages. One is the old inventor of ‘robot’ mannequins with whom Drayer is in business negotiations — there is a subtly symbolical meaning in this bringing in of mannequins, it throws back a reflection on the living characters of the story — they are themselves like mannequins or those card figures they are supposed to impersonate; they seem to move about in a flat, one-dimensional world. The method of realistic description used by Sirin, his uncannily acute vision of the smallest external details and his knack of putting his visions into striking verbal shapes, gives a peculiar effect to this air of eerie unreality. Still queerer is the other fantastic personage — Franz’s landlord, a funny old juggler who calls himself ‘Menetekelperes,’ and gives us to understand that Franz, Martha and the rest of them are but emanations of his mind. In his person the author, who until then has kept aloof from the world created by him (there is, indeed, very little subjective element in Sirin, and from his novels you never learn what are his feelings, views, likes or dislikes), seems to peep into the novel and remind us that he is the sole and arbitrary creator and master of this world which he has at his mercy.

Sirin’s short stories published after ‘King, Queen, Knave’ (but in part written before it), in a volume entitled ‘The Return of Chorb’ (together with his later poetry), reveal in miniature the same qualities which characterise his novels — a predilection for unusual situations, a great skill in handling them, an almost uncanny visual keenness, and a great assurance of style. Some of these short stories are little masterpieces. What makes them so different from any other stories in Russian literature (including Chekhov) is the amount of conscious artistic effort you feel in them, of joyful resistance to the material the author had to handle, of his pleasure in twisting it this or that way, of making it flexible and sub missive. Seldom does one get from literature such an impression of the artist’s own creative joy. The more unpleasant is the subject — and Sirin often chooses human baseness for his subject, his characters are often repulsive, though in a way very different from Dostoyevsky’s — the more you are aware of that creative joy. One of the best stories in the book is ‘The Return of Chorb’.(2) A very simple theme of a man’s grief at the sudden loss of a beloved person and the living-down of that grief is treated in a most original way. In these short stories Sirin shows his great versatility; there are no two of them written in the same menner. Different influences may be traced here and there, but they are welded into something quite original. There are,. for instance, one or two stories with a touch of Hoffmannesque element, but they also contain something you will never find in Hoffmann. One story (Podlets)(3) distantly resembles Chekhov in manner, but is a story Chekhov would never have written. An influence of Bunin can be traced in Sirin’s language, in his descriptions, in his visual acuity; but his art of composition, his skill in handling the plot, make him quite unlike Bunin. A comparison has sometimes been drawn between Sirin and Proust, but ‘creative memory’ and attention to details are, to my mind, the only things he has in common with the great French writer.

In 1929 Sirin wrote a remarkable story called Pilgram.(4) It is a study of the abnormal onesided mentality of an otherwise rather commonplace German, owner of a small zoological shop in Berlin, who has a crazy passion for butterflies and is obsessed by a dream of travelling all over the world, to see with his own eyes the exotic butterflies he so much loves and of which he has such priceless collections in stock. But this is only a dream, he is old and ailing, business is bad in the post-war slump, and there is little chance of his dream being realised. Then one day he has a visit from a famous entomologist who, after some bargaining, after keeping him for several days in suspense, buys one of his most precious collections and pays a good price for it. At last Pilgram’s dream is going to come true — he will go to Spain, thence over to Africa, to India, to the Far East. He has a wife, a simple-minded old creature, who has no sympathy with her husband’s dreams of exotic multi-coloured butterflies. He keeps her in the dark about his plans, and on the day of his proposed departure, after completing all preparations buying a ticket for Madrid, etc., he sends her away on some errand, then collects his things, the money — he intends taking all of it, leaving his wife nothing. Pinned on the mantelpiece he leaves a note for her, and is ready to start when he remembers that he has no small change, only banknotes He goes to fetch his money-box, and in opening it scatters the coins on the floor. He stools to pick them up. Here Sirin, with his usual ingenuity, breaks the story, shifts it, and tells us how Eleonora — Pilgram’s wife — returned home to find their room in a state of complete disorder. Before she has time to think of a burglary she sees the message left by her husband. Bewildered, puzzled, she sits down on the bed, trying to compass what has happened, unable to decide on some course of action, unable to grasp the meaning of her husband’s departure with all their money, just after prosperity and happiness seemed to dawn on them. I will quote in full the concluding passage of the story to show the effective unexpectedness of its ending:-

Yes, Pilgram had gone far away. He probably visited Granada, and Murcia, and Albarracin; he probably saw the pale night moths turn round the tall, dazzling white street lamps in the Sevillan avenues; he probably got, too, as far as the Congo and Surinam and saw all those butterflies he had dreamt of seeing — the velvety black ones with crimson spots between their firm veins; the rich blue ones, and the small mica-like ones with antennae resembling black feathers. And in a way it does not matter in the least that, entering the shop in the morning, Eleonora saw the valise and then her husband sitting on the floor, amid scattered coins, his back against the counter, his face set askew and grown blue, long dead.

For sheer brilliance of writing and effectiveness of construction, Pilgram is one of Sirin’s masterpieces. And in spite of the inhuman detachment with which the story is told and the inhuman crankiness of Pilgram himself there is a poignant human note in the impression it leaves on us. To realise Sirin’s loneliness in Russian literature, one has merely to imagine the way in which, say, Gogol, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky or Chekhov would have treated the same subject, (this is always a good test; in his remarkable essay on Tolstoy’s novels Constantine Leont-yev imagined how Pushkin would have written ‘War and Peace’ Mikhailovsky applied a similar test to the stories of Gleb Uspensky) .

In 1929, too, Sirin wrote his most ambitious and significant novel — ‘Luzhin’s Defence’ (Zashchita Luzhina’) [‘The Defence’]. It is also a study of abnormal, cranky mentality and psychology, that of a chess wunderkind who groVs to become a sort of chess maniac. ‘Luzhin’s Defence’ lacks perhaps the compositional unity and simplicity of ‘King, Queen, Knave’. Its psychological theme is more complex, and so is also its structure. Yet in a way Sirin achieves here a still greater economy and simplicity — instead of three characters, as in ‘King, Queen, Knave’, we have only one who matters — Luzhin himself. But there is a greater variety and a more detailed handling of secondary characters. In harmony with its theme, the novel is constructed like a complicated game of chess, full of intricate combinations — this chess construction is introduced intentionally, it is called upon to reflect the thematic design and Luzhin’s obsession, after a certain moment, with the idea that life is but a game of chess played against him.

The main interest of the novel lies in the inner tragedy of Luzhin, who has no other interest in life but chess, and in his one-sidedness, his lack of ordinary human qualities, appears to us almost as a monster. Yet there is, behind this monstrosity, something tragically and pathetically human which makes a level-headed Russian girl fall in love with him and, to her mother’s horror, become betrothed to him. But in the middle of an international tournament in Berlin, in which Luzhin has to contest the world champion ship against the Italian champion Turati (the description of their chess duel is a thing quite unique in literature), Luzhin goes mad. His slow and gradual return to reason, to the understanding of the outward world, which he perceives as a child and from which chess has disappeared completely, is presented with great mastery. All goes well till chess makes a sudden reappearance in his life, his gift and passion return to him, and at the same time his madness acquires a new turn, takes the form of chess persecution, and he finally decides to ‘drop out of the game’; he breaks the window of the bathroom and throws himself out of it.

After ‘Luzhin’, Sirin wrote three more novels — he is a prolific writer, and in this I perceive a certain danger for him. ‘The Spy’ (‘Soglyadatay’) [‘The Eye’] is a very short novel, rather a longish short story, a weird and ulti mately not very convincing study of multiplication of personality, of a man who, after committing suicide or failing to commit it — it is not quite easy to make this out — spies on himself in an after-death (or what he thinks to be an after-death) life, but in an earthly environment, and studies his mirror-like broken personality as reflected in various personages he meets. There are some brilliant passages in this story with its intermingling of the real and the fantastic, but as a whole, as I say, it is not very convincing. Through the mouthpiece of its hero Sirin expresses one of the important points in his artistic credo: ‘I have realised that the only happiness in this world is in observing, in spying, in looking with wide-open eyes at oneself, at others — in drawing no conclusions, in simply gazing.’

Sirin also voices here his philosophy of life, which is somewhat akin to Tolstoy’s historio-sophical ideas in ‘War and Peace’:

There are no laws — a tootache loses a battle, a rainy day cancels a proposed insurrection — everything is vacillating, everything is due to chance, and vain have been the efforts of that ramshackle and grumbling bourgeois in Victorian check trousers, who wrote the obscure work called ‘Capital’ — a fruit of insomnia and megrim. There is great fun is asking oneself, when one looks back at the past: What would have happened if — ...in substituting one contingency for another, in watching how from a grey minute of life, gone imperceptibly and fruitlessly, buds forth a marvellous rosy event which at its appointed hour had failed to bud, to shine forth. Mysterious is this ramification of life; in each past moment one feels one is at a crossing — it was so, but it might have been otherwise; and the countless flaming furrows stretch, doubling and trebling, over the dark field of history

Sirin’s next novel, called ‘The Feat’ (‘Podvig’) [‘Glory’] is somewhat disappointing, too. In sheer brilliance of style, of descriptions, of psychological portrayal of minor characters, it can match with his best work. But the figure of its hero lacks inner conviction. He is a young Russian émigré who, after a few years spent at Cambridge (there is an obvious element of autobiographical reminiscences in the outward skeleton of the work), a life with his mother and stepfather in Switzerland, and a somewhat strange love affair with a Russian girl he met in London, who is also loved by his English friend, Darwin, decides, for no obvious reason, out of nostalgia or an inborn passion for wanderings, to go somewhat mysteriously, after elaborate preparations, to Russia, or rather to the vague and unnamed country of his dreams and reminiscences. With his disappearance into Russia the story ends.

Sirin’s latest novel, ‘Camera Obscura’ [‘Laughter in the Dark’] has not yet been published in book form; in it he tried his hand at a new genre — that of cinematographic dynamism.

Sirin’s un-Russianness has been pointed out by several critics. This is certainly true of his technique. His interest in his plot, his careful construction, his inventiveness and ‘artificiality’ make up a whole that is very un-Russian, though separately these elements can be found in individual Russian writers. Besides, Sirin has no interest in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. GLEB STRUVE IN ‘SLAVONIC AND EAST EUROPEAN REVIEW 1934, 436-44
• ‘The Real Life of Sebastian Knight’
• ‘Bend Sinister’
• ‘Lolita’
• ‘Pnin’
• ‘Invitation to a Beheading’
• ‘Laughter in the Dark’
• ‘Pale Fire’
• ‘The Gift’
• ‘The Defence’
• ‘Eugene Onegin’
• ‘The Eye’
• ‘Despair’
• ‘King, Queen, Knave’
• ‘Ada’
• ‘Mary’
• ‘Glory’
• ‘Transparent Things’
• ‘Look at the Harlequins!’
• Bibliography
• Index