Nabokov, History and the Texture of Time

Will Norman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136264351
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book argues that the apparent evasion of history in Vladimir Nabokov's fiction conceals a profound engagement with social, and therefore political, temporalities. While Nabokov scholarship has long assumed the same position as Nabokov himself — that his works exist in a state of historical exceptionalism — this study restores the content, context, and commentary to Nabokovian time by reading his American work alongside the violent upheavals of twentieth-century ideological conflictsin Europe and the United States. This approachexplores how the author's characteristic temporal manipulations and distortions function as a defensive dialectic against history, an attempt to salvage fiction for autonomous aesthetics. Tracing Nabokov's understanding of the relationship between history and aesthetics from nineteenth-century Russia through European modernism to the postwar American academy, the book offers detailed contextualized readings of Nabokov's major writings, exploring the tensions, fissures, and failures in Nabokov's attempts to assert aesthetic control over historical time. In reading his response to the rise of totalitarianism, the Holocaust, and Cold War, Norman redresses the commonly-expressed admiration for Nabokov's heroic resistance to history by suggesting the ethical, aesthetic, and political costs of reading and writing in its denial. This bookoffers a rethinking of Nabokov's location in literary history, the ideological impulses which inform his fiction, and the importance of temporal aesthetics in negotiating the matrices of modernism.

1 Nabokov in Literary History

I

When we speak of a literary movement, the very word “movement” shows that we are speaking of a crowd, while genius is solitary. Cre- ation is the highest experience of a lonely spirit, it cannot be organized from outside, as industry can. After all, Moses had to ascend alone the last peak of Mount Sinai to get the tablets, and every prophet had to be alone to commune with God. ¹

These words from one of Nabokov’s unpublished lectures indicate some of the difficulties faced by the scholar in attempting to find a place for him within literary history. If we are to attempt to periodize Nabokov, to map his relations to historical and cultural formations and to examine his relationship with literary contemporaries and predecessors, we are first of all to work against authorial intentions. The production of a literary work was, for Nabokov, a solitary and mystical experience comparable to the communing of the prophets with God. The problem is compounded by Nabokov’s long, international writing career and his education in at least three national literary cultures—Russian, French and English. Critics have read and evaluated Nabokov within the context of the Russian “Silver Age” of 1890 –1917, in which he grew up and wrote his earliest poetry. ² During the 1920s and 1930s, Nabokov operated within the Russian émi- gré communities of Berlin and Paris under the pseudonym Sirin, where his work occasioned reviews and criticism from figures such as Vladislav Kho- dasevich and Vladimir Weidle. This impoverished, precocious and largely unread figure seems far from the self-assured international celebrity who, in 1969, appeared in Playboy Magazine to publicize his sixth novel in Eng- lish. Toward the end of his career, Nabokov’s work drew comparison with writers such as Thomas Pynchon, John Barth and Jorge Luis Borges, and mature works such as Pale Fire (1962) were viewed by some as paradigms of postmodernist fiction. ³ Perhaps the most contested of such literary-his- torical categories, however, is that of Nabokov’s modernism. ⁴ All of his works, from 1925 to 1974, could be argued to manifest one of the many characteristics that have been attributed to this protean term. His novels are teeming with allusions to canonical modernists. Nabokov wrote long and detailed lectures on Kafka, Proust and Joyce. How then are we to rec- oncile the solitary and lonely artist-figure with Nabokov the modernist?

My approach to this problem is through the introduction of time. We cannot locate Nabokov in literary history until we have understood his own perspective on the way literature evolves. The method he practiced, of severing literary evolution from history, is the key to his ambivalent rela- tionship to his peers. In order to understand the complex fiction Nabokov published in the United States after his flight there in 1940, we must begin in a very different era and place , with his reception of the great Russian critics of the mid-nineteenth century, such as Vissarion Belinsky and Niko- lai Chernyshevsky, and the legacy of their debates in the Silver Age and the Russian avant-garde. Additionally, we will need to compare Nabokov’s ahistorical perspective on literary evolution to those developed among the Russian Formalists in the 1920s and 1930s. We will then be able to build a more accurate understanding of Nabokov and European modernism, founded on his view of the cataclysmic encounters between writing and politics in modern Russia. Nabokov’s modernism found its fathers in nine- teenth-century France and the radical rejections of historical determinism made by Gustave Flaubert, Charles Baudelaire and Stéphane Mallarmé. Paying close attention to his readings of literary time, we will examine how his own European tradition developed to include Proust, Joyce and Kafka, as writers dedicated to preserving the autonomy of private artistic tempo- ralities. In adopting this kind of chronological perspective, we will finally be in a position to evaluate Nabokov’s responses to the retrospective con- struction of a high modernist canon in the American postwar academy— responses which were to shape his oeuvre in decisive ways.

II

Nabokov’s understanding of radical criticism in nineteenth-century Russia is outlined in a lecture he gave at Cornell University in 1958 called “Rus- sian Writers, Censors, and Readers.” Here he describes “the two forces that simultaneously struggled for the possession of the artist’s soul”: the government and the radical critics. Among the latter he includes “the fiery Belinski of the forties, the stubborn Chernyshevski and Dobrolyubov of the fifties and sixties, Mihaylovski, the well-meaning bore, and dozens of other honest obstinate men” ( LRL , 3– 4). Over several paragraphs, Nabokov describes the detrimental effect on Russian letters caused by the demands of these critics that literature should serve the people in a historical sense by addressing social problems, encouraging progress and giving them a sense of national identity: “the radical critics fought despotism, but they evolved a despotism of their own... they advocated freedom and equality but they contradicted their own creed by wishing to subjugate the arts to current politics” (5). For Nabokov, whatever the good intentions of the radical crit- ics, their impact on literature was as disastrous as that of the government:

If in the opinion of the Tsars authors were to be the servants of the state, in the opinion of the radical critics, writers were to be servants of the masses. The two lines of thought were bound to meet and join forces when at last, in our times, a new kind of regime, the synthesis of the Hegelian triad, combined the idea of the masses with the idea of the state (5).

This passage sets the agenda for our analysis, since it takes us from the dangers of linking literary criticism and social history through to what Nabokov saw as its logical consequence: the repressive Soviet regime, and the Cold War in the midst of which he gives the lecture. The evidence for Nabokov’s perspective on this monstrous development is scattered through his critical writings and lectures, as well as The Gift , his last Russian novel. Recurring throughout this critical narrative, as we reconstruct it, is the figure of Hegel and the misappropriation of his philosophy.

We begin with a moment that Nabokov highlights in his unpublished lecture on Belinsky, at which this towering figure of nineteenth-century Russian literary criticism is first introduced to Hegel’s philosophy in 1838, with dramatic consequences. ⁵ Nabokov relates how, misled by Bakunin’s garbled version of Hegel (Belinsky knew no German and the first trans- lations had yet to appear), “at once, completely, enthusiastically, uncriti- cally Belinsky adopted the so-called Hegelianism. This event cannot be overestimated considering the part it was to play in the shaping of Russian criticism, social thought and—literary production.” ⁶ We should heed the emphasis on the importance of Belinsky’s reading of Hegel, since this, for Nabokov, is the disastrous moment at which literary and social history become intertwined in Russian thought.

Belinsky’s obsession with Hegel was relatively short-lived, lasting only until 1841, but the influence on his thinking lingered long after. We find in Belinsky’s post-Hegelian writings an absolute conviction that literature is the expression of the spirit of the age. Hence in 1846 he claimed that “if you pay closer attention to these representatives of the different epochs of our literature and the different epochs of our society you will not fail to discern a more or less vital relation between their literary and their worldly con- ceptions and convictions.” ⁷ Accordingly, he admired Alexander Pushkin’s Onegin , but chiefly because of Pushkin’s status as “a representative of a newly awakened Russian consciousness,” rather than for, as Nabokov did, “the unique fancy of an individual genius” ( EO , 2: 151). ⁸ Belinsky adopted a pseudo-Hegelian model of literary development tied to the historical tele- ology of the nation to which it belonged, before being assimilated into the world-historical spirit itself. The great poet,

in addition to being national... must at the same time be universal , i.e., the nationality of his creations must be the form, body, flesh, physi- ognomy and personality of the spiritual and incorporeal world of ideas common to all mankind. In other words: the national poet must pos- sess a great historical significance not for his country alone, his being must be a thing of world-wide historical significance. ⁹

Nabokov responded directly in his book on Gogol and in his translation of Eugene Onegin to the “famous but talentless” Belinsky and his readings of the nineteenth-century literary giants, insisting on the authors’ autonomy from history, on such readings being “so utterly and ludicrously wrong.” ¹⁰ He also required his undergraduates to read Belinsky as a negative exam- ple ( AY , 138). More broadly, though, the radical critic’s writings formed a massive impetus behind the absolute insistence on aesthetic independence from the historical which characterized Nabokov’s teaching and criticism throughout his life.

In his location of left Hegelianism in the 1840s as the crucial turning point for Russian intellectual history, Nabokov’s account coincides with that of Isaiah Berlin, his fellow émigré. Berlin’s account of this event is just as dramatic: “in 1838– 40 Belinsky proclaimed that might was right; that his- tory itself—the march of inevitable forces—sanctified the actual.” ¹¹ In his 1937 lecture “Pushkin, or the Real and the Plausible,” Nabokov laments that “Hegelian philosophy came to no good in these parts,” suggesting that there was another, less disastrous route which Hegelianism could have taken. ¹² Ber- lin, too, felt the anguished presence of an alternative history and an opportu- nity missed, writing in his essay “A Remarkable Decade” that “without the outlook of which, for example, the Hegelian philosophy, then so prevalent, was both the cause and the symptom, a great deal of what happened might, perhaps, either not have happened, or else have happened differently.” ¹³ The future ghost of the Revolution hangs over all discussion of Hegel in Russia. In The Gift , Fyodor relates how “applied Hegelianism, working gradually left, went through... Feuerbach to join Marx” (224). Similarly, Berlin posi- tions Hegel as “the first in the fatal line of cosmic historians which stretches through Comte and Marx to Spengler and Toynbee.” ¹⁴

We can see why Nabokov was so frustrated by Belinsky’s appropriation of Hegel. In the Chernyshevsky chapter of The Gift he elaborates further on the hint from “Pushkin, or the Real and the Plausible” that there was another form of Hegelianism which was missed by the utilitarians:

Only a few years earlier the smell of Gogol’s Petrushka had been explained away by the fact that everything existing was rational. But the time for hearty Russian Hegelianism was now past. The mould- ers of opinion were incapable of understanding Hegel’s vital truth: a truth that was not stagnant, like shallow water, but flowed like blood, through the very process of cognition (223).

Hegel’s vital truth remains enigmatic in this passage, but we can pick up the trail once more in the autobiography, Speak, Memory , in which Nabokov “discovered that Hegel’s triadic series (so popular in old Rus- sia) expressed merely the essential spirality of all things in their relation to time. Twirl follows twirl, and every synthesis is the thesis of the next series” (211). Nabokov owed a profound debt to Hegel as the formulator of the dialectic (or, using Nabokov’s terminology, “spiral”) model of evo- lution through time. In Speak, Memory , he uses this model in representing his physical journey across the world in which he moved—from Russia (thesis) to Europe (antithesis) to America (synthesis)—as well as the solv- ing of a chess problem in which the player moves through the “‘antithetic’ inferno” of the trap in order to attain the solution, a “synthesis of artistic delight” (211, 223 – 4). The significance of these Hegelian episodes occur- ring during the description of his flight from Europe in May 1940, as “the headline of a newspaper dropping from the seat of a chair spoke of Hitler striking at the Low Countries,” should not be missed (225). Belin- sky yoked historical and artistic evolution together using Hegel’s model of temporal development. Nabokov, however, severs this link and uses a dehistoricized Hegelian dialectic with which to resist and even transcend historical contingency.

In his Lectures on the Philosophy of World History , Hegel argues that historical change, “the rational and necessary evolution of the world spirit,” is governed by a continual process of “rejuvenation”:

The rejuvenation of the spirit is not just a return to its original shape; it is a purification or further elaboration of itself. The solution of its problem creates new problems for it to solve, so that it multiplies the materials on which it operates.
Each of the creations in which it found temporary satisfaction pres- ents itself in turn as a new material, challenging the spirit to develop it further still. The forms it produced become the material on which it labors to raise itself up to new forms. ¹⁵

Hegel’s description of constant formal innovation is easily recognizable in Nabokov’s own articulation of artistic evolution. In an unpublished lecture on the origins of romanticism, for example, he writes that

While during the Middle Ages every facet of human nature had been dulled and all the contents of it kept frozen like a Bird’s Eye peach; it took roughly four centuries to defreeze it. Thus, the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries witness an awakening of the senses, the sixteenth and seventeenth—the rebirth of religiousness—the seventeenth–eigh- teenth—that of the intellect, and lastly the eighteenth–nineteenth—the coming again to life of the human soul reflected in the emergence of the so-called “new sensibility.” ¹⁶

We can see here Hegel’s “triadic series” at work, in the “rejuvenation” of the artistic (not world historical) spirit. The romanticism of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries presents itself as the synthesis of the rebirths of religiousness and intellect in the previous two periods. Espe- cially important is the emphasis on what Hegel calls the “temporary sat- isfaction” afforded by each new form as it becomes outdated and requires renovation. Nabokov goes on to argue that “every accepted form tends to become rigid, lose its elasticity, and deteriorate into a tight fitting coffin, for life is growth, improvement, elaboration, change.” ¹⁷ Hegel’s philosophical project as he states it in the introductory Lectures on the Philosophy of World Literature is “to eliminate the contingent.” ¹⁸ He goes on to assert that “we must bring to history the belief and conviction that the realm of the will is not at the mercy of contingency.” ¹⁹ For Nabokov, however, his- tory is precisely the manifestation of contingency. As he writes in his early Russian essay “On Generalities,” “the roulette of history knows no laws.” ²⁰ The evidence, then, is that Nabokov’s model of literary evolution is derived at least in part from Hegel, and yet this model is emphatically restricted to an autonomous, ahistorical form.

We can now return to The Gift , and to Fyodor’s mock-biography of Chernyshevsky, the nineteenth-century Russian utilitarian critic. ²¹ That Hegel is at the root of the utilitarian debate of the 1860s and the subse- quent Russian Revolution is made very clear by Fyodor. Chernyshevsky reveres the philosopher and “kept five kopecks, a cork and a button in the empty box di...