Stalking Nabokov (11 page)
Another aspect of Nabokov’s extraordinary output was his passion for butterflies and his work as a professional lepidopterist. Field was so little interested in this side of his subject that he imagined Nabokov climbing trees to catch butterflies. My biography established the seriousness of Nabokov’s science. About the time it appeared, lepidopterists working in South America were discovering new species of Blues, Nabokov’s specialty, in the Andes. They also discovered that Nabokov, who had worked out the specific and generic relationships of Latin American Blues from the very few specimens available to him in wartime Cambridge, Massachusetts, had determined them perfectly.
In just over a decade, Nabokov’s lepidopterological work went from seeming a mere personal quirk that had led to a few inconsequential amateur publications to being widely available in the 800-page
Nabokov’s Butterflies
, annotated minutely by Dieter E. Zimmer (see
chapter 9
, “Netting Nabokov”); narrated and contextualized by lepidopterist Kurt Johnson and his cowriter Steve Coates, in
Nabokov’s Blues: The Scientific Odyssey of a Literary Genius
(1999); updated, cited extensively, and commemorated in fifteen-odd papers by Johnson, Zsolt Bálint, and Dubi Benyamini; and even featuring in
Natural History
. Naomi Pierce, curator of Lepidoptera at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology, and therefore Nabokov’s successor, agreed in the early 2000s to organize an exhibition at the MCZ in commemoration of Nabokov’s butterflies. Herself an expert in the Blues, even she had assumed he was merely a gifted amateur, but she ended the project in awe at Nabokov’s insight. (Stop Press: January 2011. A new paper by a team led by Pierce suggests that DNA analysis—undreamed of, of course, in Nabokov’s day—supports his hypothesis about the evolution of Latin American Blues.)
5
In
Speak, Memory
Nabokov uses the nickname of a local bog, “America,” where he collected butterflies as a child, as a way to prefigure the America he would sail for at the end of his autobiography. In a poem, he foresaw in this America refuge,
per contra
, that he would one day be recognized in the land of his birth: “a Russian branch’s shadow shall be playing upon the marble of my hand.”
6
It did not happen in his lifetime. Even when Véra Nabokov edited the Russian poems he had selected just before his death for inclusion in
Stikhi
1979, she had no inkling that his books would be published in the Soviet Union, with official blessing, a few years later. Now Nabokov’s verse has earned a volume in the prestigious Biblioteka Poetov series; his work has been collected in a ten-volume annotated edition and glossed by Russian scholars like Alexander Dolinin; it is being reissued by Azbuka, for whom Andrey Babikov has produced an exemplary edition of all his Russian plays.
7
Nabokov had a long-standing interest in infinity. One of the many paradoxes of infinity is that although there can be larger and smaller infinities, infinity equals infinity times two. Nabokov’s work seemed inexhaustible even in his own lifetime. Now it seems twice as inexhaustible and, for all its increased diversity, even more seamless.
The Original of Laura
will be almost the last new Nabokov fiction we will ever see. But there are hundreds, even thousands more pages to come of Nabokov in full flow, and not dammed up by death.
I wrote my M.A. thesis between November 1973 and January 1974 at the University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand, on what were then Nabokov’s last three novels,
Pale Fire
,
Ada
, and
Transparent Things
. A few months later, when
Strong Opinions
reached New Zealand, I read a 1972 interview where Nabokov, talking about
Transparent Things
, expressed surprise that neither the “careful readers [who] have published some beautiful stuff about it … nor, of course, the common criticule discerned the structural knot of the story. May I explain that simple and elegant point?” He continues: “The solution, my friend, is so simple that one is almost embarrassed to furnish it. But here goes.” I had already reached that solution—that it is the ghost of the novelist Mr. R., who dies in the course of the novel, who narrates it and in its last sentence welcomes the hero, Hugh Person, over the threshold of death. To reassure Nabokov that readers could realize this unaided, I sent him my only copy of the thesis, with return postage paid. Véra wrote back on his behalf with generous praise, but what I treasured most was the occasional cross or indignant correction in Nabokov’s thick pencil hand.
By the time I received the thesis back, late in 1974, I was studying for a Ph.D. in English at the University of Toronto. For my dissertation I had considered other periods and authors, and even began working on John Barth, but I shifted back to Nabokov, focusing on
Ada
, annotating it line by line but also examining it in the context of his work and thought. In early 1977 I suddenly saw how to map Nabokov’s philosophical—and especially metaphysical—world (also see
chapter 7
; for a more detailed original version, see part 2 of my book
Nabokov’s
Ada:
The Place of Consciousness
). Another fifteen months later, in mid-1978, I saw how Nabokov had made Lucette central to the novel even as vain Van and arrogant Ada seem to push her to the periphery and to suicide (for a later reflection on this aspect of the novel, see
chapter 25
, “
Ada
: The Bog and the Garden”) and how he suggests that from beyond death she somehow intervenes in Van and Ada’s life, as Sybil and Cynthia Vane, pointedly evoked in
Ada
, had done much more directly in the 1951 story “The Vane Sisters.”
Later that year I learned from the Nabokov scholar and publisher Carl Proffer that in her introduction to her husband’s posthumous collected poems in Russian, Véra had identified
potustoronnost’
, “the beyond,” as his main theme. This both heartened me and seemed an oversimplification. Proffer showed my thesis and passed on Véra’s remark to William Woodin Rowe, whose book
Nabokov’s Deceptive World
had occasioned Nabokov’s most furious and hilarious denunciation of a critic’s work (see
SO
). Rowe quickly wrote
Nabokov’s Spectral Dimension
, in which spooks, not sex, had become the new key to Nabokov, and Proffer’s press, Ardis, published it in 1981. Indignant, I returned the contract for the book version of my thesis to Ardis. Already consumed by my first years as a university teacher and working on the Nabokov biography, I did too little to seek publication elsewhere and sheepishly returned to Ardis in 1984.
Nabokov’s
Ada:
The Place of Consciousness
, was published in 1985, with a critique of
Nabokov’s Spectral Dimension
as an appendix.
By now other more responsible scholars such as Don Barton Johnson, Pekka Tammi, and Sergey Davydov had also begun to follow Véra Nabokov’s lead.
1
I, too, added more about Nabokov’s testing the boundaries of life and death in my readings of his style in general and of some of his novels, especially
The Defense
and
The Gift
, in
Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years
(1990). The next year Vladimir Alexandrov published
Nabokov’s Otherworld
. As I wrote in a review, I thought it “immeasurably superior to Rowe’s in intelligence and argument. But is the ‘otherworld’ Nabokov’s ‘main theme’?”
To my surprise, in defending my interpretation of
Pale Fire
in
Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years
in a Nabokv-L listserv discussion at the end of 1997, I found more conclusive flaws in my earlier arguments than others had suggested and discovered evidence that seemed to demand a quite different—and decidedly otherworldly—solution that I had never expected. I set this forth in
Nabokov’s
Pale Fire:
The Magic of Artistic Discovery
, where I ensure that readers cannot reach the otherworldly without the full engagement with this world, and with the invented world of the novel, that
Pale Fire
wonderfully inspires.
In 2000 I was invited to give the keynote for a small conference on Nabokov’s metaphysics at the Nabokov Museum in St. Petersburg. This talk reflects the novelty and excitement of discovering Nabokov’s metaphysics; the suspicion that it could become a routine key to the work of someone who always hated the routine; and the questions that I felt needed to be asked both within Nabokov’s framework and outside it—where my evolutionary interests begin to show.
In 1977 I visited Russia for the first time. My Russian had just become fluent then, though it has silted up since, and I was walking and talking in the countryside with some new friends. At the time I was writing my Ph.D. dissertation on Nabokov and had recently worked out what I still think a fair analysis of his metaphysics.
2
Somehow this came up, and one person wanted to quiz me further while the others walked on ahead. When we rejoined them, one of the others asked: “What did he say about Nabokov’s philosophy?” The woman I had been talking to answered: “Nothing.”
Five years later I was at Harvard, researching Nabokov’s biography and interviewing Harry Levin, one of the great American critics of the twentieth century, who had been, through his Russian wife, Elena, a friend of the Nabokovs for many decades. Levin asked what particularly interested me in Nabokov’s work. “I suppose, his philosophy.” He laughed, puzzled at my response but sure of his own: “But he doesn’t
have
a philosophy!”
Things have changed. At the Cambridge Nabokov centenary conference in 1999, I arrived from a lecture at the Nabokov Museum just as Zoran Kuzmanovich, the editor of
Nabokov Studies
, was arguing that all the critical attention paid to Nabokov’s metaphysics left out
this
world in Nabokov’s work. After his paper we had the liveliest discussion I have been part of at any Nabokov conference. Kuzmanovich raised a real issue: now that so much has been said about Nabokov’s metaphysics, what else remains to be said, or what are we forgetting to talk about?
But perhaps that is jumping the gun. What has been established about Nabokov’s metaphysics?
It was in late 1977 that Véra Nabokov wrote for her introduction to
Stikhi
that no one seemed to have noticed the main theme of his work: the beyond (
potustoronnost’
).
3
She didn’t know that earlier that year I had written about this, or perhaps she wouldn’t have said what she did. But I think she was wrong then, as I later told her, and I still think so. I think Nabokov’s main theme was, in his own words, the position of consciousness in the universe (
SM
218: “To try to express one’s position in regard to the universe embraced by consciousness, is an immemorial urge”). That certainly
includes
asking about what might lie behind or beyond consciousness, but the beyond itself, in Nabokov’s own terms, is too unknowable to be the main theme of a novelist’s work.
I argued in 1977, and I would still argue, that Nabokov’s own image in
Speak, Memory
and elsewhere of a kind of Hegelian spiral of being provides the basic framework of his metaphysics: a first, inner, thetic, arc,
space without time
; a larger, antithetic, arc,
time without consciousness
; a still more open, synthetic, arc,
human consciousness in time
; and beyond that, ampler and still ampler arcs that include, beyond human death, as a new thesis, perhaps,
a consciousness beyond time
, and somewhere further out still, perhaps after several more twists, some more or less ultimate synthesis,
a conscious designing force
(see
SM
275, 301). I also suggested that on each arc of the spiral, two complementary poles of Nabokov’s mind point in opposite directions (
NAPC
, 67–108;
VNRY
, 294–95). He has a passion for independence, for the individuality of things, which leads him to delve deeper into the details of isolated particulars, and a passion for pattern, which leads him to search for new connections and combinations in things.
In the world of space, he attends, on the one hand, to the particularity of natural objects (butterflies, famously, but much else besides) and, on the other, to the unique combinations of things and especially to the designs of mimicry, which, as he says, “had a special attraction for me” (
SM
124). In the world of time, he focuses, on the one hand, on the freedom, the openness of time and, on the other, on the mysteries of the patterns we can see in time that might seem like fate. In the world of human consciousness, he focuses on the unique freedom of the mind within the moment and on its power to reach beyond its time or place by connecting one thing with another in memory or imagination.