Stalking Nabokov (33 page)

The evidence contradicts Dolinin’s claims at every point. Nabokov also devalues his work in
English
, like the English poems he collects in
Poems and Problems
(“they are of a lighter texture than the Russian stuff, owing, no doubt, to their lacking that inner verbal association with old perplexities and constant worry of thought which marks poems written in one’s mother tongue” [
PP
14]). He dismisses his early verse translations of Pushkin and others, before he adopted his later strict literalism.
⁹
He disparages the “frivolous little book” on Gogol, before he developed his later strictly scholarly approach to Pushkin (
EO
2.314). As in his comments on his Russian work, his criticisms come from the vantage point of new techniques or approaches or simply from his admission of the limitations of his second language, not from any perverse persona.

And he also
praises
his Russian works:
Priglashenie na kazn’
(he gives it its Russian title) is the one of his works he holds in “the greatest esteem” (
SO
92) in 1966, at the supposed peak of his mythmaking. From 1945 to his death, in private and in public, he unwaveringly designated his Russian poems of the late 1930s and especially the early 1940s as his best.
¹⁰
He repeatedly draws attention to the challenges and beauties of his Russian works. The story “Terror” “preceded Sartre’s
La Nausée
, with which it shares certain shades of thought, and none of that novel’s fatal defects, by at least a dozen years” (
SoVN
644). He describes “The Circle” as a satellite of
The Gift
but asserts that “a knowledge of the novel is not required for the enjoyment of the corollary which has its own orbit and colored fire,” while he also suggests that “the story will produce upon readers who are familiar with the novel a delightful effect of oblique recognition” (
SoVN
649–50). I could go on and on.
¹¹

From before his arrival in America, and during his early years there, Nabokov passionately and persistently sought to arrange translations into English of what he thought his three best Russian novels—
The Defense
,
Invitation to a Beheading
, and
The Gift
. He gave up in the face of the difficulty of finding a translator up to his standards and the difficulty of finding publishers even for his English-language novels (
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
,
Bend Sinister
,
Lolita
, and
Pnin
were all rejected by American publishers). He lamented in the afterword to
Lolita
, “None of my American friends have read my Russian books and thus every appraisal on the strength of my English ones is bound to be out of focus” (
Lolita
318). Despite finding many errors of fact, interpretation, and translation in Andrew Field’s 1967
Nabokov: His Life in Art
, he welcomed it enthusiastically for opening up his still untranslated Russian works and for treating the Russian and English work as a seamless whole, for breaking down what Field calls “the meaningless and harmful division of Nabokov’s art into ‘Russian works’ and ‘English works.’ ”
¹²

If the evidence is so decidedly against Dolinin’s claims, how can he even argue his case? The keystone of his argument is his reference to the poem “We So Firmly Believed”:

At the center of the Nabokov myth lies the very idea of his life in art as an uninterrupted path, a continuous ascension, to use the images of the poem “We So Firmly Believed” (
PP
, 89) from the “damp dell” of promising juvenilia up to the “alpine heath” of faultlessly crafted masterpieces, a history of triumphant emergence unimpeded (and maybe even furthered) by the painful switch to a different language. It is clear that this scenario automatically, by definition, sends all of Nabokov’s Russian writings downhill, relegating them to a secondary role of immature, imperfect antecedents.

(54)

Yet the poem does not support Dolinin’s argument as he claims it does. It does not refer to Nabokov’s art at all. It was written in 1938,
before
Nabokov switched to English, and therefore “by definition”
before
he had written his English masterpieces and before he could have possibly entertained any thought of presenting his Russian oeuvre as apprentice work. Let me cite an earlier, unpublished translation Nabokov made of the poem, which renders its sense more clearly than the version in
Poems and Problems
:

To My Youth

We used to believe so firmly, you and I, in the unity

of existence; but now I glance back—and it is

astounding—how impersonal in color, how unreal in

pattern you have become, my youth.

When one examines the matter, it is like the haze of

a wave between me and you, between the shallows and the

drowning—or else I see a receding highway, and you

from behind as you pedal right into the sunset on your semi-racer.

You are no more myself, you’re a mere outline, the subject

of any first chapter—but how long we believed

in the oneness of the way from the damp gorge

to the mountain heather.
¹³

Dolinin implies that this poem “at the center of the Nabokov myth” talks about a writer’s progress. It does no such thing. He implies that the poem suggests “a continuous ascension…up to the ‘alpine heath’ of faultlessly crafted masterpieces.” Nabokov says nothing about artistic achievement. In fact, the poem is a deeply moving reflection on the gaps in memory, the gulfs in time within the self, the sense that as you look back at yourself you realize that despite the illusion of continuous identity, you may no longer feel a live connection with your younger selves. In this context, and in view of the immemorial image of a life as a river taking one at death out to the sea, it seems more likely that Nabokov is thinking of the journey back in thought from the “damp gorge” of the present to the mountain heather, to the source and spring of one’s life: the way
back
from the present to the origins of the self. It’s not a glorious
ascension
to future achievement: after all, heather hardly grows on mountain summits, but it can flourish on slopes where springs start to flow down continuously to lower “damp dells.”

This poem was written before Nabokov changed languages, before he had written any of the English works that Dolinin tries to imply the poet implies with the “ascension” to the “alpine heath” and “this scenario” that “automatically, by definition, sends all Nabokov’s Russian writings downhill.” A page later Dolinin writes: “To quote and paraphrase his poems of the late 1930s and the 1940s written before he created a new persona for himself,” (55), but when he quotes “We So Firmly Believed” and refers to “this scenario” and its consequences “by definition,” he does not note the fact that the poem was actually written in 1938, long before the supposed “alpine heath” of flawless English masterpieces and long before the new persona that he presents the poem as confirming. Who is the mythmaker?

I would like to move to subsidiary claims that Dolinin makes that are just as obviously unfounded and even more obviously unfair. According to Dolinin, the later Nabokov looking back at his Russian self “pretended that he had always stood apart from literary battles and discussions of the day”(53). Once again, Dolinin does not ask himself why Nabokov might have done such a thing—when Nabokov could declare that “next to the right to create, the right to criticize is the richest gift that liberty of thought and speech can offer” (
LRL
ii); when he so loved being a provocateur, in his jibes at Freud and at Soviet propaganda, in his debunking of esteemed authors, in his fierce polemics on literary translation; and when he showed such recognition that this was good copy, a sure way of provoking critics’ and readers’ attention.

Let me cite just a few instances of Nabokov insisting on his part in literary skirmishes. No scholar had approached Nabokov about his Russian work until Andrew Field in 1966. That year, reading Field’s discussion of the 1931 story “Lips to Lips” in the manuscript of
Nabokov: His Life in Art
, Nabokov, unprompted, volunteered the information—and suggested “one might mention” it—that “the story is based on an actual event in connection with a certain Alexander Burov being milked by the clique of
Chisla
.”
¹⁴
In the same note, he also offers an explanation that the 1944 Russian poem “No Matter How” “was aimed at those émigré Russians whom Russian victories led to forget and forgive Soviet iniquities.” Field duly used the information, and reported on other literary feuds he had recognized, with Nabokov’s approval.
¹⁵

When Nabokov began collecting his Russian stories and poems for McGraw-Hill in the late 1960s and the 1970s, he did not miss a chance to highlight past polemics. He explains the narrative emphasis of his poetry of the late 1920s and early 1930s as expressing “my impatience with the dreary drone of the anemic ‘Paris school’ of
émigré
poetry” (
PP
14). He refers to what had become by then the main émigré newspaper, the Paris “
Poslednie Novosti
, with which I conducted a lively feud throughout the 1930s” (
SoVN
648). He explains the 1939 poem “The Poets” thus:

The poem was published in a magazine under the pseudonym of “Vasily Shishkov” in order to catch a distinguished critic (G. Adamovich, of the
Poslednie novosti
) who automatically objected to everything I wrote. The trick worked: in his weekly review he welcomed the appearance of a mysterious new poet with such eloquent enthusiasm that I could not resist keeping up the joke by describing my meetings with the fictitious Shishkov in a story which contained, among other plums, a criticism of the poem and of Adamovich’s praise.

(
PP
95)

When he introduced the translation of the story, he again reprinted the whole poem and explained the tussle with Adamovich at still greater length. Dolinin may not know Nabokov’s letters to Field, but he knows Nabokov’s references to his feuds with Paris poets, critics, and periodicals. He has a copious and exact memory. How can he claim that Nabokov “pretended that he had always stood apart from literary battles and discussions of the day” (53)?

I could go on, but the point is made. No, I
will
go on, because Dolinin keeps impugning Nabokov, despite the evidence:

Like those unhappy expatriates who leave their native country in search of a better life and then are doomed again and again to prove to themselves that their decision was right, Nabokov had to justify his emigration from his native language and literature to their acquired substitutes. For this purpose, he would argue that “the nationality of a worthwhile writer is of secondary importance” (
SO
, 63) and present himself as a born cosmopolitan genius who has never been attached to anything and anybody but his autonomous imagination and personal memory.

(53)

“For this purpose,” Dolinin says—to justify his leaving first Russia and then Europe—Nabokov would argue that “the nationality of a worthwhile writer is of secondary importance.” I would have thought it did not take much to justify fleeing death for yourself and your family, and I would have thought Nabokov’s arguments about the transnational quality of the best writing deserved serious consideration rather than dismissal as spurious self-justification. In the Russian survey lectures that he taught at Wellesley and Cornell (for the first time in 1947, so before he had written any of the English masterpieces that Dolinin claims provided the pretext for Nabokov’s belittling his Russian masterpieces), Nabokov had this to say:

Individuals
not
nations
create literature. The term “national literature” is a contradiction in terms….for me literature is
not
the echo of a nation but the echo of individual genius.…
Literature
is not created by the average Russian or the average American. It is created by a dispersed and universal family of great men. The art of Pushkin or Gogol or Tolstoy is considerably closer to that of Flaubert or Dickens or Proust or Joyce than to anything an average Russian could think up;…Dostoevsky’s divagations were much closer to the sentimental and crude phantasms of English and French mystery novels of the 18th and early 19th centuries than to any national psychology of Russian murderers and monks.
¹⁶

This sounds like Nabokov’s authentic voice and his authentic convictions. It even sounds like an opinion worth taking seriously, and advice well directed at literarily unsophisticated students. What does it have to do with justifying flight from Bolshevized Crimea or Nazified France? If Nabokov concocted such ideas to consolidate the persona of a born cosmopolitan genius, why did he say this to a class mostly unaware that he was a writer and, according to Dolinin’s dating, before he adopted this late persona?