Stalking Nabokov (35 page)

The idea of the evolution of consciousness and culture saturated and structured Nabokov’s thought. In the first chapter of his autobiography, he introduces as the first concrete scene his dawning self-consciousness his sense of his father and of his father’s and mother’s ages and identities as distinct from his own:

All this is as it should be according to the theory of recapitulation [in other words, the theory that “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” proposed in 1866 by Darwin’s German champion Ernst Haeckel: that the different stages of individual development reenact the evolution of the species]; the beginning of reflexive consciousness in the brain of our remotest ancestor must surely have coincided with the dawning of the sense of time….

My father…had that day put on the trappings of his old regiment as a festive joke. To a joke, then, I owe my first gleam of complete consciousness—which again has recapitulatory implications, since the first creatures on earth to become aware of time were also the first creatures to smile.

(
SM
22)

That ends the first section of the first chapter, and the next section begins, extending the evolutionary and “recapitulatory” imagery: “It was the primordial cave (and not what Freudian mystics might suppose) that lay behind the games I played when I was four” (
SM
22–23).

The last chapter of the autobiography again focuses on the dawn of consciousness at the individual (ontogenetic) and species (phylogenetic) levels, but with Nabokov as not son but father: pointedly, I think, a recapitulation in another key. Again, Nabokov thinks about the evolution of mind and culture, with a special Nabokovian twist on Darwin:

There is also keen pleasure (and, after all, what else should the pursuit of science produce?) in meeting the riddle of the initial blossoming of man’s mind by postulating a voluptuous pause in the growth of the rest of nature, a lolling and loafing which allowed first of all the formation of
Homo poeticus—
without which
sapiens
could not have been evolved. “Struggle for life” indeed! The curse of battle and toil leads man back to the boar, to the grunting beast’s crazy obsession with the search for food. You and I have frequently remarked upon that maniacal glint in a housewife’s scheming eye as it roves over food in a grocery or about the morgue of a butcher’s shop. Toilers of the world, disband! Old books are wrong. The world was made on a Sunday.

(
SM
298)

We can note here a Spencerian sense that the survival of the fittest fails to explain evolution; a symbolist sense that imaginations and dreams offer the likeliest route to the deepest truths; an aristocratic sense that real refinement requires leisure rather than the coarsening effect of unremitting toil; and a purely Nabokovian sense of play.
²⁰
And poetry. A few years previously, in an essay on Lermontov, he had written: “It might be said that what Darwin called ‘struggle for existence’ is really a struggle for perfection, and in that respect Nature’s main and most admirable device is optical illusion. Among human beings, poets are the best exponents of the art of deception.”
²¹

After “‘Struggle for life,’ indeed!” in the last chapter of
Speak, Memory
, the evolutionary themes persist tellingly as Nabokov goes on, and out of his way, to contrast the culturally evolved with the brutal backwardness of Hitler. Describing the various prams and baby carriages and other wheeled vehicles for Dmitri, Nabokov writes:

A new wave of evolution started to swell, gradually lifting him up again from the ground, when, for his second birthday, he received a four-foot-long, silver Mercedes racing car operated by inside pedals and in this he used to drive…down the sidewalk of the Kurfürstendamm while from the open windows came the multiplied roar of a dictator still pounding his chest in the Neander valley we had left far behind.

The next paragraph immediately makes the evolutionary imagery explicit again via the idea of ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny: “It might be rewarding to go into the phylogenetic aspects of the passion male children have for things on wheels, particularly railway trains” (
SM
300). In a Parisian park Nabokov is appalled as he sees a little girl parading a live butterfly on a thread and directs his son’s gaze away; he reflects:

I may have been reminded, in fact, of the simple, old-fashioned trick a French policeman had—and no doubt still has—when leading a florid-nosed workman, a Sunday rowdy, away to jail, of turning him into a singularly docile and even alacritous satellite by catching a kind of small fishhook in the man’s uncared-for but sensitive and responsive flesh. You and I did our best to encompass with vigilant tenderness the trustful tenderness of our child but were inevitably confronted by the fact that the filth left by hoodlums in a sandbox on a playground was the least serious of possible offenses, and that the horrors which former generations had mentally dismissed as anachronisms or things occurring only in remote khanates and mandarinates, were all around us.

(
SM
306)

Notice the combination of the evolution of the species and the evolution of culture (in this case, the local atavistic return to earlier cultural stages)—and the sense Nabokov shared with his father that the Orient (“khanates and mandarinates”) represented earlier stages in the evolution of civilization, like “medieval” within the Occidental context, which for Nabokov was also almost invariably a term of reproach. In view of his comment that in terms of the “struggle for perfection,…Nature’s main and most admirable device is optical illusion,” and that “among human beings, poets are the best exponents of the art of deception,”
²²
it is no wonder he ends the final chapter of
Speak, Memory
with a kind of optical illusion provided by life for Dmitri. “Find What the Sailor Has Hidden” is an illusion carefully left unbroken by his parents and carefully relived and made poetic by Nabokov in the retelling, so as to point toward the ship that would take them all from a Europe sliding back into barbarism and toward an America that he thought offered a new stage in the evolution of freedom.

Nabokov’s concern for the evolution of consciousness, the evolution of culture, and the evolution of art pervades his work. It reflects his sense 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.”
²³
(Pure Bergson, to my ear.) He thought that art has evolved, that it needs to keep evolving, and that it has a long way still to evolve. He declares in an unpublished lecture that “in the course of the historical evolution of literature…the various senses…become keener, probe deeper….Shakespeare saw colors more distinctly than Homer and a poet of today sees color more distinctly than Shakespeare.”
²⁴
(Notice that Nabokov drew on these international examples before he had published his first American novel: before, on Dolinin’s own account, he adopted the persona of the internationalist.) Tolstoy, he claims, was the first Russian writer to see lilac shades; Bunin saw them still more finely than Tolstoy.
²⁵
On the scene of Kitty’s giving birth in
Anna Karenina
he responds in a uniquely Nabokovian way: “Mark incidentally that the whole history of literary fiction as an evolutionary process may be said to be a gradual probing of deeper and deeper layers of life. It is quite impossible to imagine either Homer in the ninth century B.C. or Cervantes in the seventeenth century of our era—it is quite impossible to imagine them describing in such wonderful detail childbirth” (
LRL
164–65). In another lecture Nabokov looks back: “How different is this world of Dickens from the world of Homer or the world of Cervantes. Does a hero of Homer’s really feel the divine throb of pity?…let us nurse no doubt about it: despite all our hideous reversions to the wild state, modern man is on the whole a better man than Homer’s man,
Homo homericus
, or than medieval man. In the imaginary battle of
americus
versus
homericus
, the first wins humanity’s prize” (
LL
86–87). But if art and culture have evolved a long way from Homer or medieval times, they still have a long way to go: as he once exclaimed, “Art is in its infancy!” (Lucas interview).

Nabokov had such a strong sense of human possibility, and of the scope for the future evolution of human possibility, in art and in life, that he could be angry or scornful at any shortfall. As he once remarked in a deleted passage in a lecture: “I [am] so passionately fond of the good thing when I find it, that my passionate hatred for what I deem to be bad art or even worse— second-[rate art]—is on the whole, the same kind of passion.”
²⁶

He believed that the evolution of culture, art, and literature depended on individual talent and strenuous individual effort and that the most he or any artist could do for the evolution of civilization was to stick to the integrity of his art: to offer the highest standards, to open up new possibilities, which others could rise to or move beyond:

The mission of the poet to listen intently to the voice of the inner judge and never to deviate from the road which that judge points out to him was never betrayed by the best Russian poets and writers. Never betray what your artistic conscience tells you is right, never sacrifice your artistic purpose to the intellectual urgings, to the dictates of a party or to the [conventionality?]
^[27]
of a publisher. Somehow, therein lies the inherent apostolism of art. For only by adhering strictly to the bidding of the artist within him can a poet or writer achieve that degree of artistic persuasiveness which can make his message effective, and since
true
art also automatically happens to be
good
art it is but a betrayal of the purpose to try and artificially force upon it an extra message of goodness which, being not integrated with the artistic purpose does nothing but upset the whole delicate structure and compromise both the initial and the additional message.
²⁸

Or as he says in another lecture:

I am not telling you that art does not improve and enlighten the reader. But it does all this in its own special way and it does it only then when its own single purpose remains to be good, excellent art, art as perfect as its creator can make. The moment this
only
real and valuable purpose of art is forgotten, the moment it is replaced by a utilitarian aim, art stops being
^[29]
art, and through this loss of its ego, loses not only its sense and its beauty but also the very object to which it has been sacrificed: bad art neither teaches nor improves nor enlightens.
³⁰

Nabokov confesses to a close sympathy with Chekhov and cites with approval Chekhov’s “conclusion…that pure art, pure science, pure learning, being in no direct contact with the masses, will, in the long run, attain more than the clumsy and muddled attempts of benefactors” (
LRL
250).

His idea that those artists who insist on their own creative freedom and follow the dictates and the integrity of their own art will open up new possibilities for all who choose to respond is elitist but not exclusive or complacent. It places serious responsibilities on anyone with talent. For that reason he could reproach even his beloved Pushkin on the occasions when he thought Pushkin accepted easy formulae rather than searching for new ways of seeing and saying. And just as he championed individual efforts to revise the accepted and readymade he excoriated what he saw as the opposite of genius and creative evolution:
poshlost’
, conformism, not thinking for oneself, not trying for the best, or falling for false gods or false goods.

Like his father studying Italian in prison, he felt determined to improve himself, in the ways he saw fit. As a child, he “dreamed” his way through Seitz’s multivolume
Die Gross-schmetterlinge der Erde
(The macrolepidoptera of the world) (
SM
123). As a young man at Cambridge, already determined to be a writer, he did not pay attention to his studies as his father expected and not only wrote poetry compulsively but also dreamed his way assiduously through Dal’s four-volume Russian dictionary, as in later adulthood he would playfully work or workfully play his way through Webster’s
New International Dictionary Unabridged
(
VNRY
171;
VNAY
461). All his mature literary life he studied intently the works of others, questioning clichés of thought, perception, language, and narrative strategy, consciously seeking new means partly by critiquing and correcting and caricaturing the old.

Nabokov, in other words, values all cultural advance beyond the “wild state” and saw this embodied in the rapid development of Russian culture in the nineteenth century—and its converse in the tragedy of Russia’s regression after 1917. Nabokov was committed to the Russian literary tradition not only when he wrote as Sirin but also when he signed himself Nabokov, although by then his commitment reflected the ways available to him as a writer and teacher in an English-speaking environment. When he moved to English he did not lose contact with or a sense of responsibility to the Russian tradition, as Dolinin seems to imply, but he realized his English readers were starting from a very different position in relation to Russian literature than that of his émigré audience, especially if they had only the existing translations of, say, Pushkin and Gogol. He therefore translated the least accessible material: first, nineteenth-century verse, Pushkin, Lermontov, Tyutchev, and Fet; then, what he could of the least accessible nineteenth-century prose, in his
Nikolay Gogol
; and more Russian poetry from the medieval
Slovo o polku Igoreve
to the person he thought the best Russian poet of the twentieth century, Khodasevich. Once he had begun to work intensively on Pushkin for his
Eugene Onegin
translation and commentary—once he knew he could make Pushkin part of the heritage of world and not just Russian literature—he incorporated Pushkin in key ways in his fiction, in
Pnin
and
Ada
. And, indeed, he includes Russian language and literature as much as he can for an initially Anglophone audience in all his English-language novels from
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
to
Look at the Harlequins!
, with the sole exception of
Lolita
, the one novel where he planned, while he wrote, to keep his authorship concealed.