July 01, 2007

The Nabokov Code

Reader! What I heard was but the melody of children at play, nothing but that, and so limpid was the air that within this vapor of blended voices, majestic and minute, remote and magically near, frank and divinely enigmatic – one could hear now and then, as if released, an almost articulate spurt of vivid laughter, or the crack of a bat, or the clatter of a toy wagon, but it was all really too far for the eye to distinguish any movement in the lightly etched streets. I stood listening to that musical vibration from my lofty slope, to those flashes of separate cries with a kind of demure murmur for background, and then I knew that the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita’s absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from that concord.

Lolita is surely the first thing that comes to mind when one hears the name Vladimir Nabokov. One may not have heard of the novels Bend Sinister, Pale Fire, The Defense or The Gift, but even non-Russophiles have heard of Nabokov’s infamous Lolita. Some may even have read it.

Today, more than half a century after Lolita’s publication, there are few neutral reactions to the novel (which is on several “banned books” lists). For many, the book is synonymous with forbidden passion, licentiousness and a perverted mind. Unfortunately, however, the infamy surrounding Lolita often overshadows not just this singular work of fiction, but indeed the amazing body of this Russian-American writer’s work.

Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov is a significant figure in world literature, yet he was also a personality with a great many contradictions, a writer who left behind such a plethora of mysteries that, even today, more than a century after his birth, many remain unanswered.

Even the date of his birth is questioned. Was he born on April 22 or 23? As a matter of fact, he was born on April 10, 1899, according to the old Julian calendar in use in Russia at the time, which, in the 19th century, was 12 days behind the Gregorian calendar used in the West. But, with the start of the 20th century, the gap between the calendars widened to 13 days. Thus, Nabokov’s birthday is normally indicated as April 23. Yet it is worth noting that there are other reasons why the writer might have selected the 23rd for his birthday, instead of the 22nd. For one, it may not have been desirable to share a birthday with Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, the leader of the revolution that ousted Nabokov from his Russian homeland. Second, as Nabokov himself noted, it was pleasing to share one’s birth date instead with another great writer: William Shakespeare was born on April 23, 1564.

Should we consider Nabokov a Russian or an American writer? He was born in Russia, but fled abroad soon after the revolution, was educated at Trinity College in Cambridge, England, lived in Germany, France, and then for many years in the U.S., before finally moving to Switzerland. And he wrote both in Russian and in English, translating many of his books himself. So it is probably best to think of him as we think of the Nobel laureate Joseph Brodsky: as both a Russian and an American writer, with the amazing ability to compose masterpieces in either language.

Nabokov was an exceptionally multifaceted personality. His literary works include not just works of prose fiction, but poems, translations, plays, literary criticism, reviews, lectures on Russian and foreign literature, screenplays and even scientific works on entomology. Lepidoptery – the study of butterflies – was Nabokov’s second love, after literature. He revised the classification of several butterfly families, and was first to describe and name several other species and subspecies. As if that were not enough, he also composed crosswords – in fact he coined the Russian word krestoslovitsa for crossword puzzles.

Another of Nabokov’s passions was chess. He composed chess problems and even published a collection, titled Poems and Problems, consisting of 53 poems and 18 chess problems of his own making. Chess was to Nabokov an act of artistic creation. Competition on the chessboard, to him, was not between white and black, but between a problem’s creator and the imagination of the problem solver. One of his novels, The Defense, was even centered around the theme of chess.

In that story, a young, inexperienced youth in the Luzhin family finds his outlet in chess. But, with time, chess begins to suffocate him, consuming his very existence and upsetting his family life. He comes to believe that only suicide will resolve this “game” centered on his life. The novel is constructed according to parries on the chessboard and all of the characters in some way reflect pieces on the board.

Butterflies, chess and crosswords were more than just hobbies for this complex and talented writer. As Stephen Jay Gould noted, these pursuits, along with his writing, reflected Nabokov’s passion for detail, contemplation and patterns, which infused and influenced his writing.

“Pattern for Nabokov,” wrote the novelist John Banville, “was the sign of the godhead. Butterflies in particular struck him as incontrovertible proof that the universe did not occur but was made, by a joyous yet fanatically meticulous spendthrift.”

Insofar as a writer is a god of sorts – a creator of his own reality – Nabokov filled his works with similarly complex patterns. Many of his characters, though they reside in their own fictional world, seem to be trying to make out the “patterns” or “structure” of that world, striving to break out of their illusory world into the “real” world which they somehow perceive to be just beyond the veil.

Nabokov’s life in fact had many surprising parallels and coincidences of fate with his fictions. As he was working on the novel Pale Fire, which takes place in the country of Zembla (the name is related to Novaya Zemlya, or “New Land” in Russian), Nabokov discovered that one of the rivers on the island of Novaya Zemlya (a real island off the northern coast of Russia which was a major Cold War nuclear test site) bore the name of his great-grandfather.

Another – in this instance tragic – parallel occurred with the novel Pale Fire: the absurd death of the writer’s father. An assassin mistook the elder Nabokov for his intended target – former minister of foreign affairs Pavel Milyukov – and mortally shot him at a party meeting in 1922. Similarly, the hero of Pale Fire – the poet John Slade – dies because of a mistake by the murderer/ philosopher Jacob Gradus.

In Laughter in the Dark (written in 1931, in Russian, as Kamera Obscura), Nabokov spins a tale of marital infidelity and obsession that could be said to resemble his own affair with Irina Guadanini six years later, which he wisely cut off before it achieved the level of self-destructiveness experienced by Laughter’s protagonist Albinus.

Nabokov came from an old aristocratic family, presumably descended from the 15th century russified Tatar Prince Nabok-Murza, yet the Nabokov family tree is only directly traceable back to the middle of the 17th century. The Nabokov clan had so many outstanding figures that the burden of this surname weighed heavily on the writer his entire life and left its mark on his consciousness. On the one hand, it gave him an interest in seeking out family genealogy and uncovering parallels between his life and that of his ancestors, along with a great respect for and pride in his family. On the other hand, the achievements and fame of these ancestors motivated him to distance himself from the family and achieve his own measure of success.

Nabokov’s great great grandfather – Alexander Nabokov – was a full general. His eldest son, Nikolai, was made an imperial page at the age of three, and went on to marry the sister of a Decembrist and friend of Alexander Pushkin, Ivan Pushchin.

Dmitry Nabokov, the writer’s grandfather, was minister of justice, and spent his adult life defending western ideals of freedom and liberalism. Among his most important achievements were the institution of jury trials and inculcating the principle of life appointment for judges. His son, Vladimir Dmitriyevich, became one of the founders of the Kadet (Constitutional Democrat) Party in Russia. After graduating from Petersburg University’s legal faculty, he took a position working for the State, but soon gave up the life of a bureaucrat for the post of law school professor.

The years of the Bolshevik Revolution turned the Nabokov family upside-down. Upon finding out that the Kadet party was declared illegal by the Bolsheviks, Vladimir senior headed for Crimea, where his wife and family were waiting. And, on April 8, 1919, the Nabokovs, along with the families of other ex-ministers, set sail on a decrepit vessel for Greece. Their departure was repeatedly delayed due to the ship’s mechanical problems, and the boat set sail just as the Bolsheviks began to strafe the bay with machine guns. None of these Nabokovs ever returned to Russia.

Nabokov was himself fond of saying that his life was like a spiral, where each rotation represented a stage of his life. After flight from Soviet Russia, his so-called “European period” began, lasting until 1940. From Greece, the family quickly moved to England, and both sons entered Trinity College in Cambridge. In 1920, on a bet with his father, Nabokov undertook the translation of Romain Rolland’s Colas Breugnon from French into Russian (its Russian title became Nikolka-Persik, literally “Nicky-Pear”). Later, when he had moved to Berlin, Nabokov took on a similarly difficult task, when he translated Louis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland (receiving a $5 advance from the publisher), turning Alice into the Russian girl Anna.

It should be said that Nabokov was fluent in both English and French from an early age. What is more, for a short period of time when he was a young boy, he actually spoke English better than he did Russian. By his own account, he did not learn the Russian alphabet until he was seven, and the first fairy tales he heard were English, read to him by his English governess, Miss Sheldon.

Anglophilia was not some fad for the Nabokov family. For hundreds of years, Russian noble families had shown a predilection for all things British: London Tar Soap, London Toothpaste, Golden Syrup for breakfast, cakes, smelling salts, tennis balls and poker cards were all acquired from the British store on St. Petersburg’s Nevsky Prospekt.

While he was a student, on January 7, 1921, Nabokov published his first three poems and a story – Nezhit (The Wood Sprite) – in the emigre daily paper Rul (“Rudder”), which his father had helped found the year before. It was published under the pseudonym Vladimir Sirin, as a way to distance himself from his famous family name. “Sirin” is a bird in Russian fairy tales, and it showed up frequently in lubok (folk art) imagery, with the comely breast and features of a woman. Nabokov later said that he chose the pseudonym having in mind the similarity between Sirin and the word “siren” – the mythological female figures that lured sailors with their songs.

Graduating from Cambridge with honors, Nabokov moved to Germany. There, the young writer was all but lost in the background of a literary society dominated by famous personages like Gorky, Bely, Pasternak, Mayakovsky and Tsvetaeva. His poetry and dramas – he wrote exclusively in Russian at this time – did not bring him any great renown and he was miserably poor. From time to time he would write for émigré journals, but mainly he earned his living tutoring English and tennis, riding from one lesson to the next about Berlin on his bicycle. At one point he was so strapped for funds that his landlady took his coat, fearing he might leave his lodgings without paying his back rent.

In Berlin, Nabokov met the love and muse of his life, Vera Slonim. They met in the spring of 1923, at a fundraising ball. She was the daughter of Yevsey Slonim, a Jewish lawyer forced to become a forester when Russia enacted a law forbidding Jews from practicing law. A non-orthodox Jew, he could have followed the example of many other Jews in Russia at that time by converting to Christianity, as a way to continue on with his legal career, but he found that alternative unacceptable.

Vladimir and Vera were married a few months after they met, although their marriage was not officially registered in Berlin until two years later. A graduate of a St. Petersburg gymnasium, Vera had exacting tastes. She was fluent in several foreign languages, and worked as a translator and language teacher. Becoming the wife of a genius, she decided to devote her entire life to the service of her husband and his craft. Vera was not just Vladimir’s secretary, typist, editor and proofreader, but also his literary agent and chauffeur (he never learned to drive). She became de facto curator of an invaluable literary archive and was his first translator. She even learned to catch butterflies.

Nabokov’s first great literary success was his first novel, Mashenka (“Mary”), published in 1926 (and based on an earlier, unfinished novel, Happiness). The story gave readers a “group portrait of the Russian emigration,” and was filled (like many of Nabokov’s tales) with autobiographical details. The story’s protagonist is the Russian émigré Ganin, who is living in a cheap pension in Berlin. He finds out incidentally that his first love – Mashenka – married his fellow boarder, Alferov, and is soon to arrive by train. Overcome by nostalgia for his homeland and his first love, Ganin resolves to run away with Mashenka. He gets Alferov drunk and goes to meet her at the station alone. But, en route to the station, Ganin realizes that the beauty of his memory will never turn his faded love into reality. He leaves for Paris, never meeting Mashenka.

The novel was a turning point in Nabokov’s life. It was the first voicing of what would become recurrent themes in his work: exile and loss, memory and nostalgia, our illusory conceptions of time, and the uncomfortable collisions of time and memory. The story was very well received. “A new Turgenev has appeared,” the influential critic Yuli Aykhenvald said.

Over the next decade, Nabokov wrote
several novels in Russian, including Korol, Dama, Valet (King Queen, Knave, 1928), Zashchita Luzhina (The Luzhin Defense, 1930), Kamera Obscura (Laughter in the Dark, 1931), Otchayanie (Despair, 1936), Priglasheniya na kazn (Invitation to a Beheading, 1936) and Dar (The Gift, 1938). While his literary esteem increased during this decade, his and Vera’s hand-to-mouth existence continued unabated. In 1934, their son, Dmitry, was born.

The rise of fascism in Germany, increased tensions in Europe, and the persecution of Jews forced the Nabokovs to leave Germany for France in the spring of 1937. Meanwhile, Nabokov began to seek literary work in an English speaking country and during this time did readings in Belgium, France and England. At one of those readings, Nabokov met Irina Guadanini, a beautiful, well-educated, blonde coquette. A heated affair followed. Nabokov and Irina appeared everywhere together, yet this did not stop Nabokov from writing Vera daily, trying to convince her to speed up her arrival in France from Germany.

After fourteen years of a cloudless, happy marriage, Vera was deeply shaken by her husband’s betrayal. She found out about it through a four-page anonymous letter (curiously, in Laughter in the Dark, written six years prior, the feckless protagonist’s infidelities are also revealed to his wife through a letter), which went into excruciating detail about Vladimir and Irina’s affair. Nabokov denied everything, but did not have the will to break it off with Irina and had her write him poste restante under an assumed name.

Finally, Nabokov confessed to Vera that he was in love with another woman, and Vera showed a surprising nobility: “If you truly have strong feelings for this woman, you should go to her in Paris.” “I will not go,” he replied, after thinking it over. His affair with Irina came to an end. She visited him in Cannes and tried to rekindle the flame, but too much bound Vladimir to Vera. Their marriage survived his betrayal and they would remain happily married for 40 years.

It was in France, in December 1938, that the most important turn in Nabokov’s “European Period” took place: he began to write his first novel in English: The Private Life of Sebastian Knight.

Nabokov knew that his literary (and pecuniary) horizons would be limited if he continued to write only for the Russian émigré community. So, during the 1930s, he sought unsuccessfully to have some of his works translated into English (some were translated into German). His resolution to write in English was finally spurred by a literary contest which had a deadline of the end of January 1939. He and Vera had rented a one-room apartment in Paris and, while young Dmitry slept or played in the singular room, Nabokov sequestered himself in the bathroom, his writing desk a suitcase set atop the bidet. Despite these difficulties, Sebastian Knight was completed on time and sent off to London.

In fact, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (which did not win the contest, and was not published until 1941, in the U.S.) is a biography of the fictional writer Sebastian Knight. Knight’s stepbrother, a certain V., undertakes to investigate and understand Knight’s art, to uncover the “unearthly” secret that Night planned to reveal to the world from his deathbed. For this, V. has to find Night’s unknown Russian lover.

Life in France was getting increasingly difficult. Due to a lack of money, the Nabokovs moved into a tiny little apartment. And then, on May 2, 1939, Nabokov’s mother died in Prague. The greatest tragedy to Nabokov after his father’s untimely death, was his inability to help his mother or to see her very often. And now, because of Germany’s occupation of Czechoslovakia and his lack of money, he was unable to go to her funeral.

In 1939, Mark Aldanov, a writer and friend of Nabokov’s, had been offered a summer teaching position at Stanford, but decided not to take it. He offered it to Nabokov, who gladly took it and was accepted. There followed a long, bureaucratic struggle for exit and entry visas and passports. The Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, in recognition of Nabokov’s father’s support for Jewish causes in pre-revolutionary Russia, offered passage to the U.S. on the Champlain, setting sail in May 1940, but Nabokov did not have the necessary $560 for tickets. Money was collected from all over the world; benefit readings were held. Then, on May 10, Germany attacked France. And, on the eve of the Nabokov’s departure, their son Dmitry came down with a cold. There was no chance of changing the tickets, and the Nabokovs feared that they would not be allowed to board the ship with a sick child. They had no choice, ran the risk, and made the passage. On May 28, the Champlain sailed through lilac-colored smoke past the Statue of Liberty. America would be the Nabokov family’s refuge for the next 20 years.

Three weeks after their ship sailed, the house in which they had lived in Paris was destroyed by a German bomb.

It is curious to consider that it was in the U.S. that Nabokov finally began to feel at home. Even though he lived in Germany for 15 years, and had gotten his start as a writer there, Germany – as France – would remain for him a “place of exile,” a place where he had to struggle with serious financial and bureaucratic problems. Landing on the safer side of the Atlantic, Nabokov was filled with gratitude, and became an American citizen and patriot.

Nabokov repeatedly said that he felt he was an American and that he liked this feeling, that he was happier in America than he had been at any time in his life since leaving his homeland, that in America he found the best readers and a public that was closest to him in its world view. Perhaps this should not be surprising: it was in America that Nabokov truly matured as a writer, where he mastered his style and language, writing with equal virtuosity in English and in Russian. The writer Sirin died, and Vladimir Nabokov was reborn under his original name.

The greatest happiness I experience in composing is when I feel I cannot understand, or rather catch myself not understanding (without the presupposition of an already existing creation) how or why that image or structural move or exact formulation of phrase has just come to me. It is sometimes rather amusing to find my readers trying to elucidate in a matter-of-fact way these wild workings of my not very efficient mind.

The summer lectures on Russian literature at Stanford in 1941 were what brought Nabokov to America, and they were quite well received. He prepared them with over 2,000 pages of notes and did countless original translations of Pushkin, Gogol and others. The lectures were later published in book form.

During the summer of 1940, Nabokov, through a cousin, met Edmund Wilson, the acting literary editor at The New Republic. This friendship opened publishing doors for Nabokov, and his translations and short stories began to be published. In early 1941, he delivered two lectures at Wellesley College and so impressed the president there that he was offered an appointment and became that college’s one-man Russian department.

For the next seven years, he also worked in Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology, spending countless hours hunched over a microscope classifying butterflies, forever impairing his eyesight. He wrote several short stories and a book on Gogol during this period, and Sebastian Knight and Bend Sinister were both published (they received good reviews, but little commercial success). In 1948, Nabokov took a teaching position at Cornell University in upstate New York.

Nabokov began work on Lolita in 1947, basing it somewhat on a Russian story he had written in 1939, Volshebnik. No American publisher would touch the novel, so Nabokov sent it off to France to be published. Few noticed it until Graham Greene, in the London Sunday Times, called it one of the three best books of 1955.

The novel is, without question, Nabokov’s major contribution to literature. But how is it that Nabokov, a talented writer gifted with exacting tastes and a deep sense of beauty, could write such an unbridled work of obscenity? How could he lower himself to the creation of an erotic novel and bring to life a character as repulsive as Humbert Humbert? These were the sorts of critiques that were unloaded on Nabokov. A British reviewer at the London Sunday Express called it “sheer unrestrained pornography.” (The book was subsequently banned from the UK and France for two years.)

Yet only a very superficial reader could call Lolita pornography. Behind the erotic exterior is a much deeper and more significant novel, about the monstrosity of incuriosity and the unexamined life, about the abuse of power and about literature itself. Indeed, some have taken Lolita to be a powerfully ironic parody of cheap mass literature.

The parody, as in many of Nabokov’s previous works, became a basic, formulaic element. In fact, the line between reality and illusion is quite fuzzy in Lolita. There is not a single unimpeachable fact in the novel, as all of the information comes from the tortured mind of the memoirist Humbert Humbert, who has been under psychological observation for quite some time and is, in fact, writing his memoir for his prison psychiatrist. “Humbert Humbert” is also merely a pseudonym, a binomial designation that hides his real identity but betrays his schizophrenia.

While Nabokov always insisted that there were no hidden “larger messages” or social imperatives in his work, Lolita is littered with codes and literary allusions (particularly to Edgar Allen Poe, but also to the works of Lord Byron, T.S. Eliot, Sleeping Beauty and the Brothers’ Grimm). The novel is constructed according to the rules of a jousting tournament between Humbert and his doppelgänger antagonist, Clare Quilty, a mysogynistic pedophile with even worse designs for young Lolita.

After losing Lolita to Quilty, Humbert searches for her in 342 hotels, following cryptic clues Quilty leaves behind in registration books. It becomes an intellectual game between the men, where every work and every figure in the novel has significance, even a banal fact, like the license plate numbers of their cars (WS 1564 and WS 1616: the years of William Shakespeare’s birth and death). The novel is full of rebuses – a reflection of the author’s love of puzzles and word games. But this is also indicative of the sort of thoughtful reader for whom Nabokov felt he was writing: an active, engaged and educated reader who, in a sense, was a co-author of the living text.

In any event, today Lolita is considered a literary masterpiece; the Modern Library called it the fourth greatest novel of the 20th century. It was one of the first great commercial bestsellers of the 20th century and brought Nabokov financial freedom to write and to have his earlier works translated into English.

In 1961, the Nabokovs moved to Switzerland, primarily out of a desire to live closer to their son and to Nabokov’s sister. But, aside from that, Switzerland also meant beautiful countryside, peace and quiet, and, of course, alpine butterflies.

“I am an old man, very private in all my habits of life, who has preferred fruitful isolation in Switzerland to the stimulating but distracting atmosphere of America.”

Despite the fact that their material situation well allowed it, the Nabokovs never owned their own home, even in Switzerland. For Nabokov, home was in Russia. In Switzerland, their haven was a luxury suite on the sixth floor of a hotel overlooking Lake Geneva.

“The main reason, the background reason, is,” Nabokov later wrote, “I suppose, that nothing short of a replica of my childhood surroundings would have satisfied me. I would never manage to match my memories correctly – so why trouble with hopeless approximations?... Living in a hotel eliminates the nuisance of private ownership… A hotel life confirms me in my favorite habit – the habit of freedom…”

Switzerland was the fourth and final turn in the spiral of Nabokov’s life. During this period, he created his most complex, mysterious and refined works: Pale Fire, Ada, and Transparent Things. As previously, he brought to bear in them all manner of non-standard literary devices, in particular the coining of neologisms (e.g. the word “nymphet” from Lolita and the Kuranian-Slavicisms in Bend Sinister). But in these later works the toying with the reader reaches new heights. The reader of Pale Fire dare not weaken her attention for a moment. There are constant shifts in time and location, and the world before us splits in two. Every individual generates their own reality, their own world. They bump into and overlap with one another and there are correspondences with our own world. The novel is full of plays on preexisting literature; it seems at times as if every word hides an allusion or a pun. And, as if that were not enough, the heart of the novel is written in verse.

Yet to read any of Nabokov is not simple, of course, if you choose to read thoughtfully and not superficially. For he wrote for a literate, thinking reader. To Nabokov, the reader is not simply the consumer of literary products, but at once a rival and a coauthor of the text, an equal participant in the creative process, someone who is ready to enter into a game with the author, to discover and unravel numerous puzzles and word plays scattered here and there. In exchange, the reader is guaranteed satisfaction from the game.

“The true conflict is not between the characters in a novel,” Nabokov wrote, “but between author and reader... In the long run, however, it is only the author’s private satisfaction that counts.”

In June 1976, Nabokov was hospitalized with a bladder infection. He did not return to work until September. In January 1977, he gave his last interview, in which he said he planned to visit the U.S. after visiting Israel, where he had a long-standing invitation from the mayor of Jerusalem. In March of 1977, Nabokov was again hospitalized, this time with pneumonia and a fever. A month and a half later, he returned to Montreaux, attempting to get back to his writing. But by early June he was back in the hospital. On June 30, he was attacked by pleurisy and on July 2 died. Vera and their son Dmitry were at his side.

The writer was buried in Vevey, France, his tomb decorated with a simple marble slab, inscribed with his name and profession (in French):

VLADIMIR NABOKOV ECRIVAIN 1899-1977

Additional Reading & VIEWING

Nabokov in 90 Minutes, by Paul Strathern (Ivan Dee, $8.95), is a concise, expert account of Nabokov’s life and ideas. At the other end of the scale is Brian Boyd’s two-volume biography of Nabokov (The Russian Years; The American Years, Princeton), a fascinating, and detailed look at the master’s life and works. Many of those works are out of print, but The Library of America has a beautiful three-volume collection of his novels, and Knopf published a collection of 65 of his short stories. There have been two film adaptations of Lolita (Stanley Kubrick’s 1962 version, and a 1997 remake by Adrian Lyne) and one of The Luzhin Defence (2001), starring John Turturro as the obsessed chess master (visit our website for links to all of the above).

July 01, 2007

The Nabokov Code

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