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"Unquenchable Russia", or Forbidden Themes in Nabokov's Prose

"… What I think is the real modern world is a world artist creates his own Mirage, which is a new mir ("world" in Russian) of the Act of his shedding, as it were, the age he lives in ". Such Answer Nabokov once gave to an interviewer who was interested in his idea of the modern world and modern politics. The book containing this interview as well as many others, have the right Strong opinions, and, yes, Nabokov is known not only for his brilliant fiction, but for her original, independent and uncompromising views on creativity, art and instead of the artist in the world. When interviewed, he avoided discussion of "general ideas" as social, political and moral issues, and argued that such global concerns lay outside the realm of art: "A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important for the individual, and only the individual reader is important to me. I do not give a damn for group, society, the masses, and so on … There is no doubt that what makes a work of fiction safe from larvae and rust is not its social importance but its art, only his art. A work of art, for Nabokov, is a world in itself, brought to life by his creative imagination. It leads its own independent existence, that is not related to the historical setting and realities. In the introduction to his lectures on literature, Nabokov explains once again: "… The real author, the fellow who sends planets spinning and models a man was sleeping and eager tamper with the sleeper's rib, the type of author not given values at his disposal: he must create them yourself. The art of writing is a futile business if it does not involve primarily the art of seeing the world as the potential for fiction. "In this statement, visions of cosmic grandeur and an obvious reference to the story of Adam and Eve reflect a parallel between the creator-artist and creator God. In one of his interviews Nabokov explicitly brings out this comparison: "A creative writer must study careful work of his rivals, including the Almighty. He must have the innate ability to not only recombining but restores the given world ".

Nabokov's position is to some extent, a reaction to the situation in Soviet Russia, where the demands of the state dominated the needs of a person, where the individual was suppressed by the collective and details of generalities. He said once the power and independence of personal creativity, the ability of one's imagination to build worlds for themselves, and makes a sharp distinction between a work of fiction and everything outside it, including the personality of its creator. "Literature is invention. Fiction is fiction. To call a story a true story is an insult to both Truth and Art ".

Nabokov's insistence on a particular approach to literary readers, too. He renounced the usual tendencies to identify with a book's characters, searching for clues to the social and political realities at the time the work was written, or trying to form a "general ideas" about a book without having to absorb all its specific details. Emotional commitment, he pointed out, can also prevent the browser from the goal the strengthening of the work "… A wise reader book of genius not with his heart, not so much with his brain, but with his back. It is there that occurs telltale tingle even though we have to keep a little distant, a little detached when reading.

Nabokov avoided formulating his ideas under the famous slogan "art for art's sake" just as he avoided the labels of all kinds, but this well-known phrase can certainly be used to describe his views and attitudes towards literature. In this hierarchy of values, aesthetic considerations dominate all others, and influence of a large artworks reader's limited to a "tingle of the spine." However, it remains to be seen, the extent to which Nabokov's ideas need their own fiction, his novels are quite entirely a product of his creative imagination or a result of the deep personal experience as saturated fat them with great intensity.

Nabokov changed the country and language in their creative life, and it is interesting to analyze whether these changes affected his books. Comparison of two of Nabokov's novels, The Gift, written in Russian in the most Berlin in 1930, and Pale Fire, written in English at a much later time, can provide insights into these questions.

As Nabokov mentioned in the preface to The Gift, "the greatest hero" of the novel is Russian literature, and the protagonist is a writer, an emigre writer Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev, which share many autobiographical details with Nabokov. As Nabokov during his Cambridge years after, Fyodor lives in Berlin in the 1920s, writes poetry and makes a living by giving lessons in English and French. He leads, for the most part, a lonely existence, devoted his time mainly to literature. Happy childhood in St. Petersburg, love of butterflies and chess problems, synesthesia, – all that Fyodor has in common with Nabokov. Description of individual episodes mirror events from Nabokov's own life, described much later in his autobiographical book, Speak, Memory, – For example the story of a childhood disease: high fever, obsession with numbers and a large Faber pencil, donated by the mother.

Perhaps the most important attribute that Fyodor parts with Nabokov's passionate love for the literary language, faith in the power of the written word: "Because there were things he (Fedor) wanted to express as natural as unrestrainedly as the lungs would expand, thus words suitable for breathing should exist. "Fyodor reflects on his youthful interest in rhyme and meter, analyze the mechanisms words to interact and fit together like pieces of a puzzle to form the harmonious whole of a poem. Fyodor shares Nabokov's dislike generalities as social problems or mental health. When he briefly considers the opportunity to meet his acquaintance, Mme. Chernyshevski are still voiceless request to write about his son, he explains his aversion to the idea is as follows: "I would have been enmired involuntarily in a" deep "social-interest novel with a disgusting Freudian reek".

Clearly, is Fyodor's (and Nabokov's) view of the literature expressed in Fyodor's (imaginary) conversations with Koncheyev – a fellow emigre poet, the only work he admires and whose opinions he considers valuable. When Fyodor and Koncheyev leave a literary gather and walk together down the street, a unique, brilliant dialogue, filled with allusions to various works of Russian literature, takes place between them. "… There are only two types of books: the bed and waste basket. Whether an author I love dearly, or throw him out completely," – Declare Fyodor, and the two continue to argue that, in their opinion, the best and the worst in the works of famous Russian writers. Both are completely uninterested in the "general ideas "or the moral significance of the writings they talk about (issues that always attracted Russian critics and gained new importance in the Soviet period), and all they do is loving point out the purely artistic discovery of this or that author. They praise Leskov's Jesus – "the ghostly Galilean, cool and mild, in a gown the color of the maturation plum "or" the gray sheen of Mme. Odintsev black silk "in Turgenev's Fathers and Sons. Speaking of rejected Dostoyevski, Fyodor notes:" In Karamazov, there somewhere a circular mark left by a wet glass of wine at an outdoor table "- and that for him it is only" worth saving. "As several authors is known for its beautiful descriptions of nature, Fyodor mercilessly criticize them for errors in their descriptions of natural phenomena: "My father used to find all Howl kind of Turgenev and Tolstoy hunting scenes and descriptions of nature, and as for the wretched Aksakov, let's not even discuss his infamous blunders in this field. "All these statements clearly echoes Nabokov's own approach to literature, his love of detail, his insistence on accurate knowledge of the natural world and cancellation of other criteria to evaluate literary works.

Nabokov's belief in the power of deception and invention in creating fiction is often expressed in his attempt to mislead the reader, to establish this or that false move in the development of the site, which after a few pages, turns out to be an illusion, a fetus of the character's imagination. The entire exchange between Fyodor and Koncheyev turns out to be such an illusion, "Who's business is the fact we parted on the very first corner, and that I have been reciting a fictional dialogue with myself provided by a self-teaching manual of literary inspiration? "However, the significance of this non-existent conversation in the novel is not limited to express opinions about art and display of Nabokov's mystification devices. It shows the extent of Fyodor loneliness, the absence of interlocutors that he be able to share his extensive knowledge of literature and love of language: the level of the department from the outside world. In her book, Speak, Memory Nabokov describes way native Europeans were perceived by Russian immigrants in Germany or France, "These aborigines were the mind eye as flat and transparent as shapes cut out of the cellophane, and even if we used their gadgets, applauded his clowns, picked their roadside plums and apples, no real communication, rich human sort so prevalent in our own midst, existed between us and them. "The Gift recreates the atmosphere of cultural and human isolation in which Fyodor has to live. deprived of their own cultural environment, Fyodor feels nothing but anger towards the German-speaking world he is trapped in. "The Russian conviction that the German is in small numbers vulgar and in large numbers – unbearably vulgar was, he knew, a conviction unworthy of an artist "- and still he can not help it, while he manages all his irrational hat at a German who pushes him in a bus (which, ironically, proves to be a Russian).

Like Nabokov, Fyodor is trilingual, but his French and English in its current situation, serve a purely utilitarian purposes, while Russia is still the language of his soul and his art. Riding a bus to one of his boring teacher jobs Fyodor thinks of himself: "… that He is a special, rare and hitherto undescribed and unnamed variant of the man, and he is busy with God knows what, rushing from lesson to lesson, wasting his youth on a dull and empty task of mediocre teaching in foreign language – when he has his own language, of which he can make anything he like – a mosquito, a mammoth, a thousand different clouds. "This is why there are almost no examples of puns and language shift in The Gift.

On the way to yet another hateful lesson Fedor is completely immersed in memories of Russia and his past life there – reminds "quick and meaningless, and visited him as an attack of a terminal illness at any time, in a place. "The warm, sunny vision of the Russian countryside after a summer rain stands out in such sharp contrast to the surrounding colorless reality and the upcoming meeting with a hopeless student, that Fedor ends up jumping in the lesson and go home to his writings. This is another theme expressed in The Married with great emotional power – the theme of nostalgia, longing for the lost homeland. When faced with the question of Russia during his interviews, Nabokov gave answers that "all Russia I need is always with me" or "exile means to an artist just one thing – the banning of his books." But sometimes he speaks of Russia quite different: "In the first decade of this century decreasing, during trips with my family to Western Europe, I imagined, at bedtime, dreams, what it would be like to be an exile who longed for a remote, sad and (right epithet coming) unquenchable Russia, the eucalypti of exotic resorts. Lenin and his Police neatly arranged the realization of that fantasy. "

References to Russia in Nabokov's novels, especially The Gift, bears traces of an overwhelming and bitter sense of loss, will, no doubt, from personal experience. Like Nabokov, Fyodor transform his inner world of art and his poetry, born out of childhood memories, justify, as he says, they spent years in exile. But even creative fulfillment in the literature can not fully alleviate Fyodor of nostalgia his, which is sometimes almost a physical sensation: "In long he had wanted to express a way that it was in his feet that he had the feeling of Russia, which he could touch and feel all of her with her soles, as a blind man feeling the palms. "Again and again, he imagines an impossible return to its familiar and changed the country:" And when will we return to Russia? What idiotic sentimentality, what a greedy need to groan our innocent hope convey to the people of Russia. But our nostalgia is history – just human how can one explain this to them? "Right after these lines is one of Nabokov's central ideas expressed by the words of his character and given a somewhat ironic end:" It is easier for me, of course, than for another to live outside Russia, because I know for sure that I will return – first because I took away the keys to her, and secondly because, no matter when, a hundred, two hundred years, I will stay there in my books – or at least in some researcher's footnote. There, now you have a history of hope, a literary-historical one … "

In this section, there are two different perspectives on Russia, two different ways of perception – that of an artist, and that a single man, and they are more independent, proud and detached position of an artist that Nabokov prefers to show the world. He always vigorously protested against being identified with his characters, and maybe it was his way to hide that part of himself, which included his own human feelings and dreams, often painful, often helplessly irresolvable. Yet, just as in a by Fyodor's childhood memories colors leaking into his vision of letters and irrevocably affect his sense of language, this private and forbidden world of Nabokov in his inevitable fiction in various guises and through various characters. In addition to the theme of nostalgia, there is another very personal development of the plot of The Gift, and it's Fyodor the relationship with his father. Konstantin Godunov-Cherdyntsev is an explorer who is also very concerned about his profession, and uninterested in the great upheavals taking place in Russia. In 1917, for Despite the difficult situation in Russia, he goes on one of his expeditions and never come back. There is another loss that haunts Fyodor: although there is hardly any hope of see his father again, he keeps dreaming of his return, to imagine that one day he would meet his father on the street, or hear a telephone conversation … In one of the most moving episodes in the novel, the phone rings, after all, in the middle of the night, and Fyodor run to the house of his former landlady along the streets of Berlin, which suddenly turned into a beautiful, mysterious world reminiscent of St. Petersburg in a white night. Fyodor enters the room and sees his father. "With a groan and a sob Fyodor went against him, and in the collective sense of wool jacket, big hands and loving stud trimmed mustache on it swelled an ecstatically happy, vibrant, enormous, paradisal heat where his icy heart melted and dissolved. "And again, almost unbearable this time, turn the whole scene to be one of Nabokov's false turns, and Fyodor wakes up from another dream to a cold and empty mornings.

Nabokov denied a work of art any kind of "truth" aside from an artistic, but the episode with the father, Fyodor radiates with human truth: warmth, longing, vulnerability, the loss shattered hopes … One must only remember the tragic death of Nabokov's own father, to understand where all this comes from.

In The Married, covers are often transparent, and the hero is presented from different angles. He is not only a writer who "treats life as an opportunity for fiction", he a man who sees the world through the prism of their own experiences, their sorrows and joys.

The Gift was the last novel Nabokov wrote in Russian. In 1940 He emigrated to the United States, and since then, wrote his major works in English only. The change, which he said was not easy: "My complete switch from Russian to English prose prose was very painful – Like to learn again to deal with it after losing seven or eight fingers in an explosion. "Pale Fire, one of the Nabokov's English novels, was written in part at the end of their stay in America, partly in Switzerland, where Nabokov spent his last years. The novel has important structural and thematic similarities to The Gift. As The Gift, where an entire chapter is devoted to biography of Fyodor Chernyshevsky, a book on their own, Pale Fire contains a work of literature in it – a long poem written by an American poet John Shade. The rest of the novel is a commentary, which mostly has nothing to do with the poem itself. There is an extensive history of external Zembla, which the king has been destroyed throne by the revolution and fled the country. Eventually it becomes clear that Charles Kinbote, Shade neighbor and the author of the commentary is even the fleeing king. Therefore, as in The Gift, there is a theme of exile and a theme of creativity, but in Pale Fire takes the quite different development.

As Kinbote explains, "the name Zembla is corruption not of the Russian Zemlya, but Semblerland, a country with reflections, of "resemblers. Zemblan language similar to several European languages simultaneously. There are obvious traces of Russian in it, some words are borrowed almost unchanged: For example, there is a picture of bogtyr (bogatyr 'in Russian) in a Zemblan history book, and it is "stone tiles, broad-shouldered komizars" (Russian People's Commissar) to maintain order on the streets Zemblan after the revolution. Moreover, French and German is unclear discerned in other sentences. "Remind Amin, Gut mag Alkan, Pern dirstan (my darling, God makes hungry, thirsty devil) ", – a Zemblan nurse tells Kinbote, and you hear, as well as the Russian" alkat '"And, perhaps, the British" harmful "," Mon AMIE "," Gott "and the first person in the German" mochten.

Nabokov in his interviews, stressed that Zembla is not Russia, and, yes, there is another Russian in the novel, a totalitarian state that contributes to Zemblan revolution. Kinbote talking about the "tainted gold and robot troops as a powerful police state from the vantage ground a few miles away from the sea was pouring into the Zemblan revolution." Kinbote is increasingly talking about Zembla, but his memories of the lack that depth of human feeling, which marks Fyodor is nostalgia. Although Kinbote repeat again and again "my Zembla," "dazzling Zembla 'tenderness that shines through the best sides in Gif t, missing his story. It's really a story about himself and his escape from the country. To a King Kinbote shows a remarkable lack of interest in the revolution that hit his country and the possible causes that led to it. He is more concerned with aesthetic and literary pleasures and call it politics, "a boring subject". As for the revolution, all he can say about it is that it was "boring and unnecessary." In Kinbote's attitude is that some of Nabokov's own indifference to the social and political issues. Overall, the theme of exile in the novel dealt with a certain coldness and detachment, but there are passages that when it's warm and deep lyricism can be compared with The Gift. For example, Kinbote comments on his roommate who get up early tomorrow and plants flowers with a very weird name: Heliotropium turgenevi. "This is the flower scent evokes the timeless intensity at dusk, and the garden bench and a house of painted wood in a distant northern land". Even apart from the reference to Turgenev, it is clear that this country, for Nabokov, is none other than Russia – not the monstrous police state near Zembla, but the real, immortal, beloved Russia of Nabokov's memory. And this short passage retain freshness and more emotional power than the colorful descriptions of Zemblan mountains that have no counterpart in the author's childhood memories.

It seems that, to Kinbote, be in exile is not so much the loss of their home country as the loss of his name and title (which he now has to hide) and thus partial loss of their identity, and thus his isolation and detachment is more complete than Fyodor in The Gift. One of the critics of Pale Fire interpret his behavior as follows: "… he tries to get the poet John Shade to confirm its identity, to validate Zemblan reality that is his hope of salvation by turning it into a poem. "With the manic persistence Kinbote keeps talking Shade of Zembla:" I hypnotized him with it, I fed him with my vision, pressure I'm on him, with a drunkard's wild generosity, all I was helpless me to insert the verses. "Kinbote calls his relationship with the poet" friendship ", but, in fact, he can not care less about the Shade as a human being with their own hope and sorrow. While commenting on the poem, he completely neglects the part of Shade's wife and daughter. Sybil Shade, to protect her husband from his neighbor's intrusion, because Kinbote, is just as annoying obstacles in your way, and to him, tender lines Shade devotes himself to his wife is nothing but an "embarrassing intimacies. Kinbote superior deals with the theme of Shade's daughter, Hazel's, suicide, obviously a very painful and personal subject for the poet, as if it was just a stylistic device: "The whole thing strikes me as the work and long, especially after the synchronization unit has already worked to death by Flaubert and Joyce." When Kinbote feels lonely and afraid in the empty house, he wants that Shade had a heart attack – only to have an excuse to come over and escape loneliness and fear. At the end of the novel, while Shade has been mistakenly shot by the murderer, his "friend" is in no hurry to call for help: instead, he runs to hide the poem, which he believes contains the story of his own life.

In relation to Kinbote, John Shade seems to be a much more appealing character, and he possesses certain qualities that bring more human heat into his image: he can be lazy, he likes hearty meals, liquor and wine, he loves his wife and daughter and are generally more tolerant of people who are not as bright and talented as he is. Nabokov gives his character some of his most beloved tanks. For example, expresses the Shade, who is also a teacher of literature, his views on education: "First of all, reject the ideas, and social backgrounds, and few freshman to tremble, getting drunk on the poetry of Hamlet or Lear, to read with a backbone and not with in the skull. "But since Shade's personality is seen in the novel only through Kinbote's uncaring eyes, is his inner world more or less hidden from the reader. It is only through Shade poem that one can glimpse into the issues that preoccupy the poet. The poem, on the whole, is a painful, difficult search for meaning, an attempt to understand the puzzle of human life and death, to find a way to transcend one's mortality. No human thought or feeling can relieve one from being caught in one's own final world. All failed except art: art for its own sake, art that contains a unique, perfectly harmonized inner reality, which can be interpreted as a reflection of a larger pattern:

I feel I understand

Existence, or at least a minute part,

Of my existence, only through my art,

In terms of combinatorial delight …

"Combinational joy, yes, it is important not only in the Shade poems, but in the novel. As in The Gift, artistic details are the focus of concentration in Pale Fire, but here attention is focused on a more subtle level where the language is analyzed. Pale Fire is an example of extremely dense prose in which some words are more than just carriers of meaning: they are, in a way, even the subject of the novel. One of Shade's hottest pictures of the family together is a memory in the evenings when he and Sybil helped his daughter to understand really obscure words from her English textbook. A difference of one letter in the words "mountain" and "fountain" is crucial in the story of Shade attempt to penetrate the mystery of the hereafter. The book is filled with examples the pun, often involving several languages, and references to a number of literary works (some of which are likely to Nabokov's own invention). The Shade poems, there are such special combinations: "From Karamazov," he mumbles incapable everything is allowed ", which is a mixture of Alyosha Karamazov, Raskol'nikov and, perhaps, Italian painter Fra Angelico with his intense spiritual religious art. But no one in the novel are more engaged in digging in words than Kinbote. He is constantly engaged in interpreting literary allusions, pondering over the interplay of words, meanings, rhymes and sounds. Nabokov mentioned in his lectures that a dictionary would be a necessary attribute for a good read, and, ironically, Kinbote, which hardly can be called a good read, follow obediently lines Shade masterpiece with his dictionary. For the most part, he is obsessed with looking for references to Zembla and his own life story in the poem, but sometimes he takes only aesthetic pleasure in a few lines of it:

"Lines 131-132: I was the shadow of the waxwing slain by feigned remoteness in the pane.

The exquisite tune of the two lines open the poem is picked up here. Repetition of the long-drawn note has been saved from the monotony of subtle variations in line 132 where the assonance between its second word and rim gives the ear a kind of languorous pleasure that would echo some half-remembered sorrowful song … "Shade's commentator genuinely enjoy the magic words, and that makes Nabokov, as multilingualism, artistic sense and incredible mastery of the language found full expression in the creation of the truly great poem, as well as other parts of the novel.

Perhaps, admits the refined world of literature Kinbote a way to escape from his troubled personal reality, and as it does for shade, and to some extent, for the Fyodor The Gift, and finally, for Nabokov. In his commentary, Kinbote tells one episode when someone in the presence of Shade tells a story about a crazy train employees, as "thought he was God and began to reroute trains. "It (" angry ") is the wrong word," – he (Shade) said. – "One should not use it's a person who deliberately peels off a sad and unhappy past and replaces it with a brilliant invention. "Nevertheless, the comparison of Nabokov's novels as the most" brilliant invention "is truly alive only when the light of one's own human experience, but" sad and unhappy "illuminates it from within. In Pale Fire walls shelter Nabokov private world of memory and emotion is thicker than in The Gift, and the novel follows closely Nabokov's ideas about art as elegant deception, a brand invented world that should be approached on the aesthetic rather than emotional grounds. This is the big difference between Pale Fire and The Gift.

Time is likely to be one of the factors behind this change: Pale Fire was written almost twenty years later than The Gift, such as major and greater distance away Nabokov from his Russian past that he had stronger emotional ties than years spent abroad. Another important factor is, probably, language. Nabokov was very proud of his English works, and repeatedly called himself an American writer, but sometimes he gave his readers with unexpected revelations as: "My private tragedy, who can not, indeed should not be any concern, is that I had to leave my natural language, my natural idiom, my rich, infinitely rich and docile Russian tongue, for a second-rate brand of English. "In another interview, when asked what language he considered the most beautiful, Nabokov answered:" My head says English, my heart, Russian, my ear, French. "It is possible to say that for him, Russian conveyed emotional power, while the English had more of an intellectual appeal, and this is one of the reasons that Pale Fire, written in English, appealing to the brain more than it does to the emotions.

One of the most striking confessions that bridges Nabokov's inner world with its public even exist in a poem. An Evening of Russian Poetry, written in English in 1945, is a rhyme presentation of a public Nabokov gives lectures to an audience of American students, mostly female. Russian poetry is the theme of the lecture, but Nabokov approaches in the way typical of him, he does not talking about schools, trends and periods. Again, he speaks of letters, shapes, tracks individual intricate details and hidden tenderness through his words, stay invisible to their audience. They ask him questions about his favorite trees and stones, echoes the callous critic from The Gift, such as "discussion of book Koncheyev boiled down to answer her for the author a kind of tacit questionnaire (your favorite flower? favorite hero? What effect do you prize most?) "in Nabokov's discussion of Pushkin and Nekrasov all merge and melt together: the sky and grass, the beauty of verse and human feeling – and the inevitable theme of exile. Nabokov talking about memories, said openly: "I must remind you of the conclusion that I am followed everywhere, and that space is folding." His personal tragedy lost their young audience, which innocent request asks what is the most remarkable conclusion to a poem:

How would you say "nice talk" in Russian?

How would you say "good night"?

Oh, that would be:

Bessonnitza, tvoy vzor oonyl in strashen;

Moya lubov, otstoopnika prostee.

(Insomnia, your stare is dull and ashen,

my love, forgive me this waiver.)

All Nabokov carefully hidden private the world that he insists, "can not, indeed should not be everyone's concern, is suddenly revealed in these stirring lines: long nights, loneliness, feeling of guilt over leaving their language and nostalgia for the inaccessible, unforgettable, "unquenchable Russia."

Bibliography

1). Kernan, Alvin B. "Reading Zemblan: Audience Award Disappears in Nabokov's Pale Fire." Vladimir Nabokov (Modern Critical Views). Ed. Harold Bloom. Chelsea House Publishers, 1987. 101-125.

2). Набоков, Владимир. Дар. Москва: Правда, 1990.

3). Nabokov, Vladimir. The Gift. New York: Capricorn Books, GP Putnam's Sons, 1970.

4). —. Lectures on Literature. Harcourt Brace & Company, 1982.

5). —. Pale Fire. New York: Quality Paperback Book Club, 1993.

6). —. Poems and problems. McGraw-Hill International, Inc. 1970.

7). —. Speak, Memory. New York: Quality Paperback Book Club, 1993.

8). —. Strong Opinions. McGraw-Hill International, Inc. 1973.

About the Author

I was born and grew up in Russia. At the age of 20 I had to unexpectedly move to the USA where I spent 6 years. That was when I wrote this and other English-language articles. Now I’m living again in Russia. I teach English and also do web design. Here is my site: www.kotausi.com There you can see some of my works, photographs and other articles.