Gogol's Magic Chaos

"So what is the incomprehensible secret force driving me towards you? Why do I constantly hear the echo of your mournful song as it is carried from sea to sea throughout your entire expanse? Tell me the secret of your song. What is this, calling and sobbing and plucking at my heart? What are these sounds that are like a stab and a kiss, why do they come rushing into my soul and fluttering about my heart? Rus! Tell me what do you want of me! What is this strange bond secretly uniting us?"

"What does this limitless space portend? And since you are without end yourself, is it not within you that a boundless thought will be born?"

"And pray, find me the Russian who does not care for fast driving? Inclined as he is to let himself go, to whirl his life away and send it to the devil, his soul cannot love speed."

"Rus, are you not similar in your headlong motion to one of those nimble troikas that none can overtake?"

"Is that my home looming blue in the distance? Is that my mother sitting there at her window? Mother dear, save your poor son! Shed a tear upon his aching head. See how they torture him. Press your poor orphan to your heart. There is no place for him in the whole wide world! He is a hunted creature. Mother dear, take pity on your sick little child...And by the way, gentlemen, do you know that the Bey of Algiers has a round lump growing right under his nose?

Once upon a time I worked in an adult undergraduate degree completion program, With limited space, I shared an office with a fellow English instructor. Our small office also served as a repository for homework assignments and final exams. One science faculty member regularly asked students to turn in a poster-sized description of an ecosystem. The assignment seemed a little juvenile, but almost all of the students turned in carefully crafted visual representations of complex natural worlds, whether they were bogs, forests, prairies, or everglades. Generally speaking, the posters contained about 30 or so separate ecological units or natural entities. We marveled at the type-A personalities who had labored over so many hours to create such beautiful and accurate descriptions of life on planet earth.

And yet, all science students are not created alike. Inevitably, one student's assignment fell far below the standard of the class as a whole, a testament to human inequality and the science of statistics. One such retrograde assignment caught our eye. Where all other students had drawn and labelled dozens of flora, fauna, and biological processes, one student was pleased to turn in a poster-sized picture of a crudely drawn and utterly solitary turtle. Beyond a round circle meant to symbolize a puddle, and a short stick, the turtle sat alone, like some kind of prison tattoo or cosmic Hindu presence. To my mind, the turtle represented failure, but not just any failure. Here was the visual proof that one student had failed to live up to what would surely be the professor's normal academic expectations. Of course, expectations are predicated on context. If the professor had received thirty simplistic "turtle" drawings, perhaps he or she would have accepted this one as "C" or even "B" work. But this hadn't been the case: the turtle stood out as a spectacular example of low performance.

I spent a lot of time thinking about the student's putative ecosystem, the turtle. Did the student who had drawn know she had produced such crap, or did he or she imagine that most of the other students were either incapable of, or unwilling to, create something better? It was hard to say. But anybody who has ever watched American Idol knows how often people live in denial about their competitiveness. Indeed, many American Idol contestants scarcely know they lack an iota of talent even when the celebrity judges are bluntly telling them they are horrendous singers.

The pathetic moment is often captured with plaintive statesments like this one: "I know I am good... At least I think I am....My mother says I could be a star..." Perhaps the man who created the turtle still didn't know he wasn't academically competitive. Maybe the teacher gave him an inflated grade; maybe he thinks that all other students failed the assignment too. More troubling than the student's naivitee, is the recognition of my own. How many "turtle" assignments had I turned in in the course of a lifetime? It's one thing to embrace defeat, but quite another to turn in an assignment or performance without any sense of whether the result will be mocked by those who are charged with evaluating it.

Every time we create we risk churning out a turtle. The trick is ignoring the possibility of failure. Nikolai Gogol turned in few literary turtes in his creative lifetime, though his admirer Vladimir Nobokov isn't shy about denigrating almost everything he wrote except for his masterpieces, Dead Souls, Part I, The Inspecter General, and the Overcoat. Nabokov admires Gogol's creativity, absurdity, and prose, but thinks his talent developed late and ended rather early. Nabokov celebrates neither Gogol's famous St. Petersburg Tales--he thinks them trite--nor his polemical writings, which include surviving fragments of Part II ad Part III of Dead Souls. However, Nabokov's praise for Gogol's masterpieces is unbounded.

As a master stylist himself, his belief that Gogol had created richly complex, almost superhumanly inventive verbal worlds is high praise indeed. "Pushkin wrote in three-dimensional prose," Nabokov wrote, "but Gogol wrote in four-dimensional prose, at least." He meant that Gogol isn't merely funny or clever. He is also not merely a good writer. He's one of the father's of Russian prose, as profound as Russian life, or much more so. He doesn't merely capture the essence of life, he exceeds it, elaborates upon it. Gogol hasn't written literature, he has created "magic chaos," captured rare moments of "irrational perception," and delineated the literary equivalent of the curverature of the space-time continuum. Nabokov writes that the Overcoat, for instances, shows that "parallel lines not only may meet, but they can wriggle and get most extravagantly entangled..."

Opinionated

Vladimir Nabokov's book of interviews, letters to the editor, and editorials establishes the following: Nabokov... 1) is a genius; 2) knows that he is a genius; 3) doesn't usually make any aesthetic or intellectual compromises; 4) hates communism and other forms of political dictatorship; 5) eschews literary trends and labels and schools; 6) is proud of his scientific publications about butterflies; 7) loves America; 8) thinks The Gift is his best Russian book and Lolita may be his best overall book; 9) believes that Russian liberalism was vibrant on the eve of the Revolution; 10) believes he is better than most other major European or American authors, living or dead; 11) is confident about his translations, and also about his philosophy of translation; 12) is contemptuous of other people's translations; 13) is not interested in religion; 14) dislikes interviews and interviewers, by and large; 15) has a well-established creative process and philosophy of literature; 16) is not particularly found of literary criticism; loathes Freud, Marx, Sartre, et cetera and so on.

Wilson and Nabokov

Nabokov’s letters to Edmund Wilson--published in the book Dear Bunny, Dear Volodya: The Nabokov-Wilson Letters, 1940- 1971--are wonderful to behold. They remind us of the genius of both men. In his American phase, Nabokov was busily translating, annotating, lecturing, analyzing, promoting, butterfly collecting, and writing. His work was prodigious. Although he was now writing in a second language, Nabokov wrote an enormous quantity of short stories, novels, poems, commentaries, letters, lectures, translations of Russian classics, and scientific treatises on butterflies and moths. Wilson, in addition to his work as an editor, was equally busy writing poetry, prose, history, translations, lectures, letters, and literary criticism. Together, the two opinionated men seemed to be capable of debating almost every aspect of global, or at least Western, literary culture.

Their letters demonstrate that both men felt extremely comfortable with American, French, German, British, and Russian literary history. Wilson, literary editor of the New Yorker, sometime husband of Mary McCarthy, knew almost every major intellectual of the Atlantic seaboard, including the Caribbean. Not content with translating European modernism for an American public, he ventured directly into the Russian revolutionary project, producing his masterpiece, To the Finland Station, in the midst of dozens of other major and minor literary projects.

Perhaps the greatest compliment to Wilson, is the respect with which Nabokov addressed him in their letters. At first, Nabokov’s fondness for Wilson seems to be linked, at least in some small measure, with the concrete commercial favors Wilson did him throughout their long acquaintance. For instance, Wilson recommended Nabokov for university appointments, suggested him as a translator whenever the occasion arose, collaborated on projects with Nabokov, reviewed his books, provided him with literary introductions, critiqued his English, or made suggestions regarding Nabokov’s many literary contracts.

Over time, the balance of power shifted but Nabokov revealed his ongoing respect for Wilson by his continued intellectual engagement with the man, despite ideological differences. Neither man pulled his punches on the subject of political ideology. For Nabokov, Wilson fundamentally misread the Revolution, which had nothing to recommend it. According to Nabokov, whose father had once served as a high ranking official in the Provisional Government, the Bolsheviks had put an end not just to the reactionary aristocracy but also to a very vibrant and viable liberal political tradition that had included parliamentary democracy, a respect for dissenting opinions and human rights, and an independent judiciary.

Wilson agreed with Nabokov that Stalin was a tyrant, but did not agree with the proposition that Lenin’s original project was debased and despotic. Moreover, Wilson thought that Nabokov’s biased refusal to acknowledge the positive aspects of the revolutionary tradition in Europe led him to underrate the importance aspect of the social dimension of literature. I think perhaps that Wilson was on to something though Nabokov’s privileged position in today’s literary canon suggests that Wilson effectively lost both the historical and the literary debate with his Russian interlocutor.

One sympathizes with Nabokov during the 1940s and 1950s. Americans didn’t always take him seriously, thinking that his claim to represent a middle ground between Bolshevism and White Reaction was untenable if not insincere. It reminds one of how bisexuality is treated today. People don’t tend to believe that one can adopt a middle ground between gay and straight. Surely the bisexual is merely covering his tracts, pretending to be something more reasonable than gay? Why, people sometimes ask, doesn’t the bisexual just get it over with and say that he isn’t attracted to women at all? Nabokov repeatedly faced intolerance and disbelief over his claim to be neither tsarist nor Marxist. Why hide things? It was obvious that he hated the Bolsheviks. What could this mean if not a love for the Ancien Regime? At any rate, while we’re on the subject of sexuality, it’s interesting to note that it was Wilson who turned Nabokov on to a fascinating “true confession” of an irredeemable pederast that surely formed the genesis of perhaps his finest English novel, Lolita.

Siberian Utopia

When I tell people I have started a blog on modern Russian history, they inevitably ask: “Are you Russian? “ When I say no, they ask: “Well, have you been to Russia?” The answer to both questions is no. I have no natural or biological connection to Russia or any of the countries that made up the Soviet Union. I don’t even speak a word of the language. It’s an arbitrary fixation which, to my mind, is the best kind of obsession. In fact, I am not always sure I actually desire to go to Russia. How could the actual location live up to the “Coast of Utopia,” to borrow a phrase from Tom Stoppard? And of course I’d be better off not going if the cost of a ticket alone is $2000 or so. When it comes to travel, Mexico fits my budget.



This is how I used to think before Russia came to me. That’s right, this author filled out a simple three-page form a couple of months ago (and did so last year as well) and I’ve just now been informed that I will likely be heading to Russia in May 2011. I’m stunned. More shockingly, a Russian visitor may be staying with my family as early as October 2010. This is not a drill: if all goes well, I may be schlepping a Russian faculty member or administrator around Chicago in the fairly near future.




And how strange to find myself on the way to Russia only a few months after electing to create a blog to track my deepening interest in Russian history? But odder than the fact that I may be headed for Russia (the program still has to find a match in this specific country before I can be more definite), is that I’m not headed to Moscow or St. Petersburg but rather to the heart of Russia and indeed the entire Eurasian landmass apparently, Yekaterinburg.

In the next several days I hope to post something about Yekaterinburg. When I applied, I knew nothing other than the fact that Yekaterinburg was in Siberia and that the czar and his family had been murdered there during the Revolution. It’s not a pleasant association. Since then, I’ve just briefly Googled the place, and it seems that Yekaterinburg is a large city, the third largest in Russia in fact. It’s odd to think that I selected this Siberian city over similar opportunities in Switzerland, Holland, Finland, and England, where the population at large will be much more likely to speak English. After all, who willingly puts himself on a place for 24 hours? And what is there to visit in Yekaterinburg outside of the city itself?



But when else would I ever in my life have the opportunity to visit the heart of Russia? I’m struck dumb with gratitude to my college for sponsoring the journey and looking forward to tracking everything in this blog. But never fear dear reader, if it turns out that they can’t find a match in Russia, I’ll seek out Russian history in one of the other sponsoring countries. In Switzerland, I’ll look for the homes and hotels of Lenin, Solzhenitsyn, Nabokov, and other Russian exiles. I read Conrad’s Under Western Eyes. If in Finland, I’ll journey across the gulf to visit St. Petersburg itself. In London, I’ll spend time in the London Museum, exactly where Marx used to sit, or seek out the place where the Russian social-democrats made mischief. In Holland, I’ll have to settle for looking back a couple of centuries to Peter the Great’s famous visit to learn about the shipbuilding trade.

Same Time Next Year

I’ve never understood poetry, but now that I’m almost forty I prefer poetry to prose. I don’t have enough time left on this earth to waste my time on prose. Artistic statements should be fit neatly into a haiku or limerick. With my new found appreciation of poetry, I naturally found my way right into the epicenter of Russian soul, Joseph Brodsky.



My only widely circulated aphorism is this one: It’s better to write poetry than to read it. But if a second of my aphorisms gains currency some day, let it be this: If you have to read poetry, let it be Russian poetry. And if somehow another one of my aphorisms gets popular as a result of some freak YouTube video, let it be this: If you have to read Russian poetry, let it be Joseph Brodsky’s poetry.

Why do I say that? Because he wrote in Russian and English, like Nabokov, and became a national American institution, like foreign policy czar, Brzezinski. Because he was prosecuted in Russia, and exiled internally, for being a “social parasite.” Because he somehow taught himself English and became America’s poet laureate. Because he won the Nobel prize for literature. Moreover, his poetry is both profound and straightforward, a rare combination.



Brodsky’s Nativity Poems are a case in point. They’re artful, and they are (wait for it) Christian, notwithstanding the author’s claims to be a polytheist. Brodsky wrote a poem each Christmas. And something about the fact that he wrote them at the same time each year helps to create the impression of a deep meditation on the nature of time. Moreover, by focusing on the nativity scene (Christmas and Nativity are the same word in Russian), Brodsky seems to be making a deliberate effort to make contact with sacred time, that is, time unrelated to the passing of years. Brodsky's special interest is picturing himself at Jesus' birth, at a time when Jesus was more or less like all other human beings.

Brodsky's Nativity poems are filled with the only worthwhile subjects in poetry: existential dread, religiosity, the passage of time, and death. And of course Brodsky isn’t shy of politics. These poems touch upon Marxism, capitalism, and Soviet politics. Brodsky gives you lines such as these: “KGB, stop jerking off!” “Take out your saints. Take out the GenSec’s portrait!” And: “…in that nation where among the forests of hands the tyrant of the State is voted in, its only candidate, and spit goes ice-cold on the tongue.”

I like Brodsky’s poems in their original Russian, although I don’t understand a word of Russian and can’t decipher a single Cyrillic letter. I like the mystery. One sees the date—that translates into English—and nothing else.

Below are some favorite lines from mostly Brodsky's non-Nativity poems:

“All talk is a barren trade. A writing on the wind’s wall.”

“People are not my thing. I hate the look of them. Grafted to life’s great tree, each face is firmly stuck and cannot be torn free."

“Scythe, skull, and skeleton—an absurd pack of lies. Rather, ‘Death, when it comes, will have your own two eyes.’

“My life has dragged on. In the recitative of a blizzard a keen ear picks up the tune of the Ice Age. Every ‘Down in the Valley’ is, for sure, a chilled boogie-woogie. A bitter, brittle cold represents, as it were, a message to the body of its final temperature.“

“if you dream of a door, you tend to slam it.”

“My life has dragged on. The signs are plenty. They’d make yet another life, just as dragging.”

“..stiffened, sternly preventing the wandering of the future into the past.”

“In space, the deepest inhaling hardly ensures an exhaling, nor does the departure a return.”

“Labor is no commodity. To say it is insults the workers. It’s the goal and form of being. Money’s, well, it’s base. It’s more than just a meal, but let’s try making sense of this. Things are more than their worth in cash.:

Butterflies, Memories, and Poetry

Nabokov’s interest in butterflies is legendary. It seems unlikely that his interest is coincidental to his literary genius. What does it say about an author when he takes a detour in a novel to describe butterfly collecting using the following words: antennae, insect, thorax, appendages, corneal, wings, specimens, breeding, caterpillars, genitals, larvae, species, colors, chrysalis, tympanum, sounds, smells, mimetic disguises, evolution, predators, prey, abdomen, pierids, hibernates, hatched, et cetera and so on? Are the butterflies, trapped in their cases—for more than a century in the case of Linnaeus’ specimens—a metaphor for memory itself? Do they represent beauty? Is the open-ended, all encompassing, endless search for butterflies indicative of the purposefulness of life or its random meaninglessness? Is the specificity of Lepidoptera a mirror to the specificity of life as a whole, where god is in the details? This seems in general to be the point of almost all of Nabokov’s books, particularly The Gift.



In The Gift the protagonist’s father was a Lepidopterist in life, but as a dead man, he was also a series of memories. To know his father, was to remember him. To remember him, was an effort akin to the difficult search for new species of butterflies. Sometimes one needed to go to remote, unmapped terrain to have any success.



Blending these two themes together, Nabokov’s narrator recalls the time his father thought he had discovered a rare species of butterfly in St. Petersburg, only to find out that he had been beaten to the punch on the discovery by a matter of weeks. His father had cried, probably much like the narrator (or Nabokov the author) cried when summoning up this very specific, allusive memory.



If you’re not a butterfly collector, it’s hard to see why anyone would devote his life to the study of these strange insects. And if you’re not an exile from Russia—or at least somebody who has lost a parent (Nabokov’s died at the hands of a political assassin)—you probably can’t get the full sense of why people chase memories, sometimes to the ends of the earth. The Gift shows one more strange kind of collecting--that of Nabokov as a collector or preserver of Russia’s short but distinguished literary tradition. Nabokov’s attempt to summon up the spirit of Pushkin seems redolent of his fictional father’s search for butterflies, and or protagonist’s quest for memories.

Neil the Generous

My brother donated his copy of Nabokov’s novel Defiance to my growing Russian library on one condition: that he get a proper “shout out” on this blog. So this writer would like to formally acknowledge the ongoing generosity of his benevolent brother, the renowned patron of the arts, Neil.

And, while I am at it, I hope that by thanking others who have contributed to my Russian fetish I will in no way dilute the role my brother has played in laying the foundations for one of Woodlawn’s finest private collections of Russian history and literature. Taking that risk, I want to thank my Milwaukee friend for scouring the Russian shelves at the central Milwaukee library for their wonderful discarded monographs that sell, amazingly, for $1 dollar. I also thank my stepmother for her donation of other Nabokov books, a book about the Russian memory of Stalin’s crimes, and a few novels by other novelists of the Russian Diaspora. And I thank my parents-in-law and boss who gave me gift cards to bookstores. Without them, there would be no posts about bloody Civil War warlords or post-apocalyptic, nuclear landscapes.

My co-author too, deserves thanks, not only for indulging my obsession with Russian history, and writing many posts in the midst of a busy life, but for donating his entire Russian library, Chekhov stories and all, to my growing collection. The Sheila Fitzpatrick history was particularly appreciated, since it brought back memories of my favorite city, Urbana, the Paris of the area of central Illinois that is immediately West of Darien.

My wife also deserves praise, both for not mocking me too ruthlessly for the subject of this blog, and for giving me a grand and unsolicited biography of Peter the Great. My Aunt-in-Law does too, for English as well as Russian spelling corrections.

As the list goes on, I am grateful to a friend in Washington who took me to a Russian Orthodox Church bizarre which, despite the stereotype, had a rich collection of under-priced texts. Additionally, one colleague at work donated a Serbian novel; another gave me some old Soviet pamphlets; a third gave me a copy of House of the Dead and loaned me his articles on Siberian travel.

I am also grateful for a recent shipment from a Canadian friend who had collected some Soviet propaganda while on a high school trip back in 1988. Those posts are coming soon. And I should probably add a word of thanks to the Hyde Park bookseller who dramatically slashed the price of Keeper of Antiquities after I told him that I visited the book for three years, and gave me Gorky’s short book on his trip to New York for free in the knowledge that it would go to a good home. He also promised me a deal if I ever raised the capital to buy his set of E.H. Carr histories. Thanks also to my dad for keeping my grandfather’s books and newspapers on socialism for many decades. And thanks to anybody I have forgotten. I'll remember you on the red carpet, I promise. Last but not least, I thank you, gentle reader, for reading on, ignoring your complete lack of interest in the topic.

P.S. Neil, you need only to send me your photo to be more publicly recognized in this post for your outstanding works. Donate another book and there might be a naming opportunity on this site, as in the Officiall Mr. Neil X Soviet History and Literature Blog.

The Wandering Spector of the Revolution

When I was 21 I moved from Washington D.C. to Los Angeles, California. Upon arrival, I entered a totally alien world. Los Angeles felt like a foreign country, more foreign than many of the real foreign countries I had previously visited. In some ways it felt like another planet. Greater Los Angeles had exotic plant life like palm trees, exotic homes (all homes occupied a single level, no matter how grand), and exotic weather (winter—a staple of life up until that moment--somehow disappeared altogether and I ended up going hiking on Christmas Eve). In California one ran into magnificent beaches, washed up movie stars delivering Chinese food, mountains, and deserts. Still ostensibly in America, I was now a few hours from surreal locales like Tijuana, Barstow, Santa Monica, and Las Vegas.

I lived first in Santa Monica and then in Westwood, but I worked in Hollywood, which seemed to be the epicenter of the bizarre universe I had unwittingly entered. I was here on a fluke—my girlfriend had moved and I had followed her on a whim—and that made everything more interesting, more jarring. Each day I drove to work on Sunset Avenue, scene of so many movies and television shows that had, up until now, seemed to be located in a fantasy landscape. I started my drive in Beverly Hills—the show was in full swing at the time and defined the place for me—and drove past enormous landscapes on a winding road, past the Beverly Hills Hotel, past the enormous billboards featured on Entourage, and into Hollywood. My job was located at Sunset and LaBrea, at a post-production studio, something I had never heard of until I landed the interview through a friend of a friend. The place was directly across from the Seventh Veil, a strip joint, and crack addicts regularly strolled the alley behind it.

I left Los Angeles abruptly, dramatically--moving back across the length of the country to Washington, D.C. My departure from alien Los Angeles was so abrupt that, for many years (and sometimes even now), I vividly imagined that my old life in L.A. was continuing, even as one part of me set up shop again thousands of miles away on the East Coast. Years later, I sometimes still wonder how my Los Angeles persona is getting on. I figure he has gotten a few promotions, and is no longer working for $9 dollars an hour. I am in sales now, no doubt, living in a cheaper suburb, enjoying the weather, etc. As I write this, I figure Californian Derek is probably on Facebook, and I should certainly attempt to “friend” him. He’s out there somewhere—unless he too has moved by now. Or perhaps he has already died. And come to think of it, doesn't death work according to the same principle of doubleness: what are ghosts if not evidence of rupture and the multiplicity of plot lines that emanate from the same point of origin?

I think all history is like that. I think ruptures (especially traumatic ones) don’t really end lives, they just multiply them. In Russia, these ruptures were commonplace, and severe. The Revolution of 1917 was the ultimate break in continuity. Thus it is that many Russians continued to believe for decades that the Old Russia was still alive and well, living its life quietly and uneventfully. If the tsar and his family were brutally murdered in a basement, many believed for a very long time that at least one or two of the children had managed to escape and had escaped abroad, waiting to return to Russia to reestablish the old way of life. It’s seems quite probably that there is a Romanov somewhere still hoping to return to the thrown—and who can say with certainty that he won’t?

The Russian Diaspora (perhaps all exile communities work this way) lived a rich double life, setting up show in alien worlds—Prague, Berlin, Paris, New York—even as they enjoyed making contact with ongoing pre-revolutionary life of their alternative personas. Bunin and Nabokov expressed this feeling of temporal bifurcation in two totally different literary styles, but the mood was the same: the Old Life still existed. When Nabokov’s protagonist enters a Russian food shop, it’s a “kind of wax museum of the old country’s cuisine.” Most poignantly, Nabokov—like all those who allow themselves to acknowledge the existence of double (or a multiplicity of) lives, imagines a homecoming to Russia, where his childhood goes on, unencumbered by political reality, economic transformation, violence, or indeed his present life as an exile. He imagines walking around his family’s old estate, noticing the changes that have occurred to the place over time. The idea of re-capturing the past (however frustrating or illusive) is, he says, the thing that makes “the business of exile worth cultivating.”

It’s childhood, above all, that continues to live for Nabokov. The Revolution came during his childhood with unexpected fury and violence, and thus that childhood can’t evolve or disappear. It lives on. Nabokov sometimes says that he recognizes that it’s futile to recapture that which has disappeared, but his whole work testifies to the contrary. His childhood is more vivid in his books than it must have been when it occurred. As Nabokov writes in the Gift: “Thus a former impression keeps living within harmony’s ice.”

Perfectly Perfect

The most interesting debate about Lolita is between the aetheticists who think the book has nothing to do with sex and molestation, but with poetry and butterflies, and those who think there is a connection with the real world in his book, however much Nabokov might want to deny it. Nabokov always insisted great novels have no relation to the social milieu that produce them, that they are a pure concoction of the writer's imagination. In Lolita, according to this view, the idea is to mock the reader who is so swept up in moralism and titillation that he fails to see the pathos of Mrs. Haze, the vulnerability of Lolita, and the humanity of the dozens of others characters, including Humbert himself, despite his moral monstrosity. The main vehicle for this critique of the reader is the elaborate series of Quilty-clues spread throughout the book; those who fail to pick up on the identity of Humbert's tormentor are chided as bad readers by Humbert himself late in the book. So the novel is a great fairy tale; whatever horrors are inflicted on Lolita are merely effects, like the plan to bake the children alive in Hansel and Gretel.

To me this reading was always reinforced by my distaste for the rash of novels in the 80s and 90s with a molestation theme. Because it only happens to a minority, it didn't seem to justify the attention. Of course, many novels include some sort of violent death, something most of us will not experience. But we will all die, and so a killing is valuable as a metaphor and as a way to give shape (that is, endings) to a narrative. Since molestation is located in the past, it could never serve to represent human experience with the same universality as a killing. But it occurs to me now that we are all damaged in childhood in one way or another, so the molestation theme might serve as a dramatization of that fact, in the same way literary murders force us to grapple with the inevitability of endings.

This opens me to seeing the molestation theme in Lolita as real, not a ruse. When the Jeremy Irons version of the movie came out, James Wood made this point in the New York Review of Books. But Nabokov himself emphasizes in his Lectures on Literature that the writer is three things at once: storyteller, moralist, and enchanter. The enchanter is by far the most important, but he doesn't deny the other two functions. In this sense the novel does say something about the nature of predatory sexual behavior, as well as the absence of a sufficiently attentive aesthetic sense. It would be interesting to consider how Nabokov, given his distaste for Freud, would have explained the sexual elements of the Russian Revolution, in the way that Klaus Theweleit does for fascism in Male Fantasies.

Motel Love

What light does Nabokov’s Lolita shed on the importance of the Russian Revolution on modern American life? I’d say plenty. I see the vaguely European hero of that book as a Russian, much like the author, who is simultaneously startled by, and at home in, the American landscape. And what does Nabokov see in America? What does an exile from the Soviet experiment encounter here? I’d say he encounters a land of innocence, represented by the young woman his protagonist seduces, as well as her gullible mother.

America is a land of freedom too, where even a pedophile has access to highway anonymity and an endless string of cheap motels. To flip Talleyrand’s maxim on its head, Nabokov knew that nobody who had not lived through the Russian Revolution knew how wretched and vile life could be. Nabokov’s protagonist takes that vileness right into the heat of America, which is awaiting exploitation, betrayal, immorality, and disappointment.

If the reader feels that my grasp of this novel is weak, she is right: I’ve not read the book in many years. I can only say that this blog is centered on the small fragment of a novel or work of history that remain with you after you’ve put a book down for a month, year, or indeed decade. Sadly, it ain’t much…

Reflections on Nabokov #51

For a long time I thought my two favorite European writers were Nabokov and Proust. They shared a love of fantasy that was appealing to someone who wanted to be immunized from conflict. Nabokov thought the artist was a deceiver who wove mysterious illusions that imprisoned the reader in a sticky web of enjoyment. Proust suggested that by aestheticizing memory the past could be remade into something more palatable or heroic. For years when someone asked who my favorite writers were (usually myself, since no one really ever wanted to know) this is the litany I recited, reassuring myself that we all control our own happiness by the quality of the fantasy life we lead.

Now that the years that have passed since since I've read anything by either person are in the double-digits I've stopped asking myself to defend my artistic ideals, and I had almost forgotten this is what I sort-of believe. Somehow I've now turned into someone who is more interested in revealing the ugly brute reality of life and death to those who appear suspiciously over-happy. I only realized this recently after reading a bunch of Philip Larkin poems. In particular, "A Study of Reading Habits", which ends with:

Don't read much now: the dude
Who lets the girl down before
The hero arrives, the chap
Who's yellow and keeps the store,
Seem far too familiar. Get stewed:
Books are a load of crap.

Not sure what this has to do with Nabakov or Russia, other than the fact that I picked up the Lectures on Literature the other day. But maybe this pose of Larkin's, which appears so quintessentially Anglo, is part of the appeal of Russian history, the central message of which is: things really are, and have been, and will be, much worse than the peddlars of enchantment want you to think.

Poshlost

There are of course better and worse examples of the kind of Russian intellectual fluff to which I’ve referred in the previous post. I think Imagining Nabokov: Russia between Art and Politics is one of the better sorts of intellectual fluff pieces. Notwithstanding the author’s heavy-handed biographical presence in the book, she does have a real thesis: that Nabokov’s books are especially relevant to contemporary, crisis-laden, post-Soviet Russia. As the author notes, Nabokov, once banned from publication in Russia, is now enjoying a major resurgence in popularity among Russia’s younger reading audiences.

The author believes that this popularity stems from Nabokov’s radical break from Russian literary tradition. For Nabokov was a post-modern author rather than a modern one, and, more importantly, Nabokov believed in the priority of the personal over the collective, as well as the possibility of achieving happiness, a very un-traditional Russian literary theme. (Incidentally, the book recalls Lesley Chamberlain’s intellectual history of the Russian Diaspora, which includes Nabokov and his father. Here, Chamberlain points out that many exiled Russian intellectuals were religious thinkers who were crafting a highly individualistic response to modernity called personalism.)

In one section of Imagining Nabokov, the author discusses the traditional Russian concept of the banal, or poshlost, which was odious to most major Russian authors. Better to suffer or do evil than to wallow in the un-dramatic or ordinary. She says Nabokov recognized the pitfalls of such contempt for poshlost. Lolita’s tragedy is not that she lived an ordinary life before she met Humbert. Her tragedy is that Humbert robbed her of this bland but worthwhile life. The interesting thing about this book is that its blend of literary criticism and diary resulted from the rich imagination of Nikita Khrushchev’s granddaughter, Nina Khruschcheva.

The granddaughter of a man accused of mass murder in the Ukraine has surely thought deeply about the superiority of ordinary life when weighed against the heroic but bloody acts of state socialism. If only Ukrainian peasants had been left to enjoy their boring lives rather than starved to death or transported in the pursuit of a Bolshevik Utopia. Incidentally, Boym’s Common Places , which approaches Khruschcheva’s theme about the role of banality in Russian culture from another angle, is also worth reading.

Lenin in Zurich

Notwithstanding the fact that Solzhenitsyn’s trilogy on World War I is basically unreadable, Lenin in Zurich (material related to Lenin compiled into its own stand-alone novel) is worthwhile. It gets at the heart of the author’s real concern with the World War I era: Bolshevism and its embodiment, Lenin. Self-evidently, Lenin in Zurich focuses on an interesting moment in Lenin’s life, his time in exile waiting patiently for revolution to break out in the motherland.

The Swiss backdrop is fascinating and the author isn’t afraid to dwell on the paradox of a radical revolutionary dwelling in comfortable, scenic, bourgeois Switzerland. The irony that Solzhenitsyn was dropped off in Switzerland after being exiled from the Soviet Union must have played a part in his fascination with this period in Lenin’s life.

What kind of man is Solzhenitsyn’s Lenin? He’s intelligent and argumentative and single-minded. He’s hard-working and scholarly too. He’s also vindictive and petty, incapable of compromising with socialist allies as well as bourgeois enemies. Lenin had a need to be in charge, completely in charge. In Solzhenitsyn’s opinion, Lenin’s intractable nature dictated everything, including his theory of a tightly controlled, professional revolutionary elite. The decision to board the train to Russian receives special emphasis, and serves as the book's denouement. To Solzhenitsyn, the deal reveals Lenin's cynicism and, to a lesser extent, special concern for his personal safety. One could come up with a different interpretation of this episode, and indeed of Lenin in general, but Solzhenitsyn's attempt to portray this seminal figure in Russian history is worthwhile and not entirely biased by the author's prejudices against the system Lenin helped to create.

It’s hard to accept stable Switzerland as site of revolution. Yet Conrad’s Under Western Skies shows that revolutionary activity thrived in free places. E.H. Carr’s Bukharin reminds of his own time in the country. But the counter-revolution also resided there, and we shouldn’t forget that Nabokov lived there too in his final years.