By Yuri ANDRUKHOVYCH, The Day
Like all gamesters and mystifiers, Vladimir Nabokov is pliant and protean.
The chain of his lifelong transformations reminds one of his largest and
perhaps not the worst of his novels. The most spectacular transformation
was when crossing the Atlantic and his own equator - the 41-year-old Nabokov
decided to become a US author. Not a Russian-American, but a US one. And
the sad fact remains that he did. "So what is a fatherland after all?"
I was asked by a woman sharing train compartment with me sometime in 1990.
"Nabokov was a citizen of the world and lived in hotels. A Fatherland is
just a nuisance for a good writer."
Nabokov's native land (and all who are more or less familiar with his
talent agree) is primarily the height of summer. It is park alleys, arbors,
obsession with things English, tennis, and the cult of healthy hygiene.
It is also childhood, heaven on earth, his own golden era against the backdrop
of Russia's silver age. A perfectly typical ambitious, well fed and, clothed
son of a perfectly standard landlord, wearing Bermuda shorts and Panama
hat, surrounded with love and care, books, butterflies, correct non-Russian
education, regularly receiving the latest models of bicycles, workshop
tools ordered and supplied from European cities like Koblenz, Ems, or Utrecht.
One can believe that this was really so, because all this is described
by the author in such vivid detail; in fact, the descriptions are so carefully,
brilliantly, and singularly rendered, with such physiological precision
that I do not believe him. It suffices to take a closer look at his honest
childish-youthful face to become convinced of one's doubts.
His other visage is poetic. Almost everybody agrees that as a poet he
is rather uninteresting, although well trained, Parnassian, at times relatively
sentimental - sorry, I mean sensitive, except for his openly demonstrative
use of refined techniques. Poetry hates manipulation, strategy, or tactics;
poetry must be naturalness incarnate, or so they say. Well, I don't know
what this naturalness is all about. Perhaps the naturalness of poetry lies
in its artificiality? Nabokov's most successful mystification is probably
the fact that his poetry can prove much stronger than his prose. In 1970,
he published the collection Poems and Problems. As usual, it was
another showcase of verse and chess problems. Fishing out poems and lining
up chess pieces, tracking, catching, and pinning down butterflies, thinking
up characters and then lending them literary verisimilitude. To him, all
this was of the same family and species. An attitude found in only a truly
carried away poet, a provocateur of long-established hierarchies.
And thus his next visage is provocative. And the entomological habit
of pinning things comes in very handy. Nabokov really pins one down with
his murderously accurate characterization, lapidary, acrimonious, and stylistically
faultless. His collection of victims reminds one rather of a pantheon of
culture with luxuriously sounding exotic names and picturesque diversified
portrayals. There they are dying slowly on their pins embedded in eternity:
Dostoyevsky, Camus, Joyce, Freud, Thomas Mann, also an oblique character
named Solzhenitsyn and another called Pasternak... Just look at what is
left of Chernyshevsky! Spots of ink on the elbows, dirty fingernails, dandruff
on the shoulders. The poor unlucky devils that attracted his cold ruthless
attention. And the poor devil of the author with his lethal precision,
delivering viciously accurate blows. A more than vivid testimony to Nabokov's
deeply hidden inferiority and desperate loneliness. Always under suspicion,
criticized by one and all, loved by none, with a sharp venomous tongue,
a homeless American, hotel cosmopolitan, everyman in search of his true
homeland, a loser in his every triumph.
Yes, a loser. Like every other great literary phenomenon, the Nabokov
project turns out a failure after all has been said and done. His mystifications
are too obvious, his playacting is piercingly true to life, his aristocratic
condescension and indifference are actually a plebeian's passion for existentialism,
his mind-boggling literary experimentation betrays a hack's blunders. Only
his joy is genuine. The joy of writing and reading, of being an author.
And it is our joy as well: a capricious desire to pick a book from a shelf,
spotting a familiar title, and reread it, maybe starting in the middle,
at the peak of a hot summer day, amidst paradise on earth, finding oneself
in the middle of a novel and real life.
True gamesters cannot be professionals. And vice versa.







