Centenary of a Loner
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.
