Imagining Nabokov by Khrushcheva Nina L

Author:Khrushcheva, Nina L. [Khrushcheva, Nina L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300148244
Publisher: YaleUP
Published: 2007-09-15T05:00:00+00:00

He . . . was bothered by the undismissable fact that he could not find what system of inclusion and circumscription governed the horizontal recurrence of the pattern; that such a recurrence existed was proved by his being able to pick out here and there . . . the reappearance of this or that element of the series. . . . It stood to reason that if the evil designer—the destroyer of minds, the friend of fever—had concealed the key of the pattern with such monstrous care, that key must be as precious as life itself and, when found, would regain for Timofey Pnin his everyday health, his everyday world; and this lucid—alas, too lucid—thought forced him to persevere in the struggle. (ibid.)

Reconstructing a missing pattern soothes a loss. It restores the meaning of one’s former life; it renews hope that there will be new prospects for new patterns: an untarnished, better world can be assembled from once broken, scattered pieces. This recreation of a pattern is indeed “the true purpose of autobiography” (SM, 16).

“The man is the book,” writes Sebastian Knight in his other book The Doubtful Asphodel, “unquestionably his masterpiece” (RLSK, 172–73). Books are marks we leave in a world that goes on without us. They are manifestations of our lives. Through them we overcome death. They give us an illusion of immortality; they allow us to achieve parity with the gods; they win back the past and conquer the future. Isn’t this really the reason why many of Nabokov’s characters—Humbert in Lolita, Felix in Despair, Sebastian Knight in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Kinbote in Pale Fire, and others—are writers themselves? They are trying to immortalize their life before, having run its course, it disappears into oblivion.

But these are his characters, the lesser writers under Nabokov’s masterful supervision, while he himself, the highest authorial deity, could not trust in simple marks and manifestations—in merely creating works of art, as did amiable Pushkin, for example, or his frivolous hero Mozart12—they threw around their divine masterpieces like some scanty pocket change. In an unpredictable universe full of revolutions, dangers, and destruction even books didn’t promise an absolute guarantee for eternity, order, and justice. In the post-1917-Revolution world, émigré artists turned out to be too fragile, too poetic, too unearthly, too wasteful in their imagery and their talent. After all, in a non-Russian, modern, “disenchanted,” dispassionate, wide world, God only helps those who help themselves. Meanwhile Russian-speaking Ivan Bunin and Vladislav Khodasevich will always remain émigré poets, torn from their native Russian literature, but unable to enter the broader world canons.

Trusting neither God, nor past, nor future (at times perhaps doubting his own literary gift), Nabokov takes on even the vicissitudes of capricious fate, trying to prevent them from affecting his readers’ reaction. As invulnerable as he might have seemed, as a human being (despite everything he was still a human being) he couldn’t help but doubt (at least once in a while) the success of his quest to win over time, to overcome the borders of geography, of mortality.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.