Nabokov, History and the Texture of Time by Norman Will;

Author:Norman, Will;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group

5 Freudian Time

Lolita, Psychoanalysis and the Holocaust

I

About two-thirds of the way through Nabokov’s 1957 novel, Pnin , the eponymous character has a chance conversation with another Russian émi- gré living in the United States, in which he is reminded of the death of a girl he had loved in his youth. Pnin and Mira Belochkin had courted in pre- Revolutionary St. Petersburg before the Civil War of 1918–22 separated them. “History broke their engagement,” explains the narrator who, we have learned by this point, takes a malicious pleasure in relating Pnin’s mis- fortunes. 1 Pnin is on holiday with a group of colleagues, friends and fellow émigrés, but rather than join them for tea, he stumbles off into the woods in search of solitude. The memories of Mira, which he has spent years try- ing to banish, are inexorably present, and what follows is the most explicit passage Nabokov ever wrote in his fiction about the Holocaust:

One had to forget—because one could not live with the thought that this graceful, fragile, tender young woman with those eyes, that smile, those gardens and snows in the background, had been brought in a cattle car to an extermination camp and killed by an injection of phenol into the heart, into the gentle heart one had heard beating under one’s lips in the dusk of the past. And since the exact form of her death had not been recorded, Mira kept dying a great number of deaths in one’s mind, and undergoing a great number of resurrections, only to die again and again, led away by a trained nurse, inoculated with filth, tetanus bacilli, broken glass, gassed in a sham shower-bath with prussic acid, burned alive in a pit on a gasoline-soaked pile of beechwood (112–13).

It is crucial that we bear the narrator in mind as we read these disturbing sentences, for it is easy to slip into the idea that these are Pnin’s words. They describe, within the world of the novel, his thoughts. The words however, the lyrical heart beating in the dusk of the past, the alliteration of “sham shower,” the aesthetics of this passage, are someone else’s, a Professor of Russian literature at Waindell College. In fact, Pnin writes in a letter earlier in the novel “Why not leave their private sorrows to people? Is sorrow not, one asks, the only thing in the world people really possess?” (43). We are, then, in a position to read this articulation of Pnin’s thoughts as a direct violation of his deepest convictions. Moreover, just before this passage the narrator tells us that “if one were quite sincere with oneself, no conscience, and hence no consciousness, could be expected to subsist in a world where such things as Mira’s death were possible” (112). What follows—the enu- meration of the multiple possibilities of Mira’s death—is, in a sense, the attempt to abolish Pnin’s own conscience, his own consciousness.

How then do we respond to this passage? Before we congratulate our- selves on our pity

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