VLADIMIR NABOKOV [1899-1977]

The Wit and Whimsical Stylist

D. ANJANEYULU

The central fact about Vladimir Nabokov’s life and work as a writer is that he was an emigre. That was the main source of his strength as well as of his weakness. It provided the special flavour of his personality.

Nabokov described himself as “an American writer, born in Russia and educated in England.” He combined in himself the contemporaneity of the West American with the nostalgia of a White Russian and the urbanity of an English aristocrat. A real European he was, and quite an unsentimental one, too.

No sacred cows for Nabokov. He could make fun of anything in the world that appeals to his sense of the ludicrous. Parody and Pathos have found in his scheme of things! as an artist, a rare mixture that could be delectable to the cultivated but may often prove caviar to the general.

Asked for his preferences in the matter of language, he went on record with the reply, at once wise and witty:

“My head says English, my heart Russian, my ear French.”

As it happened, Nabokov’s reputation was established as a writer in English, mainly as a novelist, though he was a poet, playwright, translator and critic as well. He was the author of over 25 titles, in fiction and non-fiction, but it was only after the publication of Lolita in 1955, that he could claim, like Byron, to have woken up one fine morning and found himself famous, or rather notorious. Lolita certainly proved one of the most controversial books of this century, like Lady Chatterly’s Lover and Ulysses.

It was a special favourite of the author too, as much because it was the most difficult to write, as because it proved the most successful. The author was a queer combination of vanity and wit, naivity and sophistication, as could be seen from his claim: “I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author and speak like a child.”

Not overly autobiographical in his fictional writing, Nabokov cannot, however, be fully understood in all his nuances and undertones without a glance at his rich and variegated background.

Vladimir Nabokov, born in 1899, was the product of an aristocratic English-speaking household in Russia. His father, who bore the same name, was a lawyer by profession, a liberal statesman, member of the first Duma (Russian Parliament), champion of justice and constitutional monarchy in a difficult empire and thus fell out of favour with the Tsar. He went to exile in 1919 and three years later was assassinated in Berlin by a Fascist gang, while trying to shield his friend, Professor Milukov. The son seems to have fully inherited the father’s liberalism, remembering to spell it in the lower case, and divesting it of its political commitment.

Familiar in his childhood with all the major English classics from Shakespeare to Wilde, Conrad to Kipling and Conan Doyle to Chesterton, Vladimir was not unprepared for his education at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he specialised in the modern European languages, including Russian, in which he wrote a lot of verse. His stay in Berlin was made difficult but that did not prevent him from falling in love or getting married. It was here that he wrote his first novel, Mary (Mas’henka) in Russian in 1924. This as well as the six others that followed, had a Berlin background, in part or in full. He brushed up his German by translating Heine and reading Goethe and Kafka.

The rise of Nazis to power in the early ’Thirties posed a threat to Nabokov as it did to all liberal intellectuals, writers and artists, staying in Germany. It was, therefore, not unexpected that he was forced in 1937 to leave Berlin with his family and settle in Paris. Here he eked out his livelihood by giving lectures on Russian literature. It proved a short stay for in 1940, when Paris fell to Hitler’s hordes, he migrated to the U. S.

It was in America, where he lived from 1940 to 1960, that he wrote almost all his major English fiction. But, before being able to do so, Nabokov had to work for seven or eight years in the ‘Forties as a Research Fellow in Entomology at the Museum of comparative Zoology at Harvard. This enabled him to indulge his passion for butterflies, which was to last a lifetime. His contribution to lepidoptera (study of butterflies and moths) is only second in significance to his contribution to literature. His name is perpetuated in the butterfly species, “Nabokovi” and the genus “Nabokovia”, now preserved in the museums of North and South America.

At the same time he was teaching Russian literature at Wellesley.A few years later, after attaining some celebrity as a creative writer, he delivered lectures on comparative literature at Cornell University. His full-length literary work in English, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, was brought out in 1941. His stories, memoirs and other miscellaneous works were published in the New Yorker, between 1945 and 1954. Lolita was published in 1955, followed by The Gift in 1952, Prin in 1957 and Nabokov’s Dozen (Stories) in 1958.

After two decades in the U. S., Nabokov became settled as an American, but he chose in 1960 to return to Europe, where he made his residence at Montreaux. One does not know whether he did this to revive his nostalgia this time for America as well as to Russia or to enjoy the idyllic tranquillity of a lakeside hotel. But we know that he turned out a lot of work including Pale Fire (1962), a major novel, Ada: A family Chronicle (1969) and his monumental, four-volume work on Alexander Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin (1964).

In considering the corpus of Nabokov’s published work, fictional and other, it is necessary to remember his attitude to life and his attitude to language. There is something distinctive about his mode of communicating his experience to the reader. A clue to this could be found in his cryptic comment on Satire and Parody. “Satire is a lesson,” he said, “Parody is a game.” And his whole fictional work could be viewed as an extended parody, a game in which he revels, at the expense of the characters, at the expense of the reader, or at his own expense!

In many of the novels, the author seems to indulge himself in the composition of riddles, word games, sleights of hand, false bottoms, that drop out from under the reader like the trap-door in the gallows. Deceiving the reader’s expectations seems to be his way of winning the game.

But the games are not so frivolous, as they might appear to us at first sight. They are closely related to the idea of Illusion and Reality, with their multicoloured interplay and endless complexity. In The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, for instance, there is hardly any real life at all. For it is a book about art, dealing in depth with the subjective appearance of reality and the glaring distinction between art and life. The basic theme of deceptive reality is only reinforced by the word games and deluding moves from the conjurer’s bag of tricks. We know a lot about the literary genius of this character, but precious little about his real life. The mask is there all right staring us in the face, but the man behind it eludes us. The eminent American critic, Edmund Wilson, who considers this as one of Nabokov’s best novels reads it as a tell-tale parable of the author’s Russian and English personalities.

Prin could be seen as a parody of his humble little Russian professor, who dreads Nabokov’s brilliance and insolence. There is something funny about the names he invents, Prin suggesting Sirin which happens to be one of Nabokov’s own pseudonym.

The name “Sebastian” comes with associations of kings and saints trailing behind. We cannot also help being reminded of the loved twins, Viola and Sebastian, in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night.

When we come to Lolita, its author seems to enjoy the fun of the game all the more, as the reader is left guessing and gasping. “Of all my books”, he claimed, “Lolita has left me with the most pleasurable after-glow -- perhaps because it is the purest of all, the most abstract and carefully contrived…..” The more shocked the reader, the more satisfied the author!

Told in prosaic terms, the story is woven round the infatuation of a middle-aged widower for his l2-year old step-daughter. He is called by the not-so-common name of Humbert Humbert (which is playfully varied by the narrator, for comic and tragic effects, as Hamburg, Humburg, Humbertson, Hamburger, etc.). The girl goes by the name of Dolores Haze (rhyming with maze, blaze, laze and so on). Dolores is, in turn, endearingly abbreviated to “Lolly, Lo, Lota or Lolita.”

The opening paragraph lets the reader into the hero’s morbid ecstasy: “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-Lee-ta; the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the plate of trap at three on the teeth. Lo, Lee, Ta.”

The Humbert Humbert (also referred to as H. H.) with the memory of an early encounter with a “nymphet” (teen-age heroine) before his brief and sad marriage, comes to an American small town as a sort of paying guest in the household of the handsome widow, Charlotte Haze. Her 12-year old daughter is the main centre of his interest. The widow takes a liking to him and he to her daughter. Lodger becomes lover and soon husband. His secret wish was for the wife’s death and his prayers are soon granted in a road accident. He is left alone with the young daughter. An idyllic dream for him!

What follows is not, however, the all-too commonplace story of paternal seduction and the perversion of incest. It is really a case of mutual seduction. Only in matters intellectual Lolita is still a child; but otherwise the nymphet is as mature as a full-grown woman with her explosive sensibilities. For sometime the hero has an unbroken spell of these promiscuous thrills. Bill soon the self-willed, wayward slip of a girl begins to grow out of hand and gives him the slip after an affair with a playwright-mechanic, Clare Quilty (to rhyme with “Guilty”) and ends up in a marriage with a poor workman, called Richard F. Schiller. She appeals to her step-father for monetary help, which is readily forthcoming. But leaving her and the poor husband, the hero kills the sedueer Quilty, after tracking him down in a cross-country chase. “I could not kill her, of course, as some have thought, you see”, he confesses, “I loved her. It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight.” Lolita dies in child-birth. But the hero in jail still thinks of her, along with “aurochs and angels, the secret of double pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art.” “And this is the only immortality, you and I may share, my Lolita,” he muses, ending on a note of pathos.

A sad story and a sordid theme it might well seem to the staid reader. But the treatment is obviously more significant than the theme itself. The style has a lush exuberance and a rich variety that speak of a sensitive foreigner just fallen in love with the language. The author is described as a “Dosteovsky crossed with Voltaire,” thereby implying a blend of the comic spirit with a more serious tragic purpose. Well-meaning critics had sought to read into the story of thoughtless passion the idea of “old Europe debauching young America” or vice versa. Others have felt that the exile who had invented Europe in his world of art had now to invent America as well. The panorama of middle class homes and favourite resorts from hilltop hotels, to seaside motels and roadside inns to chocolate bars and tennis courts is more vivid and amusing than that of their counterparts in Europe.

There is also room here for critics seeing something like emotion–conspicuous by its absence in the other novels. The shifting locale enables the author to provide picturesque glimpses of the American scene, to which he must have acclimatised himself in a sophisticated process compounded of delight and disgust, fascination and fear.

The most remarkable thing about the book is the style which has an exotic charm, with a prodigality of puns, double-entendres and rhymes, besides a recurring pattern of alliteration and assonance, curiously reminiscent of the extravagance of the medieval Sanskrit poets. In the vigour and expressiveness of its self-conscious idiom, it provokes comparison with Joseph, from whom Nabokov claims to differ “couradically.” If Joyce parodies Carlyle, Emerson and company, Nabokov can parody not only Joyce and Kafka but Proust and Gogol as well.

These qualities of sensitivity to the texture and rhythm of writing and skill in manipulating language are seen to advantage in his most ambitious work on Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin. The linguistic virtuosity is evident at every step in his literal but imaginative translation.

Whether one likes him or not, Vladimir Nabokov is not an imitator but an innovator in the realm of modern fiction. He was not content to be an expert practitioner of an established technique. He sought to be an experimenter, whose courage is camouflaged in whimsicality and verbal wit.

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