Natasha's Dance

3

'Our tragedy', wrote Nina Berberova of the younger exiled writers in the 1920s, was 'our inability to evolve in terms of style.'⁴⁵ The renewal of style entailed a fundamental problem for the emigres. If their purpose as Russian artists was to preserve their national culture, how could they evolve Stylistically without adapting to their new environment and

hence, in some ways, abandoning Russia? The problem mainly affected the younger generation - writers like Nabokov who had 'emerged naked from the Revolution'.⁴⁶ Older writers like Bunin brought with them to the West an established readership and written style from which they could not break. There was too much pressure on them to continue in the comforting traditions of the past - to churn out plays and stories about nests of Russian gentlefolk - and those who tried to break away were little prized or understood. Tsvetaeva's tragedy - to lose the readership that had sustained her as the rising star of the pre-revolutionary avant-garde - was yet another variant of this experience.

Scattered in bookshops, greyed by dust and time, Unseen, unsought, unopened, and unsold, My poems will be savoured as are rarest wines -When they are old.⁴⁷

Even Miliukov, former statesman, historian and editor of the Parisian journal Poslednie novosti, said, 'I don't understand Tsvetaeva.'⁴⁸ But for writers like Nabokov who had yet to find their feet there was little point or prospect in returning to the past. The old generation was dying out and the new becoming less Russian by the day as it assimilated into the mainstream of European culture. To create a new readership such writers had to break out of the mould.

Nabokov was the first major writer to complete this literary metamorphosis. According to Berberova, he was the only Russian-language writer of her generation with the genius to create not just a new style of writing but a new reader, too. 'Through him we learned to identify not with his fictional heroes' - as the nineteenth-century writers expected of their readers - 'but with the author, with Nabokov, and his existential themes became our theme as well.'⁴⁹ Nabokov always claimed that his writings were not about Russia or the emigres. But exile was their central theme. And even if he saw that as a universal theme, a metaphor of the human condition, the appearance of Nabokov's writings in the Berlin of the 1920s was received by the Russian emigres as an affirmation of their own national identity. Nabokov's writings were proof that 'Russia' (as embodied in its culture) was still with them in the West. As Berberova put it, with the

publication of his first great novel, The Luzhin Defence, in 1930, 'a great Russian writer had been born, like a phoenix from the ashes of the Revolution and exile. Our existence acquired a new meaning. All my generation were justified. We were saved.'⁵⁰

Exile was Nabokov's omnipresent theme, though he discovered the 'sorrows and delights of nostalgia' long before the Revolution had removed the scenery of his early years.⁵¹ Nabokov was born in 1899, the elder son of a highly cultured and prominently liberal aristocratic family from St Petersburg who fled Russia in 1919. His grandfather, Dmitry Nabokov, had been Minister of Justice in the final years of Alexander II's reign, when the Emperor had considered the adoption of a liberal constitution in the European mould. Until his dismissal in 1885, he had opposed the attempts by Alexander III to overturn the liberal judicial reforms of 1864. The writer's father, V. D. Nabokov, was a well-known liberal lawyer and an influential member of the Kadet (Constitutional Democratic) Party in the First Duma of 1906. He had drafted the abdication manifesto of the Grand Duke Mikhail, briefly invited to assume the throne in the February Revolution of 1917, which brought the monarchy to an official end. He had also been head of the Chancellery in the Provisional Government, a sort of executive secretary to the cabinet, and had played a leading role in formulating the electoral system of the Constituent Assembly. The Bolshevik seizure of power forced the Nabokovs to leave Russia, moving first to London and then to Berlin, where the writer's father was the editor of the newspaper Rul' until his assassination by a Russian monarchist in 1922. Throughout his career as a Russian writer in Europe Nabokov kept the pen name 'Sirin' (the name of a legendary bird of paradise in Russian mythology) to set himself apart from his famous father in the emigre community.

The Nabokov family was strongly Anglophile. Its mansion in St Petersburg was filled with 'the comfortable products of Anglo-Saxon civilization', Nabokov wrote in Speak, Memory:

Pears' soap, tar-black when dry, topaz-like when held to the light between wet fingers, took care of one's morning bath. Pleasant was the decreasing weight of the English collapsible tub when it was made to protrude a rubber underlip and disgorge its frothy contents into the slop pail. 'We could not improve the

cream, so we improved the tube,' said the English toothpaste. At breakfast, Golden Syrup imported from London would entwist with its glowing coils the revolving spoon from which enough of it had slithered on to a piece of Russian bread and butter. All sorts of snug, mellow things came in a steady procession from the English shop on Nevski Avenue: fruitcakes, smelling salts, playing cards, picture puzzles, striped blazers, talcum-white tennis balls.⁵²

Nabokov was taught to read English before he could read his native tongue. He and his brother and sister were looked after by 'a bewildering sequence of English nurses and governesses', who read them Little Lord Fauntleroy; and later by a mademoiselle who read to the children Les Malbeurs de Sophie, Le Tour du Monde en Quatre-vingts Jours and Le Comte de Monte Cristo. In a sense Nabokov was brought up as an emigre. As a schoolboy he would set himself apart, imagining himself as an 'exiled poet who longed for a remote, sad and - unquenchable Russia'.⁵³ Pushkin was Nabokov's inspiration. Many of the heroes in his novels were meant to be the poet in disguise. Nabokov saw himself as Pushkin's heir. So much so, in fact, that when, at the age of eighteen, Nabokov found himself a refugee in the Crimea, where his family had fled the Bolsheviks, he took inspiration from the image of himself as a romantic exile, wandering in the footsteps of Pushkin, who had been sent into exile a hundred years before. His first published collections of poems, The Empyrean Path (1923),contains an epigraph from Pushkin's poem 'Anon' on the title page.

From the Crimea the family sailed to England, where Nabokov completed his education at Trinity College, Cambridge, between 1919 and 1922. The reality of post-war England was a long way from the Anglo-Saxon dreamworld of the Nabokov mansion in St Petersburg. The rooms at Trinity were cold and damp, the food unspeakable, and the student clubs were full of naive socialists, like the pipe-smoking 'Nesbit' in Speak, Memory who saw only bad in Russia's past and only good in the Bolsheviks.* Nabokov grew homesick. 'The story of my college years in England is really the story of my trying to become

* Nabokov later identified R. A. ('Rab') Butler, the future Tory Deputy Prime Minister and 'a frightful bore', as the man behind the mask of R. Nesbit Bain in Speak, Memory (B. Boyd, Nabokov: The Russian Years (London, 1990), p. 1 68).

a Russian writer', he recalled. 'I had the feeling that Cambridge and all its famed features - venerable elms, blazoned windows, loquacious tower clocks - were of no consequence in themselves but existed merely to frame and support my rich nostalgia.'⁵⁴

The focus of Nabokov's longing for Russia was the family estate at Vyra, near St Petersburg. It contained his childhood memories. In Speak, Memory he claimed to have felt his first pangs of nostalgia at the tender age of five, when, on holiday in Europe, 'I would draw with my forefinger on my pillow the carriage road sweeping up to our Vyra house.'⁵⁵ The pain of losing Vyra was acute - perhaps more acute than the loss of much of the family wealth or the loss of his homeland, which Nabokov hardly knew, apart from Vyra and St Petersburg. In Speak, Memory he emphasizes the point.

The following passage is not for the general reader, but for the particular idiot who, because he lost a fortune in some crash, thinks he understands me.

My old (since 1917) quarrel with the Soviet dictatorship is wholly unrelated to any question of property. My contempt for the emigre who 'hates the Reds' because they 'stole' his money and land is complete. The nostalgia I have been cherishing all these years is a hypertrophied sense of lost childhood, not sorrow for lost banknotes.

And finally: I reserve for myself the right to yearn after an ecological niche:

… Beneath the sky Of my America to sigh For one locality in Russia.

The general reader may now resume.⁵⁶

From the gloom of Cambridge - where the porridge at breakfast in Trinity College was 'as grey and dull as the sky above Great Court' -he wrote to his mother, who had settled in Berlin, in October 1920:

Mother, dear, yesterday I woke up in the middle of the night and asked someone - I don't know whom - the night, the stars, God: will I really never return, is it really all finished, wiped out, destroyed? Mother, we must return, mustn't we, it cannot be that all this has died, turned to dust - such an idea could drive one mad. I would like to describe every little bush, every stalk in our

divine park at Vyra - but no one can understand this. How little we valued our paradise! - we should have loved it more pointedly, more consciously.⁵⁷

This nostalgia for Vyra was the inspiration for Speak, Memory, in which he lovingly describes its 'every little bush' in an effort to recover his childhood memories and desires. It was a sort of Proustian discourse on the sinuosity of time and consciousness. Nabokov's 'memory' was a creative act, a reanimation of the past which blended with the present through association, and was then transfigured into personality and art. He once wrote that the exile has a sharper sense of time. His extraordinary capacity to re-create through words the sensations of the past was surely his own exile's dividend.

Exile is a leitmotif throughout Nabokov's works. Mary, his first novel, published in Berlin in 1926, was intended as a portrait of the emigre condition, even if Nabokov, in his introduction to the English version in 1970, stressed its autobiographical nature. Ganin, the hero, in yearning for Mary, becomes an emblem of the exile's dream: the hope of retrieving and reliving the lost happiness of his youth in Russia. In Glory (1932) the hero, Martin Edelweiss, a Russian emigre from the Crimea who is studying at Cambridge University, dreams of returning to Russia. His fantasies take shape as he travels to Berlin and ventures through the woods to cross the Russian border, never to return. The subject of The Gift (1938) is equally the 'gloom and glory of exile'.⁵⁸ It is the theme of all Nabokov's Russian-language novels (of which there are nine). Their tragic characters are emigres, lost and isolated in a foreign world or haunted by a past which is irretrievable except through the creative memory of fantasy or art. In The Gift its hero, the writer Fedor Godunov-Cherdyntsev, re-creates the literary life of Russia through his poetry. In Glory and Pale Fire (written in English in 1962) the hero lives in a dreamworld Russia to escape the misery of his exile. Nabokov's thoughts about the 'distant Northern land' he called Zembla in Pale Fire reveal the writer's response to exile:

1. The image of Zembla must creep up on the reader very gradually… 4. Nobody knows, nobody should know - even Kinbote hardly knows - if Zembla really exists.

5. Zembla and its characters should remain in a fluid misty condition…

6. We do not even know whether Zembla is pure invention or a kind of lyrical simile of Russia (Zembla: Zemlya [the Russian word for 'land']).⁵⁹

In the first of Nabokov's English-language novels, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941), the exile theme appears in a different form: the split identity. The hero, Sebastian, is the subject of a biography, ostensibly written by his brother, who gradually emerges as the real Sebastian. This sense of confusion and inner division was experienced by many emigres. Khodasevich writes very movingly about it in 'Sorrento Photographs' (in his collection of poems European Nights (1922-7)), in which he compares the exile's divided consciousness, the confusion in his mind of images from his two lives at home and abroad, to the double exposure of a film.

Nabokov's switch from writing in Russian to writing in English is a complicated story intimately linked with his adoption of a new (American) identity. It must have been a painful switch, as Nabokov, who was famous for his showmanship, always liked to stress. It was, he said, 'like learning to handle things after losing seven or eight fingers in an explosion'.⁶⁰ Throughout his life Nabokov complained about the handicap of writing in English - perhaps too often to be totally believed (he once confessed in a letter to a friend that his 'best work was written in English').⁶¹ Even at the height of his literary prowess he argues, in his 1956 afterword to Lolita, that it had been his 'private tragedy' to

abandon my natural idiom, my untrammelled, rich and infinitely docile Russian tongue for a second-rate brand of English, devoid of any of those apparatuses - the baffling mirror, the black velvet backdrop, the implied associations and traditions - which the native illusionist, frac-tails flying, can magically use to transcend the heritage in his own way.⁶²

But even if such claims were a form of affectation, his achievement is undeniable. It is extraordinary that a writer who has been hailed as the supreme stylist of the modern English language should have written it as a foreigner. As his wife Vera put it, not only had he 'switched from a very special and complex brand of Russian, all his own, which he had perfected over the years into something unique and peculiar to

him', but he had embraced 'an English which he then proceeded to wield and bend to his will until it, too, became under his pen something it had never been before in its melody and flexibility'. She came to the conclusion that what he had done was substitute for his passionate affair with the Russian language un manage de raison which 'as it sometimes happens with a manage de raison - became in turn a tender love affair'.⁶³

Until the Revolution destroyed his plans, Nabokov had set out to become the next Pushkin. In later life he played upon this image of the stymied genius, even if in fact his English writing style, which he had developed since the age of five, had always been as good as, if not better than, his Russian one. But once he was in exile Nabokov had a sense of writing in a void. Liberated from the Soviet regime, he began to feel that the freedom he enjoyed was due to his working in vacuo - without readers or a public context in which to write - so that 'the whole thing acquired a certain air of fragile unreality'.⁶⁴ (Tsvetaeva expressed a similar despair - although in her case, without another language to fall back on, it signalled a more profound private tragedy: 'From a world where my poems were as necessary as bread I came into a world where no one needs poems, neither my poems nor any poems, where poems are needed like - dessert: if anyone - needs - dessert…')⁶⁵

The need for an audience was the fundamental motive of Nabokov's switch. As he himself explained, a writer 'needs some reverberation, if not a response'.⁶⁶ His Russian-language reading public was reduced in size with every passing year, as the children of the emigres became assimilated into the culture in which they lived. It was virtually impossible for a young Russian writer like Nabokov to make a living from writing alone, and the competition was intense. 'To get into literature is like squeezing into an overcrowded trolley car. And once inside, you do your best to push off any new arrival who tries to hang on', complained another writer, Georgy Ivanov.⁶⁷

Berlin was a particularly difficult place to live, as thousands of Russians fled the city after Hitler's rise to power in 1933. The Nabokovs stayed in the German capital. They lived in poverty - Vera working as a secretary and Nabokov giving private lessons in English and in French. But it was obvious that they, too, would have to leave. Vera was Jewish, and in 1936 the man who had assassinated Nabokov's father, Sergei Taboritsky, was appointed second-in-command of

Hitler's department for emigre affairs. Nabokov searched in desperation for an academic post in London or New York, anywhere but Hitler's Germany, and settled in the end for a move to Paris in 1938. From there the Nabokovs made arrangements to go to New York in the spring of 1940, just two weeks before the Germans reached Paris. In their studio apartment near the Bois de Boulogne Nabokov locked himself in the bathroom, laid a suitcase across the bidet and typed out his entry ticket to the English literary world: The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, published in New York in 1941.

Nabokov's passage to New York had been arranged by Alexandra Tolstoy, the novelist's daughter and the head of the Tolstoy Foundation, which had just been set up to look after the interests of Russian emigres in America. The outbreak of the Second World War had brought about a flood of well-known refugees from Hitler's Europe: Einstein, Thomas Mann, Huxley, Auden, Stravinsky, Bartok and Chagall - all made new homes for themselves in the USA. New York was swollen with Russian emigres. The literary capital of Russia in America, its daily Russian newspaper, Novoe russkoe slovo (New Russian Word) had a national readership of half a million. The Nabokovs settled in 'a dreadful little flat' on West 87th Street, near Central Park. As a writer Nabokov was not well known among the emigres in the USA. Until the scandal and success of Lolita, completed in 1952 but not published until 1955, he struggled to survive from his writing. Like the hero of his novel Pnin (1957), he was forced to make his living from temporary lecturing jobs at, among other universities, Stanford, Wellesley and Cornell. Not that his financial hardship reduced Nabokov's considerable pride. When Rachmaninov sent the struggling writer some of his old clothes, Nabokov, who was something of a dandy and the son of possibly the best-dressed man in the entire history of St Petersburg,* returned the suits to the composer, complaining that they had been tailored 'in the period of the Prelude'.⁶⁸

* Nabokov pere was famous for his finely tailored English suits, which he wore, without self-consciousness, in the Duma assembly, where many of the rural deputies were dressed in peasant clothes (A. Tyrkova-Williams, Na putiakh k svobode (New York, 1952), P. 2.70). His sartorial extravagance was a common source of anecdotes in pre-revolutionary Petersburg. It was even said that he sent his underpants to England to be washed.

'America is my home now,' Nabokov said in interviews in 1964. 'I am an American writer.'⁶⁹ Despite his sometimes rather scathing portraits of the USA (most notoriously in Lolita), it appears the sentiment was genuinely held. Nabokov liked to play the real American. Having lost the Nabokov inheritance in the Old World way, through revolution, he had earned his fortune in the New World way: by hard work and brains.⁷⁰ The bounty of Lolita was a badge of his success as an American, and he wore it with great pride. 'This is the only known case in history when a European pauper ever became his own American uncle', writes an envious but admiring reviewer of the Russian writer and emigre Vadim (read: Nabokov) in Look at the Harlequins! (1974).⁷¹ Nabokov would not tolerate any criticism of America. He was a patriot. Throughout his life he kept the oath which he had sworn when he became a US citizen in 1945. When Gallimard produced a cover design for the French edition of Pnin showing the professor standing on the US flag, Nabokov objected to the Stars and Stripes 'being used as a floor coverage or a road surfacing'.⁷²

Nabokov's anti-Soviet politics were at the core of his Americanism. He sided with McCarthy. He despised the liberals who harboured sympathies for the Soviet Union. He refused to have anything to do with Soviet Russia - even at the height of the Second World War when it was an ally of the West. When Nabokov learned, in 1945, that Vasily Maklakov, the official representative of the Russian emigres in France, had attended a luncheon at the Soviet embassy in Paris, and had drunk a toast 'to the motherland, to the Red Army, to Stalin', he wrote in anger to a friend:

I can understand denying one's principles in one exceptional case: if they told me that those closest to me would be tortured or spared according to my reply, I would immediately consent to anything, ideological treachery or foul deeds and would even apply myself lovingly to the parting on Stalin's backside. Was Maklakov placed in such a situation? Evidently not.

All that remains is to outline a classification of the emigration. I distinguish five main divisions:

1. The philistine majority, who dislike the Bolsheviks for taking from them their little bit of land or money, or twelve Ilf-and-Petrov chairs.

2. Those who dream of pogroms and a Rumanian Tsar, and now fraternize with the Soviets because they sense in the Soviet Union the Soviet Union of the Russian people.

3. Fools.

4. Those who ended up across the border by inertia, vulgarians and careerists who pursue their own advantage and lightheartedly serve any leader at all.

5. Decent freedom-loving people, the old guard of the Russian intelligentsia, who unshakeably despise violence against language, against thought, against truth.⁷³

Nabokov placed himself in the final category. In his courses on Russian literature he refused to lecture on any literature since 1917, although in his classes at Cornell he made a concession for Akhmatova and the poetry of Pasternak.* Nabokov maintained that the communist regime had prevented the development of an 'authentic literature'.⁷⁴ He was equally hostile to the realist tradition of the nineteenth century which looked to literature for social content and ideas - a tradition which he rightly saw as a predecessor of the Soviet approach to literature. It was on this basis that he criticized both Dr Zhivago ('dreary conventional stuff), which competed with Lolita at the top of the bestseller lists in 1958, and Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago (1973-5) ('a kind of juicy journalese, formless, wordy and repetitious')⁷⁵ - although there must have been some jealousy at work

* Nabokov was normally dismissive of Akhmatova and of the many female imitators of her early style. In Pnin the professor's estranged wife Liza sings out 'rhythmically, in long-drawn, deep-voiced tones' a cruel parody of Akhmatova's verse:

'I have put on a dark dress And am more modest than a nun; An ivory crucifix Is over my cold bed.

But the lights of fabulous orgies Burn through my oblivion, And I whisper the name George -Your golden name!'

(V. Nabokov, Pnin (Harmondsworth, 2000), p. 47). Akhmatova was deeply offended by the parody, which had played upon the 'half-harlot, half-nun' image used by Zhdanov in 1948 (L.Chukovskaia, Zapiskiob Anne Akhmatovoi, 2 vols. (Paris, 1980), vol. 2, p. 383).

there as well (for unlike Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn, Nabokov never won the Nobel Prize). And yet, despite his political denials, he felt a deep attachment to the Russian tradition. He longed to write another novel in his native tongue. He felt that there was something of his tragic hero Pnin - the bumbling, noble-hearted emigre professor of Russian who cannot quite adapt to his American environment - not only in himself but in all the best emigres.

In 1965 Nabokov worked on a Russian translation of Lolita. In the afterword to the English edition he had referred to his switch from Russian into English as a 'private tragedy'. But he now began his afterword to the Russian edition by confessing that the process of translating his prose back again had been disillusioning:

Alas, that 'marvellous Russian language' that I thought awaited me somewhere, blossoming like a faithful springtime behind a tightly locked gate whose key I had kept safe for so many years, proved to be nonexistent, and beyond the gate are nothing but charred stumps and the hopeless autumnal vista, and the key in my hand is more like a jimmy.⁷⁶

The Russian language had moved on since Nabokov left his native land, and 'the baffling mirror, the black velvet backdrop, the implied associations and traditions' which he had used like a magician in his early Russian novels were now lost on his Soviet audience.