Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years

Frustration suddenly replaced by joy at the generosity of life: that is the pattern of The Gift.

After five years' research and writing—and time "off" for another novel, two translations, a play, eleven stories and a small-scale autobiography—he completed The Gift in January 1938.

CHAPTER 14

The Defense (Zashchita Luzhina)

IN THE DEFENSE, his first masterpiece, Nabokov perfected the surface of his art and at the same time discovered how to plumb its depths.

After personality and time comes the third constraint upon consciousness that Nabokov defines, unsettles us into noticing, and tries to transcend: the closed circle of mortal knowledge.

Throughout his novels he undermines the comfortable solidity books usually seek. Something out of kilter here or there suggests that the worlds we have immersed ourselves in as if they were real are only two-dimensional compared with a reality beyond.

Formed and delivered in a moment, likely to be forgotten soon after, spoken language smacked to Nabokov of the prison of the present. The very nature of written language meant something special to him: an opportunity to revisit the impulse of a past instant from which time has forced us to march on, a sort of access to a more elastic time where one can loop back on an idea and develop it to maximum power and grace.

As with personality, so with time: Nabokov's structures compel us to recognize the fading of the past as an absurd constraint on human consciousness rather than a direct reflection of the way things are.

The fates of his characters indicate again and again the gross discrepancy between our ability to return in space and our inability to return in time.

Like everything else in Nabokov, his ethics spring from his view of consciousness. He sees consciousness as the space of freedom: as his style proclaims, the mind has an enormous ease of movement and range of choice and room for self-awareness within the moment. And yet consciousness, although it seems to be the agent of liberation, is also, being only human, the site of our confinement. Nabokov devises characters of astonishing mental freedom who are at the same time utterly obsessed.

In a century that saw the rise of minimalist art, Nabokov was a maximalist. He explored human nature at the upper reaches of consciousness.

The first postulate of Nabokov's philosophy is the primacy of consciousness, "consciousness, which is the only real thing in the world and the greatest mystery of all."

No subject would become more uniquely Nabokov's than the preposterous fact that we cannot retain the real past we have lived through. Like Chorb, many of his characters—Humbert, Kinbote, Van Veen, Hugh Person—seek to reimpose a vanished past a changed present and become grotesque or cruel in the process. Only within the mind, through memory and imagination, do characters like Ganin, Cincinnatus, Fyodor, Shade, and, again, Van Veen, cope with the pain of loss.

Mary is a novel about time: about the reality of the past, even though we can only reach it within the present; about the delusive force of our anticipations of the future (Alfyorov's and Ganin's visions of meeting Mary at the station, Podtyagin's of crossing into France); and about the present, where we are free to act and responsible for the choices we make: free enough for Ganin to decide not to see Mary at all.

Time, not space, is Nabokov's real subject: not the Russian Berlin the book renders so well, but the accumulated time of memory that allows Ganin to superimpose the country of his past on the city streets of his present.

Later he might recall Mary as mere nostalgic indulgence, but back in 1925 he had taken great pains to construct a novel of exile. Ganin's yearning for Mary becomes a personalized image of the emigre dream, the hope of reliving and resuming the happiness of remembered Russia. Not that Mary is in any way a symbol: Nabokov knew he could make her live in the imagination only if he kept true to the irrational particulars of the past.

CHAPTER 11

Scenes from Emigre Life: Berlin, 1925-1926

EXILE for the Nabokovs was a succession of rented rooms.

In the 1920s Berlin was fabled for the vitality and diversity of its theaters and especially its cabarets. The first and by far the most successful of Berlin's Russian cabarets was Yakov Yuzhny's Sinyaya Ptitsa (Bluebird). Founded at the end of 1921, a descendant of Nikita Baliev's famous Letuchaya mysh' (The Bat) in Moscow, it lasted more than ten years, influenced other Berlin cabarets and theaters, toured frequently throughout Europe and in North America.

CHAPTER 22
Searching for an Exit: France, 1939-1940

Dr. Ray's voice: They have all their papers now.They are all set to go.Good-bye, gray Paree! Humbert: Good-bye, gray Paree. Now, my dear,don't lose your passport.—Lolita: A Screenplay

With its characteristic density, The Gift records all aspects of a writer's life and work: tradition and the individual talent; the childhood that underlies the adult work; the slow growth of the writer's mind and art; the mature imagination active in its everyday world; all the stages of composition and publication, from the vague foreglow of a new work to the reviews the finished book receives, and even the writer's own harsh final review as his next work already dawns.

Bunin himself, until now the undisputed master of emigre literature, commented on The Defense: "This kid has snatched a gun and done away with the whole older generation, myself included."