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On Vladimir Nabokov

by A. Abate

“The good, the admirable reader identifies himself not with the boy or the girl in the book, but with the mind that conceived and composed that book.”

Since the time when we lived in rough-walled caves and still needed the aid of one hairy-knuckled limb to walk from time to time, man has been creating art. One could say that it was the very act of creating that made us human; that while the discovery of fire and the development of agriculture merely made us more effective animals, it was those first crude ash etchings that made us something more. And from those humble, stumbling beginnings we have taken art, the idea of creating something for no better reason that to enjoy its existence, and ran with it. Music and poetry, sculpting and etching, painting, sketching, acting and dancing, all have long histories within our race, and not coincidentally across every culture that is or ever has been. The one thing that ties all these disciplines together, the one aspect that unites all the varied facets of that thing called “art,” is that they where created by people.

A sunset may be beautiful, but it is not art, as it lacks the hands of man. A desert landscape may inspire the soul of an observer, but it is not art, as no hand guides its creation. It takes people to create art, weather it be moving a brush, wielding a chisel, or penning a work of fiction. As art comes from the mind of man, it fallows that the mark of the creator is forever on his, or her, creation.

A painter can be distinguished by his brush strokes, a thumb print that to an expert is as clear as the signature in the corner. Musicians have distinct composition styles; the works of Beethoven and Mozart are as different as night and day. Likewise a writer will have his or her own style of writing, a way of constructing sentences, scenes, and stories that is unique to them. But apart from considerations of style, artists can often be classified by the themes in which they work, the pieces of themselves the put into everything they do.

You can always find pieces of the creator in their work; small and large, important or trivial, purposeful or accidental, it is truly unavoidable. It is evident in all works of art, from photography to sculpting, but is in no place more easily seen than in written works. “Write what you know,” a piece of advice often given to aspiring writers, and if the greats of today and yesterday are any indication, an idea that many take to heart.

Vladimir Nabokov; born April 22, 1899 in Saint Petersburg, Russia. Fluent not only in Russian and English but also French from an early age, he wrote novels in all three languages, on a vast number of topics and in several different styles. He is noted for his creative, hugely descriptive writing style and his love of word play. From simple puns and anagrams to complex word twisting requiring from the reader a knowledge of more than one of the languages Nabokov writes in, each of his stories has the flavor more of a puzzle than a simple tale. Open one of his books; Lolita or Pale Fire, Ada or Transparent Things, and you will be present with a rich, complex prose style and a collection of detailed descriptions that are unmistakable. In addition to that there is something else that ties all the various works of Nabokov together, and that is Nabokov himself.

“I have often noticed that after I had bestowed on the characters of my novels some treasured item of my past, it would pine away in the artificial world where I had so abruptly placed it.” If you look, and you must look carefully, you will see bits of Nabokov sprinkled throughout his books like bits of diamond among rough gravel. His life is present in his books, as is his views and opinions, his insecurities and his eccentricities. He can be found in his characters, in his worlds (which are never exactly our own, even if they are), in the events big and small. Now it is possible that these parallels are in their by some cosmic accident, writers do, after all, draw upon their own experiences to create from, but knowing how Nabokov writes, with the precision of an Olympic fencer, it is hard to imagine.

“Happy is the novelist who manages to preserve an actual love letter that he received when he was young within a work of fiction, embedded in it like a clean bullet in flabby flesh and quite secure there, among spurious lives. “

Lolita, written in 1955 while on butterfly hunting trips across America, is often hailed as Nabokov's greatest and most controversial work. The controversial aspects of it are easy to see; the narrator, Humbert Humbert, becomes attracted and has sex with a young girl. Where this the works highlight, however, it would be nothing, a mediocre piece of trash easily forgotten. It is not, it is so much more, a work of genius and genuine creativity. And, of course, Nabokov is in it throughout.

He is in it very directly once; as Vivian Darkbloom, co-writer of The Enchanted Hunters a play by the villain of the story (or one of them, in Lolita all the characters are, in their own way, villainous) Claire Quilty. Vivian Darkbloom is an anagram for Vladimir Nabokov; and of course he put himself into the story as a writer, but this is merely the start, and the most obvious, of the direct links between Nabokov's life and his work. In his autobiographical work Speak, Memory he talks about the French girl he met while on vacation. This girl, age ten, like himself, is named in the book Colette, and was Nabokovs first young love. A love that he lost, never to be seen again. Lost like Humbert Humbert lost his Annabel (to typhus) at the mold able age of thirteen. In Lolita the death of Annabel is presented as a reason for Humbert's later pedophilia; his desire for young girls being an attempt to recapture the lost love of his youth (ironic for a man whom claimed to despise psychiatrists and the practice in general, he offers a very Freudian reason for Humberts problems). Now certainly Colette did not die, merely left his life, and Nabokov was able to process the loss healthily, unlike Humbert, but it is clear that when creating his characters past, the Russian émigré reached back into his own.

Speaking of emigrant's; it is no surprise that many of Nabokov's characters are. Born in Russia, Nabokov's family was forced to flee during the turbulent years of the early twentieth century. He lived for a time in England, then in Berlin. Later he moved to Paris for a time, before the advancing German army's of Hitler forced him to flee once again, this time to America. An outsider, Nabokov wrote many of his characters that way. Humbert Humbert was born in Paris. Kinbote, the commentator in Pale Fire, claims to be from the fictional land of Zembla, a land that in may ways resembles a kind of fairy-tale Russia. Kinbote was even forced to flee his kingdom because of a rebellious uprising; events that loosely mirror the chaos of Nabokov's Russia. In Transparent Things, published in 1972, the protagonist, Hugh Person, is an America, though the novel takes place in Switzerland. Nabokov was not very fond of symbolism, so we will give him the benefit of the doubt and allow that this pattern is not meant to mean anything, but rather is a way to give an outsiders (and thus more objective) views.

Pale Fire is a multi-layered illusion of a novel; levels of deception stacked one atop another like sandstone blocks in some monolithic ancient structure. On the surface it is a nine-hundred and ninety-nine line poem by the brilliant and eccentric poet John Shade fallowed by the long, rambling, and irrelevant commentary by Dr. Charles Kinbote, a refuge from the land known as Zembla. Once we grasp our rocks and sink beneath the placid, ordinary surface we realize that Zembla does not exist, has never existed, but is merely an invention of the madman Charles Kinbote, himself the delusional alter-ego of Professor Botkin, a Russian teaching at the same college as Shade. There are several other interpretations of the book, from Shade being an invention of Kinbote to Kinbote being an alternate personality of shade, and in the way of Nabokovian art all are true.

Of all Nabokov's works, Pale Fire is perhaps the most closely associated with the authors own life (except, of course, for his auto-biography Speak, Memory), so much so that some consider it to be a fanciful retelling of his own history. Certainly, this is true; there are many examples of the Russian in his book. For example; the land of Zembla, though fictional, has etymological roots in the land of Novaya Zemlya, in english Nova Zembla. Novaya Zemlya is a pair of small island in the far north of Russia, in the Arctic Ocean. Zembla is written in the index of Pale Fire, also penned by Kinbote, as “a distant northern land.” There is even a river in Nova Zembla named “Nabokov's River,” after the ancestor of Vladimir that helped map the land with the Russian Navy.

Then there are the characters; sometimes seeing so much like Nabokov that one can picture them being taken, piece by piece, from him and re-assembled in different shapes, like building a mountain cabin out of the used wood of an old barn. Like the way that John Shade wrote out his poem on “eighty medium-sized index cards, on each of which Shade reserved the pink upper line fro headings and used the fourteen light-blue lines for writing out with a fine nib in a minute, tidy, remarkably clear hand, the text of his poem (from the Foreword).” Nabokov was known his unusual practice of writing his novels and short stories out on note cards so that he may play with the order of passages; the better, we may assume, to construct his literary puzzles. Then there is the fact that Shade, Kinbote, and V. Botkin (three people, from a literary perspective) taught various language courses at the fictional Wordsmith College, while Nabokov taught a comparative literature class at Wellesley College from 1941 to 1948.

Of course, Nabokov drew from the the tragedy as well as the inconsequential in his life to develop his stories. In Berlin, in 1922, at a public lecture, Vladimir's father,Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov was shot by an assassin while attempting to protect his friend, the lecturer, the true target of their bullets. This violent, and yet noble, death is horribly echoed in Pale Fire when John Shade is shot for shielding the exile Zemblan King Kinbote from the assassin, Gradus's, bullets. At least thats how Kinbote, aka Botkin saw it. Actually, Shade was the intended target of the killers lead, though he was not the one the killer originally intended to kill. It is proof that, to a mind and soul willing to deal with the pain, the most devastating events in real life can be turned to constructive uses.

On a similar note, though a higher octave, are placed Nabokov's many childhood illnesses. “As far back as I remember myself, I have been subject to mild hallucinations,” he admits to us in Speak, Memory (he has synesthesia , among other things). This he gives, in a small degree, to John Shade, and to a much larger degree to John Shades daughter, the inspiration for, and subject of, his poem.

“Frequently, in the friendly middle of the day, on the fringe of some trivial occupation, in the idle wake of a passing thought, I would experience, without warning, a twinge of mental pleasure as the bud of a chess problem burst open in my brain, promising me a night of labor and felicity.” This excerpt, from Speak, Memory, demonstrates not only Nabokov's unique mind (he enjoyed creating chess problems in his free time), not only his personal brand of insanity (he enjoyed creating chess problems in his free time), but also his deep, abiding love for chess (he enjoyed creating chess problems in his free time). Chess can be seen throughout Pale Fire, in fact the entire novel can be seen as a chess game; the reader being one player and the the author another. In this instance the book itself would be one of the problems that Nabokov loved to create, the reader is tasked with solving it. Or, if we wish to confine ourselves to the world of the pages, we find that the poet Shade is playing a game of chess with the assassin, Gradus. Each of Shades moves- his stanzas in the story- are copied and countered by Gradus as he moves about the world, until the game comes to a head when the two face each other in the street outside Shades home. There are other, more blatant references to chess; the commentator observes that the king “had the amusing feeling of his being the only black piece in what a composer of chess problems might term a king-in-the-corner waiter of the solus rex type,” for example. These only serve to further illustrate the liberal pouring of his own hobby that Nabokov poured into his book.

“I confess, I do not believe in time,” this sentiment, from Pale Fire, once again displays the twisted, unique workings of Nabokov's mind, but his brilliance as an author is writing an entire book on the non-reality, the intangibility, of time. Transparent Things is a novella about an mans life, his four trips to Switzerland, his wife, her murder, and his own death. The work has little respect for time or permanence, examines the difficulties associated with memory, and attempts to explore the human soul. Nabokov found time to be an artificial construct, something erected in memory only after the fact, a framework that held up events and kept them in their proper, rigid order. He hated this about memory, sought to experience it without the temporal girders; thus Transparent Things.

So what does all this tell us? If an artist breaks himself down into his works, can we reconstruct him from the pieces, reweave the tapestry from the individual threads? Indeed we can. Everything an artist does is a part of them, everything they create is from themselves. Right what you know is not just overused dogma given to aspiring writers, it is an inescapable element of the craft. A writer literally cannot write about anything he does not have knowledge of, either first hand or through study and mimicry. If it is first hand, and the skills of the creator are up to to par, it will be grand, perhaps even unique. If the subject being approached is known only through second-hand observation, copying what other's have written of, for example, it will be much less grand, and certainly not unique.

So what does that say about Nabokov? His characters are all essentially mad; Kinbote is quite starkly, intensely insane. Humbert Humbert, aside from the pedophilia, lives mostly in his own, self-justified, world. Lolita threw herself into an older mans bed. Nabokov rights beautifully about madness, does this mean he is insane? It does.

Clarification is required here. It is not the purpose here to accuse Nabokov of pedophilia, nor of an inability to distinguish between real and imaginary worlds. He does not, however, see the world the way the rest of us do (not just because of his synesthesia), and that is the very definition of insane. He perceives of time in a way the vast majority of us do not, he is as fascinated by the time before his birth as the time after his death; most of us tend to fixate on the latter. If his writings can be believed, and we must always remember that he is a professional liar, then he can remember events dating back to the first few years of his life. He is different than most of us, and that is great. A touch of insanity is necessary for a touch of genius, one goes with the other; both are states of being that mean “different than the rest.” Vladimir Nabokov is totally, wonderfully, insane.