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"This re-Englishing of a Russian re-version of what had been an English re-telling of Russian memories in the first place, proved to be a diabolical task, but some consolation was given me by the thought that such multiple metamorphosis, familiar to butterflies, had not been tried by any human before" (364)

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Vladimir Nabokov : Novels and Memoirs 1941-1951 : The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Bend Sinister, Speak, Memory (Library of America) Hardcover – October 1, 1996

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Vladimir Nabokov : Novels and Memoirs 1941-1951 : The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Bend Sinister, Speak, Memory (Library of America)

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Vladimir Nabokov : Novels and Memoirs 1941-1951 : The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Bend Sinister, Speak, Memory (Library of America) [Vladimir Nabokov, Brian Boyd] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers.

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Speaking of Memory:  Nabokov's Folded Fabric

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Speaking of Memory:  Nabokov's Folded Fabric

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EARLY IN THE PAGES of his memoir, Speak, Memory, Vladimir Nabokov confesses that he is a "chronophobic," that he in fact not only fears but also doesn't "believe in time," that he is less impressed by memory's ability to sort and retrieve information than by its knack for synthesizing that information into poetry. He writes, "I witness with pleasure the supreme achievement of memory, which is the masterly use it makes of innate harmonies when gathering to its fold the suspended and wandering tonalities of the past."

It is in the pursuit of this pleasure that Nabokov mimics, in his memoir and in his novels, the way our memories tell themselves to us: in hints, collisions, and rushes, overlapping, upside down, out of order. Nabokov's belief in the surreptitious, intentional nature of memory was at the heart of his writing process - he wrote his novels on index cards, jumping from section to section as mood and memory struck him - and is as much a subject of his memoir as are the memories themselves.

Beginning with an account of the months in 1903 when the author's four-year-old consciousness rouses itself and begins to record images of a happy, eventful childhood, the Nabokov that emerges is as impressed with himself as one might expect him to be, but also painfully introverted, exquisitely attuned to the subtexts of human interaction, powerfully drawn to the hidden movements of nature, and, even as a young child, haunted by his recollections.

"A bewildering sequence of English nurses and governesses, some of them wringing their hands, others smiling at me enigmatically," he writes, "come out to meet me as I re-enter my past." He catches his caretakers in the act of becoming characters in his story, and fixes them to the page in candid snapshots, as with this description of a particular, acrobatically gifted tutor: "The next picture looks as if it had come onto the screen upside down." So the observer reveals himself observing, reveling in the variety of his modes of perception, in their ability to unveil hidden realities. "If one looked through blue glass," he recalls, "the sand turned to cinders while inky trees swam in a tropical sky. [...] The red made the foliage drip ruby dark upon a pink footpath. The green soaked greenery in a greener green."

Those panes of colored glass are just a few of the countless refractive surfaces through which we observe the landscape of Speak, Memory - prisms, mirrors, decanters, marbles, photo-slides, magnifiers, pince-nez, flutes, and vials - all rendered in sentences that are themselves glass-like, recursive, moving at great speed through provisional spaces, opening on to ever-approaching and receding points of arrival or departure. Nabokov the chronophobe may fear clock time, but he is in thrall to the experience of mind time, the awareness of his own inner temporality, which he refers to as "the radiant and mobile medium," "the pure element." There is a sense throughout Speak, Memory that the human experience of time is the essence of consciousness itself - that for Nabokov time is life.

For instance - on a train that travels from southern Russia in 1917 to a Swiss hotel room in the 1960s, Nabokov contemplates the locks on a suitcase his mother carried with her on her honeymoon in 1897:

At a collapsible table, my mother and I played a card game called durachki. Although it was still broad daylight, our cards, a glass and, on a different plane, the locks of a suitcase were reflected in the window. [...] [I]n sudden ravines, and among scuttling cottages, those discarnate gamblers kept steadily playing on for steadily sparkling stakes. [...] [O]n this gray winter morning, in the looking glass of my bright hotel room, I see shining the same, the very same, locks of that now seventy-year-old valise.

The collapsible table, the "different plane." The sudden ravines and cottages. The glass, the window, the locks, the "sparkling stakes," the mirror. All the elements of the Nabokovian universe are here: motion, light, reflection, hints of other dimensions, time travel. This is a deeply skeptical exploration of our attempts, in a spinning world of evolving phenomena, to define a fixed, concrete Self, to define anything in stasis; that is, it is less concerned with how a character moves through time than how time flows through a singular consciousness. And the book is filled with moments like this - of Nabokov pointing and saying, "Look at that! Can you believe that?" He is not making a case for a post-Einstein universe; he's discovering that universe with a childlike delight, and inviting the reader to discover it with him.

¤

An obsessive student of butterflies, Nabokov was frustrated by what he saw as the arbitrary nature of rigid taxonomical definitions, writing that, "such conceptions as species, subspecies, etc. [...] exist as abstract conceptions, mummified ideas severed from and uninfluenced by the continuous evolution of data-perception." As the wandering shape-shifter tours his pasts he reassembles old selves - "a pretty boy in knickerbockers and sailor cap," "a lanky cosmopolitan expatriate in flannel bags and beret," "a fat hatless old man in shorts," each one as substantial and fragile as the newly minted American mandarin narrator of Speak, Memory - each one momentarily useful to his storytelling purposes. But the compulsively self-reinventing, forever-in-transit author clearly believes, as he did about butterflies, that a human persona is possessed of a "fugitive sense," an essentially transitional nature, and, as he said elsewhere, that "to adopt [it] as a logical reality [...] would be much the same as conceiving a journey in terms of stopping places." The only thing resembling a still point in the universe of Speak, Memory is the mind of the narrator, but even it is keenly sensitive to the fundamental inconstancy of its condition and environment.

The practical writing benefits of this sensitivity are many. Unbeholden to a single "I," the author avoids the tangles of self-justification; and owing no loyalty to the calendar, he is freed from the constraints of commonplace, linear narrative. He avails himself of a perspective from which he is able to comment at a particularly poignant and amusing distance on each of his many brief lives. Nabokov presents Sirin - the pseudonym under which he wrote most of his early Russian novels - in the third person, as someone he enjoyed reading in his youth, a writer whose "mirrorlike angles and clear but misleading sentences" were roundly and justly praised by critics, yet who - and here Nabokov could be speaking about any of his several personas - "Across the dark sky of exile [...] passed [...] like a meteor, and disappeared, leaving nothing much else behind him but a vague sense of unease."

A compulsive chess player and puzzle-maker (as well as bug chaser), Nabokov understands his obsession with his past as not unlike the physicist's attempt to discern patterns and points of connection, which in turn might provide a glimpse of infinity. He writes,
I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip. And the highest enjoyment of timelessness - in a landscape selected at random - is when I stand among rare butterflies and their food plants. This is ecstasy, and behind the ecstasy is something else, which is hard to explain. It is like a momentary vacuum into which rushes all that I love. A sense of oneness with sun and stone.
He earns the reader's indulgence of these minor rhapsodies by 1) writing them so exquisitely, and 2) by hovering at just the right height above a given scene to reveal both its orderly movements and its observer's unruly passions. He assumes the narrative stance of a scientist in love with his amoeba, hunched over squiggling history, recording every darting movement while simultaneously monitoring the fluctuations of his own enraptured, often-startled heart.

"[The] permanent importance," he proposes, of his memory project is as a "meeting point of an impersonal art form and a very personal life story," one that links experiences from his early life - interminable sleigh rides, garden safaris, schoolyard humiliations - with his emergence into emotional and spiritual maturity. The scientist-author captures the breadth of his subjects by keeping his vision resolutely nearsighted. Focusing exclusively on the inner experience of events in his immediate emotional vicinity - the loss of his father, the loss of his country - he seems always to be describing the wider world, the one inhabited by the reader.

In this way, this study of a particularly exotic childhood, spent in the embrace of "the legendary Russia of [his] boyhood," waited on by a staff of 50 servants, stands in for our own attempts to recover and examine perhaps more ordinary, yet no less "legendary," pasts. Nabokov writes: "The following of such thematic designs through one's life should be the true purpose of autobiography"; it is this elevation of theme over plot, of mind time over clock time, that lifts the deeply personal book into the realm of the universal, even the cosmic:
He felt that all this skein of random thoughts, like everything else as well-the seams and the sleaziness of the spring day, the ruffle of the air, the coarse, variously intercrossing threads of confused sounds - was but the reverse side of a magnificent fabric, on the front of which there gradually formed and became alive images invisible to him.
This belief in the revelatory potential of the coarse, the arbitrary, the seamy and confused elements of his life sends Nabokov into the past with eyes wide open. He re-watches the rocket-like progression of his time-travels - from the early days on his family's St. Petersburg estate to their flight from Russia in 1917, and again from the Crimea as it was overrun by the Red Army two years later, to his early life as a student at Cambridge, contemplating the abrupt shock of his loss, then on to prewar France and almost immediately another flight, this time from the Nazis, and finally to America - with a poet's sorrow and a scientist's sense of awe.

So he tacks through time as memory, not chronology, dictates. He recalls arriving in England, dimly nostalgic for St. Petersburg, but more saddened by the realization that he will never see Russia through the eyes of an adult. The scene moves from a memory of remembering to a recollection of what was to come: "The story of my college years in England," he writes,

is really the story of my trying to become a Russian writer. [...] As with smarting eyes I meditated by the fire in my Cambridge room, all the potent banality of embers, solitude and distant chimes pressed against me, contorting the very folds of my face as an airman's face is disfigured by the fantastic speed of his flight.

Even while sedentary the time traveler is in quantum motion.

When Nabokov writes about his mother reading to him as a child at bedtime he recalls a ring on her hand as she turned the pages of his book. He conjures in its facets "a room, people, lights, trees in the rain - a whole period of émigré life for which that ring was to pay." He is remembering an imagined memory of childhood nostalgia, nostalgia for a past that predated his birth, as first remembered during young adulthood. Moreover, he credits his facility with memory to his mother, who, in those last days of the family's Russian life, jealously hoarded her own recollections. "She cherished her [...] past with the same retrospective fervor that I now do her image and my past. Thus, in a way, I inherited an exquisite simulacrum - the beauty of intangible property, unreal estate." And his affectionate tending of that legacy is everywhere in his work. In the circular structure of Pnin, in the jumbled past and present of Ada. Fyodor, the main character of The Gift, jumps in a lake and swims "for a long time, half an hour, five hours, a week, another." In the short story "The Visit to the Museum," the narrator visits a European museum and leaves by a back door that opens onto a Russian street.

¤

In the later sections of Speak, Memory Nabokov closely maps his extended European exile, during which, in 1919, his father was murdered in Berlin. But much earlier, in the book's most audacious gesture, near the end of a long chapter about a cold, grammar-school winter, 10 years before his family would arrive in Germany, Nabokov quietly, almost casually, slips the event of his father's future assassination into the last, brief paragraph like an icy shiv.

The two paragraphs that precede it tell the story of the evening in 1909 when his father managed cleverly to avert death at the hands of a duelist, but the events described occur almost exclusively in Nabokov's worried imagination. During a "dreamy" sleigh ride home from school which "engenders [...] an almost hallucinatory state of mind," he witnesses "dim silhouettes of duelists [advance] upon each other and [...] stop at the crack of dawn in damp glades of old country estates." He sees "Pushkin, mortally wounded at the first fire, grimly sit up to discharge his pistol at d'Anthès." And, "behind it all," he writes, "there was yet a very special emotional abyss that I was desperately trying to skirt [...] and this was the tender friendship underlying my respect for my father; the charm of our perfect accord."

When he arrives home he immediately intuits, from images that seem to have "opportunities of dream arrangements" - his uncle coming downstairs, looking back up at his parents with a laugh and slapping the balustrade with his gloves - that the duel has been called off and that his father would survive. He sees his father but cannot look directly at him.

"And then, it happened." Nabokov writes (a phrase so un-Nabokovian it stops the reader cold), "My heart welled in me like that wave on which the Buynïy rose when her captain brought her alongside the burning Suvorov, and I had no handkerchief."

It is only post-climax, in the almost-parenthetical sentence that follows that melodramatic peak, that the author takes us 10 years into the future to report his father's assassination, and only in the sentence after that, the very last of the chapter, that he makes its most salient point. He writes, as if to explain his methods: "But no shadow was cast by that future event upon the bright stars of our St. Petersburg house; the large, cool hand resting upon my head did not quaver, and the several lines of play in a difficult chess composition were not blended yet on the board." He is teaching us something about the building of stories and the experience of time yet the moment couldn't feel less academic or pedantic, and is in fact almost unbearably emotional. Lots of memoirists construct nonlinear narratives, but for Nabokov the construction of the story is the story.

Understanding the emphatic disdain Nabokov's quietly abrupt segue conveys for the conventional rhythms of transition is a key to understanding his ambitions in this scene, and in general. For Nabokov, time exists only in personal, reflective consciousness, and is forever being blown around by the unpredictable weather of the mind. For his purposes - the navigation of the "intangible property" of memory - a polite device like linear foreshadowing is as useful as a tape measure in outer space.

Instead of leading us directly, step-by-creaky-step to a dark and fateful moment, scientist that he is, the author traces the emotional black hole at the center of the story by inference, by measuring disturbances in the trails of objects subjected to its pull. He shows us a spiral of shadows, one concocted so adroitly it feels like a trick, but that works precisely because it eschews the usual trickery. The telling of his father's murder achieves its breathtaking effect by dramatizing not the way the father dies, but the way the mind of the father's rememberer works. We experience the abruptly delivered moment as a sucker punch, but we recognize that the deliverer of the blow is memory, not Nabokov. What we remember of our lives may be different, but how we remember is the same.

¤

In a typical response to an editor's request for some changes to a chapter of his novel Pnin, Nabokov would write, "Such changes would effect the inner core of the piece which is built on a whole series of inner organic transitions; it would be agony even to contemplate replacing some of them at random by mechanical inorganic links when I have taken such pains with the inner linkage and balance."

So it is with Speak, Memory: in welcoming his memories on their own disorderly terms, Nabokov opens himself to a universe in which, as he wrote in Ada, "The present is only the top of the past, and the future does not exist," or, as his fellow multi-exile Einstein put it, "the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion."

His many obsessions reveal themselves, in Speak, Memory, to be obliterators of that distinction, coaxers of secret selves from the realm of the radiant medium, borderless time, the "two eternities of darkness" between which our "existence is but a brief crack of light." The chronophobic is drawn to that black expanse like an anti-moth, only to be thwarted by illusion. He writes, "That this darkness is caused merely by the walls of time separating me and my bruised fists from the free world of timelessness is a belief I gladly share with the most gaudily painted savage."

There is a giddy, illicit charge to Nabokov's hunt for a glimpse of infinity. He stalks his prey through endless summer gardens, a patient but determined peeping-tom, swinging a butterfly net at sacred experience, capturing a "thrill of gratitude to whom it may concern - to the contrapuntal genius of human fate or to tender ghosts humoring a lucky mortal."

The humble lepidopterist's smile in that sentence is what keeps Speak, Memory from floating off into the ether, as it occasionally threatens to do, or sinking into morbid self-pity. The notion at the heart of this tender, wistful book, the enlightenment Nabokov gleans from his compulsive pattern-seeking reveries, is a bright but steely-hard one, as beautiful, but as cold, as the St. Petersburg blizzards that so mesmerized him as an already nostalgic young boy: that memory can corrugate time, call its bluff, that sometimes it can even, by twists and turns, when the light is just right, render it meaningless.

¤
Peter Birkenhead is a writer living in Washington, DC. His memoir Gonvillewas published in 2010.

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Speaking of Memory: Nabokov's Folded Fabric

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EARLY IN THE PAGES of his memoir, Speak, Memory, Vladimir Nabokov confesses that he is a "chronophobic," that he in fact not only fears but also doesn't "believe in time," that he is less impressed by memory's ability to sort and retrieve information than by its knack for synthesizing that information into poetry.

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How Nabokov Preserved His Lost Childhood Like a Butterfly in Speak, Memory

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How Nabokov Preserved His Lost Childhood Like a Butterfly in Speak, Memory

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It is undeniable that Nabokov lived through extraordinary times. His father being a liberal statesman, later assassinated, he was privy to political events more than most. Yet Nabokov is concerned with personal, impressionistic history rather than the political. An army General visiting his family draws a picture of stormy seas for the young Vladimir with matches. His father is imprisoned for demonstrating against the government, but what he remembers most is the countryside on the day of his liberty - 'under archivolts of fir needles and crowns of bluebottles, my father's favourite flower'. The Nabokovs' exile to Western Europe in 1919 brings a decade of opulence to a sharp end, but Nabokov's contempt for Soviet dictatorship is bound up in 'a hyper-trophied sense of lost childhood, not sorrow for lost banknotes'.

Though this unconventional autobiography deserves to be appreciated in its own right, it nevertheless offers valuable insight into his other works. Nabokov had written a short story, Mademoiselle O, published in the French journal Mesures, which is reworked into Speak Memory, published several years later. Chapter five is dedicated to a portrait of Nabokov's Swiss governess, whose idiosyncrasies are described in molecular detail. As Nabokov meditates on Mademoiselle's death, he feels something of his real memory has been lost since she inspired a character for his writing. The author somewhat audaciously asks: 'Have I really salvaged her from fiction?'

There is a certain commitment to artifice and ambiguity in Speak, Memory that is typically Nabokovian. Thomas Karshan has highlighted that at the center of Nabokov's work is the theme of 'play'. A keen gamesman in real life, Nabokov sought to incorporate games into his stories too. Memory itself is treated as a kind of game, in which the writer can be seen to play hide-and-seek with time, often finding commonality between past and events that occur decades later. The appendix of Speak, Memory also features a review of the work, calling it 'a unique freak as far as autobiographies go, easier to define in terms of what it is not than what it is'. The reviewer is none other than Nabokov himself.
Sources:
With Thanks to Thomas Karshan and Anna Maslenova

Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory: An Autobiography (Penguin, 2016)

Thomas Karshan, Nabokov and the Art of Play (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010)

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How Nabokov preserved his lost childhood like a butterfly in "Speak, Memory" - Pushkin House

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Anna Moss looks at a remarkable autobiography, by one of the most distinctive and complicated authors of the 20th century "I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another.

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Time, Photography and Optical Technology in Nabokov's Speak, Memory

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Time, Photography and Optical Technology in Nabokov's Speak, Memory

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Time Photography and Optical Technology in Nabokovs Speak Mem

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Why Nabokov's Speak, Memory Still Speaks to Us

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Why Nabokov's Speak, Memory Still Speaks to Us

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The National Endowment for the Humanities

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Why Nabokov’s Speak, Memory Still Speaks to Us

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He was referring to the classic account by Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) of his idyllic Russian childhood in a family of colorful aristocrats, the 1917 Bolshevik revolution that banished him to exile, and the path that would eventually lead him to live in the United States.

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How I Found Solace in Nabokov's Speak, Memory during the Pandemic

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How I Found Solace in Nabokov's Speak, Memory during the Pandemic

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he early months of Covid-19 were marked by a ubiquitous question in my social circle of fellow writers, AKA the Least Essential Workers: how will this affect books? Friends on Zoom cited 9/11 literature and debated adding face masks to their characters. I was distracted by a more important question: How will books affect me?

I found fault with everything I picked up. John M Barry's The Great Influenza was too on the nose. Did people in 1918 form book clubs around Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year? (If Barry answers this, let me know in the comments.) Even novels, my usual refuge, seemed irresponsibly escapist. I abandoned books after 10 pages and took long walks while mainlining news podcasts. To my credit, I did finish reading a few friends' novels published in the summer. I hope they read this and appreciate the depths of my generosity.

My listlessness ended after I pulled Vladimir Nabokov's autobiography Speak, Memory from my bookshelf, more or less at random. I first read it 10 years ago and quickly saw the wisdom in the author's oft-quoted line, "One cannot read a book: one can only reread it." Nabokov's remembrances granted reprieve from the new abnormal and - crucially - guidance on how to navigate it.

Nabokovians, I feel your groans. The last thing old Vladimir desired was anyone drawing lifestyle advice from his work. In my defense, literary propriety felt especially flexible after bleach-wiping groceries.

Speak, Memory collects magazine pieces originally written for Harper's and the New Yorker, when Nabokov needed cash to supplement his meager teaching income. (Literary greats: they're just like us!) The book was revised at Lake Geneva's Montreux Palace, where Vladimir and Véra lived after Lolita's success provided a comfortable sinecure. Nabokov stayed at the hotel from 1961 until his death in 1977.

Montreux was self-isolation par excellence. The Nabokovs entertained no friends, never went to the movies, tipped everyone well, and rarely left town. For the introverts, his daily schedule, outlined in a 1975 profile by James Salter for People magazine(!), sounds downright heavenly. The grounds were Edenic, too. Martin Amis, making his pilgrimage in 1981, called Montreux a "suspended playground ... I thought of the lost and innocuous parklands of an idealised boyhood."

As for the autobiography itself, nearly every chapter resonates in 2020. There's jingoistic cousin Yuri, whose callow opinions of Tolstoy echo the isolationism of Fox News-addicted relatives. An aside on Heinrich von Kleist's infatuation with a prepubescent ancestor of Nabokov's - which, of course - sent me to Kleist's 1810 novella Michael Kohlhaas (recently translated by Michael Hofmann) and its timely satire of state corruption and vigilantism. And for writers experiencing self-doubt, remember that Nabokov's first book was so maligned his teacher set aside class time to sarcastically quote it at length.

As one might expect the most salutary bits are Nabokov's writings on nature. For much of his boyhood the family summered at an estate 50 miles outside St Petersburg, roughly half the distance of my Hudson Valley home from New York City. The swoon-worthy descriptions of his verdant surroundings helped me see my own with new eyes. I had taken to spending the twilight hour on my deck - what else is there to do? - and a paragraph on the slow-setting sun ("a state of infinite vesperal suspense") cast an enlightened, almost cinematic quality to the routine. The prose also renewed my faith in language. No surprise there, but much needed in the face of Trump's serial abuses of grammar and sense.

When greater presidential abuses provoked despair, I returned to Nabokov's chapter on butterflies. He ends it with a surprising admission: "I confess I do not believe in time ... And the highest enjoyment of timelessness - in a landscape selected at random - is when I stand among rare butterflies and their food plants. This is ecstasy, and behind the ecstasy is something else, which is hard to explain. It is like a momentary vacuum into which rushes all that I love."

Mind you, he wrote this after Bolsheviks seized his property and his inheritance, after family members were sent to the camps, and after he and Véra lived for decades in exile. I don't know when our own reality will improve or when the mass suffering will lessen. I do know where to find a bit of solace, and a key to my own momentary vacuum.
Ryan Chapman is the author of the novel Riots I Have Known and lives in Kingston, New York

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How I found solace in Nabokov's Speak, Memory during the pandemic

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he early months of Covid-19 were marked by a ubiquitous question in my social circle of fellow writers, AKA the Least Essential Workers: how will this affect books? Friends on Zoom cited 9/11 literature and debated adding face masks to their characters. I was distracted by a more important question: How will books affect me?

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I did not realize that versions of almost every chapter had been published in American magazines in the late 40's/early 50's, primarily The New Yorker, but also The Atlantic  and Harpers.

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The first paragraph of chapter one is one of the greatest ever written in English --- prose that is as rich, compressed, modulated, and moving as any work of poetry.  It is both a masterful statement of the themes of the book and a bid for immortality.  He is showing that he can out-Proust Proust in his profound engagement the problems of time, memory, the past, and death.

The image of the not-yet-occupied baby carriage as having the "smug encroaching air of a coffin" (369) is as bizarre and chilling as anything from the metaphysical poets.  And it contracts in one image his entire point about the "two eternities of darkness" that make birth and death mirror images of each other --- in the imagination at least --- the only place where time is fully reversible.

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From the Wikipedia article on "Speak, Memory":

The book's opening line, "The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness," is arguably a paraphrase of Thomas Carlyle's "One Life; a little gleam of Time between two Eternities," found in Carlyle's 1840 lecture "The Hero as Man of Letters," published in On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and The Heroic in History in 1841. There is also a similar concept expressed in On the nature of things by the Roman Poet Lucretius.[citation needed] The line is parodied at the start of Little Wilson and Big God, the autobiography of the English writer Anthony Burgess. "If you require a sententious opening, here it is. Wedged as we are between two eternities of idleness, there is no excuse for being idle now."

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padlet audio file 238815df 9aa5 4d2a bebf ef797f7989a6

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Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov (1870-1922) - Nabokov's father

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This is another example of Nabokov in a self-consciously proustian mode --- another all time masterpiece of a paragraph, bookending the famous first one.

The image of his father being tossed aloft and caught by the peasants in celebration of his magnanimous gesture as "the good barin" is rendered in poetic and spiritual terms, but also shadowed by premonitions of history and politics.  The "primly pessimistic" governess comments pointedly "Un jour ils vont le laisser tomber"  [one day they will let him fall] -- which of course they will, once the Russian Revolution gets underway.  The tradition of tossing the "good barin" in the air against his own will takes on ominous overtones --- it's an expression of appreciation and acceptance of the class system and the ancien regime, while at the same time implying the power of the people to "let them fall."  The paragraph too falls, from the lofty heights of the father "reclining, as if for good, against the cobalt blue of the summer noon" to the final image of the "open coffin."  Note:  Nabokov's father, a liberal reformist politicians, would be murdered in Berlin in 1922 by Tsarist assassins.

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You all know me, but I thought I'd invite each participant to say a few words about themselves to the others.

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The author discusses his "case of colored hearing"

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The author discusses his "case of colored hearing"

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Nabokov begins Chapter two again in high Proustian mode --- with a kind of poetic phenomenology of the contents and operations of his own mind.  Given his enormous ego and pretentions to absolute mastery as a writer, there is a touching vulnerability in what he reveals here about the burdens and terrors of his own hyperactive imagination.  The "hallucinations" are both auditory and visual.  The auditory:  "a kind of one-sided conversation going on in an adjacent section of my mind, quite independently from the actual trend of my thoughts" (380).  As for the visual ones, David Lynch please note:  "They are often grotesque. I am pestered by roguish profiles, by some coarse-featured and florid dwarf with a swelling nostril or ear" (380).

We can still hear his pride in self-possession, however, in his insistence that he looks upon his own "mild hallucinations" "with interest, with amusement, seldom with admiration or disgust" (380).  He calls them "silly" and that even while experiencing them, Nabokov insists, "he [meaning himself] is still master of his senses" (380).

And while Nabokov's jihad against Freud is not specifically referenced here, I believe it is in the subtext:  this production of the imagination is no "royal road" to personal enlightenment,  no cause for alarm, panic, or recourse to analysis.  It holds no master key to the subject's innermost truth -- it is simply an amusing spectacle to be taken in, described in the most vivid and precise language possible, and appreciated an epiphenomenon of an exquisitely active, sensitive, and well-stocked mind.

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Another spectacular passage from a section that focuses on young Vladimir's relationship with his mother.  She is credited throughout as his inspiration and guide in an aesthetic existence.  We learn on p. 382 that she was a fellow "synesthete" when it came the earlier described phenomenon of "colored hearing."

Here the action is narrated from an impossible position -- the young boy in the throes of fevered delirium is somehow able to perceive every detail of his mother's journey to Treumann's stationary shop --- down to the clacking scrotum of the horse pulling her sleigh.  And of course the paragraph ending in the middle of page 384 is clearly an homage to Proust:  ". . . and as I write this, the touch of reticulated tenderness that my lips use to feel when I kissed her veiled cheek comes back to me --- flies back to me with a shout of joy out of the snow-blue, blue-windowed (the curtains are not yet drawn) past."

I would also posit that the war against Freud continues sub rosa in his revelation that the gift was a giant pencil "four feet long and correspondingly thick" (384). The master of diabolical chess problems is trying to flush out the Freudians from their hiding places --- DARING them to call this giant pencil "a phallic symbol" and to reduce his gorgeously-embroidered descriptions of his intimate relationship with his mother as the "desire for the mother, " etc.

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Another lovely and nearly self-contained set piece on "the Russian sport of hodit' po gribi (looking for mushrooms) continues the reflections on the narrator's mother.  Much of this section illustrates the principles of literary composition laid out in Nabokov's Lectures on Literature --- especially the idea that the writer and ideal reader should have the imagination of the artist combined with the precise observational skills of the trained scientist. Nabokov's background in biology comes through here in perhaps pedantically specific discussion of the different types of mushrooms to be found on the Vyrna estate.  Still it's in service of a celebration of the lost and magical Russian landscape of his childhood:  "Its shady recesses would then harbor the special boletic ree, which makes a Russian's nostrils diate -- a dark, dank, satisfying blend of damp moss, rich earth, rotting leaves" (390).

The final passage on his mother's mushroom-hunting treasure is curiously studded, again, with ominous premonitions of the future disaster and exile. The mushrooms themselves are "bundled away by a servant to a place she knew nothing about, to a doom that did not interest her" (391). Still bearing bits and pieces of the Russian soil they've been ripped from, the prefigure the soon-to-be-exiled family. Even more so the final image: "And a tiny caterpillar would be there, too, measuring, like a child's finger and thumb, the rim oft he table, and every now and then stretching upward to grope, in vain, for the shrub from which it had been dislodged" (391).

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A brilliant character sketch in miniature of the "bleary, incredibly wrinkled old woman (born a slave around 1830) with the small face of a melancholy tortoise and big shuffling feet" (391).   This senile old servant, who is allowed to believe that she has the real keys to the larder, reminded me of Felicite in Flaubert's short story "Un Couer Simple" -- the old lady who clings to her moldy stuffed parrot as her sole connection to the world. Nabokov's old woman is described as "Sole mistress of her moldy and remote little kingdom, which she thought was the real one (we would have starved had it been so), she was followed by the mocking glances of lackeys and maids as she steadily plodded through long corridors to store away half an apple of a couple of broken Petit-Beurre biscuits she had found on a plate" (392). Like Flaubert's Felicite, there is something sublime and pathetic in her --- one of the many exiled monarchs living in a kingdom of their imagination, and doing the artists work of hoarding the smallest crumbs of the true and lost kingdom of memory.

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Nabokov introduces a curious elliptical cut towards the end of chapter two when recounting the story of his and his brother's disobedience to his mother on a Christmas morning.  They were told not to open their Christmas stockings until they were in her presence, but examined the stocking nevertheless, opened the gifts, then crudely re-wrapped them and pretended to be surprised when they opened the stockings in from of their mother (393).  Here is what follows:

"after observing us for a moment, our audience [his mother] burst into tears.  A decade passed.  World War One started.  A crowd of patriots and my uncle Ruka stoned the German Embassy.  St. Petersburg was sunk to Petrograd against all rules of nomenclatorial priority.  Beethoven turned out to be Dutch.  The newsreels showed photogenic explosions, the spasm of a cannon, Poincare in his leathern leggings, bleak puddles, the poor little Tsarevich in Circassian uniform with dagger and cartridges, his tall sisters so dowdily dressed, long railway trains crammed with troops (393).

"A decade passed.  World War One started."

Probably two of the shortest sentences Nabokov ever wrote!  What a quick cut! there--- but why?

What does World War One have to do with this painfully personal memory of his mother crying upon learning that her little sons had deceived her over opening a Christmas stocking?

The connection between lying and the war --- in terms of wartime propaganda --- is stressed when he offhandedly remarks that [according to wartime Russian propagand, one assumes] "Beethoven turned out to be Dutch."  And St. Petersburg is crudely rewrapped by patriot Russian propagandists as "Petrograd" -- "against all rules of nomenclatorial priority" (393).

Still, I think the most important effect achieved here is balance between a happy and secure domestic life (where boyish naughtiness is the worst crime known) and the tragic history that stands just outside the blissful family circle, waiting to destroy everything.  The war intrudes into the domestic narrative suddenly, violently, relentlessly, and without warning.  For this memoir it is the "expulsion from Paradise" moment, with exile and personal and national tragedy dominating the future.

By connecting the two incidents is he imitating the thought process of a child, who somehow in the depths of his mind connects the minor sin of lying to mama and her unexpectedly intense reaction with the end of their domestic paradise?

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Another subtle elliptical cut of enormous consequences

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Another subtle elliptical cut of enormous consequences

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Bottom of page 394:

With the story now shifted into high speed, we are suddenly past World War One and the entire family, having lost their estate and everything in the Russian Revolution, is in exile --- the parents in Berlin and Nabokov and his brother at Cambridge.

We get a brief description of the parents' "eminently bourgeois" Berlin apartment as the boys visit their parents from the UK.  Then this:  "On the night of March 28, 1922, around ten o'clock, in the living room where as usual my mother was reclining on the red-plush corner couch, I happened to be reading to her Blok's verse on Italy----had just got to the end of the little poem about Florence, which Blok compares to the delicate, smoky bloom of an iris, and she was saying over her knitting, "Yes, yes, Florence does look like a dimniy iris, how true!  I remember---"  when the telephone rang."

"After 1923, when she moved to Prague. . ."  (394)

What is going on here?  What is the phone call?  And why is the exact moment of the phone call remembered with such precise detail?  If the phone call is so important, why is not discussed in the text? And why the new jump cut -- a year now-- to 1923 with his mother in Prague?

March 28, 1922 was the day Nabokov's father was assassinated in Berlin by Tsarist terrorists while attending a conference:

Wikpedia's entry describes V.D. Nabokov's murder as follows:

"Nabokov attended a CD [Russian Constitutional Democrat Party] political conference in Berlin on 28 March 1922. During the proceedings, Pyotr Shabelsky-Bork and Sergey Taboritsky approached the stage singing the Tsarist national anthem and then opened fire on liberal politician and publisher Pavel Milyukov. In response, Nabokov jumped off the stage and wrestled the gunman down to the floor. Taboritsky then shot Nabokov twice, killing him instantly. The assailants failed even to wound their intended target Milyukov."

So Nabokov leads us to perhaps the most important single moment in his life --- the moment his family learns of his father's murder---and leaves a massive gap.  We get the serenity of the emigre apartment, the dutiful visiting sons, one reading Blok's poem on Venice to his mother, the shared appreciation for Blok's apt simile comparing Venice to the "smoky bloom of an iris"; we get all this, with the description of the moment before the cataclysm drawn out to the limit.  It's a pattern in this memoir ---as the author dwells on the sweet and precise details of intimate and familial pleasure as a way of holding off---through imagination at least --- the brutalities of history.

What is left out tells us a great deal about Nabokov's attitude towards personal tragedy.  We got the mother's tears after the Christmas stocking incident, but not after the father's murder.  No intimate family details of how the news was received, what happened next, etc.  Just another discrete quick cut to 1923, with his mother a widow who spends final emigre days playing cards with lady companions: "on her finger is two marriage rings---her own and my father's, which being too large for her, is fastened to hers by a bit of black thread" (395).

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Pg. 399: "After divorcing her first husband, Justizrat Graun, the composer's son, in 1795, [Elisabeth Fischer] married the minor poet Christian August von Stägemann, and was the 'motherly friend,' as my German source puts it, of a much better-known writer, Heinrich von Kleist (1777-1811), who, at thirty-three, had fallen passionately in love with her twelve-year-old daughter Hedwig Marie (later von Olfers)."

Was this an inspiration for Lolita?

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I had a lot of distractions recently, so it took me a while to get through chapter 3.  Although it has some amusing anecdotes, it's definitely not one of my favorites so far.  Their are fewer proustian rhapsodies and sumptuous descriptive passages.  Nabokov here is mostly in what I will call "Gore Vidal" mode ---- filling us in on the various branches of his aristocratic family tree with lots of gossip and name dropping.   He piles on names and dates with pedantic precision that make it an overwhelming and confusing experience for the non-genealogically-obsessed.  But that seems to be part of the point:  When you are a member of his class, part of your charge is to remember and honor ancestors as well as ancestral estates and holdings and to continually burnish the honor and reputation of the family name, demonstrating its centuries of importance to European politics and culture.

The Nabokovs, the von Korffs, etc. are members of the European elite going back centuries and Nabokov is eager to demonstrate the depth and detail of his genealogical knowledge.  Of course they are always crossing paths with history and or the most famous and important people in European politics and culture.

We learn, for example,  that Heinrich von Kleist was turned away by one of his great-grandmothers  from saying adieu before heading off to complete a suicide pact because it was "laundry day" (399). We also get the story of young Pushkin arranging and then calling off one of his many duels on the family's Batavo estate (408).  You can read the complete scorecard of Pushkin's duel's here:  https://rinatim.com/2016/12/03/alexander-pushkins-duels/ .  Spoiler -- most end in cancellation -- until French officer George d'Anthes mortally wounds Pushkin in 1837.

There is also a full discussion of "Le Chemin de Pendu"  ("path of the hanged one") near the Batavo estate (see map on p. 368).  The "hanged one" is  Kondraty Ryleyev  (or Rileev, as Nabokov styles it) - Russian romantic poet, intellectual, dissident and leader of the Decembrist coup attempt or 1825.

We also get a fairly throwaway claim that a baroness in his family tree "in 1791, lent her passport and her brand-new custom-made traveling coach. . . . to the [French] royal family for their [unsuccessful] escape to Varennes" --- a key turning point in the French Revolution (401).

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Every high school kid today knows that Alexander Pushkin was shot at a duel and died in 1837, at the age of 37. Dueling was a sign of that generation, but studying the full list of Pushkin's duels, strikes me with awareness of how incredibly reckless were men at that time. Here is the list of Alexander Pushkin's duels.

1816. Pushkin (aged 17) summoned his uncle Paul Hannibal to a duel.
The cause: during a ball, Paul lugged away Pushkin's girlfriend, miss Loshakova.
The result: duel canceled.

1817. Pushkin summoned his friend Pyotr Kaverin to a duel.
The cause: Kaverin's facetious poems.
The result: duel canceled.

1819. Pushkin summoned a poet Kondratiy Ryleev to a duel.
The cause: Ryleev told a joke about Pushkin at a high society gathering.
The result: duel canceled.

1819. Pushkin was summoned to a duel by his friend Wilhelm Küchelbecker.
The cause: funny verses about Küchelbecker, namely the passage about "feeling Küchelbeckery and sickening".
The result: Wilhelm shot at Alexander, but missed, Alexander refused to shoot.

1819. Pushkin summoned Modest Korf, a Ministry of justice worker, to a duel.
The cause: Pushkin's drunk manservant pestered Korf's servant, who finally beat Pushkin's servant up.
Result: duel canceled.

1819. Pushkin summoned Major Denisecich to a duel.
The cause: Pushkin behaved provocatively in theater: he yelled at actors, so Denisevich reprimanded Pushkin.
The result: duel canceled.

1820. Pushkin summoned Fedor Orlov and Alexey Alexeev to a duel.
The cause: Orlov and Alexeev reprimanded Pushkin for being drunk and trying to play pool, which disturbed the others.
The result: duel canceled.

1821. Pushkin summoned Deguilly, a French military officer, to a duel.
The cause: An argument, and a quarrel under unclear circumstances.
The result: duel canceled.

1822. Pushkin was summoned to a duel by lieutenant colonel Semyon Starov.
The cause: a conflict occurred because of a restaurant orchestra at a casino, where both indulged in gambling.
The result: each of them shot the other, but both missed.

1822. Pushkin summoned a 65-year-old state councilor Ivan Lanov to a duel.
The cause: a quarrel during a holiday dinner.
The result: duel canceled.

1822. Pushkin summoned a Moldavian nobleman Todor Balsh, the host of the house where Pushkin was staying during his Moldavia trip.
The cause: Maria, Balsh's wife, responded to Pushkin's question in an impolite manner.
The result: both shot, but missed.

1822. Pushkin summons a Bessarabian landowner Skartla Pruncul to a duel.
The cause: Prunkul, as well as Pushkin, were seconds at someone else's duel; they could not agree upon the rules of the duel.
The result: duel canceled.

1822. Pushkin summons Severin Pototsky to a duel.
The cause: discussion about serfdom at the dinner table.
The result: duel canceled.

1822. Pushkin was summoned to a duel by a captain Rutkowski.
The cause: Alexander Pushkin did not believe that a hailstone can weigh up to 3 pounds (which is possible) and made fun of the retired captain.
The result: duel canceled.

1822. Pushkin summoned a Chisinau tycoon Inglezi to a duel.
The cause: Pushkin coveted his wife, a gypsy woman Ludmila Shekora.
The result: duel canceled.

1822. Pushkin was summoned to a duel by a General Staff warrant officer Alexander Zubov. The cause: Pushkin had caught Zubov on cheating during a game of cards.
The result: Zubov shot but missed Pushkin, then Pushkin refused to shoot.

1823. Pushkin summoned a young writer Ivan Rousseau to a duel. The cause: Pushkin's personal dislike for this person.
The result: duel canceled.

1826. Pushkin summoned Nikolay Turgenev, one of the leaders of the Union of Welfare, a member of the Northern Society, to a duel.
The cause: Tugrenev did not approve of Pushkin's poems, especially, his epigrams.
The result: duel canceled.

1827. Pushkin was summoned to a duel by an artillery officer Vladimir Solomirskiy
The cause: the officer's female friend, a Sofia, to whom Pushkin was personally attracted.
The result: duel canceled.

1828. Pushkin summoned the Minister of Education Alexander Golitsyn to a duel.
The cause: Pushkin wrote a bold epigram, so the Minister arranged a rough interrogation, which Pushkin found humiliating.
The result: duel canceled.

1828. Pushkin summoned Lagrenée, a French Embassy Secretary in St.Petersburg.
The cause: an unknown girl at a ball.
The result: duel canceled.

1829. Pushkin summoned a Foreign Office worker, Mr. Hvostov to a duel.
The cause: Hvostov was dissatisfied by Pushkin's epigrams, in particular, by the fact that Pushkin compared Khvostov with a pig.
The result: duel canceled.

1836. Pushkin summoned Nikolay Repin to a duel.
The cause: Repin was dissatisfied with Pushkin's poems about him. The result: duel canceled.

1836. Pushkin summoned a Foreign Office worker Semyon Hlustin to a duel.
The cause: Hlustin did not approve of Pushkin's poetry.
The result: duel canceled.

1836. Pushkin summoned Vladimir Sologub to a duel.
The cause: Sologub's unflattering remarks about the poet's wife, Natalia.
The result: duel canceled.

1836-37. Pushkin summoned a French officer George d'Anthès.
The cause: an anonymous letter, which stated that Pushkin's wife had been cheating on her husband with d'Anthès.
The result: Pushkin wounded by d'Anthès, and died two days later, on January 29, 1837.

Sources:

Вадим Алёшин. Список дуэлей Пушкина, ЖЖ. http://vakin.livejournal.com/1427046.html?utm_source=fbsharing&utm_medium=social

George Steiner. Pushkin's date with death. https://www.theguardian.com/theobserver/1999/mar/14/featuresreview.review1

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Every high school kid today knows that Alexander Pushkin was shot at a duel and died in 1837, at the age of 37. Dueling was a sign of that generation, but studying the full list of Pushkin's duels, strikes me with awareness of how incredibly reckless were men at that time.

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1905 - Childhood in the countryside while first Russian Revolution rages

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1905 - Childhood in the countryside while first Russian Revolution rages

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Mademoiselle, The Enormous Swiss Governess

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Mademoiselle, The Enormous Swiss Governess

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Nabokov on sleep, "the most moronic fraternity in the world"

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Nabokov on sleep, "the most moronic fraternity in the world"