VLADIMIR NABOKOV: THE EMIGRE

...Far, far from it, a world from it: it is a language evolved in the spirit of high play...

...Above all, somehow to keep the culture alive and flourishing was of supreme importance: Soviet power in its early years seemed precarious, even after the Civil War, and all the more so when, fed by exuberant rumor, it was regarded from afar by dreaming eyes...

...Inevitably, one thinks of Conrad, Beckett, a scattering of lesser writers...

...But it didn't matter much because Russia was with us...

...How many writers can live forever on a petrified stock of images and a long memory of childhood...

...of language, culandscape...

...We represented Russia...

...The pain was searing and lifelong, there can be no doubt of that, whatever the feeling of this unabashed White reactionary toward the despoliations of the Soviets...

...Not until the Mid-Thirties, in Nabokov's case, had all hope fled...

...Criticism of Conrad and Beckett, though it must, of course, somewhere reckon with the displacement of language, neither begins nor ends with it...

...their ranks were not replenished...

...it becomes quaint "classical" in its own time, archaic...

...and therefore the perfect amber for the enchanter...

...Gut of that vividly remembered and elaborately imagined land the novels came...

...it becomes its own time, e, or linguistic a colony which at least an insh colonies, say, English colonies of North America or, in a very different way, India...

...Not until Nabokov's case, : the cruel point, of a brute fact nsplanted culture 1 dies visibly day id their audience not replenished...

...As the inheritors and custodians of the language and culture, the White emigres were certain they had carried the high civilization away into exile, leaving behind a crude mockery, barren tundra, a debased bureaucratic gibberish, some dreadful kitsch called "social realism," a cultural void...

...or to French, if his fate had made France the country of his exile...

...he was of course superbly, disdainfully (not to say alarmingly) competent...

...he died there some months ago...

...And fatuously at times: he does not so much dismiss Freud and all his works, for example, as blot him and them out...

...Nearly twenty years later he returned to Europe, to a hotel in Switzerland, supremely the place and condition of exile, to live out his life...

...Dmitri Nabokov, his father, was a distinguished intellectual in his own right—Minister of Justice, a professor of Jurisprudence, a leading Liberal, above all a deeply humane and civilized man, the best of Old Russia...

...No one who has not "experienced this feeling can really understand its . . . tragic aspect . . . the sadness and bitterness of my situation...

...French was the language of the dinner-table...

...We were Russia...

...lot grow up into are of their parat of their hosts zan writers, and he children are the most terrible ' in two laninguage and culrom the motherwither...

...The nostalgia I have cherished all these years," he wrote in his autobiography, Speak, Memory (the revised version of Conclusive Evidence), "is a hypertrophied sense of lost childhood...

...Language ossifies and quickly...

...No: in its German exile, emigre Russian, reflecting the hermetic irreality of cafe and salon, could feed off itself only, a static, rigidified, fixed store: a schoolman's language, turning in upon and exhausting itself, addressing a diminishing coterie of ghosts...

...There was never a question of linguistic competence in any of the usual senses and no need to "change conradically...

...But his family had emigrated to Germany in consequence of the Revolution...

...The language Nabokov may be said to have invented in order to become, not an American writer but a writer in America writing for an American audience, is a variant, of English, a kind of dialect meant to be written rather than spoken in a tiny though majestic principality presided over by the prince who is its only subject and who in his splendid isolation may be said to play language as he might play chess with an imagined adversary—or, if he were musical (Nabokov, in fact, was tone-deaf and hated music), play the harpsichord, or net and transfix butterflies, or cultivate rare blossoms in inhospitable soil: solitary, regal amusements...

...Yet the cruel point, which has the force of a brute fact of nature, is that a transplanted culture is a doomed one which dies visibly day by day by day...

...it was a matter of fashioning a literary language, his own, out of English...

...children in exile did not grow up into the language and culture of their parents but rather into that of their hosts (unless, as Puerto Rican writers, and not only they, say, the children are destined to live under the most terrible of curses: "illiteracy in two languages...

...at the same time there is another: in its migration from life to art that pain was transmuted into the melancholy—that stricken, permeating sadness—of which he is the great aristocrat and master in our time...

...Berlin became the center of (White) Russian culture, providing its writers with a vigorous, turbulent, disputatious literary atmosphere —with a critical, sophisticated audience, periodicals, publishing firms: with, that is, the possibility of surviving as a Russian writer...

...or a manner of utterance contrived by a prodigiously gifted, inspired child in that lost kingdom of which he is the necromancer...

...It hovers like a mist over his work, like a vapor across its landscapes: the sounds, sights, smells, sensations of the magical kingdom suspended in memory, the very feel of things past when the world was harmonious, whole, vibrant, glowing, softly suffused, inviolate...

...an art-object created by a master artificer...

...A more acute sense of the torment is evident in a letter to his wife written around the same time...

...What had we lost...

...Multilingualism in aristocratic St...

...In May, 1940, Nabokov left Vichy France (not a moment too soon: Mme...

...Competence" applied to Nabokov is a ludicrously inappropriate term...

...magic childhood...

...I think," Nabokov told his biographer Andrew Field,* "that in the middle thirties we had just given up the idea of going back...

...VLADIMIR NABOKOV: SAUL MALOFF guage of Pushkin and Gogol...

...The language of his American period—arcane, playful, recondite, stylized, exuberant, eccentric—is as unmistakably his own as that of any other memorably original stylist, a glistening rich baroque chamber orchestra of strings, woodwinds, and clever, surprising brass...

...these eventually live lives of their own, develop in profoundly original ways a language that looks like but isn't that of its sources and indeed may, precisely because it is released from cultural pieties, obligations, the burden of tradition, evolve a language strangely wondrous, rich, eccentric, wild, infinitely inventive, resourceful, expansive, aberrant: rhetorical, excessive, even grotesque...

...Before he turned novelist, Nabokov was a poet and had already made a small name for himself...

...What had we lost...

...but poetry, especially poetry, doesn't travel well across the frontiers of language, culture, weather and landscape...

...Nabokov is Jewish) for America and his final literary emigration...

...but: "The English language in this light is illusion and ersatz...

...Dolefully he adds (and the pun is pure Nabokov): "I am too old to change conradically...

...This language, or linguistic culture, is not that of a colony which is itself a nation, or at least an incipient one—the Spanish colonies, say, of Latin America...

...Wildly bored" in a strange city during a lecture tour he goes for a walk and is "pleasantly pierced by a lightning bolt of inspiration," and feels "a passionate desire to write, and write in Russian" but he cautions himself that he "must not...

...There is of course something charmingly self-serving in mis aesthetic pronouncement: enchantment is not the only thing that matters in literature, though it is the essential quality of a kind of literature...

...Petersburg, it should be noted, was common in families such as his...

...The Mother Russia they dreamed of, imagined, wrote of, as they couldn't help knowing, however much they buoyed up their flagging spirits with euphoric reports and wistful rumors—that Russia, their Russia, lay shimmering in the irrecoverable past, violated beyond recognition by the usurping barbarians, the principal one not even a Russian but a Georgian, an assassin, a peasant rogue and unlettered vandal...

...In art as in life Nabokov was a dandy, a fop, a swell: an incomparable choreographer of the minor emotions...

...The decision has already been made...

...nor indeed, is it a matter of major interest (as against mere curiosity...

...Russian was the sacred language of the old rite which he "must not" and in any case could not use again...

...For a iter Paris, could lished scale as a etersburg, though vith it the deadly rorld into a salon, : said for writing known audience, writer will see in Above all, someulture alive and supreme imporin its early years en after the Civil ire so when, fed it was regarded ng eyes...

...and in that sense the Cambridge, then the Berlin, then the Paris years constituted a kind of serial emigration...

...The Nabokovs were more than merely rich, widely-traveled, Angloand Francophile...

...Among ligres (as among Florida Cubans) r past the bounds ation...

...One is always conscious of Nabokov's language, always, its odd phrasings, willful diction, unexpected cadences, sportive nuances and word-play: its constant astonishments...

...But in that remark Nabokov, clearly, is talking about himself and his part: his images and the complex emotions of regret, longing, yearning, the pervasive floating sadness which occupy the center of his art...

...If Aestheticism, the cult of art, can be said to require of its priests an exclusive fealty, then Nabokov was, as it were, an internal emigre before history converted metaphor to fact...

...For a time, Berlin, and later Paris, could function on a diminished scale as a kind of transposed Petersburg, though such a scale carries with it the deadly menace of turning a world into a salon, whatever else may be said for writing for a visible, familiar, known audience, the very persons the writer will see in the cafe the next day...

...In 1942, adrift in the American academic world and on the lecture circuit, which would take him to strange siberias indeed, he wrote to a Russian friend mournfully and half-jestingly of his "absolutely tragic situation," a Russian writer bereft of country and language who, having achieved a major oeuvre, was a stranger, unknown and unacknowledged, in his newfoundland...

...Russian the lansaul maloff, a novelist and critic, is now working on a political memoir of the Fifties, the darkest side...

...he had no choice if he was to continue to write...

...Language jvered root and Hi...

...Moreover, language and culture die—or, cut off from the mothering stream, atrophy, wither...

...Moreover, another and passionate impulse must be taken into account: there could be no vital relation to a homeland which the emigres had not merely left but repudiated with contempt and loathing...

...severed root and branch from its earth...

...Yet the pain he felt as a dispossessed citizen cast out of the beloved homeland and condemned to outer darkness is one thing...

...the English colonies 6 January 1978: 18 le young Pasolini it at the creation...

...These are the emotions of an exquisite, a connoisseur of delicate, elusive, tenuous feelings caught at the instant of their disappearance—the lepidopterist (Nabokov, it doesn't need saying, was a distinguished one) catchCommonweal: 19 ing at its momentary height and fixing immortally the butterfly's beauty before it can, like Lola, decay into age, ugliness, death...

...and imagines an endless melancholy procession of refugees in an age of involuntarily displaced populations: deracination, not as a spiritual and psychic condition, and surely not as material for literature, but as a stark fact of life...

...a few sounds and smells, the sun at the end of a leafy avenue, the backdrop of a ?Nabokov: His Life in Part, by Andrew Field (Viking, $15...

...Unlike the real and authentic past, it is all an illusion and ersatz, like English, like America...

...In saying that from the beginning of his career as a writer while still in his teens and still a poet, he was a "stateless" person, a "cosmopolitan" traveling from realm to realm on a Nansen passport, I do not intend to dishonor or in the smallest degree slight the depth and poignancy of his loss of Russia...

...what came after did not resonate in his imagination—the actual contemporary world scarcely exists in his work despite the garish neon lights and squalid motels strung across the raw landscape of his most famous novel...

...s have to be on tfESTERBECK, JR...

...his kind...

...The pathos tolls like a bell: for most of the writers of the emigration everything had been lost, the vital, nurturing connection...

...rilHE literary phenomenon is not all •*¦ that rare, that of more or less voluntary self-exile from the mother tongue and native culture, and the adoption, gladly or exigently, of a language other than the one in which the writer first said bread, milk, earth, water...

...It is entirely fitting that a great fabulist and shaman of literature should have thought of art as magic, of the artist as conjuror: in 1946 he wrote to his then-friend Edmund Wilson, "The longer I live the more I become convinced that the only thing that matters in literature is the (more or less irrational) shamanstvo of a book, i.e., that the good writer is first of all an enchanter...

...No doubt had he stayed in England after his Cambridge days were over, he would have turned much sooner to English as his literary language...

...the language of the consummate emigre, a courtly monarchial, archaic language, ceremonial, contemptuously graceful in a grand manner and in the grand manner not quite serious...

...As he conceived it, the world he was cast into by history had been overrun by barbarians...

...Among the White Russian emigres (as among the Taiwan Chinese or Florida Cubans) the dream persisted far past the bounds of reasonable expectation...

...An artificial language which unlocks the gates to the preternaturally green fields of memory...

...It can be said Vladimir formed his first words trilingually: an English nanny and the family's English culture shaped one...

...Literally: writers and their audience died...

...Nabokov's English is not British and certainly not American, nor is it a masterful foreigner's English (as Conrad's is), a laboriously, triumphantly learned language faintly but unmistakably redolent of midnight oil, the sweat stains of parsed sentences and conjugated verbs still barely visible, the accent audible...

...The late Vladimir Nabokov is a special, not to say unique, case: a major writer in one language who, in middle-age and out of necessity, became a major writer in another . . . and who, on his own (highly plausible) supposition might well have become a major writer in a third...

...he dismissed the whole of it out of hand, imperiously...