Nabokov and the Platonic Quest:

...In Camera Obscura, Albinus’ sleazy Margot becomes a tigerish parody of the Dietrich Fraulein...

...Humbert’s first night with Lolita and his clash with Quilty...

...Not that the hunting days are over: Has anyone seen a copy of Despair lately, or of Sie kommt— kommt sie...

...Not, as the cover of the paperback issue of Nabokov’s Dozen—retitled Spring in Fialta—suggests, a “strange and haunting affair” of nymphets: “She would be ten in November...

...and such is M’sieur Pierre, executioner of Invitation to a Beheading, whose efforts to misdirect Cincinnatus C.’s passion to society’s ersatz “brotherhood” and “beauty” begins with his victim’s final isolation from his world in prison...

...The vitality of Nabokov’s novels arises from their variegated dramatization of this Platonic quest...

...For, seeking butterflies, Nabokov’s heroes seem capable, at best, of finding only models: and, as Nabokov himself asks, Can one marry a model...

...Well, things have changed since Lolita flashed to the tops of the best-seller lists and glossy Pnin also fluttered thereabouts...

...Or, perhaps, as we are caught in it...

...For the hero’s dilemma is not tragic or comic as we feel or think, but both as he is irrevocably human and caught in an impossible world...

...For their snatch of heaven, Nabokov’s heroes turn to the third, the female, member of their eternal triangles, trying to find somewhere in the flesh that Beatrician ideal in whom they can invest their spirits...

...Of course, they are short-changed...

...Cincinnatus C.’s Eves—mother, wife, child—all desert him without ever having known allegiance to his Rebellion...

...The terrain of conflict in Nabokov’s novels thus becomes the mind of man, in which individual consciousness, in despite of the impending executioner’s blade, strikes toward its ideal through the morass of conventionality...

...Rather, it is the very essence of the satiric technique of a writer one of whose first literary efforts was a translation of Alice in Wonderland, but whose closest literary kin in this century is certainly Kafka...

...Again in the remotest Slavic alcove of his shop, Aurelian Lepidus slides out a case containing a rare Cyrillic “Sirin”—pseudonymously Nabokov of the emigre past...

...For if we shun the hero’s manias and perversions, we cannot help admiring his heroic commitment—till the death— to an attempt to step through that “distant door...

...and Humbert’s elusive nymphet—is she more than his own imaginative animation of an adolescent Raggedy Ann?—runs off with Quilty...

...The trade winds are blowing from Nabokov-land—what other bright, elusive specimens, floating in from the Berlin-Paris days, will the publishers net us...

...Whatever they will be—perhaps a reissue of Bend Sinister or a translation of The Luzhin Defense (Zaschchita Luzhina)—they will probably display a concern which has become discernible as the crux of Nabokov’s fiction...

...For at another level—beyond the idealist’s battle to “strike through the mask,” beyond the tragi-comedy of his misapprehended goals and misshapen efforts—Nabokov’s books test the quality of his reader’s own insight and freedom...

...These grow from the two more intrinsic problems of the idealist...

...In so entangling us in the struggles of idealism with conventionality, Nabokov’s books, far from being sensationally immoral or laboriously esoteric, perform the always relevant function of the novel...

...Kill your past, make you real, raise a family, by removing you bodily from back numbers of Sham...

...Two years before, I had been much attached to the lovely, sun-tanned little daughter of a Serbian physician...

...Thus, as A. R. Brick has pointed out, Nabokov traps our sympathies between his futile, mad, “immoral” but vital heroes and the dispassionately cruel, papier-mache circuses in which they are unwitting clowns and victims...

...The latter problems of man’s deficiencies haunt Nabokov’s heroes in the form of a sneering, perverse, oily Vice whose special horror is that he irrefutably establishes himself as the hero’s alter-ego...

...For all that the world is an ugly farce, one has no guarantee that, beyond the “sooty curtain,” there is a “bluish view,” or, for that matter, anything at all to view...

...Nor has one really much right to hope that human grossness and fallibility—the inner traitors in deepest alliance with the social enemy—can be transcended sufficiently for a glimpse of whatever might not be out there...

...This struggle Nabokov traces most deeply when society’s threat to individuality, instead of being literalized as political tyranny (as in Bend Sinister and Invitation to a Beheading), remains implicit in social ostracism (as in “Cloud, Castle, Lake,” Camera Obscura and Lolita...

...Or a “best story” collection opens to reveal, spread among innumerable Cabbage Whites, a blue-winged Cyclargus Nabokov...

...Peter (Nankivell), is Camera Obscura...

...The impossibility of their position Nabokov projects into the extravagantly comic nightmares which usually provide climaxes to his books...

...The “political” novels are less successful partly because Nabokov’s dictatorships are one-dimensional burlesques and his heroes thus too easily and too fully “heroic,” but primarily, I think, because the hero’s freedom in the non-political books intensifies and makes more significant the conflicts within him which are at the center of Nabokov’s art...

...Nabokov’s search, and intrinsically that of his heroes, has not been for exotic amours, but for those flittering glimpses of a reality beyond the dead and churlish masks society imposes on the faces of nature and man: so I would unrobe turn inside out, pry open, probe all matter, everything you see, the skyline and its saddest tree, the whole inexplicable globe, PAUL LAUTER is a teacher on the faculty of the Department of English at the University of Massachusetts...

...blind, ignorant Albinus, central figure of Camera Obscura, mocked by his nude persecutor and their paramour...

...So we have had a Nabokov’s Dozen of stories, a new Sebastian Knight complete with critical morphology, and now a slender Poems and a translated 1938 “Sirin,” Invitation to a Beheading...

...To Nabokov the worlds of -isms and affluence are equally nightmarish impositions on the life of a man...

...But the Nabokov heroes all share an obsession to restore “the jewel of a bluish view...

...Down two stacks and three shelves,” the librarian says, and obediently settled there, a green and gold butterfly between The Root and the Flower (Myers) and The Fourteen Thumbs of St...

...As Nabokov’s outsiders are tragic in their inevitable isolation, torment and defeat by ruthlessly cynical insiders, so they become comic as their very hopes betray them into wild, demented postures...

...to find the true, the ardent core as doctors of old pictures do when, rubbing out a distant door or sooty curtain, they restore the jewel of a bluish view...

...It is perhaps a measure of Nabokov’s increasing ability to integrate his fancy with his theme that M’sieur Pierre seems a rather too quaint, too ingenious and sometimes irrelevant, imposition on Cincinnatus’ nature, whereas Quilty is surely Humbert’s grosser self mirrored through a Looking-Glass Hollywood...

...In this attempt they are, of course, perpetually thwarted by societies to which the very effort to live outside the People’s Republic of Hollywonderland is the capital crime, in itself an “invitation to a beheading...

...the dinner party on the eve of Cincinnatus’ execution celebrating his “brotherhood” with his executioner—the ghastly mummery of these and so many other scenes does not merely strut a genius for the grotesque...

...But the bookdealers know the name and the publishers (at last) its value...

...a movie of his son’s destruction by lustful maniacs shown to Krug...

...No—but a more passionate, more dangerous liaison with “the leaf-like insects, the eye-spotted birds” soaring somewhere behind the billboards or above the clutter of buffoons and dolls which constitute Nabokov’s modern world...

...The totalitarian states of Bend Sinister and Invitation to a Beheading, the Germany of Laughter in the Dark and a number of other novels and stories, the America of Lolita and Pnin share a compulsion to homogenize people, an allegiance to uniform vulgarity...

...the hero of Bend Sinister...

...They force us both to reconsider our assent to the stereotypes which smother the life of our civilization, and to rediscover the vigor, and the hazards, of idealism as a means for freeing “the true, the ardent core...

...Such, of course, is Quilty, who appears on the scene in Lolita on the eve of Humbert’s first possession of the girl...