Nabokov and the

Question of
Morality
Aesthetics, Metaphysics,
and the Ethics of Fiction

Edited by
Michael Rodgers and
Susan Elizabeth Sweeney
Nabokov and the Question of Morality
 Michael Rodgers • Susan Elizabeth Sweeney
Editors

Nabokov and the

Question of Morality
Aesthetics, Metaphysics, and the Ethics of Fiction
Editors
Michael Rodgers Susan Elizabeth Sweeney
English Studies English Department
University of Strathclyde College of the Holy Cross
Glasgow, UK Worcester, Massachusetts, USA

ISBN 978-1-137-59666-6 ISBN 978-1-137-59221-7 (eBook)

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-59221-7

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016944246

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016

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This volume is dedicated to Samuel Schuman (1942–2014),
a friend of Nabokov studies and of Nabokovians:
“you are in that song, you are in that gleam, you are alive”
(Vladimir Nabokov, “Easter”)
 CONTENTS

1 Introduction: Nabokov’s Morality Play 1

Michael Rodgers and Susan Elizabeth Sweeney

Part I Responsible Reading 19

2 “And So the Password Is—?”: Nabokov and the Ethics

of Rereading 21
Tom Whalen

3 Nabokov and Dostoevsky: Good Writer, Bad Reader? 33

Julian Connolly

4 The Will to Disempower? Nabokov and His Readers 51

Michael Rodgers

Part II Good and Evil 71

5 Nabokov’s God; God’s Nabokov 73

Samuel Schuman

6 By Trial and Terror 87
Gennady Barabtarlo
vii
viii CONTENTS

7 The Aesthetics of Moral Contradiction in Some

Early Nabokov Novels 109
David Rampton

Part III Agency and Altruism 127

8 Loving and Giving in Nabokov’s The Gift 129

Jacqueline Hamrit

9 Kinbote’s Heroism 143

Laurence Piercy

Part IV The Ethics of Representation 159

10 Whether Judgments, Sentences, and Executions

Satisfy the Moral Sense in Nabokov 161
Susan Elizabeth Sweeney

11 The Art of Morality, or on Lolita 183

Leland de la Durantaye

12 “Obnoxious Preoccupation with Sex Organs”:

The Ethics and Aesthetics of Representing Sex 197
Elspeth Jajdelska

13 Modern Mimesis 213

Michael Wood

Notes on Contributors 225

Index 229
 ABBREVIATIONS FOR TITLES OF NABOKOV’S
WORKS

Ada Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle

AnLo The Annotated Lolita
BS Bend Sinister
Def The Defense
Des Despair
En The Enchanter
Gift The Gift
Glory Glory
Invitation Invitation to a Beheading
LATH Look at the Harlequins!
Laugh Laughter in the Dark
LL Lectures on Literature
Lo Lolita
LRL Lectures on Russian Literature
LV Letters to Véra
Mary Mary
NB Nabokov’s Butterflies
NG Nikolai Gogol
NWL Dear Bunny, Dear Volodya: The Nabokov-Wilson Letters
PF Pale Fire
Pnin Pnin
PP Poems and Problems
RLSK The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
SL Selected Letters, 1940–1977
SM Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited
SO Strong Opinions
Stikhi Stikhi

ix
x ABBREVIATIONS FOR TITLES OF NABOKOV’S WORKS

Stories The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov

TOM The Tragedy of Mister Morn

ABBREVIATIONS FOR NABOKOV’S BIOGRAPHY

VNAY Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years, by Brian Boyd
VNRY Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years, by Brian Boyd
 LIST OF FIGURE

Fig. 5.1 This photograph depicts something similar to what the

protagonist sees at the end of Nabokov’s story: a newly
hatched Attacus atlas moth with its wings outspread,
“a glazy eyespot on each and a purplish bloom dusting their
hooked foretips” (“Christmas” 136), here resting on the
cocoon from which it has just emerged. Image: Barrie
Harwood/Alamy 81

xi
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Nabokov’s Morality Play

Michael Rodgers and Susan Elizabeth Sweeney

“Morality play” may seem like an odd way to describe Nabokov’s oeu-
vre. It immediately evokes the kind of allegorical drama, popular in the
late medieval period, in which assorted personifications of vice and virtue
interact with a figure such as Everyman so as to teach a didactic lesson.
Nabokov, of course, is neither allegorical nor didactic. He detested lessons
and symbols and simplifications, anything that subordinates individual
experience to general rules. Even so, this phrase strikes us as fitting because
Nabokov’s writing is both profoundly playful and inherently moral.
Critics have long noted his delight in patterns, puzzles, and perfor-
mances, while recent books such as Thomas Karshan’s Nabokov and the
Art of Play (2011) or Siggy Frank’s Nabokov’s Theatrical Imagination
(2012) examine that affinity for plays and playing even more fully.
Unfortunately, some of Nabokov’s readers have been slower to compre-
hend the moral aspects of his fiction. (By moral, we mean those aspects
relating to ethical judgments about “right” or “wrong” behavior.) His
novel Lolita, in particular, has been labeled as “amoral, moral, or immoral
art,” in Eric Lemay’s phrase, ever since its 1955 publication; occasionally,

M. Rodgers ()
English Studies, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK
S.E. Sweeney
English Department, College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, Massachusetts, USA

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 1

M. Rodgers, S.E. Sweeney (eds.), Nabokov and the Question
of Morality, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-59221-7_1
2 M. RODGERS AND S.E. SWEENEY

it has been banned outright by public libraries or government ministries.

In early 2013, a group of self-appointed censors in Russia, condemning
it as “amoral,” first tried to suppress a stage adaptation with anonymous
threats, then assaulted the producer, and finally vandalized St. Petersburg’s
Nabokov Museum in order to express their outrage against the author.1
And yet, despite occasional controversy over Lolita’s moral import, and
despite lingering impressions of Nabokov as interested only in art for art’s
sake, many scholars have explored the ethical and spiritual dimensions of
not only this novel but his entire body of work.
Nabokov and the Question of Morality is the first collection to gather,
evaluate, and compare these attempts to establish what Leland de la
Durantaye calls “the moral art of Vladimir Nabokov.”2 It was inspired
by a symposium on “Nabokov and Morality,” organized by Michael
Rodgers at the University of Strathclyde in 2011, that featured seven of
the scholars whose work is represented here. The volume’s title sums up
our sense that Nabokov’s fiction continually poses difficult, mischievous,
serious, and lively questions about both morality and ethical behavior. Its
subtitle—Aesthetics, Metaphysics, and the Ethics of Fiction—focuses more
narrowly on issues relating to his definition of art; his speculations about
other realms of being; and the implications of his characters’ choices and
fates. Admittedly, these three categories are interconnected. Vladimir
Alexandrov points out that Nabokov’s “metaphysics are inseparable from
his ethics and his aesthetics; indeed, all three are best understood as names
for a single continuum of beliefs” (“Otherworld” 568). The artistic credo
expressed in Nabokov’s well-known essay “On a Book Entitled Lolita”—
that literary works only exist for him to the extent that they provide “a
sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being
where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm” (314–
315)—clearly reflects such interdependence.3
Even though the three concepts remain closely linked, this volume
establishes subtle distinctions among them.4 Nabokov and the Question of
Morality includes detailed investigations of matters such as just or unjust
reading; religious imagery; monomania; ethical dilemmas; love and sacri-
fice; crime and punishment; and representations of sex, violence, or moral
emptiness in his work. In exploring these topics, the collection offers pre-
viously unpublished chapters by some of the world’s leading Nabokov
scholars on the full scope of his literary career—from his earliest short sto-
ries, plays, and poems to his most important novels in Russian and English
(with some chapters focused solely on The Gift, Lolita, or Pale Fire), as
 INTRODUCTION: NABOKOV’S MORALITY PLAY 3

well as his other books. It also examines Nabokov’s writing in the context
of other thinkers—Carlyle, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Baudelaire, Nietzsche,
Heidegger, Shklovsky, Wittgenstein, Lacan, and Derrida—as well as other
disciplines such as anthropology, neuroscience, jurisprudence, religion,
and philosophy (including, within this last category, moral sense theory,
poststructuralism, and action theory).
These widely different approaches offer new insights into Nabokov’s
fiction, suggesting that morality itself is perpetually “in play,” allowing
for a range of movement as well as a number of options. Each story or
novel juggles a series of philosophical, ethical, and spiritual possibilities.
We might even say that Nabokov’s fiction does indeed stage a kind of
morality play, if by that we mean a highly stylized performance which pro-
vokes profound moral questions. He is always careful, however, to leave
such questions unanswered.

ENACTMENTS OF NABOKOV AND MORALITY

Up until the last two decades of the twentieth century, the terms
Nabokov and morality seemed anathema to one another. From the very
beginning of his career as a Russian émigré writer in Europe, Nabokov was
seen as abandoning the “moralizing and didacticism” of his predecessors
(Perelshin, qtd. in Dolinin 56), while instead emphasizing aesthetic splen-
dor, displaying an apparently indifferent (some might even say cruel) atti-
tude toward his characters’ fates, and utterly refusing to engage with social
or political themes. For many years, it seemed a matter of simple common-
sense—which was one of his least favorite words, we should remember
(LL 372)—that Vladimir Nabokov was uninterested in moral questions.
Even after he started a second career as a writer in English, immigrated to
the USA, published Lolita, and attained a wide audience, commercial suc-
cess, and international acclaim, the first books about his work still stressed
its artfulness, as their very titles indicate: Escape into Aesthetics; Nabokov:
His Life in Art; Nabokov’s Deceptive World; and Crystal Land: Artifice in
Nabokov’s English Novels.5 One early review of his fiction even proclaimed
that “as for the moral and humane dimensions—‘profundities,’ compas-
sions, inner developments—it simply does not have them” (Adams 423).
With the publication of Ellen Pifer’s Nabokov and the Novel in 1980,
however, his work was for the first time explicitly considered in a moral
context, rather than condemned for its apparent indifference to such mat-
ters. Questioning the calcifying view of Nabokov as a mere aesthete, Pifer
4 M. RODGERS AND S.E. SWEENEY

established that his fiction reveals an “abiding interest in human beings,

not only as artists and dreamers, but as ethical beings subject to moral
law and sanction” (iii–iv). Since then, a number of other scholars have
explored his humanism as well as his representation of ethical issues. In a
critical study of the Russian and English fiction, David Rampton proposed
in 1984 that Nabokov’s works emphasize content as much as form, invok-
ing the figure of “the moral Nabokov” for the first time (30). In one of
the earliest books devoted to a single work, Nabokov’s Ada: The Place of
Consciousness, Brian Boyd argued in 1985 that this novel, which some
readers considered self-indulgent, offered “a demanding critique of the
moral responsibilities of consciousness” (12). A few years later, in Nabokov
and the Mystery of Literary Structure (1989), Leona Toker traced the dis-
tinctive “combination of formal refinement and poignant humanism” in
many of his books (ix). The author’s attitude toward the terrible suffering
endured by his characters, in particular, has been a subject of debate ever
since philosopher Richard Rorty published, also in 1989, a chapter on
Nabokov and cruelty in his book Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity.6
During this same period, the notion of a spiritual Nabokov began to
appear. In 1979, two years after Nabokov’s death, his widow remarked in
her introduction to a slender posthumous edition of his Russian poems
that “potustoronnost’,” or the hereafter, was a pervasive theme in his
work which had been little noticed by critics (3–4). Over the next few
decades, several scholars—particularly Vladimir Alexandrov, in Nabokov’s
Otherworld (1991)—took Véra Nabokov’s hint and investigated this theme
in detail.7 Consideration of the supernatural in Nabokov has led to new
readings of familiar works, proposing that they embed cryptic messages
from deceased characters to living ones in the form of dreams, weather,
inanimate objects, or wordplay.8 Critics have also investigated Nabokov’s
allusions to Judaism and Christianity as well as his use of various religious
motifs, including demons, angels, saints, and the Garden of Eden. Such
scholarship suggests that his works often contain hidden references to a
transcendent moral realm.
A related strain of Nabokov criticism explores his novels’ concern with
ontological and teleological mysteries, especially in terms of narrative struc-
ture. D. Barton Johnson’s Worlds in Regression (1985) offered an impor-
tant early overview of Nabokov’s imaginary worlds, while Pekka Tammi’s
Problems of Nabokov’s Poetics, published the same year, showed how his
self-reflexive narrative devices model his cosmology. More recently, David
S. Rutledge has argued, in Nabokov’s Permanent Mystery: The Expression
 INTRODUCTION: NABOKOV’S MORALITY PLAY 5

of Metaphysics in His Work (2011), that his narrative designs evoke the
ineffable and unknowable. Clearly, then, to consider Nabokov within a
moral context involves joining him on a quest for things not “dreamt of in
[our] philosophy” (Hamlet 1.5.166–167).
With regard to philosophy, in fact, Nabokov once asserted, in his fore-
word to the English translation of Invitation to a Beheading, that the
only author who had influenced him was Pierre Delalande—a nineteenth-
century French philosopher whom he himself invented (6–7). But even if
Nabokov were sui generis, as he claimed, he must still have encountered
similarities between his insights and those of other minds. Toker suggests
that his fiction evokes various schools of thought without subscribing
to any particular system: “Gnostical imagination, Christian symbolism,
Romantic search for wholeness, Schopenhauer’s poesy, and Bergson’s
vision were alternative takes on experience—visions with which Nabokov’s
own intuitions had various affinities” (“Nabokov’s Worldview” 238–239).
Some critics have argued that this or that philosopher did influence his
thinking, if only in a negative way. During the 1980s, for example, several
scholars—including Phyllis Roth in “The Man behind the Mystification”
(1982) and Geoffrey Green in Nabokov and Freud (1988)—considered
his vexed relationship with “the Viennese witch doctor” (Invitation 9).9
More recently, critics have examined his explicit or implicit dialogues with
other important philosophers, including Kant, Bergson, and Sartre.
Interest in the humanist, otherworldly, metaphysical, and philosophi-
cal aspects of Nabokov’s work leads, in turn, to another topic: his politi-
cal beliefs. Robert Alter published an important essay on the author and
“the art of politics” as early as 1970. In 1992, Charles Nicol observed
that Nabokov “had a deep political philosophy, on which he rarely acted;
when he did act, it was in a highly personal manner. It was woven from
two strands that seem antithetical: a profound acceptance of the views of
his articulate and politically active father, and an equally profound indi-
vidualism that prevented Nabokov from joining any group—especially
one of a political nature” (625). Since then, several critics have explored
the connections between Nabokov’s political beliefs and personal relation-
ships,10 while others discuss his fiction in the context of its resistance to
totalitarianism.11
Today, some thirty years after Pifer published Nabokov and the Novel, it
may no longer seem startling to mention such moral problems in connec-
tion with his fiction. Indeed, two subsequent books—Michael Wood’s The
Magician’s Doubts (1994) and de la Durantaye’s Style is Matter (2007)—
6 M. RODGERS AND S.E. SWEENEY

both claim, in different ways, that Nabokov’s attentiveness to these issues

is inherently related to, and indeed inseparable from, his aesthetic practice.
As Wood succinctly explains: “Moral questions, like epistemological ones,
are put to work in his fiction. Nabokov doesn’t write about them; he
writes them” (7).
Nevertheless, some aspects of Nabokov’s thinking about morality—
let  alone its expression in his work—remain ambiguous or even contra-
dictory. In the very same year that de la Durantaye extolled Nabokov’s
“moral art,” for example, Michael Glynn expressed doubt that “there is
anything deeply philosophical or moral” in his writing (156). Since then,
other books have focused on his fascination with deviant behavior—Eric
Naiman’s Nabokov, Perversely (2010)—as well as his joyous affirmation
of life—Lila Azam Zanganeh’s The Enchanter: Nabokov and Happiness
(2011). Certainly, one can also conceive of, and find ample textual or
biographical evidence for, an agnostic, Christian, or secular Nabokov;
a sardonic Nabokov as well as an idealistic one; a Nabokov who rigidly
controls his characters and his readers, and another who celebrates their
independence.
Nabokov himself acknowledged the complexity of his moral stances,
and their oblique manifestations in his art, when he remarked in a 1971
interview:

one day a reappraiser will come and declare that, far from having been a
frivolous firebird, I was a rigid moralist kicking sin, cuffing stupidity, ridi-
culing the vulgar and cruel—and assigning sovereign power to tenderness,
talent, and pride. (SO 193)

Such disparate accounts of the relationship between the terms Nabokov

and morality—including this ambiguous pronouncement by an imaginary
future critic—indicate the extent to which his writing continually chal-
lenges readers to resolve the issue. The question haunts his prose, even at
the level of individual sentences. Progressing from one clause to another,
as when Humbert Humbert describes his mother’s death in Lolita,
Nabokov’s words can induce both distaste at the cursory way in which
Humbert treats the event—“a freak accident (picnic, lightning)”—and
awe at the writer’s evocative imagery—“you all know those redolent rem-
nants of day suspended, with the midges, about some hedge in bloom”
(Lo 10). Here, as in many other instances, readers are left to reconcile two
contradictory responses to his work: indicting the callousness of a charac-
 INTRODUCTION: NABOKOV’S MORALITY PLAY 7

ter that he created, or admiring his elegant and eloquent prose. Nabokov’s
ambivalent remarks in prefaces, afterwords, interviews, and published cor-
respondence further exacerbate the dilemmas confronting his readers.
He calls Lolita a “highly moral affair” (NWL 298), for example, but also
warns that it has “no moral in tow” (“On a Book” 314). Can we trust
either of these statements? Is it possible to resolve the discrepancy between
them? Given our awareness of Wimsatt and Beardsley’s “intentional fal-
lacy,” should we even consider Nabokov’s own remarks when appraising
the moral aspects of his work?
It is only fitting, perhaps, that the final ethical problem raised by
Nabokov’s last piece of fiction involves the question of whether to read it
at all. Nabokov had insisted that any of his works left unfinished should
be destroyed after his death. Despite his wishes, however, the incomplete
and inchoate manuscript of his last novel, The Original of Laura, was pre-
served in a Swiss bank vault for over three decades before being published,
in 2009, by his son and literary executor. Dmitri Nabokov had agonized
for many years, often in public fora, about whether or not to obey his
father’s wishes. By deciding at last to publish the fragmented manuscript
of The Original of Laura, Nabokov’s son forced readers to confront a
similar ethical dilemma: whether to read a novel whose author had not
wanted it to be read. That impossible predicament, we might say, was the
end of the ingenious play staged for us by Nabokov.

PERCEIVING, BELIEVING, ACTING, AND PORTRAYING

Thanks to such perplexities, Nabokov’s readers may still have trouble
deciding whether he is “the laureate of cruelty,” in Martin Amis’s phrase
(ix), or whether he evinces a morality that is hidden, ambiguous, or ironic,
but nevertheless functions as a structuring principle in his fiction. Nabokov
and the Question of Morality resolves this dilemma by addressing specific
aspects of his aesthetics, metaphysics, and ethics. The volume is divided
into four sections that emphasize, respectively, the ethics of reading and
rereading; religious belief and moral condemnation; altruistic behavior
and agency; and representations of cruelty, suffering, lust, or bad thinking
that prompt readers’ awareness of their own moral judgments.
.....
The first section, “Responsible Reading,” focuses on the act of read-
ing itself in order to disrupt what Tom Whalen calls the “Standard
8 M. RODGERS AND S.E. SWEENEY

Simplification Model” of Nabokov’s critical reception: that is, the tendency

to label him as a writer who privileges lapidary style over substance, moral
content, and social or political issues. These chapters confront Nabokov’s
own literary standards (or, perhaps, double standards), including his well-
known pronouncements on good and bad readers. At the same time, they
compare readings of and by Nabokov in a way that reveals fecund dis-
crepancies in his work. Consider, for example, the incongruity between
his method of translating Eugene Onegin—a “fidelity of transposal” that
emphasizes content over style (SO 38)—and his decision not to title his
own 1938 novella Priglashenie na otsechenie golovï, in order to avoid the
unpleasant duplication of the suffix (Invitation 7). By reading one text
through another, these chapters view Nabokov’s writing differently, espe-
cially in terms of his own emphasis on reading as a form of compassionate
awareness, on the one hand, or as a site for resistance and manipulation,
on the other.
Whalen’s chapter, “‘And So the Password Is—?’: Nabokov and the
Ethics of Rereading,” glosses a series of passages from his works that both
demand and model sensitive perusal. The “password” of the title refers
obliquely to Nabokov’s claim that “Beauty plus pity […] is the closest
we can get to a definition of art” (LL 251). By linking the appreciation
of beauty to feelings of pity, Whalen argues, Nabokov shows how atten-
tive rereading, remembering, and reimagining can lead to compassion, for
inanimate objects as well as for other human beings. In “Nabokov and
Dostoevsky: Good Writer, Bad Reader?” Julian Connolly offers an analysis
of Nabokov’s published lecture on his Russian precursor that leads to very
different conclusions about his attitude toward empathy. Connolly claims
that, in reading Dostoevsky, Nabokov did exactly what he advises read-
ers not to do in his lectures, prefaces, and interviews. Such a discrepancy
between theory and practice reveals Nabokov’s disdain for the “neurotic”
religious content of Dostoevsky’s novels (LRL 101), as well as his inat-
tentiveness to their craft. Connolly’s Nabokov is indeed a bad reader—at
least of Dostoevsky.
Michael Rodgers’s “The Will to Disempower? Nabokov and His
Readers” puts forth the benefits of imagining different ways to read
Nabokov’s work. Framing his argument in terms of parallels between
Nietzsche’s “master-slave” morality and “will to power” and Nabokov’s
textual practice, Rodgers argues that Nabokov eagerly engages in compe-
tition with actual readers—even as the figure of an ideal reader was neces-
sary for him to imagine and execute his pioneering works. Rodgers uses
 INTRODUCTION: NABOKOV’S MORALITY PLAY 9

Nabokov’s notorious puzzle story, “The Vane Sisters,” to contrast a naïve

reading, a sophisticated reading, and a Nietzschean reading of his fiction,
showing how interrogating Nabokov’s gambits can enable us to better
appreciate and understand his fiction.
.....
Our next section is titled “Good and Evil.” When teaching Bleak House
at Cornell, as Rorty observes, Nabokov would emphasize the conflict in
Dickens’s novel by using the abstract nouns “good” and “evil,” complete
with “shudder quotes” (148). The shuddering acknowledges, and paro-
dies, the reductiveness of employing those binary opposites. In choosing
the title “Good and Evil,” however, we want to keep this opposition in
play, so as to stress the challenge of contemplating such bookends as well
as the benefits of exploring the fertile space between them. Chapters in
this section trace Nabokov’s efforts, throughout his long career, to estab-
lish subtle moral distinctions within the world of his fiction. Nabokov’s
memorable response when asked by an interviewer whether he believed
in God—“I know more than I can express in words, and the little I can
express would not have been expressed, had I not known more” (SO
45)—is typically coy about his feelings on the subject of religion. He was
equally emphatic, and ambiguous, when it came to his thoughts about the
afterlife, free will, or the nature of evil. Nevertheless, these three chapters
help us to better understand what Nabokov believed and how it shaped
his art.
In “Nabokov’s God; God’s Nabokov,” Samuel Schuman argues that
some of Nabokov’s early works clearly invoke a religious perspective—
and, more specifically, a theist one. Schuman explores the implications
of Nabokov describing himself as an “anthropomorphic deity” (BS xii),
with regard to his invented worlds, by carefully reading two enigmatic
stories from the 1920s that have received little critical attention before
now: “The Word” and “Christmas.” Schuman suggests that we should
not accept without question Nabokov’s frequent dismissals of religion—
such as the hostility toward Dostoevsky’s faith that Connolly points out in
his chapter—but should consider the possibility that Christianity provided
solace to him, at least at the beginning of his career.
Gennady Barabtarlo, in “By Trial and Terror,” takes a panoramic look
at Nabokov’s moral vision and contrasts it with that of Tolstoy, in particu-
lar, as representative of an earlier Russian tradition (just as Connolly, in
his chapter, contrasts Nabokov with Dostoevsky). In witty imitations of
10 M. RODGERS AND S.E. SWEENEY

Tolstoy’s dogmatic pronouncements about morality, and in an ongoing

comparison of the two writers’ distinct modes of first- and third-person
narration, Barabtarlo argues that Nabokov’s vision is much darker than
Tolstoy’s. He suggests, in particular, that Nabokov saw unchecked passion
as a source of evil, and that all his novels can be read as variations on this
theme. David Rampton’s chapter, “The Aesthetics of Moral Contradiction
in Some Early Nabokov Novels,” provides a fascinating counterpoint to
Barabtarlo’s, especially because they each compare Nabokov to his Russian
predecessors (here, Chekhov and Goncharov as well as Dostoevsky and
Tolstoy) and consider his third novel, The Defense, a pivotal text. But while
Barabtarlo traces Nabokov’s progression from ironic, mostly third-person
narratives in Russian to unreliable first-person confessions in English,
Rampton examines the early fiction’s increasing moral ambiguity—and
in terms of narrative closure, rather than narration. The conclusions of
Nabokov’s first novels emphasize either poetic justice or divine retribu-
tion; halfway through his Russian period, however, he began to devise
more ambiguous endings, indicating a new awareness of the complexity
of moral decision-making for both protagonists and readers. As Rampton
explains, Nabokov’s fiction thus became more “allegorical,” “using moral
questions in order to ask aesthetic ones.”
.....
If the section titled “Good and Evil” traces the development of
Nabokov’s moral thought, from his earliest stories and novels in Russian
to his later shift into English, then our next section focuses squarely on
two masterpieces: The Gift, Nabokov’s major Russian novel, and Pale Fire,
one of his most important works in English. And while Barabtarlo’s and
Rampton’s chapters examine wrongdoing by Nabokov’s characters and
what it implies about the nature of evil, these chapters focus instead on
moments of love and sacrifice in his fiction. They therefore challenge the
familiar caricature of Nabokov’s “jowly arrogance,” “literary-patrician
disdain” (Transitional 2), and cruelty toward his characters, his readers,
or other writers whom he deems mediocre. At the same time, they con-
tinue the recurrent debate in Nabokov studies—manifested earlier in our
volume by Whalen’s and Connolly’s chapters—about his attitude toward
tenderness and compassion. We call this section “Agency and Altruism”
because it places such acts of generosity within the context of social rela-
tionships, as well as constructions of the self.
Jacqueline Hamrit’s chapter, “Loving and Giving in Nabokov’s The
Gift,” explores love’s ethical dimensions by considering three relation-
 INTRODUCTION: NABOKOV’S MORALITY PLAY 11

ships that shape Nabokov’s novel: the “banal triangle of tragedy,” char-
acterized by asymmetry and unrequited passion; the “virtuous triangle”
of family affection, involving parents, children, and feelings of plenitude;
and the productive triangle formed by a tension between romantic love
and artistic creativity. Hamrit adds that the very title of Nabokov’s novel
evokes an inexhaustible experience of loving, creating, and being. Indeed,
his concept of the gift anticipates later insights from Derrida, Barthes, and
Blanchot—as well from the cultural critic Lewis Hyde, who has argued
that by passing on the gift instead of keeping it, one can enjoy the sense
of “abundant” possibility Nabokov describes (26). Whereas Hamrit estab-
lishes the significance of generosity and gratitude in The Gift, Laurence
Piercy examines Nabokov’s ironic depiction of a single act of self-sacrifice
in Pale Fire. Piercy’s chapter, “Kinbote’s Heroism,” uses both action the-
ory and narratology to ponder the difference between Kinbote’s sponta-
neous action, as he tries to shield Shade from a bullet, and the way that he
narrates it in his commentary. How, for example, can Kinbote assume this
bullet was meant for Shade and, at the same time, believe that the would-
be assassin was aiming at Kinbote himself? Piercy shows how Nabokov
draws upon notions of free will, automatic behavior, and the retroactive
assumption of motives in order to transform this shooting—and Kinbote’s
response to it—into a paradox which readers can resolve only by con-
structing Nabokov’s frame narrator as a complex and dynamic character.
.....
The final section of our volume is titled “The Ethics of Representation.”
The close relationship between art and morality in Nabokov’s thinking
recalls Wittgenstein’s claim that “ethics and aesthetics” are one (105).
Indeed, Nabokov’s own dictum that “style is matter” (SL 116) sub-
verts the usual notion that rhetoric must be subjugated to content and
instead conflates the two modes, creating new opportunities to address a
perennial debate. The chapters in this section, therefore, investigate how
Nabokov presents art—and, in fact, representation itself—as a moral mat-
ter. To that end, they examine his choices when constructing a work of
fiction, including which details he includes and which details he leaves
out. As Rodgers demonstrates early in our volume, such decisions can
lead to difficult but extremely productive negotiations between Nabokov
and his readers. These four chapters consider, more specifically, how he
depicts such delicate matters as punishment, suffering, sex, and even the
very act of perceiving a resemblance. In narrating his stories and novels,
after all, Nabokov demonstrates an acute awareness of how the human
12 M. RODGERS AND S.E. SWEENEY

mind perceives, recognizes, evaluates, and labels the kind of informa-

tion that demands an ethical response. By depicting this mental process
with remarkable subtlety and verisimilitude, Nabokov allows his readers
to become more aware of it as well—and more self-conscious, therefore,
regarding their own ethical decisions.
In “Whether Judgments, Sentences, and Executions Satisfy the Moral
Sense in Nabokov,” Susan Elizabeth Sweeney focuses on Bend Sinister—
and, more precisely, on the author’s question, in a preface, about whether
this cruel and unusual novel gives “any satisfaction to the moral sense”
(ix)—in order to trace the significance of trials and punishments through-
out his fiction. Her chapter complements Barabtarlo’s earlier account of
Nabokov’s criminal protagonists, as well as Rampton’s and Piercy’s inves-
tigations of moral decision-making in his work. Sweeney points out that
although Nabokov often alludes to capital crimes, criminal trials, death
sentences, and executions in his novels and stories, he never describes
an actual or legitimate scene of judgment, sentencing, or punishment.
Instead, he leaves it up to individual readers to decide for themselves how
justice should be served.
Our next two chapters look closely at the role of representation in
Nabokov’s most controversial novel. In “The Art of Morality, or on
Lolita,” Leland de la Durantaye argues that Nabokov considered moral-
ity—as opposed to “moralizing,” which he detested—to be inseparable
from a work of art. Lolita, for example, “is a moral book” because it con-
tinually alludes to the very question of whether or not Humbert’s behavior
is moral. Like Rampton, Piercy, and Sweeney, de la Durantaye identifies
some of the formal strategies by which Nabokov leads his readers to pon-
der such questions; here, he shows how Nabokov carefully orchestrates
the tension between lyricism and parody in Humbert’s narration as well as
the shift from blindness to insight in Humbert’s understanding of himself.
Elspeth Jajdelska, in “‘Obnoxious Preoccupation with Sex Organs’: The
Ethics and Aesthetics of Representing Sex,” focuses instead on Nabokov’s
ability to evoke aesthetic delight even when describing painful or disturb-
ing subject matter. How does he portray sexual acts convincingly in Lolita,
for example, without making readers feel ashamed, aroused, or indiffer-
ent? Jajdelska draws upon anthropological and historical studies of con-
straints governing the depiction of sex, as well as cognitive studies of the
way that the mind processes information, to answer this question. Her
chapter resonates, in particular, with Piercy’s analysis of how Nabokov
depicts complex mental states and involuntary actions in Pale Fire.
 INTRODUCTION: NABOKOV’S MORALITY PLAY 13

In the final chapter, “Modern Mimesis,” Michael Wood links

Nabokov’s notions of ethical representation with his resistance to moder-
nity. “Nabokov’s attention to modernity is a moral concern,” Wood
explains, because he identifies it with whatever is fake, shallow, mindless,
or phony, whatever glosses over actual reality. Nabokov’s fiction proposes
and demonstrates, instead, a kind of reading that allows readers to per-
ceive the existence of something real, “something as irrefutable as dis-
tress.” Although Wood cites several of Nabokov’s short stories, he finds
Kinbote’s commentary, in Pale Fire, to be the best example of a character
or narrator somehow experiencing reality inside an imaginary narrative.
“Moral Mimesis” complements both Piercy’s earlier reading of Kinbote’s
motives in Pale Fire and Jajdelska’s analysis of how verbal descriptions can
evoke readers’ cognitive perceptions in Lolita. At the same time, Wood’s
chapter brings us back to the question that drives our entire volume: how,
exactly, to read Nabokov in the context of morality?

PLAYING WITH A LIVE DOG

In the fourth chapter of Despair, that novel’s brutal, calculating, and
self-deceiving narrator poses a series of rhetorical questions to the reader:
“What is this jest in majesty? This ass in passion? How do God and Devil
combine to form a live dog?” Such quips illustrate Hermann Karlovich’s
ability “to make words look self-conscious and foolish, to bind them by
the mock marriage of a pun, to turn them inside out, to come upon them
unawares” (46). These particular puns and anagrams manage to create an
interplay, at the level of thought as well as diction, between the elements
of several apparent binaries. In this way, they allude to some of the very
issues explored in Nabokov and the Question of Morality, such as the nature
of power, the ethical constraints on one’s attraction to another person,
and the relationship between good and evil. Hermann never answers these
questions, of course. As a result, their provocative juxtapositions—of the
concepts of humor and gravity, foolishness and fervor, animal nature and
spiritual being—remain unresolved.12
Such paradoxes reverberate throughout Nabokov’s writing. Indeed,
the contributors to Nabokov and the Question of Morality acknowledge the
open-ended nature of any inquiry into the moral aspects of his work by
asking similar questions of their own. These questions begin with a riddle
about attentive reading in the title of Tom Whalen’s chapter (“‘And So
the Password Is—?’”), and a sly insinuation about Nabokov’s judgment
14 M. RODGERS AND S.E. SWEENEY

of Dostoevsky in the subtitle of Julian Connolly’s (“Good Writer, Bad

Reader?”). Michael Rodgers imagines a Nietzschean reading of Nabokov,
which does not try to solve his textual puzzles but instead asks why he
created them. In his chapter, Samuel Schuman repeats a “strange ques-
tion” about religious faith—which Edmund Wilson once supposedly put
to Nabokov—before posing his own queries about Nabokov’s beliefs.
Gennady Barabtarlo, for his part, treats Nabokov’s fiction as a series of
“epistemological experiments,” while David Rampton, tracing the grow-
ing moral complexity of the early novels, finds it only fitting that “large
question marks hover over Nabokov’s work.”
In her chapter on The Gift, Jacqueline Hamrit explores how literature
“questions and complicates” philosophical assumptions about love, just
as Laurence Piercy, in his chapter on Pale Fire, suggests that Nabokov
developed Kinbote’s character by devising “logical anomalies” within
his narration that must be explained. Susan Elizabeth Sweeney ponders
Nabokov’s own rhetorical question about whether the brutal punishments
he proposed for his characters might satisfy the moral sense. Leland de la
Durantaye evokes a missing interrogation mark in his chapter on the moral-
ity of Lolita. Elspeth Jajdelska speculates about how cognitive perceptions
and social constraints govern the depiction of private moments. And in the
volume’s concluding chapter, Michael Wood argues that Nabokov con-
tinually asks his readers to reflect upon the subtle moral distinction—“a
question of scruple”—between good and bad reading.
That such questions and question marks recur throughout this vol-
ume seems entirely appropriate. After all, Nabokov himself was always able
to see the jest in majesty, to address serious matters of power, love, and
faith even as he also turned them into riddles. In this sense, too, his writ-
ing makes morality a matter for open-ended play. His novels and stories
seem to have been designed so that, as readers, we must ultimately resolve
for ourselves the complex issues that they raise. In tackling such ethical
conundrums, the authors of the twelve chapters gathered here not only
articulate the various weighty moral questions posed so deftly, and so deli-
cately, by Nabokov’s fiction. They also suggest just how much is at stake
in any of the answers that we choose.

NOTES
1. On the verbal threats, physical assaults, and acts of vandalism that charac-
terized these protests against Lolita, see Murphy.
 INTRODUCTION: NABOKOV’S MORALITY PLAY 15

2. See the subtitle of Style Is Matter.

3. The exalted states of being that Nabokov invokes in this passage suggest
not only “heightened aesthetic perception” but also “quickened ethical
awareness” and “metaphysically refined consciousness,” as Leona Toker
explains (“Nabokov’s Worldview” 232).
4. Alexandrov acknowledges that “for analytical purposes, it is necessary to
formulate distinctions and definitions.” He explains his definition of these
particular terms more fully:
By “metaphysics” I mean Nabokov’s faith in the apparent existence of a
transcendent, nonmaterial, timeless and beneficent, ordering and ordered
realm of being that seems to provide for personal immortality and that
affects everything that exists in the mundane world. […] By “ethics” I
mean Nabokov’s belief in the existence of good and evil; his belief that
both are absolutized by being inextricably linked to the transcendent oth-
erworld; and that both are accessible to mankind and especially to true
artists as universal criteria for judging man’s behavior. Nabokov’s “aesthet-
ics” consist of two aspects: the first is the theme of the creation of art,
which, as has long been noted by critics, Nabokov embodies in his fictions
in a variety of forms; the second is the characteristic shape and style of his
works. (568)
Not everyone will agree with Alexandrov’s emphasis on the supernatural—
for example, some might identify the literary work itself as the transcen-
dent realm Nabokov invokes—but these definitions provide a succinct
starting point for a study of Nabokov’s beliefs. See also Toker’s brief but
thorough survey of aesthetics, ethics, and metaphysics (as well as politics)
in “Nabokov’s Worldview.”
5. These books, written by Stegner, Field, Rowe, and Bader, respectively,
appeared between 1966 and 1972.
6. Some critics, like Kuzmanovich in “Suffer the Little Children” (2003),
focus on Nabokov’s representation of victims. Others, like Sweeney in
“Executing Sentences in Lolita and the Law” (2004), explore his attitude
toward state-sanctioned punishments, especially the death penalty, as part
of the burgeoning law and literature field.
7. See Boyd’s interesting and useful history of scholarly investigations into
Nabokov’s metaphysics, beginning with an account of his own initial
exploration of this topic even before Véra Nabokov identified it as an
important theme in her husband’s work (“Retrospects”).
8. See, for example, Barabtarlo’s Aerial View (1993) and Boyd’s Pale Fire:
The Magic of Artistic Discovery (1999).
9. Couturier continues to produce invigorating psychoanalytic readings of
Nabokov’s work, most notably Nabokov ou la cruauté du désir (2004).
10. See Diment, who analyzes Nabokov’s bitter feud with Edmund Wilson
about politics, among other issues, in her essay on “The Nabokov-Wilson
16 M. RODGERS AND S.E. SWEENEY

Debate” (2002), and Dragunoiu, whose book Nabokov and the Poetics of
Liberalism (2011) traces the influence of V. D. Nabokov’s political beliefs
on his son’s intellectual history.
11. Nafisi’s memoir Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003)—which recounts the
experience of furtively studying Nabokov’s fiction inside an oppressive the-
ocracy—emphasizes its relevance to the real world. Pitzer’s Secret History
of Vladimir Nabokov (2013) argues that Pale Fire and other novels offer
documentation, often in disguised fashion, of the history of anti-Semitism,
political persecution, and genocide in the twentieth century.
12. It is tempting to contrast the “live dog” of Despair, in which both god and
devil are somehow combined (46), with the greasy, slimy, pale, “coldish,”
“dreadful little pseudo dog” (96–97) that Hermann later dreams about, in
a series of recursive nightmares, the very night before he decides to kill his
supposed double. Notice, in fact, that Hermann’s reference to the “mock
dog” in his initial nightmare (96) links it to two phrases—“the mock mar-
riage,” “a live dog”—that appear in the earlier passage (46; our emphasis).

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———. “The Otherworld.” Garland Companion 566–71.
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———. “Nabokov’s Worldview.” Cambridge Companion 232–47.
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 PART I

Responsible Reading
 CHAPTER 2

“And So the Password Is—?”: Nabokov

and the Ethics of Rereading

Tom Whalen

My subtitle risks presenting the complexly comical, playfully elusive author

in a rather somber and predominantly pedagogical light. It also risks, of
course, his wrath; some readers may already hear a shout from the wings
of his afterword “On a Book Entitled Lolita”: “Lolita has no moral in
tow” (314). Certainly by the early 1960s, in the wake of Lolita’s notori-
ety, many welcomed what they saw as Nabokov’s anti-moralistic stance,
as suggested by the titles of the first two book-length studies in English
on his fiction, Page Stegner’s Escape into Aesthetics (1966) and Andrew
Field’s Nabokov: His Life in Art (1967). In Nabokov’s prose, critics could
revel as if it were poetry: examine the manner and method, not the man
or message. “Come on! Play!” the narrator’s great-aunt in Nabokov’s final
completed novel Look at the Harlequins! says, “Invent the world! Invent
reality!” (9). And play we did on Nabokov’s ludic trapeze, with a net
below us so rich in patterns that we could never fall through it. Ideologies
had burdened our literature and lives enough. We needed a writer like
Nabokov in the 1950s and 1960s to tell us that books which can produce
in their readers “aesthetic bliss” are better than any “Literature of Ideas,
which very often is topical trash coming in huge blocks of plaster that
are carefully transmitted from age to age until somebody comes along
with a hammer and takes a good crack at Balzac, at Gorki, at Mann” (Lo

T. Whalen ()
Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Stuttgart, Germany

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 21

M. Rodgers, S.E. Sweeney (eds.), Nabokov and the Question
of Morality, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-59221-7_2
22 T. WHALEN

315). Only philistines and censors (or madmen) could side with Adolf
Eichmann, who commented on Lolita from his Jerusalem cell: “Das ist
aber ein sehr unerfreuliches Buch” (qtd. in Field 323).
But Lolita is indeed, if accurately read, a very unpleasant book, and
Nabokov knew it. “Once or twice I was on the point of burning the
unfinished draft and had carried my Juanita Dark [Dolores Haze’s origi-
nal name1] as far as the shadow of the leaning incinerator on the innocent
lawn, when I was stopped by the thought that the ghost of the destroyed
book would haunt my files for the rest of my life” (Lo 312). Blinded by
Nabokov’s supreme self-consciousness and legerdemain, along with the
crystalline dazzle of his prose and his protagonist’s moral slipperiness, it
was easy for readers to miss the ethical basis of his art, as well as a related
theme identified by Véra Nabokov in her introduction to her husband’s
Russian poems: evidence in this life of an afterlife (cf. Alexandrov 4). “A
creative writer,” Nabokov told his students, “creative in the particular
sense I am attempting to convey, cannot help feeling that in his rejecting
the world of the matter-of-fact, in his taking sides with the irrational, the
illogical, the inexplicable, and the fundamentally good, he is performing
something similar in a rudimentary way to what the spirit may be expected
to perform when the time comes, on a vaster and more satisfactory scale” (qtd.
in Alexandrov 57; Alexandrov’s emphasis).2 The gradual development of
these themes—that is, ethics and spiritual transcendence—in the history
of Nabokov studies mirrors, in a way, the Nabokovian universe saturated
with signs, in which a consciousness spiritualizes all matter, though only
rarely are his characters aware of it.
In a 1971 interview with Kurt Hoffman for the Bayerischer Rundfunk,
Nabokov said he believed that “one day a reappraiser will come and declare
that, far from having been a frivolous firebird, I was a rigid moralist kick-
ing sin, cuffing stupidity, ridiculing the vulgar and cruel—and assigning
sovereign power to tenderness, talent, and pride” (SO 193). And in 1945,
thirteen years before his statement that “Lolita has no moral in tow,”
Nabokov wrote in response to criticism of his 1944 study Nikolai Gogol:

I never meant to deny the moral impact of art which is certainly inherent
in every genuine work of art. What I do deny and am prepared to fight to
the last drop of my ink is the deliberate moralizing which to me kills every
vestige of art in a work however skillfully written. There is a deep morality
in the Overcoat which I have tried to convey in my book, but this morality
has certainly nothing whatever to do with the cheap political propaganda
 “AND SO THE PASSWORD IS—?” 23

which some overzealous admirers in nineteenth century Russian have tried

to squeeze out of, or rather into it, and which, in my opinion does violence
to the story and to the very notion of art.
By the same token, though you may be right that Gogol did not object
to serfdom, the interior moral standards of the book bristle against it. […]
(SL 56–57)

What distinguishes deep morality or interior moral standards from deliber-

ate moralizing? The answer to this question forms the basis of Nabokov’s
ethics, which as in all aspects of his thought is inextricably linked to his
aesthetics. Nabokov knew that morals are ineffective when served up on a
placard or platter. Better to intuit art’s inherent morality, to freely discover
it, than have it coerced into being. The aim of his aesthetics is to make this
discovery possible.
The best writers, Nabokov said, echoing the ancients, were a combina-
tion of storyteller, teacher, and enchanter (LL 5). Without that middle
ethical dimension, Nabokov’s fiction, no matter how great an enchanter
and storyteller he could be, would not continue to fascinate us. “For me
a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly
call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being, somehow, somewhere, con-
nected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kind-
ness, ecstasy) is the norm” (Lo 314–15). Each of his four attributes of
art is concerned with the nature of the good in man.3 The first and last,
however, curiosity and ecstasy, when severed from tenderness and kindness,
leaves us with the cruelties of Axel Rex, with his “cold, wide-eyed curios-
ity” (Laugh 142–43), or the insufficiently tempered ecstasies of Humbert
Humbert.
But despite Nabokov’s own well-documented statements (“When
you do read Lolita,” he wrote to Edmund Wilson, “please mark that it
is a highly moral affair” [NWL 298]) and a phalanx of superb Nabokov
scholars having led us beyond issues of involution and reflexivity (see,
among others, the fine studies by Vladimir Alexandrov, Brian Boyd, Dana
Dragunoiu, John Burt Foster, Jr., D. Barton Johnson, and Ellen Pifer),
we still find the Standard Simplification promulgated by critics like Morris
Dickstein. “Nabokov,” Dickstein unthinkingly states in his 2002 Leopards
in the Temple: The Transformation of American Fiction 1945–1970, “always
believed that fiction was neither moral, social, nor psychological but a sen-
suous exercise in style” (124).
24 T. WHALEN

The failure of Dickstein and other readers to uncover the ethical basis
of Nabokov’s art and the moral imperative behind his patterning is due,
in part, to an unconsidered acceptance of his art-for-art’s-sake stance, as
well as to another imperative: the necessity, sometimes insistent, to reread
his work. The ethical high-wire a reader must manage in order to appreci-
ate Nabokov’s fiction has been thoughtfully examined by others, notably
Leland de la Durantaye: “To express in art a morality other than pre-
scriptive […] required a density and complexity which became Nabokov’s
passion—and which required of his readers a patience and a persistence
which to many of them seemed too great” (179). For Richard Rorty, in
“The Barber of Kasbeam: Nabokov on Cruelty,” the necessity to reread
Nabokov’s work exposed the author’s contempt for his reader. “[R]uefully
and contemptuously aware that most of his readers will fall short, he tells
us in his Afterword [to Lolita] what we have missed” (Rorty 163). For
me, on the other hand, it reveals Nabokov’s generosity.
“Curiously enough,” Nabokov said, “one cannot read a book: one can
only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader
is a rereader” (LL 3). In stories like “Terra Incognita,” “Perfection,” “The
Circle,” “Spring in Fialta,” and “The Vane Sisters,” the need to reread
what has just been read forms part of the narrative. In “The Circle,” for
example, the story’s beginning (“In the second place, because he was pos-
sessed by a sudden mad hankering after Russia” [375]) impels us forward
to the ending (“In the first place, because Tanya had remained as enchant-
ing and as invulnerable as she had been in the past” [384]) which, because
of its reverse-ordered structure, drives us back to the beginning for
another reading. The acrostic message that concludes “The Vane Sisters”
achieves its efficacy for the reader only if he returns to retrace the story’s
inlaid motifs. In works “swarming with detail and abounding in obvious
patterns,” as Brian Boyd notes, “these details are so slight and their rep-
etition subjected to such transformation that no reader could even notice
these matching clusters until a careful re-reading. Even then they may be
overlooked as mere incidental decoration—until we discover how they
take their place in a larger design” (VNRY 300).
To actively reread one must also actively remember. Nabokov’s char-
acters themselves are often keen rememberers or retracers: from Vadim
Vadimovich’s retelling of his life, to Hugh Person retracing his first trip to
Switzerland, to Van and Ada’s “family chronicle,” to Kinbote rereading
his past by misreading Shade’s poem “Pale Fire,” to Humbert doubling
back on his first love and his journey with Lolita, to Sebastian Knight’s
 “AND SO THE PASSWORD IS—?” 25

brother tracing Sebastian’s past (“You are a traveler?” Silbermann asks

him, to which our narrator replies, “Oh, in the past I suppose” [125]),
to Fyodor’s attempt to write the biography of his father in The Gift,
Nabokov’s last Russian novel, to the narrator of “Spring in Fialta” recall-
ing his encounters with Nina—all the way back to Ganin in Nabokov’s first
novel, Mary: “Now, many years later, he felt that [his and Mary’s] imagi-
nary meeting and the meeting which took place in reality had blended and
merged imperceptibly into one another, since as a living person she was
only an uninterrupted continuation of the image which had foreshadowed
her” (44). This proleptic imaginary meeting, however, isn’t necessarily a
gift from a benign otherworld. Ganin, in the end, must reread his reading
of the past and learn to separate it from the present.
“Mirage and reality” may “merge in love,” as we learn two-thirds of the
way into Lolita, where Nabokov tucks the “profound message” of Clare
Quilty’s play The Enchanted Hunters (Lo 203), but Ganin is one of the
few Nabokov protagonists able to detect the mirage that often inhabits
memory. “Everything seemed askew, attenuated, metamorphosed as in a
mirror. And just as the sun rose higher and the shadows dispersed to their
usual places, so in that sober light the world of memories in which Ganin
had dwelt became what it was in reality: the distant past” (Mary 113).
Memory itself entails rereading, but the creative participation envisioned
by Nabokov for his rereaders and practiced by himself in his autobiogra-
phy demands that we grapple, as Ganin finally had to do, with the eviden-
tiary, not the speculative; with matter, not mirage.
Nabokov’s harsh pronouncements toward his, as he saw it, less subtle
forebears may make him seem a pitiless realist insistent that we never turn
away from memory’s truth, but even a cursory glance at his style informs
us that something else is in play—enchantment, for one thing. But note
how some memories, as indicated by his reticence in Speak, Memory
regarding his father’s murder or the death of his brother Sergey in a con-
centration camp near Hamburg, may be too painful to recall or write.4 As
an autobiographer, Nabokov strove for accuracy and the discovery of the
patterns in his life, but this didn’t mean embracing memory fully at every
moment. Pnin, too, trying to fathom the death in a concentration camp of
the woman he loved when he was a young man, needs to forget, though
he cannot:

In order to exist rationally, Pnin had taught himself, during the last ten
years, never to remember Mira Belochkin […] because, if one were quite
26 T. WHALEN

sincere with oneself, no conscience, and hence no consciousness, could be

expected to subsist in a world where such things as Mira’s death were pos-
sible. One had to forget—because one could not live with the thought that
this graceful, fragile, tender young woman with those eyes, that smile, those
gardens and snows in the background, had been brought in a cattle car to
an extermination camp and killed by an injection of phenol into the heart,
into the gentle heart one had heard beating under one’s lips in the dusk of
the past. (Pnin 134–35)

Pnin says he has taught himself not to remember, but in this passage
Nabokov shows him remembering, and thus urges the reader to do so as
well.
The image of Nabokov as a cruel, aloof, purely mental artist perverts
both his past and his philosophy. In a famous passage from his lecture on
Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis,” he defines art in a way that makes clear the
moral implications of his aesthetics:

We can take the story apart, we can find out how the bits fit, how one part
of the pattern responds to the other; but you have to have in you some cell,
some gene, some germ that will vibrate in answer to sensations that you can
neither define, nor dismiss. Beauty plus pity—that is the closest we can get to
a definition of art. (LL 251)

Nabokov lets us pity even mad Humbert and Kinbote and grants salva-
tion to some of his most tortured protagonists. The fully dimensional
Cincinnatus C. is allowed to walk away from the two-dimensional world
about to execute him, “in that direction where, to judge by the voices,
stood beings akin to him” (Invitation 223). Adam Krug’s salvation comes
when the author “felt a pang of pity for Adam and slid towards him along
an inclined beam of pale light—causing instantaneous madness, but at
least saving him from the senseless agony of his logical fate” (BS 233).
Many of Nabokov’s characters suffer or die from a bad—that is to say,
too full—heart, among them the successful Sebastian Knight; the failed
Humbert Humbert; and the tutor Ivanov of “Perfection,” who “had a
passionate desire to experience everything, to attain and touch everything,
to let the dappled voices, the bird calls, filter through his being and to
enter for a moment into a passerby’s soul as one enters the cool shade of a
tree” (340), and whose heart will burst while trying to save a boy who is
feigning that he can’t swim. Pnin’s heart also is much too full, as is that of
the good man and mediocre poet Podtyagin, in Mary, who dies of a heart
 “AND SO THE PASSWORD IS—?” 27

attack after losing his passport the same day he receives permission from
the Berlin authorities to go to Paris.
Beauty plus pity spiritualizes Nabokov’s world, animates its objects.
In Glory, we see “the paws of the fir trees against the blue of the sky”
(45). In the same novel, “[s]ome glass object fell and broke in one of
the bedrooms, and the phone in the study rang in immediate response
but nobody paid any attention to it” (115)—no one, that is, except the
reader prompted to linger over the phone’s alarmed reply. The phone did
what? Let me read that again. The telephone’s “response” is either an
instance of Martin’s heightened sensitivity to the world around him (pos-
sibly a sentimentalized one, since Martin here is in the apartment of Sonia,
the woman he loves, and her family); or it’s a true communing of one
object (the phone) with another (the glass object), and perhaps also the
objects of the apartment expressing their dismay because the family is in
the process of moving away; or the objects are inhabited by ghosts try-
ing to send, as so often in Nabokov’s work, messages back to the living;
or else some “contrapuntal genius” is at work at his desk inspiriting the
universe of his letters (SM 139); and so on. And so on not because what
we call reality is an epistemological dead end and truth a convention, but
because, as Nabokov’s entomological studies confirmed for him, reality is
“a kind of gradual accumulation of information; and […] specialization.
[…] You can get nearer and nearer, so to speak, to reality; but you never
get near enough because reality is an infinite succession of steps, levels of
perception, false bottoms, and hence unquenchable, unattainable. […]
So that we live surrounded by more or less ghostly objects” (SO 10–11).
Nabokov’s remarks on reality and his personifications reflect the plied
nature of his fictional universes, each level an invitation to a rereading.
In Bend Sinister, after returning from the hospital where his wife has
just died, and after a ghastly experience at two checkpoints on the bridge
he must cross (the second checkpoint sending him back to the first, like
an ant on a stalk “you […] turn upside down the moment he gets to the
tip, which becomes the pit” [15–16]), Professor Krug receives a familiar
welcome from the elevator. Again we may do a double-take at Nabokov’s
personifications, which request a rereading as much as does the chiastic
stalk [tip/ pit] in the line above: “He entered the elevator which greeted
him with a small sound he knew, half stamp, half shiver, and its features
lit up.” But after he hangs up “his wide-brimmed black felt hat,” the hat,
“no longer feeling at home, fell off the peg and was left lying there” (23).
“No longer feeling at home” because, first, the hat is no longer on Krug’s
28 T. WHALEN

head and, second, his wife will never again live in this apartment. In the
deadened world of Bend Sinister, a dystopian nightmare that fuses Nazi
Germany with Communist Russia, such ludic activity and anthropomor-
phisms counter cruelty.
Toward the end of his story, Pnin, after a successful housewarming
party has concluded with his being told that the tenure he expected from
his college will never be given to him, “prepared a bubble bath in the
sink for the crockery, glass, and silverware, and with infinite care lowered
the aquamarine bowl into the tepid foam” (171–72). Are the following
personifications that we find in Pnin’s bubble bath examples of Pninian
pathetic fallacies, or of the sympathies of an author alert to the mysteri-
ous patterns within our world? The bowl’s “resonant flint glass emitted a
sound full of muffled mellowness as it settled down to soak”; the infamous
nutcracker is “a leggy thing” that “fell like a man from a roof” (172).
When we encounter these personifications, at least somewhat informed
by the life-generating comparisons of Gogol that Nabokov examined in
his study of the author (NG 78–79), it’s as if something we can’t quite
understand but can only sense, some consciousness, is trying to make itself
known, calling us to return to the text to discern its pattern (or conscious-
nesses, in the case of Nabokov’s penultimate novel, Transparent Things,
which is narrated by a committee of ghosts—not unlike, perhaps, Pnin’s
belief in a “democracy of ghosts” [136]). The “leggy” nutcracker, for
example, is connected with the squirrels that appear in each of the novel’s
chapters, a motif which Charles Nicol and Gennady Barabtarlo, among
others, have traced. Though these arboreal animals may have been sup-
plied by the narrator, we still sense that another, possibly otherworldly,
hand has been placing signs in Pnin’s path, signs that he, being mortal,
cannot fully discern.
Nabokov’s “particularity and precision,” Brian Boyd emphasizes, “far
from working against or scoring off his readers, show him […] at his most
generous. He allows us to find out through our own curiosity and imagi-
nation the excitements and achievements of the mind in confronting its
world” (VNRY 315). Nabokov’s sympathy for others is coupled with his
belief in “the supremacy of the detail over the general, of the part that
is more alive than the whole, of the little thing which a man observes
and greets with a friendly nod of the spirit while the crowd around is
being driven by some common impulse to some common goal” (LL 373).
His wordplay, his acrostics and anagrams, patterns, involutions, polytonal
prose, and metaphysical chess turns (“a knight’s move off the board into
 “AND SO THE PASSWORD IS—?” 29

space” [NB 213]) are also details that bind his art to the world. Far from
being solipsistic, as with rereading itself they serve to trigger rather than
arrest cognition; to reengage us with, rather than isolate us from, the
world.
The immense generosity of Nabokov’s project is no better exempli-
fied than in the passage toward the end of Speak, Memory, as he, his wife
Véra, and their young son Dmitri are about to depart war-torn France
for the USA. The parents, taller than the child, can see in the distance
the funnel of the ship on which they will embark, but they refrain from
pointing it out to their son. Since the world is at base good, that is,
spiritualized, the discovery, often through rereading, of this goodness
becomes an ethical act. At a key epiphanic moment in Speak, Memory,
after confessing that he does not believe in time, Nabokov experiences
“a sense of oneness with sun and stone. A thrill of gratitude to whom
it may concern—to the contrapuntal genius of human fate or to tender
ghosts humoring a lucky mortal” (139). Through the aural and eye-
rhyme of one/ sun/ stone and by shifting the s from sun to one, leaving
only the t (of transcendence?) to add, in order to make a sun-warmed
stone, the receptive reader enters (re-re-enters) the Nabokovian zone of
“ecstasy” that he likens to “a momentary vacuum into which rushes all
that I love” (139).
Earlier in his autobiography, Nabokov has pointed us to the role that
consciousness plays in these heightened moments:

It is […] when one is wide awake, at moments of robust joy and achieve-
ment, on the highest terrace of consciousness, that mortality has a chance
to peer beyond its own limits, from the mast, from the past and its castle
tower. And although nothing much can be seen through the mist, there is
somehow the blissful feeling that one is looking in the right direction. (50)

Like the indentation a child sees in the grass that foretells the hidden,
colorful egg, the mast-past-castle-mist sequence in this passage awakens
us to art and life’s “combinatorial” delights—unlike Humbert, who with
his more limited or “inattentive” consciousness doesn’t see in “mist and
mast” a combinatorial pleasure, but equates their difference with that of
“terrestrial women” and his beloved nymphets (Lo 18).
When in his afterword to Lolita Nabokov catalogues “the nerves of
the novel,” he is asking us to reread (posthumously, so to speak) these
“secret points, the subliminal coordinates by means of which the book is
30 T. WHALEN

plotted.” Each of the nine items he selects—among them Mr. Taxovich,

the Ramsdale School class list, and “the Kasbeam barber (who cost me a
month of work)” (316)—contains the beauty-plus-pity seed of his ethi-
cally based art. Rorty claims, as was noted earlier, that Nabokov’s direct-
ing us to reread this sentence is a sign of his contempt for the reader,
rather than a generous hint to search for the clues to the art within it.
He rightly calls attention to Humbert’s inattentiveness in this passage,
yet elsewhere surprisingly states that Humbert as an artist is equal to his
creator. “Humbert is as exactly as good a writer, exactly as much of an
artist, capable of creating exactly as much iridescent ecstasy, as Nabokov
himself” (159). This is a remarkable equating of the creation to the cre-
ator, as if suddenly Rorty’s criticism had strayed into a Queneau novel
where the characters escape their book’s confines, though I doubt such
was Rorty’s intent. If he meant that artists are capable of criminal acts,
he’s telling us nothing we don’t know. If he is aware of writers who have
achieved Nabokov’s artistry and committed crimes equal to those of
Humbert’s, he doesn’t name them.
In his psychobiographical approach, Rorty imagines a kind of Oedipal
struggle between Nabokov and his father: “I can sum up my reading of
Nabokov by saying that he tried to defend himself against the charge
of infidelity to his father’s project [of social reform] by wielding some
general ideas about the function of ‘the writer,’ ideas which connect this
function both with his own special gifts and with his own special fear of
death” (167–68). But there’s no need to paste a Freudian reading onto
Nabokov’s metaphysics, any more than onto, say, one of Melville’s blank-
wall meditations or Bellow’s anthroposophy, each of which enrich greatly
its author’s work. Whether or not Nabokov’s otherworldly metaphysics
break apart upon the shoals of likelihood, his sympathies, his ethics, and
aesthetics do not.
Humbert’s “inattentive” patter about the Kasbeam barber is only
momentarily arrested (“it came as a shock to realize […] that the mus-
tached young ball player had been dead for the last thirty years” [213]),
before he’s off again and has “bought a bunch of bananas for my mon-
key,” that is, Lolita. The reader, if she’s not a careful, creative, empathic
rereader, is off again as well, blithely following Humbert down his allitera-
tive, self-justifying road.
“And so the password is—?” asks Kinbote in Pale Fire (225). And
Shade, you might recall, replies…
 “AND SO THE PASSWORD IS—?” 31

NOTES
1. “‘Lolita Haze’ was ‘Juanita Dark’ in Father’s drafts of the novel until very
late in the game,” according to Dmitri Nabokov, “On a Book Entitled The
Enchanter” (En 90).
2. The italicized passage is taken by Alexandrov from Nabokov’s 1941 draft of
his lecture “The Art of Literature and Commonsense.” This passage is miss-
ing from the 1951 version Bowers used for his edition of the lectures (cf. LL
377).
3. Only later, for his Russian translation of Lolita, did Nabokov include a more
formalistic fifth element: harmony (“Postscript” 189).
4. The importance to Nabokov’s life and work of his relationship to Sergey,
one year older than Nabokov, to whom as a child Nabokov remained often
aloof and whom at times he bullied, bears more consideration. On one
highly refracted level, for example, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight can be
seen as Sergey relating the story of his more creative brother, Vladimir. Only
after this novel was published, however, did Nabokov find out about
Sergey’s fate during the war, according to Boyd (VNAY 88–89).

WORKS CITED
Alexandrov, Vladimir E. Nabokov’s Otherworld. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1991.
Boyd, Brian. Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1991.
———. Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1990.
de la Durantaye, Leland. Style is Matter: The Moral Art of Vladimir Nabokov.
Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007.
Dickstein, Morris. Leopards in the Temple: The Transformation of American Fiction
1945–1970. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002.
Field, Andrew. VN: The Life and Art of Vladimir Nabokov. New  York: Crown,
1986.
Nabokov, Vladimir. Bend Sinister. 1947. New York: Vintage, 1990.
———. “The Circle.” [“Krug,” 1936.] Trans. by the author. Stories 375–84.
———. The Enchanter. [“Volshebnik.”] Trans. and introd. Dmiri Nabokov.
New York: Vintage, 1991.
———. Glory. [Podvig.] 1932. Trans. Dmitri Nabokov with the author. 1971.
New York: Vintage, 1991.
———. Invitation to a Beheading. [Priglasheniye na kazn’.] 1938. Trans. Dmitri
Nabokov with the author. New York: Vintage, 1989.
32 T. WHALEN

———. Laughter in the Dark. [Kamera Obskura.] 1932. Trans. Vladimir Nabokov.
New York: Vintage, 1989.
———. Lectures on Literature. Ed. Fredson Bowers. New York: Harcourt, 1980.
———. Lolita. 1955. New York: Vintage, 1989.
———. Mary. [Mashen’ka.] 1926. Trans. Michael Glenny with the author.
New York: Vintage, 1989.
———. Nabokov’s Butterflies: Unpublished and Uncollected Writings. Ed. Brian
Boyd and Robert Michael Pyle. Boston: Beacon Press, 2000.
———. Nikolai Gogol. New York: New Directions, 1959.
———. Pale Fire. 1962. New York: Vintage, 1989.
———. “Perfection.” [“Sovershentsvo,” 1932. Trans. by the author. Stories
338–347.
———. Pnin. 1957. New York: Vintage, 1989.
———. “Postscript to the Russian Edition of Lolita.” Trans. Earl D.  Sampson.
Nabokov’s Fifth Arc. Ed. J. E. Rivers and Charles Nicol. Austin: University of
Texas Press, 1982. 188–194.
———. The Real Life of Sebastian Knight. 1941. New York: Vintage, 1992.
———. Selected Letters: 1940–77. Ed. Dmitri Nabokov and Matthew J. Bruccoli.
New York: Harcourt, 1989.
———. Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited. 1966. New York: Vintage,
1989.
———. The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov. New York: Vintage, 1997.
———. Strong Opinions. 1973. New York: Vintage, 1990.
———. Transparent Things. New York: Vintage, 1989.
Nabokov, Vladimir, and Edmund Wilson. The Nabokov-Wilson Letters: Vladimir
Nabokov and Edmund Wilson, 1940–1971. Ed. Simon Karlinsky. New  York:
Harper, 1979.
Rorty, Richard. “The Barber of Kasbeam: Nabokov on Cruelty.” Contingency,
Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. 141–68.
 CHAPTER 3

Nabokov and Dostoevsky: Good Writer,

Bad Reader?

Julian Connolly

One of Nabokov’s most distinctive attributes as a literary critic was his

penchant for rendering “strong opinions” on writers and their art. For
example, he told Robert Hughes in 1965: “I have been perplexed and
amused by fabricated notions about so-called ‘great books.’ That, for
instance, Mann’s asinine Death in Venice or Faulkner’s corncobby chroni-
cles can be considered ‘masterpieces,’ or at least what journalists call ‘great
books,’ is to me an absurd delusion, as when a hypnotized person makes
love to a chair” (SO 57). Among the authors of famous Russian works,
Fyodor Dostoevsky came in for Nabokov’s harshest pronouncements, as
in his 1964 Playboy interview: “He was a prophet, a claptrap journalist and
a slapdash comedian. I admit that some of his scenes, some of his tremen-
dous, farcical rows are extraordinarily amusing. But his sensitive murder-
ers and soulful prostitutes are not to be endured for one moment—by
this reader anyway” (SO 42). Yet such declarations did little to inform
Nabokov’s audience about the specific shortcomings of Dostoevsky’s art
that would lead one to render such a judgment.
Despite his disparagement of Dostoevsky, we know that in his own fic-
tion, especially the works written during his years as a Russian-language
writer, Nabokov incorporated and reworked many important themes and
concepts originally found in Dostoevsky’s work.1 These include variations

J. Connolly ()
Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of Virginia,
Charlottesville, Virginia, USA

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 33

M. Rodgers, S.E. Sweeney (eds.), Nabokov and the Question
of Morality, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-59221-7_3
34 J. CONNOLLY

on the theme of the double (from The Double), in The Eye and Despair;
the manipulation of the narrator’s relationship to his audience (from Notes
from the Underground), in Despair and Lolita; the theme of pedophilia
(from The Devils and Crime and Punishment), in Lolita; the tyranny of the
adult over a vulnerable child (from “A Gentle Creature”), in Lolita; and
the consequences of one’s discovery of the world’s absurdity (from “The
Dream of a Ridiculous Man”), in The Eye.
Given this combination of vague condemnation and repeated imitation, if
we want to find out what in Dostoevsky’s work Nabokov found specific fault
with, we must look beyond Nabokov’s own fiction and turn to the lectures
he delivered to his students at Cornell. As readers of Nabokov’s lectures on
literature are well aware, he was fond of telling his audience how they should
read (“One should notice and fondle details”) and what they should not do
as readers (“If one begins with a ready-made generalization, one begins at
the wrong end and travels away from the book before one has started to
understand it” (LL 1). Because Nabokov expressed such low opinions of
Dostoevsky, even though Dostoevsky has generally been considered one of
the greatest of Russian writers, it would be worthwhile to examine Nabokov’s
own critique of Dostoevsky and see how well it holds up under close scru-
tiny. In other words, was Nabokov a “good reader” of Dostoevsky, whom
he clearly considered a “bad writer”? Or did Nabokov overlook or fail to
understand certain important aspects of Dostoevsky’s works, thereby leading
to an inadequate or unbalanced approach to the latter’s accomplishments?
We must, however, approach our task with the understanding that the
lectures in their currently published form ought not be considered a com-
prehensive, authoritative version of the lectures Nabokov actually deliv-
ered at Cornell, nor did he himself give approval for their publication in
their present form. In fact, in 1972, after perusing his lecture notes with
an eye toward preparing them for publication, he characterized the lec-
tures as “chaotic and sloppy” and declared that they “must never be pub-
lished. None of them!” (qtd. in Boyd, VNAY 175). Brian Boyd, author
of the two-volume biography of Nabokov, states that the lectures edited
for publication “contain many puzzling omissions, misreadings, spurious
improvements, and even sheer editorial inventions” (VNAY 173).

GENERAL CRITICISM
With this caveat in mind, we will take a two-pronged approach in our
analysis of Nabokov’s critique. First, we will examine Nabokov’s criticisms
 NABOKOV AND DOSTOEVSKY: GOOD WRITER, BAD READER? 35

of Dostoevsky’s art and try to determine how accurate they really are in
relation to Dostoevsky’s actual practice. Second, we will, when appro-
priate, consider how well Nabokov’s criticism of Dostoevsky’s art might
apply to his own work. The main thrust of Nabokov’s critique, one might
assume at the outset, would be aesthetic. As he once asserted: “there can
be no question that what makes a work of fiction safe from larvae and rust
is not its social importance but its art, only its art” (SO 33). Yet when one
looks closely at the specific elements in Dostoevsky’s work that Nabokov
singles out for criticism, one comes to the conclusion that Nabokov may
have objected as much to Dostoevsky’s ideological agenda as to any per-
ceived flaws in style, structure, technique, and so forth. We should turn,
then, to the lectures, and find out precisely what Nabokov had to say
about Dostoevsky.2
He begins by making a general assessment: “In all my courses I
approach literature from the only point of view that [in] literature interests
me—namely the point of view of enduring art and individual genius. From
this point of view Dostoevski is not a great writer, but a rather mediocre
one—with flashes of excellent humor, but, alas, with wastelands of literary
platitudes in between” (LRL 98).3 Just what did Nabokov have in mind
here? Our analysis of his remarks offers mixed results. One notes right
away that in his introductory comments and biographical sketch of the
author, Nabokov focuses first and foremost on the ideological content of
Dostoevsky’s work:

When after his return from Siberia his essential ideas began to ripen—the
idea of salvation to be found through transgression, the ethical supremacy
of suffering and submission over struggle and resistance, the defense of
free will not as a metaphysical but as a moral proposition, and the ultimate
formula of egoism-antichrist-Europe on one side and brotherhood-Christ-
Russia on the other—when these ideas […] suffused his novels, much of the
Western influence still remained. (LRL 103)
I do not like this trick his characters have of “sinning their way to Jesus”
or, as a Russian author Ivan Bunin put it more bluntly, “spilling Jesus all
over the place.” Just as I have no ear for music, I have to my regret no ear
for Dostoevski the prophet. (LRL 104)

In these introductory remarks, Nabokov offers up some provocative for-

mulations as he tries to convey the essence of Dostoevsky’s philosophy,
including “neurotic Christianism” and “a kind of very artificial and com-
pletely pathological idealization of the simple Russian folk” (LRL 101).
Nabokov does not offer any justification for his use of such charged psy-
36 J. CONNOLLY

chological terminology as “neurotic” and “completely pathological,” but

his antipathy for the ideas he found in Dostoevsky’s works may go a long
way to explain his overall disapproval of the writer’s art.
It is only after making these generalizations about the ideas contained
in Dostoevsky’s work that Nabokov moves on to say something about
technique, yet here too he begins with something of a “ready-made gen-
eralization.” Regarding The Brothers Karamazov, he states: “you will note
that the natural background and all things relevant to the perception of
the senses hardly exist. What landscape there is is a landscape of ideas,
a moral landscape. The weather does not exist in his world, so it does
not much matter how people dress” (LRL 104). One might concur with
Nabokov’s observation if one compares Dostoevsky’s descriptions with
those of some of his contemporaries, such as Turgenev, for example (or
even with Nabokov himself). But it is not quite accurate to suggest that
Dostoevsky is indifferent to physical description, even of the weather. One
thinks of the Petersburg cityscape evoked on the second page of Crime
and Punishment:

It was terribly hot out, and moreover, it was close, crowded; lime, scaffold-
ing, bricks, dust everywhere, and that special summer stench known so well
to every Petersburger who cannot afford to rent a summer house[…] The
intolerable stench from the taverns […] and the drunkards he kept running
into […] completed the loathsome and melancholy coloring of the picture.
(Crime and Punishment 4)

And what did Nabokov, who asked his students to visualize the layout of
the railroad car in which Anna Karenina traveled,4 make of Dostoevsky’s
descriptions of such interiors as Rogozhin’s gloomy house in The Idiot,
with its “walls of imitation marble, an oak block floor, and furniture of
the 1820s, crude and heavy” (225), or Father Zosima’s monastery cell in
The Brothers Karamazov, with its telling mixture of “important engrav-
ings from great Italian artists of the past centuries” and “the commonest
Russian lithographs of saints, martyrs, hierarchs, and so on, such as are
sold for a few kopecks at any fair” (39)?
After delivering some broad comments about how one should read a
literary work (“Literature must be taken and broken to bits, pulled apart,
squashed” [LRL 105]), Nabokov delivers the solemn pronouncement
that “art is a divine game” (LRL 106). The notion of the game seems very
important to Nabokov, and he explains:
 NABOKOV AND DOSTOEVSKY: GOOD WRITER, BAD READER? 37

it is a game, because it remains art only so long as we are allowed to remem-

ber that, after all, it is all make-believe, that the people on the stage, for
instance, are not actually murdered, in other words, only as long as our
feelings of horror or of disgust do not obscure our realization that we are, as
readers or as spectators, participating in an elaborate and enchanting game:
the moment this balance is upset […] we cease to derive that feeling of plea-
sure and satisfaction and spiritual vibration, that combined feeling which is
our reaction to true art. (LRL 106)

The clear implication of his subsequent discussion is that works such as

Crime and Punishment (with its depiction of murder) and Notes from the
Underground (which he calls Memoirs from a Mousehole) fail to maintain
that balance. Yet one cannot help thinking of the murder of David Krug
in Bend Sinister. Encountering that scene, we as readers are hard-pressed
to remember that we are participating in “an elaborate and enchanting
game.” On the contrary, we recall that the murderous experiment itself is
described as a game: mention is made of “release games,” “the ‘squeezing
game,’” and “the ‘spitting game’” (BS 218, 219). “What a Treat,” says the
title card in the film of the event (BS 224). Clearly, Nabokov wants us to
feel the full horror and grotesqueness of such a denigration of the human
spirit. Perhaps he would argue that it is the very antithesis of the notion of
the “divine” game he writes about in Lectures on Russian Literature. But if
his readers do not feel that they are participating in something “elaborate
and enchanting” at this moment, does it mean that Nabokov has failed his
own test of true art here? Or does this experience suggest that his defini-
tion of the “divine game” may be inadequate to describe some moments
of high pathos in literature?
Nabokov concludes his general observations on Dostoevsky’s art by
turning to the types of characters who appear in Dostoevsky’s work.
Referring to these characters as “freakish” (LRL 107), Nabokov indicates
that Dostoevsky’s “whole gallery of characters consists almost exclusively
of neurotics and lunatics” (LRL 109), and he helpfully offers a listing
of characters based on “the categories of mental illnesses by which they
are affected” (LRL 107), relying almost verbatim here on an article on
Dostoevsky in The Psychoanalytic Review.5 The four categories are: “epi-
lepsy,” “senile dementia,” “hysteria,” and “psychopaths.” Leaving aside
the fact that epilepsy might well be categorized as something other than
a “mental illness,” we should note that the actual numbers of characters
listed in these categories are extremely small (only one under the category
38 J. CONNOLLY

of “senile dementia,” for example) in comparison to the hundreds of indi-

viduals (including dozens of major characters) who do not fit neatly into
these categories.6 Nabokov’s own works, by the way, could also be said
to be teeming with “freakish” characters (including Humbert Humbert,
Clare Quilty, Alexander Luzhin, and Bachmann, to name just a few).
Also problematic is Nabokov’s assertion that Dostoevsky’s characters
“do not develop as personalities” throughout the book: “We get them
complete at the beginning of the tale, and so they remain without any
considerable changes although their surroundings may alter and the most
extraordinary things may happen to them” (LRL 109). While it is true that
Dostoevsky’s characters do not generally undergo the same kind of edu-
cational or emotional maturation process that one finds in a nineteenth-
century Bildungsroman, they do not go through his novels unchanged.
What makes Dostoevsky’s work distinctive, in fact, is that his protago-
nists’ crucial discoveries center on themselves. That is, they make their most
important discoveries about their own natures—their preconceptions,
their limitations, and so forth—rather than about the world around them.
What is more, these discoveries generally involve revelation or disclosure
of core truths about the protagonist’s personalities that they had not fully
realized or acknowledged before. For example, Ivan Karamazov in The
Brothers Karamazov slowly comes to realize the degree to which he him-
self is responsible for the murder of his father and how fallacious it is to
believe that one’s inner wishes are harmless or inconsequential.

CRITICISM OF INDIVIDUAL WORKS

After making general remarks on Dostoevsky’s ideas and characters,
Nabokov turns to five individual works. In the interests of space, we will
look only briefly at a few of Nabokov’s more salient judgments. The
first text he deals with is Crime and Punishment, and one of its features
that provokes a particularly negative response from Nabokov is the way
Dostoevsky brings together the murderer Raskolnikov and the prostitute
Sonia. Nabokov exclaims: “I suggest that neither a true artist nor a true
moralist […] should have placed side by side, in one breath, in one gust
of false eloquence, a killer together with whom?—a poor streetwalker[…]
There is no rhetorical link between a filthy murderer, and this unfortu-
nate girl[…] It is a shoddy literary trick, not a masterpiece of pathos and
piety” (LRL 110). Nabokov argues strenuously that the crime of murder
and the act of selling one’s body are not comparable, and he is indignant
 NABOKOV AND DOSTOEVSKY: GOOD WRITER, BAD READER? 39

with Dostoevsky for seeming to link them. Yet Nabokov simply does not
understand that, for Dostoevsky himself, the two “crimes” are really not
comparable. In the very same scene Dostoevsky shows Raskolnikov mak-
ing this precise error when he tries to link his own conduct with Sonia’s:
“You, too, have stepped over … were able to step over. You laid hands on
yourself, you destroyed a life … your own (it’s all the same)” (Crime and
Punishment 329). It clearly is not “all the same,” however, and Dostoevsky
knows it. For Dostoevsky, the murder of another human being and the
sacrifice of one’s body for the good of one’s family are in no way equal
or commensurate. Raskolnikov is coupled with Sonia not to suggest any
essential similarity between the two in terms of conduct, but rather so that
Raskolnikov can learn from Sonia how to cope with devastating feelings of
humiliation and shame.
Even so, Nabokov is correct when he points out that Dostoevsky
shows Raskolnikov’s crime in “all sordid detail,” whereas he passes over
Sonia “in the exercise of her trade” (LRL 112–13). If Dostoevsky had,
however, tried to show something of Sonia’s “trade” in more detail, he
might well have exhibited the melodrama and situational clichés that
Nabokov so abundantly decries in the novel. While we are on this subject,
though, it might be worth noting that Nabokov’s evident annoyance at
Dostoevsky’s refusal to discuss the details of Sonia’s trade adds a fresh
perspective on Nabokov’s own handling of Humbert’s striking reluctance
to describe clearly what occurred between him and Dolly on their first
night together. Humbert writes: “I shall not bore my learned readers with
a detailed account of Lolita’s presumption[…] But really these are irrel-
evant matters; I am not concerned with so-called ‘sex’ at all. Anybody can
imagine those elements of animality” (Lo 133–34). Nabokov summarily
dismisses Dostoevsky’s treatment of Sonia’s “sin” as follows: “The harlot’s
sin is taken for granted. Now I submit that the true artist is the person
who never takes anything for granted” (LRL 113). We might therefore
use Nabokov’s judgment on Dostoevsky as a gloss on his depiction of
Humbert. Humbert seeks to take his conduct with Dolly “for granted”
at this moment: does this not help to undermine his pretensions at being
an artist as well?
The second significant aspect of Nabokov’s critique of Crime and
Punishment is his claim that Dostoevsky’s handling of Raskolnikov’s
motivation for murder is “muddled” (113), and therefore represents an
artistic weakness in the novel. Yet as one reads Nabokov’s description of
the various possible motives that Raskolnikov himself raises and discards,
40 J. CONNOLLY

it becomes clear that Nabokov failed to understand (just as Raskolnikov

himself did) Raskolnikov’s deepest motivation for killing the pawnbro-
ker. It was not to help his family, nor to help humanity, nor even to find
out whether he was an extraordinary man (since he already knew he was
not: “if I tormented myself for so many days: would Napoleon have gone
ahead or not?—it means I must already have felt clearly that I was not
Napoleon” [Crime and Punishment 419]). No, Raskolnikov committed
this murder in order to bring to the surface the virulent sickness that
was eating away at his soul: the haunting sensation that he was someone
special, different, and apart from the crowd—in fact, tragically isolated.
Desperate to overcome this isolation and find a way to reconnect with
humanity, he did something so abhorrent that he was forced into con-
tact with the world again. Murder, in short, was Raskolnikov’s perverse
(and unconscious) way of launching this process of reintegration back into
the world. Dostoevsky does not present this motivation explicitly. The
reader must go beneath the surface and see what unconscious drives are
at work in Raskolnikov. Yet one would think that this subtlety would not
overly trouble Nabokov, who himself seemed condescending to those who
only want their “knowledge nicely browned” (“An Evening of Russian
Poetry,” PP 158).
When we turn to Nabokov’s commentary on Notes from the
Underground, we find three essential problems with his approach. First,
Nabokov seems not to understand precisely what Dostoevsky was striv-
ing to achieve in the first part of the work. Admitting that his interest
in the text is limited to “a study in style” (LR 115), Nabokov offers an
interpretation of what the Underground Man illustrates, in the first part
of the novel, which has significant gaps. Nabokov begins with the promis-
ing observation that “references are made to topical events of the day in
the middle of the 1860s” (LRL 116), but he laments that Dostoevsky
failed to use them to characterize the protagonist in the way Tolstoy did
with Oblonsky in Anna Karenina. Indeed, he declares: “The topicality,
however, is vague and has no structural power” (LRL 116). Here, though,
Nabokov completely fails to recognize (or perhaps to acknowledge) that
the structure of the Underground Man’s discourse and the operating
philosophy conveyed in it represent a pastiche of ideas on “rational ego-
ism” set forth in Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s essay “The Anthropological
Principle in Philosophy” (1860). Many of the Underground Man’s utter-
ances about the laws of nature and human behavior represent a paraphrase
of Chernyshevsky’s formulations, although often with a parodic twist.
 NABOKOV AND DOSTOEVSKY: GOOD WRITER, BAD READER? 41

Indeed, what gives the Underground Man’s discourse in Part 1 so much

of its idiosyncratic character is the fact that intellectually he has absorbed
and accepted Chernyshevsky’s deterministic view of human nature,
while emotionally and morally he reacts violently against it. This divided
response creates a stunning dialectic whose numerous paradoxes and con-
tradictions make the text an extraordinarily distinctive piece of writing.7 It
is curious that Nabokov did not notice this crucial Chernyshevskian sub-
text (or did not care to explicate its significance), since he had examined
Chernyshevsky’s life and philosophy so closely when he was working on
The Gift. Perhaps his negative appraisal of the Underground Man’s dis-
course represents a visceral (and unconscious?) reprise of his own response
to the Chernyshevsky material.
The second problem in Nabokov’s discussion of Notes from the
Underground is his tendency to characterize the narrator’s idiosyncratic
style as Dostoevsky’s: “The repetition of words and phrases, the intonation
of obsession, the hundred percent banality of every word, the vulgar soap-
box eloquence mark these elements of Dostoevsky’s style” (LRL 115).
Of course, this is not exclusively Dostoevsky’s style. Many of the stylistic
features Nabokov finds objectionable are based on the Chernyshevsky text
(and Nabokov was fully familiar with and critical of Chernyshevsky’s style,
as he demonstrated in The Gift). Dostoevsky endowed his narrator with
this idiosyncratic style as a means of characterization, and he intended its
awkwardness and vulgarity to help create the image of an “anti-hero” (as
the narrator terms himself at the end of the text), a truly original figure in
Russian literature.
The final problem with Nabokov’s assessment is how he treats
Dostoevsky’s portrayal of the prostitute Liza. Clearly, Nabokov had had
enough of soulful prostitutes after Sonia in Crime and Punishment, but
his refusal even to discuss the conversations between the Underground
Man and Liza toward the end of the novel certainly does not serve either
Dostoevsky or himself very well. It is interesting that he had earlier tried
to characterize the Underground Man’s indulgence in “filthy vice” (LRL
120) by referring to the example of Rousseau’s St. Preux in Julie, ou la
Nouvelle Héloïse, “who also visited a remote room in a house of sin where
he kept drinking wine under the impression it was water, and next thing
found himself in the arms of what he calls une créature.” He concludes:
“This is vice as depicted in sentimental novels” (LRL 120). Nabokov’s
subsequent treatment of the Underground Man’s encounter with Liza
leaves the impression that Dostoevsky has simply followed Rousseau’s
42 J. CONNOLLY

shallow model here, when actually, his meeting with her is one of the most
searing and revelatory episodes in Dostoevsky’s work.8
Nabokov’s comments on The Idiot and The Devils are relatively brief
for such complex novels, but a few issues in his discussion are worth high-
lighting nonetheless. First is his mention of the religious dimension in
The Idiot. He cites D. S. Mirsky’s appraisal that Dostoevsky’s Christianity
“is of a very doubtful kind” (LRL 127). He then supplements Mirsky’s
appraisal with comments of his own: “If we add to this that he kept throw-
ing his weight around as a true interpreter of Orthodox Christianity, and
that for the untying of every psychological or psychopathic knot he inevi-
tably leads us to Christ, or rather to his own interpretation of Christ, and
to the Holy Orthodox Church, we shall better understand the truly irri-
tating side of Dostoevsky as ‘philosopher’” (LRL 127). Once again, how-
ever, this curt dismissal does not do justice to Dostoevsky’s fiction nor to
the complexity of his art. For one thing, the question of the exact nature
of Dostoevsky’s Christian belief is quite complicated. Critics and scholars
had begun debating this issue even while Dostoevsky was still alive,9 and
Dostoevsky himself remarked, while writing The Brothers Karamazov, that
“it is not as a child that I believe in Christ and confess Him, but my hosanna
has passed through a great crucible of doubts” (Dostoevskii, Polnoe 27: 86;
original emphasis). One of the core elements of Dostoevsky’s mature fic-
tion is the tension and struggle between positions of faith and doubt. It
is in this very tension, where often the strongest arguments seem to be
on the side of doubt, that much of the compelling power of his work lies.
Nabokov was obviously not interested in this aspect of Dostoevsky’s
fiction, which, as he indicates, “irritated” him. It is unfortunate, however,
that he did not try to look more closely at the specific way it informs
Dostoevsky’s fiction (as opposed to his public activities). Far from “throw-
ing his weight around” in his literary texts, Dostoevsky handled the topic
in such a nuanced way that talented critics of his work cannot even agree
whether the religious dimension in a work such as The Brothers Karamazov
represents authentic Orthodoxy or amounts to little more than “nature
mysticism.”10 As one might expect, this issue would crop up again in
Nabokov’s discussion of Dostoevsky’s last novel.
Nabokov’s discussion of The Devils is briefest of all. Focusing on
Dostoevsky’s introduction of a scene of scandal early in the novel, Nabokov
describes how Dostoevsky crams all the characters into one room “with
all the gusto of a playwright tackling his climax” (LRL 130). This insight
leads Nabokov to an important criticism: “I want to stress again the fact
 NABOKOV AND DOSTOEVSKY: GOOD WRITER, BAD READER? 43

that Dostoevsky was more of a playwright than a novelist. […] Considered

as novels, his works fall to pieces; considered as plays, they are much too
long, diffuse, and badly balanced” (LRL 130). Nabokov makes here a
highly interesting and important point. The dramatic (and melodra-
matic) element in Dostoevsky is indeed distinctive. The critic Konstantin
Mochulsky, for one, treated Crime and Punishment as “a tragedy in five
acts with a prologue and an epilogue” (Dostoevsky 300). Yet Nabokov’s
claim, that when considered as novels “his works fall to pieces,” implies
a Jamesian view of the novel as a well-ordered, tidy structure, in contrast
to the “loose, baggy monsters” that James himself decried in nineteenth-
century fiction (“Preface” 477). Perhaps Nabokov simply did not recog-
nize (or appreciate) the fact that Dostoevsky was a remarkable innovator
in this genre, and not merely the imitator of French and other European
models that Nabokov at times suggests he was (see, for example, LRL
103, 129, and SO 229). As Mikhail Bakhtin so eloquently demonstrated
in his Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, Dostoevsky pioneered a new type of
novel—the “polyphonic” novel—that was based on dialogical principles
and oriented toward open-endedness rather than closure.11 This aspect of
Dostoevsky’s art may have been interpreted by Nabokov as a defect, not
as an innovative contribution to the novel genre.
Nabokov concludes his discussion of Dostoevsky with The Brothers
Karamazov, and again we encounter some familiar problems in matters
of interpretation and evaluation. First is the tendency to blur the distinc-
tion between author and narrator. When Nabokov uses the term “author”
and “writer” in his opening descriptions of the novel, he is really refer-
ring to the unnamed narrator-chronicler figure created by the authentic
author Dostoevsky. It is this narrator-chronicler who is embarrassed about
the name of “our town” (Skotoprigonevsk—“something like oxtown,”
Nabokov notes); it is he who invents the fanciful titles of the chapters; and
it is he who “entices his reader” in “this taunting and teasing way” (LRL
132). Of course, Dostoevsky himself is ultimately responsible for the nar-
rator’s effects, but Nabokov does not investigate why Dostoevsky may
have created such an unusual narrator, a gossipy fellow who at times seems
intimately familiar with the inner workings of the protagonists but at other
times provides contradictory hypotheses about behavior or even confesses
total ignorance about the protagonists’ motivations. This inconsistent
narration is not simply sloppiness on Dostoevsky’s part, but represents a
carefully constructed strategy designed to shape the reader’s response to
the story and its characters in distinctive ways.12
44 J. CONNOLLY

The second familiar issue is Nabokov’s resistance to and rejection of

Dostoevsky’s abundant use of Christian material in the novel. In particu-
lar, Nabokov says of Book 6, which recounts Father Zosima’s biography
as well as his exhortations on living a life of Christian practice: “The whole
lengthy limp story of the monk Zosima could have been deleted from the
novel without impairing it; rather, its deletion would have given the book
more unity and a better balanced construction” (LRL 135). Nabokov is
not alone in expressing reservation about the form in which Zosima’s
story is presented.13 Yet we should note that the narrator asserts that
Zosima’s biography has been compiled by Alyosha Karamazov, and that it
is designated a zhitie in the chapter title. In Old Russian literature, the zhi-
tie, or saint’s life, was a distinct genre used to convey the life story of holy
figures. Dostoevsky intentionally invokes this tradition to signal that the
story of Zosima’s life has a special relationship to the text that surrounds
it. Not only does it underscore the unique nature of its subject, but it also
functions as a verbal icon, lifting the reader’s attention beyond the frame
of the novel and its quotidian activities into a realm of timeless spirituality.
Nabokov might have enlightened his students about this tradition and its
potential significance to the novel’s design.
As for his assertion that Zosima’s entire story “could have been deleted
from the novel without impairing it,” one can point to numerous ways in
which specific events and utterances in the story find resonance in episodes
that occur both before and after the story’s appearance in the novel and
that involve all three of the brothers. Many of Zosima’s pronouncements
about how one should treat children, confront the wrongdoing of others,
and avoid the dangers of haughty pride echo key incidents in other parts
of the novel. Moreover, if one were to expunge Zosima’s entire story, the
fierce battle between faith and doubt would slip dangerously out of bal-
ance. Zosima’s advocacy of “active love,” in particular, serves as a crucial
means of combating the lack of faith that afflicts so many of the characters
in The Brothers Karamazov.
Finally, Nabokov had little use for the character of Alyosha, whom
he sees as an exponent of “the author’s unfortunate love for the simple-
minded hero of Russian folklore” (LRL 135). Yet his discussion of
Alyosha’s role in the novel contains some serious errors. First, he states
that if we accept Dostoevsky’s world and its rules, “we may consider it a
possibility that even Alyosha may kill his father,” either for Dimtry’s sake,
or “in a sudden rebellion against the evil which his father represents, or for
any other reason” (LRL 133). Alyosha, however, is the one brother who
 NABOKOV AND DOSTOEVSKY: GOOD WRITER, BAD READER? 45

simply could not kill his father. We are told early on that he “did not want
to be a judge of men […] and would not condemn anyone for anything
[…] he accepted everything without the least condemnation” (Brothers
Karamazov 19). When he entered his father’s house, a true den of vice
and debauchery, he would “retire quietly […] without the least expression
of contempt or condemnation of anyone at all”; “[h]e never remembered
an offense” (Brothers Karamazov 19, 20). As it turns out, the only respon-
sibility he might have borne for his father’s murder was his failure to track
down Dmitry in the hours before the fatal event, but Dmitry had left town
and would have been difficult to find in any case.14
The concluding lines of Nabokov’s lectures on Dostoevsky are also
curious. Nabokov states that whenever we come to the character of
Alyosha—in contrast to Dmitry—we are “immersed in a different, entirely
lifeless element. Dusky paths lead the reader away into a murky world of
cold reasoning abandoned by the spirit of art” (LRL 135). One is hard-
pressed to understand just what Nabokov has in mind here, since the
entire novel argues against relying on “cold reasoning” alone to live one’s
life. Alyosha himself exclaims to Ivan that one should “love life before
everything else in the world.” Ivan asks: “Love life more than its mean-
ing?” To which Alyosha answers: “Certainly, love it before logic, as you
say, certainly before logic” (Brothers Karamazov 231). This is far from
“cold reasoning.” What’s more, in the final lines of the novel, Alyosha
makes a spontaneous speech to a group of children, calling on them to
make what is essentially a leap of faith. He challenges them to treasure
their good memory of their friend Ilyusha, who has just died, because
that one good memory may save them from wrongdoing later in life. And
he asserts that they will all rise again after death and see each other once
more, telling each other “with joy and gladness all that has happened”
(Brothers Karamazov 19).15
Clearly, Dostoevsky’s artistic methods and message did not hold much
appeal for Nabokov. The latter writer, who strove for subtlety in his explo-
ration of moral issues and claimed, for example, that Lolita had “no moral
in tow” (“On a Book” 314), undoubtedly felt irritated by the sort of overt
moralizing he could find in Dostoevsky’s work. Yet Nabokov himself does
not succeed in moving beyond his antipathy to Dostoevsky’s “neurotic
Christianism” and “pathological idealization of the simple Russian folk”
to provide a serious analysis of Dostoevsky’s poetics, either by investigating
the grounds on which his novels are structured or by asking why his narra-
tive voices display such distinctive traits and rhythms. To extract a simple
46 J. CONNOLLY

religious message from a work such as The Brothers Karamazov, stripped

of the vital debate between faith and doubt that is waged in the novel,
does not do true justice to its author or his effort. Nabokov declared in
his lectures on Dostoevsky that “the true artist is the person who never
takes anything for granted” (LRL 113). That statement should also apply,
I submit, to the teacher and the literary critic.

NOTES
1. Such echoes and revisions represent a special kind of aesthetic critique of
their own. For specific discussions of Nabokov’s creative relationship to
Dostoevsky, see, inter alia, Blackwell; Davydov; Deroy; Dolinin; Foster
(Chap. 6); O’Connor; Patterson; Seiden; and Tammi. See also several of
my previous essays (“The Function of Literary Allusion in Despair,”
“Madness and Doubling,” “Nabokov’s Dialogue with Dostoevsky,” and
“Nabokov’s (re)visions of Dostoevsky”). In his important article, “Caning
of Modernist Profaners,” Dolinin argues that a crucial distinction should
be made between Nabokov’s artistic reception of Dostoevsky’s work in the
1930s and his later critical reaction to the valorization of Dostoevsky by
Western writers and critics in the 1950s and 1960s. Recently, Naiman has
taken an unusual approach to the Nabokov–Dostoevsky relationship, ana-
lyzing Dostoevsky’s short novel The Double as if it had been written by
Nabokov, and concluding that Dostoevsky anticipated Nabokov’s metafic-
tive orientation (see the Epilogue to Nabokov, Perversely).
2. For an interesting discussion of Nabokov’s (mis)reading of another signifi-
cant writer, Franz Kafka, in his published lectures—contrasting Nabokov's
claims about what aesthetic criteria he uses to critique a work of literature
with his actual critical practice—see de la Durantaye.
3. This chapter uses the spelling “Dostoevsky” but preserves styles of translit-
eration chosen by other writers, including Nabokov.
4. Nabokov’s description and drawing of the railway car are included in LRL
231–32. Boyd quotes Nabokov on the importance of knowing such details:
“Any ass can assimilate the main points of Tolstoy’s attitude toward adul-
tery but in order to enjoy Tolstoy’s art the good reader must wish to visual-
ize, for instance, the arrangement of a railway carriage on the
Moscow-Petersburg night train as it was a hundred years ago” (cited in
VNAY 175).
5. See the article by Smith and Isotoff which appeared in The Psychoanalytic
Review in October 1935 (not 1939, the date listed by the editor in LRL
107). It might be noted here that Smith and Isotoff are more circumspect
in their classification of Dostoevsky’s characters than Nabokov. They
 NABOKOV AND DOSTOEVSKY: GOOD WRITER, BAD READER? 47

remark that theirs is “perhaps a profane use of the personages of great fic-
tion” (376).
6. One character to whom Smith and Isotoff devote considerable space gets
only passing mention by Nabokov—Stavrogin in The Devils. The article
discusses Stavrogin’s “violation of a girl of twelve” (384). This, of course,
is the age of Dolores Haze when she was violated by Humbert, and the
links between Stavrogin and Humbert have been the subject of comment
by Nabokov scholars.
7. For an insightful analysis of Dostoevsky’s treatment of the Chernyshevsky
material, see Frank 310–31.
8. It should be noted that Dostoevsky himself was highly skeptical of
Rousseau’s ideas, and this is particularly evident in Notes from the
Underground, where the Underground Man accuses Rousseau of telling
lies in his Confessions. For commentary on this topic, see Miller.
9. See, for example, Leontiev’s 1880 essay, “O vsemirnoi liubvi.” Thoughtful
contemporary discussions of Dostoevsky’s religious belief include those by
Cassedy, Jones, and Williams.
10. Hackel uses the term “nature mysticism” in his discussion of Alyosha’s
epiphanic experience in The Brothers Karamazov (164). Williams examines
the same scene and finds it thoroughly Christian in spirit (225).
11. Bakhtin’s work was originally published in Leningrad in 1929 under the
title Problemy tvorchestva Dostoevskogo (Problems of Dostoevsky’s Art). It was
significantly revised, expanded, and republished in Moscow in 1963 under
the title Problemy poetiki Dostoevskogo (Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics).
12. For an informative discussion of the elaborate narrative structure of The
Brothers Karamazov, see Belknap 69–97.
13. See, for example, Hackel, who finds that the “authenticity and effective-
ness” of the incidents recorded in the biography are “reduced the further
each is removed from Zosima’s cell and the time of his impending death”
(141).
14. Nabokov also errs when he discusses Dmitry’s trial and the introduction of
evidence that Dmitry kept some money in a small bag hanging from a
string around his neck. At the trial, Alyosha suddenly remembers Dmitry
hitting his chest at that spot, and he now recognizes that Dmitry had been
pointing to the place where he was carrying the money. Oddly, Nabokov
asserts: “Incidentally, Alyosha was wrong: Dmitry meant a charm he had
on a chain” (LRL 135). Dmitry, however, backs up Alyosha’s observation,
and the narrative states: “Mitya confirmed that it had all happened pre-
cisely that way, that he had precisely been pointing at the fifteen hundred
rubles that were on his chest” (Brothers Karamazov 679).
15. Incidentally, Alyosha’s invocation to the boys here represents a summons
for them to cherish what Nabokov himself would call a “future memory.”
48 J. CONNOLLY

WORKS CITED
Bakhtin, Mikhail. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Trans. Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1984.
Belknap, Robert. The Structure of The Brothers Karamazov. Evanston, IL:
Northwestern University Press, 1989.
Blackwell, Stephen. “Nabokov’s (Dostoevskian?) Loopholes.” Revising Nabokov
Revising: The Proceedings of the International Nabokov Conference. Ed.
Mitsuyoshi Numano and Tadashi Wakashima. Kyoto: Nabokov Society of
Japan, 2010. 175–80.
Boyd, Brian. Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1991.
Cassedy, Stephen. Dostoevsky’s Religion. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press,
2005.
Chernyshevsky, N.  G. “The Anthropological Principle in Philosophy.” Selected
Philosophical Essays. Moscow: Foreign Language Publishing House, 1953.
Connolly, Julian W. “The Function of Literary Allusion in Nabokov’s Despair.”
Slavic and East European Journal 26.3 (1982): 302–13.
———. “Madness and Doubling: From Dostoevsky’s The Double to Nabokov’s
The Eye.” Russian Literature Triquarterly 24 (1990): 129–39.
———. “Nabokov’s Dialogue with Dostoevsky: Lolita and ‘The Gentle Creature.’”
Nabokov Studies 4 (1997): 15–36.
———. “Nabokov’s (re)visions of Dostoevsky.” Nabokov and His Fiction: New
Perspectives. Ed. Julian W. Connolly. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1999. 141–57.
Davydov, Sergei. “Dostoevsky and Nabokov: The Morality of Structure in Crime
and Punishment and Despair.” Dostoevsky Studies 3 (1982): 157–70.
de la Durantaye, Leland. “Kafka’s Reality and Nabokov’s Fantasy. On Dwarves,
Saints, Beetles, Symbolism, and Genius.” Comparative Literature 59.4 (2007):
315–31.
Deroy, Chloé. Hommage satiriques à Dostoïevski dans l’oeuvre de Nabokov.
Saarbrücken: Éditions universitaires européennes, 2010.
Dolinin, Alexander. “Caning of Modernist Profaners: Parody in Despair.” Cycnos
12.2 (1995): 43–54. Expanded version published online at http://www.librar-
ies.psu.edu/nabokov/doli1.htm
Dostoevskii, Fedor. Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh. Vol. 27.
Leningrad: Nauka, 1984.
Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The Brothers Karamazov. Trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa
Volokhonsky. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002.
———. Crime and Punishment. Trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.
New York: Vintage, 1993.
———. The Idiot. Trans. Henry and Olga Carlisle. New York: Signet, 1969.
 NABOKOV AND DOSTOEVSKY: GOOD WRITER, BAD READER? 49

Foster, John Burt, Jr. Nabokov’s Art of Memory and European Modernism.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993.
Frank, Joseph. Dostoevsky: The Stir of Liberation, 1860–1865. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1988.
Hackel, Sergei. “The Religious Dimension: Vision or Evasion? Zosima’s Discourse
in The Brothers Karamazov.” New Essays on Dostoyevsky. Ed. Malcolm Jones and
Garth M. Terry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. 139–68.
James, Henry. “From the Preface to The Tragic Muse.” The Portable Henry James.
Ed. John Auchard. New York: Penguin, 2004. 476–478.
Jones, Malcolm. Dostoevsky and the Dynamics of Religious Experience. London:
Anthem Press, 2005.
Leontiev, Konstantin. “O vsemirnoi liubvi” (“On Universal Love”). Kriticheskie
stat’i. Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 8. Moscow: Izdanie V.  M. Sablina, 1912.
175–212.
Miller, Robin Feuer. “Dostoevsky and Rousseau: The Morality of Confession
Reconsidered.” Dostoevsky: New Perspectives. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall,
1984. 82–98.
Mochulsky, Konstantin. Dostoevsky: His Life and Work. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1971.
Nabokov, Vladimir. “Good Readers and Good Writers.” Lectures on Literature.
Ed. Fredson Bowers. New York: Harcourt, 1980. 1–6.
———. Lectures on Russian Literature. Ed. Fredson Bowers. New York: Harcourt,
1981.
———. Lolita. 1955. New York: Vintage, 1990.
———. “On a Book Entitled Lolita.” Lolita 311–317.
———. Poems and Problems. New York. McGraw-Hill, 1970.
———. Strong Opinions. 1973. New York: Vintage, 1990.
Naiman, Eric. Nabokov, Perversely. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010.
O’Connor, Katherine Tiernan. “Rereading Lolita, Reconsidering Nabokov’s
Relationship with Dostoevskij.” Slavic and East European Journal 33.1 (1989):
64–77.
Patterson, Galina. “Nabokov’s Use of Dostoevskii: Developing Goliadkin
‘Symptoms’ in Hermann as a Sign of the Artist’s End.” Canadian Slavonic
Papers 40.1-2 (1998): 107–24.
Seiden, Marvin. “Nabokov and Dostoevsky.” Contemporary Literature 13.4
(1972): 423–44.
Smith, S.  Stephenson and Andrei Isotoff. “The Abnormal from Within:
Dostoevsky.” The Psychoanalytic Review 32.4 (1935): 361–91.
Tammi, Pekka. “Invitation to a Decoding: Dostoevskij as a Subtext in Nabokov’s
Priglashenie na kazn’.” Scando-Slavica 32 (1986): 51–72.
Williams, Rowan. Dostoevsky: Language, Faith and Fiction. Waco, TX: Baylor
University Press, 2008.
 CHAPTER 4

The Will to Disempower?

Nabokov and His Readers

Michael Rodgers

In the fourth chapter of his autobiography, Speak, Memory, Vladimir

Nabokov warns: “The following passage is not for the general reader, but
for the particular idiot who, because he lost a fortune in some crash, thinks
he understands me” (59). Since no readers want to think of themselves
as idiotic, most will probably indulge in a snicker of haughty laughter at
anyone belonging to this ‘lower,’ lampooned category. Given Nabokov’s
frequently disparaging remarks on “the general reader,” however, experi-
enced Nabokovians will probably not classify themselves with that group-
ing either, instead raising themselves still further, perhaps to something
akin to the “good” readers he describes in Lectures on Literature.1 Yet,
by declaring at the end of the section that “The general reader may now
resume” (SM 59), Nabokov effectively brands all readers as merely “gen-
eral,” since everyone resumes reading the text at the same point. Such
a narrative trick is perhaps most embarrassing for readers who think of
themselves as belonging to the hypothetical “good” group, given that
they, ironically, might not notice the trick at all. This chapter argues that
aspects of Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy—specifically “master-slave
morality” and the “will to power”—can illuminate that kind of interplay
between author and reader in Nabokov’s fiction. Informed by Bernard
Reginster’s recent interpretation of the will to power as the “activity of

M. Rodgers ()
English Studies, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 51

M. Rodgers, S.E. Sweeney (eds.), Nabokov and the Question
of Morality, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-59221-7_4
52 M. RODGERS

overcoming resistance” (36), the chapter claims that the readerly resistance
engendered by the distinction between elevated author and subjugated
reader is both an anticipated and a productive aspect of his work.

THE AUTHOR-READER RELATIONSHIP

Although some kind of mutual obligation between writer and reader
seems to be a constant, this communicative dynamic can differ dramatically
between one text and another. The dynamic can be characterized by play-
fulness, for example, such as the kind of direct readerly address found in
Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman.2
The custom of some Victorian writers was to address the reader as friend or
confidant—Jane Eyre’s announcement, “Reader, I married him” (Brontë
444), is paradigmatic of this kind of intimacy. Popular fiction such as the
romance, the adventure novel, or the crime story is more dependent on
tacit reciprocal interaction, whereby escapism and entertainment correlate
with bestseller lists and mass readership. The author-reader relationship
changed in the early twentieth century, however; the writings of high mod-
ernists such as T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and James Joyce seem instead to be
concerned with lamenting the cultural and religious “wasteland” of their
time and demanding, to use Wolfgang Iser’s term, “implied readers” who
are attentive, educated, and well-versed in literary tradition.3 The relation-
ship between author and reader arguably shifted again with the advent of
postmodernism. In describing the writer’s interaction with the reader as
“like shooting fish with a slingshot in the dark” (“Ten Rules”) or as “the
mental equivalent of [the writer] pissing on your shoes, holding a knife
to your throat, or spouting nuclear physics at you” (Hume iv), authors
and critics such as Margaret Atwood and Kathryn Hume effectively frame
the relationship as one based on combat, belligerence, even antagonism.
This development suggests that twentieth-century authors may perceive
the reader as an opponent or a threat. If that is the case, then how do actual
readers enjoy, and even benefit from, the experience of engaging with such
texts? As Fyodor asks in Nabokov’s last Russian novel, The Gift, “Why
must one ‘disarm’ the reader? Is he dangerous?” (18).

NABOKOV AND HIS READER(S)

Readers of all kinds may find a strange discrepancy in Nabokov’s pub-
lished statements about “the reader.” On the one hand, he claims that
“the author is perfectly indifferent to the capacity and condition of the
 THE WILL TO DISEMPOWER? NABOKOV AND HIS READERS 53

reader’s brain” (Interview 122) and that “nervous publishers of popular

novels pamper the ‘average reader’—who should not be made to think”
(SM 124). Such remarks have given rise to interpretations like those found
in Leland de la Durantaye’s Style is Matter:

What Calvino, Oates, Carroll, Proffer, Rorty, Amis, and many others were
responding to in Nabokov’s work was in part an indifference verging on the
cruel within his works—in the cruel fates dealt to kind characters. But they
were also responding to an indifference verging on the cruel as concerns his
relation to his audience and his stress that he was “perfectly indifferent,”
“supremely indifferent” to what they thought and felt. (30)

On the other hand, even though de la Durantaye claims that Nabokov dis-
played “extraordinarily little concern for his readership” (30), the author’s
own words belie such an assertion on a number of occasions. Nabokov
explains that the pleasures of writing “correspond exactly to the pleasures
of reading,” because “the bliss, the felicity of a phrase is shared by writer
and reader: by the satisfied writer and the grateful reader” (SO 40), and
boasts that he himself has enjoyed “the greatest readers any author has
ever had” (SO 192). Viewing this relationship as more equal or recip-
rocal in nature—rather than uneven—makes sense when thinking of the
correlation between Nabokov’s fiction writing and his delight in com-
posing chess problems.4 Other critics, perhaps more fruitfully, claim that
“Nabokov actually ‘dramatizes’ his reader within his text and makes him
a frequent presence in the narrative. He talks to his reader, plays with his
expectations, teases him” (Connolly 44).
In his essay on “Good Readers and Good Writers,” in Lectures on
Literature, Nabokov simultaneously conveys both his indictment of “gen-
eral,” “average” readers and his corresponding praise of the “good” (or
even “great”) reader. After providing ten possible definitions as to what
the latter might be, Nabokov remarks, “Of course, as you have guessed,
the good reader is one who has imagination, memory, a dictionary, and
some artistic sense” (3). Here, Nabokov’s coercive second-person address
and his confident assertion about what “you” have understood creates the
impression that these distinctions are universally accepted by all readers,
regardless of what their individual choices might actually be. Although
ostensibly helpful, Nabokov’s definition of the proper way to read actually
attempts to limit readers’ autonomy and govern their behavior. His essay
goes on to hypothesize distinct personas not only for good readers, but
for good authors as well:
54 M. RODGERS

The real writer [is …] that kind of author [who] has no given values at his
disposal: he must create them himself. […]
Up a trackless slope climbs the master artist, and at the top, on a windy
ridge, whom do you think he meets? The panting and happy reader, and
there they spontaneously embrace and are linked forever if the book lasts
forever. […]
Since the master artist used his imagination in creating his book, it is natural
and fair that the consumer of the book should use his imagination too. (LL
2–4, my emphasis)

Although Nabokov professes to want readers and writers to “embrace” at

the top of a mountain—an alliance related to the “artistic harmonious bal-
ance between the reader’s mind and the author’s mind” (4)—his repeated
references to himself as “the master” set himself above the “panting and
happy” reader, zoomorphized into a loyal, docile creature.5 In comment-
ing that “for better or worse the reader enters into the spirit of the game”
(LL 4, my emphasis), Nabokov invites readers into a literary chase where
willing consent may not be fully granted. Indeed, it seems to be only his
readers’ resisting presence that is needed in order to let “the game” begin.

NIETZSCHE’S “MASTER-SLAVE” AND

NABOKOV’S “AUTHOR-READER”
Although Nietzsche is cited only twice in Brian Boyd’s Vladimir Nabokov:
The Russian Years (76, 150), Nabokov’s engagement with the philosopher
appears to have been deeper than commonly thought. Thomas Karshan,
in Nabokov and the Art of Play, explains that in 1918, under the tute-
lage of Maximilian Voloshin, Nabokov “made a list of ten ‘books which
must be read.’ One of three books crossed out, and marked as read, is
Thus Spoke Zarathustra” (17n). Explicit references to “eternal recurrence”
in his first novel, Mary (55), and to Thus Spoke Zarathustra itself in his
final novel, The Original of Laura (265), suggest that Nietzsche was an
enduring presence in Nabokov’s composition. The philosopher’s influ-
ence on some of Nabokov’s predecessors and literary models—especially
Russian Silver Age writers such as Alexsandr Blok, Andrei Bely, and Ivan
Bunin—must not be overlooked, either. Edith Clowes claims that “for all
the considerable differences between the Symbolist poets, Merezhkovsky,
Ivanov, Blok, and Belyi shared much the same orientation in their separate
responses to Nietzsche: all were drawn to the religious-mythical aspect of
 THE WILL TO DISEMPOWER? NABOKOV AND HIS READERS 55

Nietzsche’s inquiry, his overarching vision of life and the role of human
creativity in it” (116). Nabokov may have felt the same attraction to him
that these writers did; in a letter to Edmund Wilson about early twentieth-
century Russian literature, he stated: “I am a product of that period, I was
bred in that atmosphere” (SL 246).
Like Nabokov, Nietzsche was especially concerned with interpreta-
tion and evaluation. His dissatisfaction with traditional Christian morality,
for example, was partly based on what he deemed to be incorrect value
judgments. His theorization of master–slave morality involves a dialectic
between two opposing value systems—the former privileging such quali-
ties as pride, intelligence, and power; the latter privileging the (commonly
Judeo-Christian) virtues of the common good, modesty, and humility.6
For Nietzsche, the ancient Greek masters’ action is superior to the slaves’
re-action. The concept of master-slave morality is a way for him to address
and critique the doctrines of Christian morality that Western culture had
imbibed, while also celebrating the alternative values of the master. Given
that the philosopher and the novelist employ similar dialectics—in each
case, featuring two distinct “personas” who hold contrasting values—
Nietzsche’s account of master-slave morality is helpful in exploring the
author-reader relationship in Nabokov’s texts.
A good starting point for such exploration is the epigraph and foreword
that Nabokov attached, in 1959, to the English translation of Invitation
to a Beheading (which had been published serially in Sovremennye zapiski
from 1935 to 1936, and in its entirety in 1938). It reads, “Comme un fou se
croit Dieu, nous nous croyons mortels” (“As a madman believes himself to be
God, we believe ourselves mortal”). The quotation is attributed to Discours
sur les ombres (“Speech on the Shadows”), a text by a writer or philosopher
known only as “Delalande” (IB 5).7 Given the anti-totalitarian stance early
in the foreword and the assumption that such an author is not going to use
his authority to deceive, most readers are likely to believe in the epigraph’s
veracity. Yet, rather than offering a possible interpretive key, Nabokov closes
the paragraph by asserting that the only figure to influence his novel was
not some esoteric author but a fictive person of his own imagining (giving
six sycophantic adjectives before the imagined name for rhetorical flourish):

the only author whom I must gratefully recognize as an influence upon me at

the time of writing this book [… is] the melancholy, extravagant, wise, witty,
magical, and altogether delightful Pierre Delalande, whom I invented. (IB 8)
56 M. RODGERS

Given that readers now know that Delalande is a fictitious creation, they
may quickly realize that Nabokov’s epigraph is parodying the very con-
vention of alluding to a text or an author at the beginning of a piece of
literature (such as Eliot quoting from Dante’s Inferno at the opening of
“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”). Appropriating, and parodying,
this convention is one way in which Nabokov claims the status of “mas-
ter.” Nabokov goes even further, however—he later mentions something
once said by his “favourite author (1768–1849)” (IB 9), and provides a
quotation from that author in untranslated French. Despite surmising that
this literary figure probably refers to Delalande, readers may still attempt
some (futile) detective work by matching up the birth and death dates
with real-life figures or translating the French.8
In extolling a writer whom he created himself, Nabokov recalls the
masters whom Nietzsche describes. In his treatise On the Genealogy of
Morality, Nietzsche suggests that it was the masters

who felt and ranked themselves and their doings as good, which is to say, as
of the first rank, in contrast to everything base, low-minded, common and
vulgar. Out of this pathos of distance they first took the right to create values,
to coin names for values: what did they care about usefulness? (10)

In the paratextual example from Invitation, then, Nabokov not only toys
with the conventions of his predecessors, but also implicitly connects anti-
utilitarian customs to superior literature through his own textual practice.
Although Nabokov claimed that “art at its greatest is fantastically deceit-
ful and complex” (SO 33), deceit and complexity do not typically benefit
understanding. By openly parodying a device which usually aids readers’
comprehension, Nabokov effectively invites us to participate in the “spirit
of the game” (LL 4)—that is, a dialectical relationship where opposing
value systems are at play.9 Indeed, Nietzsche’s conception of the “Artist’s
ambition,” characteristic of those who “wrote in order to triumph; their
whole art cannot be imagined without competition” (Human 116), seems
very much applicable to Nabokov’s literary practice.
Nabokov’s most impassioned ripostes were reserved for his better read-
ers—not only in his exchanges with Edmund Wilson about Bend Sinister
(NWL 209–212) or his translation of Eugene Onegin (NWL 374–377,
492–494), for example, but also his description of Jean-Paul Sartre’s
“remarkably silly article” in response to the latter’s critique of Despair
(10).10 Such quarrels seem to be instances of Nietzschean “ressentiment,”11
 THE WILL TO DISEMPOWER? NABOKOV AND HIS READERS 57

but between masters rather than between masters and slaves. As read-
ers, after all, Wilson and Sartre can hardly be called “slaves” or “fools.”
Whereas Nabokov’s own textual values seem more aligned with those of
Nietzsche’s masters (daring, difficult, anti-utilitarian), Wilson and Sartre’s
are, at least in this context, more like those of the slave (humble, accessible,
relatable).12 Indeed, despite Véra Nabokov’s remark that “My husband
wants to confirm that he is supremely indifferent to hostile criticism” (SL
395), Nabokov appears to both crush and welcome such critique(s). He
wrote to Wilson on one occasion, for example, that “It may sound foolish
(in the light of what I always have felt towards criticism of my work), but
your letter did give me a twinge of pleasure” (NWL 288), and on another
that “We have been always frank with each other, and I know that you will
find my criticism exhilarating” (NWL 338). Such exchanges suggest both
a relishing of resistance and a reluctance to relinquish his masterly status.

NIETZSCHE’S WILL TO POWER

In his essay on “The Will to Power and the Ethics of Creativity,” Bernard
Reginster claims that:

Few of Nietzsche’s ideas have been more maligned than his concept of the
will to power. Among the various objections it has invited, the deepest and
most enduring remains rooted in a tempting interpretation of power in
terms of control or dominance: to will power is to seek to control or domi-
nate. (32)

Refashioning Arthur Schopenhauer’s theory of the “will to live” as a

subsidiary drive, Nietzsche theorizes that our primary human drive is to
increase our power. As he writes in The Will to Power,

Man does not seek pleasure and does not avoid displeasure […] what man
wants, what every smallest part of a living organism wants, is an increase of
power […] driven by that will it seeks resistance, it needs something that
opposes it—Displeasure, as an obstacle to its will to power, is therefore a
normal fact […]; man does not avoid it, he is rather in continual need of it
[…] (373)

Building on Alexander Nehamas’s suggestion that Nietzsche’s new eth-

ics are about “self-creation,” Reginster believes that Nietzsche’s “ethics
58 M. RODGERS

of creativity” is a “paradigmatic manifestation” (34) of the will to power.

Associating Nietzsche’s valuing of the will to power with greatness and
creativity, Reginster claims that “the individual who is creative in this
sense will deliberately seek out opportunities for creative activity in the
form of limitations to challenge, difficulties to overcome, or boundar-
ies to transgress” (43). His rethinking of Nietzsche’s will to power “as
a desire for the overcoming of resistance” (37) is helpful in illuminating
what might cause a particular person to write or, indeed, to read difficult
literature. Rather than simply subjugating his readers, then, Nabokov’s
authorial tactics suggest a wish to provoke the reader into resisting both
his work and his authorial persona. Indeed, writing about the relationship
between Nabokov’s art and morality, Michael Wood argues that “to be
thoroughly clear and balanced on a subject like this is to plod, that is to
refuse a chance for provocation, and Nabokov is not going to do that except
in extremis. […] His art is flatly confrontational” (“Kindness” 232–233;
my emphasis).13

THE WILL TO DISEMPOWER: “THE VANE SISTERS”

Although Nabokov cannot control readers directly, he can influence them,
whether emotionally, psychologically, or intellectually. One example of
such influence appears in his notorious short story, “The Vane Sisters.”
The story’s somewhat convoluted plot revolves around two academics
and their relationships with the sisters Sybil and Cynthia Vane. From the
beginning, the first-person narrator, a French literature professor, appears
to have a keen eye for detail. After a few “trivial investigations” one Sunday
in early spring, he bumps into a fellow professor, D., who informs him that
Cynthia Vane has committed suicide. The story then recounts how the
characters know one another—Cynthia was the narrator’s student, and
had had an affair with him. Earlier, Cynthia’s younger sister, Sybil, had had
an affair with D. and committed suicide after he decided to leave town.
The narrator contacted Cynthia after hearing the news about Sybil, with
the story then centering on their developing relationship. Their romance
eventually ended, however, due to their competing views of the occult
and the narrator’s skepticism about an afterlife. Referring back to the nar-
rator’s chance encounter with D. during a spring thaw, the story’s last
paragraph, odd and particularly open-ended, expresses his anxiety about
the news of Cynthia’s death:
 THE WILL TO DISEMPOWER? NABOKOV AND HIS READERS 59

I could isolate, consciously, little. Everything seemed blurred, yellow-

clouded, yielding nothing tangible. Her inept acrostics, maudlin evasions,
theopathies—every recollection formed ripples of mysterious meaning.
Everything seemed yellowly blurred, illusive, lost. (Stories 631)

When Nabokov submitted “The Vane Sisters” to The New Yorker in 1951,

editor Katharine White rejected it on account of its “overwhelming style,”
“light story,” and “elaboration” (SL 115). Yet, in his response to White’s
rejection, Nabokov reveals the significance of “the last paragraph which,
read straight, should convey that vague and sunny rebuke, but which for a
more attentive reader contains the additional delight of a solved acrostic”
(SL 116; my emphasis). The statement encoded in the story’s last three
sentences, “Icicles by Cynthia meter from me Sybil,” refers to two events
earlier in the narrative: the narrator noticing the icicles at the beginning of
the story (“I had stopped to watch a family of brilliant icicles drip-dripping
from the eaves of a frame house” [Stories 619]), and the parking meter
that he sees soon after (“The lean ghost, the elongated umbra cast by a
parking meter upon some damp snow” [Stories 620]). The acrostic effec-
tively suggests that the narrator’s gaze has been directed by supernatural
forces—and, more specifically, by the influence of the two dead sisters. The
narrator’s skepticism about the beyond is therefore undermined, without
his knowledge, by evidence of ghostly interference in his environment and
even in the very text he is narrating.14
In Nikolai Gogol, Nabokov hypothesizes about three different types of
readers of “The Overcoat” in ascending order of rank: the “superficial,”
the “solemn,” and the “creative” reader (118). In a similar fashion, I sug-
gest three ways in which the final paragraph of “The Vane Sisters” might
be read, corresponding to three different kinds of readers. The first read-
ing might be produced by a “general reader” who has perhaps not read
Nabokov’s work before. He or she is unlikely to pick up on the acrostic in
the last paragraph; after all, readers have no expectation that stories nor-
mally finish like this. When we embark on a word search, for example, we
know the operational parameters it abides by and may be able to complete
it as a consequence. Such a reader might be confused by the apparent lack
of closure and, as a consequence, draw general conclusions from the story
as a whole. For example, he or she may infer that “Sybil Vane” alludes to
The Picture of Dorian Gray (an inference strengthened by an earlier allu-
sion to Oscar Wilde in the narrative) and draw an analogy between that
other Sybil’s influence on Dorian Gray’s portrait and this Sybil’s influence
60 M. RODGERS

on the narrator’s story. Such a reader may also pick up on the odd use of
language in the last paragraph (such as a lack of coordinating conjunctions
or an excessive use of adverbs and adjectives), though he or she may not
be able to draw any further meaning from it.
A second reading might be produced by a “more attentive” (SL 116)
and more experienced reader of Nabokov—perhaps equivalent to a
Nabokov critic—who has a thorough knowledge of his texts and signature
themes. This reader is familiar with the four criteria of good reading that
Nabokov privileges in Lectures on Literature, and recognizes Nabokov
himself as a superior litterateur with a penchant for self-reflexivity. He
or she has also been trained, by encounters with Nabokov’s other works,
to reread and “caress the details […] the divine details” (LL xxiii)—even
though here the narrator seems to refer to that practice dismissively as
“trivial investigations” (Stories 619). Similarly, this reader is probably
familiar with the “otherworld” motif that runs through Nabokov’s fiction
(see Alexandrov), and also with his fondness for literary deception. An
experienced Nabokovian, even one reading the story for the first time, no
doubt surmises that some of the sentences in this passage—for example,
“every recollection formed ripples of mysterious meaning” (Stories 619)—
are meta-clues that refer to the text itself.15 Indeed, given the earlier ref-
erences to Cynthia’s fascination with encoded messages from beyond
(Stories 624–626), an experienced reader might even wonder whether
the text incorporates that phenomenon somewhere. Such readers are well
aware of literary puzzles—whether Old Norse kennings, the riddles of The
Exeter Book, the acrostics in the Bible’s Book of Lamentations and Charles
Dodgson’s Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, or
even the Oulipan writing of Georg Perec—and will probably notice the
metafictive details, emphasis on the occult, and allusions to secret writ-
ing earlier in the story. Even so, no matter how “good” they are, such
readers are unlikely to decode the last paragraph without having been
informed of Nabokov’s stratagem ahead of time. Instead, it is likely that
these readers will simply be impressed once the acrostic technique has
been revealed by someone else, thus further elevating Nabokov’s status as
masterly innovator.
The third way of reading this story is produced by what I call the
“Nietzschean reader.” Notably, he or she is no more likely than anyone in
either of the other two groups to notice the acrostic. Similarly, he or she is
also likely to be frustrated by the text’s baffling conclusion, until learning
about the existence of the acrostic from someone else. Yet, rather than sim-
 THE WILL TO DISEMPOWER? NABOKOV AND HIS READERS 61

ply being impressed by Nabokov’s linguistic feat, the Nietzschean reader

asks whether “The Vane Sisters” is merely designed as a test for obedient
readers (Naiman 108). Recognizing that the story questions traditional
reading behavior through audacious and destabilizing means, he or she
may even refuse to consider the acrostic as the text’s most important fea-
ture. The Nietzschean reader knows that even a “good reader” should not
be blamed for failing to notice the puzzle in “The Vane Sisters,” given that
readers almost always process fictional narratives as sequential sentences
rather than as acrostics. Indeed, the Nietzschean reader not only laments
the interpretive closure that the acrostic “solution” brings, but also ques-
tions the ethics of Nabokov’s textual practices and speculates about what
employing such a narrative technique might imply.

RISK AND RESISTANCE
When Nabokov published “The Vane Sisters” in Encounter, he wrote that
“nothing of this kind has ever been attempted by any author” (SL 286).
In the note to “The Vane Sisters” that appeared in Nabokov’s Quartet and
also in Tyrants Destroyed and Other Stories, he asserts that “this particu-
lar trick can be tried only once in a thousand years of fiction. Whether it
has come off is another question” (Stories 659). The egotism of the first
sentence is counterpoised by Nabokov’s recognition of the risk of textual
innovation in the second sentence. In section 168 of Human, All Too
Human, Nietzsche not only makes a similar point about artistic advances
which might not “come off,” but also employs strikingly similar imagery
to Nabokov’s idea of the master artist who meets the panting reader on
the mountaintop (LL 2):

Artist and his follower must keep step. The progress from one level of style
to the next must be so slow that not only the artists, but also the listen-
ers and spectators participate in it and know exactly what is taking place.
Otherwise, a great gap suddenly forms between the artist, who creates his
work on remote heights, and the public, which can no longer climb up to
those heights, and finally climbs farther downhill again, disgruntled. For
when the artist no longer lifts his public, it sinks quickly downwards and
falls. (115)

In Nabokov’s case, he inserted numerous clues into the text of “The Vane
Sisters” in order to prepare readers for the elevation from one level of
62 M. RODGERS

style to another. He alluded to the possibility of an acrostic by having

his narrator utter statements like “the first letters of the words in its last
paragraph formed, as deciphered by Cynthia, a message from his dead
mother” (Stories 626) or “I set myself to reread my dream—backward,
diagonally, up, down—trying hard to unravel something Cynthia-like in it,
something strange and suggestive that must be there” (Stories 631),16 and
he even embedded a reference to “acrostics” in the passage itself (Stories
631). Nevertheless, Katherine White, the first person to read “The Vane
Sisters”—someone whom Nabokov respected and whom he had already
classified as a good reader (see SL 77, 80, 180–81)—still did not attain
the lofty heights required of this story’s implied reader.17
White’s rejection of “The Vane Sisters” could be said to be an ulti-
mate form of resistance. It is clearly not the kind Nabokov was seeking, of
course. Yet, in his response to her letter of rejection, Nabokov suggests a
way in which a more engaged form of resistance—arguably desirable for
his literary practice and beneficial for his readers—could still occur in the
future, even if The New Yorker did not publish his story:

You may argue that reading downwards, or upwards, or diagonally is not

what an editor can be expected to do; but by means of various allusions to
trick-reading I have arranged matters so that the reader almost automatically
slips into this discovery, especially because of the abrupt change in style[…] I
am really very disappointed that you, such a subtle and loving reader, should
not have seen the inner scheme of my story. I do not mean the acrostic—but
the coincidence of Cynthia’s spirit with the atmosphere of the beginning of
the story. When some day you re-read it, I want you to notice—I hope with
regret—how everything in the tale leads to one recurving end, or rather
forms a delicate circle, a system of mute responses[…] I am really quite
depressed by the whole business […] what matters most is the fact that
people whom I like so much and admire have completely failed me as readers
in the present case. (SL 117)18

In her first reading of “The Vane Sisters,” at any rate, White neither
“almost automatically slips” into the discovery Nabokov had prepared,
nor meets “the master artist […] at the top, on a windy ridge” (LL 2),
and thus effectively fails to enter into the “spirit of the game.”19 Nabokov
implies, however, that she may be able to do these things if she now reads
the story again. Indeed, the phrase with which Nabokov introduces this
idea—“I hope with regret”—is arguably the most revealing in the entire
letter. Because Nabokov claims that “a good reader, a major reader, an
 THE WILL TO DISEMPOWER? NABOKOV AND HIS READERS 63

active and creative reader is a rereader” (LL 3), he foregrounds the good
reader’s regret when rereading the story and only noticing the pattern of
the story’s inner weave retrospectively. The assumption is that, now that
she knows better, White will feel chagrin at having been so easily bested.
Nabokov apparently realized, however, that he could not expect good
readers to read “The Vane Sisters” as he had intended. As Gennady
Barabtarlo explains, “the message-carrying acrostic is by no means easy to
detect. […] Nabokov in later publications resigned himself to supplying
it in a brief foreword” (113). The first two times that “The Vane Sisters”
appeared in print, initially in The Hudson Review in February 1959 and
then in Encounter in March of the same year, he prefaced it with the follow-
ing warning (although slight divergences exist in the wording): “puzzle-
minded […] readers […] may be interested in looking for a coded message
that occurs on the last page of the story.” 20 Announcing the solution to
the text’s riddle before the text itself acts to facilitate readers’ understand-
ing ahead of time, rather than risk their bafflement or rejection. In a sense,
this practice makes sure that every reader of “The Vane Sisters,” whether
“good” or not, automatically becomes “a rereader.” Such a concessionary
action is redolent of Nietzsche’s observation in section 157 of Human,
All Too Human:

The genius’s sorrows and their value. The artistic genius wants to give plea-
sure, but if his work is on a very high level, he may easily lack people to
appreciate it; he offers them food, but no one wants it. That gives him a
sometimes ludicrously touching pathos; for basically he has no right to force
pleasure on me. His pipe sounds, but no one wants to dance. Can that be
tragic? (107)

Yet, if the explanatory note comes after the text—as it does in the col-
lected edition of Nabokov’s stories—then learning about how “The Vane
Sisters” operates “on a very high level,” only after one has already been
mystified by the story, makes readers share White’s “regretful” experi-
ence, as Nabokov wistfully imagines it. Interestingly, both before and after
engender their own kind of readerly resistance: if before, readers may wish
to have had the chance to “solve” the story for themselves; if after, read-
ers may feel vulnerable because they utterly failed to notice the “various
allusions to trick-reading” and other clues that Nabokov had carefully
inserted into the story.
64 M. RODGERS

In a letter to his first American publisher, James Laughlin, Nabokov

explained that “In modern Russian literature, [he occupied] the particu-
lar position of a novator, of a writer whose work seems to stand totally
apart from that of his contemporaries” (SL 34). However, his striving
for artistic originality at times complicates, and even jeopardizes, readerly
understanding.21 Nabokov’s tendency to “lure the reader this way and that
and then tickle him behind the ear just to see him whirl around” (Boyd,
VNAY 71) reveals an active pursuit of resistance, rather than simply a
stance of indifference. In his own accounts of his relationship with his
audience, Nabokov tends to disparage “general,” “average,” or “super-
ficial” readers and to warmly praise “attentive,” “subtle,” “grateful,”
“loving,” “happy,” and “good” ones. This chapter argues, however, for
another possible interpretive position vis-à-vis his work. By inverting the
typical responses to Nabokov’s art, embracing his authorial provocations,
and recognizing the benefits of precisely such resistance, the Nietzschean
reader may not only develop a better awareness of the readerly role in his
fiction, but also evaluate the ethics of his textual practice.

NOTES
1. See Nabokov’s essay “Good Readers and Good Writers” in Lectures on
Literature (1–6).
2. David Lodge raises a similar point in regard to the passage in Sterne’s
Tristram Shandy where the narrator tells the implied reader, “Madam,” to
“read the whole chapter over again” (Sterne 48) as punishment for having
been inattentive. Lodge claims that “We who, as it were, remain with the
author are made to feel privileged by his confidence, and tacitly invited to
distance ourselves from the imperceptive reader” (83).
3. For further discussion of this idea, see Carey.
4. In Speak, Memory, Nabokov writes: “I remember one particular problem I
had been trying to compose for months. […] It was meant for the delecta-
tion of the very expert solver. […] The pleasant experience of the round-
about route […] would amply reward him for the misery of the deceit”
(223–24). See also Barabtarlo’s chapter “By Trial and Terror” in this vol-
ume, which claims that Nabokov “took his reader for an eager partner
rather than a pupil” (93).
5. In Nabokov, Perversely, Eric Naiman describes a Wesleyan University
undergraduate who posted a query on NABOKV-L, an online forum dedi-
cated to Nabokov, several years ago. The post details the student’s fear and
apprehension in doubting his own understanding of Nabokov’s texts: “I
 THE WILL TO DISEMPOWER? NABOKOV AND HIS READERS 65

still feel without reward or at least without comprehension having read and
‘reread,’ as he would require, most of his books” (qtd. in Naiman 109).
Naiman’s response suggests that the student is not alone: “This post cap-
tures the anxiety that many readers of Nabokov experience but few scholars
dare to put into print. Have I met the Master’s expectations?” (110). In
one issue of The Slavonic and East European Review (89.4, October 2011),
Nabokov is referred to as “master” by three separate reviewers: Will
Norman (723), Udith Dematagoda (725), and Leona Toker (726). The
caption “The Master in his seventies” adorns one of the photos contained
in Nabokov’s Selected Letters, 1940–77 (294).
6. Nietzsche’s concept seems to be derived from Hegel’s theorization of the
“Master-slave dialectic” in The Phenomenology of Spirit.
7. This figure also makes an appearance in Nabokov’s The Gift (282, 332).
8. In a letter to Carl R. Proffer, Nabokov wrote: “The ‘favourite author’ is
not Chateaubriand but Delalande mentioned in Invitation to a Beheading
and The Gift, who survived Chateaubriand by one year. The quotations,
and Delalande himself, are, of course, invented” (SL 390).
9. For instances of “honest deception,” see Rowe.
10. See “Sartre’s First Try” and SL 217.
11. “Slave revolt” is an important element in Nietzsche’s master–slave moral-
ity. In designating masters as “evil,” the slaves define “good” by what is
unlike them. For him, slaves’ ressentiment enables their belief system to
usurp the masters’, with the pervasiveness of Christianity exemplary of this
phenomenon. Discussing Nietzsche’s explicit account in On the Genealogy
of Morality, Simon May claims that ressentiment “is a psychological condi-
tion which has at its core an experience of pain, or discomfort, or frustrated
desire. […] The original pain and the negative affect towards its presumed
cause jointly motivate a desire for mastery or superiority in the subject of
ressentiment” (123). Nietzsche accepts, however, that the slave revolt
should actually be lauded, given that the slaves have displayed admirable
ability in allowing their system to prevail.
12. In his review of Nabokov’s translation of Eugene Onegin, Wilson mentions
“the perversity of [Nabokov’s] tricks to startle or stick pins in the reader”
(“The Strange Case of Pushkin and Nabokov”). See also Nabokov’s review
of Sartre’s Nausea, where he claims that “the task to make the world exist
as a work of art was beyond Sartre's powers” (“Sartre’s First Try”). Such
remarks suggest that it is reasonable, in the context of these disputes, to
align Nabokov’s values with those of the masters and Wilson’s or Sartre’s
with those of the slaves.
13. In the introduction to Bend Sinister, Nabokov claims: “I am not ‘sincere,’
I am not ‘provocative,’ I am not ‘satirical’” (BS xiii).
14. Three years after the publication of “The Vane Sisters,” Nabokov devised
similarly elusive wordplay in the assemblage of apparently random letters in
66 M. RODGERS

the “barn section” of Pale Fire, although this time no note appends the
text to insist that a message actually exists. In Pale Fire: The Magic of
Artistic Discovery, Brian Boyd deciphers these letters in order to elucidate
a certain hermeneutical key—that is, the Atalanta butterfly (129–149).
Boyd takes the repeated references as validation of the theory that Hazel
Shade’s ghost helps Kinbote’s composition.
15. Comparing the short story to Finnegans Wake, for example, Raguet-
Bouvart argues that “the absence of conclusion to the plot, or rather the
absence of plot, empties the text of any logical sense but it also hints at
some other function, that is its ludic mechanism.”
16. Indeed, the reference to “gullible readers” (Stories 626) may be an offhand
remark alluding to the very people reading the story.
17. The acrostic may be further camouflaged given the narrator’s caricaturing
of the possibility that the dead can influence the living:
She was sure that her existence was influenced by all sorts of dead friends
each of whom took turns in directing her fate as much as if she were a stray
kitten which a schoolgirl in passing gathers up, and presses to her cheek,
and carefully puts down again, near some suburban hedge. […] Cynthia, a
much more perverse amateur of misshapen or illicitly connected words,
puns, logogriphs, and so on, had helped the poor crank to pursue a quest
that in the light of the example she cited struck me as statistically insane.
(Stories 624–626)
Nabokov’s description of the narrator as a “somewhat obtuse scholar and
a rather callous observer of the superficial planes of life” (SL 116) suggests
that he expected “good readers” to find this character’s perspective
unreliable.
18. Writing to Edmund Wilson about Lolita, Nabokov comments, “I realize
that even you neither understand nor wish to understand the texture of this
intricate and unusual production” (NWL 296). For more on the idea of
readerly resistance, see Judith Fetterley’s The Resisting Reader: A Feminist
Approach to American Fiction.
19. The elevated status of Encounter’s “first five code-crackers” (SL 285) is
undermined by Wilson’s letter to Nabokov about the acrostic in “The
Vane Sisters”: “Nobody would have seen it in Encounter if the editors
hadn’t tipped them off. I had no difficulty in solving it, but I thought that
the ‘meter’ applied to the poem that came in through the ouija-board”
(NWL 363). Whether Wilson’s claim is true or not is debatable.
20. Ironically, Nabokov remarks in Nikolai Gogol that when Gogol’s work was
misconstrued, “he did the worst thing that a writer could do under the
circumstances: he started explaining in print such points of his play as his
critics had either missed or directed against him” (48).
21. Nabokov’s innovation in “The Vane Sisters” sits alongside, for example,
the intrusion of the implied author as an “anthropomorphic deity” in Bend
 THE WILL TO DISEMPOWER? NABOKOV AND HIS READERS 67

Sinister, the idea that the “commentary is the novel” in Pale Fire, and his
own third-person review of his work in Speak, Memory. In a letter to
Donald B.  Elder, Nabokov remarked that “This singular apotheosis (a
device never yet attempted in literature) is, if you like, a kind of symbol of
the Divine power” (SL 50).

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Boyd, Brian. Pale Fire: The Magic of Artistic Discovery. New Jersey: Princeton
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———. Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
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de la Durantaye, Leland. Style is Matter: The Moral Art of Vladimir Nabokov.
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 PART II

Good and Evil

 CHAPTER 5

Nabokov’s God; God’s Nabokov

Samuel Schuman

Nabokov is a profoundly serious and thoughtful author, and many of

the key themes in his major and minor works are deeply spiritual. His
novels, poems, short stories, and plays reveal a powerful and consistent
moral perspective. Nabokov studies, during the past three decades, has
often focused on the moral and spiritual aspects of his oeuvre. In 1979,
the author’s widow, Véra Slonim Nabokov, contributed a foreword to a
posthumous collection of his Russian poems. Mrs. Nabokov startled the
small world of Nabokov scholars, and significantly changed the course
of Nabokov scholarship, by announcing that “potustoronnost’,” which is
usually translated as “the otherworldly” or “the hereafter,” is the “main
theme” of her late husband’s works, and that it “permeates all that he has
written and characterizes it like a kind of watermark” (Stikhi 3–4).1 Since
Mrs. Nabokov was deeply engaged in her husband’s creative process,2 her
declaration was taken very seriously by students of Nabokov’s works. The
1980s saw several books and articles which focused upon the motif of the
Otherworld or the otherworldly.3 The author’s few and often enigmatic
words on the subject of the otherworld were dug up and reexamined.
Perhaps most famously enigmatic was his response to the final question
asked by Alvin Toffler in a January 1964 interview:

S. Schuman ()
Former Chancellor Emeritus at the University of Minnesota,
Morris, Minnesota, USA
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 73
M. Rodgers, S.E. Sweeney (eds.), Nabokov and the Question
of Morality, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-59221-7_5
74 S. SCHUMAN

Q.  Man’s understanding of these mysteries is embodied in his concept of a

Divine Being. As a final question, do you believe in God?
A.  To be quite candid—and what I am going to say now is something I
never said before, and I hope it provokes a salutary little chill—I know more
than I can express in words, and the little I can express would not have been
expressed, had I not known more. (SO 45)

Brian Boyd cites a similarly mysterious dialogue between Nabokov and

Edmund Wilson—somewhat reminiscent of Shade’s and Kinbote’s peri-
patetic discussions—which was reported by Wilson’s former wife, Mary
McCarthy:

Out on a long stroll together, Wilson asked Nabokov whether or not he

believed in God. “Do you?” countered Nabokov. “What a strange ques-
tion!” muttered Wilson, and fell silent. (VNAY 27)

These rather remarkable statements remain enigmatic. And even when

critics in the 1980s began to explore the spiritual dimension of Nabokov’s
work, they focused on a distinctly nonsectarian, nonreligious otherworld,
one seemingly unconnected to the otherworldly beliefs of any and all reli-
gious faiths. Thus, scholarly attention to the motif has overwhelmingly
remained at a rather vague and general level—it has been more comfort-
able to speak of “spirits” than of, say, “angels”; to discuss ghosts but not
heaven; and to note “spirituality” or “the otherworldly,” rather than to
cite specific religious referents, such as Christianity or Judaism. In many
cases—such as the ghostly messages at the conclusion of “The Vane
Sisters”—this approach is justified by the texts.4 In other works, however,
such a staunchly secular approach does not do justice to the religious rich-
ness of the fiction.5
Nabokov himself did not shy away from distinctly theist language in
many of his works. So, for example, in the concluding sentence of the
story “A Letter that Never Reached Russia,” he writes, “everything will
pass, but my happiness, dear, my happiness will remain […] in everything
with which God so generously surrounds human loneliness” (“Letter”
140). Kinbote, who certainly does not speak for Nabokov, but for whom
religion is a powerful force, argues with touching conviction,

When the soul adores Him Who guides it through mortal life, when it dis-
tinguishes His sign at every turn of the trail, painted on the boulder and
 NABOKOV’S GOD; GOD’S NABOKOV 75

notched in the fir trunk, when every page in the book of one’s personal
fate bears His watermark, how can one doubt that He will also preserve us
through all eternity? (PF 158)

And God even appears in Nabokov’s autobiographical nonfiction: “A

creative writer must study carefully the works of his rivals, including the
Almighty” (SO 32).

THE ARTIST AND THE DEITY

The first and probably most obvious manner in which the theist
theme appears in Nabokov’s work is in the parallel he so often empha-
sizes between the creative artist and the creative deity. This trope is hardly
unique to Nabokov, and hardly unnoted in his work. But it is so pervasive
and important an element of his authorial stance that it merits a brief
review. Vladimir Alexandrov remarks that “Nabokov’s characteristic aes-
thetic practices resurrect the Romantic idea that the artist is God’s rival,
and that man’s artistic creations are analogues to God’s natural world”
(18), as in the assertion above that “a creative writer must study” the
works of a divine competitor (Nabokov, SO 32). A particularly conspicu-
ous example of the parallel between the creative artist and the creative
God is the 1947 novel Bend Sinister.
In Bend Sinister, the narrator, a rather pervasive and intrusive one at
that, arranges and rearranges the materials of the novel before the reader’s
eyes. Describing a conversation between the protagonist, Krug, and the
antagonist, Paduk, he suggests that he is inventing the narrative as he goes
along:

Which, of course, terminated the interview. Thus? Or perhaps in some other

way? Did Krug really glance at the prepared speech? And if he did, was it
really as silly as all that? He did; it was. The seedy tyrant or the president of
the State, or the dictator, or whoever he was—the man Paduk in a word,
the Toad in another—did hand my favorite character a mysterious batch of
neatly typed pages. (BS 135)

As W.  W. Rowe explains, this is the voice of “the author, as a Creator

who can turn backwards and forwards at will the file cards upon which
he composes [… and who thus] transcends the time of his unsuspecting
characters’ world” (108).
76 S. SCHUMAN

This theme reaches its culmination in the final moments of Bend

Sinister, when the narrator tells the readers that he takes pity on his
invented protagonist and, in a kind of stylistic knight’s move, veers the
novel in an unpredicted direction by blessing Krug with the blissful anes-
thesia of madness: “it was then that I felt a pang of pity for Adam and slid
towards him along an inclined beam of pale light—causing instantaneous
madness, but at least saving him from the senseless agony of his logical
fate” (210). As in Invitation to a Beheading, the created world of the novel
dissolves just as its chief character loses his (fictive) life: “I knew that the
immortality I had conferred on the poor fellow was a slippery sophism, a
play upon words” (BS 216–217).
In an uncharacteristically blunt discussion of this novel with a potential
publisher, Nabokov wrote that Krug “realizes suddenly the presence of
the Author of things, the Author of him and of his life and of all the lives
around him,—the Author is I, the man who writes the book of his life.
This singular apotheosis (a device never yet attempted in literature) is, if
you like, a kind of symbol of the Divine Power” (SL 49–50). Later, in the
introduction he wrote for the 1964 Time-Life edition of Bend Sinister,
Nabokov refers to “an anthropomorphic deity impersonated by me,” and
describes the novel’s ending in similar theological terms: “Krug returns
unto the bosom of his maker” (“Introduction” xviii).
Nabokov has sometimes been depicted as a puppet master, manipulat-
ing his creations (for example, by Alfred Appel Jr. in “Nabokov’s Puppet
Show” and Siggy Frank in Nabokov’s Theatrical Imagination). But pup-
peteers do not slide down beams of light or confer immortality; gods do.
Moreover, the puppeteer analogy suggests a simplistic dualism between
the “real” world of author and the artificial cosmos inhabited by charac-
ters—Krug or Cincinnatus C. or Dolores Haze or Van Veen. But Nabokov
always insists that the “real” wear its thorny crown of quotation marks,
and his model of reality is much more a graduated series of transparent
layers than a digital on/off switch. Such a view, like the mirror reflecting
another mirror, suggests (to cite the title of D. Barton Johnson’s book on
Nabokov) worlds in infinite regression. It may also imply a kind of theism:
as Nabokov is to Krug, so Nabokov’s rival, the Almighty, is to Nabokov.6
In his later, more complex, fictions, Nabokov the creative deity remains
a presence, but he often seems to peek out from behind the mask of a crazed,
defective, and flamboyantly unreliable narrator—Humbert Humbert or
Charles Kinbote, for example. Thus, Appel points out in his introduction
to Lolita that behind the mask of the suave and haughty Humbert is the
 NABOKOV’S GOD; GOD’S NABOKOV 77

face of the desperate Humbert, and behind him is Nabokov, “the protean
impersonator [who] is always a masked presence in his fiction” (AnLo
xxx).
To me, this recurrent motif (Nabokov is to his created world as God
is to his) makes no sense unless Nabokov is at the very least willing to
imagine a universe in which that God exists. The writer’s insistence on
comparing himself to the Everlasting is a weak analogy in a nontheist con-
text. Alexandrov puts it neatly: for Nabokov, “the metaliterary is cam-
ouflage for, and a model of, the metaphysical” (18). Nabokov’s image
of himself as a creative artist leads him to compare himself to God. Both
arrange their creations into a beautiful coherent order. We are to recall
the writer’s charming description of his childhood as an embryonic art-
ist: “I used to be a little conjurer when I was a boy. I loved doing simple
tricks—turning water into wine, that sort of thing” (SO 11; cf. the wed-
ding at Cana, the first miracle ascribed to Jesus, in John 2:1–11). With this
general background, I turn now to the particular: two short stories of the
early 1920s, “The Word” and “Christmas,” which seem to me inescapably
metaphysical.

“THE WORD”
“The Word” was published in the Russian language émigré journal
Rul on January 7, 1923, the exact date of the Orthodox celebration of
Christmas. After languishing relatively unnoticed for three-quarters of a
century, it has recently appeared in not one but two different translations.
One, by Dmitri Nabokov, appeared in The New Yorker on the day after
Christmas, 2005. The other is an online version by “L. V.”7 The former is
a more “Nabokovian” translation: exact, literalist, word-for-word, some-
what challenging to read; the latter is a looser version, less faithful, easier
to read. Since the author of the story made very clear his own preference
for precise, word-for-word literal translations, I will cite Dmitri Nabokov’s
less graceful but more accurate version.
The tale is a simple one. The narrator, an émigré (presumably, but not
explicitly, an exile from Russia like his creator), dreams that he stands at
the edge of a road in a beautiful land, under a golden sky. “My soul was
seized by a sense of heavenly iridescence, freedom, and loftiness: I knew
that I was in Paradise” (n.p.). As he recalls the suffering of his homeland,
a cloud of angels appears in a tempest of wings: “Their tread was ethereal;
they were like colored clouds in motion, and their transparent visages were
78 S. SCHUMAN

motionless except for the rapturous tremor of their radiant lashes.” When
he tries to tell the angels of the plight of his native land, “clutching at the
hems of their bright chasubles,” he cannot get their attention. But at last
“a miracle occurs”: one of the final angels, not yet totally divorced from
Earth, comes to him and the narrator tells of the horrors of his homeland.
The narrator asks the angel, “tell me, what can save my land?” and the
angel pronounces a word:

The word he spoke was so marvelous that, with a sigh, I closed my eyes and
bowed my head still lower. The fragrance and the melody of the word spread
through my veins, rose like a sun within my brain; the countless cavities
within my consciousness caught up and repeated its lustrous edenic song.
[… I]t poured heavenly warmth over my heart. (n.p.)

In the final sentence of the story, we realize that the narrator has been
dreaming throughout; and when he awakes, he discovers to his horror
that he has forgotten what the word which promised salvation was.
The otherworld evoked in this story is described in fairly conventional
Christian terms—angels, heaven, and so forth—albeit in rather excessive
and florid prose (for example, “Like a taut knot, it beat within my temple,
its dampness trembled upon my lashes, its sweet chill fanned through my
hair, and it poured heavenly warmth over my heart” [n.p.]). Since the
story is about a word, about language, it is interesting that its own lan-
guage seems to be grasping, unsuccessfully, to describe the indescribable.
Given Nabokov’s skill as a stylist, even in his earliest years, this effect is
probably intentional. It seems evident that some aspects of this story are
parodistic; it is equally clear that the main theme of heartbroken exile is
meant to be understood as profoundly serious.
Beyond Nabokov, of course, the concept of “The Word” evokes a deep
and central mystery of the Christian faith: “In the beginning was the Word
and the Word was with God and the Word was God,” says John 1:1.8
Thus, the first theological meaning of “the Word” is that it is God. A sec-
ond meaning, also found in John, proclaims that the Word “became flesh
and dwelt among us.” Thus, God is the Word and Jesus, as God made
flesh, is also the Word. Thirdly, the Word is actual words: the Gospels, the
teachings of Jesus, all of sacred scripture: “If you abide my word, then you
are truly disciples of mine” (John 8:32). The proclamations of the Lord
are the Word: “for the word of God is living and active and sharper than
any two-edged sword” (Heb. 4:12). Gospel is the “word of life” (Phil.
 NABOKOV’S GOD; GOD’S NABOKOV 79

2:16), sacred scripture is the “word of truth” (Psalms I 19:43), and the
Ten Commandments are the “word of the covenant” (Exodus 34:27–8).
Given these powerful Christian and Judeo-Christian denotations of
“the Word,” it would be obtuse not to see in the short story a substantial
religious element. Nabokov’s personal exile from his beloved Russia seems
here equated to mankind’s expulsion from Eden. In his dream, the narra-
tor is given the Word which will “save” his land, but when he awakens in
the fallen world (“the winter dawn glows greenish in the window”), the
Word is gone.
The story is susceptible to additional interpretations, of course, although
it has not been much discussed by Nabokov scholars. Some readers have
seen it as more thoroughly a parody than I have indicated, with an hysteri-
cal, over-zealous narrator, speaking in an excessive and florid style. As the
translator “L. V.” remarks,

the rather purple prose of “The Word” could seem a failed experiment; and
yet what makes this story interesting against the background of Nabokov’s
larger oeuvre is the irony that is itself a record of the very same failure—the
failure of the narrator to convey in words his dreamed experience is also a
lesson to the young author. The overwrought ornateness of the language
belongs to the narrator, in much the same way as Lolita’s fancy prose style
belongs to a murderer, not the author.

Others could see the work’s language not as a parody of weak writing, but
as the genuine thing. It is also tempting to connect the narrator’s inability
to remember the saving word with Nabokov’s assertion that he knows
“more than I can express in words.” What seems indisputable is that this
short story contains, at its core, language and structure based on Christian
motifs and traditions: paradise, angels, the Word that saves: this is not
some vaguely spectral secular otherworld. Even if “The Word” is not a
Christian story, it is largely dependent upon Christianity for its imagery
and meaning.

“CHRISTMAS”
A second short story with a substantial religious theme is “Christmas,”
which has been the subject of considerable critical attention in recent
years, after nearly a half-century of critical neglect.9 The story was writ-
ten in 1924 and published, again in Rul, the following year. It was first
80 S. SCHUMAN

collected in 1930, and subsequently translated by Dmitri Nabokov and

included in Details of a Sunset and Other Stories in 1976 and the collected
Stories in 1995. It is worth noting that the Russian title of this story,
“Rozhdestvo,” is etymologically close to the name of the Nabokov and
Rukavishnikov family estate “Rozhdestveno,” named after the neighbor-
ing Church of the Nativity of Our Lady, “Rozhdestva Bogoroditsy”—the
Russian for “nativity” (“rozhdenie”) is the common root.
“Christmas” is quite short (six pages in the collected Stories) and
divided into four sections. Its plot is simple. In the midst of a snowy
Russian Christmas season, Sleptsov, a wealthy landowner, pays a short
visit to his rural manor. He has come from St. Petersburg to bury his
son “in the family vault near the village church” (133).10 The boy has
died, in delirium, of some unspecified illness. After spending a night in
one of the estate’s outbuildings, Sleptsov revisits the graveyard the next
day, as the bright sun catches “the equanimous radiance of the cross on
the church” (133). Later that day, he has his servant unlock the main
house and he wanders disconsolately through it, finding himself finally
in his dead son’s room, where he revisits and recalls his son’s collec-
tion of butterflies and moths, including one particularly “large, exotic
cocoon” (134). Overcome by a fit of mourning, he sobs “I-can’t-bear-
it-any-longer” (135), and then cries, “It’s Christmas tomorrow and I’m
going to die. Of course. It’s so simple. This very night” (136). He closes
his eyes, then, in the story’s climax:

At that instant there was a sudden snap—a thin sound like that of an over-
stretched rubber band breaking. Sleptsov opened his eyes. The cocoon
[…] had burst at its tip, and a black, wrinkled creature the size of a mouse
was crawling up the wall above the table. It stopped, holding on to the
surface with six black furry feet, and started palpitating strangely. It had
emerged from the chrysalid because a man overcome by grief had trans-
ferred a tin box to his warm room, and the warmth had penetrated its
taut leaf-and-silk envelope; it had awaited this moment so long, had col-
lected its strength so tensely, and now, having broke out, it was slowly
and miraculously expanding. Gradually the wrinkled tissues, the velvety
fringes, unfurled; the fan-pleated veins grew firmer as they filled with air.
It became a winged thing imperceptibly, as a maturing face imperceptibly
becomes beautiful. And its wings—still feeble, still moist—kept growing
and unfolding and now they were developed to the limit set for them by
God, and there, on the wall, instead of a little lump of life, instead of a
dark mouse, was a great Attacus moth like those that fly, birdlike, around
 NABOKOV’S GOD; GOD’S NABOKOV 81

Fig. 5.1 This photograph depicts something similar to what the protagonist sees
at the end of Nabokov’s story: a newly hatched Attacus atlas moth with its wings
outspread, “a glazy eyespot on each and a purplish bloom dusting their hooked
foretips” (“Christmas” 136), here resting on the cocoon from which it has just
emerged. Image: Barrie Harwood/Alamy

lamps in the Indian dusk. And then those thick black wings, with a glazy
eyespot on each and a purplish bloom dusting their hooked foretips, took
a full breath under the impulse of tender, ravishing, almost human happi-
ness. (136)

There are some puzzles concerning this story’s meaning. Dmitri Nabokov
remarks in The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov that it “oddly resembles the
type of chess problem called ‘selfmate’” (643). Selfmate is a problem in
which White forces an uncooperative Black to check White; that is, one
player forces his opponent to win and himself to lose. It is not transparently
clear to me in what way this story “oddly” resembles such a chess problem.
Is it, perhaps, that Sleptsov so manipulates the elements of his grief as to
force upon himself not the ending he seeks, which is perhaps death, but
the reverse, the “defeat” of happiness? He gives the world, or fate, or God,
only one possible move, and that move obliterates his mourning.
82 S. SCHUMAN

A second puzzle: whose happiness is “tender, ravishing, and almost

human”? Is it the protagonist Sleptsov, overcome by happiness at this sign
of life where he thought there was only death? Why, then, the “almost”
human? Is it instead the Attacus moth tenderly and ravishingly preparing
to beat for the first time its thick, black wings? Or is it the ghost or spirit
of the dead son (perhaps embodied in the moth), lovingly hovering over
his grieving father, ravished by Sleptsov’s uncontrollable sobs, and now
“almost human” because he is a ghost?
Also puzzling is the fact that the Attacus atlas moth is not black, either
as a caterpillar or in its adult state: it is actually a reddish brown, with two
light spots on each side. I presume those “thick, black wings” must refer
to the fact that the newly hatched adult moth is perhaps dark in color
(Fig. 5.1), until its wings dry and assume their normal lighter shade.11
In “The Word,” Nabokov describes a parade of angels looking very
similar to that Attacus moth:

Wings, wings, wings! How can I describe their convolutions their tints?
They were all-powerful and soft—tawny, purple, deep blue, velvety black,
with fiery dust on the rounded tips of their bowed feathers. (n.p.)

Another somewhat quirky aspect of the story is its autobiographical twist.

Sleptsov’s manor outside St. Petersburg seems reminiscent of those of
the Nabokov and Rukavishnikov families as depicted, for example, in
Speak, Memory. (In one instance, Sleptsov strides off down a straight path
quite like the alley of slender oaks which traversed the grounds of the
Nabokov country home.) If we note that link, though, it is a bit discon-
certing to ask who in the Nabokov family corresponds to the characters in
“Christmas.” The protagonist would have to be equated with the master
of the manor, V. D. Nabokov, the novelist’s father, who died in March of
1922, shortly before the story was written. The young, recently deceased
son, collecting his butterflies in the rural manor outside St. Petersburg,
reminds us unmistakably of Nabokov himself. This shift of persona is
somewhat eerie. The writer depicts a character like his own, recently
dead, father wandering around a country home, like his own house, with
that father mourning the death of a lad such as the author himself had
been a decade or so earlier.
What is clear is that “Rozhdestvo” is a story of rebirth, redemption,
and salvation, explicitly set at Christmas. It would have been simple to tell
much the same tale in a secular vein, give it a slightly different twist, and
 NABOKOV’S GOD; GOD’S NABOKOV 83

call it “A New Year’s Story.” The New Year is, after all, also a time of fresh
beginnings, of life emerging from a seemingly dead world (especially in
frozen Northern Russia!). But this is a story about Christmas; indeed, at
one point Sleptsov’s old family retainer, Ivan, tries to console his master by
bringing into the room a two-foot Christmas tree, complete with a candle
on its “cruciform tip” (135). (Sleptsov sends it away.) The miracle of new
life that is celebrated when the dormant cocoon springs surprisingly into
animation is unavoidably linked, in the story, to the miracle of new life cel-
ebrated at Christmas. The moth that spreads its shockingly beautiful wings
does so to the limit set for them by God, not by Nature or entomological
evolution, although the hatching itself can be attributed to the increase
in the room’s temperature. And when Sleptsov looks out over the village,
he sees the “equanimous radiance” of the church-top cross catching the
light of the sun (133). It would distort this story not to see in it a theme
of Christian consolation of grief, and the promise of Christmastime salva-
tion from death. “Christmas,” with its undisguised religiosity, is a power-
ful statement of its author’s deep and abiding interest in religious issues,
including aspects of the traditional religion of his homeland. This story of
the movement from a desperate and mourning parent “reeling with grief”
to beauty and “tender, ravishing, almost human happiness” on Christmas
night is both moving and surprisingly pious.

FATHER AND SON

I am most certainly not trying to argue that Nabokov was a Christian
or a Christian author or a Christian apologist: indeed, in his later, fat and
famous, years, he affirmed that he was not. It is clear, however, that at a
certain point in his life, in the early- to mid-1920s, several of his works
adhered very closely to the Christian tradition.12 Although his more
mature works—including those written in English, beginning in 1940—
continue to stress the parallel between the artistic creator and the divine
one, they are much less particularly Christian. (Indeed, as Maxim Shrayer
has pointed out, later works such as The Gift and Pnin deeply engage
Jewish issues [73–91].)
Nabokov himself would be the first to heap scorn upon any critic
who sought to link his writings to his psychological situation. But it is
difficult not to recall that his enormously admired and beloved father,
Vladimir Dmitrievich, was assassinated in Berlin on March 28, 1922, right
before these stories were written. Brian Boyd, in his definitive biogra-
84 S. SCHUMAN

phy of Nabokov, calls March 28, 1922, “the most tragic day of his life”
(VNRY 191). It is interesting to note that Nabokov, the bereaved son of a
recently dead father, creates in “Christmas” the story of a bereaved father
mourning a recently dead son. The death of a parent, especially one so
worshipped by his son as V. D. Nabokov had been, can sometimes shake
even the most stubborn agnosticism.
Some writers would be struck mute by the sudden and wholly unex-
pected loss of a beloved parent; Nabokov, characteristically, responded by
writing. The very first thing he wrote was a poem about how the dead are
not gone, but live on in the miracles of the world: “But if all the brooks
sing anew of miracle … you are in that song, you are in that gleam, you
are alive” (qtd. and trans. in Boyd, VNRY 193–194). That poem was pub-
lished on the day in the liturgical calendar when Christians most fervently
celebrate the promise of a resurrected life eternal, and it is named for that
day, “Easter.”

NOTES
1. An English translation by Dmitri Nabokov appears in “Translating with
Nabokov.”
2. See Schiff, Véra.
3. See, for example, Johnson; Tammi; Alexandrov; Barabtarlo; Boyd, Pale
Fire: The Magic of Artistic Discovery; and the somewhat discredited work
by Rowe, Nabokov’s Spectral Dimension.
4. It is worth recalling that Nabokov’s most-cited Shakespearean work is
Hamlet, a drama in which a ghost figures importantly—indeed, in a nicely
Nabokovian touch, popular Shakespearean lore suggests that the author
himself played that role.
5. It is hopefully unnecessary, but perhaps may be helpful, to note that I am
not a Christian. Nor, as I note below, do I know or believe that Nabokov
would ever in his lifetime have so described himself. Nabokov’s personal
faith is not the subject of this essay.
6. This effect is like that at the conclusion of A Midsummer-Night’s Dream:
as the actors playing the Athenian court sit and chuckle at the acting of the
rude mechanicals, so we, in the second-tier audience, chuckle at them, but
might have a moment in which we wonder what audience is amused by our
antics. Similarly, in his story “Recruiting,” Nabokov reveals that the action
of the story is an invention of the narrator, who has “recruited” an indi-
vidual with whom he has a chance encounter for an important part in a
work of fiction he is creating.
 NABOKOV’S GOD; GOD’S NABOKOV 85

7. The online version of “L. V.”’s translation is at Nabokov.4 mg.com/slovo.

htm. An electronic version of Dmitri Nabokov’s translation is available at
http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/12/26/051226fi_fiction2?
8. On this point, see Mello.
9. See, for example, references to the story by several contributors to The
Cambridge Companion to Vladimir Nabokov.
10. Not unlike the arrangement at the home of Nabokov’s maternal ancestors,
Rozhdestveno, which still stands across from a church and the
Rukavishnikov family tomb.
11. See, for example, the information and images provided by Tan.
12. Including as well several untranslated poems, such as “On Angels” (1924).

WORKS CITED
Alexandrov, Vladimir E. Nabokov’s Otherworld. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1991.
Appel, Alfred, Jr., ed. The Annotated Lolita. By Vladimir Nabokov. New  York:
McGraw-Hill, 1970.
———. “Nabokov's Puppet Show–I.” The New Republic 14 Jan. 1967: 7–30.
———. “Nabokov's Puppet Show–II.” The New Republic 21 Jan. 1967: 25–29.
Barabtarlo, Gennady. Aerial View: Essays on Nabokov’s Art and Metaphysics.
New York: Peter Lang, 1993.
Boyd, Brian. Pale Fire: The Magic of Artistic Discovery. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1999.
———. Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1991.
———. Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1990.
The Cambridge Companion to Vladimir Nabokov. Ed. Julian Connolly. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Frank, Siggy. Nabokov’s Theatrical Imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2012.
Johnson, D. Barton. Worlds in Regression: Some Novels of Vladimir Nabokov. Ann
Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1985.
“L. V.” Translator’s Afterword. “The Word.” By Vladimir Nabokov. Accessed at
Nabokov.4mg.com/slovo.htm
Mello, Jansy. “The Word (Nabokov, 1923) Aleph (Borges, 1960) and Zembla’s
Infinite Mirrors.” Posting to the Vladimir Nabokov Electronic Forum
([email protected]). 12 November 2011.
Nabokov, Dmitri. Note on “Christmas.” V. Nabokov, Stories 643.
———. “Translating with Nabokov.” The Achievements of Vladimir Nabokov. Ed.
George Gibian and Stephen Jan Parker. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Center for
International Studies, 1984. 145–77.
86 S. SCHUMAN

Nabokov, Vladimir. Bend Sinister. 1947. New York: Time-Life, 1964.

———. “Christmas.” [“Rozhdestvo,” 1925.] Trans. Dmitri Nabokov with the
author. Details of a Sunset and Other Stories. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976.
Stories 131–136.
———. “Easter.” [“Grozd’,” 1923.] Trans. Dmitri Nabokov. Selected Poems. Ed.
Thomas Karshan. New York: Knopf, 2012. 7.
———. Introduction. Bend Sinister xi–xviii.
———. “A Letter that Never Reached Russia.” [“Pis’mo v Rossiyu,” 1925.]
Stories 137–140.
———. Pale Fire. New York: Putnam, 1962.
———. “Recruiting.” [“Nabor,” 1935.] Trans. Dmitri Nabokov with the author.
Stories 397–401.
———. Selected Letters, 1940-1977. Ed. Dmitri Nabokov and Matthew J. Bruccoli.
New York: Harcourt, 1989.
———. Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited. New York: Putnam, 1966.
———. Stikhi [Poems]. Introd. Véra Nabokov. Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1979.
———. The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov. Ed. Dmitri Nabokov. New York: Knopf,
1995.
———. Strong Opinions. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1973.
———. “The Word.” [“Slovo,” 1923.] Trans. Dmitri Nabokov. New Yorker 26
December 2005. Electronic version at http://www.newyorker.com/
archive/2005/12/26/05
Pifer, Ellen. Nabokov and the Novel. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1980.
Rowe, W. W. Nabokov’s Spectral Dimension. Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1981.
Schiff, Stacy. Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov). New York: Random House, 1999.
Shrayer, Maxim D. “Jewish Questions in Nabokov’s Art and Life.” Nabokov and
His Fiction: New Perspectives. Ed. Julian Connolly. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1999. 73–91.
Tammi, Pekka. Problems of Nabokov’s Poetics: A Narratological Analysis. Helsinki:
Annales Academiae Scientiarum Fennicae, Ser. B, vol. 231. 1985.
Tan, Ria. “Atlas Moth.” Mangrove and Wetland Wildlife at Sungei Buloh Nature
Park. Accessed at http://www.naturia.per.sg/buloh/inverts/atlas_moth.htm
 CHAPTER 6

By Trial and Terror

Gennady Barabtarlo

“All good art is moral; every kind of immoral art is bad in its own way.”
What Tolstoy actually says in What Is Art? is different only in shape: bad is
the art if it’s immoral, for art should be infectiously moral. Tolstoy thought
it was his duty to cast broad the latest of his conclusions. Nabokov’s atti-
tude to this sort of direct publicity could not have been in greater contrast.
Nevertheless, his art also sought a point d’appui and justification outside
itself. It was for him rather a keenly, sometimes ecstatically delectable
means to explore the created world, both outside and inside man—its
beginnings, its ends, and its limits, as well as what is beyond the limits.
In fact, I do not know of another modern prose writer, particularly of the
rarefied meta-Nobel rank, who would advance so consistently—so clan-
destinely—the principles of high moral virtue, projecting as it were its
gloaming preexistent idea against the dark background of iniquity of every
description.
Tolstoy will be mentioned a few more times in this chapter, as a sound-
ing, or bouncing, board for Nabokov’s methods. In terms of the artis-
tic evolution of prose fiction, there is a solid bridge arching across the
two-generation span between Tolstoy and Nabokov. Much can be said
on the subject of their artistic and ideatic affinities and disparities, but
that is outside our scope.1 One thing is certain: while Tolstoy’s moral

G. Barabtarlo ()
German and Russian Studies, University of Missouri, Columbia, Missouri, USA

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 87

M. Rodgers, S.E. Sweeney (eds.), Nabokov and the Question
of Morality, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-59221-7_6
88 G. BARABTARLO

broadcasting with time grew louder to the point of hectoring, Nabokov,

who always shunned any appearance of moralizing, indeed of any unmedi-
ated communication with the reader, makes his higher designs ever more
convolute and inextensible. Yet a moral plane is always there. If you have
to work your way to discover Nabokov’s artistic treasures, you’ll have to
work twice as hard to get to the moral, let alone spiritual, dimension of his
fictions. And it is a tough and steep climb: the reader first ought to find
and map the hidden artifacts (the pointers, the hints, the already-seens,
the thematic vasculature), and only then attempt, ever so cautiously, to
grasp the philosophical implications: on a tall ladder one should not skip
steps—or stand too long on the top one.

THE AGENCY OF LOVE

As a master of prose, Nabokov was the only true beneficiary and developer
of Tolstoy’s tremendous artistic accomplishments, surpassing him in several
important aspects, for instance, by upgrading the craft of composition and
narrative technique to levels that the author of the two-epilogued epic could
scarcely imagine, even if lacking Tolstoy’s singular ability to write novels
with parallel plotlines and his prodigious command of every stratum of the
Russian language: the premeditated looseness of Tolstoy’s style required the
sort of cocksure daring that even Nabokov did not possess. No wonder he
“admired Tolstoy above all other novelists” (Boyd, Stalking 231).2
On the other hand, if it is true that of all fiction writers Tolstoy was the
most influential moralist, of the stentorian dogmatic kind, then Nabokov
presents a contrast so perfectly clean as to be attractive: he would allow
glimpses of his moral tenets only toward the end of his life, in written
answers to interviewers’ questions, or, more obliquely, in the prefaces to
the English editions of his Russian fiction. Much as he despised the very
notion of things “public,” in the post-Lolita years he yielded a few excep-
tions for the sake of publicity.
The later Nietzsche, facing mental disintegration, proclaimed that truth
was ugly: “We possess art lest we perish of the truth” (Will to Power 435).
Pushkin, in the clutches of recidivous melancholy, made his alter ego pro-
nounce something very similar, and in an elegant verse to boot: “T’my niz-
kikh istin mne dorozhe / Nas vozvyshaiuschchiy obman” (“A lie that lifts us up
is dearer / to me than scores of lowly truths”).3 In 1836, Tiutchev forged an
influential dictum that anticipated and corrected Nietzsche’s, namely that “a
thought, once uttered, is untrue”—which would have been a self-destruc-
tive fallacy, had it not been for the fact that it is dressed in the protective
 BY TRIAL AND TERROR 89

uniform of poetry—in his famous “Silentium!” We may infer that art is a

strong preservative for thought, and that what is uttered artistically (iambi-
cally, at any rate) is not untrue. In the next century, another poet, reliably
unaware of these antecedents, replayed them by saying that in poetry “the
truth is a silence to which our words can only point but cannot utter.”4
Nabokov would have none of these. With a straightforwardness found
nowhere else in his writing, he states in one great passage of his memoir
his belief in the opposite, and very much uplifting, truth: that beauty is
preordained, that its goodness is axiomatic, that goodness is a function
and agency of love permeating the universe, and that an artist seeks to
discover it, find the right expression for it, and impart it. And if it cannot
be imparted even artistically, or preserved in its unutterable essence, then
the artist can describe its very ineffability in such a way as to make that
truth and love somehow shine round and over and through his words.5
That radiant page-long passage in the last chapter of Conclusive Evidence
(Berlin, early morning, coming back to the maternity ward) is about this
very want of words to express the incongruity of the feeling of limitless
love within the limits set by mortality.

SILENT INDICES
His total fiction can be studied as a series of epistemological experiments
whose ultimate purpose seems to be a deep investigation, by means
of extrapolation, into his presence in this world, its relations and purposes
and destiny. Fiction affords a singular ability to thwart timeflow and to
offset its inexorability. Every déjà vu is carefully set up by the experimenter
and must be verified by the reader who, having found point A, would
ideally set the book aside and ponder the implication of the delightful
cooperative feat just accomplished. In a critical scene early in The Defense,
Luzhin’s aunt tells him: “I never expected such tenderness … You are a
nice little boy after all” (46). This soft after all that she lets slip off her
tongue (it cannot quite render the nuance of the original vsyo-taki) hap-
pens to be a barely visible aglet at the end of a long and utterly important
thematic lace that strings together much of the subsurface plot. She mut-
ters this after Luzhin kisses her hand, begging her to reveal to him the
moves and names of chess-pieces (she herself is to remain unnamed, like all
the women in this highly pronominal novel). But her attention is divided:
she is straining more than one ear to catch the muffled sounds coming
from a distant room, where a painful exchange is taking place caused by
Mrs. Luzhin’s suspicion, perfectly correct and underscored by the young
90 G. BARABTARLO

aunt’s incautious behavior earlier at lunch, that her husband is having an

affair with her second cousin. This is the last time the aunt sets foot in the
Luzhins’ house, although the affair will go on for years—until Luzhin’s
mother dies—gnawing on Luzhin Sr.’s conscience, and thus shaping the
novel’s colossal metaphysical dimension.6 The affair is never named even
indirectly, but at this point even a first-time reader will not fail to pick up
this strand of the plot’s heddle. The rereader, however, will see that this
fleeting “after all” means that during their trysts Luzhin’s father must have
confided to the aunt his worries over his surly, unloving, callous son, and
Luzhin’s touching gesture came to her as a surprising proof to the con-
trary. Just two plain words, dropped almost unwittingly, reveal not merely
what sort of intimacy she had with Luzhin’s father but also throw oblique
light on interrelations within the Luzhin family, without which Luzhin’s
character and fate cannot be fully understood.
At another turning point of the novel, when Luzhin’s fateful chess
encounter is adjourned, he is staggering, in the thick mist of total, hal-
lucinogenic exhaustion, through the streets of Berlin toward his child-
hood home, from the eighth chapter back to the first, across a distance of
nineteen years and 819 miles. He collapses at the gate of his late father’s
last residence,7 is collected and delivered to his fiancée’s address by two
German drunks, and is then placed in a sanatorium to recuperate, so that
his chess memory may be erased and the ante-chess one restored. The chief
psychiatrist of the sanatorium “ha[s] a black Assyrian beard and moist,
tender eyes,” and when Luzhin’s comatose fog begins to clear, the first
thing he can discern is “a face with a black, curly beard, a familiar image,
an inhabitant of childish nightmares” (159). Even in a state of full mental
capacity, Luzhin would not be able to trace back the original image: déjà
vu episodes are not supposed to be tracked down within one hermetic
system—Luzhin’s world, in this case. The reader, nudged by a tingling
recollection to leaf back some 140 pages, locates the primary image at the
end of the first chapter. There, a ten-year old Sasha Luzhin, having escaped
from his parents at the train station in a neat anticipation of his future run
“home” through Grunewald, is sitting in the attic of their country house,
from which he is taken down in a most remarkable and at first glance enig-
matic pantomime that silently unhides his parents’ fears that he might have
fallen down the stairwell, thus pointing to the defenestration in the book’s
finale.8 The last in the long queue of actors who come up the stairs to the
attic is “a black-bearded peasant from the water mill, future inhabitant
of future nightmares,” who carries the apparently kicking and screaming
 BY TRIAL AND TERROR 91

boy to the carriage (24). If Luzhin could connect this first appearance to
the latest, he might pay closer attention to other scenes in Anna Karenin
besides the zemstvo elections (167), namely the persistent appearance in
Anna’s (and at least once Vronski’s) dreams of a bearded peasant, accom-
panying her to her suicide on the railroad tracks, just as the original moujik
had died under the wheels of a train in the novel’s beginning.
Both examples toggle a number of moral switches: adultery, paternal
and filial love and fears, the sense of guilt and repentance, the delights and
dangers of passion, and above all man’s curious natural inability to con-
nect dots of significance.

THIRD PERSON FIRST

All of Nabokov’s Russian novels but two are principally third-person
narrations (some with complicating variances); all of his English nov-
els but one are written in the first person.9 All the usual, philosophically
coherent, assumptions about an objective narrator are borne out, with
pioneering enhancements: he is the implied demiurge of characters both
good and evil, present everywhere but imperceptible, all-knowing but
revealing little, loving his well-made creatures, even if they are made to
be ugly, yet remaining their sole judge—and absolutely inconceivable to
most of them. Those few who are allowed the inkling of being implacably
determined by a metacosmic maker (are shown to) lose their minds—
Falter, Krug, perhaps “VVN” in the last novel—or (are shown to) run
from the danger of such knowledge—Luzhin, Pnin, perhaps Cincinnatus.
“When the drama is done, the director shows us his actor without his
make-up and garb[…] Do you now see that it was not he but I who was
moving you?” says Tolstoy in the first of the two epilogues to War and
Peace (Voina 6, 164; my translation). That “I”—capitalized, remarkably,
in the original Russian—is closely related to the pronoun in the epigraph
to Anna Karenin, not so much quoted as borrowed from the Scripture
and transposed to suit his purpose: “Vengeance belongeth unto Me; I
shall repay”—where Tolstoy takes on the duties of both the director and
supreme justice of the drama. Nabokov resorted to very few epigraphs
(none in his English novels), all more dissembling than Tolstoy’s, and
allowed no epilogues—those structure-smashing time-wreckers. Even so,
one can see how triumphantly he might cite Tolstoy’s maxim, “we ought
to reject the nonexistent freedom [of acting personae] and acknowl-
edge [their] imperceptible dependence,” and with what significance he
might stress, in his lectures and interviews, that key attribute of being
92 G. BARABTARLO

“imperceptible.”10 That capital “I” in the quotation above is a clear answer

to Pierre’s frantic enquiry in mid-novel: “But who in the blue blazes is
doing all this? … Who is he? who, pray tell?” (Voina, 5, part 2, 224; my
translation). And shortly before Anna, crossing herself, falls under a slowly
passing freight car, she is beset by the strangest thought: “‘No, I won’t
let you torment me,’ addressing defiantly not him, not herself, but him
who made her suffer” (Anna Karenin, Polnoe 19: 347; my translation and
emphasis).11 The readers of Bend Sinister will recognize in these words a
striking similarity with that book’s last page.

LECTURES AND SEMINARS

Among other assumptions about the teleology of Nabokov’s fiction,
which must adduce and “explain” also his craftsmanship and method in
achieving his philosophical goals, one seems particularly gainful—that he
staged it as a series of laboratory experiments in a maximally conditioned
and completely controlled environment and with continually refined
instruments. Even before he began composing fiction, in his verse and
drama, he was intensely drawn to the mysteries of existence and conscious-
ness, and to the line that puts an inexorable end to both—and tried to peer
beyond that ever nearing line. It would be idle to deny that Nabokov had
a mystical disposition of mind. His unique position was that he combined
this bent with an eye astonishingly keen to take in the created world,
knowing by name its things and phenomena and possessing the means to
describe them so magically as to make the readers recognize the author’s
experience as their own, even when it is not. Those experiments seem to
be odd and endearing attempts to invite extrapolations: if I can scan my
verse right, then perhaps I can scan the universe as well—with infinite
adjustments, of course, and with every sort of conditional scaffolding, and
at the cost of numerous blunders and vast disappointments.
The moral divide between the first- and third-person narratives is clearly
marked, as even the neutrality and abstracted impersonality of the objective
narrator are biased toward the general goodness of principles. After the
action is done, no matter how tragic, the cathartized reader must remember
that “nothing on earth really matters, there is nothing to fear, and death
is but a matter of style,” because the characters comfortably return “to
the bosom of [their] maker” (BS xviii). As said before, there is a curious
narrative dichotomy between his Russian and English fiction: the former,
with the notable exception of Despair and The Eye,12 are all third-person
narratives, whereas the latter almost invariably pose as homodiegetic (to
 BY TRIAL AND TERROR 93

use Genette’s term), or character (to use Phelan’s) narration. Thus modus
narrabilis determines not only the life-and-death outcome of the storyline
(“The I of a book cannot die in the book” [LATH 239]), not only the lim-
its of the narrator’s knowingness and control and trustworthiness (and thus
the quality and boundaries of the book’s realism), but also the novel’s moral
content in relation to the reader’s involvement in its correct assessment.
Tolstoy’s familiar third-person voice-over is the reader’s best naviga-
tor, because Tolstoy presumes his reader to be a novice; Nabokov, on the
contrary, relies on his reader’s advanced skills, with enough expertise first
to find the map hidden in “plain sight,” and then to use it as intended.
Tolstoy’s third-person narrator is also the supreme judge dealing out jus-
tice and mercy; he reserves his first-person narration for a confessional sort
of prose, trying different guises, from a female voice in Family Happiness
(1859) to a horse’s mouth in “Yardstick” (1885), and eventually watering
down—for example, in The Kreutzer Sonata—or altogether suppressing
the entire make-believe underpinning of autodiegetic fiction.13 The out-
come was a long series of confessions and sermons retaining the structure
and poetics of a Tolstoy novel.
Conversely, Nabokov, who took his reader for an eager partner rather
than a pupil, makes his objective narratives morally unintrusive, even though
higher justice is served, or satisfied, in every one of his Russian novels. His
first-person narrators, however, are not so much immortal (notwithstand-
ing Vadim N.’s adage about “The I of the book”) as immoral, on a broad
scale of variations. Outside the short stories, the only exception to this rule
is his memoir, built and furnished as a novel. No wonder most of his fellow
émigré readers, formed in Tolstoy’s public school, thought that Nabokov’s
writings had a strong “modern, Western” feel: to an uninstructed and
untrained eye his fiction seemed neutral toward the divide between good
and evil. To his later Soviet readers, with their perverted valuation scale and
a taste that combined mawkish pathos with brutish cynicism, his English
books (often in flawed translations) appeared to transgress from neutral
handling to savoring evil. Both of these misreadings reflect thorough mis-
understanding of how Nabokov composed his fictions, and why.

LOVE TIMES MEMORY EQUALS —

One of the objectives of Nabokov’s moral studies is passion, in the Graeco-
Latin semantic sense of pathein-pati, his patients glissading from pathos
to pathology. Most of Nabokov’s novels are studies of a self-consuming
concentration on a singular predilection that leads to severe curtailing of
94 G. BARABTARLO

judgment and of psychological or even physical acuity of observation (as

with Albinus, Hermann, Humbert, or Kinbote). Passion, if allowed to
develop unchecked, leads to insanity, death, and perdition. His wicked pas-
sion-driven narrators cannot, technically, die on stage; people don’t jump
under passing trains in Nabokov’s books.14 This is why various circumvent-
ing devices are employed, including the insertion of an additional narrative
layer, such as a fictional preface (in Lolita), or a conditional provision (since
you are reading this, the writer of the will is dead, as in Ada).
Nabokov’s character-narrators are usually egomaniacs, with a limited
and perverted sense of reality and of the people round them. Since they
may be keenly observant, they narrate a great wealth of intelligence about
their world that they themselves cannot process, in detail the significance
of which they cannot grasp, owing to the limitations their passion imposes
on their intellectual faculties. It is the rereader’s duty to do the sorting and
to arrive at conclusions often far removed from the narrator’s.
The extricable morality of Nabokov’s fictions is essentially Christian,
both apophatically (the utter loathing of brutality, torturing dictatorships,
cheating, popular trash and so forth [SO 117, 133, 149, 152]) and in its
positive aspects: the high value of personhood and individuality in coun-
terstance to the tyranny of a colloidal collective, sympathy with the under-
dog, and above all, love—of the kind that he tries to describe in one grand
and unusually confessional soliloquy in his memoir.15 Such love puts a
protective and beautifying coat of grace on drab reality and personal mis-
ery in the short story “Beneficence” (1924);16 stripped of this coating, the
world and its inhabitants appear ghastly and devoid of any possible mean-
ing: a condition that afflicts, in violent, mind-eroding bouts, the narrator
of “Terror” (1927)—as well as Anna Karenin, trapped in her desensitized
inner monolog on her fatal way to the train station.17 Nabokov told his
Cornell students that in Anna Karenin “death is the delivery of the soul.
Thus childbirth [Kitty’s] and soulbirth (death) are expressed in the same
terms of mystery, terror, and beauty […] the birth of faith in Lyovin,
the pangs of faith birth” (LRL 165). That lyrical passage in Conclusive
Evidence, composed perhaps at the very time of Nabokov’s lectures on
Tolstoy, connects the centripetal force of love with the tragedy of mor-
tality in a most peculiar way, sending readers back to the beginning of
the book, where a cradle is rocking between two unknowable abysses.
The memoirist’s wife, we remember, has just given birth, which prompts
this hymn to the love stretching radially, its imperishable radiance in stark
incommensurability with the notion of mortality.
 BY TRIAL AND TERROR 95

In that famous opening sentence of his memoir, in an uncommon def-

erence to common sense, Nabokov writes that “the cradle rocks above”
an eternity that precedes birth, just as the grave is suspended over the one
that awaits at death, life being a “brief crack of light” between the two
darksome abysses. On the edges of both the pre-natum and post-mortem
unknowns, another telling difference sets off the two masters against one
another. The incredibly, embarrassingly detailed, physiologically exact,
psychologically superb description of Kitty Lyovin’s giving birth had no
rivals in world literature, as the astonished Nikolay Strakhov wrote to
Tolstoy upon seeing the chapter in The Russian Messenger, where the novel
appeared in installments. Tolstoy’s families may be happy or unhappy, but
they are always large. In contrast, nobody ever gives birth in Nabokov’s
eighteen novels, and only Albinus (in Laugh), Krug (BS), Shade (PF), and
Vadim Vadimych (LATH) have one natural child each—of which the first
three die young and the fourth is lost in a different way. No toddlers, and
no natural siblings. Before Tolstoy turned to founding a new religion, he
seldom if ever showed brutal crime—only a variety of moral trespasses.
Nabokov’s characters plot murder already in his second novel, King,
Queen, Knave, and a version of murder or suicide occurs in all of his sub-
sequent novels, Russian and English, but one (The Real Life of Sebastian
Knight). Tolstoy was the world’s best depicter of dying and death viewed
at close range, in all phases and in many varieties, both violent and natural.
Nabokov, on the other hand, never takes even a medium shot of a dying
man; in fact, his characters, like patients in Soviet hospitals, are practically
never allowed to die while in his care, in full view on the stage.18
It is little wonder that Nabokov’s beliefs and direct suppositions in mat-
ters of spiritual importance can be found not in his fiction but in his verse,
especially lyric poetry (a confessional genre by definition), in his novelized
memoir, and in an occasional, but carefully measured, remark in an inter-
view. In his brilliant early play in verse, The Tragedy of Mr. Morn, he makes
one of his most mysterious creatures, Dandelio, formulate the clearest, in
the dogmatic sense, statement of Christian faith in all of Nabokov’s pub-
lished writings:

To resurrect,
Matter must decompose. I see quite clear
The Trinity. What Trinity? This: space
Is God, matter is Christ, and time
Is Spirit. Hence we posit that a world
96 G. BARABTARLO

Composed of these three—that this world of ours—

Is but Divine [bozhestven].19

And when Tremens, a shivering skeptic, tries to interject a doubt, Dandelio

cuts him short to reaffirm the doctrine:

Tremens: […] And yet our world ….

Dandelio: … is but Divine. And all is happiness,
And therefore we must sing ev’n as we toil,
For living on this Earth means working for
That Master in three persons: space, and matter,
And time. But time is up, the work is done,
And we depart hence for the feast eternal,
Committing time to memory, and space
To form, and love—to matter.
(Dav vremeni—vospominan’e, oblik—
prostranstvu, veshchestvu—liubov’)20

Three years later, Nabokov wrote a rather weak poem entitled “V raiu”
(“In Paradise”). There, the dreamer encounters an angel of an unknown
species, is thrilled that he will be the first to describe him, but then realizes
that there are no scientific journals in paradise—nor, indeed, any readers.
It ends:

i smotrish’, smotrish’ ty skvoz’ slezy

na bezymiannyia kryla.
(and so you look and look through tears
at wings that have no proper name.) (Stikhi 195; my translation)

The late Dmitri Nabokov remembered, and often repeated, that during
his next to last visit to his dying father the latter’s eyes glistened with tears
(the former’s could hardly be dry, either) at the thought, it appeared, that
he would never see again a certain butterfly that was then on the wing, an
“uncaptured specimen of an insufficiently described subspecies” (Dmitri
Nabokov 136).
We shall never know what Nabokov’s real notion of Paradiso was,
or even if had one, except what, in his belief, it could not be: a shared
Heaven, a somewhat “open to all, Protestant, austere” place, to quote
from the very poem by Gumilev that Nabokov paraphrased three years
before his own death (Stikhi 297; my translation). But we do know, from
a surprising and rare bit of revealing intelligence lurking in one of the
 BY TRIAL AND TERROR 97

prefaces to English editions, that while his scoundrels are dispatched to

Hell, the semblance of even a twisted love can slake the verdict—with
no furloughs for Hermann.21 As for the rest, their souls seem to inhabit
a peculiar limbo, in which unsmiling, caring, often penitent spirits are
allowed the right of visitation.
At the core, as said above, these valuations, both positive and negative,
are Christian sensu lato and may be traced back to the commandments
in Deuteronomy—somehow, the second (“love thy neighbour”) without
the first. His abhorrence of cruelty, for example, one of Nabokov’s main
subjects, depends on the old moral benchmark that one should not treat
fellow creatures as one would not wish to be treated oneself. Tagging
Nabokov a “modernist” writer is the regular mistake of indiscrimination
that strives to make a tourist feel secure by placing clearly marked signposts
along his well-trodden path. Such critics will never quite understand what
Nabokov admired in Joyce and Proust and why he detested Mann and
Sartre, and above all, why he swam athwart the ideological mainstream.
In general, in matters of morality he might join Shakespeare’s chorus: et
bonum quo antiquius eo melios.22

THE SCAPEGOAT OF TRAGEDY

From the early forties to the late fifties, in fiction after fiction—in
verse, too—Nabokov would place his youngsters as whipping boys, as it
were (once even a girl), setting for them various imaginable dangers and
horrors, as if in order to render harmless a particular disaster in life by
forestalling it in fiction, as if counting on fate’s supposed aversion to pla-
giarism. A lifeless body on a remote hill in “A Poem,” a strange wartime
poem beginning “When he was small, when he would fall”; kidnapped
and tortured David Krug; the poor demented youth tortured in a differ-
ent way in “Signs and Symbols”; precocious, “up, up, up” tall teenager
Victor (104), whose dreams are permeable to Pnin’s, the illegitimate son
of Pnin’s heartless former wife and a witless German bromide; lanky Lance
vanishing into thin air, while his parents stare through a film of tears into
starry night skies and imagine him scaling craggy cosmic space, as he did
the mountains; even Lolita,—all are employed in perhaps a longer series
of stand-ins.
Here is just one fleeting, pointed example, rare in its carefully protected
nakedness. In the middle of “Signs and Symbols”—Nabokov’s darkest
story, in three short acts, published in The New Yorker the week his son
turned fourteen—an exhausted elderly couple come back to their dingy
98 G. BARABTARLO

New York apartment after a heart-wrenching visit to the asylum for the

insane where their teenaged son has made another attempt to kill him-
self. The wife absently leafs through an album of chronologically arranged
pictures:

Minsk, the Revolution, Leipzig, Berlin, Leipzig again, a slanting house

front, badly out of focus. Here was the boy when he was four years old, in a
park, shyly, with puckered forehead, looking away from an eager squirrel, as
he would have from any other stranger. (599)

In June of 1936, Nabokov wrote to his wife, who was in Leipzig with their
two-year-old son: “Strange he’s afraid of squirrels” (LV 274). This sen-
tence is tucked away among perfectly innocent bits of usual endearments
and no-news banalities, but any reader of that tightly wound little tragedy
written a dozen years later can sense a tensed note muffled by noncha-
lance. No wonder squirrels are given such an inferential, mostly dislikable
part in every chapter of Pnin.
This “gargoyle” principle of exorcizing evil by exposing it in some of its
ugliest, highly artistic manifestations underlies his fiction in a broader, less
personal sense, turning every novel into a modernized tragedy. Peeled of
modern complications, Nabokov’s view of evil appears, at its foundation,
quite traditional, with some marginal additions, all derivative, such as vari-
ous newer trends, the uniformity and conformity of the leftist tendencies
of the strabistic age,23 down to the entropic or degrading trends in artistic
fashion. A curious list of various forms of the lees of things in contempo-
rary life appears of a sudden at the very end of Shade’s poem, while the
poet is shaving, as if in preparation for the death waiting only some sixty
lines away: poetry, rhymed verse in particular, is the best curing medium
for perishable and often embarrassingly direct dicta. That list itself could
be a subject of, and a springboard for, a fascinating socio–aesthetic study:

Now I shall speak of evil as none has

Spoken before. I loathe such things as jazz;
The white-hosed moron torturing a black
Bull, rayed with red; abstractist bric-a-brac;
Primitivist folk-masks; progressive schools;
Music in supermarkets; swimming pools;
Brutes, bores, class-conscious Philistines, Freud, Marx,
Fake thinkers, puffed-up poets, frauds and sharks. (PF, ll. 923–930)
 BY TRIAL AND TERROR 99

PASSION AS A STAGE OF INSANITY

Evil in Nabokov’s well-crafted worlds is punished in novel after novel. It
must, however, be understood and kept in mind that in most of these nov-
els an artistic secondary for evil is passion—understood, as stated before,
as a progressively worsening maniacal condition whereby a character’s
self-centric drive robs him of ethical instincts, dulls the sense of the real-
ity of other people’s existence, and in the end breaks down inbred moral
immunity against taking someone’s life, figuratively or literally (Humbert
Humbert, for example, does it both ways). If left unchecked and unrem-
edied by authorial (that is, miraculous) intervention, a consuming passion
evolves into madness and often leads to death. Pushkin’s so-called little
tragedies, which Nabokov admired and from which he translated some
excerpts into English, are studies of this final, ruinous stage of a passion
gone too far to be reversed.
In King, Queen, Knave, the author’s agent (with “his wife”), when
inspecting the scene of the final act (Preface viii), makes sure that the
noble-spirited Dreyer is spared, that his ignoble plotting wife is done for
instead, and that her middle-lowbrow lover plods on to utter degradation
outside the novel’s boundaries. The Defense is a stage for a grand attempt to
cure a morose, life-consuming passion by the application of compassionate
warmth that only selfless charity can generate. The evil force prevails, but
the struggle is of such high stakes and the outcome seems so variable that
the inexperienced reader tends to forget that Nabokov pulls off a tremen-
dous technical trick by leaving nameless the majority of the main players
(Luzhin’s aunt, Luzhin’s mother, Luzhin’s wife, Luzhin’s in-laws) while
neatly enwrapping the entire book in the mystery of Luzhin’s own name.
Few scenes in the literature about human misery can compare in pang
and subtlety of implication with the one in the novel’s Chapter Eight,
when Luzhin says to his nameless fiancée in a soft voice, “V khoroshem
sne my zhivem […] ia ved’ vse ponial” (143)24—the first instance in a long
series of Nabokov’s probings into a character who on the brink of despair
is allowed to catch a shadow of the fleck of the reality of his ephemeral
yet secure existence in someone else’s fantasy. Or take the piercing panto-
mime of Luzhin’s bidding farewell to his wife by carefully removing every-
thing from the pockets of his jacket and trousers as if he were emptying his
heart’s contents, revealing a love for her that he has no means to transpose
into any remotely sensible verbalism, except “bylo khorosho” (252),25 and
for the sake of which love he is about to bow out and as it were “fall out
100 G. BARABTARLO

of the game” that has entrapped his mind. The last thing he utters in the
book is “yes, yes, […] feigning absent-mindedness”—feigning, that is, so
as not to betray to her his intention.
The slight semantic tweak of that flitting, unaccented “ved’” in the
life-as-a-dream phrase is nearly impossible to render in English, its subtle
effect escaping the crude, off-the-rack “after all” that the average translator
automatically reaches for. When, in Invitation to a Beheading, Cincinnatus
C. is let to wander out of his prison on an invisible but strong tethered
leash, he passes by a bench on which one stranger says to another, “A
ved’ on oshibaetsia” (“I say he is wrong” [19]), which, as in the example
above, may be referring at once to what is happening within the book
(Cincinnatus is errant to think that he can escape from his prison) and
to the more complex condition without—to the spot where the book’s
teasingly all-explaining epigraph is placed (he is mistaken to believe that
he cannot escape from the prison, that he is, in other words, mortal) and
where creatures akin to him exist—such as Pierre Delalande, who wrote
that maxim in the novel’s epigraph. Thus Cincinnatus, the only persona in
his world, is transgressing the confines of the novel toward its epigraph,
while his evil tormentors turn into rag dolls and shades.

HIGHER GROUNDS
All these subtleties are possible only in the third-person mode of narration;
any variant of autodiegesis obviously requires a very different method of set-
ting up a moral grid. This is why Nabokov’s English novels present, or rather
conceal, a system of ethical justice that is much harder to discover and under-
stand. When, in an embittered and astonishingly frank letter to Katharine
White, sent after The New Yorker had turned down “The Vane Sisters,” he
says that in his system “a second (main) story is woven into, or placed behind,
the superficial semitransparent one” (SL 117; my emphasis), Nabokov means
not only the fourth, metaphysical dimension of his fiction but also, I now
believe, the complex difficulty of making discernible the axes of moral coordi-
nates in a first-person narrative, especially if that narrator is an egocentric and
a “rather callous observer of superficial planes of life” (SL 116).
The English series moreover differs in this cardinal respect from the
Russian, owing not only to the difference in psycholinguistic mentality,
in terms of what can and cannot be properly expressed in either tongue,
but also to the change in Nabokov’s environment, his status, his perceived
audience, and, not least, an evolution of his personal epistemology. In
this regard, his Montreux Palace writings could be profitably studied as a
 BY TRIAL AND TERROR 101

separate body—an operation that Martin Amis, it seems, would not mind
seeing done, for a different reason.26
In an age of “existential” dead-ends, aestheticized despair, and anaes-
theticized inwits, of art that swims in what Dwight Macdonald dubbed
“midcult” (its fig-leaf gradually falling off), at once fawning and spong-
ing on pravity—Nabokov cut an odd figure, with his old-fashioned high-
principled morality and teleology that differed little from those of Dante.
This singularity has been not so much not understood as shrugged off
with a wince. It is, however, no light labor to find another top-level
twentieth-century writer with loving, noble, happily married parents
whom he admired, who himself went through just one known crisis in
over fifty years of what he called a perfectly cloudless marriage, who had a
much loved and devoted son, and who generally lived a fully attentive, rich
in sense, fresh in expression, and overall happy life.
It is very much doubtful, too, that there has ever been a fiction writer
with a wider clough between his personal moral principles and those of
his characters than Nabokov, or in any event the English Nabokov. But
this is not the place, were it my intention, to enter into the murky matter
of the ways in which private morals are reflected in an artist’s fiction, even
though it might be curious to scope and compare the moral scene in fiction
by, for instance, the Nobelized author of The Killers (one of several pieces
of literature that Nabokov oddly singled out for overrating), his coeval
within two months, who at ten, when Nabokov was voraciously study-
ing the “mysteries of mimicry” (SM 125), hacked to death with an axe a
sleeping porcupine trapped in a woodshed (proudly reporting the feat to
his papa), ten years later lied about his war decoration, pummeled his four
successive wives, fathered children who later condemned him obscenely
(as a “gin-soaked abusive monster” and worse), and ended up shooting
himself;27 or by the six-times married, grotesquely violent, indefatigably
and indiscriminately philandering Pulitzerized author of The Executioner’s
Song—with the proceedings in, say, Invitation to a Beheading (to line up
the three titles on the same brink). Auden’s deep thought that a book reads
its reader serves to point out that a book by Nabokov rereads its rereaders.

HIGHER TRUTHS
Tolstoy’s famous memoromanistic tracts My Confession and What Do I
Believe In? both open with the ego-pronoun; respectively, “I was baptized
and brought up in the Orthodox Christian faith” and “I have lived in
this world fifty-five years.” Of all Nabokov’s first-person books, includ-
102 G. BARABTARLO

ing Speak Memory, only the last begins with the capital “I,” the one that
presumably “cannot die in the book” (LATH 239), and which the hero
of his next novel, cut short by the author’s death, tries to decapitalize and
obliterate altogether by the force of corradiated will-power.28 Curiously,
the initial drafts of what would become Conclusive Evidence, started while
Nabokov was still in Europe, bore as provisional titles It Is Me and even
just Me.29 By the time we reach the last chapter of his memoir, we real-
ize that the book is not addressed to us, really: the second person of its
apostrophic “you” is the author’s wife, to whom the book is dedicated.
Inside, Nabokov makes several declarations of love, some more direct than
others: love of his parents, of her, of their son, of the train bending its
slowed course above the streets and against the pastel skies of a Berlin
sunset, of a swallowtail he chased all the way from Vyra to Colorado, of
Russia, of life. He wrote that memoir at about the same age Tolstoy did his
confessions—its Russian, quite different, version, Other Shores, at exactly
the same age. The word “confession,” in Tolstoy’s double-sense of shriv-
ing and creeding, occurs there only once, and as it happens, the phrase
includes elements of both of Tolstoy’s titles: “I confess I do not believe in
time” (SM 14). If Tolstoy had been told that this paradoxical pronounce-
ment, nowhere more extravagant than in a memoir, was meant to express
the timelessness of the higher truths in life—of which art can hope to
capture only bright reflections and colored shadows but which somehow
correspond to the immortal truth above and beyond human lifespan—he
might have thought that it was not so wild after all.
Tolstoy was a supreme artist and insuperable moralist who set his art
on moral grounds. Dispensing his custom-made tenets over the last thirty
years of life, he said more than he knew. Nabokov, too, was a supreme
artist, whose ethology, however, avoids saliency, indeed is befogged and
has to be discovered by investigation and proved by repeated tests, like
a law of nature. His closed-circuit answer to a question about his faith
begins, “I know more than I can express in words” (SO 45). The rest
of the answer may strike one as circuitous tongue-in-cheekiness, but the
underlying principle served him well to push back the pressures of the
dawkin yet insidious spirit of the times, which seeks intellectual warrants
to confiscate the sensors of probity.
“No other modern author was more alive than he to the toll taken by
snobbery, cruelty, brutishness; none so exalted kindness, loftiness of spirit,
sweetness of character, the kind and generous heart. No great novelist
 BY TRIAL AND TERROR 103

has ever written oblivious to morality […]” (Epstein C7). This is said of
Proust, but I think Nabokov’s example softens the categorical “no other.”
Nabokov’s imaginative power throws a sheer mesh over virtue and puts
vice on display, certainly not in order to expose it to a Swift-like satirizing
or to teach a lightly fictionalized moral lesson patented by the post-1880
Tolstoy, and most certainly not to nurse it as have done scores of minor
writers, coming out of Dostoevsky’s mousehole to tell the world of their
latest life crotchet. He showed it, and sought out new forms of it, or new
ways to show the old forms, because in his laboratory he experimented
with, and brought to literary results, passions of varying strength and det-
riment, all curtailing vision and dimming and twisting one’s sense of the
inner and outer realities of life between the two unknowns—and because
Nabokov was a cheerful and serious realist, in the true and encompassing
sense of the word. To borrow an image from Mandelstam, a Nabokov
novel is thrust in a bottle and thrown into the sea, for posterity to fish
it out and either read with a new, deeper understanding of its threefold
(artistic, moral, and philosophical) complex—or else toss it back with a
shrug.

NOTES
1. For a fresh treatment of this theme see Boyd, Stalking 229–47.
2. Curiously, Nabokov admitted his want of the same freedom when com-
pared to Joyce’s English: more than a supreme command, it assures confi-
dence to allow oneself deliberate imperfections, unchamfered edges,
pliable morphology, and grammatical quirks—all of which Nabokov had
attained in his utterly “docile” Russian (“On a Book” 316).
3. “A Hero” (1830), a brief exchange in verse about Napoleon’s legend,
between the Poet and his down-to-earth Friend, with the epigraph from
the Gospel According to John: “What is Truth?”
4. W. H. Auden, in a taped eulogy for T. S. Eliot, in BBC One’s TV program
Monitor, Jan. 12, 1965.
5. Hans Urs von Balthasar appears to agree with Nabokov, and not with
Nietzsche, when he writes that the “severance of beauty from goodness
and truth” signaled the twilight of civilization and led to a catastrophic
perversion of morals and metaphysics, the hollowing of ontology devoid of
“the splendor reflected from eternity” (Beckett 29).
6. See Boyd, “Problem.”
7. See Barabtarlo, Aerial 223–24 and Sochinenie 128.
8. See Barabtarlo, Aerial 220–21 and Sochinenie 123–24.
104 G. BARABTARLO

9. And even Bend Sinister is an arguable case, considering its last page and the
light it backcasts on the entire narration (confirmed by the helpful preface
to the 1964 edition).
10. One can recall how pleased Nabokov was (even if still politely evasive,
when asked about a solution to the ending of Invitation to a Beheading)
with Alfred Appel Jr’s unwitting paraphrase of Tolstoy:
[Q.] How should a reader react [. . .] when the vectors are removed and
the fact of the fiction is underscored, the cast dismissed?
[A.] The question is so charmingly phrased that I would love to answer it
with equal elegance and eloquence, but I cannot say very much. I think
that what I would welcome at the close of a book of mine is a sensation of
its world receding in the distance and stopping somewhere there, sus-
pended afar like a picture in a picture: The Artist’s Studio by Van Bock. (SO
72).
11. That the first “he” stands for Vronski and not for the coachman who had
delivered Vronski’s note to her is plain enough, even though Tolstoy, typi-
cally, does not bother to sort out the two masculine pronouns for clarity.
In her translation, Rosemary Edmonds replaces the second “he” with
“. . . the power that made her suffer” (789).
12. The other one, The Eye, is an unfledged novel, and, in any event, the ques-
tion of its persona exponenta is part of the plot, to which the question of the
narrative mode is directly subservient.
13. This useful term is used here loosely. For the theory behind it, see Stanzel
229–32; for a more precise and adjusted application with reference to
Nabokov, see Tammi 159–73.
14. Although one of his two Luzhins put his head between the buffers of two
sleeping-cars about to be coupled (“Matter of Chance”), while the other
does jump out of the fifth-storey window (Def)—but the safety net of the
novel’s plicate finale catches him in mid-air.
15. In his preface to Despair, Nabokov remarks, curiously, that in their after-
lives Humbert is “permitted to wander at dusk once a year” down the
“green lane” in Nabokov’s maximum-security “paradise,” but “Hell shall
never parole Hermann” (Def 9). Why should one murderer’s sentence be
so lenified, if not because he came to experience a semblance of unselfish
love, even if late and in a disfigured way?
16. The important original title, “Blagost’,” means neither “well-being,” as in
Juliar’s Bibliography, nor “beneficence” (literally, “blagodeianie”), as in the
standard version. The word is actually Church Slavonic, itself a rendition of
the Greek agathotês or chrêstotês, and it combines the notions of serene
goodness and gracious bliss (“blazhenstvo”). “Benignity” may be the clos-
est English rendition, but even “Benevolence” better overlaps with the
original meaning.
 BY TRIAL AND TERROR 105

17. See Barabtarlo, Aerial 228–37.

18. Even Podtyagin does not quite die in Mary (his death is reported second-
hand in The Defense); nor do we see the last of Alexander Chernyshevsky in
The Gift. Curiously enough, Chekhov, whose prose both Tolstoy and
Nabokov admired for similar reasons, also avoids dwelling on the last clini-
cal minutes. Despite the persistent medical background in many of his
writings, Chekhov dislikes putting his corpses on show, be it in his plays or
short stories. His technique of avoiding this in “Gusev” was analyzed by
Dr. Nicole Monnier.
19. TOM 265; my translation (when this essay was written, there was no pub-
lished English version of the play). This adjective in Russian has exactly the
same secondary secular currency as “divine” does in English, as in “it’s a
divine poem” and the like, but it is used here in the primary sense of
Dante’s three-part poem.
20. TOM 266; my translation. It is tempting, if probably idle, to wonder
whether Nabokov knew, by 1924 at any rate, Hume’s arguments over the
concept of an “intelligent Designer” and an empirical foundation of faith:
the participants in the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion bear noms
parlants curiously resembling those of the characters in Nabokov’s play:
Philo [Dandilio], Demea [Medea], Cleanthes [Clian].
21. See n. 15 above.
22. The older the good is, the better. Pericles, 1.10.
23. When he rendered the title Bend Sinister into Russian for bibliographic
reference, he chose, significantly, to interpret it rather than simply trans-
late: Under the Sign of Bastardy.
24. “We’re living in a fine dream[. . . .] Now I understand everything” (Def
133). This plain translation loses almost all of the heart-pinching
tenderness-cum-sadness of the original.
25. This compressed phrase means, unpacked, “it—our short-lived life
together—was so good while it lasted, and now I thank you for it and have
to bid farewell.”
26. See Amis, “Problem” and “Divine Levity.”
27. On the very day, absurdly enough, on which Nabokov was to die sixteen
years later. The original 1909 letter with the porcupine-axing episode
(along with excerpts from Gregory Hemingway’s invective and much
more) was published in Campbell 8. To stretch the string of coincidences
still more, the reader of Nabokov’s “Lance” (1952) unexpectedly steps
upon “the quilled remains of a dead porcupine in a corner of the old barn”
(634).
28. Philip Wild, in the remaining draft of The Original of Laura, records his
experiments in mental self-annihilation.
29. See his letters to his wife of February 2, 1936, and February 15, 1937,
respectively (LV 244, 297).
106 G. BARABTARLO

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———. “Ultima Thule.” 1939–40. Stories 500–522.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Will to Power. Trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.  J.
Hollingdale. New York: Vintage, 1968.
Phelan, James. Living to Tell About It: A Rhetoric and Ethics of Character
Narration. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005.
Shakespeare, William. Pericles. Ed. F.  D. Hoeniger. London: Methuen and
Harvard University Press, 1963.
Stanzel, F.  K. A Theory of Narrative. Trans. Charlotte Gödsche. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1984.
108 G. BARABTARLO

Tammi, Pekka. “Exploring Terra Incognita.” Free Language, Indirect Translation,

Discourse Narratology: Linguistic, Translatological, and Literary-Theoretical
Encounters. Ed. Pekka Tammi and Hannu Tommola. Tampere: Tampere
University Press, 2006. 159–173.
Tiutchev, Fyodor. “Silentium!” Verses and Versions: Three Centuries of Russian
Poetry. Trans. Vladimir Nabokov. Ed. Brian Boyd and Stanislav Shvabrin.
Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 2008. 236–237.
Tolstoy, Leo. Anna Karenin. Polnoe sobranie sochinenii [Complete collected works].
Vols. 18–19. Moscow: Edition d'êtat, 1935.
———. Anna Karenin. Trans. Rosemary Edmonds. Rev. ed. London: Penguin,
1978.
———. A Confession and Other Religious Writings. Trans. Jane Kentish. London:
Penguin, 1987.
———. “The Death of Ivan Ilych.” Tolstoy, Great 245–302.
———. “Family Happiness.” Tolstoy, Great 1–82.
———. Great Short Works of Leo Tolstoy (Short Works). Ed. John Bayley. Trans.
Louise and Aylmer Maude, J. D. Duff, and Sam A. Carmack. 2nd ed. New York:
HarperCollins, 1967.
———. “The Kreutzer Sonata.” Tolstoy, Great 353–450.
———. [Graf Lev Tolstoy.] Voina i mir [War and Peace]. 6 vols. Moscow: T. Riese,
1868–69.
———. [Lyof N. Tolstoi.] What Is Art. Trans. Aylmer Maude. New York: Crowell,
1899.
 CHAPTER 7

The Aesthetics of Moral Contradiction

in Some Early Nabokov Novels

David Rampton

Although the idea of linking the words Nabokov and morality no longer
surprises, recognition of him as a writer for whom moral concerns are cen-
tral is a relatively recent phenomenon in Nabokov criticism. Suggestions
that he did not belong to the moralizing “Russian tradition” (somewhat
tendentiously defined), the “frivolous firebird” (SO 193) reputation that
he acknowledged in a 1971 interview, the desire of various experimental
American novelists to claim him as one of their own, the formalist empha-
sis predominant in criticism during the era in which he acquired his inter-
national reputation, the remarks that Nabokov himself made impugning
the notion that novels have a didactic role to perform, his visceral antipa-
thy to any suggestion that good fiction might provide a useful commen-
tary on the behavior of a group or society—all of these had a role to play
in discouraging readers from thinking of morality in conjunction with his
work. But now it has been more than thirty years since Ellen Pifer caused
a stir when she argued for Nabokov’s “abiding interest in human beings,
not only as artists and dreamers but as ethical beings subject to moral law
and sanction” (Nabokov iii–iv). In his definitive biography, Brian Boyd
helped administer the coup de grâce to the idea that Nabokov was merely
an aesthete, showing in elaborate detail how his novels’ artistic and intel-
lectual concerns intersected with his moral ones. Since then, a number of

D. Rampton ()
Department of English, University of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 109

M. Rodgers, S.E. Sweeney (eds.), Nabokov and the Question
of Morality, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-59221-7_7
110 D. RAMPTON

major critics have made an impressive case for the importance of moral
questions in his work.1
That said, it might be useful at this stage to muse about the implica-
tions of reading Nabokov in this way, particularly as a new generation of
critics prepares to take the study of his work in new directions. Although
the shape of his career is not often mentioned in such discussions, it does
have interesting things to tell us about this subject. A series of choices that
Nabokov made just after turning thirty, concerning what sort of novel he
wanted to write, is illuminating in this regard. In what follows I propose
to look at some of the issues, moral and otherwise, raised by Nabokov’s
fiction, particularly The Defense and the novels that immediately followed
it during this extraordinarily productive period.

In his first two novels, Nabokov makes it relatively easy to tell the good
from the bad. The former are rewarded and the latter punished. Usually,
the ethical judgments invited are easy to make. For example, in Mary,
Ganin may be a bit self-absorbed, and he almost ends up wronging the
woman he loved by plotting to break up her marriage. Yet it is clear that
he acts rightly in leaving Berlin, telling his slovenly Berlin girlfriend that
he feels nothing for her, and turning his back on his former love and the
bittersweet memories of their brief time together. Ganin’s future is wide
open at the novel’s end because he has so resolutely refused to give in
to inertia or allow himself to be kept in thrall by the irrecoverable past.
Settling for something incommensurate with his dreams of self-fashioning
is the only thing he must avoid. The blurred areas between right and
wrong, or ethical nuances more generally, hardly enter the picture.
Sometimes the blame is handed out in huge dollops: for example,
Nabokov’s second novel, King, Queen, Knave, in which characters are
presented as part of a moral hierarchy and treated accordingly. Martha, the
epitome of murderous selfishness and kitschy desires, is killed off uncer-
emoniously. Though Franz, Martha’s would-be partner in crime, escapes
his just deserts, there can be no doubt what we are to think of him. As
repulsed by life as it is by him, Franz is cheerfully condemned to a moronic
existence, inspired by what Carlyle, a moralizing writer who seems to have
intrigued Nabokov, dismissed as “pig philosophy” (379). Meanwhile,
poor Dreyer, left in deep mourning for the woman who dreamed up a
dozen different ways of murdering him, is certainly a ludicrous figure but
 THE AESTHETICS OF MORAL CONTRADICTION 111

hardly an evil one. Far from it: his philanderings, self-centeredness, and
general obliviousness to those around him (the general verdict on Dreyer
is that he is an artist manqué)2 are more than compensated for by a radiant
openness to life and its transformative moments, which Nabokov suggests
is the sine qua non of human existence.
After these two novels, however, things get trickier: good characters start
to suffer, sometimes a lot, and nasty ones tend to flourish. This development
leads to questions that have no clear answers but that take us to the very heart
of Nabokov’s Russian fiction. For example, why is the hero of The Defense
driven to suicide? Because he misconstrues life as a chess game? Because he
must go where his genius takes him? Because his wife’s bourgeois solicitous-
ness is not enough to save him? Because the world is cruel (whatever that
means)? Because the author’s compassion for his character is superseded by
his fidelity to his aesthetic designs, as orchestrated by one Valentinov, his
somewhat heartless agent in the novel? Such questions are helpful because
they make us sensitive to the text’s minute particulars, but they are not easy
to answer. We might conclude that Luzhin’s plight is mitigated by influ-
ences from the otherworld, or exacerbated by his realization that he is a two-
dimensional character in a simulacrum of a three-dimensional universe, or
clarified by our understanding of elaborate sacrifices on the chessboard, or
illuminated by the precepts of Gnosticism. There is always a risk, however,
that such cerebral reactions to Luzhin’s plight, although persuasively argued
by the novel’s many critics,3 will sit awkwardly beside the felt moments of
the text, if we choose to concentrate on them instead.
Even that formulation is misleading, since, in a sense, we no more choose
to be moved by moments in this novel than we decide to be delighted by
a Rossini overture or to get goose bumps at the end of Boito’s Mefistofele.
We might well feel that the moments leading up to Luzhin’s death, his
final frantic efforts to squeeze through the bathroom window, the blood
he sheds when he cuts himself on the broken glass, the whoosh he antici-
pates as he envisions his plunge to the pavement, the stupefying effect of
his life-explaining, life-ending revelation, make it harder to see that death
as symbolic, no matter how rational, plausible, and well-supported the
schema chosen to explicate the novel in which it occurs. As a number of
critics have noted, the most interesting aspect of The Defense, the thing
that makes it so difficult to talk about, is the success with which Nabokov
manages to convince us that such seemingly contradictory notions must
be entertained simultaneously.4 This doubleness has important implica-
tions for those interested in the morality of the text.
112 D. RAMPTON

The sustained interest in moral questions has occasioned what might be

described as the allegorical turn in Nabokov criticism. That adjective may
well seem hyperbolic, preposterous even, particularly for those who recall
his scathing denunciation of allegorical fiction and its earnest practitioners.
Surely a writer who always knew exactly what he was doing could never
end up working in a genre that he hated. Only “learned loonies” find
allegories in his fiction, as Nabokov briskly informed one interviewer (SO
196). Yet, if we think of complex abstractions, represented in recognizable
characters and situations in ways that give them strong moral overtones,
then a word like “allegory” seems apposite.
The Defense is a case in point. Eric Naiman, one of its most authorita-
tive readers, argues that “The work is intended as an allegory [Naiman’s
emphasis] about the relationship prevailing between author and character
in all fiction,” and reminds readers that “Fundamental to allegory is the
extent to which virtually all events in a text are reducible to an abstract
idea or set of ideas” (182). Vladimir Alexandrov concludes his account of
the novel, in the Garland Companion, by noting that “The reference to
‘the dream of life’ […] recalls the Gnostic themes evoked earlier in the
novel, and indicates that the quotidian physical existence Luzhin seems
to cherish at this moment is a delusion and that real life is elsewhere”
(“Defense” 87). And Boyd contends that Luzhin’s death may constitute,
inter alia, a return “home” to the past, where “the fundamental goodness
of things will somehow disclose itself on a level beyond life that does not
scant the difficulties of life at this level.” He continues: “From the bank of
death, perhaps, he will awaken to a world where the past becomes both
his haven, home, defense, and the new domain of his art where he can
endlessly explore the pattern of time” (“Problem” 600). Abstract ideas,
dream of life, fundamental goodness, the pattern of time, other levels of
meaning, other lives—no wonder a word like “allegory” starts to seem less
outlandish in such a context.
The allegorical turn in Nabokov criticism is closely linked to the vision
of a transcendent world in which clarity, translucence, and simultaneity
manifest themselves. Such a vision underlines the importance of seeing
Nabokov’s metaphysics and ethics as inextricably bound up together.
Although its presence is eloquently attested to by a myriad details, all
those indicators do not necessarily make for a concomitant number of
moral subtleties in the text they invite us to analyze. Take, for example,
Luzhin’s discovery that he is a character in a fiction. The pattern is there,
very clearly, but its implications are not so clear. What exactly are the
 THE AESTHETICS OF MORAL CONTRADICTION 113

moral implications of such a discovery? What would such a feeling tell us

about the nature of human agency? Is this feeling cognate with the sense
we get on days when reality conspires to make the world seem as oblique
as a puzzled exchange in a Kafka novel, or as malevolent as the machina-
tions of Hardy’s “Immortals” in Tess of the d’Urbervilles? But such impres-
sions tend to be fleeting, whereas Luzhin’s problem is chronic. The hum
and buzz of émigré life or chess culture, the significance of deeds done,
desires felt, compromises sought, and so on, do provide rich material for
the novel’s moral arguments. However, the novel’s self-reflexivity makes
the field of play for such arguments more restricted. The notion worries
the status of all the characters, not just Luzhin. The fact that, at least
part of the time, we deliberately ignore any suggestion of allegory while
musing about the details that constitute it makes things that much more
indeterminate. Whatever claims we might want to make about the ways
that such a novel evokes new definitions of selfhood, or comments on the
human drama writ large, are fated to receive only a general sort of support
from our allegorical equation, and to be of a somewhat general nature as a
result. The battle between darkish forces and those struggling to find the
light is obviously a moral one, but its rendition in this particular novel may
limit readers’ room for maneuver.
Alexandrov puts it well when he speaks of “Nabokov’s belief in the
existence of good and evil; his belief that both are absolutized by being
inextricably linked to the transcendent otherworld; and that both are
accessible to mankind and especially to true artists as universal criteria for
guiding and judging man’s behavior” (“Otherworld” 568). The prob-
lem is obvious: if good and evil are “absolutized,” bound up with some-
thing as shifty and difficult to detect as the “otherworld,” and accessible
only to the persevering sleuth or the initiate, then these allegories we are
chasing are going to be long on ambiguity, short on specific applications.
At such times we may feel that we are dealing with a writer who really is
sui generis, that unlike “otherworlders” whose work has sentimentalized
or even trivialized moral implications, Nabokov’s fiction stands clear of
moralizing banality. But, by the same token, critics looking for a certain
kind of moral subtlety have to work extra hard. Alexandrov pays elo-
quent homage to “the atomistic details out of which [Nabokov] built his
work” (“Otherworld” 570). But those details have more bearing on the
reader’s search for aesthetic patterns and the characters’ psychological
profile than on the attempt to discern the subtleties in a series of moral
judgments.
114 D. RAMPTON

After The Defense, Nabokov’s interest in using moral questions in order

to orchestrate aesthetic ones continues apace. In the foreword to The Eye,
Nabokov identifies “the forces of the imagination” with “the forces for
good” (10), a reiteration of the anti-utilitarian philosophy and anti-Marxist
vision of history articulated in that short novel. Yet such a formulation
might well leave readers wondering why The Eye’s most imaginative char-
acter is doomed to such pathetic isolation at the end, an isolation in which
fantasy supplies him with a pale imitation of the human contact that life has
denied him. Nabokov’s comic interests constitute at least a partial answer
(and another problem for critics intrigued by morality in his fiction), since
the narrator’s penchant for self-dramatizing and delusions of grandeur
make the ironic gap between what he thinks he is and what he actually is
central to the novel’s functioning. In this gap, the imagination can enjoy
all the free play it wants, devoting its considerable energies to imposing its
narrow but intensely visualized version of reality on the readers themselves.
In fact, in subsequent novels the formulation equating imagination and
the good, which readers instinctively find consolatory, is precisely the one
that Nabokov chooses to interrogate most energetically. In the process we
can see how the really evil characters in his work gradually become more
complex, more multifaceted, and more interesting than their admirable,
upstanding counterparts. This combination of developments is crucial. The
Russian novel in which Nabokov finds the ideal combination of diverting
voice and repugnant villainy, Despair, is totally dominated by Hermann,
the cold-blooded murderer who narrates the tale, arguing like a skillful
sophist for his bizarre but mesmerizing view of the world and his own
brand of “pig philosophy,” a pseudo-rational moral calculus. Does this link
him with previous Nabokov villains? Well, sort of, yet Hermann is differ-
ent in kind from someone like Franz. As a maniacal would-be artist and an
idiosyncratic guide to a verbal universe of his own creation, one in which
words and their efforts to make them represent the world matter greatly,
Hermann commands a kind of attention that Franz does not. True, there is
also Ardalion, a rival artist figure who grabs the moral high ground and has
much of the aesthetic argument on his side, but he is a cheat, a sponger,
and a hypocrite, and seems to be a failure as a painter as well.
When the forces of imagination triumph in a Nabokov novel from this
period, it happens in a world ruthlessly circumscribed by the obtuseness
of a society that hates and fears genuine individuality. This strain in his
work is developed in a novel such as Invitation to a Beheading, which was
published in 1935, just after Hitler’s maneuverings resulted in his seizure
 THE AESTHETICS OF MORAL CONTRADICTION 115

of political power. In this novel, Cincinnatus is the character doing all the
creative imagining. Yet he is persecuted by the diabolical pseudo-humans
who seek to torture him while he awaits his execution, and haunted by
mortality itself. The novel’s ambiguous conclusion seems to offer real
hope, but Cincinnatus does die in the end, despite the impressive care
Nabokov has taken to reassure readers by constructing another matrix of
Gnostic allusions, despite our critical assumptions concerning the value of
proud self-assertion, and despite the flimsy nature of the material world he
leaves so triumphantly. And we haven’t even gotten to later novels such
as Bend Sinister, Lolita, Pnin, and Pale Fire, in which the forces for good
take some serious battering, black humor flourishes, incipient violence
systematically threatens the worthy, generic hybridism challenges critical
assumptions, and the creation of aesthetic objects is repeatedly associated
with subversion and destruction of various maleficent sorts.

I think that Nabokov was particularly intrigued by questions of moral

awareness and aesthetic distance at this point in his career—and how he
chose to deal with them sheds light on the course of his development as
a novelist. This increasing moral complexity is as important, in its way,
as his decision to give the job of telling the story to a more interesting
voice. If The Defense is the book in which Nabokov first asks how certain
kinds of moral questions might be most effectively broached, then the
novels he wrote directly after it can be seen as offering potential answers
to those questions. The reader may have noticed that my brief summary
of Nabokov’s early fiction omitted Glory and Laughter in the Dark, two
books he wrote between May 1930 and May 1931. They are worth look-
ing at in more detail to see what light they cast on the subject at hand.
The two novels are sometimes described by way of the vivid contrasts
they make:5 Glory is about radiant insight and a world of noble aspirations,
Laughter in the Dark devoted to abject blindness and benightedness. The
former is organized around disinterested heroism; the latter, around ego-
tism and cowardice. These differences are real and important, but the two
novels have a lot in common as well. First, Nabokov was very much aware
of their imperfections: in a letter to Edmund Wilson, he dismissed Glory
as “blevotina [vomit]” (NWL 105), and he never had a good word to say
about Laughter in the Dark, even though he worked very hard at improv-
ing it in translation.6 Second, both feature characters who, like Luzhin, are
116 D. RAMPTON

so consumed by a single desire that their lives become a synecdoche for

that desire, which in turn puts our allegory-sensitive antennae on a state
of high alert. Third, the suffering of innocent children, though seemingly
incidental to the main narrative, is central in both. In Glory, there is the
account of the fourteen-year-old Irina Pavlov being sexually abused on
a train during the Civil War and the disastrous consequences that ensue
(“That’s how they have in their home a permanent living symbol” [Glory
150]). In Laughter in the Dark, there is the death of Irma, Albinus’s
daughter, for which her prodigal parent is indirectly responsible and by
which he is oddly unaffected. Nabokov uses these monstrous inversions of
the natural order to plot a moral nadir. Fourth, in both texts he begins with
broad effects to evoke the moral issues at stake, radically simplifies certain
circumstances to make those issues that much more vivid, and uses the
novels to invite a meditation on the morality of the well-lived or artfully
designed life. Fifth, in these novels Nabokov foregrounds devices such as
ekphrasis, “the verbal representation of visual representation” (Heffernan
3), to complicate the moral argument and make it that much more inex-
tricably bound up with aesthetic concerns. And, finally, just when things
should be clearest, as the story concludes and the loose ends are about to
be tied up, readers are left in suspense, unsure about exactly how to react.
First, Glory. The moral argument of this novel is clearly derived from
what might be characterized as the aestheticization of experience: for
Martin, to perform the exploit referred to in the title means to do some-
thing that shows high courage even though the world may see it as use-
less, something whose very uselessness makes the courage of performing
it that much more estimable. His reward for acting on such a resolve is
that his dreams come true. This means not only that he gets to perform
his heroic deed but also that the story of his life is invaded by all the lit-
erary devices, aesthetic allusions, artistic traits, and “embedded fictions”
(Tammi, “Glory” 173) contained in it. They acquire a sort of nonfictional
status in Glory, materializing for Martin in a way that hints at synchronici-
ties of which he is barely aware.
As every student of the novel knows, it is organized around one of
Nabokov’s most ostentatious ekphrastic gambits, the painting on the wall
over young Martin’s bed. Glory begins with a reference to that painting
and concludes by conflating the scene represented in it with the one at the
end of the novel—same wintry woods, same winding path—which leaves
Martin’s friends and acquaintances trying to make sense of what he has
done. Making a nonverbal work speak evocatively in such circumstances is
 THE AESTHETICS OF MORAL CONTRADICTION 117

relatively easy; making it speak clearly is more difficult. Of course, ek-

phrasis is a powerful rhetorical tool. As Valentine Cunningham points out,
it reaffirms the power of a work of art “to tell, convince, persuade, over-
whelm, to mean strongly, to be with a transcendent force, to be a kind
of truth: in other words, ekphrasis celebrates the wonder, the miracle,
the shock of art, the aura of the art-object” (65). But it is also a tool that
involves readers in exploring a lot of ambiguous territory. In this spirit,
critics have “read” the painting in Glory (and the invasion of the fiction
by the fictions that surround Martin) as a conflation of different orders
of reality; an example of art’s power to triumph over time; an aesthetic
manifestation of the circularity of existence; a metaliterary take on the
metaphysical; and a glimpse of a world in which destiny is desire, the com-
mitted past the eternal present, and the expectant now the radiant future.
Trying to sort through such arguments rewards those in possession of
a modicum of Keatsian negative capability, that is, a capacity for existing
“in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after
fact and reason.”7 Ekphrasis often speaks to ethical issues as well, using
the work of art to instruct or admonish, to teach a lesson while avoid-
ing a simplistic didacticism, to make pronouncements but simultaneously
qualify them with nuance and ambiguity (“Beauty is truth, truth beauty”).
As far as Glory is concerned, we can listen to what the painting is saying,
particularly when it speaks of the romantic past, chivalric deeds, larger-
than-life courage and tenacity. But it is no Grecian urn, in the sense that
everything happens not in the picture itself but in the off-canvas scene, as
it were. What is more, because this is a Nabokov novel, we fully expect
Martin’s deed to be suggestively ambiguous, open to various readings,
elusive in the same way that other revelations in Nabokov’s novels are.
So, whatever we finally decide about the painting’s meaning, we’re bound
to be aware of a certain arbitrary quality in the position we take, since
the aesthetic object that makes its appeal beyond language says different
things to different people. That is presumably why, at the end of Glory,
we are left with a disquieting silence, one that mimics the refusal to say
anything directly on the part of the painting itself. Martin’s deed seems
heroic; the political world in which innocents die ignominiously has been
momentarily transcended; the imagination and the forces for good have
re-forged a useful alliance.
The counterargument is harder to make. We may find ourselves nagged
by a voice saying that the hard men who have seized control of Russia
have succeeded in snuffing out another life, that the West seems full of
118 D. RAMPTON

well-meaning time-wasters, and that Irina Pavlov, unlike the painting that
speaks to Martin so eloquently, will never say anything again, no matter
how many transcendent moments young émigré adventurers have. The
energies of the novel are directed against such doubts, making it harder
for such a reading to come into focus. Yet even if part of Nabokov wants
moral clarity, his extraordinary rhetorical resources may make him reluc-
tant simply to assert it. He would avoid such a schematic approach to the
subject in the future, even though he revisited its difficulties in the next
novel that he wrote immediately after Glory.
If we turn now to Laughter in the Dark, we can see how its moral argu-
ment also stands out in sharp relief, even though it too is qualified by the
novel’s absolutizing schema and by some of the devices that Nabokov
uses to achieve his special effects. Julian Connolly makes a detailed and
plausible case for the central issues at stake in this regard. He identifies
the moral subject of the novel as “the relationship between an author’s
work and his awareness of pain and suffering in life.” According to this
view, the novel is a series of portraits of the artist. In Kamera obskura, the
Russian original, Segelkranz is a talented writer but guilty of hyperbolic
remorse occasioned by his wrongheaded attempt to preserve reality by
transcribing it verbatim. Udo Conrad, his replacement in Laughter in the
Dark, is a gifted but aloof writer who “retreats into aesthetic detachment”
(Connolly, “Laughter” 222). Then there is Horn/Rex, a brilliant artist
but a heartless sadist. His delusions of grandeur and his gratuitous cruelty
remind us that vile people can be aesthetically gifted, and that a certain
kind of detachment from human affairs can have appalling consequences.
As Boyd says, in the world of this novel “the moral eye seems the highest
and surest form of vision, and no one can avoid its gaze” (VNRY 368).
Once more, ekphrasis dominates from the outset. In Kamera obskura,
there is the Cheepy cartoon and the pregnant allusions to Yorick’s skull in
Hamlet. In the revised version, Laughter in the Dark, Albinus thinks about
hiring Rex to animate seventeenth-century paintings by the Flemish mas-
ters. With an eye to its splendid suggestiveness, Nabokov has Rex propose
Brueghel’s Proverbs as the painting that he will make into a film for Albinus.
Critics have been quick to point out that one of the characters in the paint-
ing is an adulterous woman leading a blind man, with obvious relevance
to the plot of Nabokov’s novel.8 This fact is important, because it pro-
vides a ready-made moral for the novel, which the postman even spells out
with his wry “Love is blind” remark (185). We should be aware, however,
that Rex’s suggestion is another of his outlandish jokes. For the Brueghel
 THE AESTHETICS OF MORAL CONTRADICTION 119

painting he mentions teems with variegated life, iconic characters, implied

stories, and universal themes, and to animate it or write a screenplay for it
would require extraordinary narrative and mimetic gifts. The moralizing
aspect of the painting is bound up with its being, besides a vast canvas
from ordinary village life, a commentary upon a series of one hundred (!)
proverbs, in which metaphors are literalized, moral lessons taught, and free
reign given to the artist’s imagination. In short, Brueghel has produced an
allegory, or rather a whole bunch of allegories. Reproducing them as a film
or a novel would challenge the limits of those genres.
Here, too, subversive suggestions would seem to be gently discouraged,
or at least not systematically supported. Yet readers might be tempted to
muse about just how sharp the difference is between the suffering imposed
on Kretschmar/Albinus by Horn/Rex, and the suffering for which the
author is himself responsible. A case in point is the almost lovingly reported
details of the scene in which Albinus slowly, painfully discovers that he is
blind. Or: could his wife Elisabeth’s “sixth sense” that her husband is in
danger be seen as an example of Nabokov’s bemused parody of a tired con-
vention? If one must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell
in Dickens’s Old Curiosity Shop without laughing, as Oscar Wilde wittily
put it, then what kind of latitude does that leave us for interpreting Irma’s
death, for seeing it as something other than a cipher for Kretschmar’s
moral nullity? To do so could result in revealing oneself to be as heartless
as Horn, as iconoclastic as Axel Rex, particularly when Nabokov has used
the death of this child so deliberately to plot his protagonist’s moral failure.
Are we invited to identify with such a villainous type? Not exactly, but
we are told at one point that Horn/Rex imagines himself a sadistic voy-
eur with season tickets at the spectacle of life, and a reserved space “in
the stage manager’s private box”—someone who is, like him, “an elusive,
double, triple, self-reflecting magic Proteus of a phantom […] the ghost
of a juggler on a shimmering curtain” (Laugh 183). This is the language of
anti-human art and its demonic energies—swirling, deceptive, hypnotic.
The cadences of Rex’s conviction here reflect his belief that he occupies
another order of existence altogether, one in which incidental lives provide
local amusements, and that this position allies him with great artists. The
novel carefully shows us that he is evil to think so. That said, the language
in which he affirms such a conviction puts some pressure on the carefully
designed moral framework of the tale. Quick-change magicians, reflec-
tions of phantoms, and curtains that facilitate deception or frame perfor-
mances are part of what makes art so special in Nabokov’s world.
120 D. RAMPTON

Again, the ending is of the suspended kind that leaves us with all sorts
of questions to ponder. The gun on Kretschmar’s mind in the first chap-
ter has gone off in the last, and everything seems to have been neatly
resolved. The villain has been beaten with a cane by Max, a victory of
sorts for the forces of good. Magda survives Kretschmar’s attempt to kill
her and escapes, but she will be arrested soon enough, and forced to try
out her indifferent Desdemona impersonation in a less credulous court.
Anneliese/Elisabeth symbolizes, in the end, the beauty of compassion and
the saintliness of forgiveness. Her idea of the sanctity of marriage survives,
while her bored husband’s all-consuming and doomed desire proves to be
the empty exercise in self-destruction that was hinted at from the begin-
ning. Only a hypertrophied case of sexual jealousy and a need for revenge
prevents him from starting life anew with his wife. The attractions of con-
ventional vulgarity stand revealed as the spurious things that they are, and
thus the moral reading is splendidly confirmed.
Is there an equally plausible anti-moral reading that would stand this
one on its head? Not quite equally plausible, but… . No doubt Horn/
Rex will move on to other victims, and Magda/Margot has proved herself
again and again a survivor. Albinus too has had his vision, the brilliant
illumination that accompanies his death, one that is cognate with the fiery
bliss that uninhibited sex gave him, the vision he was doomed to have
from the beginning. But in the end, he is described as an inert object,
something that resembles a large rag doll. In that form, Albinus’s dead
body embodies for the last time the difference between the glittering,
fragile, exotic world that he coveted and the messy, deceptive, physical
one that destroys him. That would seem to constitute a clear moral lesson.
Yet the world of messy complications destroys his wife and daughter too,
which complicates whatever conclusion readers are tempted to draw here.
Those who find too little moral clarity in Nabokov’s early fiction would
do well to reread these deceptively straightforward indictments of cruelty.
Those who find too much moralizing in these experiments in novelistic
forms should nonetheless be intrigued by the circumstances that made
them a necessary stage in his development as a writer. Those thinking
about Nabokov’s career as an author might find it useful to see these
two novels as a throwback to the first two that he wrote—as two books
in which he eschews the search for subtlety and the play with ambiguity
that he was to take up in earnest in the rest of his fiction, and by doing
so, finds new ways to write about the rights and wrongs of a world that
intrigues him.
 THE AESTHETICS OF MORAL CONTRADICTION 121

Questions about the morality of fiction are inevitably complicated by the

obligation to think about it within a certain tradition or from a given per-
spective, and the nineteenth-century novel often sets the norms for such
discussions. Given his interest in and indebtedness to his great Russian
forebears, that too is a problem for Nabokov and his critics. Eric Naiman
points out an important difference from Nabokov’s predecessors when he
observes that Russian writers tend to ask big questions such as “What is
the Meaning of Life?” or “What is the Essence of Humanity?” He goes
on: “The questions that haunt readers of Nabokov are not those that chal-
lenge the readers of Dostoevsky, Chekhov, and Tolstoy. But Nabokov’s
readers are haunted all the same, dogged by a variation of the self-reflexive
inquiry that ‘rewards’ readers of the great late nineteenth-century Russian
authors. Nabokov’s literature has a penchant for turning moral questions
about life into procedural ones about reading” (9). The allegorical turn, it
would seem, must at times pursue a bit of a zig-zag course.
Yet there’s a sense in which such a characterization of the nineteenth-
century Russian novel risks giving an excessively ponderous impression
of its central concerns and a misleading sense of the difference between
Nabokov’s fiction and that of his great predecessors. The great Russian
novels do deal with big questions. For example, we can all summon up
nightmare scenarios in which we are forced to discuss in perpetuity the
ontological implications of suicide with the frenzied cast of Dostoevsky’s
Devils, but such conversations are only a part, admittedly an important
part, of a novel that, in a way, turns on all the minor questions that come
up in an ordinary encounter, questions about whether an assembled group
should vote on whether they’re participating in a meeting or not, or
whether it’s rude to interrupt a speech to ask if someone has a pair of nail
scissors. Arguably, in such novels such seemingly insignificant things tell us
a lot concerning the large subjects being explored. Crime and Punishment
is all about a frenzied search for the essence of humanity, but Dostoevsky
does not seek to represent anything so hopelessly abstract as that. Instead,
his novel tells us to imagine the agony of doing something very simple:
what it would be like on a daily basis to talk to your mother or your sis-
ter about perfectly ordinary things, after you had committed a murder.
In Oblomov, to take another example, the upheaval occasioned when the
owners of a large country estate have to spend some precious money to
buy a bit of sugar is a much less important subject than “the Meaning
of Life,” but understanding such an upheaval is crucial for appreciating
122 D. RAMPTON

the ideas that Goncharov contributes to such a broad subject. In Anna

Karenina, watching Kitty deal with his dying brother, Levin learns about
life and death undistracted and unprotected by abstractions. The big ques-
tion—what does Nikolay’s death signify?—is only made real for his brother
by all the minor problems involved in palliative care, and these practical
details tend to make such a large question curiously unreal. The overarch-
ing concerns hover in the background, but the small details serve as the
reader’s link with them. Reading nineteenth-century fiction in this way is
a prolegomenon for the encounter with Nabokov’s novels. If they recom-
bine the “moral” and the “procedural,” or “life” and “reading,” in their
distinctive ways, they simultaneously suggest some important continuities.
Naiman concludes his study of the perverse Nabokov by observing that
“lesser books might make us into better people” (273), thus reminding
his readers that there are limits to the didactic usefulness of the moral
arguments in these novels, even for those dedicated to following them.
Michael Wood concludes his study of Nabokov the magician by describ-
ing Nabokov’s morality as “a subtle, almost invisible, quirky, but curiously
sturdy affair […] a scene of refusal which is also a scene of recognition”
(234–35). In the process of working out the implications of this defini-
tion, Wood convincingly makes the case that Nabokov’s “elegant” resis-
tance to moralizing readings is a reason why we should continue to come
up with them. In short, questions as large as those raised by the conjunc-
tion of Nabokov and morality will continue to require readers to deal with
ambiguity, contradiction, and creative tension. Nabokov’s early experi-
ments in this vein suggest that when he tried to keep it simple, he suc-
ceeded at a certain cost; hence his impatience with novels like Glory and
Laughter in the Dark. These experiments also anticipate developments in
his later, more complex fiction. His resistance to being read either as fer-
vently didactic or as perniciously frivolous is a central part of such produc-
tive tension and ambiguity.
That large question marks hover over Nabokov’s work, at various
stages, should not in the end seem strange. How odd it would have been
if the work of one of the twentieth century’s most original, subtle, and
controversial writers had ended up being judged as unequivocally on the
side of the angels, insofar as its morality is concerned.
 THE AESTHETICS OF MORAL CONTRADICTION 123

NOTES
1. See Boyd, VNRY and VNAY; Connolly, Nabokov’s Early Fiction; de la
Durantaye; and the contributors to Pifer’s volume Vladimir Nabokov’s
Lolita: A Casebook.
2. See, for example, Proffer 301 and Grayson 107.
3. See, for example, Alexandrov, “Defense”; Johnson 83–92; Connolly,
Nabokov’s Early Fiction; and Naiman 181–220.
4. See, for example, Tammi, Problems 142.
5. Boyd, VNRY 365: “Composed immediately after Glory, the novel appears
deliberately designed as a contrast to Glory’s world. In the earlier book life
seems an exalted, romantic disinterested adventure, in Camera Obscura a pit
of cowardice, selfishness, and cruelty.”
6. In fairness, it should be pointed out that Nabokov praises Glory a number of
other times, most notably in the foreword to the English translation.
7. See his letter to Tom Keats and George Keats on December 21, 1817 (Keats
492).
8. See Dewey 29–31; de Vries and Johnson 33.

WORKS CITED
Alexandrov, Vladimir E. “The Defense.” Garland Companion 75–87.
———. “The Otherworld.” Garland Companion 566–71.
Boyd, Brian. “The Problem of Pattern: Nabokov’s Defense.” Modern Fiction
Studies 33.4 (1987): 575–604.
———. Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1991.
———. Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1990.
Carlyle, Thomas. Latter-Day Pamphlets. Collected Works. Vol 19. London:
Chapman and Hall, 1894. 268–70.
Connolly, Julian. “Laughter in the Dark.” Garland Companion 214–25.
———. Nabokov’s Early Fiction: Patterns of Self and Other. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1992.
Cunningham, Valentine. “Why Ekphrasis?” Classical Philology 102.1 (2007):
57–71.
de la Durantaye, Leland. Style is Matter: The Moral Art of Vladimir Nabokov.
Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007.
de Vries, Gerard and D. Barton Johnson, eds. Vladimir Nabokov and the Art of
Painting. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2005.
Dewey, A. Katherine. “The Sixteenth-Century ‘Blue Cloak’ in Vladimir Nabokov’s
Laughter in the Dark.” Nabokovian 21 (1988): 29–31.
124 D. RAMPTON

Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Crime and Punishment. Trans. David McDuff.

Harmondsworth, Middlesex, UK: Penguin, 2002.
———. The Devils. Trans. Robert A. Maguire. Harmondsworth, Middlesex, UK:
Penguin, 2008.
The Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov. Ed. Vladimir E.  Alexandrov.
New York: Garland, 1995.
Goncharov, Ivan. Oblomov. Trans. David Magarshack. Harmondsworth,
Middlesex, UK: Penguin, 2002.
Grayson, Jane. Nabokov Translated: A Comparison of Nabokov’s Russian and
English Prose. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977.
Heffernan, James. Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to
Ashbery. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.
Johnson, D. Barton. Worlds in Regression: Some Novels of Vladimir Nabokov. Ann
Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1985.
Keats, John. Complete Poems and Selected Letters. New  York: Modern Library,
2001.
Nabokov, Vladimir. The Defense. [Zashchita Luzhina.] 1930. Trans. Michael
Scammell with the author. New York: Vintage, 1990.
———. Despair. [Otchaianie.] 1934; 1936. Rev. and trans. by the author. 1965.
New York: Putnam, 1966.
———. The Eye. [Sogliadatai.] 1930. Trans. Dmitri Nabokov with the author.
New York: Phaedra, 1965.
———. Glory. [Podvig.] 1932. Trans. Dmitri Nabokov with the author. 1971.
New York: McGraw-Hill, 1971.
———. Invitation to a Beheading. [Priglasheniye na kazn’.] 1935. Trans. Dmitri
Nabokov with the author. New York: Putnam, 1959.
———. Kamera obskura. Berlin: Sovremennye zapiski, 1933.
———. King, Queen, Knave. [Korol’, dama, valet.]. 1928. Trans. Dmitri Nabokov
with the author. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968.
———. Laughter in the Dark. [Kamera obskura.] 1932. Trans. Vladimir Nabokov.
New York: Vintage, 1989.
———. Mary. [Mashen’ka.] 1926. Trans. Michael Glenny with the author.
New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970.
———. Strong Opinions. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1974.
Naiman, Eric. Nabokov, Perversely. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010.
Pifer, Ellen. Nabokov and the Novel. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1980.
———, ed. Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita: A Casebook. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2003.
Proffer, Carl. “A New Deck for Nabokov’s Knaves.” Criticism, Reminiscences,
Translations, and Tributes. Ed. Alfred Appel Jr. and Charles Newman. Evanston,
IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970. 293–309.
 THE AESTHETICS OF MORAL CONTRADICTION 125

Tammi, Pekka. “Glory.” Garland Companion 169–78.

———. Problems of Nabokov’s Poetics: A Narratological Analysis. Helsinki:
Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, 1985.
Tolstoy, Lev. Anna Karenina. Trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.
Harmondsworth, Middlesex, UK: Penguin, 2003.
Wood, Michael. The Magician’s Doubts: Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction. Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994.
 PART III

Agency and Altruism

 CHAPTER 8

Loving and Giving in Nabokov’s The Gift

Jacqueline Hamrit

Thanks to literature, we can consider philosophical concepts such as love

and the gift in a new light, especially as they appear in Nabokov’s fiction.1
Indeed, Nabokov titled his last Russian novel The Gift, and in his preface
to Bend Sinister—the first novel he wrote in the USA—he declared that
“the main theme of Bend Sinister, then, is the beating of Krug’s loving
heart, the torture an intense tenderness is subjected to” (BS vii). His focus
on these ideas in The Gift, in particular, marks a significant change from
the darker and more sardonic novels that preceded it in his Russian fic-
tion of the 1930s, especially King, Queen, Knave, The Eye, Laughter in the
Dark, Despair, and Invitation to a Beheading. My analysis of these con-
cepts in his work extends previous studies of Nabokov by scholars such as
Maurice Couturier (on desire and cruelty) and Leland de la Durantaye (on
tenderness). Indeed, love in Nabokov’s fiction can be either pathological
and cruel, as in Lolita, or paternal and tender, as in Bend Sinister.
To resolve such contradictions, I explore the human and ethical dimen-
sion of love in Nabokov’s fiction by focusing on The Gift. I also incorporate
the insights of psychoanalysis, sociology, and poststructuralist philosophy,
especially Jacques Lacan’s, Maurice Blanchot’s, and Roland Barthes’s
accounts of love and Marcel Mauss’s and Jacques Derrida’s investigations
of the gift.2 I attempt on the one hand to identify the main characteristics

J. Hamrit ()
University of Lille, France

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 129

M. Rodgers, S.E. Sweeney (eds.), Nabokov and the Question
of Morality, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-59221-7_8
130 J. HAMRIT

of love, and on the other to show how love, considered as a gift, can be
a source for moral action—how, in other words, Nabokov’s novel illumi-
nates the relationship between love and morality.

LOVING
The issue of love is indeed at the core of The Gift.3 As a künstlerroman, it
tells the story of a young Russian writer in the process of becoming a full-
fledged author; the action takes place in Berlin in the 1920s, and features
a romance between the protagonist, Fyodor, and a young Russian girl
named Zina Mertz. I agree with Alexander Dolinin’s assessment, in his
essay on the novel, that “in this sense The Gift itself can be called ‘a kind of
declaration of love’” (165).4 For my part, I argue that the novel examines
the nature of love by juxtaposing three different situations. The first corre-
sponds to what Nabokov calls “the banal triangle of tragedy” (that is, the
relationship between Yasha, the son of one of Fyodor’s friends, Rudolf, a
young German man, and Olya, a Russian girl); the second situation relates
to what I call “the virtuous triangle” between Fyodor, his mother, and his
father; and the third corresponds to Fyodor’s and Zina’s romance, which
turns out to constitute yet another triangle.
The banal triangle of tragedy, to begin with, recounts the evolving rela-
tionships among a group of friends. Yasha falls in love with Rudolf, who
falls in love with Olya, who is in love with Yasha, so that, as the narrator
states, “the geometric relationship of their inscribed feelings was complete,
reminding one of the traditional and somewhat mysterious interconnec-
tions in the dramatis personae of eighteenth-century French playwrights
where X is the amante of Y (‘the one in love with Y’) and Y the amant of Z
(‘the one in love with Z’)” (Gift 47). What results is a case of impossible,
unrequited love which is generated out of friendship but differs radically
from it, as the narrator suggests:

Yasha kept a diary and in those notes he neatly defined the mutual relation-
ship between him, Rudolf and Olya as a “triangle inscribed in a circle.” The
circle represented the normal, simple, “Euclidian” (as he put it) friendship
that united all three, so that if it alone had existed their union would have
remained happy, carefree and unbroken. But the triangle inscribed within
it was a different system of relationships, complex, agonizing and slow in
forming, which had an existence of its own, quite independent of its com-
mon enclosure of uniform friendship. This was the banal triangle of tragedy,
 LOVING AND GIVING IN NABOKOV’S THE GIFT 131

formed within an idyllic circle, and the mere presence of such a suspiciously
neat structure, to say nothing of the fashionable counterpoint of its develop-
ment, would have permitted me to make it into a short story or novel. (46)

Fyodor thus uses geometrical figures to represent the two proximate but
different feelings denoted by friendship and love. The circle of friendship
represents perfection, union, and harmony, whereas the triangle of love is
associated with disharmony.5
Love also corresponds here to a certain kind of relationship which
the French philosopher Maurice Blanchot delineates in his book La
Communauté inavouable [The Unavowable Community]. Blanchot tackles
the issue of love through the concept of the community,6 by resorting
to texts written by Georges Bataille, Marguerite Duras, and Emmanuel
Levinas. He first quotes Bataille, who wrote “A la base de chaque être, il
existe un principe d’insuffisance” [“There exists in each person a principle
of insufficiency”] (qtd. in Blanchot, Communauté 15), meaning that the
principle of insufficiency is one of incompleteness which does not strive to
be completed through reunion and fusion but, on the contrary, becomes
even more intense as it is being completed. This notion leads to the vision
of an impossible love based on a fundamental asymmetry, which Blanchot
finds in Duras’s book La Maladie de la mort [The Disease of Death], and
which he associates, in turn, with Levinas’s thought. Levinas pinpoints
the presence of such asymmetry in the nonreciprocal ethical relation-
ship between an individual and others, claiming that love, from that per-
spective, is doomed even before it first appears, because the self and the
other do not live in the same time, are never together, and are separated
even when united. For Blanchot, such love makes it seem that the world
beyond the lovers utterly disappears and disintegrates, as in the relation-
ship between Tristan and Isolde, who said: “Nous avons perdu le monde,
et le monde nous” [“We have lost the world and the world has lost us”]
(Blanchot, Communauté 72).
This kind of love resembles Yasha’s love for Rudolf in The Gift, which is
so desperate and tragic that he commits suicide. Yet it seems that Nabokov
does not extol such yearning—not because it is homosexual, but because
it does not reach the pure, authentic state to which a more spiritual pas-
sion could have given birth. Fyodor comments: “I would have refused to
see in Yasha’s case an incorrigible deviation had Rudolf been to the least
degree a teacher, a martyr, or a leader; and not what he really was, a so-
called ‘Bursch,’ a German ‘regular guy’” (Gift 46). Yasha’s love is thereby
132 J. HAMRIT

degraded and becomes vulgar because its object is a “regular guy.” This
sense of vulgarity is even stronger because Yasha was, as he wrote in his
diary, “fiercely in love with the soul of Rudolf […] its harmonious pro-
portions, its health, the joy it has in living. I am fiercely in love with this
naked, suntanned, lithe soul […]—and this is just as fruitless as falling in
love with the moon” (Gift 46). Because his love is imaginary, even verging
on delusional, it loses both authenticity and legitimacy.
What I call “the virtuous triangle,” however, presents a different kind
of love. In the second chapter, Fyodor depicts his parents’ affection for
him and his for them. He begins by describing his bond with his mother:

She had come to him for two weeks, after a three-year separation, and [when
she, …] her face twisted with the pain of happiness, was clinging to him,
blissfully moaning, kissing him anywhere—ear, neck—it had seemed to him
that the beauty of which he had been so proud had faded, but as his vision
adjusted itself to the twilight of the present, so different at first from the
distantly receding light of memory, he again recognized in her everything
that he had loved. (84; my emphasis)

Expressed here is the meeting, after a separation, of two people who love
each other, and as such it reflects qualities found in Roland Barthes’s
description of “une fête,” or a festivity:

The Festivity is what is waited for, what is expected. What I expect of the
promised presence is an unheard-of totality of pleasures, a banquet; I rejoice
like the child laughing at the sight of the mother whose mere presence her-
alds and signifies a plenitude of satisfactions: I am about to have before me,
and for myself, the “source of all good things.” (119)

Indeed, Nabokov also describes the delight, the pleasure, the plenitude,
and the exultation of the mother as well as the son’s obvious certainty
regarding his love for her. Notice how Nabokov insists on the intensifica-
tion of the lover’s gaze. Love here sharpens vision as the son becomes
even more aware of his mother’s beauty (“the pure outline of her face, the
changeful play of [her] green, brown, yellow, entrancing eyes”). Similarly,
his mother, “unblinded […] by the excitement of the meeting, as any
other would have been,” looks attentively at a grotesque scene in the
street that both of them have noticed (Gift 84).
As Nabokov describes it here, the reunion of mother and son also
marks the origin of an ambivalent feeling: not only a sense of “happiness”
or “bliss” (one of Nabokov’s favorite notions) but also, at the same time,
 LOVING AND GIVING IN NABOKOV’S THE GIFT 133

“pain” (Gift 84). This ambivalence may reflect his sense, as he later says
in Speak, Memory, that “in order to enjoy life, we should not enjoy it
too much” (17). Mainly, however, the feeling occurs because love itself
appears as a sort of pharmakon, both a fortunate thing and a poison, both
a joy and a suffering. Thus, when his mother leaves for Paris, Fyodor expe-
riences a sense of loss due to the incompleteness of his conversations with
her. Fyodor feels uneasy because he is, as he says, “pensive, abstracted,
vaguely tormented by the thought that somehow in his talks with his
mother he had left the main thing untold” (Gift 93). Love indeed craves
to be spoken about, as psychoanalysts Julia Kristeva (in Histoires d’amour)
and Daniel Sibony (in L’Amour inconscient) insist. One feels pleasure and
joy in talking about one’s love, but failing to do so is a cause of suffering.
Fyodor’s love for his father, as described later in The Gift, also begins
with the sensation of bliss, but there is a difference. The narrator declares:

How to describe the bliss of our walks with Father through the woods, the
fields and the peat bogs, or the constant summer thought of him if he was
away, the eternal dream of making some discovery and of meeting him with
this discovery—How to describe the feeling I experienced when he showed
me all the spots where in his own childhood he had caught this or that […]

And what fascination there was in his words, in the kind of special fluency
and grace of his style […]

What a truly enchanting world was unfolded in his lessons! (104; my

emphasis)

The lyrical tone, the emotional intensity, and the stylistic choices in these
passages indicate Fyodor’s attempt to express his love for his father, which
is characterized not only by the happiness it produces but also by the
almost idolatrous admiration it reveals. He idealizes his father just as a
lover idealizes the beloved, according to Stendhal, who calls this process
“crystallization” because it consists of transforming a real person into a
perfect, ideal, brilliant object. Indeed, Fyodor later recounts all the admi-
rable qualities with which his father was endowed, including his self-
control, his sense of humor, and so forth. Fyodor adds, however, that
there was a further aspect of his father’s being:

In and around my father, around this clear and direct strength, there was
something difficult to convey in words, a haze, a mystery, an enigmatic
reserve which made itself felt sometimes more, sometimes less. It was as
134 J. HAMRIT

if this genuine, very genuine man possessed an aura of something still

unknown but which was perhaps the most genuine of all. (109)

Fyodor describes here a secret, an enigma, an ineffable “je ne sais quoi,”

as Vladimir Jankélévitch would say, which shows that something inac-
cessible exists in love, a genuine solitude (recalling Blanchot’s analysis
of love) which verges, in this instance, on a feeling of being abandoned.
For all its mystery, however, love can also be considered as a moral pre-
cept. For Fyodor, the fact of loving and being loved by his father allows
him to become aware of ethics. The father transmits not only knowledge
but moral qualities—rejecting hypocrisy or cowardice, for example, and
endowing life instead with “a kind of bewitching lightness” (110).7
The Gift is also concerned with the love between Fyodor and Zina, of
course. Before we compare their romance to the banal triangle of tragedy
and the virtuous triangle of filial devotion, however, we need to establish
its role in the plot. Critics, including Brian Boyd and Eric Naiman, have
noted that Zina appears only in the middle of the book, mainly in the
third and fifth chapters (which are interrupted by the fourth, devoted to
Fyodor’s biography of Chernyshevsky). Yet while she does not explicitly
appear until late in the novel, Zina is indirectly introduced in the very first
chapter, when Fyodor describes the lady who gave her drawing lessons in
Saint Petersburg. Besides, throughout the novel there exists a continuous,
subterranean thread of allusions to the color blue, an association with
Zina in condensed form that begins at the end of the second chapter,
when Fyodor decides to rent a room in the house where he glimpses “a
gauze dress, pale bluish and very short” (135), that he wrongly imag-
ines as belonging to Zina—as if chance, fate, and necessity were constant
themes in their romance.
Even so, their love story does have a beginning. Fyodor describes their
first meeting rather soberly, although he mentions Zina’s “graceful lan-
guor” (148) and her sullenness. But when his desire grows, it is with an
anxious hope and expectation that he awaits her: “Waiting for her arrival.
She was always late—and always came by another road than he” (164).
Fyodor goes on to describe how “she always unexpectedly appeared out
of the darkness, like a shadow leaving its kindred element” (164). We
can note here the repetition of the experience, the surprise of her appear-
ance each time, but most of all—contrary to Fyodor’s meeting with his
mother—the obsessive pain of frustrated desire due to her absence.
 LOVING AND GIVING IN NABOKOV’S THE GIFT 135

What indeed characterizes the love Fyodor feels for Zina is neither
friendship (as with Yasha), nor mere idealization (as with his father), but
desire—that is, a lack of being. Desire is also a form of suffering, because
Zina’s apparent perfection induces pain and frustration, which is relieved
only when Fyodor perceives a blemish or defect: “he suffered when he
detected something particularly enchanting in her and was glad and
relieved when he glimpsed some flaw in her beauty” (165). Yet Fyodor’s
love for Zina is “benevolent,” too, according to various philosophers’
accounts—such as Descartes’s or Leibniz’s, for example—of a love that
consists of wishing for the good and happiness of the beloved. As the
narrator explains: “both of them, forming a single shadow, were made to
the measure of something not quite comprehensible, but wonderful and
benevolent and continuously surrounding them” (164).8
In the second part of my essay, I will explore further the “something
not quite comprehensible, but wonderful and benevolent,” that the narra-
tor evokes here (Gift 164). This strange benevolence is in fact a gift—a gift
which affirms, as Fyodor exclaims, that “it was good to be alive” (166).
Whereas Yasha’s love for Rudolf is, in a certain sense, a failure because it
ends in suicide, Fyodor’s is benevolent because it enriches his own moral
existence and that of his beloved. Happiness, Nabokov seems to suggest,
illuminates what is good in life.

GIVING
I wish now to tackle the issue of the gift, first as it is conveyed in the title
of the novel, and secondly as suggested by the meaning of Fyodor’s name,
“a gift of God.”9 A third consideration is to take up Boyd’s observation
that Fyodor enjoys a double gift—his love for Zina, on the one hand, and
his literary talent, on the other (468)—which anticipates my approach to
the notion of the gift from the perspectives of first loving, and then writ-
ing, and, finally, being.
Now, Webster’s Dictionary defines a gift first as “something that is vol-
untarily transferred by one person to another without compensation,” and
then as a “capacity, a talent, a faculty.” Derrida complicates such defini-
tions, however. In Donner le temps (39ff), for example, he deconstructs
this concept by showing how Marcel Mauss, in his remarkable “Essai sur
le don” [“Essay on the Gift”], does not really deal with that subject but
treats issues such as “economy,” “exchange,” “contract,” “sacrifice,” and
so forth, or in other words, what induces the gift and annuls it. Derrida
136 J. HAMRIT

suggests that, in a sense, there is no such thing as a gift because each time
you give somebody a gift, you and the other person are inscribed in an
economy of exchange. You feel good about yourself for giving something,
and the other person is grateful to receive it. At that very moment, the
gift disappears. Giving should therefore preclude any exchange: the pure
gift consists in giving without getting anything back, without receiving
anything, and this, according to Derrida, is not merely “impossible” but
in fact “the impossible,” implying that to give necessitates an infinite and
demanding desire.10 This paradox can be applied to the notion of love;
indeed, a number of poststructuralist philosophers associate love with giv-
ing. Barthes, for example, declares: “I love the other, not according to his
existence; by a movement one might well call mystical, I love, not what he
is, but that he is […] so, acceding to the other’s thus [in French, ‘le tel’],
I no longer oppose oblation to desire” (222). And we can also refer to
Lacan’s well-known formula: “loving is giving something one does not
have to somebody who does not want it.”11 These sentences imply that
loving is not a question of having but of being, that there is something
infinite and inexhaustible in love.
In Nabokov’s novel, this sense of endless giving seems characteristic
of the love Fyodor feels for his parents, especially his father (we indeed
remember how he could not express his emotion in words), but perhaps
not his relationship with Zina. Fyodor’s love for Zina is particular, after
all, and Zina herself is particularly strange. Many critics of The Gift, such
as David Rampton and Barbara Wyllie, have noticed that she is a ghostly,
shadowy figure in the novel because she rarely participates in the action,
and when Fyodor declares his love for her at the end, he does so very ten-
tatively and not in an assured or vigorous way. Thus, when Zina asks him if
he loves her, he answers, “What I am saying is in fact a kind of declaration
of love,” to which she replies, “A ‘kind of’ is not enough” (332). Zina is,
in fact, more a guide or a muse than a lover, especially because she has a
rival in the form of Fyodor’s vocation as a writer. In a sense, then, their
romance constitutes yet another triangle. As the narrator explains, Fyodor
“was incapable of giving his entire soul to anyone or anything: its working
capital was too necessary to him for his private affairs” (165).
Fyodor is indeed endowed with a creative gift, that of writing. From
the very beginning, the novel characterizes him as a writer. He has recently
published a book of poems, and the first chapter is devoted to his reflec-
tions and comments on them. The second chapter reveals his intention to
write a biography of his father before he composes, instead, a biography of
 LOVING AND GIVING IN NABOKOV’S THE GIFT 137

the nineteenth-century Russian writer Chernyshevsky (which is integrated

into the novel in the form of the fourth chapter, a book within a book).
Eventually, at the end of The Gift, Fyodor decides to write a classical novel.
What is striking in Fyodor’s (and indirectly Nabokov’s) analysis of writing
is that he considers it a gift accompanied by an ethical dimension. The
narrator declares that “Fyodor thought […] with proud, joyous energy,
with passionate impatience, [that] he was already looking for the creation
of something new, something still unknown, genuine, corresponding fully
to the gift which he felt like a burden” (91). Writing is therefore “a gift”
that he nevertheless experiences as “a burden,” something like a duty, an
obligation, or a responsibility. At the same time, it evokes the same moral
qualities, “unknown” and yet also “genuine,” that he associates with his
love for his father (109).
What is more, Fyodor’s notion of approaching “something new, some-
thing still unknown” in his art also applies to the composing of chess
problems, which, according to Fyodor, resembles poetic inspiration and
literary creation. As the narrator remarks,

If he had not been certain (as he also was in the case of literary creation)
that the realization of the scheme already existed in some other world, from
which he transferred it into this one, then the complex and prolonged work
on the board would have been an intolerable burden to the mind, since it
would have to concede, together with the possibility of realization, the pos-
sibility of its impossibility. (159; my emphasis)

Creation, therefore, not only depends upon the possibility of a realization

but also confronts and transcends the dismaying possibility of an impossi-
bility. With this notion, Nabokov prefigures Derrida’s analysis of the char-
acteristics of the gift as “the impossible.”
Nabokov’s paradoxical notion of the metaphysics of artistic creativity
also suggests an infinite inexhaustibility, as Fyodor explains:

Where shall I put all these gifts with which the summer morning rewards
me—and only me? Save them for future books? Use them immediately for
a practical handbook: How to Be Happy? Or getting deeper, to the bottom
of things: understand what is concealed behind all this, behind the play, the
sparkle, the thick, green grease-paint of the foliage? For there really is some-
thing, there is something! And one wants to offer thanks but there is no one
to thank. The list of donations already made: 10,000  days—from Person
Unknown. (299; my emphasis)
138 J. HAMRIT

The phrase “there is something” echoes Heidegger’s “es gibt Sein,” the
gift of being, which is unconditional and affirmative. Nabokov declared, in
fact, that he had chosen Dar as the title of the novel because the Russian
word Dar includes the affirmative Da with an “r.”12 In this way, the novel
indeed offers a “Yes” to life and literature. There is nobody to thank,
however, because there is, in the gift, no debt, no exchange, no return; it
is a reserve of being, of ceaseless writing, of blissful loving. Thus, contrary
to Blanchot’s pessimistic perspective, which associates love with loss and
solitude, Nabokov optimistically conceives of love as something that glori-
fies and transfigures the world. Indeed, when Fyodor goes for a daily walk
outside the city, he describes his experience in those terms:

When in the mornings I entered this world of the forest […]; when on these
hot, summer weekdays I walked over to its southern side, into its depths,
to wild secret spots, I felt as much delight as if this was a primeval paradise
within two miles from Agamemnonstrasse. Coming to a favourite nook of
mine which magically combined a free flow of sunshine with protection by
the shrubbery, I would strip to the skin and lie down supine on the rug,
placing my unnecessary trunks beneath my head. Thanks to the suntan coat-
ing my entire body (so that only my heels, palms and the raylike lines around
my eyes kept their natural tint), I felt myself an athlete, a Tarzan, an Adam,
anything you like, only not a naked town-dweller. (303)

Here Fyodor describes an experience of prelapsarian, innocent, “prime-

val” happiness due to the freedom of his naked body. In this feeling we
recognize Nabokov’s propensity for celebrating the sensuality and sensu-
ousness of the world, something also encountered later in the novel when
the narrator declares:

The low sun settling behind the rooftops seemed to have fallen out of the
clouds that covered the rest of the sky (but they were by now quite soft and
aloof, as if painted in melting undulations upon a greenish ceiling); there,
in that narrow slit, the sky was on fire, and opposite, a window and some
metallic letters shone like copper. (327)

This tender, rapturous description leads to Fyodor’s later vision of Zina,

and also of a glittering plane against the dark, velvety night sky, which
prompts him to exclaim, “Look, […] what a beauty!” (329).
In Nabokov’s novel, love acts as if it were writing the world anew, and
the world reappears, triumphant and unquestionable. Just as love enriches
 LOVING AND GIVING IN NABOKOV’S THE GIFT 139

the lovers’ moral life, so it creates a new world which whets and sharpens
moral action.13 The Gift therefore seems to encapsulate various situations
in which love, whether filial or amorous, is prompted by an inexhaustible
urge of generosity toward others and the world. In spite of the deep-
rooted ambivalence that love may evoke—as an experience of both loss
and plentitude, both joy and pain—its unconditional nature also produces
a constant sense of reinvigoration and affirmation.

NOTES
1. My intention is to show how fiction renews the impact, meaning, and
apprehension of philosophical ideas. Whereas, in my previous analyses of
Nabokov’s fiction, I resorted to Derridean philosophy to analyze literary
notions, in this essay I reverse my stance and start from notions within lit-
erature (such as love) in order to renew philosophical concepts, privileging
in a way the “bottom-up” (inductive) approach to the “bottom-down”
(deductive) one. Moreover, I wish to show that a psychoanalytical and
poststructuralist approach can be useful for a comprehension of Nabokov’s
fiction, and notably of his treatment of morality, despite his distrust of
Freud and the social sciences in general.
2. See, for example, Derrida’s Donner le temps [Given Time] and Donner la
mort [The Gift of Death].
3. Nabokov’s 1962 foreword to the novel’s English translation tells us that
the greater part of The Gift (in Russian, Dar) was written from 1935 to
1937  in Berlin, its last chapter being completed in 1937 on the French
Riviera. It was published serially by an émigré magazine in 1937–1938,
but with the fourth chapter omitted; not until 1952 was the entire novel
published, in New York, by the Chekhov Publishing House. The Gift was
translated from Russian into English by Michael Scammell and revised by
the author, who is responsible, he says, for the versions of various poems
scattered throughout the book.
4. Dolinin continues by saying that The Gift declares the “love of the creator
for his creature, and of the creature for its creator, love of a son for his
father, love of an exile for his native land, love for language and those who
love it, love for the beauty of the world, and last but not least, love for its
readers” (165).
5. It seems that circular forms appealed to Nabokov and were particularly
meaningful for him, as he declares in Speak, Memory: “The spiral is a spiri-
tualized circle. In the spiral form, the circle, uncoiled, unwound, has ceased
to be vicious, it has been set free” (211).
6. The notion of “community” can be applied to the tragic triangle formed
by Yasha, Rudolph, and Olya and the particular relations they entertain,
140 J. HAMRIT

because they do have something in common, that is, the desire to die
together. Yet this community explodes because Yasha is the only one to
commit suicide.
7. This notion recalls the lightness of being that Blanchot describes in a short
autobiographical story, published in book form as L’Instant de ma mort
[The Instant of My Death], when he experiences the imminence of death.
8. Blackwell examines this same sentence in his subtle monograph on The
Gift, although he focuses on how the imagery of “forming a single shadow”
illustrates how their bond creates a new whole out of unitary autonomous
parts (Blackwell 134–135).
9. In his essential and comprehensive Keys to The Gift, Leving expatiates on
the title’s meaning, recalling that the English term “gift” is a translation of
the original Russian title “dar,” a one-syllable word one can hear in the
protagonist’s very name, “Fyodor.” Leving adds that, in Russian pronun-
ciation, the vowel in the second syllable of the name is reduced to sound
like the title: Fyodar (127–133).
10. I summarize here, with the help of Lucy’s A Derrida Dictionary and
Wortham’s The Derrida Dictionary, the notion of the gift developed in
Derrida’s Donner le temps and Donner la mort. In Donner le temps [Given
Time], Derrida wonders about that expression because, he says, one does
not possess time. So is it possible (or impossible) to give time? In Donner
la mort [The Gift of Death], Derrida expatiates on the sacrificial gift as
experienced by Abraham, who associates death with infinite giving and
therefore infinite love. I also draw on Marion’s analysis of Derrida’s state-
ment that he never concluded that the gift was absolutely impossible, and
that there was no such thing as a gift. According to Marion, Derrida means
that, if there is a gift, it must be the experience of the impossible and
should appear as impossible (165).
11. According to French psychoanalyst Thamy Ayouch (personal correspon-
dence), the formula cannot be found in Lacan’s works in its entirety. The
initial phrase (“loving is giving something one does not have”) appears in
the following texts: Le Séminaire, livre V, “Les formations de l’inconscient”
(Leçon du 29 janvier 1958); Le Séminaire, livre VIII, “Le Transfert”
(Leçons du 23 novembre 1969, 18 janvier, 15 mars et 22 mars 1961);“La
direction de la cure et les principes de son pouvoir” (1958), from Écrits;
and “Jeunesse de Gide ou la lettre et le désir” (1958), also from Écrits. The
second part of the formula (“to someone who does not want it”) is often
reconstituted from what is said later, but does not appear affixed to the first
part. I am grateful to Professor Forbes Morlock for providing references to
the English translations: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book V, “The
Formations of the Unconscious,” 1957–1958, and Book VIII,
“Transference,” 1960–1961, trans. Cormac Gallagher from unedited
 LOVING AND GIVING IN NABOKOV’S THE GIFT 141

French manuscripts and privately published; and “The Youth of Gide, or

the Letter and Desire,” in Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English,
trans. Bruce Fink with Héloïse Fink and Russell Grigg (New York: Norton,
2006), 623–644, 828–831.
12. Leving, the source of this information (127), cites two letters from
Nabokov to Zinaida Shakhovskaia now in the Library of Congress. In an
undated letter from 1936, for example, Nabokov writes: “I am afraid that
my next novel (its title has been extended by one letter: not ‘Da’ but ‘Dar,’
transforming the initial statement in to something flourishing, pagan, even
priapic), will disappoint you.”
13. As I have shown, Nabokov has prefigured Derrida’s analysis of the gift in
his own novel with that very title. Indeed, because love is an affect and not
merely a concept, it is best described in a literary work which can explore
the different nuances of love’s singularities and renew its own representa-
tions of them. Our new critical stance, therefore, should be one that alter-
nates between philosophy and literature in a “give-and-take” manner.
After all, philosophy helps us to understand and regenerate the meaning of
literature, while literature fleshes out and revives the concepts defined by
philosophy.

WORKS CITED
Barthes, Roland. A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments. 1977. Trans. Richard Howard.
London: Vintage, 2002.
Blackwell, Stephen H. Zina’s Paradox: The Figured Reader in Nabokov’s “Gift.”
New York: Peter Lang, 2000.
Blanchot, Maurice. La Communauté inavouable. Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1983.
———. L’Instant de ma mort. Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1994.
Boyd, Brian. Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1990.
Caputo, J. D. and M. J. Scanton. God, the Gift and Postmodernism. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1999.
Couturier, Maurice. Nabokov ou la cruauté du désir: Lecture psychanalytique.
Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 2004.
de la Durantaye, Leland. Style is Matter: The Moral Art of Vladimir Nabokov.
Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007.
Derrida, Jacques. “Demeure.” Passions de la littérature. Ed. Michel Lisse. Paris:
Galilée, 1996. 13–73.
———. Donner la mort. Paris: Galilée, 1999.
———. Donner le temps. 1. La Fausse monnaie. Paris: Galilée, 1991.
Dolinin, Alexander. “The Gift.” The Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov.
Ed. Vladimir E. Alexandrov. New York: Garland, 1995. 135–169.
142 J. HAMRIT

Jankélévitch, Vladimir. Le Je-ne-sais-quoi et le Presque-rien. Paris: Presses

Universitaires de Paris, 1957.
Kristeva, Julia. Histoires d’amour. Paris: Denoel, 1983.
Lacan, Jacques. Écrits 1. Paris: Seuil, 1999.
———. Écrits 2. Paris: Seuil, 1999.
———. Le Séminaire: Livre V, Les Formations de l’inconscient: 1957–1958. Ed.
Jacques-Alain Milner. Paris: Seuil, 1998.
———. Le Séminaire: Livre VIII, Le Transfert: 1960–1961. Ed. Jacques-Alain
Milner. Paris: Seuil, 2001.
Leving, Yuri. Keys to The Gift: A Guide to Vladimir Nabokov’s Novel. Boston:
Academic Studies Press, 2011.
Lucy, Niall. A Derrida Dictionary. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004.
Marion, Jean-Luc. “L’impossible et le don.” Derrida, la Tradition de la philoso-
phie. Ed. Marc Crépon and Frédéric Worms. Paris: Galilée, 2008. 155–170.
Mauss, Marcel. “Essai sur le Don.” Sociologie et anthropologie. 1950. Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, 2004. 145–279.
Nabokov, Vladimir. Bend Sinister. 1947. Harmondsworth, Middlesex, UK:
Penguin, 1974.
———. The Gift. [Dar.] 1937–1938. Trans. Michael Scammell and Dmitri
Nabokov with the author. 1963. Harmondsworth, Middlesex, UK: Penguin,
1981.
———. Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited. 1966. Harmondsworth,
Middlesex, UK: Penguin, 1969.
Sibony, Daniel. L’Amour inconscient: Au-delà du principe de précaution. Paris:
Grasset, 1983.
Wortham, Simon Morgan. The Derrida Dictionary. London and New  York:
Continuum, 2010.
 CHAPTER 9

Kinbote’s Heroism

Laurence Piercy

John Shade’s death scene in Pale Fire is of central importance as a moment

of structural intrigue. Kinbote’s narration becomes particularly unstable at
this point in the novel, and storyworld equivocations demand with some
urgency the scrutiny of the narrator’s conative states.1 Without fixed facts
in the storyworld, the reader is drawn to make sense of Kinbote’s actions
by working out the possible types of intention, belief, and desire that we
might infer as the basis of those actions, in order to build up a picture of
his character. This essay systematizes the conative approach by utilizing
models from the philosophy of action, as a means of clarifying the ways in
which the relationship between action and equivocation play a formative
role in characterization. The philosophical models used in this analysis
show how information presented or withheld in the text can manage the
interpretive routes that are open to the reader.
In order to consider possible reasons for Kinbote’s behavior at Shade’s
death, there are points at which I have to describe some events in the
novel as if they are true in the storyworld, even though the very truth of
the narrative is being constantly undermined. This speculation is neces-
sary in order to draw out the complexities of characterization in Pale Fire;
indeed, I argue that Nabokov develops Kinbote’s character by construct-

L. Piercy ()
University of Sheffield, South Yorkshire, UK

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 143

M. Rodgers, S.E. Sweeney (eds.), Nabokov and the Question
of Morality, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-59221-7_9
144 L. PIERCY

ing logical anomalies that prevent a clear understanding of his motives.

These logical anomalies underpin the ambiguous narrative that leads Brian
McHale, among others, to regard Pale Fire as “a text of absolute episte-
mological uncertainty” (18). I suggest that this uncertainty is not simply
playfulness, but that it forms the structural basis for creating the dyadic
characterization of Kinbote and Jack Grey. It is through this pairing that
Nabokov is able to put forward a nuanced and morally probing spectrum
of agency, which subverts what Paisley Livingston calls the “rationality
heuristic” at work in literary interpretation (53). Nabokov thus presents a
complex vision of the relation between action and moral judgment.

The analytic steps that I take in this essay begin with the assumption
that part of the interpretation of textual events comes from reading the
intentional states of characters in the text. This approach is in line with sev-
eral theoretical approaches, ranging across narratology and the philosophy
of literature. In narratology, the crossover between action theory and the
study of character and narrative has been tentatively explored (van Dijk;
Doležel; Herman, Story Logic). These theories have generally utilized con-
ventional action theory to put forward ways of understanding how narrative
events can be described through schematic, philosophical models of action.
For Teun van Dijk, this method is based on the “intuitive idea […] that nar-
rative discourse may be conceived of as a form of natural action description,
whereas a philosophy or, more specifically, a logic of action attempts to pro-
vide formal action descriptions” (287). David Herman points to a similar
split when he suggests that, while philosophers “create taxonomies of act-
types […] mapping the structures and supports of human action,” storytell-
ers make worlds through which readers can “better appreciate exemplary as
well as exceptional varieties and modes of action” (Story Logic 55). If stories
“rely implicitly on the same conceptual systems that action theorists strive
to make explicit,” as Herman suggests (55), then action theory can poten-
tially elucidate the processes of understanding what we are reacting to when
we read, as well as the viable parameters for verisimilitude in fictional action.
These claims need to be seen in conjunction with similar work in the
philosophy of literature. Interpreting fictive action through the inference
of character motive, intention, and belief is certainly recognized as a partial
model for reading. Noël Carroll suggests that narrative is, for the most
part, made up of indicative representations, but that the situations that are
represented inevitably provoke questions: “We ask these questions in virtue
 KINBOTE’S HEROISM 145

of certain background beliefs and presuppositions we already hold about

the nature of [events]—that they involve agents—and about agents—that
they have motives” (8). Livingston agrees that “understanding narrative
discourses invariably requires readers to apply background beliefs con-
cerning not only intentional attitudes, but subjective schemata of practi-
cal reasoning”; accordingly, he reads fictional action by relating it to “the
depicted agent’s possible beliefs, desires, and intentions” (53). To temper
this approach, however, Gregory Currie points to the fact that we also read
fictional happenings as “relations of dependence between events as basic
facts about the [text] world, and not as reducible to facts about the motives
of agents” (“Narrative Representation” 313). Cautiously adopting an
approach that centers on the model of inferring characters’ conative states,
Livingston’s “rationality heuristic” (53) yields some distinctive results
when applied to Kinbote. Before I share those results, however, I need to
unpack the interpretative problem that Shade’s death scene presents.

Toward the end of Pale Fire, Nabokov presents the reader with an
unsolvable problem. This riddle does not appear to be just another one of
the intra-referential games that structure the book, but concerns a specific
point at which Kinbote’s story seems to break down in his telling of it.
Immediately following the completion of the poem “Pale Fire,” John
Shade is invited by Kinbote to share his finished work over “half a gal-
lon of Tokay” at the Goldsworths’ house, which Kinbote rents (288).
Crossing the road between their homes, Shade and Kinbote notice a caller
at the Goldsworths’ house whom Kinbote first believes to be a door-
knocking evangelical, but who is actually Gradus, the man that Kinbote (a
disguised king, of course) claims has come to assassinate him. This case of
misidentification provides the first of the equivocations which characterize
the episode. Kinbote starts toward the caller and is ahead of Shade when
Gradus opens fire. This spatial positioning leads to the main complication
in the scene: whether Kinbote shields, or does not shield, John Shade from
Gradus’s bullets. Kinbote gives a dramatic account:

His first bullet ripped a sleeve button off my black blazer, another sang
past my ear. It is piffle to assert that he aimed not at me (whom he had just
seen in the library—let us be consistent, gentlemen, ours is a rational world
after all), but at the gray-locked gentleman behind me. […] I instinctively
backed, bellowing and spreading my great strong arms […] in an effort to
146 L. PIERCY

halt the advancing madman and shield John, whom I feared he might, quite
accidentally, hit[…] (294)

Kinbote also includes reports from his gardener and from Sybil Shade.
The gardener was a witness, but Sybil arrives at the scene after the main
events have played out:

Shade’s widow found herself so deeply affected by the idea of my having

“thrown myself” between the gunman and his target that during a scene I
shall never forget, she cried out, stroking my hands: “There are things for
which no recompense in this world or another is great enough.” (298)

Although we may have the distinct sense that Kinbote has misreported
Sybil’s words and gestures, the statement ostensibly testifies to Kinbote’s
goodness, and bolsters his own claim that he spread his arms in order
to “halt the advancing madman and shield John” (298). The question
of Kinbote’s heroism seems inconsequential at first, but the equivocation
places his intentions directly under critical focus.
The gardener’s report, the only eyewitness account of Shade’s death,
provides the clearest insight into the equivocation as it juxtaposes two
vitally related phenomena:

My good gardener, when enthusiastically relating to everybody what he had

seen, certainly erred in several respects—not so much perhaps in his exag-
gerated account of my “heroism” as in the assumption that Shade had been
deliberately aimed at […] (298)

Mediated by Kinbote, the uneasy entanglement of his “heroism” and

the “assumption that Shade had been deliberately aimed at” becomes
clear: Kinbote’s heroism is most credible in the account which has the
gunman aiming at John Shade. Without that assumption, the claim
becomes weak; Kinbote could not have tried to shield Shade had he not
thought that Shade was under fire. This notion has larger ramifications
for our understanding of Kinbote because the will to shield Shade seems
entirely at odds with his professed claim to Zemblan heritage. Kinbote
could only step into the line of fire if he thought that Shade was the
target, and if Kinbote believed Shade to be the target then he could
not, in the moment of attack, have thought himself an ex-king worthy
of assassination.
 KINBOTE’S HEROISM 147

This event is just one of many points in Pale Fire at which we see cracks
in Kinbote’s narrative of Zembla. More interestingly, the scene offers an
opportunity to analyze the Zembla myth by focusing on the ways in which
Nabokov presents Kinbote’s intentional states. The action matrix is incom-
mensurable, which means that both Kinbote’s action and the reasons we
might suggest for his action are suspended and reduced to conjecture.
Because the scene is equivocal, it is amenable to testing against philosophi-
cal models, the use of which can clarify the relevancy of different readings
of Kinbote’s intentional states. More pertinently, it raises the question as
to how our judgment of Kinbote relates to the way in which we read his
intentions.
Kinbote’s action takes the reader to a consideration of choice in the
novel; we are led to question the distinction between Kinbote’s spon-
taneous action under Gradus’s fire, and his reimagining of these actions
in retrospect. The gulf is between what Thomas Nagel terms the inter-
nal and external standpoints (110). The internal view is the acting agent;
the external view is the self-reflective gaze that weighs the actions of the
self and demands control of them. There is a conflict here, Nagel notes,
between the agent and the ever-questioning external view which destabi-
lizes the reasons for action. To open up some of the questions that arise
from this problem as it manifests in Pale Fire, I move to a staple of action
theory—the principle of alternate possibilities—in order to discuss the
approaches that have been taken by philosophers.
The theory of alternate possibilities is traditionally an important ele-
ment of action theory. Its power arises from the phenomenology of
choice, which takes on a paradoxical aspect in the conflict between internal
and external views. William James summarizes the intuition, and problem,
involved in the principle:

[D]ecisions, for him who makes them, are altogether peculiar psychic facts.
Self-luminous and self-justifying at the living moment at which they occur,
they appeal to no outside moment to put its stamp upon them or make them
continuous with the rest of nature. Themselves it is rather who seem to
make nature continuous; and in their strange and intense function of grant-
ing consent to one possibility and withholding it from another, to transform
an equivocal and double future into an inalterable and simple past. (158)

The choice, at the moment of making it, regards a future that is “equivocal
and double,” but once the act is done, what was open becomes a final-
148 L. PIERCY

ized past. The external view that is the privilege of retrospect is an issue of
control. From the internal perspective, according to Nagel, we “consider
our own actions and those of others simply as part of the course of events
in a world” (113). However, from the external view, we are not content to
see our actions as part of these larger events, so we seek an “explanation
[…] which is complete in itself and renders illegitimate all further requests
for explanation of [our] action as an event in the world” (117). For Nagel,
even if we base our motives for action on an objective rationale, the exter-
nal view can still reduce our reasons to an infinite regress. The desire of the
external position, Nagel suggests, is impossible:

However much harmony with an objective view we may achieve in action,

we can always undermine the sense of our own autonomy by reflecting that
the chain of explanation or absence of explanation for this harmony can be
pursued till it leads outside our lives. (136)

The sense that we have alternate possibilities can be seen as a corollary

to Nagel’s impossible position. The same external view that might seek
reasons for our actions appears very similar to the view that probes the
choices that were available when acting. Attempting to solidify one’s rea-
sons for acting is to assert agential control in a way that also regards the
roads not taken. The principle of alternative possibilities is a connective
feature between the phenomenology of action, and the retrospective ques-
tioning which situates any act within a web of possible acts.
The slippage between the action and a retrospective view of the action
means that when analyzing Pale Fire, two distinct questions need to be
considered: Why did Kinbote act in the way he did? And, why does he
narrate the action in the way he does? The first of these questions is impos-
sible to answer, because our information is entirely focalized through
Kinbote’s narration. However, taking it into account as a question is still
necessary, both in order to distinguish what is at stake in his narration and
in order to measure his actions in the death scene against his actions at
other moments in an attempt to form a coherent storyworld.
The “principle of alternate possibilities” (PAP) is a useful starting point
for characterizing what is at stake in Kinbote’s narration of the scene.
PAP is not just the feeling that we have when we act, but has also been
long established as a compatibilist argument for moral responsibility
within determinism. As Peter van Inwagen suggests, when we claim that
an agent could have done otherwise, we are also claiming that “a necessary
 KINBOTE’S HEROISM 149

condition for holding an agent responsible for an act is believing that the
agent could have refrained from performing that act” (189; original empha-
sis). In addition, PAP, as a way of divining moral judgment, is intuitively
compelling because it focuses on the idea of free action as different from
restriction and coercion. Although this focus makes PAP essential in vari-
ous approaches to the free-will problem, the theory is not uncontested.2
The idea of alternate possibilities comes to the fore in Shade’s death scene
because coercion and choice are combined; Kinbote still seems to make
an active choice, even under fire. Because he takes the heroic route, there
is a sense that he could have done otherwise; it would have been easier to
have been coerced, and resistance is a display of agency. His actions strain
against the compelling force of Gradus and are heroic for that reason, so
the account of his behavior that he sets up—and wishes to be judged by—
is intimately related to the intuitive moral force of alternate possibilities.
PAP, then, helps to clarify the positive image of moral agency that Kinbote
attempts to present.
Although this probing assists with a general characterization of Kinbote,
further investigation reveals how Nabokov produces the scene to render
hunting for intentions fruitless. If Kinbote did shield John Shade, his rea-
sons for doing so are unclear, which is part of the problem. The scant
suggestions of purpose behind Kinbote’s heroism direct us not toward his
great love for Shade, but toward his fanaticism about the poem. Indeed, an
odd atmosphere in the scene arises from the disparity between Kinbote’s
love for the poem and his offhand treatment of Shade’s corpse. While “an
inward leap of exultation” accompanies Kinbote’s relieving Shade of “the
large envelope” that holds the finished poem, any short moments of good
feeling toward Shade are clouded in metaphysical triteness:

I felt—I still feel—John’s hand fumbling at mine, seeking my fingertips,

finding them, only to abandon them at once as if passing to me, in a sublime
relay race, the baton of life. (294)

Other moments just convey a peculiar callousness: Kinbote “dialed 11111

and returned with a glass of water to the scene of the carnage,” at a point
when Shade was already dead on the ground. Reflecting on Shade lying
“prone on the ground with a red spot on his white shirt,” Kinbote writes:
“I still hoped he had not been killed” (295). The obviousness of this state-
ment makes it unsettling and leads us to think: what else could Kinbote
hope for?
150 L. PIERCY

If Kinbote did act in the heroic way that he claims, then the motives
that might be readily inferred, such as his love for Shade, are peculiarly
buried by his own narrative of the event. Despite this incongruity, the act
remains possible, though not automatically plausible, because nothing in
the novel makes it impossible. The absence of continuity between char-
acter and action then forces us to read the action as spontaneous, which
in turn raises further problems in the search for intention. Reading inten-
tion into spontaneous actions is especially difficult because they are not
as closely wedded to extended and end-directed intentional structures.
The obvious repercussion of such a reading strategy is that we are led to
structure an interpretation around inferences that are based on conjecture
about characters’ sub-intentional states. This approach seems especially
open to abuse, and calls to mind Michael Wood’s warning that reading
Pale Fire by “tagging what we think is real and using it as an explanation
for the rest” is largely unhelpful (179). Appropriate caution notwithstand-
ing, a turn to phenomenological forms of action theory can at least help to
explore the recesses of agency to which Nabokov’s novel takes us.

As I have suggested, spontaneous action is particularly difficult to

describe in terms of the commonsense link between intention and action.
One way to model spontaneity in a circumstance of choice is to incorpo-
rate forces such as sub-intentional states. These processes are apparent
when, for example, we are able to perform a task that we have performed
over and over again, with minimal attention to it. Richard Holton recog-
nizes that although there are situations in which an agent quite explic-
itly needs to make a choice, there are also numerous situations in which
“agents frequently just know what to do; they do not need to make a
choice” (53). Daniel Dennett makes similar claims, which he extends to
moral judgment. In moral philosophy, he notes, the difficult choices, “the
decisions that ‘might go either way,’ are not the only, or even the most
frequent, sorts of decisions for which we hold people responsible” (135).
In many cases, agents have trained themselves to automatically act in cer-
tain circumstances and not be able to do otherwise. When Kinbote is seen
in this way, his heroism takes on a different aspect: plausibility among
uncertainty. To defend this view, I turn to a brief explication of Daniel
Wegner’s recent work in order to provide a model that brings Kinbote’s
heroism into relief.
 KINBOTE’S HEROISM 151

Wegner, in The Illusion of Conscious Will, contentiously extends the

notion of unconscious or automatic behavior to encompass all forms
of action.3 The idea of volition, he suggests, comes from the persistent
notion of an ideal agent. The ideal provides the basis both for understand-
ing other agents, and for understanding ourselves. We create situations
and run through possibilities for motivation, and when we approach other
agents, we expect them to act according to certain rules of rationality.
When their motives are unclear, we often fill them in by way of justifica-
tion. Similarly, we can be more or less aware of the motives and intentions
behind our own actions, and “[t]his idealization of agency serves as the
basis for going back and filling in such goal and intention knowledge even
when it doesn’t exist” (147). For Wegner, the experience of will does not
control our actions, but “marks our actions for us” (325). Wegner’s pri-
mary claim is that “people experience conscious will quite independently
of any actual causal connection between their thought and their actions”
(64). If conscious will is an inference based on the common temporal
coincidence between thought and action, slippage is introduced which
makes the feeling of action more directly interpretive. When our actions
happen in a different way than how we plan them to happen, we can
rewrite how we feel about the action that we did do. Action authorship
is flexible enough to make action and intention coherent, and we can
convince ourselves that how an action occurs is how we really wanted it to
occur all along. The feeling of will, in this reading, is a way of designating
and claiming authorship over actions, through the post hoc attribution of
choice and volition.
Our ideal of agency seems closely linked to Carroll’s suggestion that
questions naturally arise from indicative representation; when there
is action, we ask why. More than that, fiction, as Currie notes, actually
“allows for vastly more inferential connections between actions, events,
and character to be made than is ever legitimate when we are considering
the actions and suffering of real people” (“Narrative and the Psychology”
63). Following from Currie’s remarks, the notion of ideal agency becomes
especially pertinent as an interpretive strategy because it is central to the
inferential connections that create the sense of a novel. Ideal agency, how-
ever, can manifest in two different ways when applied to fiction. In one
reading, ideal agency is implicit as a condition of the textual world. In
this scenario, which is the one that Currie seems to be referring to, ideal
agency is an organizing feature of the fictional world; inferences need to
be drawn between characters and actions, and actions and consequences,
152 L. PIERCY

in such a way as to create a narrative. In another reading, ideal agency can

be seen as both an implicit structure and a thematic feature of a fictional
work. In this latter regard, there is potential for interplay between the
implicit connections that form the narrative of a work, and the points at
which agency becomes an explicit feature. Wegner’s ideas become vital to
this kind of interpretation because he suggests that appeals to reason are
often misguided and that attention should not be on the volitions them-
selves, but on the feeling of will that attributes actions to volitions. In the
case of Pale Fire, this approach leads the focus away from why Kinbote
acts, to why he frames his action in a particular way.
Before moving on to the implications of Wegner’s ideas, it is impor-
tant to get a sense of what complications a Wegnerian reading might
help to resolve. One of the major interpretive stumbling blocks in Pale
Fire is chronological uncertainty. Nabokov creates an intricate puzzle,
a fiction that plays off the disparities in its telling through two con-
tested narrators. Its design in the form of a poem with commentary,
coupled with Kinbote’s extreme unreliability as an editor, mean that, in
the novel, disrupted temporality is a significant part of the interpretive
play. Shade’s rigorous poem is poised against the correlates in Kinbote’s
fantasy of Zembla, where the chronology of the latter emerges from
chance words of inspiration in the former. Conjoining the commen-
tary and the story of Zembla means that there is an unresolvable slip-
page between the two. Although Zembla, taken at face value, exists in
the storyworld, we are invited to read that land as a fiction imagined
by Kinbote. Fulfilling the second condition also means assuming that
Zembla had a genesis as a story. Its origin could have occurred at any
point prior to, during, or after the writing of “Pale Fire,” generating a
set of possibilities which, if followed, have wide-ranging effects on the
interpretation of intention within the novel. A possible lead appears
from Kinbote’s commentary:

Often, almost nightly, throughout the spring of 1959, I had feared for my
life. Solitude is the playfield of Satan. I cannot describe the depths of my
loneliness and distress. […] I suppose it was then, on those dreadful nights,
that I got used to consulting the windows of my neighbor’s house in the
hope for a gleam of comfort. (96)

This despair is interwoven with the overbearing and slightly malicious atti-
tude to the Shades that characterizes Kinbote’s neighborliness:
 KINBOTE’S HEROISM 153

What would I not have given for the poet’s suffering another heart attack
[…] leading to my being called over to their house, all windows ablaze, in
the middle of the night, in a great warm burst of sympathy, coffee, tele-
phone calls, Zemblan herbal receipts […] and a resurrected Shade weeping
in my arms. (96)

Here, Kinbote’s fantasy seems tied up with his desperate loneliness.

Elsewhere, however, the commentary appears in a mode where fantasy
is integrated with intention and the source loneliness is subsumed into
Kinbote’s obsession with Shade’s task. The acts of spying through Shade’s
windows “in the hope for a gleam of comfort,” in spring, become the
“vigils” that, once Shade begins his poem, prepare Kinbote “to observe
him at his miraculous and midsummer task” by following his movements
around house and garden (88). In “mid-June,” between the spring vig-
ils and summer observations, Kinbote begins to gauge Shade’s ability to
vicariously “recreate in a poem the dazzling Zembla in [his] brain,” and
accordingly “saturate[s]” Shade with his own “vision,” pressing upon the
poet “with a wild drunkard’s generosity” what he was “helpless” to put
into verse himself (80). This brief chronology suggests that the fantasy of
Zembla has been generated by Kinbote’s loneliness, but takes its particular
form from his proximity to Shade.

It is clear, from the confusion that still besets the chronology of Pale
Fire, that this tentative time-frame is not conclusive evidence. Reading
Wegner against Kinbote’s fantasy can produce a more supple interpreta-
tion. Kinbote’s fantasy doesn’t have to have come to fruition in a single
burst of inspiration, but might be better understood as an adaptive narra-
tive. Kinbote presses Zembla on Shade, but it is not necessarily the same
Zembla that he brings to the reader. At the very least, the narrative of
Zembla that we read comprises Gradus, which the version told to Shade
must have lacked.
In this adaptive narrative, Gradus justifies Kinbote’s story and vividly
underpins his descriptions of Zembla. Wood describes Gradus as a “pos-
terior fate,” a “phantom who converts belated knowledge into imputed
design, mere sequence into intricate plot” (199). The role of Gradus is
to fill in the gaps in retrospect, to provide the clear causal line that both
leads to Shade’s death and makes Kinbote a central figure in the scene. To
154 L. PIERCY

use Wegner’s terminology, Kinbote might be read as engaging in a “con-

fabulation of intentions” (170). By retrospectively creating a narrative that
fits the facts at hand, he magnifies his own causal powers and centralizes
his sense of agency. Turning Jack Grey into Jakob Gradus provides a way
for Kinbote to play a role in Shade’s death. Without Kinbote’s arrival
as Shade’s new neighbor, Gradus would have never been in a position
to kill the poet; it is Kinbote’s presence that brings the assassin to New
Wye. Gradus means that Kinbote is causally, though not directly, linked to
Shade’s death. In this line of thinking, the creation of Gradus is an illusion
of influence. This illusion, however, is further destabilized by Kinbote’s
heroism, and the story strains under the evidential pressure of both of
Kinbote’s claims to grandeur.
Gradus appears both as Kinbote’s narrative tool and as a simple foil to
the complexities of his purported intentional states. This dual role occurs
through a slippage between Jack Grey, the “escapee from an asylum,” and
Gradus, the assassin created from the essentials of Grey’s action (299).
Gradus is described in a range of mechanistic guises: a “clockwork man”
whose “inward movements” are produced by “mere springs and coils”
(152), and an “automatic man,” a “half-man who [is] also half mad”
(279). The niggling name-calling just might, as Brian Boyd suggests,
“minimiz[e] Gradus’s humanity, freedom, and dignity” (226), but more
interestingly, Gradus’s automaticity is also used to raise questions about
moral responsibility. Kinbote archly trades off Grey’s madness to present
Gradus as mad with ideology; the two concepts can be linked, he implies,
because they both show an absence of reflective action. This idea recalls a
commonplace assumption in action theory that there are those, including
the mad, who are more causally determined than those who can rationally
assess and act upon their conative states. Harry Frankfurt, among others,
formulates his arguments for willed volition against the distinct category
of wanton madness, where the individual has diminished rational control
over the desires that arise in her. Because these desires appear to be rooted
within a conception of causal determinism, if the individual follows such
desires without actively endorsing them, then she is, to a greater extent
than a willing agent, controlled by mechanistic forces. For Frankfurt, indi-
viduals only meet the “concept of a person” if they are capable of “reflec-
tive self-evaluation” of their own desires (“Freedom” 7). This notion of a
non-agent, acting in synchronization with a deterministic universe, can be
seen in contrast to the expansive concept of intention that characterizes
Wegner’s “ideal agent.”
 KINBOTE’S HEROISM 155

Above Kinbote’s narrative machinations is the real author of Pale Fire,

and ideas of diminished control, at a super-structural level, become cen-
tral to the way in which Nabokov distinguishes between Gradus and Jack
Grey. Jack Grey is not hard to discern beneath Gradus, but doing so,
as Boyd remarks, constitutes a readerly “discovery” that Kinbote “does
not expect” (58). However, the screen that the Gradus narrative provides
allows Nabokov to describe a very particular image of agency through
Jack Grey. Grey’s story appears to be a simple revenge narrative, which
retains its simplicity only because it is told indirectly. This bare plot takes
Grey from his incarceration to the accidental murder of John Shade: Grey
intended to kill Judge Goldsworth, the man who put him away.
As suggested above, insanity and diminished control are intimately
related to moral responsibility. Dennett suggests that there are some ways
of falling short of the ideal of moral agency that mean the agent is judged
differently—as a case of circumstantially “diminished responsibility,” as
suffering from “exculpating pathology,” or as simply “not responsible at
all” (157). Gradus’s ideological madness slides into Grey’s criminal insan-
ity when it becomes clear that there is a disparity between how Kinbote
wants Gradus to be judged in his narrative and how other characters
judge him. Kinbote struggles, for example, to characterize Gradus’s abil-
ity to kill:

Gradus would not have killed anybody had he not derived pleasure not
only from the imagined act […] but also from having been given an impor-
tant, responsible assignment (which happened to require he should kill) by
a group of people sharing his notion of justice, but he would not have taken
that job if in killing he had not found something like that rather disgusting
anticomedoist’s little thrill. (279)

This confused passage strains as it attempts to marry a semblance of

responsibility with the idea of automaticity. Kinbote seems to fall prey
to his own narrative and its conventions. He is attempting to interpose
intention on his fictional character while also claiming that there is none;
he wants Gradus to be morally reprehensible, but realizes that this isn’t
possible if Gradus is simply automatic. Because of this contradiction,
Kinbote inadvertently makes Gradus more complex than he apparently
intends. Even as he tries to construct an entirely mechanistic picture of
the killer, he is unable to entirely simplify Gradus because the idea of
agency keeps slipping through, turning him from an “automatic man” to
156 L. PIERCY

something more complex that “offend[s] the senses” with his crassness
(279). Kinbote claims that “no amount of motive hunting and ratio-
nal inquiry can ever really explain” why Gradus kills, but this is also an
admission that inventing the killer is counterintuitive work in itself (279;
original emphasis).
Unlike Kinbote’s fabulations about Gradus, the presentation of Grey’s
narrative and his relative moral responsibility is left to be pieced together
through the killer’s interactions with other characters. When Shade dies,
that outcome seems to fulfill Grey’s desired revenge. The suggestion of
fulfillment, which becomes a trope of behavioral simplicity, is confirmed
by how other characters act in the scene. The gardener disarms Grey by
hitting him with a shovel, but afterwards smokes with him and shares a
glass of water. Even the policeman is benign: “Come along, Jack, we’ll
put something on that head of yours” (295). From his narrativizing posi-
tion, Kinbote even feels affronted by Grey’s new harmlessness: “either
because he was in pain, or because he had decided to play a new role,
[Grey] ignored me as completely as if I were a stone king on a stone
charger” (295).
These details build a picture of Grey as unthreatening. His closed
revenge narrative is simple and end-directed. The telling of Grey’s story,
through inference, depicts him in simplistic terms because it bypasses
what Carroll calls the “natural thought process” of “question forma-
tion,” in which readers probe the motivational structures that underpin
characters (8). Grey is set up as a solution to the problem of Kinbote’s
narrative, and, because of this role, escapes the kind of direct question-
ing that Kinbote’s narrative invites. Nabokov actively directs our atten-
tion away from questioning Grey. To be properly conveyed as a madman,
he can only emerge as an antithesis to Kinbote’s story, and in Grey’s
simplicity, Nabokov creates a kind of non-agent to build up a picture
of varied action. In this reading, one of Grey’s main functions in the
narrative is to act as a foil to Kinbote’s ideal agent complex, an effect
that is brought about by the structural function of mutually supportive
characterization.
Through these polarized characters, Nabokov provokes detailed atten-
tion to the role of agency in Pale Fire. Focus on agency is entwined with
the novel’s stylistics, because Kinbote’s eruptive heroism only becomes
recognizably important when the contradictions of Shade’s death scene are
extricated from the bombast of the narrative. Consideration of Kinbote’s
 KINBOTE’S HEROISM 157

heroism leads, in turn, to a complex moral assessment, where judgment

occurs without the models of action and coherence that would ordinar-
ily facilitate it. The use of action theory clarifies the possibilities that are
closed by the narrative, and leaves readers with the provocative demand
to judge Kinbote’s heroism as spontaneous. However, this assessment is
not an interpretive resolve, but a reading that redirects interpretation away
from clear intention-based assumptions and toward inconclusive sub-
intentional inferences. Such ambiguity leads, peculiarly, to the conclusion
that Kinbote’s narrative—in which he seems to shift reality to propose a
causal network of events of which he is the center—might be driven by
the sub-intentional desire for effective agency. This strategy of involution
and obfuscation, then, allows Nabokov to lead the reader of Pale Fire away
from a simple intention-based interpretation, and into the more complex
world of agency.

NOTES
1. Storyworlds are “mental models of who did what to and with whom, when,
where, why, and in what fashion,” in an imagined environment that inter-
preters construct in order to make sense of a narrative (Herman,
“Storyworld” 570).
2. The validity of PAP is called into question through counterexample in
Frankfurt, “Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility.”
3. See Wegner, The Illusion of Conscious Will. Wegner’s theory is contentious
and several arguments have been mounted against it. For the purposes of
this chapter, it is not necessary to assess his full argument, but simply to use
some of his observations to bring out a number of valuable features regard-
ing Kinbote’s characterization. For one particularly thorough criticism of
Wegner and the anti-intentionalism movement, see Mele.

WORKS CITED
Boyd, Brian. Nabokov’s Pale Fire: The Magic of Artistic Discovery. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1999.
Carroll, Noël. “Narrative Closure.” Philosophical Studies 135 (2007):1-15.
Currie, Gregory. “Narrative and the Psychology of Character.” Journal of Aesthetics
and Art Criticism 67.1 (2009): 61-71.
———. “Narrative Representation of Causes.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art
Criticism 64.3 (2006): 309-316.
Dennett, Daniel. Elbow Room. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984.
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Doležel, Lubomír. Heterocosmica: Fiction and Possible Worlds. London: Johns

Hopkins University Press, 1998.
Frankfurt, Harry. “Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility.” Journal of
Philosophy 66.23 (1969): 829-839.
———. “Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person.” Journal of Philosophy
68.1 (1971): 5-20.
Herman, David. Story Logic. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004.
———. “Storyworld.” Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory. Ed. David
Herman, Manfred Jahn, and Marie-Laure Ryan. New York: Routledge, 2005.
569-570.
Holton, Richard. Willing, Wanting, Waiting. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2009.
James, William. The Will to Believe. New York: Dover, 1956.
Livingston, Paisley. Literature and Rationality: Ideas of Agency in Theory and
Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
McHale, Brian. Postmodernist Fiction. London: Methuen, 1987.
Mele, Alfred R. Effective Intentions: The Power of Conscious Will. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2009.
Nabokov, Vladimir. Pale Fire. 1962. New York: Vintage, 1989.
Nagel, Thomas. The View from Nowhere. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986.
van Dijk, Teun A. “Philosophy of Action and Theory of Narrative.” Poetics 5
(1976): 287-338.
van Inwagen, Peter. “The Incompatibility of Free Will and Determinism.”
Philosophical Studies 27 (1975): 185-199.
Wegner, Daniel. The Illusion of Conscious Will. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002.
Wood, Michael. The Magician’s Doubts: Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction. Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994.
 PART IV

The Ethics of Representation

 CHAPTER 10

Whether Judgments, Sentences, and

Executions Satisfy the Moral Sense
in Nabokov

Susan Elizabeth Sweeney

In his introduction to Bend Sinister, written in 1963 for the Time-Life

Reading Program, Nabokov asks whether that novel—which features
many scenes of bullying, depravity, suffering, and torture—ultimately
offers “any judgment on my part carried out, any sentence pronounced,
any satisfaction given to the moral sense?” (xiv). This essay applies the
same question to his other works. I find that although Nabokov’s fiction
often invokes the necessity of judging, sentencing, and punishing charac-
ters, in almost every case he leaves the determination of such matters up
to the morality of individual readers. More broadly, and more heretically,
I argue that he not only knew his readers would have “the last word,” as
Kinbote puts it in Pale Fire (29), but even designed his narratives to pre-
pare them for this responsibility.

RHETORICALLY SPEAKING
Nabokov’s question—whether there is any judgment carried out, any
sentence pronounced, or any moral satisfaction given in Bend Sinister—
directly addresses the ethics of reading fiction. It focuses, in particular, on

S.E. Sweeney ()

Department of English, College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, Massachusetts, USA

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 161

M. Rodgers, S.E. Sweeney (eds.), Nabokov and the Question
of Morality, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-59221-7_10
162 S.E. SWEENEY

readers’ and authors’ desire to see wrongdoing punished and suffering

compensated within a work of imaginative literature. It also acknowledges
the difficulty (in fiction or outside it) of establishing another person’s guilt
or innocence, deciding on an appropriate punishment for someone else’s
crime, and ensuring that such determinations meet a particular conception
of justice. The question’s three parallel clauses, in fact, seem to echo the
concluding stages of a criminal trial: first, a jury announces the verdict,
or judgment; next, if the defendant is found guilty, a judge pronounces
sentence; and finally, various individuals comment, often upon the court-
house steps before a phalanx of microphones, about the fairness of both
verdict and sentence.
And yet, because Nabokov inquires first whether “any judgment” has
been “carried out,” and only then whether “any sentence” has been “pro-
nounced”—not unlike the Queen of Hearts’ insistence, in Alice’s Adventures
in Wonderland, on “sentence first, verdict afterwards” (Dodgson 161)—
his question also suggests the possible disruption of this sequence. After all,
no sentence should be carried out against a defendant before it has been
duly announced in court, at least according to widely accepted notions of
human rights.1 Indeed, justice demands a distinction between the sentence
and its execution, which not only must be administered by someone other
than judge or jury, but also, depending upon the circumstances, may never
even be performed (as in most capital cases in the USA). Nabokov’s nov-
els offer many examples of this juridical sequence breaking down, from
Invitation to a Beheading—which begins as Cincinnatus’s death sentence
is declared, and ends as he leaves the chopping block, ostensibly still in
one piece—to Lolita, where Humbert, presiding over a kangaroo court
at Pavor Manor, has composed Quilty’s death sentence in advance and
begins enacting it before the trial is over. Nabokov depicts such episodes
as largely rhetorical, and not only because he presents imaginary characters
determining culpability and assigning retribution in imaginary cases. Even
within the fictional world, these scenes appear as specious as the Knave
of Hearts’ trial in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.2 Not only do they
emphasize verbal discourse in odd ways—for example, Cincinnatus’s sen-
tence is whispered to him, according to law, while Quilty’s takes the form
of a poem—but they also command punishments that are illegitimate,
impossible to carry out, or destined never to take place. Any pronounce-
ment of a criminal sentence in Nabokov’s novels seems to be an unsuccess-
ful or, in J. L. Austin’s terms, “infelicitous” utterance.3
How does such a dubious notion of justice apply to Bend Sinister, in par-
ticular? In his introduction, Nabokov answers his own rhetorical question
 JUDGMENTS, SENTENCES, AND EXECUTIONS 163

about the novel’s morality by assuring readers “that crime is punished at

the end of the book when […] the dummies are at last in quite dreadful
pain and pretty Mariette gently bleeds, staked and torn by the lust of 40
soldiers” (xiv). This statement isn’t entirely true, however. To begin with,
“quite dreadful pain” is not the same thing as punishment—which must
be imposed by a duly constituted civil authority, under the auspices of “a
legal system against which the offense is committed” (Hart 5). Besides,
Nabokov is essentially pronouncing both verdict and sentence before any
trial has occurred—or, at least, before his readers have read Bend Sinister.4
More important, he misrepresents the novel’s ending. Although the final
chapter does mention various forms of retribution, they all take place off-
stage, might occur in the future, or exist only as possibilities for Krug to
avenge his son’s murder. The narrator presents Mariette’s gang rape, for
example, indirectly and in retrospect: she lies “in a rigid faint, bleeding
gently,” as “forty satisfied soldiers in the neighboring guardhouse com-
pared carnal notes” (BS 228, 230).5 Likewise, some of Mariette’s fellow
culprits will “be shot later”; others, such as a telephone operator who was
“disgracefully manhandled” before being removed on a stretcher, seem to
have already been tortured (217); and still others are dispatched so invis-
ibly that their deaths appear only in an ellipsis, as when several soldiers
busy themselves “trying and then burying the rest of the staff” (225).6
Evoking retribution in this covert fashion underscores the narrator’s
barely contained rage, just as the oblique depiction of David’s death (in
a black-and-white filmstrip with comic subtitles, which breaks off before
his dismemberment begins) adds to its horror. By merely alluding to such
scenes in Bend Sinister, Nabokov forces readers to imagine them. Unlike
David’s murder, however—which has clearly occurred, even if not shown
directly—the punishment of those individuals responsible for his death
remains largely hypothetical, given the various sentences that are pro-
posed, in increasingly desperate fashion, and with less and less likelihood
of being carried out, by bureaucrats of rapidly waning authority. As soon
as officials realize Krug’s son is missing, for example, they vow “that those
who made this mistake will be dearly punished” (216); after a few hours
have passed, they declare “that a new torture room” is “being prepared
to receive those who had blundered” (217); later, they promise Krug that
“the six main culprits will be executed by an inexperienced headman in
[his] presence” (228); and finally, they propose “a very special offer”—the
chance to “slaughter the culprits” himself (229).
Even if such gruesome sentences were enacted in the novel, it is doubt-
ful that they would satisfy anyone’s “moral sense” (Introduction xiv).
164 S.E. SWEENEY

Certainly, they mean little to Krug, who rejects them, fails to comprehend
them, and is eventually driven mad by his author in order to spare him
further pain. In Bend Sinister, morality seems to be rhetorical in more
ways than one: unspeakable crimes, illegitimate sentences, specious pun-
ishments, and only the most tenuous sense of justice.

CRIMES AND PUNISHMENTS
Nabokov claims, nevertheless, that “crime is punished” (Introduction
xiv). Indeed, his fiction emphasizes both wrongdoing and retribution
to a surprising degree. Many of his works examine criminal behavior—
especially adultery, kidnapping, molestation, rape, torture, blackmail, and
murder—as well as the institutions responsible for discovering, assessing,
or punishing it. As Zoran Kuzmanovich, among others, has pointed out,
Nabokov often focuses on children’s suffering, especially at the hands of
criminal adults. David Lodge, noting the astounding number of plot inci-
dents in Nabokov’s fiction involving “crimes, misdemeanors, detection,
arraignment, and judicial punishment,” speculates that two popular genres
devoted to such subjects—the suspense thriller and the classic detective
story—“provided the narrative model for the majority of Nabokov’s nov-
els” (136). Some early works like King, Queen, Knave and Laughter in
the Dark qualify as crime fiction. Other novels, especially The Eye, Despair,
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Lolita, and Pale Fire, are “metaphysical
detective stories” that subvert the conventions of the detective genre.7
Most of Nabokov’s novels, from Glory to Ada, employ the disguises,
aliases, secret messages, escapes, and pursuits associated with espionage
fiction. Many of them—including The Eye, Despair, Lolita, Pale Fire, and
Ada—are also first-person confessions in which a narrator admits his guilt.
No matter whether they pass as crime fictions, detective stories, spy
stories, or confessions, Nabokov’s novels frequently refer to the inves-
tigation, judgment, and punishment of wrongdoing, in passages rang-
ing from dystopian absurdity—as in Cincinnatus’s trial for the crime of
“gnostical turpitude,” or “opacity” and “impenetrability,” in Invitation
to a Beheading (62)—to the accounts of actual criminal codes and cases
in Lolita. To begin with, his novels generally emphasize “the research
theme,” as the narrator of The Real Life of Sebastian Knight calls it
(104). Nabokov’s protagonists often fancy themselves as amateur detec-
tives. Policemen appear in his novels, too, although they tend to be
anonymous and ineffectual. Private investigators are less common, but
 JUDGMENTS, SENTENCES, AND EXECUTIONS 165

they are more fully developed as characters: consider the remarkably

helpful Mr. Silbermann, in Sebastian Knight, and the imbecilic “ex-
pugilist” whom Humbert hires to track down names and addresses in
Lolita (253).
In these fictions, Nabokov not only describes the investigation of
crime—as crime and detective novelists generally do—but also considers
its treatment within the legal system. This focus is understandable, given
that his father, Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov, was a criminologist, a
member of the Duma (the supreme legislative council in imperial Russia),
a legal expert on capital punishment, a professor at the Imperial School of
Jurisprudence, and the minister of justice for the Crimean regional gov-
ernment after the October Revolution.8 Accordingly, Nabokov features
at least two criminal defense lawyers among the many attorneys in his
novels: foolish Roman Vissarianovich, in Invitation to a Beheading, and
staid Clarence Choate Clark, one of three legal counselors in Lolita.9 He
includes several judges as well, notably the hoary old justice in Invitation
and the coldly obsessive Judge Goldsworth in Pale Fire. Nabokov depicts
farcical criminal trials, too—especially in Invitation to a Beheading and
Lolita—that raise provocative questions about legal ethics. It is not sur-
prising that scholars in the field of law and literature have recently begun
to explore these aspects of his fiction.10
Nabokov also represents the penal system, an institution which vir-
tually never appears in the suspense thrillers and detective stories he
parodies. Here, too, Nabokov may have been influenced by his father’s
example.11 Indeed, while the precise nature of his protagonists’ crimes
may be indeterminate, the expected punishment for those same crimes
seems, if anything, over-determined. Nabokov’s novels dwell upon the
death penalty, in particular. In his critical biography, Brian Boyd identifies
the repudiation of capital punishment, and “the ultimate encroachment
on individuality” it implies (VNRY 18), as a major theme in Nabokov’s
work—reflecting both his grandfather’s efforts to minimize the death pen-
alty’s barbarity, as Russia’s minister of justice, and his father’s short-lived
success in abolishing it altogether, as a criminologist and a member of
the Duma (VNRY 34–36). Nabokov’s fiction invokes not only executions
and executioners in general, but also specific procedures—including the
noose, the chopping block, the stake, the firing squad, the guillotine, the
gas chamber, and the electric chair—as well as particular death-penalty
traditions such as the final cigarette, the ultimate request, or the last words
uttered by a condemned prisoner.12
166 S.E. SWEENEY

In some cases, Nabokov alludes to capital punishment only obliquely,

in disturbing images and analogies. In The Real Life of Sebastian Knight,
for example, Sebastian keeps in his study “an enlarged snapshot of a
Chinese […] in the act of being vigorously beheaded” (37). The prison
waiting room in Bend Sinister features equally tasteless décor: a “[c]ute
little model of guillotine (with stiff top-hatted doll in attendance) under
glass bell on mantelpiece” (214). In other instances, such allusions to the
death penalty reveal the first-person narrator’s morbid imagination. In
Lolita, Humbert describes one neighbor as “looking like a kind of assis-
tant executioner” and speculates that another might well be “a retired exe-
cutioner” (102, 188). He calls each of his plans for killing someone whom
he blames for Dolores’s disappearance “the execution” (252, 293)—or,
in her husband’s case, the “violent death” that will serve as “the carrying
out of the sentence” (267). Humbert even compares his urge to revisit the
Enchanted Hunters Hotel, where he first raped Dolores, to “that swoon-
ing curiosity which impels one to examine with a magnifying glass bleak
little figures—still life practically, and everybody about to throw up—at an
early morning execution” (262).
Nabokov’s references to the death penalty often suggest, in fact, a
horrible intimacy among the executioner, the condemned, and the spec-
tators. Consider M’sieur Pierre, the affable headsman in Invitation to
a Beheading, who pretends to befriend the man he is about to kill, or
Judge Goldsworth, in Pale Fire, who keeps an album into which he has
“lovingly pasted the life histories and pictures of people he had sent
to prison or condemned to death” (83). In Nabokov’s novels, execu-
tion, like murder—as in Hermann’s tenderness toward his victim in
Despair, or the “game” played with a “little person” in Bend Sinister
(219)—grotesquely imitates the very forms of benign social interaction
it subverts. The disturbing nature of such relationships extends to those
who witness the killing, which Nabokov usually presents as a theatrical
or cinematic spectacle. Lodge remarks that “it is difficult to think of
a modern literary novelist whose works end more often with a death,
usually a violent one” (147). It’s even harder to name any other writer
who offers at least two different protagonists the chance to see someone
being executed. In Bend Sinister, after all, the Ministry of Justice invites
Krug to view the beheading of his son’s killers, and in Lolita, Quilty
tries to conciliate Humbert with a similar opportunity: “I can arrange
for you to attend executions, not everybody knows that the chair is
painted yellow—” (302).
 JUDGMENTS, SENTENCES, AND EXECUTIONS 167

And yet, despite these pervasive allusions to capital crimes, criminal

trials, death sentences, and executions, Nabokov never presents an actual
or legitimate scene of judgment, sentencing, or punishment in his fiction.
Instead, such procedures are forestalled and, in effect, trumped by his
novels’ narrative designs, particularly their recursive, self-reflexive, unre-
solved endings. Bend Sinister again offers a case in point. Although the
author’s intervention at the end of the novel may alleviate Krug’s suffer-
ing, it eliminates any possibility of addressing that suffering within the
fictional world. Krug’s death by deus ex machina is not unusual. Nabokov
concludes most of his novels by whisking the protagonists offstage before
they can be appropriately punished for their crimes or adequately com-
pensated for their losses—even though the preceding narratives not only
acknowledge characters’ guilt and suffering, but also describe the very
process that is intended to right such wrongs.

A SUMMONS TO JURY DUTY

Why does Nabokov emphasize the need to address wrongdoing, and
invoke various procedures for judging, sentencing, or punishing his char-
acters, yet fail to show those actions being legitimately carried out?
Richard Rorty suggests that Nabokov was so sensitive to suffering,
and so afraid of inflicting pain himself, that he could neither tolerate its
existence nor accept a world where it occurs. Rorty’s theory may explain
why most of Nabokov’s protagonists—even ignoble ones, like Hermann
in Despair—dream of escaping to a happier place. It may also explain why
many of them seem to fulfill that dream in the novel’s final pages, whether
by returning to Russia in Glory, or walking out of a bad play in Invitation
to a Beheading, or becoming a moth clinging to the author’s window in
Bend Sinister, or driving toward the horizon in Pnin, or dying, “as it were,
into the finished book,” in Ada (587), or becoming one of the ghosts nar-
rating the story in Transparent Things. Disappearing into the book itself,
in one way or another, is the respite most often granted to Nabokov’s
protagonists. In that sense, his novels do offer “aesthetic bliss” as an ulti-
mate resolution of the crimes they describe (“On a Book” 314).
But if Nabokov seeks to mitigate characters’ suffering in this way—by
dissolving fictional worlds where suffering occurs, and gesturing toward
“states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the
norm” (“On a Book” 315)—that still doesn’t explain his novels’ insis-
tence on the necessity of adjudicating and punishing crime. Indeed, the
168 S.E. SWEENEY

need for some form of redress becomes even more acute when a novel
depicts both judicial and penal systems as either ineffectual or illegiti-
mate, or when that same novel recounts characters’ desperate efforts to
judge, sentence, punish, or redeem themselves. Such stratagems may even
increase readers’ expectations of an ending in which some characters must
finally atone for their wrongdoing, while other characters’ suffering must
be acknowledged at last.
And yet this kind of resolution—which seems to be anticipated by the
characters, demanded by the plot, and suggested by the conventions of the
narrative genres Nabokov adapts—never actually occurs within the text.13
In Laughter in the Dark, for example, Albinus’s suffering actually increases
as the novel concludes, even as Margot and Axel Rex, who have cuck-
olded, robbed, tormented, and killed him, escape unharmed. In this case,
as Lodge points out, Nabokov “refus[es] to apportion punishment justly”
in the book’s dénouement (137). Other novels end abruptly, before any
compensation or retribution could possibly take place. In Invitation to a
Beheading, Cincinnatus finds the physical world disintegrating as he walks
away from his imminent execution. In Despair, Hermann is surrounded
by police but has not yet been arrested.14 In Lolita, Humbert dies not only
before he has been judged, sentenced, or punished, but also before his trial
even begins. In Pale Fire, the identity of John Shade’s killer is obscured by
Kinbote’s commentary. Although each plot emphasizes crime and detec-
tion, then, the novel ends before the ostensible criminal—who may or
may not be guilty—has been clearly identified (in Pale Fire), arrested (in
Despair), tried (in Lolita), or executed (in Invitation).
In some cases, the text is narrated by the criminal himself, making it
more difficult, and yet even more necessary, to assess his culpability and
remorse. As such confessions draw to a close, the narrators seem com-
pelled to defend their criminal behavior to themselves as well as their read-
ers. They find their own acts inexplicable, however. After all, as Kinbote
remarks of Shade’s assassin in Pale Fire, “no amount of motive hunting
and rational inquiry can ever really explain how and why anybody is capa-
ble of destroying a fellow creature” (279).
First-person narrators like Hermann and Humbert struggle to under-
stand, then, exactly why their actions were wrong and why awareness of
their guilt—which they avoid, deny, or suppress as much as possible—is
so painful. Toward the end of their confessions, they even try to judge
their own behavior as if they were someone else, but end up minimizing,
aestheticizing, or rationalizing their crimes once more.15 In Despair, for
 JUDGMENTS, SENTENCES, AND EXECUTIONS 169

example, Hermann laboriously tries to pinpoint the difference between

killing an ape and murdering a human being, claiming that the distinction
is ambiguous. Later, beset by guilt and fear, he rereads his confession in a
vain attempt to reassure himself about what he has done. Hermann tries to
judge not only his own actions, but also his written account of them—as if
the murder he committed might somehow be justified by the artistry with
which his manuscript represents it.
In Lolita, Humbert also “review[s] his case”—which now includes evi-
dence of Dolores’s suffering he had suppressed earlier—and admits his
guilt (282). Despite his earlier exhortations to imaginary jurors, Humbert
now assumes that an actual jury will find him guilty but that the judge
will spare his life. He even announces, on the novel’s penultimate page,
what verdict and sentence he considers appropriate: “Had I come before
myself, I would have given Humbert at least thirty-five years for rape,
and dismissed the rest of the charges” (308). This pronouncement is
another instance of rhetorical justice: it’s impossible to come before one-
self, let alone to exonerate, convict, sentence, or punish oneself. Even so,
Humbert’s statement, which I discuss elsewhere in terms of cognitive lin-
guistics,16 reinforces the need for someone to render a decision about his
case. After all, it indicates how he would plead, implies that jurors would
convict him, and speculates about which form of punishment might be
most appropriate—even as it reminds readers that he will never actually be
judged, sentenced, punished, or even tried.
Nabokov constructs his novels, then, so that the necessity of assessing
and addressing wrongdoing grows more acute as the ending approaches.
He emphasizes the suffering of individual characters, especially those who
are defenseless, abandoned, or misunderstood; he presents the judicial and
penal systems within his fictional worlds as either illegitimate or irrelevant;
he describes criminals’ misguided efforts to settle their own cases; and he
often depicts his protagonists as dying before justice can be determined,
thus poignantly underscoring the need to judge, convict, acquit, sentence,
punish, rehabilitate, avenge, or redeem them. Because Nabokov’s novels
deliberately withhold such a resolution, however—even after anticipat-
ing, rehearsing, predicting, and demanding it—his readers must provide it
instead. They must decide for themselves what crime has occurred, who is
at fault, whether mitigating circumstances exist, if rehabilitation is possible,
how much compensation is required, and what exact degree of forgiveness
or condemnation is called for. Such scenes of judgment, sentencing, and
punishment are also rhetorical, of course—not because they are absurd or
170 S.E. SWEENEY

illegitimate, but because they occur only in the mind of Nabokov’s reader
and not in the text itself.
One of Nabokov’s earliest works of fiction, a very brief story titled
“Razor” that appeared in 1926, a month before his first novel was pub-
lished (Stories 645n), anticipates all the ways in which his longer narra-
tives evoke such themes: suffering; cruelty; vigilante justice and other
illegitimate judicial or penal procedures; unreliable confessions; allusions
to capital punishment, especially decapitation, that emphasize a gruesome
intimacy between executioner and victim; and ambiguous endings that
ask readers to decide for themselves how justice should be served.17 In
this story, a Russian barber in Berlin named Ivanov finds himself, razor
in hand, about to shave a man who once brutally interrogated him. After
identifying himself and warning that the customer is now at his mercy,
Ivanov begins to shave the man while recounting a tale. (Apart from a
mumbled request for a shave, the other man remains silent throughout.)
Nabokov brilliantly withholds the substance of Ivanov’s account from the
text of “Razor,” so that readers must imagine it for themselves; presum-
ably, however, it concerns the torture that Ivanov suffered, and barely sur-
vived, at the other’s hands. As the narrator explains, “the tale he told must
have been terrifying indeed, because from time to time his hand would
stop, and he would stoop very close to the gentleman sitting like a corpse
under the shroudlike sheet” (181).
Once Ivanov finishes his tale, he asks the other man: “Tell me, what
do you think would be a suitable atonement for all that? […] Those sen-
tenced to death are shaved too. And now I am shaving you. Do you realize
what is going to happen next?” (181). These are rhetorical questions, of
course. The first prompts readers to consider what form of “atonement”
might be “suitable,” even if the antecedent for the vague phrase “for all
that,” referring to the terrible experience in the past that demands such
recompense, exists only in readers’ imaginings of whatever it is Ivanov
may have endured. The second question invites readers to speculate, more
literally, about some hypothetical action in the future—something that “is
going to happen,” presumably a violent act—which might provide such
atonement.
As in Nabokov’s subsequent novels, however, this anticipated punish-
ment also turns out to be rhetorical, in more ways than one. After com-
pleting the shave, Ivanov says, “That will do for you. […] I am satisfied.
You may leave” (182). The other man, his eyes tightly shut, clutching his
briefcase “with an outstretched petrified hand,” exits the barbershop “like
 JUDGMENTS, SENTENCES, AND EXECUTIONS 171

an automaton through the door that Ivanov was holding open” (182).
For Ivanov, apparently, this performance—narrating his suffering to the
other and forcing him to imagine an appropriate punishment for it—has
been atonement enough. Meanwhile, Nabokov’s readers, finding them-
selves abruptly ushered out of the story as well, are left to ponder the
nature of whatever plot development they had imagined would “happen
next,” and exactly what kind of satisfaction it might have given them.
In his later novels, Nabokov carefully prepares readers to take on such
responsibility. He addresses them more explicitly than he did in this early
story, and especially in the final pages of each work, as peers of the pro-
tagonist who will make the ultimate determination about his case: that is,
as people whom the protagonist finds difficult to convince (in The Eye),
as beings who are somehow akin to him (in Invitation to a Beheading),
as fellow “citizens” who might assist his escape (in Despair), or as “ladies
and gentlemen of the jury” who might be persuaded to either exonerate
or condemn him (in Lolita). Consider the example of Lolita, in particular.
As Matthew Laufer explains, Nabokov manages to construct a compos-
ite reader for this novel by invoking various members of an imaginary
jury, whose hypothetical responses to Humbert’s case—and to the text
itself—are developed in elaborate detail and carefully distinguished from
one another. Nabokov may have designed Lolita, in other words, so that
his readers can conceivably arrive at quite different but equally justified
conclusions with regard to Humbert’s culpability, incorrigibility, rehabili-
tation, or redemption.18
In Lolita, as in Nabokov’s other novels, the readers’ final determina-
tion necessarily trumps that of civil authorities represented in the text. By
concluding his novels before any verdict or sentence has been announced,
in some instances, or before any punishment has been administered, in
others, Nabokov even allows his readers’ findings to overrule his own
authority as author. Bend Sinister, which Nabokov enters in propria per-
sona to end Krug’s nightmare, may seem to violate this rule, but even
here, “the immortality” that the author “confer[s] on the poor fellow”
actually occurs within the “written and rewritten pages” of an unfin-
ished manuscript (240), which Nabokov’s readers are now complet-
ing—in more ways than one—as they read its final words. The foreword
to Despair, which metes out different degrees of condemnation to two
other protagonists, may seem to violate the rule as well: “There is a green
lane in Paradise where Humbert is permitted to wander at dusk once a
year, but Hell shall never parole Hermann” (xiii). Certainly, Nabokov
172 S.E. SWEENEY

pronounces both judgment and sentence here—not only conclusively (in

more than one sense), and in a manner indicating godlike power over
the fictional worlds he has created, but also with a clarity that carefully
distinguishes between Humbert’s sinfulness and Hermann’s. Notice,
however, that Nabokov’s pronouncement occurs outside the two novels,
each of which insists, within the text, upon preserving its protagonist’s
indeterminate status. Although Nabokov may vividly assess his charac-
ters in forewords, interviews, and other paratexts—as when he calls Ada
Veen “bitchy and lewd” (SO 146)—the novels themselves are carefully
constructed to prompt readers to draw their own conclusions. Besides, in
this instance, as I argue elsewhere, Nabokov’s comparison of Humbert’s
and Hermann’s moral worth resulted from his simultaneous rereading of
both texts—he was translating Lolita into Russian at the same time that
he was revising the English translation of Despair—and thus reflects his
own experience as a reader, a position that allows him to claim in this
foreword the authority of the consumer, interpreter, or critic as well as
that of the author.19
Recently, critics have begun to explore Nabokov’s penchant for tenta-
tive structures and provisional trajectories that are meant to be completed
by those who follow him.20 In this sense, each unresolved death-penalty
case in Nabokov’s novels offers his readers, too, an “invitation to a behead-
ing”—but leaves it up to them whether to accept that invitation, or refuse
it, or somehow intervene in order to find a more satisfactory solution.

THE ACT OF FINDING

Despite Nabokov’s frequently stated strong opinions, then, he designed
the endings of his novels so that readers must resolve for themselves the
thorny questions about suffering, culpability, punishment, and redemp-
tion raised by the preceding narrative, deciding in each case what outcome
might be appropriate. Such a narrative design assumes that apprehending
a literary work involves “the mind in the act of finding/ what will suffice”
for each reader, as Wallace Stevens says in “Of Modern Poetry” (ll. 1–2)—
in matters of ethics as well as aesthetics.
The way that Nabokov constructs his rhetorical question about Bend
Sinister’s morality, quoted at the beginning of this essay, confirms the per-
sonal nature of such judgment. Determining whether “any satisfaction
is given to the moral sense” by a novel must inevitably be a subjective
matter (Introduction xiv). By “moral sense,” Nabokov doesn’t mean an
 JUDGMENTS, SENTENCES, AND EXECUTIONS 173

absolute principle, like justice or virtue, but instead a perception of moral-

ity that might differ from one person to another, as a sense of humor does.
According to moral sense theory—a form of empiricist ethical intuition-
ism proposed by Enlightenment philosophers such as Francis Hutcheson,
David Hume, Adam Smith, and John Reid—one’s awareness of moral-
ity derives from individual sensations, experiences, emotions, and insights
(Routledge 588). Nabokov’s affinity for this moral philosophy is not sur-
prising, given his interest in acute perceptions, his fascination with synaes-
thesia and other neurological oddities, his characterization of both Krug
(in Bend Sinister) and Van (in Ada) as philosophers who imagine abstract
concepts like time in sensory terms, his focus on phenomenology as well
as embodied consciousness, and his speculation about such mysteries as
whether or not “the Senses Make Sense?” (Lo 3).
Nabokov invokes “the moral sense” in Lolita, too, when Humbert
quotes two lines from “an old poet” that explicitly compare this kind of
awareness to aesthetic appreciation:

The moral sense in mortals is the duty

We have to pay on mortal sense of beauty. (283)

This imaginary quotation suggests that making difficult decisions about

morality (and perhaps admitting one’s responsibility for another’s suffer-
ing, as Humbert and some of Nabokov’s other protagonists are eventu-
ally able to do) is the inevitable result of our short-lived experiences of
pleasure and aesthetic bliss.21 Describing the moral sense as “the duty/
We have to pay” seems like a strange metaphor. And yet, in the context of
satisfying the moral sense, Nabokov’s analogy recalls the original and pri-
mary meaning of satisfaction—literally, payment of a debt in full—which,
according to the Oxford English Dictionary, eventually came to be associ-
ated with the figurative rendering of social, legal, ecclesiastical, theologi-
cal, or ethical obligations.
Nabokov’s assumption, in the introduction to Bend Sinister, that the
moral sense is something that can be satisfied (or rather, that can be
“given” “any satisfaction,” to reiterate the full extent of his passive con-
struction) further emphasizes its subjective nature. Indeed, the connec-
tions between the secondary meaning of satisfaction—the gratification
of a need or desire—and feelings of pleasure, fulfillment, or content-
ment seem to evoke once more, if only indirectly, a private experience
of bliss (OED). Whether or not one finds something satisfying, after all,
174 S.E. SWEENEY

is a highly personal, even idiosyncratic affair. That Nabokov also quali-

fies this hypothetical appraisal of his novel’s morality with the adjec-
tive “any”—implying that there are various degrees, forms, or levels of
“satisfaction” available—makes it seem even more a matter of taste, as if
what entirely suffices for one individual might not be nearly enough for
another. As Ivanov says of the retribution he seeks in “Razor,” “That
will do [...] I am satisfied” (182).
Given such emphasis on subjectivity, it is not surprising that Nabokov’s
remarks on the morality of Bend Sinister refer explicitly to his own moral
sense. That is, they reflect not only his notions of right and wrong—a
“judgment on my part,” he says—but also his perceptions as to whether
this judgment has been appropriately “carried out” and whether he per-
sonally finds such a resolution sufficient (iv). Here, as in other forewords,
afterwords, annotations, and interviews, he presents himself as a judge of
his own work. Nabokov’s question about Bend Sinister thus dramatizes
the act of rereading, in 1963, a novel he had written almost twenty years
earlier—as if he is wondering aloud whether his younger self had solved
the plot’s ethical conundrums in a manner that he will still find satisfying.
And yet his rhetorical question is also directed, of course, to an audience.
The introduction to Bend Sinister may even represent the first time that
Nabokov queried the morality of one of his novels in an accompany-
ing preface.22 Since he is neither defending it against possible obscenity
charges (as in “On a Book Entitled Lolita”) nor explaining its historical
or political background for American readers (as in his forewords to Glory
and The Gift), asking about its morality suggests that he considers this
issue crucial to understanding the text. Indeed, his very formulation of
the question reveals his awareness of, interest in, and ultimate deferral to
the moral sense of those individual readers who are about to peruse Bend
Sinister.
Several years after writing this introduction, in a 1971 interview,
Nabokov speculated that someday “a reappraiser” might find “that far from
having been a frivolous firebird,” he had actually been “a rigid moralist
kicking sin, cuffing stupidity, ridiculing the vulgar and cruel” (SO 193).23
Since then, many critics have indeed debated whether he is an aesthete or
an ethicist, whether he evinces cruelty or tenderness toward his characters,
and whether he is hostile or friendly to his readers.24 Such questions about
the morality of his novels will remain unresolved, however, because of
the very way in which he has framed the debate. Nabokov’s description
 JUDGMENTS, SENTENCES, AND EXECUTIONS 175

of himself as “a rigid moralist,” for example, can be read ironically, or

taken seriously, or interpreted in both ways at once.25 Notice, too, that
he doesn’t even take responsibility for this ambiguous characterization of
himself—which appears, of course, at the very end of the interview—but
instead credits it to some imaginary figure in the future. Regarding the
morality of his fiction in general, as with the ethical problems that are
posed by various novels in particular, Nabokov leaves the final determina-
tion up to his readers’ own moral sense.

NOTES
1. See, for example, the Sixth Amendment to the US Constitution, which
states that “the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by
an impartial jury,” and Article 6 of the European Convention on Human
Rights, which states that “everyone is entitled to a fair and public hearing
within a reasonable time by an independent and impartial tribunal estab-
lished by law,” and that “Judgment shall be announced publicly.”
2. The Alice books probably influenced Nabokov’s metafictional and teleo-
logical stratagems. In particular, the Knave of Hearts’ trial at the conclu-
sion of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland—which shifts from an
unresolved criminal case to a final mise-en-abyme—anticipates the end-
ings of novels like Invitation to a Beheading, Despair, Lolita, and Pale
Fire. Nabokov translated Dodgson’s fantasy into Russian in 1922, before
writing his first novel.
3. Austin posits various factors that make a performative statement either
“felicitous” (that is, viable, effective, and legitimate) or not, depending on
whether a speaker has the authority to utter such a command and whether
circumstances are appropriate for its fulfillment. On death sentences as
infelicitous declarations, see Kaufman-Osborn, who imagines situations in
which an individual might say “I sentence you to death,” but not be autho-
rized to do so (26). I discuss Nabokov’s use of illegitimate performatives—
especially to represent criminal trials, judgments, sentences, and
executions—in my essay “Executing Sentences.”
4. Walter argues that by promising readers that wrongdoers will be severely
punished, Nabokov “unknowingly” imitates the dictatorship which ten-
ders such offers to his hero. Walter adds: “However, Krug is entirely
immune to such vengeful ‘pleasures,’ making Nabokov’s offer to his reader
of similar ‘consolation’ all the more revealing, an unlikely and unacceptable
endorsement of this often unpleasant book’s most brutal images. The
author’s need to stoop to such ‘moral satisfaction’ betrays the depth of his
176 S.E. SWEENEY

hatred for his own characters as well as for the political ideologies he dis-
agrees with” (34).
5. The verbal adjective “satisfied,” referring to the sated soldiers (BS 230),
anticipates the question of whether Mariette’s pain might “give satisfaction
to the moral sense” (Introduction xiv).
6. Presumably, the soldiers stage these trials so that a guilty verdict, death
sentence, and execution are not only foregone conclusions but may even
occur at the same instant.
7. On the metaphysical detective story, see Merivale and Sweeney.
8. On V. D. Nabokov’s juridical experience and its influence on his son’s fic-
tion, see Barabtarlo; Dragunoiu, Vladimir Nabokov; and Laufer 58–59.
9. Consider Albinus’s attorney in Laughter in the Dark, whom he plans to
consult about leaving his wife; the divorce lawyer in The Gift for whom
Fyodor translates legal materials; and a “quick little lawyer” whom Kinbote
hires to secure his right to edit Shade’s manuscript in Pale Fire (298).
Other characters such as Orlovius, Hermann’s insurance agent in Despair,
or Goodman, Sebastian’s literary agent in The Real Life of Sebastian
Knight, also function as legal advisors. Attorneys in Lolita include John
Farlow, Charlotte Haze’s friend and “part-time lawyer” (79); Jack
Windmuller, to whom Farlow passes the task of settling Charlotte’s estate;
and Clarence Choate Clark, Humbert’s defense counsel and the first reader
of his memoir. As Nabokov grew more successful—and more wary of
copyright entanglements like those afflicting Lolita after its publication by
Olympia Press—his novels began to include legal representatives for his
fictitious authors. Such advocates may be simply identified as someone’s
lawyer (in Transparent Things) or may develop, instead, into specific char-
acters such as Gromwell, Van’s lawyer, “whose really beautiful floral name
[referring to a European wildflower] suited somehow his innocent eyes
and fair beard” (Ada 342), or Horace Peppermill, whom Vadim occasion-
ally mentions in narrating Look at the Harlequins!
10. For an overview of approaches to law and literature, see Brooks and
Gewircz. For readings of Nabokov’s fiction in the context of legal ethics,
see Dragunoiu, “Lolita”; Laufer; Morgan; and my essay “Executing
Sentences.”
11. When V. D. Nabokov was sentenced to three months’ solitary confinement
in 1906 (as punishment for signing the Vyborg Manifesto and publishing
it in a newspaper he edited), he wrote a series of articles criticizing Russian
penal practices that was published immediately upon his release (Boyd,
VNRY 76).
12. On Nabokov’s depiction of capital punishment, see also Grant, who stud-
ies his gallows humor.
 JUDGMENTS, SENTENCES, AND EXECUTIONS 177

13. Lodge points out that two narrative genres appropriated by Nabokov—the
thriller and the detective story—“are in their most typical manifestations
deeply conventional and ideologically conservative literary forms, in which
good triumphs over evil, law over anarchy, truth over lies. Nabokov’s nov-
els, needless to say, offer no such reassurance” (137).
14. At the end of Despair, Hermann plans to escape by persuading bystanders
to serve as extras in an imaginary movie, urging them to keep “the police”
from seizing him. In his foreword to the English translation of the novel,
Nabokov remarks that he doesn’t know if Hermann ever made the movie
he envisioned, thus suggesting that the outcome—Hermann’s capture,
trial, conviction, and punishment—remains unresolved.
15. For a detailed discussion of Hermann’s and Humbert’s appraisals of their
own culpability and their own confessions, see my essay “Had I Come
Before Myself.”
16. I analyze this same passage as a non-performative declaration (in “Executing
Sentences”), as a form of illegitimate self-appraisal (in “Had I Come Before
Myself”), and as an example of thinking in the subjunctive mood (in
“Thinking about Impossible Things”).
17. I am grateful to Michael Rodgers for suggesting this story’s relevance to
my argument.
18. On the various possibilities for judging Humbert, see also my essay
“Executing Sentences” (187–190).
19. See my essay “Had I Come Before Myself,” where I analyze at length
Nabokov’s statement comparing Humbert’s and Hermann’s posthumous
fates (29–31).
20. On Nabokov’s unfinished structures, see Blackwell and my own essay
“Thinking about Impossible Things.”
21. Green succinctly paraphrases the fictitious poet’s couplet as follows: “The
moral sense is an obligation, which we pay resignedly as part of the price of
beauty” (363–64). “In other words,” Salomon adds, “the artist must at
least not deny moral issues, the real consequences of human acts in the
world of experience” (215). Weiner concurs: “In other words, the mean-
ingful creation and contemplation of art can only take place in an atmo-
sphere saturated with our sense of what is moral and immoral, good and
evil” (202). Toker interprets the metaphor differently: “‘The mortal sense
of beauty’ is a euphemism for carnal pleasure, the pleasure of the senses
that must be held in check by one’s moral alertness. Yet in the case of aes-
thetic enjoyment divorced from the gratification of more basic needs, the
‘moral sense’ is not a tax to be paid but a vital dimension of the experience”
(Nabokov 228). Still another interpretation comes from de la Durantaye,
who argues that “the tax or ‘duty’ that keeps the sense of beauty (sensual
perception of beauty) from becoming ‘mortal’ (i.e., fatal) for certain mor-
178 S.E. SWEENEY

tals is the moral sense. Phrased otherwise, mortals’ sense of beauty, if not
reined in by the moral sense, can be mortal (fatal)” (Style 63; original
emphasis).
22. Lolita features a foreword that ponders the morality of Humbert’s mem-
oir, but it is fictitious. Since 1958, editions of the novel have also included
Nabokov’s 1957 essay “On a Book Entitled Lolita”—in which he denies
that it has any “moral in tow” (314)—but as an afterword. In a taxonomy
of Nabokov’s prefaces, Nicol points out that those preceding the 1963
introduction to Bend Sinister—to Invitation to a Beheading and The Gift—
are much shorter and do not discuss moral content (116–117).
23. In a 1962 interview, Nabokov lists five things that he loathes, four of which
align with the targets of his disapprobation in this putative reappraisal:
“stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty” (SO 3).
24. American critics initially emphasized Nabokov’s “escape into aesthetics,”
in Stegner’s formulation, until Pifer shifted the focus to moral issues in his
fiction. Rorty argues that Nabokov may have felt others’ pain so intensely
that he could not “tolerate the reality of suffering” (155); by contrast,
Amis calls him the “laureate of cruelty” (ix) and Toker suggests that he
distinguishes callousness—lack of curiosity about others—from deliberate
infliction of pain (“Liberal Ironists”). De la Durantaye documents others’
accounts of Nabokov’s authorial cruelty but refrains from deciding whether
he is “cruel, kind, or cruel to be kind” (“Pattern” 325). While many critics,
such as Geoffrey Green, point out Nabokov’s defensiveness regarding oth-
ers’ interpretations of his work, I believe that he welcomes readers, seeks to
turn them into “good reader[s]” and “rereader[s]” (LL 3), and constructs
his novels with their varied responses in mind.
25. Here, as in the opposing phrase “a frivolous firebird,” Nabokov appends a
single judgmental adjective to a more neutral and nuanced noun. While
“rigid” has obvious negative connotations, for example, “moralist” can
mean either a didactic scold or simply a philosopher who studies morality.
Likewise, “frivolous” is a clearly disparaging term (and, indeed, an ant-
onym to “rigid”), whereas “firebird” can indicate either a magical creature
in Stravinsky’s ballet The Firebird—recalling Nabokov’s Russian pseud-
onym, Sirin, as well as his connections to the Ballets Russes—or, more
simply, any golden-breasted bird such as an oriole.

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Austin, J. L. How to Do Things with Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1962.
 JUDGMENTS, SENTENCES, AND EXECUTIONS 179

Barabtarlo, Gennady. “Vladimir D. Nabokov and Capital Punishment.” Nabokovian

25 (1990): 50–62.
Blackwell, Stephen H. “Nabokov’s Fugitive Sense.” Transitional Nabokov 15–29.
Boyd, Brian. Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1990.
Brooks, Peter and Paul Gewirtz, eds. Law’s Stories: Narrative and Rhetoric in the
Law. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996.
de la Durantaye, Leland. “The Pattern of Cruelty and the Cruelty of Pattern in
Vladimir Nabokov.” Cambridge Quarterly 35.4 (2006): 301–326.
———. Style is Matter: The Moral Art of Vladimir Nabokov. Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 2007.
Dodgson, Charles Lutwidge. [Pseud. Lewis Carroll]. Alice’s Adventures in
Wonderland. The Annotated Alice. Ed. Martin Gardner. New York: Bramhall
House, 1960. 21–164.
Dragunoiu, Dana. “Lolita: Law, Ethics, Politics.” Approaches to Teaching Lolita.
Ed. Zoran Kuzmanovich and Galya Diment. New  York: MLA, 2008.
121–127.
———. Vladimir Nabokov and the Poetics of Liberalism. Evanston, IL:
Northwestern University Press, 2011.
Grant, Paul Benedict. “Nabokov’s Last Laughs.” Nabokov’s World. Ed. Jane
Grayson, Arnold McMillin, and Priscilla Meyer. 2 vols. Basingstoke, UK:
Palgrave, 2002. Vol. 1: The Shape of Nabokov’s World. 141–58.
Green, Geoffrey. Freud and Nabokov. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
1988.
Green, Martin. “The Morality of Lolita.” Kenyon Review 28 (1966): 352–77.
Hart, H.  L. A. Punishment and Responsibility: Essays in the Philosophy of Law.
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968.
Kaufman-Osborn, Timothy V. From Noose to Needle: Capital Punishment and the
Late Liberal State. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003.
Kuzmanovich, Zoran. “Suffer the Little Children.” Nabokov at Cornell. Ed.
Gavriel Shapiro. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003. 49–58.
Laufer, Matthew I. “‘Ladies and Gentlemen of the Jury’: Summoning Readers in
Lolita.” Compar(a)ison 1 (2003): 55–71.
Lodge, David. “What Kind of Fiction Did Nabokov Write? A Practitioner’s View.”
Cycnos 12.2 (1995): 135–147.
Merivale, Patricia and Susan Elizabeth Sweeney, eds. Detecting Texts: The
Metaphysical Detective Story from Poe to Postmodernism. Philadelphia: University
of Pennsylvania Press, 1999.
Morgan, Ed. “On Art and the Death Penalty: Invitation to a Beheading.” Law and
Literature 15 (2003): 279. Accessed at http://ssrn.com/abstract=1482005.
Nabokov, Vladimir. Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle. 1969. New York: Vintage,
1990.
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———. Bend Sinister. 1947. New York: Vintage, 1990.

———. Despair. [Otchaianie, 1934; 1936.] Rev. and trans. by the author. 1965.
New York: Vintage, 1990.
———. The Eye. [Sogliadatai, 1930.] Trans. Dmitri Nabokov with the author.
New York: Phaedra, 1965.
———. Foreword. Despair xi–xiv.
———. Introduction. 1963. Bend Sinister xi–xix.
———. Invitation to a Beheading. [Priglasheniye na kazn’, 1938]. Trans. Dmitri
Nabokov with the author. New York: Capricorn, 1959.
———. King, Queen, Knave. [Korol’, dama, valet, 1928]. Trans. Dmitri Nabokov
with the author. New York: Vintage, 1990.
———. Laughter in the Dark. [Kamera Obskura, 1932.] Trans. Vladimir Nabokov.
New York: Vintage, 1989.
———. Lolita. 1955. New York: Vintage, 1991.
———. “On a Book Entitled Lolita.” 1957. Lolita 311–317.
———. Pale Fire. 1962. New York: Vintage, 1989.
———. “Razor.” [“Britva,” 1926.] Trans. Dmitri Nabokov. Stories 179–182.
———. The Real Life of Sebastian Knight. Hamden, CT: New Directions, 1941.
———. “Signs and Symbols.” 1946. Stories 598–603.
———. The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov. Ed. Dmitri Nabokov. New York: Knopf,
1995.
———. Strong Opinions. 1973. New York: Vintage, 1990.
———. Transparent Things. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1972.
Nicol, Charles. “Necessary Instruction or Fatal Fatuity: Nabokov’s Introductions
and Bend Sinister.” Nabokov Studies 1 (1994): 115–129.
Pifer, Ellen. Nabokov and the Novel. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1980.
Rorty, Richard. “The Barber of Kasbeam: Nabokov on Cruelty.” Contingency,
Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. 141–68.
Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Ed. Edward Craig. New  York: Taylor and
Francis, 1998.
Salomon, Roger B. “Nabokov: Reassembling Zembla.” Desperate Storytelling:
Post-Romantic Elaborations of the Mock-Heroic Mode. Athens: University of
Georgia Press, 1987. 184–224.
Stegner, Page. Escape into Aesthetics: The Art of Vladimir Nabokov. New York: Dial
Press, 1966.
Stevens, Wallace. “Of Modern Poetry.” 1940. The Palm at the End of the Mind:
Selected Poems and a Play. Ed. Holly Stevens. New York: Knopf, 1971. 175.
Sweeney, Susan Elizabeth. “Executing Sentences in Lolita and the Law.”
Punishment, Politics, and Culture. Ed. Austin Sarat and Patricia Ewick. (Studies
in Law, Politics, and Society, vol. 30.) Oxford: Elsevier, 2004. 185–209.
 JUDGMENTS, SENTENCES, AND EXECUTIONS 181

———. “‘Had I Come Before Myself’: Illegitimate Judgments of Lolita and

Despair.” Cycnos 24.1 (2007): 31–45.
———. “Thinking about Impossible Things in Nabokov.” Transitional Nabokov
67–78.
Toker, Leona. “Liberal Ironists and the ‘Gaudily Painted Savage’: On Richard
Rorty's Reading of Vladimir Nabokov.” Nabokov Studies 1 (1994): 195–206.
———. Nabokov: The Mystery of Literary Structures. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1989.
Transitional Nabokov. Ed. Duncan White and Will Norman. London: Peter Lang,
2009.
Walter, Brian D. “Two Organ Grinders: Duality and Discontent in Bend Sinister.”
Discourse and Ideology in Nabokov’s Prose. Ed. David H. J. Larmour. New York:
Routledge, 2002. 24–39.
Weiner, Adam. “Nabokov and the Exorcism of the Novel.” By Authors Possessed:
The Demonic Novel in Russia. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press,
1998. 189–226.
 CHAPTER 11

The Art of Morality, or on Lolita

Leland de la Durantaye

A MISSING QUESTION MARK

The phrase Nabokov and morality would seem to be missing something: a
question mark. For did Nabokov not denounce the dangers of “introduc-
ing an epigrammatic or moral point at the end of a poem, and thereby
murdering the poem” (SO 124)? Did he not stress that “what makes a
work of fiction safe from larvae and rust is not its social importance but its
art, only its art” (SO 33)? Did he not emphatically declare that his finest
and most famous book, Lolita, had “no moral in tow” (AnLo 314)? These
statements, and the many others like them,1 do not, of course, exclude
the possibility that there are important things to say about Nabokov and
morality, that Nabokov was a moral writer, or even that he saw himself as
one. And they most certainly do not exclude the possibility that ethical
insights are to be sought and found in Nabokov’s works. They do, how-
ever, stress something of the difficulty of the search.

Parts of this essay are adapted from Style is Matter: The Moral Art of Vladimir
Nabokov, by Leland de la Durantaye. Used by permission of the publisher,
Cornell University Press.

L. de la Durantaye ()
Department of Literature, Claremont McKenna College,
Claremont, California, USA

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 183

M. Rodgers, S.E. Sweeney (eds.), Nabokov and the Question
of Morality, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-59221-7_11
184 L. DE LA DURANTAYE

The most intuitive place to begin such a search would, it seems, be the
work of Nabokov’s that has sparked the most debate and the most enthu-
siastic misunderstanding concerning moral matters: Lolita. While the story
of this debate is complex, its outline is simple. When given the occasion
to share his strong opinions in public, Nabokov stressed that Lolita was
neither moral nor immoral because, by virtue of being a work of art, it had
nothing to do with morality. “I have no purpose at all when composing
my stuff except to compose it,” he remarked (SO 114–115). In private
communications, however, a different note was struck, and Nabokov did
not hesitate to remind those close to him not only that Lolita was an
intensely moral work, but that all great works of literature were. He noted
that Lolita had “no moral in tow,” and yet also wrote to his friend (later
to become his enemy) Edmund Wilson that it was “a highly moral affair”
(NWL 298). When asked by David Rampton about Lolita, he responded
in similar terms, saying, “I think it is a moral [book]” (Rampton 202
n34). How are we to reconcile this disparity among public and private
statements? The answer, it would seem, lies in what Nabokov called “the
inherent morality of uninhibited art” (SL 57).

COAL, EMPATHY, AESTHETIC EDUCATION

Discussing a relation between literature and ethics entails, of course, ask-
ing what there is to learn from literature. I might, for instance, read a
novel whose setting is a coal mine, and through reading it learn a set
of facts concerning the extraction of coal, the efficient division of labor,
the dangerous plight of miners, the geography, geology, and ecology of
our planet, as well as many other things besides. I might consider myself
morally improved by this increase in knowledge, this widening of histori-
cal, social, or scientific horizon, just as I may not. But what would be at
issue in a specifically literary insight into ethical matters would transcend
historical and material conditions. It would presumably be of the order of
a moral truth, fact, or law, rather than that of information. Thus the fun-
damental question of whether readers might find and express such moral
truths, facts, or laws in Nabokov’s work—or in any artist’s work.
In the afterword to Lolita, Nabokov claimed that “it is childish to study
a work of fiction in order to gain information about a country or about a
social class or about the author” (AnLo 316). Novels are not for gathering
information, he says, and although they may make use of all manner of
accurate (and invented) fact, and we may learn, or begin to learn, many
things through the curiosity they awaken, they should not be seen as sim-
 THE ART OF MORALITY, OR ON LOLITA 185

ple sources of information. Consequently, if I want to know more infor-

mation about coal mines, I would do better to read nonfictional works
on the subject rather than Zola’s Germinal. But if I want to know what
in the hearts and minds of men and women has led to the exploitation of
mineral resources, and to the exploitation of workers in their extraction,
then I might do well to turn to a literary work depicting the movements
and motivations of individual hearts and minds. Which is to say that if my
goal were to know more about mines, it would indeed be childish of me
to read of imaginary mines rather than real ones. But if my goal were to
understand more about how and why people live as they do, then turning
to a novel, to a work that seeks to present highly personalized and indi-
vidualized accounts of struggle, would not, it seems, be a bad idea.
Nabokov may have claimed that he had no other intention when com-
posing his works than to compose them, but the same cannot be said of his
creation, Humbert Humbert, for within the world of the novel Humbert
reveals a variety of intentions, from exculpation (Part 1) to inculpation
(Part 2). The moral mystery that Humbert—and thus Lolita—presents
to the reader is how it would be possible for a highly sensitive, reflective,
refined and imaginative individual—someone graced with taste, cultiva-
tion, and a finely tuned artistic sensitivity—to behave so callously and so
cruelly toward someone he loves, or pretends to. Humbert owes his fame
to the discomfort he has caused his readers. At the outset of his mem-
oir, and for quite a few pages thereafter, he dismisses and discredits oth-
ers’ cares and concerns with what many readers—such as Lionel Trilling,
Wayne Booth, Alfred Appel Jr., Leona Toker, and Nomi Tamir-Ghez—
have described as unnerving facility.2 But how exactly does he do this? In
the name of what values, through what reasoning, and playing upon what
assumptions, does he make his readers so ill at ease?
The first answer to the question of how Humbert manages to unset-
tle his reader is that he is eloquent. He possesses fantastic verbal range,
depth, and dexterity. He is, moreover, routinely surprising. Eloquence is
no blank slate simply awaiting persuasive words to fill it. It responds to
specific desires, fears, ambitions and anxieties. What, then, are the ele-
ments involved, what chords does Humbert strike, what fears or desires
does he evoke, and what ambitions does he flatter? The first minor chord
is pity. Humbert begins by telling us of love and loss at a tender age. In
the triple tradition of the confession, the case study, and the court docu-
ment, he makes use of a painful past to explain and excuse a deplorable
present. There is the early loss of his mother: “(picnic, lightning)” (AnLo
10). And this first loss is compounded by another: that of his childhood
186 L. DE LA DURANTAYE

love, Annabel Leigh. Here, too, his account blends lyrical pain and merci-
less self-mocking. Nabokov not only approvingly cited Flaubert’s dictum
that “irony does not impair pathos—on the contrary, irony enhances the
pathetic side,” but he also seems to have followed it (cf. LL 149). In
the first half of Lolita, this archly ironic pathos is central. If you find his
story unbelievable, his complaints mawkish, his reasoning faulty, then he
is protected by the sword of irony and the shield of parody. If you find,
however, his account credible, his complaints compelling, his reasoning
sound, then the parody becomes something else: the sign of his suffering.
All are familiar with the phenomenon of a pain so great that it can only
be spoken of with distance. Humbert’s urbane self-parody is maintained
in the opening sections of his memoir with such delicate intensity that, by
keeping his own guard up, he tempts his readers to lower theirs—just as
Trilling, Booth, Appel, Toker, Tamir-Ghez, and others have described.
To the suggestion of childhood trauma and arrested development,
Humbert also adds the question of cultural relativism. He evokes dis-
tant times and places where sexual relations between people vastly sepa-
rated in age were not only not condemned but encouraged. “Hugh
Broughton, a writer of controversy in the reign of James the First,”
he informs us, “has proved that Rahab was a harlot at ten years of
age”—two years younger than Lolita when they become lovers. And we
should not forget that “Lepcha old men of eighty copulate with girls
of eight, and nobody minds” (AnLo 19). As Eric Rothstein has noted,
“Nabokov’s own way of keeping us unsure as to values is to flood the
written text with them” (30).
Alongside of this game, Humbert plays another with his reader: a game
of letters. Readers are notoriously vain—above all about reading. Humbert
routinely invokes the literary sensitivities and education of his reader. From
the very first lines of his memoir, he begins to weave lines—and names—
from one of Poe’s most famous poems, perhaps written for his first cousin
and child-bride (Virginia Clemm was thirteen and Poe twenty-seven when
they married in 1836) and only published after her death: “Annabel Lee.”
The poem has a childlike, hypnotic repetitiveness, the kind of distinctive
rhythm which led Emerson to unflatteringly dub Poe “the jingle man”
(qtd. in Quinn 328), that well suits Humbert’s hypnotic purposes. Shortly
thereafter, in more cryptic fashion, Humbert invokes the adult sorrows
of Rousseau, Baudelaire, and Proust. (In noting the frequency of French
referents, we should recall that French is Humbert’s native language—the
presence of Poe being fully compatible with this preference, given the
 THE ART OF MORALITY, OR ON LOLITA 187

celebrity of translations of Poe by Baudelaire and Mallarmé.) Humbert

even sees a literary heredity to such fascination with young girls. “After
all,” he notes,

Dante fell madly in love with his Beatrice when she was nine, a sparkling
girleen, painted and lovely, and bejeweled, in a crimson frock, and this was
in 1274, in Florence, at a private feast in the merry month of May. And
when Petrarch fell madly in love with his Laureen, she was a fair-haired
nymphet of twelve running in the wind, in the pollen and dust, a flower in
flight, in the beautiful plain as descried from the hills of Vaucluse. (AnLo 19)

Humbert does not, of course, mention that Dante himself was only eight
when he met the, in reality, eight-year-old Beatrice Portinari, or that
Petrarch was only six years older than Laura—but then again, why would
he?
Humbert’s artistic comparisons do not stop at biographical parallel and
literary allusion. He tells us that to perceive a nymphet, to recognize one
in a crowd, you must be an “artist and a madman” (AnLo 17). One of
the principal things that artists and madmen share in Nabokov’s world
is their indifference to what others think of their inspired (or deranged)
states. Nabokov loans many of his characters experiences and opinions
which were also his own, and this giving of very personal gifts is not lim-
ited to likeable protagonists such as Glory’s Martin or The Gift’s Fyodor,
but extends to characters whom Nabokov singled out as “scoundrels”
and “wretches,” such as Ada’s Van, Pale Fire’s Kinbote, and Lolita’s
Humbert. Nabokov not only graces Humbert with the perceptual and
linguistic powers necessary for art, but also lends him the belief that a true
artist creates in sublime isolation and answers only to his genius. It is here
that things begin to go, morally speaking, truly awry.
Humbert’s eloquence depends upon a further element that unifies those
mentioned above, something that was not, for instance, at Hermann’s
disposal in Despair: love. For all his blindness and madness and hurt,
Humbert loves. And for the Humbert of Part 1, the lover and the artist
see the world in the same all-enlivening, all-consuming way. This is the
heart of his eloquence and the essence of his alibi: his justifications for
his love, and for his pursuit of that love (despite the fact that the rules of
society and reason outlaw it) are in every way analogous to Nabokov’s jus-
tifications for art. Humbert calls upon the inner vision, the sudden image,
and the irrefutable call of the senses that are all hallmarks of Nabokov’s
188 L. DE LA DURANTAYE

vision of art. Humbert’s subtlest reasoning appears in the parallel he estab-

lishes between the proud creation of great art and the heedless pursuit of
love. By subtly describing and avidly pursuing Lolita as one would the
inspiration for a work of art, Humbert tempts the reader to look at her as
precisely that—and it is this most slippery step that allows sensitive readers
such as Trilling to wonder if they have slipped. We are led astray because
we are offered the wrong optic through which to see Lolita—the optic of
art—and we may be too eager to be worthy of it to suggest that it should
not here apply.

THE GARDEN AND THE GATE

Nabokov wrote to his friend and colleague Morris Bishop in 1956 that
“Lolita is a tragedy” (Letter). The novel is a tragedy for the same reason
that Humbert is granted a brief stroll in paradise—because Humbert real-
izes the fault in his own character and the crime of his conduct, but does
so too late to halt the progress of the poison.3 The tragedy is the loss of
Lolita—and she is lost from the beginning of Humbert’s memoir. She can
be said to be absent from the book which bears her secret name (only to
Humbert is she “Lolita”—she is “Lo” to her mother, “Dolly” at school,
“Dolores on the dotted line” [AnLo 9], and so forth), because of the
less-than-safe solipsism to which Humbert subjects her. (“Lolita had been
safely solipsized,” AnLo 60). She is everywhere referred to, everywhere
described, everywhere poetically loved, but of her thoughts and feelings,
of her inner life, Humbert offers us scarcely a glimpse. He is able to take
advantage of her—to “deprive her of her childhood” (AnLo 283), as he
says—because of his refusal to think about things from her perspective:
that is, to think beyond the lyricism of his love and the cold precautions
of maintaining a tractable little concubine. Near the end of the novel,
after hearing a chance remark that Lolita makes to a friend, Humbert
comments:

and it struck me, as my automaton knees went up and down, that I sim-
ply did not know a thing about my darling’s mind and that quite possibly,
behind the juvenile clichés, there was in her a garden and a twilight, and a
palace gate—dim and adorable regions which happened to be lucidly and
absolutely forbidden to me. (284)
 THE ART OF MORALITY, OR ON LOLITA 189

A few pages later, enumerating his indignities, Humbert continues, “Now,

squirming and pleading with my own memory, I recall that on this and
similar occasions [as here, when Lolita is grieving over her mother’s death],
it was always my habit and method to ignore Lolita’s states of mind while
comforting my own base self” (287), thus echoing his earlier confession
that he had “firmly decided to ignore what [he] could not help perceiv-
ing” (283). Humbert finally adds, “I must admit that a man of my power
of imagination cannot plead ignorance of universal emotions” (287).
Schematically stated, the arc that Nabokov’s book traces is from moral
blindness to moral insight. Humbert’s self-justifications, which he recre-
ates for his reader as he recalls this first period of his love for Lolita, cen-
ter around his singularity—his singular passion and his singular aesthetic
sensitivity. The lesson Humbert seems to want to impart to his readers
concerns a matter that interested Nabokov in a number of works: the
tension between the single-minded focus required for artistic creation,
and many-minded concern for others. Up until the very end of Part 1,
Humbert has endeavored to preserve “the morals of a minor” (62). In
his narration, however, he has not done much to preserve the morals of
his reader. He has dedicated his remarkable rhetorical resources toward
seducing the reader into an acceptance of, or complicity with, not just his
fantasies but his acts. Part 2 tells, however, a very different story, one with
a moral message that transcends any legal limits to pedophilia, and that
concerns the moral matters of coercion, hurt, and harm.4
In his early review of the novel, Howard Nemerov stressed that “Lolita
is […] a moral work, if by morality in literature we are to understand the
illustration of a usurious rate of exchange between our naughty desires
and virtuous pains, of the process whereby pleasures become punish-
ments. […] Humbert Humbert […] gets punished […] in the end. Also
in the middle. Also in the end” (320). Nemerov is concerned here with
showing that the novel is not amoral or immoral. He stresses that Lolita is
“a moral work” because its thematic concern is intrinsically moral, focus-
ing as it does upon the relation of fantasy to reality and desire to act.
But there is an added element to Lolita’s morality. Humbert encourages
his reader to view his memoir in its initial stages through the lens of art,
as does Hermann, the character to whom Nabokov later compares him.
In its second stage, Humbert encourages his reader to view his memoir
through another lens: the lens of life. This opposition is one of many ways
in which the novel emphasizes the question of art’s relation to life, and
how to make the necessary moral distinctions between the two.
190 L. DE LA DURANTAYE

Bertrand Russell once noted that there is nothing so useful to democ-

racy as immunization against eloquence.5 Might we not see Humbert’s
memoir in a similar light? Does it not ultimately tell his reader: “What I
have done is monstrous, let no amount of eloquence ever convince you
that such acts are anything but: look at them for what they are, look at
them for the pain they cause?” Stated somewhat differently, Nabokov’s
book tells us that the artist cannot live in the world as he lives in the world
of words—and that this is a lesson worthy of expressing in the world of
words.

LOLITA IS A MORAL BOOK

Lolita is not a moral book because Nabokov said it was. It is a moral book
for the reason, and in the sense, that from its first page to its last, it explic-
itly treats moral questions. It is a moral book in the sense that morality,
in the form of asking whether it is acceptable, or even simply compre-
hensible, for Humbert to do what he does when and how he does it, is
one of the novel’s central themes—one that is constantly alluded to and
addressed therein. Morality, moral choices, and moral failings are insepa-
rable from the story the book tells. In this sense, Nabokov’s reminder that
the book was a “moral” one seems clear. “Humbert Humbert,” Nabokov
once remarked, “in his last stage is a moral man because he realizes that
he loves Lolita like any woman should be loved. But it is too late, he
has destroyed her childhood” (qtd. in Rampton 202n34). This change
in Humbert’s heart that makes of him, in Nabokov’s final words on the
subject, a “moral” man is also what leads to his annual reprieve. He is
offered this special dispensation, however, not only because of the lesson
that he learns, but also because of one that he imparts—because of “the
pattern of remorse daintily running along the steel of his conspiratorial
dagger” (AnLo 75). Humbert applied the methods destined for art to
life, he moved in his world as though it were but a work of art where the
kindling of the senses and the pursuing of inspiring images should come
before all else. This is how someone graced with his powers of perception
and sensitivity could act with such callousness toward someone he claimed
to love. And it is this lesson, learned too late, which spurs him to a special
undertaking: the writing of his confession. Nabokov has him compose a
memoir which he narrates not from the point of view of his repentance
and bitter resignation at the time of writing, but from that of the euphoria
and haunted rapture that preceded it, the perspective through which he
 THE ART OF MORALITY, OR ON LOLITA 191

gradually persuaded himself that what he was doing to young Dolores

Haze could be explained, could be justified, could not be avoided. This
device allows the fine pattern of remorse along the blade of his conspirato-
rial dagger to remain, for a time, invisible. When it ceases to be, when he
ceases to recreate and relate his coldness for the sake of what he calls “ret-
rospective verisimilitude,” we understand why he had chosen to call that
dagger “conspiratorial” in the first place. Against whom was it turned?
Against whom did he conspire? “Tum-tee-tum. And once more—TUM!”
we read in Despair. “I have not gone mad. I am merely producing gleeful
little sounds. The kind of glee one experiences upon making an April fool
of someone. And a damned good fool I have made of someone. Who is
he? Gentle reader, look at yourself in the mirror” (Des 24). Humbert’s
conspiracy is against his reader, and like all successful conspiracies, is so
effective because so well concealed.
Much of Lolita’s poignancy comes from Humbert and his artistic
gifts—gifts put into practice too late to stop him from depriving Lolita
of her childhood, but not too late to tell an entrancing tale. The gifts of
perception and persistence that are the artist’s bring with them a charge:
the moral duty, as an “old poet” reminds us, that mortals must pay on art
(AnLo 283). This moral duty is nothing other than vigilance as regards the
danger of art—the threat that in its single-minded pursuit of its goal, in its
heat and hurry, it might trample the tenderness that the artist, more than
any other, should know to prize and to protect. In his Defense of Poetry,
Shelley claimed that “the greatest instrument of moral good is the imagi-
nation” (488). Nabokov may have felt similarly, but he found the matter
far from simple as, in his fiction, the imagination and the senses that fire it
must be reined in, must learn to limit themselves to the artistic sphere so
that they may remain an instrument of widening and deepening percep-
tion, not of pain and abuse.
For more and less practical reasons having to do with how he envi-
sioned his works to be read, Nabokov was extremely wary about stressing
the moral import of his works in the public domain. Because it seemed
to Nabokov that readers of his time were more inclined to err on the side
of placing a work of art—especially the novel—in too immediate and inti-
mate contact with information or instruction, and were more inclined to
identify an artist’s creations with their creator, he stressed the other side:
art’s autonomy. Nevertheless, Nabokov did consider art to be not only
deeply but inherently moral, as shown with remarkable clarity in a letter
from October 1945. Therein, Nabokov replied to a reader’s reproach that
192 L. DE LA DURANTAYE

in his recently published Nikolai Gogol he had presented Gogol, and art
itself, as fundamentally amoral. “I never meant to deny,” wrote Nabokov,
“the moral impact of art which is certainly inherent in every genuine work
of art. What I do deny and am prepared to fight to the last drop of my
ink is the deliberate moralizing which to me kills every vestige of art in a
work however skillfully written” (SL 56). By separating “moral impact”
from “moralizing,” Nabokov is trying, in compressed form, to express
his vision of art. Nabokov claims here, as elsewhere, that conceptions of
art which ask the work to transport social, moral, or political messages
endanger it by reducing it to the mere carrier of an ideological freight that
would, in any event, have been more efficiently transported—or towed—
by another vessel.
That Lolita incited a public scandal concerning the social and moral
effects of works of art on society does not make it a moral book. Its at
once thematic and stylistic occupation with moral questions—and the
tension between artistic impulses and moral imperatives—makes it moral.
In Nabokov’s (and Nemerov’s) words, Lolita is “a moral book” for the
simple reason that it directly engages moral questions. In this light, we
can see that Nabokov is not simply contradicting himself, or being cun-
ningly deceptive, when he says on the one hand that Lolita has “no moral
in tow” (AnLo 314) and on the other that it is a “moral book” (qtd.
in Rampton 202n34). The seeming contradiction arises because of the
special sense in which Nabokov understood the relation of morality to
art. A “moral in tow” would be something separate and separable from
the work of art—a moral to the story that lies outside it and is pulled
along in its wake. In the terms he used in his letter above, this would be
“moralizing.” For Nabokov, it is only failed novels, ones where matter
and manner do not fuse, which “moralize”—only they have “a moral in
tow,” because they must tow behind them what they could not bring on
board. A truly “moral book” is not merely prescriptive, does not bluntly
or blandly offer ethical precepts or maxims, but presents an integral vision
of the relation of morality to art. When Nabokov claimed that Lolita was
“a moral book,” he clearly meant “moral” in precisely the same sense of
“an inherent morality of uninhibited art” about which he wrote elsewhere
(SL 57)—that is, a “moral impact” so intimately bound up with the indi-
vidual elements of the story as to be inseparable from it (SL 56).
 THE ART OF MORALITY, OR ON LOLITA 193

AN ASIDE ON THE MORAL DANGERS OF MISREADING

In discussing the limitless potential for misreading in relation to The
Prague Cemetery, Umberto Eco declared that “you can become a pedo-
phile reading Manzoni’s The Betrothed,” adding, “I know, there are no
children in the novel, but it doesn’t matter.” The reason it does not is that
there are no limits to misreading. Readers with fixed ideas fit situations to
match them—and there is no avoiding this. In such a statement, Eco is
invoking the same danger that so preoccupied Plato in The Republic, the
danger entailed in vividly presenting repellent views, and points out that
there is no way for an author to safeguard against absurd interpretations.
If one can become a pedophile by reading Manzoni’s Betrothed, then
how much greater the risk in reading Nabokov’s Lolita, where there are
not only children but pedophilia, and not only pedophilia, but pedophilia
lyrically described? The moral point here is one concerning freedom in art,
and the freedom of art. No reasonable reader of Lolita would find it a plea
for pedophilia, just as no reasonable reader would find Manzoni’s novel to
be one, or would find Eco’s novel anti-Semitic. But for a thing to present
a danger, it does not need to have been created with dangerous inten-
tions—and this was Plato’s point in The Republic. The counterargument,
which is the strongest moral argument in favor of uninhibited art, is that
virtue untested is no virtue at all. “I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered
virtue,” proclaimed Milton in favor of freedom (and in opposition to cen-
sorship), and neither, of course, should we (247).

A PROVISIONAL ANSWER
The distinction to be made concerning Nabokov and morality is thus
between a prescriptive morality—whether as code or as commandments,
whether legal or religious—and an ethical stance which is expressed imma-
nently. The idea which Nabokov ardently held, early and late, was that art
worthy of the name entailed unconditional freedom. And so a “moral in
tow,” like a “moral point” (SO 124) or any of the other “[e]thical and
religious considerations” extraneous to the literary matter at hand (NG
103), is a thing of “didacticist[s]” and “allegorizer[s]” (BS xii), not of true
artists or real art.
In what Nabokov felt was the finest literary work of the twentieth cen-
tury, Joyce has Bloom reflect on precisely this matter. As Bloom sips a
194 L. DE LA DURANTAYE

late-night cocoa, the narrator asks, “What cerebration accompanied his

frequentative act?” (677). The answer given is that Bloom “reflected on
the pleasures derived from literature of instruction rather than amusement
as he himself had applied to the works of William Shakespeare more than
once for the solution of difficult problems in imaginary or real life” (677).
The following question, “Had he found their solution?” is answered in
turn: “In spite of careful and repeated reading of certain classical passages,
aided by a glossary, he had derived imperfect conviction from the text,
the answers not bearing on all points” (677). The answers do not bear on
all points because the points are constantly in motion. Bloom, Stephen,
Molly, and any number of other Dubliners might derive instruction from
literature, even moral instruction, but it could never simply be in the form
of rules to follow and axioms to apply.

NOTES
1. For one further example: “I am not ‘sincere,’ I am not ‘provocative,’ I am
not ‘satirical.’ I am neither a didacticist nor an allegorizer. Politics and eco-
nomics, atomic bombs, primitive and abstract art forms, the entire Orient,
symptoms of ‘thaw’ in Soviet Russia, the Future of Mankind, and so on,
leave me supremely indifferent” (BS xii).
2. For a brief compendium of such remarks, see my Style is Matter 7–9.
3. “I am unable to foresee and to fend inevitable attempts to find in the alem-
bics of Despair something of the rhetorical venom that I injected into the
narrator’s tone in a much later novel. Hermann and Humbert are alike only
in the sense that two dragons painted by the same artist at different periods
of his life resemble each other. Both are neurotic scoundrels, yet there is a
green lane in Paradise where Humbert is permitted to wander at dusk once
a year; but Hell shall never parole Hermann” (Des xiii).
4. See Rorty’s remark that “Lolita does have a ‘moral in tow.’ But the moral is
not to keep one’s hand off little girls but to notice what one is doing, and in
particular to notice what people are saying. For it might turn out, it very
often does turn out, that people are trying to tell you that they are suffer-
ing” (164).
5. “To acquire immunity to eloquence is of the utmost importance to the citi-
zens of a democracy” (Russell 314).
 THE ART OF MORALITY, OR ON LOLITA 195

WORKS CITED
Appel, Alfred, Jr. “Lolita: The Springboard of Parody.” Wisconsin Studies in
Contemporary Literature 8 (Spring 1967): 204–224.
Booth, Wayne. The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1961.
de la Durantaye, Leland. Style is Matter: The Moral Art of Vladimir Nabokov.
Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007.
Eco, Umberto. Remarks made during Libri come: Festa del Libro e della Lettura
2011. Rome, April 10, 2011. [Eco’s remarks are available (in Italian) here:
http://itunes.apple.com/it/podcast/libri-come.-festa-del-libro/
id364611804]
Joyce, James. Ulysses. New York: Vintage, 1990.
Milton, John. The Major Works. Ed. Stephen Orgel and Jonathan Goldberg.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.
Nabokov, Vladimir. Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle. 1969. New York: Vintage,
1990.
———. The Annotated Lolita. Ed. Alfred Appel Jr. New York: Vintage, 1991.
———. Bend Sinister. 1947. New York: Vintage, 1990.
———. Despair. [Otchaianie.] 1934; 1936. Rev. and trans. by the author. 1965.
New York: Vintage, 1990.
———. The Gift. [Dar.] 1937–1938. Trans. Michael Scammell and Dmitri
Nabokov with the author. 1963. New York: Vintage, 1991.
———. Glory. [Podvig.] 1932. Trans. Dmitri Nabokov with the author. 1971.
New York: Vintage, 1991.
———. Letter to Morris Bishop. 6 March 1956. Morris Bishop Collection,
Cornell University.
———. Nikolai Gogol. 1944. Hamden, CT: New Directions, 1961.
———. Pale Fire. 1962. New York: Vintage, 1989.
———. Selected Letters, 1940–1977. Ed. Dmitri Nabokov and Matthew J. Bruccoli.
New York: Harcourt, 1989.
———. Strong Opinions. 1973. New York: Vintage, 1990.
Nabokov, Vladimir, and Edmund Wilson. The Nabokov-Wilson Letters: Vladimir
Nabokov and Edmund Wilson, 1940–1971. Ed. Simon Karlinsky. New  York:
Harper and Row, 1979.
Nemerov, Howard. “The Morality of Art.” Kenyon Review 19 (1957): 313–321.
Quinn, Arthur Hobson. Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography. Introd. Shawn
Rosenheim. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998.
Rampton, David. Vladimir Nabokov: A Critical Study of the Novels. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1984.
Rorty, Richard. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1989.
196 L. DE LA DURANTAYE

Rothstein, Eric. “‘Lolita’: Nymphet at Normal School.” Contemporary Literature

41.1(2000): 22–55.
Russell, Bertrand. “The Taming of Power.” Atlantic Monthly 162.4 (October
1938): 438–449. Rpt. Power: A New Social Analysis. London: George Allen
and Unwin, 1938.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe. The Prose Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Ed. E.  B. Murray.
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993.
Tamir-Ghez, Nomi. “The Art of Persuasion in Nabokov’s Lolita.” Vladimir
Nabokov’s Lolita: A Casebook. Ed. Ellen Pifer. New  York: Oxford University
Press, 2003. 17–38.
Toker, Leona. Nabokov: The Mystery of Literary Structures. Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1989.
Trilling, Lionel. “The Last Lover—Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita.” Encounter
(October 1958): 9–19.
Zola, Émile. Germinal. 1885. Trans. Roger Pearson. New York: Penguin, 2005.
 CHAPTER 12

“Obnoxious Preoccupation with Sex Organs”:

The Ethics and Aesthetics of Representing Sex

Elspeth Jajdelska

A number of Nabokov’s readers have felt pressure to divide their emotional

responses, including responses of empathy, from their aesthetic appreciation
for his work. Richard Rorty claims that Kinbote, the deranged editor of Pale
Fire, “speaks for Nabokov when he says, ‘In the temperature charts of poetry
high is low, and low high,’” meaning that low emotion is equated with high
poetic success, and vice versa (PF 162; qtd. in Rorty 165). Again and again,
Nabokov’s readers seem to be confronted by a choice between aesthetic
delight in perceiving an object, and horror at its moral or emotional signifi-
cance. At the end of “A Letter that Never Reached Russia,” for example, the
“crescent-shaped prints left by” the heels of a woman who committed suicide
in a cemetery, “tiny as a child’s, on the damp soil by the plinth,” are described
as “mysterious and enchanting” (140). In The Gift, there is an assumption
that the aesthetic appreciation of patterning in the life of Chernyshevsky takes
precedence over pity for the sorrows that make up this pattern:

We remark also that the theme of “nearsightedness” develops, too, begin-

ning with the fact that as a child he knew only those faces which he kissed and
could see only four out of seven stars of the Great Bear. His first—copper—

E. Jajdelska ()
English Studies, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 197

M. Rodgers, S.E. Sweeney (eds.), Nabokov and the Question
of Morality, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-59221-7_12
198 E. JAJDELSKA

spectacles donned at the age of twenty. A teacher’s silver spectacles bought

for six roubles so as to distinguish his students in the Cadet School. (211)

The succession of spectacles in copper and silver, the visions they reveal
of faces kissed, constellations, and individuals emerging into focus from a
crowd, are delightful—but only if we forget the wearer, an isolated child,
an adult in exile, imprisoned by his poor vision as much as by the Siberian
landscape, “yearning for spectacles in a letter to his sons” (212).
The problem of divided emotional and aesthetic response is pressing
enough to invite solutions. Brian Boyd detects in “A Letter that Never
Reached Russia,” the story with the enchanting heel prints left by a suicide,
Nabokov’s “secret recipe for happiness”: “detach the mind from accept-
ing a humdrum succession of moments, and everything becomes magical”
(VNRY 238). The difficulty with such a solution, however, is that the prints
are only “humdrum” if you forget why they were made. Detaching the
mind, then, means separating the aesthetic qualities of the material world
from the cruelty which helps to shape it. A cruder, less sophisticated critic
than Boyd might call this “making lemonade if life gives you lemons,” or
even “making lemonade if life gives someone else lemons,” and it seems
hard to reconcile with aspects of the works which insist that we must be alert
to others’ suffering. Rorty, whose interpretation of Nabokov relies heavily
on the latter idea—that reading Nabokov is a lesson in paying attention to
suffering—understands the conflict between aesthetic and compassionate
responses differently. For him, this unresolvable conflict lies at the very heart
of Nabokov’s work, where “a private mythology about a special elite” of art-
ists who rise above cruelty is relentlessly confronted by the fact that artistic
gifts, in fact, have no special connection with “pity and kindness” (168).
I am not concerned here with attempting my own resolution of this
difficulty. I do want to look at one kind of description in Nabokov’s prose,
however, which may be inherently resistant to the moral neutralization
that he applies to the prints and spectacles above. I also wish to suggest
that at least some of these descriptions are more deeply structured by
moral constraint than might at first be supposed. The descriptions in ques-
tion are those of sexual acts and sexually arousing acts.

There are at least two reasons why it is hard for Nabokov to represent
sexual scenes as he does a suicide’s footsteps or Chernyshevsky’s eye-
glasses—that is, as perceptions to be appreciated aesthetically and divorced
 “OBNOXIOUS PREOCCUPATION WITH SEX ORGANS” 199

from their significance to human experience. The first reason concerns

innate cultural constraints on representing sex and sexuality. For some
twentieth-century critics, influenced by Freud and by early anthropology,
such inhibitions arose from historically specific beliefs about sex, beliefs
that such theorists themselves believed to be false (Ellis; Pease 165–194).
Nabokov lived through, and was an agent in, a significant change in the
norms of representing sex in literature, something visible both in the pub-
lishing history of Lolita and in the development of Nabokov’s writing
between that novel and the starring role of sex itself in Ada’s complex
structure of allusion.1 However, there are good reasons to think that while
particular constraints on representing sex might vary from one society to
another, or from one historical period to another, the fact of special con-
straints at all is a universal. The anthropologist Jack Goody has examined
such constraints in a range of cultures: “The tension between the shame
and the enjoyment of sex, between the desire for knowledge and the wish
for privacy, is a quasi-universal phenomenon that takes different forms in
different societies and in different clusters of societies” (237). In present-
day European and North American societies, discussion about the permis-
sible representation of sex is often framed in terms of liberal ideas about
harm reduction. Depictions which could cause harm—perhaps by perpe-
trating damaging stereotypes or glamorizing abusive sexual behavior—are
the most likely candidates for constraint or prohibition. This liberal dis-
course is founded on the belief that representations of sex are not a special
case; that they fall within the same remit of harm reduction as, say, rep-
resentations of race or gender. Yet our exceptions to these constraints in
the sphere of art, from Renaissance nudes to installations, recall Goody’s
account of constraints arising from “cognitive contradiction” (235) rather
than from repression, superstition, or, more recently, harm reduction:

Those differences may also take a hierarchical form within the same society;
what is forbidden down below being practiced up above [. . .] a highly
differentiated society is marked by “luxury” as well as by literacy[. . . .]
Epicureanism is accompanied by asceticism, excess by restraint. (Goody 237)

For Goody and for the historian of obscenity Allison Pease, high art and
sexual transgression are more accessible to elites; the more widely a trans-
gressive representation is likely to circulate, the more likely it is to be per-
ceived as offensive (Goody 237; Pease 39–40).
I am not trying to suggest that we are wrong to distinguish morally
between Lolita—or even more frankly erotic art—and child pornography.
200 E. JAJDELSKA

But the fact that we wish to make the distinction at all suggests that the
simple harm-reduction account of constraints on representations of sex
is inadequate. It is culturally acceptable to depict sex, but within a differ-
ent set of constraints than those governing, say, the depiction of sofas or
swimming or birthday parties.
Goody’s account of the special nature of sex as an object of represen-
tation is connected to another account of its special nature as an object
of observation (234). And this brings me to the second reason why it
is difficult to portray sex in literature. Contemporary literary analysis is
heavily dependent on the concept of invisible observation, and on the
visual metaphors that go with it. Readers “focalize” the story through
particular characters, they adopt “viewpoints,” they experience descrip-
tions “close up” or from a distance. None of these metaphors has an exact
parallel in real life; we can rarely, if ever, actually be unseen observers of
our fellow human beings, or float above the countryside enjoying the pan-
oramic view of a nineteenth-century narrator. But there is, nonetheless,
some relationship between real-life observation and readerly observation,
a relationship captured in the eighteenth century by Addison’s Spectator
roaming at large, reporting and commenting on what he saw without
participating in it, and by his various observing heirs in the eighteenth-
century novel; indeed, Helen Deutsch calls “the universal survey” one
of Samuel Johnson’s “favourite opening gambits” (Deutsch 32). So for
eighteenth-century readers—and, I would argue, often for us, too—read-
erly observation at least recalls the idea of detached real-life observation.
This exacerbates the problem of representing sex, since there are few, and
perhaps no, acceptable settings for observing sexual acts or sexually arous-
ing behavior. To find oneself in such a situation is sure to lead to a range
of troubling emotions, troubling in a different way from those aroused
by looking at a suicide’s footprints in a graveyard. Even observing pri-
vate families in their houses, as when Kinbote spies on the Shades, can be
accommodated within an everyday, if rather shameful, idea of our rela-
tion to others. And even then, shame is not obligatory; when Dickens
takes Scrooge into the homes of Christmas past, present and future, for
example, Scrooge is not ashamed that those he observes are unaware of
his presence. Sexual acts are different. Repellent as Kinbote the voyeur
might be, Kinbote the peeping Tom would be a great deal worse. Readers
are willing to accept Scrooge as the observer of his relatives even though
those relatives are talking about him at that moment, putting him in what
would, outside the story, be the disreputable position of eavesdropper.
 “OBNOXIOUS PREOCCUPATION WITH SEX ORGANS” 201

But it is hard to imagine readers who would feel comfortable following

Scrooge into the bedroom of his former fiancée as she retreats for the
night with her husband. Narrators who describe sexual acts, therefore, are
taking their readers into potentially uncomfortable contexts.
One possible solution to this problem might be to think of readers not
as observing the characters, but as identifying with them. However, that
solution may be equally problematic. If the reader identifies with one of
the participants in the sexual act, it is possible that he or she will become
aroused. This in turn has the potential to provoke in the reader the shame
of arousal, in contrast to the shame of unlicensed access potentially created
by the role of observer. This response immediately brings back the special
problems identified by Goody—of sex as inherently private—but now the
reader is in the painful position of one whose sexual arousal has been antic-
ipated by the narrator, and thus made, if not public, then at least known.
Sexual behavior, therefore, is potentially in a different category of
objects of description when it comes to the kind of moral neutrality that
Nabokov favors in the case of the suicide’s footprints or the exile’s spec-
tacles. Remarkably, Nabokov almost seems to relish this problem, increas-
ing the challenge by repeatedly choosing to depict abusive or troubled
sexual relationships, in particular those involving children. This prac-
tice could be seen as his most extreme statement of aestheticism, of the
supremacy of art over everyday ethics, in keeping with the elitist excep-
tions to representing sex discussed by Goody. But, as it turns out, the
moral problems with representing sex which I have outlined above are
inextricably linked to aesthetic ones. The evidence for this literary diffi-
culty is plentiful; the combination of realist fiction and twentieth-century
ideas about sexual liberation have produced what may be an unprece-
dented number of detailed literary descriptions of sex, which often persist,
for all the authors’ skill and sincerity, in making readers laugh or cringe.
The Literary Review even bestows an annual Bad Sex in Fiction Award,
won in 2010 by the novelist Rowan Somerville for this description: “The
wet friction of her, tight around him, the sight of her open, stretched
around him, the cleft of her body, it tore a climax out of him with a final
lunge. Like a lepidopterist mounting a tough-skinned insect with a too
blunt pin he screwed himself into her” (Somerville 76). Somerville is as
accomplished a novelist as any of his peers; the problem here surely does
not lie with the writer’s basic skill, but with the object of description itself.
The realist narrator is obliged to create an illusion of reality by describing
the characters’ private sensations. But, at the same time, he or she has
202 E. JAJDELSKA

to overcome the social problem of representing sex by avoiding clarity,

or by putting the description into the category of high art, or both. The
result is a blend of cliché (the sexual feelings are exceptionally intense),
absurdity (for art’s sake, the imagery must be recherché), and banality
(the mechanical effect of arousal created by depicting specific triggers,
such as wetness, openness, and clefts in association with female bodies).
The effect may be particularly unfortunate here, but the difficulty is not
of the author’s making.
Nabokov, therefore, faces a cluster of problems in attempting to rep-
resent sex in a way that combines, as the description of the suicide’s
footsteps does, detachment from the ordinary human significance of the
action, on the one hand, and the aesthetic possibilities of perceiving it,
on the other. If my account of the problems involved in representing
sex is correct, managing either of these approaches would be difficult,
let alone both. The problem is exacerbated by Nabokov’s own loathing
of vulgar obscenity in the name of art, as expressed by John Ray, Jr. in
the fictitious foreword to Lolita: “the robust philistine who is condi-
tioned by modern conventions into accepting without qualms a lavish
array of four-letter words in a banal novel, will be quite shocked by their
absence here” (AnLo 4). Nabokov himself is yet more “robust,” deplor-
ing Ulysses, a book he revered, for its “obnoxious, overdone preoccupa-
tion with sex organs” and for the “sexual affairs” which heap “indecency
upon indecency” (qtd. in Appel, AnLo liii). Yet if obscenity represents
one kind of vulgarity, then polite innuendo, like the “decency code”
used by the romance publisher Harlequin in the 1950s (Regis 158),
represents another, one no less offensive to Nabokov. He could certainly
be deftly and tactfully indirect at times, as in the account of meeting
his teenaged love Tamara by night in Speak, Memory (232ff). But, for
the most part, Nabokov’s love of precision applies to descriptions of
sex as much as to descriptions of everything else, as in this account of
twelve- or thirteen-year-old Annabel’s interaction with thirteen-year-old
Humbert:

Her legs, her lovely live legs, were not too close together and when my
hand located what it sought, a dreamy and eerie expression, half-pleasure,
half-pain, came over those childish features. She sat a little higher than I, and
whenever in her solitary ecstasy she was led to kiss me, her head would bend
with a sleepy, soft, dropping movement that was almost woeful, and her bare
knees caught and compressed my wrist, and slackened again. (AnLo 14)
 “OBNOXIOUS PREOCCUPATION WITH SEX ORGANS” 203

This passage is both explicit (the positions and actions of both parties are
clear) and indirect (“my hand located what it sought”), and thus already
goes some way toward solving the problems of representation I outline
above. But when Humbert describes his sexual encounters as an adult with
the child Dolores, the moral stakes are much higher. Nabokov’s task is to
represent precisely what occurs without either arousing the reader, which
would be both vulgar and vicious, or removing all aesthetic satisfaction
from the description. I believe that he accomplishes this very difficult task
in Lolita, at least in part, thanks to his intuitions about the unconscious
processes of perception itself.

To understand Nabokov’s accomplishment, I turn away for the

moment from accounts of sex to a different category of difficult descrip-
tion: descriptions of faces. In an article for Poetics Today, my co-authors
and I suggest that describing faces creates a special difficulty for authors.
Faces are perceived and recognized in a range of ways that differ from
the perception of other objects. In particular, we process faces holistically
rather than one feature at a time (Jajdelska et al. 444ff). Although descrip-
tions of faces, and description in general, might be associated with static
objects, the holistic approach to face perception covers aspects of the face
which involve change, such as the overall emotional expression, or other
manifestations of emotion, such as blushing. In this respect, descriptions of
faces are to some extent comparable with descriptions of movements such
as gestures, especially movements which can be understood to a greater
or lesser extent as involuntary or compulsive rather than intentional, as is
the case in some descriptions of sexual acts. For the purposes of this essay,
then, while I do not assume that there is no distinction between descrip-
tions of faces and descriptions of bodily acts more generally, I suggest that
there is enough in common to support an investigation into perception
of sexual actions on the same grounds as an investigation into perception
of faces.
The intuitive approach to describing a complex object or behavior
might be to provide details so that the reader can assemble as complete a
picture of the object, act, or sequence of acts as possible. Yet this approach
is counterproductive in the case of faces. Indeed, putting the memory of
a face into words, feature by feature, actually reduces the describer’s abil-
ity to recognize that same face in the future (Jajdelska et al. 442–443).
204 E. JAJDELSKA

In the article, we discuss the relationship between imagination, memory,

and perception, and suggest that descriptions of faces which work with,
rather than against, the process of memory and perception are more likely
to be vivid. Holistic descriptions, and descriptions which appeal to the
embodied nature of perception—for example, by including facial change
or movement—are more likely to be vivid than those which catalogue a
face’s static features item by item.
Nabokov proves to be a rich source of descriptions which solve the
potential problem of putting faces into words, either by mimicking per-
ception or by creating vividness through indirect means:

She had been crying after a routine row with her mother and, as had hap-
pened on former occasions, had not wished me to see her swollen eyes: she
had one of those tender complexions that after a good cry get all blurred
and inflamed, and morbidly alluring. I regretted keenly her mistake about
my private aesthetics, for I simply love that tinge of Botticellian pink, that
raw rose about the lips, those wet, matted eyelashes. (AnLo 64)

The first part of the description is holistic; it is a general description of her

complexion as it often appeared, rather than a catalog of individual facial
features. It is also likely to appeal to the embodied aspects of perception,
through the description of physical change (blurring, inflammation, swell-
ing). The second part does identify specific features (“lips” and “eyelashes”)
as well as general ones (“Botticellian pink”), but associates them with quali-
ties which affect the face as a whole (rawness, rosiness, wetness). Nabokov,
therefore, intuitively understands that more detail in descriptions of faces
does not necessarily mean more vividness, and concentrates instead on holis-
tic qualities and on bodily change. A hint of this intuitive knowledge may
lie behind Humbert’s comparison of his memories of Annabel and Dolores:

There are two kinds of visual memory: one when you skilfully recreate an
image in the laboratory of your mind, with your eyes open (and then I
see Annabel in such general terms as: “honey-colored skin,” “thin arms,”
“brown bobbed hair,” “long lashes,” “big bright mouth”); and the other
when you instantly evoke, with shut eyes, on the dark innerside of your
eyelids, the objective, absolutely optical replica of a beloved face, a little
ghost in natural colors (and this is how I see Lolita). (AnLo 11)

The science of face perception had not been established at the time of
Lolita’s composition, so Nabokov shows remarkable intuition here in
 “OBNOXIOUS PREOCCUPATION WITH SEX ORGANS” 205

identifying a contrast between a feature-by-feature method of describ-

ing faces and a holistic approach. Humbert’s memory of Annabel con-
sists of a list of features in “general terms” itemizing different aspects of
her appearance, and especially of her face: skin, hair, lashes and mouth.
This unsatisfactory method is compared to a laboratory, to the attempt
to create something organic by artificial reconstruction. His memory of
Dolores, on the other hand, is holistic and identical with nature itself: an
“absolutely optical replica,” a “beloved face,” a “little ghost in natural
colors.” The feature-by-feature method applied to Annabel is well adapted
to the linear, sequential nature of language, but it is the holistic approach,
conjuring Dolores’s face as a ghost, which is better adapted to the pro-
cess of face perception. Annabel exists in Humbert’s memory in the same
unsatisfactory way that mental images of faces produced by unsatisfactory
descriptions exist in readers’ minds. Dolores’s face, on the other hand, is
as vivid in Humbert’s memory as Nabokov’s own holistic descriptions of
faces often are for his readers.

I turn now to the question of whether Nabokov had comparable intu-

itions about the perception of sexual acts. It is perhaps not surprising that
there is less research available in this field than on the perception of faces
(LeVay and Valente 250). Perceiving a face is one of the first things a
human being does in life (Bruce and Young 252), whereas many, even
most, of us will go through life without once observing other people have
sex. But there is some research on the nature of sexual experience, rather
than perception, which can help us to identify the competing elements of
moral constraint and vivacity in Nabokov’s descriptions in Lolita.
First, it is a peculiarity of sexual states that the intentional and the unin-
tentional, the voluntary and the involuntary, can be hard to untangle.
Some states of arousal are clearly involuntary, and indeed unwelcome at the
wrong place and time. But other sexual bodily actions, though they may
be hard to control, are clearly voluntary; in the wrong context they can,
in fact, be illegal. Distinguishing intentional from unintentional motion
is critical to our interpretation of the emotional states and intentions of
others (Alaerts et al). But in the case of sexual behavior, this process surely
gets more complicated. The context of arousal changes the potential
meaning of any of the given actions involved, so isolating each action from
the overall context of sexualized behavior or sexually aroused perception
206 E. JAJDELSKA

can create a misleading impression. Verbal description involves separating

one action from another in the same way that descriptions of faces tend
to isolate one feature from another. Turning sexualized behavior into a
sequence of actions risks making them absurd, however. To quote again
from the Bad Sex Award winner: “He grasped the side of her hips, pushed
her away and pulled her to him with a slap” (Somerville 75). Accurately
describing the context of arousal in order to avoid such absurdity almost
inevitably leads to a different problem, that of creating arousal in the
reader. One study suggests that male viewers of video clips grow aroused
to the extent to which they recognize the actions in the clips as erotic:
“the response of the mirror neuron system may not only code for the
motor correlates of observed actions, but also for autonomic correlates of
these actions” (Mouras et al). The mirror neuron system is a term used to
describe the way certain brain regions not only participate in the prepara-
tion for a bodily action, such as reaching for an object or smiling, but also
participate in the perception and recognition of another individual making
the same action (Carr et al; Gallese, “Manifold” and “Roots”; Rizzolatti
and Craighero; Dapretto et  al). In the case of this research, the degree
to which the mirror neuron system was activated was correlated with the
degree to which the subject was aroused (Mouras et al 1148). And since
sexual acts are usually more likely to be experienced than perceived, the
mirror neuron system in this case might even support an effect similar to
watching one’s own sexual actions, recalling V.  S. Ramachandran’s rub-
ber hand illusions, demonstrating an ambiguity between perception and
proprioception (Ramachandran et  al). So representing actions in such a
way that we perceive them to be sexual may be difficult or impossible to
separate from arousing the reader.
However, the mirror neuron system’s ability to identify erotic behavior
and thereby cause arousal is not the only aspect of sexual experience which
is relevant here. Sex belongs to a family of pleasures involving anticipa-
tion, and this may provide an indirect route for putting sex into words,
one which could combine recognition of the behavior as sexual and, for
at least one party, arousing, without arousing the reader him or herself.
Anne Blood and Robert Zatorre identify the brain structures involved in
“intensely pleasurable responses to music” as those “known to be active
in response to other euphoria-inducing stimuli, such as food, sex, and
drugs of abuse” (Blood and Zatorre 11818). In particular, the relevant
pleasures are organized around anticipation—for example, through an
expectation of reward. Food, music, and drugs are not affected by the
 “OBNOXIOUS PREOCCUPATION WITH SEX ORGANS” 207

problems of representation which burden sex; there are no prizes for bad
descriptions of eating, listening to music, or using drugs. But their fam-
ily resemblance to sex, as pleasures structured around anticipation, offers
Nabokov a mechanism to let us recognize Humbert’s feelings and actions
without being aroused by them.
In this passage, Humbert describes his ecstatic frustrations on the beach
with Annabel, as they struggled to find privacy and consummation:

We would sprawl all morning in a petrified paroxysm of desire, and take

advantage of every blessed quirk in space and time to touch each other: her
hand, half-hidden in the sand, would creep toward me, its slender brown
fingers sleepwalking nearer and nearer; then, her opalescent knee would start
on a long cautious journey; sometimes a chance rampart built by younger
children granted us sufficient concealment to graze each other’s salty lips;
these incomplete contacts drove our healthy and inexperienced young bod-
ies to such a state of exasperation that not even the cool blue water, under
which we still clawed at each other, could bring relief. (AnLo 12)

Using the oblique and unexpected approach to his subject that arguably
characterizes many vivid descriptions (Scarry 89–99), Nabokov first identi-
fies and then preempts the reader’s potential for arousal, exploiting rather
than evading the inherent problems with descriptions of sex. The impres-
sion of fragmented body parts, acting independently of one another in the
absence of the coherent context of arousal, is exaggerated, not minimized.
Annabel’s hand, for example, is disconnected from her body by being
“half-hidden in the sand.” It also has an agency independent of the whole
person, creeping toward Humbert apparently of its own accord. The hand
itself is further fragmented as the fingers, again endowed with agency,
sleepwalk toward Humbert. The knee, again, is both detached and an
agent, embarking on a journey. The children act as coherent wholes only
to “graze each other’s salty lips.” The tactile elements of this description
remind the reader not of sexual contact, but of other kinds of exaspera-
tion satisfied by flesh meeting flesh—such as itching—as lips are grazed,
bodies are cooled, and the children claw at one another in search of relief
as though they were afflicted with chicken pox rather than carnal desires.
Nabokov preempts the alternate dangers of arousal and absurdity in
this description, but it is still recognizable as an account of sexual desire
in all its complexity and force. He achieves this feat by exploiting the fam-
ily resemblance between pleasures founded on anticipation (Blood and
208 E. JAJDELSKA

Zatorre). The passage is structured around furtive, goal-directed move-

ments across space. The children are in a “petrified paroxysm,” suggesting
that accomplishing the goal of crossing space is dangerous, adding to the
sense of anticipating the journey’s end. They take advantage of “every
blessed quirk in space and time”; parts of their bodies creep, sleepwalk, or
go on “a long cautious journey” before they finally graze behind ramparts
and claw under water. The central metaphor is movement through space.
It could be stopped at any moment, but will produce an intense pleasure
if completed successfully. The description therefore combines elements
which deter sexual arousal but not sexual recognition, using the anticipa-
tion associated with sex and other pleasures.
In this passage, the two participants can be seen as equally innocent
(or, perhaps, guilty). That is not the case, however, in sexual descriptions
where one participant (Humbert) is corrupt and the other (Dolores) is
either a victim or simply unaware of his scrutiny, as in this instance:

There my beauty lay down on her stomach, showing me, showing the thou-
sand eyes wide open in my eyed blood, her slightly raised shoulder blades,
and the bloom along the incurvation of her spine, and the swellings of her
tense narrow nates clothed in black, and the seaside of her schoolgirl thighs.
Silently, the seventh-grader enjoyed her green-red-blue comics. She was the
loveliest nymphet green-red-blue Priap himself could think up. (AnLo 42)

As with the problem of arousal, Nabokov turns the issue of synchronic-

ity—of splitting a single moment of sexual arousal into sequential seg-
ments of prose—into an advantage. He uses the fragmentation of itemized
description to split Dolores into two beings. One is a schoolgirl stretched
out on her stomach reading comics, oblivious to the narrative gaze. The
other is the nymphet of Humbert’s imagination, the demonic figure he
discerns in (or imposes on) the real girl. The first is “silently enjoying her
comics”; the second is conjured from discrete parts of the body acting
independently of her will, “showing” to the equally fragmented “thou-
sand eyes wide open” in Humbert’s “eyed blood” her shoulder blades,
spine, nates, and thighs. This demonic self is monstrous and mirrors the
monstrous account of his own desiring self as a “green-red-blue” Priap,
whose colors mimic the colors of the comics read by the real Dolores, just
as the newspaper read by the real Humbert hides movements that accom-
pany his arousal, “rocking slightly under my newspaper.” Just as Nabokov
makes a virtue of the problem of synchronicity, so he exploits the potential
 “OBNOXIOUS PREOCCUPATION WITH SEX ORGANS” 209

for obscenity in an itemized description—that is, the detachment of arous-

ing body parts from a unified person—by turning the desiring Humbert
into a monster. The monstrosity arises only partially from the reference to
Priap; it also comes from bodily distortion, from the substitution of the
swollen green-red-blue penis for the whole man, from the multiplication
of eyes, and from the confusion of eyes with blood. The potential for
obscenity in descriptions of sexual arousal becomes an asset, not a liability.
It allows Nabokov’s reader to recognize the arousal without sharing it,
to see Dolores simultaneously as an object of erotic beauty in Humbert’s
eyes and as an unself-conscious child in her own. And, as an added benefit,
the reference to Priap could also shield a child reader who had mistakenly
been allowed access to the book.
As the passage continues, Nabokov again uses the structure of antici-
patory pleasure to represent Humbert’s desire without either producing
the kind of unintentional absurdity celebrated by the Bad Sex Awards, or
risking the arousal of his reader:

As I looked on, through prismatic layers of light, dry-lipped, focusing my

lust and rocking slightly under my newspaper, I felt that my perception of
her, if properly concentrated upon, might be sufficient to have me attain a
beggar’s bliss immediately; but, like some predator that prefers a moving
prey to a motionless one, I planned to have this pitiful attainment coin-
cide with one of the various girlish movements she made now and then as
she read, such as trying to scratch the middle of her back and revealing a
stippled armpit—but fat Haze suddenly spoiled everything by turning to me
and asking me for a light. (AnLo 42–43)

The passage about Annabel mapped sexual anticipation onto a perilous

journey. Here, the structure of anticipation and reward is mapped onto a
feat of concentration requiring sustained effort, vulnerable to external dis-
tractions which will frustrate its goal. Humbert suggests that his orgasm
will finally happen when Dolores moves. But he also specifies that it will be
a “girlish” movement, such as scratching her back in a way that reveals her
armpit. The intentional part of the action—scratching her back—is sepa-
rated from the unintentional and erotic part—revealing the armpit. Her
action is simultaneously non-sexual from the point of view of the reader
and arousing for Humbert himself. The interruption from “fat Haze” is
as abrupt for the reader as it is for Humbert, but in a different way. For
Humbert, the journey of arousal has been interrupted. For the reader, a
210 E. JAJDELSKA

description of prolonged concentration and narrative suspense has been

interrupted. Humbert’s experience and the reader’s follow parallel lines
of tension and anticipation, but where Humbert experiences arousal, the
reader experiences a more generalized anticipation and then interruption.
Beyond these highly skilled and subtle maneuvers of perception, imagi-
nation, and language, it can be seen that Nabokov’s preferred temperature
for art was not always as “low” as he claimed. He takes care to avoid the
much despised emotions of “human interest,” denying his readers, for
the most part, the pleasures of easy compassion for a victim, of the vicari-
ous sense of virtue aroused by the wrong kind of pity. But there is surely
compassion in the way he protects Dolores, Humbert’s victim, from other
kinds of degradation, such as being described in ways that could arouse
desire or vulgar laughter in the reader at the movements of her body in
sex, or in sexually arousing acts. Nabokov protects Dolores from our pity
as well as our arousal or our mockery; he also protects us from ourselves.
He does this by representing sex so that the descriptions are recognizable
and aesthetically satisfying, but not arousing or obscene. In doing so, he
makes it even harder for us to maintain a distinction between aesthetic and
ethical responses to his work.2

NOTES
1. Boyd has illustrated the rich patterns of allusion that lend an allegorical
quality to Ada’s representations of sex in “Ada, the Bog and the Garden.”
2. My thanks to an anonymous peer reviewer for several helpful suggestions.

WORKS CITED
Alaerts, Kaat, Evelien Nackaerts, Pieter Meyns, Stephan P. Swinnen, and Nicole
Wenderoth. “Action and Emotion Recognition from Point Light Displays: An
Investigation of Gender Differences.” PLoS ONE 6.6 (2011). Accessed at
http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0020989.
Blood, Anne J. and Robert J. Zatorre. “Intensely Pleasurable Responses to Music
Correlate with Activity in Brain Regions Implicated in Reward and Emotion.”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Science 98.20 (2001): 11818–11823.
Boyd, Brian. “Ada, the Bog and the Garden: or Straw, Fluff and Peat: Sources and
Places in Ada.” Nabokov Studies 8 (2004): 107–133.
———. Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years. London: Chatto and Windus,
1990.
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Bruce, Vicki and Andrew Young. In the Eye of the Beholder: The Science of Face
Perception. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Carr, Laurie, Marco Iacoboni, Marie-Charlotte Dubeau, John C. Mazziotta, and
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———. “The Roots of Empathy: The Shared Manifold Hypothesis and the Neural
Basis of Intersubjectivity.” Psychopathology 36 (2003): 171–80.
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Theatre, Fiction, Relics and Sexuality. Oxford: Blackwell, 1997.
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“Crying, Moving and Keeping It Whole: What Makes Literary Descriptions of
Faces Vivid?” Poetics Today 31.3 (2010): 433–463.
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———. The Gift. [Dar.] 1937–1938. Trans. Michael Scammell and Dmitri
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———. Pale Fire. 1962. New York, Vintage, 1991.
———. The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov. Ed. Dmitri Nabokov. New York: Knopf,
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 CHAPTER 13

Modern Mimesis

Michael Wood

“Il faut être absolument moderne.” We have heard this cry many times, in
its literal, canonical form in Arthur Rimbaud’s Une Saison en enfer, in its
multifarious other spoken and unspoken forms. We must be modern, this
is our destiny, we don’t have any choice. And we must be not just modern,
but absolutely modern. The context in Rimbaud suggests ruthlessness and
an embrace of a harsh reality, a refusal of old visions.1
Rimbaud assumes that we have heard this cry’s imperative, but also asks
whether we have heard its difficulties and disavowals, picked up its helpless
submission to fashion. We must be modern, he is also sardonically saying,
because if we are not we shall be nobody, we shall be abandoned, parked
on some historical shelf no one ever visits.
Nabokov is not a modern writer in this particular and multiple sense:
he is not anxious enough, not strident enough. He doesn’t have to try to
be modern, or want to be modern. But modernity is one of his subjects,
and his characters are irredeemably, insistently modern—whether they are
rethinking the possibilities of murder, as so many of them are; learning
the latest slang, as Dolores Haze diligently does; or aspiring regally to be
above or beyond mere time and custom, as Van and Ada Veen do.
Nabokov’s attention to self-advertised modernity is a moral concern,
almost always accompanied by judgment. We could place his uses of the word

M. Wood ()
Departments of English and Comparative Literature, Princeton University,
Princeton, New Jersey, USA

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 213

M. Rodgers, S.E. Sweeney (eds.), Nabokov and the Question
of Morality, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-59221-7_13
214 M. WOOD

“modern” on a rising scale of distaste, although there seems to be a mild

rebuke even in phrases that sound neutral, like “modern fiction” (Lo 233),
“modern drama” (Lo 116), “modern thought” (Pnin 120), “modern sci-
ence” (Lo 140), or “modern furniture” (Lo 40). “Modern education” (Pnin
140) and “modern co-education” (Lo 151) are both deplorable, and we shall
certainly have to worry about the “modern child” (Lo 53), who is subject to
“modern nonsense” (Lo 193), or even “modern atrocity” (Pnin 148). The
phrase “modern conventions” (Lo 2) begins to look like an oxymoron, and
the evocation of “some phony modern poem” (PF 46) surely contains one
adjective too many. Of course we realize, as John Shade reminds us, that
“your modern architect/ Is in collusion with psychoanalysts” (PF 94), and
we know what to expect when we need the restroom: “nice, modern liquid
soap in the nice, modern, almost odorless lavatory” (PF 274).
The frequent occurrence of the term suggests something inescapable
about the condition. Yet it is not all-encompassing: it shares time and
space with relics and anachronisms; not everyone or everything we find in
the modern world is modern, even by the broadest modes of dating and
definition. And not every aspect of modernity incurs Nabokov's scorn.
A writer who wishes to represent this world will have to engage with
the modern, as well as with whatever forms of resistance or exception
to it seem significant. And a writer who wishes to invent that world, in
Nabokov’s sense, will have to do more than copy it. Like the twentieth-
century writers he most admired, Nabokov believed that reality was too
serious (and elusive) a matter to be left to realism. The great realists knew
this too, but that is another critical story.

How does one represent, or invent, a world—modern or not—whose

chief characteristic is shabby fakery? What would be the writer’s sense of
the morality of such a task? Of its feasibility? One might say, in a meta-
phor that combines a form of Gnosticism with the art of the movies, that
the whole construct is the work of a deputy, doing what he can in the
absence of his boss. This is what Nabokov suggests throughout his story
“The Assistant Producer,” and briefly elsewhere—in “Conversation Piece
1945,” for example, where the narrator tries to “convince [himself] that
these were real people and not a Punch-and-Judy show” (590). “That vile
script was enacted in reality,” we read in the former work, meaning that
an overripe scene from a bad film actually happened in the material world
(“Assistant” 547). Worse still, compounding the confusion, “German film
 MODERN MIMESIS 215

companies” have hired “totally unreal people—to represent ‘real’ audi-

ences in the pictures” (551). A little later we hear of “the same unreal
nature” of this audience (552). This comic combination of entertainment
history and epistemological assertion takes a little unpacking. The peo-
ple are Russian émigrés whose unreality is not a question of fact, but of
political relevance: their “only hope and profession was their past” (551).
They represent within a film the supposedly actual audiences of fictional
events—and they may, for that matter, although Nabokov’s narrator does
not openly say this, become the real audience for a real film, however
fictional its contents. At the end of the story, the trope moves in this
direction with the phrase “Welcome reality” (559), referring to “the solid
world” of “the sober night” outside the intoxicated cinema. This would
be the place where the politically unreal people live their real biological
lives. Or where the real biological people live their unreal political lives.
Either formulation, any formulation, will do as long as it recognizes that
both reality and unreality are here to stay—that both are real, we might
say, if the proposition were not too dizzying.
This is one of the ways in which Nabokov tackles the modern without
being modern himself in any obvious and deleterious sense. His sense
of the world is thoroughly perspectival: everything is seen by someone.
But perspectivism is not relativism, as several philosophers have insisted.2
Reality is always a matter of perspective for us, but that is not all it is.
We know reality is there, even when we are not looking at it—because
we crash into it through not looking. Nabokov makes jokes about “the
solid world” when thinking in perspectival mode—solid for whom, solid
in what way?—but he has the sturdiest, most anti-modern conviction that
the world beyond our perspectives is just what it is.
In “That in Aleppo Once,” perspectives and realities are juggled in a very
telling way. A man composes a letter to a friend, a fellow writer, recounting the
disappearance of his newlywed wife after the fall of France in 1940; his frantic
attempts to find her; his success; his losing her again. None of this makes
sense if he doesn’t have a wife, but he insists, not once but twice, that he is
“positive […] that my wife never existed” (560), “had never existed at all”
(567). What he calls his “mangled romance”—was his wife unfaithful to him
during the time they were separated?—has become a zone of “deep mist,”
meaning not so much invisibility as unreality. “Life had been real before, life
will be real from now on, I hope” (567). What are we to make of this?
We might say that the man’s assertion of his wife’s nonexistence is his
attempt to excise her from his life—a desperate denial, and therefore a
proof, of her existence and his own sense of jealousy and loss. Or is it that
216 M. WOOD

he knows she is real, but can’t make her real to himself even as a memory,
can only construct and reconstruct a mystery? The allusion to Othello in
the title, picked up from the man’s narrative itself (“It may all end in
Aleppo if I am not careful”), half-hints that he may have killed his wife or
wanted to kill her, or perhaps, more literally, that he has killed or wants to
kill someone else, just as Othello, having smothered Desdemona, remem-
bers having stabbed a Turk. Or is the suggestion simpler still: possible
suicide, since Othello remembers his act in Aleppo only to turn it against
himself, “thus,” as he says (Shakespeare 5.2.66).
Whatever the man’s future, his pain is real, and would be so even if his
wife were imaginary. This is not to say that her existence or nonexistence
don’t matter, only that they are questions in their own right, not an epis-
temological solution for him. This is how the real regularly appears in
Nabokov’s fiction: it comes and goes and it is always there. A similar usage
of this trope appears in Pale Fire. “Spiritually he did not exist,” we are told
of Gradus, an assertion with complicated layerings beneath or behind it.
Even if Gradus is only an imaginary back-formation from the criminal Jack
Grey, he is still, within the Zemblan fiction, within the very world where
he is said to have no spiritual existence, real enough to try assassinate a
king and to kill a poet instead. “His weapon was a real one,” Kinbote says,
“and his quarry a highly developed human being” (PF 278). In fact, in
every version of the narrative of Pale Fire, no matter how fantastic or ratio-
nalized, John Shade is shot, and his “reasonable” certainty that he will be
alive tomorrow proves to be desperately unfounded. “Figments” can kill,
as Kinbote himself suggests (PF 302).
Reality in Nabokov’s fiction almost never presents itself without dis-
guise or delusion or madness. This means not that mimesis disappears,
but that for him it is rarely straightforward imitation. It loses its sense of
mimicry, but retains all its implications of (indirect) representation, just as,
say, music does in Aristotle. We divine the reality of this fiction not by a
rigorous skepticism, as we reach the meanings of so much modern writing,
but by a kind of faith in Nabokov’s project—a belief that what lies behind
all the obliquity is not more obliquity, but something as irrefutable as dis-
tress, or what John Shade calls “the tears of all ill-treated human beings,
throughout the hopelessness of all time” (PF 217). We learn how to read
for this “something” by paying close attention to any of Nabokov’s works.
“Signs and Symbols” and “The Vane Sisters” are good places to start, but
Pale Fire, in some of its most eloquent and enigmatic passages, offers a
fully developed theory of such reading.
 MODERN MIMESIS 217

Here is Kinbote’s note to line 991 of John Shade’s poem:

We are absurdly accustomed to the miracle of a few written signs being able
to contain immortal imagery, involutions of thought, new worlds with live
people, speaking, weeping, laughing. We take it for granted so simply that in
a sense, by the very act of brutish routine acceptance, we undo the work of
the ages. […] I wish you to gasp not only at what you read but at the miracle
of its being read … Although I am capable, through long dabbling in blue
magic, of imitating any prose in the world […] I do not consider myself
a true artist, save in one matter: I can do what only a true artist can do—
pounce upon the forgotten butterfly of revelation, wean myself abruptly
from the habit of things, see the web of the world and the warp and the weft
of that web. Solemnly I weighed in my hand what I was carrying under my
left armpit, and for a moment I found myself enriched with an indescribable
amazement as if informed that fireflies were making decodable signals on
behalf of stranded spirits, or that a bat was writing a legible tale of torture in
the bruised and branded sky.
I was holding all Zembla pressed to my heart. (PF 289)

Kinbote’s suggestion is that reading and writing are aspects of a single

miracle, which rests on what “a few written signs” are able to do. Written
signs do not have to do this, and often do not. The miracle is that they
can, and that we can see that they have done it when they do. It’s not
being able to read that is the miracle, although Kinbote expresses hor-
ror at the thought of our forgetting how to do it. Our being able to
read allows us to attend to the miracle when it occurs, when the written
signs offer us immortal imagery, involutions of thought and new worlds
with live people. One might think the writer would appear in this para-
graph somewhere as the orchestrator of these signs, the conjuror of
worlds from marks on paper, but he doesn’t. Or else he appears only as
a grammatical ghost, hinted at as the source of the “few written signs.”
However, Kinbote’s focus is not finally on the miracle, but on our miss-
ing it and his celebrating it. This is what he means by saying he is an artist:
he knows how to shake off “the habit of things” that grips the rest of us.
Kinbote probably doesn’t know he is paraphrasing Viktor Shklovsky,3 but
he could have found a similar thought in Bergson, and characteristically
he is both saying something important and slightly getting in the way of
that something, fussing about it a little too much. As always in this text, an
218 M. WOOD

emotional and mental disturbance hovers around our narrator—even here,

even if the sense of disturbance is faint. It gets clearer when he moves from
the plain assertion of the missed miracle—the miracle that he manages to
keep not missing—to a new iteration of what the miracle feels like. There
would be many ways of saying what the butterfly of revelation resembles,
but what has Kinbote chosen? Stranded spirits and a tale of torture. And
the examples are not now examples of writing at all, but of fantastic forms
of not writing, as-if writing. We are to understand the miracle not as being
able to read—to read of new worlds and the rest—but as being able to
imagine legibility everywhere, to imagine something like legibility itself.
The fireflies are making signals, visible signs in code; the bat is not just
writing a tale of torture for its bat community, but writing a legible tale of
torture, a tale of torture that we can read. Because this is what reading is
like for Kinbote: access to a secret language that is everywhere. Or rather,
not having this access, when the language was all around us, is what not
being able to read would be like.
We note that Kinbote’s language has become increasingly precise and
eloquent as well as troubled, and that his large claim about written signs,
while still sound and engaging, now looks rather bland. The immortal
imagery, the involuted thought, the new worlds with live people—let’s
say, just to provide examples, the written signs left for us by Shakespeare,
Spinoza, and Tolstoy—now seem like mere verbal gestures compared with
the signaling fireflies and the bat testifying about torture.
What has happened? Kinbote the theorist of reading has become Kinbote
the extravagant reader, the man who reads his own story, or metaphori-
cal versions of his own story, in the evening light; and he has also become
Kinbote the writer, the very artist he says he is not. What we are reading
now, what the quoted passage offers to us, is not just written signs, but writ-
ing itself, taking place before our eyes. Taking place twice—figuratively, in
the work of the fireflies and the bat, and literally, in the case of Kinbote, with
the actual prose on the page. The writing of pain or distress has displaced
the generalized memory of reading, or the generalized principle of reading.
There is more. (With Nabokov, there is always more.) Why is Kinbote
so distressed when he is supposed to be happy, why does what he identifies
as a miracle lead him into such darkness? We pick up something of what is
going on in the careful clumsiness Nabokov lends him. He and Shade are
walking from Shade’s house to Kinbote’s. Shade has all but finished Pale
Fire, the index cards are in an envelope that Kinbote is carrying, and indeed
it is this package that has set off the meditation we have been looking at.
 MODERN MIMESIS 219

Here’s what we get just before the fireflies: “Solemnly I weighed in my

hand what I was carrying under my left armpit.” The physical picture here
is either elusive or burlesque. Could such an action be done “solemnly”?
(Imagine trying to get an actor to perform this movement. No, no, that’s
not solemn—that looks as if you’re scratching yourself or trying to find
your wallet.) And, of course, this ungainly visual contrast to Kinbote’s ver-
bal mastery is just a tiny mirror of the larger incongruity in the situation.
He is not holding all Zembla pressed to his heart; he is holding a draft of
Shade’s all but Zembla-less Pale Fire, and everything that he eloquently
says about reading is untrue about what he hopes to read. Or rather, it is
true, but not for him; or perhaps, not yet for him.

With such obliquity and disappointment in mind, we can turn to another

passage:

There was something else, something I was to realize only when I read
Pale Fire, or rather reread it after the first hot mist of bitter disappoint-
ment had cleared before my eyes. I am thinking of lines 261–267 in which
Shade describes his wife. At the moment of his painting that poetical por-
trait, the sitter was twice the age of Queen Disa. I do not wish to be vulgar
in dealing with these delicate matters but the fact remains that sixty-year-
old Shade is lending here a well-conserved coeval the ethereal and eternal
aspects she retains, or should retain, in his kind noble heart. Now the curi-
ous thing about it is that Disa at thirty[…] bore a singular resemblance not,
of course, to Mrs. Shade as she was when I met her, but to the idealized and
stylized picture painted by the poet in those lines of Pale Fire. Actually it
was idealized and stylized only in regard to the older woman; in regard to
Queen Disa, as she was that afternoon on that blue terrace, it represented a
plain unretouched likeness. I trust the reader appreciates the strangeness of
this, because if he does not, there is no sense in writing poems, or notes to
poems, or anything at all. (PF 207)

What exactly is the strangeness here? That Disa should resemble Sybil
Shade as she was when younger? That a portrait of one person in a poem
should be a portrait of another as she is in life? That Shade should have
found for the image of his wife the language that matched, of all the
people in the world, the image of Kinbote’s wife? That Kinbote should see
this portrait, this “plain unretouched likeness,” as he puts it, here?
220 M. WOOD

Or is it strange that a poet’s actual wife should resemble the no doubt

imaginary wife of his neighbor? Has Kinbote borrowed the resemblance
from the poem, rather than found it there? Or, wilder still, how can the
imaginary wife of the imaginary king of an imaginary country resemble
anyone, and what is there that Botkin (if this is Botkin) could find strange
in the notion that she does—because, after all, he has made her up, with
or without the resemblance to Sybil.
We can reduce the strangeness a little by looking at the lines Kinbote cites
from the poem, and this move helps us to see more clearly where we are. But,
obviously, the point is not finally to reduce the strangeness but to understand
it as Kinbote sees it, and to get some idea of why he is so desperate about it,
why our failure to grasp it should make the writing of poems or commentary
“or anything at all” so perfectly senseless. Here is the passage in question:

Your profile has not changed. The glistening teeth

Biting the careful lip; the shade beneath
The eye from the long lashes; the peach down
Rimming the cheekbone; the dark silky brown
Of hair brushed up from temple and from nape;
The very naked neck; the Persian shape
Of nose and eyebrow, you have kept it all— (PF 42)

Elegant Popian lines, but not very specific. Long eyelashes, a certain
hairdo, whatever a “Persian shape/ Of nose and eyebrow” is. The “care-
ful lip” perhaps suggests a style of personality, something in the face
that might evoke the person more fully than accumulating documentary
detail.4 Not everyone has glistening teeth or peach down on the skin. Still,
we do have to recognize such a picture, that is, to already know the person
being evoked, as Shade knows Sybil and Kinbote knows (or has invented)
Disa. The portrait could represent several, if not many, women. The initial
strangeness, really, is that Kinbote should have found anything precise or
localized enough in the lines to have recognized his wife at all, let alone
see here a “plain unretouched likeness.” His experience offers a sort of
tribute, then, to the double miracle of signs: the evocation of a live person
in a new world, to borrow Kinbote’s terms from the earlier quotation, and
the act of reading that finds this person in the script.
This must be, in part, what Kinbote finds strange and wants us to find
strange. But why is he so agitated, and why does the idea of our under-
standing the strangeness make such a difference to him? The tone is the
 MODERN MIMESIS 221

same one he reaches in the other passage, but it does not start out that
way. He begins there with a meditative claim about signs and reading, a
general truth. Here the general truth seems at risk, a provocation of panic.
What Kinbote is saying, I think, is that writing—the emphasis is clearly
on writing as well as reading now—is always a matter of making such
transfers possible, and that reading is what effects the transfer, in this case
of Sybil into Disa, or into whomever we need her to be. To put it luridly, if
we can’t find our own friends and family in a poem, whatever names they
may bear in the text, or if we can’t read life itself in such a way as to con-
vert the man other people call Jack Grey, a local American murderer, into
Jakob Gradus, an envoy from Zembla, then there is no sense in writing,
or in life. The writer—poet or God or fictional mover of worlds—doesn’t
make these transfers, only permits them to happen, makes them possible.
But he must permit them, not close them off.

Of course, what I have just described sounds like a model of bad reading,
and that is what it is. But if we think of Kinbote’s evocation of Gradus
as a metaphor at the end of the novel—“he will ring at my door—a bigger,
more respectable, more competent Gradus” (PF 302)—and his apparent
half-knowledge of the novel he himself is in—“I may […] cook up a stage
play, an old-fashioned melodrama with three principles [sic]: a lunatic who
intends to kills an imaginary king, another lunatic who imagines himself
to be that king, and a distinguished old poet who stumbles by chance
into the line of fire, and perishes in the clash between the two figments”
(PF 302)—then we realize that behind Nabokov’s mockery of Kinbote,
behind the obsessed commentator who can find Zembla in the purloined
poem only by dreaming it up in his notes, is an eerie and difficult insight.
There is no theoretical or methodological difference between good and
bad reading, only a local, empirical one. Or a moral difference, if you like,
a question of scruple, not whether the imagination is used but how it is
used. Both good and bad readers proceed by analogy, animating written
signs by seeing links to them in their own lives. The crazy, desperate con-
nections that Kinbote tangibly fails to make are hyperbolic inverse models
of what Nabokov expects readers to find—of what he found for himself
in annotating Eugene Onegin, for example, where he clearly thought that
he played the role of Kinbote too. As Duncan White says, there is a sense
in which we are all Kinbote, or can be Kinbote at times; Eric Naiman
222 M. WOOD

suggests, however, that through Kinbote’s hermeneutic antics “this novel

[…] manages to free the reader from interpretive anxiety” (118). This is
perhaps not entirely true—if only because nothing will entirely free us—
but the point is a good one. As I have suggested, if we can’t read badly,
we can’t read well, because we shan’t really know what reading is. And we
shall, to shift the terrain a little, imagine that we are grasping meaning,
when in fact we are only failing to grasp the principle of reference.
Although neither Kinbote nor Nabokov will ever confess to it, a good
deal of modern philosophical and linguistic theory lurks in their thought.
I have mentioned Shklovsky, and we may recall Saussure too. But the
linguistic sign is not arbitrary or unmotivated in this context, and the
strangeness is not so much estrangement as a form of dispossession or
takeover. “Your profile has not changed […] you have kept it all.” “You”
is Sybil Shade if John Shade is talking; Disa, if Kinbote chooses to ven-
triloquize the lines; someone else, if we choose to apply them to a friend.
That is how pronouns work. We often confuse meaning and reference in
this respect because ordinary language doesn’t always need to distinguish
them. “That means you” is a way of saying, “that refers to you”; but that
isn’t what “you” means. Our names, for example, are our own, but they
are also often the names of others. The name itself is just a possibility of
reference, a candidate for connection to one person or another.
This, Nabokov is reminding us, is how written signs work. Think of the
many games with names in Lolita. There is a great deal to be said about this
question of shifting reference—I’ve come to believe it helps us to be a lot
clearer about the relation of literature to history than we often are—but I’ll
concentrate for now on one particular use of it in Nabokov, which lingers
everywhere in the notion of transfer, or analogical reading, as he sees it.
This use consistently suggests that the transposable figure, person or place,
not only has all kinds of possible counterparts within a fiction—every Sybil
could become Disa, so to speak—but will ultimately have a real-life refer-
ence outside the fiction, unknown, shadowy, but repeatedly implied. This is
how Gradus, having taken over from Grey, becomes death itself. It is how
Dolores Haze comes to have a real name that only rhymes with Haze; how
Humbert Humbert has an actual name we shall never know; how Humbert
himself can tell us, when he has located the house of Dolores’s husband
Dick, that he is not going very far for his pseudonyms—“his address was, let
me see, 10 Killer Street” (Lo 305). The pseudonym is, in a sense, Kinbote’s
principle—there is nothing that can’t be taken as a pseudonym, nothing
that can’t be reread through a change of name. And Nabokov’s principle,
 MODERN MIMESIS 223

although not Kinbote’s, is that every pseudonym, by definition, disguises

a reality, just as Kinbote hides a Botkin, even if the disguises are of varying
success and some are so perfect that they suggest nothing of the reality at
all—except that it exists.

NOTES
1. “Car je puis dire que la victoire m’est acquise: les grincements de dents, les
sifflements de feu, les soupirs empestés se modèrent. Tous les souvenirs immondes
s’effacent. Mes derniers regrets détalent. […]
“Il faut être absolument moderne.
“Point de cantiques : tenir le pas gagné. Dure nuit! le sang séché fume sur ma
face, et je n’ai rien derrière moi, que cet horrible arbrisseau! […]
“Et à l’aurore, armés d’une ardente patience, nous entrerons aux splendides
villes.”
“For I can say that victory is mine: grinding teeth, hissing fire, pestilential
sighs are on the wane. All vile memories dissolve. My last regrets make
themselves scarce. […]
“It is necessary to be absolutely modern.
“No hymns of thanksgiving; yield not one inch. A tough night! Dried
blood smokes on my face and there is nothing behind me now save that
small terrible tree! […]
“And at dawn, armed with scorching patience, we shall enter the cities of
splendor.” (Rimbaud 252–253)
2. See, for example, Nehamas and Clark.
3. See Shklovsky, “Art as Technique.”
4. See the interesting article by Jajdelska et al.

WORKS CITED
Clark, Maudemarie. Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1990.
Jajdelska, Elspeth, Christopher Butler, Steve Kelly, Katie Overy, and Allan McNeill.
“Crying, Moving, and Keeping It Whole: What Makes Literary Description of
Faces Vivid?” Poetics Today 31.3 (2010): 433–463.
Nabokov, Vladimir. “The Assistant Producer.” 1943. Stories 542–555.
———. “Conversation Piece, 1945.” 1945. Stories 583–593.
———. Lolita. 1955. New York: Vintage, 1997.
———. Pale Fire. 1962. New York: Vintage, 1989.
———. Pnin. 1957. New York: Vintage, 1989.
224 M. WOOD

———. The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov. Ed. Dmitri Nabokov. New York: Knopf,
1995.
———. “That in Aleppo Once.” 1943. Stories 556–564.
Naiman, Eric. Nabokov, Perversely. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010.
Nehamas, Alexander. Nietzsche: Life as Literature. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1985.
Rimbaud, Arthur. Une Saison en Enfer. Collected Poems. Trans. Martin Sorrell.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.
Shklovsky, Viktor. “Art as Technique.” Russian Formalism. Ed. Lee T. Lemon and
Marion J. Reiss. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965. 3–24.
White, Duncan. Nabokov’s Bibliopoetics. Ph.D. diss. University of Oxford, 2011.
 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Gennady Barabtarlo, Professor of Russian at the University of Missouri, has writ-

ten a number of books and articles on topics ranging from Pushkin and Tiutchev
to Solzhenitsyn and especially Nabokov, concentrating mostly on his artistic means
and ends. He has translated three of Nabokov’s novels and all of his English short
stories into Russian. Barabtarlo has also published original poetry and prose (col-
lected, in part, in a 1998 book, In Every Place). His most recent book came out
in 2011, in Russia, under the title Sochinenie Nabokova, which could be trans-
lated, depending on the angle of view, as “Nabokov’s Composition,” “Nabokov’s
Syntax,” or “Composing Nabokov.”
Julian Connolly is Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the
University of Virginia. He attended Harvard University (A.B. 1972, M.A. 1974,
Ph.D. 1977). He is the author of Ivan Bunin (1982), Nabokov’s Early Fiction:
Patterns of Self and Other (1992), The Intimate Stranger: Meetings with the Devil
in Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature (2001), A Reader’s Guide to Nabokov’s
Lolita (2009), and Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov (2013). Connolly also
edited the volumes Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading: A Course Companion
(1997), Nabokov and His Fiction: New Perspectives (1999), and The Cambridge
Companion to Nabokov (2005). He has written over 80 articles on nineteenth- and
twentieth-century Russian literature.
Leland de la Durantaye is Professor of Literature at Claremont McKenna
College. He is the author of Style is Matter: The Moral Art of Vladimir Nabokov
(2007), Giorgio Agamben: A Critical Introduction (2009), and Beckett’s Art of
Mismaking (2016), as well as articles on modern literature and philosophy.

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 225

M. Rodgers, S.E. Sweeney (eds.), Nabokov and the Question
of Morality, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-59221-7
226 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Jacqueline Hamrit holds a B.A. from the University of Montpellier, France,

and spent two years in the USA as a teaching assistant, first at Mount Holyoke
College and then at the University of California, Davis, where she earned an M.A.
in French. In 1990, she secured the agrégation and was recruited by the University
of Lille, where she received a doctorate (with a dissertation on “Boundaries and
Limits in Nabokov’s Work”) and now teaches English literature. Hamrit has pub-
lished several articles on Nabokov and Derrida as well as a book on Authorship in
Nabokov’s Prefaces (2014). Her research interests include the relationship between
literature and philosophy and between literature and psychology.
Elspeth Jajdelska is Lecturer in English Studies at the University of Strathclyde.
Her interest in the history of reading has focused to date on the eighteenth cen-
tury, with publications including Silent Reading and the Birth of the Narrator
(2007) and Speech, Print and Decorum in Britain, 1600–1750 (2016). Jajdelska’s
historical work on reading comprehension led to an interest in the psychology of
reading and an article on mental imagery, co-authored with three psychologists
and a neurologist: “Crying, Moving and Keeping it Whole: What Makes Literary
Descriptions of Faces Vivid.” She has completed an M.Sc. in Mind, Language, and
Embodied Cognition and is working on a new account of narrative processing.
Laurence Piercy holds a Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of
Sheffield. He is interested in the crossover between literature and philosophy and
how our ideas of literary action can gain from philosophical conceptions of intro-
spection, autonomy, second-person understanding, and ethics. In his scholarship,
Piercy explores such literary and philosophical connections through the writing of
Malcolm Lowry, Anna Kavan, Samuel Beckett, and Nabokov.
David Rampton, Professor of English at the University of Ottawa, is the author
of Vladimir Nabokov: A Critical Study of the Novels (1984), Vladimir Nabokov
(1993), William Faulkner: A Literary Life (2007), and Vladimir Nabokov: A
Literary Life (2012). Rampton has also published numerous articles on nine-
teenth- and twentieth-century American literature, co-edited four anthologies of
essays and short fiction, and edited a book of essays on the work of Northrop Frye.
Michael Rodgers completed his Ph.D. dissertation—“A Nietzschean Analysis
of Vladimir Nabokov’s Fiction”—at the University of Strathclyde, where he
organized a symposium titled “Nabokov and Morality” in 2011. His articles on
Nabokov include “Lolita’s Nietzschean Morality,” in Philosophy and Literature
(2011), “The Original of Laura: A Zarathustran Tool?” in the volume Shades of
Laura: Critical Approaches to Vladimir Nabokov’s Last Novel, The Original of
Laura (2013), and “A Theory of Genre Formation in the Twentieth Century,” an
essay on Invitation to a Beheading and magical realism in CLCWeb: Comparative
Literature and Culture (2015). Rodgers’ wider research interests include twenti-
eth-century literature, theory, and culture; the intersection between literature and
philosophy; Bob Dylan; and humor.
 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS 227

Samuel Schuman was Chancellor Emeritus of the University of Minnesota’s

Morris campus and served as president of the International Vladimir Nabokov
Society. He was the author of Vladimir Nabokov: A Reference Guide as well as
several dozen articles and conference papers on Nabokov. Much of his Nabokov
scholarship focused on the relationship between Nabokov’s works and those
of Shakespeare; his last book, Nabokov’s Shakespeare, appeared in 2014, shortly
before his death. Schuman also published extensively on British Jacobean drama
and on issues in higher education.
Susan Elizabeth Sweeney is Professor of English at the College of the Holy
Cross and the author of over thirty essays on Nabokov, including three in press:
“Nabokov in an Evening Gown,” in Nabokov’s Women; “Academia,” in Nabokov
in Context; and “Backward, Contrariwise, Downside Up: Thinking in Different
Directions in Nabokov,” in Nabokov Upside Down. Sweeney was twice elected
president of the International Vladimir Nabokov Society and spent a decade
as co-editor of NABOKV-L. Besides working on Nabokov, she publishes on
American literature, detective fiction, and narrative theory—including two co-
edited books, Anxious Power: Reading, Writing, and Ambivalence in Narrative
by Women (1993) and Detecting Texts: The Metaphysical Detective Story from Poe
to Postmodernism (1999)—and is editing a volume of The Complete Works of Edith
Wharton. Sweeney has also published a collection of her poems, Hand Me Down
(2013).
Tom Whalen is a novelist, poet, critic, short-story writer, translator, and lecturer
in film at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste Stuttgart. His articles
have appeared in Agni, Bookforum, Film Quarterly, The Hopkins Review, The
Iowa Review, The Literary Review, Studies in Short Fiction, The Wallace Stevens
Journal, The Washington Post, and other publications. Whalen’s books include The
Birth of Death and Other Comedies: The Novels of Russell H. Greenan (2011), The
President in Her Towers (2013), The Straw That Broke (2014), and a translation of
Girlfriends, Ghosts, and Other Stories by Robert Walser (2016).
Michael Wood is Professor Emeritus of English and Comparative Literature at
Princeton University. He studied French and German at Cambridge University,
and has taught at Columbia University and at the University of Exeter, UK. He
has written books on Vladimir Nabokov (The Magician’s Doubts: Nabokov and the
Risks of Fiction, 1994), Luis Buñuel, Franz Kafka, and Gabriel García Márquez, as
well as The Road to Delphi, a study of the ancient and continuing allure of oracles.
Wood is a member of the American Philosophical Society and of the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences, and is a regular contributor to the London Review
of Books and the New York Review of Books. His other books include Literature
and the Taste of Knowledge (2005), Yeats and Violence (2010), Film: A Very Short
Introduction (2012), and Alfred Hitchcock (2015).
 INDEX

A ideal of, 151–2, 154

Action theory, 3, 147, 150, 154, 157. intentionality and, 143, 150, 154,
See also Agency 209
definition of, 143–4 mental illness and, 154–5
Ada, 94, 167, 173, 187, 199 moral judgments and, 144, 150,
Aesthetics, 10, 23, 103, 117, 187–8, 156–7
189. See also Art for art’s sake; motive for, 11, 13, 39
Artist, depictions of; Moral art principle of alternate possibilities
aesthetic bliss, 21, 23, 132–3, 167, and, 147–9
173, 198 “rationality heuristic” as, 144, 145
aestheticization of experience, 116, representation of sex and, 205–7
198 will as interpretation of action, 151
art as a game (see Game) Agnosticism. See Religion
autonomous art, 191–2, 193 Allegory, 112, 113, 116, 119. See also
beauty, 8, 27, 30, 89 Ekphrasis
definition of, 2, 15n4, 26 definition of, 112
representations of sex and, 197–210 treatment of, in Nabokov studies,
Afterlife. See Otherworld 112, 121
Agency, 7, 10, 113, 144, 149–50, Altruism, 7, 10. See also Compassion;
155–7. See also Action theory; Forgiveness; Goodness; Heroism;
Determinism; Free will Love
automatic behavior, 11–12, 151, generosity, 11, 24, 29, 137–9
154–6, 170–1 gratitude, 11, 137–8
conative states in, 12, 143, 145 sacrifice, 2, 10, 39, 99–100, 145–6

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 229

M. Rodgers, S.E. Sweeney (eds.), Nabokov and the Question
of Morality, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-59221-7
230 INDEX

Amis, Martin, 7, 53, 101 loving as, 138

Anthropology, 3, 199 moral satisfaction and, 173
Art for art’s sake, 2, 24, 202. See also Blok, Alexsandr, 54
Aesthetics Boito, Arrigo, 111
anti-utilitarianism, 56, 114 Brontë, Charlotte, 52
Nabokov as aesthete, 3, 7, 23, 109 Brueghel, Pieter, 118–19
Artist, depictions of. See also Aesthetics Bunin, Ivan, 54
as “anthropomorphic deity,” 75–7
as other figures, 118, 187, 189,
218 C
“The Assistant Producer,” 214–15 Carlyle, Thomas, 3, 110
Atonement. See Forgiveness Carroll, Lewis. See Dodgson,
Atwood, Margaret, 52 Charles
Austin, J. L., 162 Carroll, Noël, 144–5, 151, 156
Chekhov, Anton, 10, 105n18
Chernyshevsky, Nikolai, 40–1, 137,
B 197
Bakhtin, Mikhail, Problems of “The Anthropological Principle in
Dostoevsky’s Poetics, 43 Philosophy,” 40
Balzac, Honoré de, 21 Christian themes in Nabokov’s work.
Barthes, Roland, 11, 129, 132, 136 See also Christianity; Forgiveness;
Bataille, Georges, 131 God; Religion
Baudelaire, Charles, 3, 186 condemnation, 94, 96–7, 169,
Beauty. See Aesthetics 171–2
Being, 11, 135, 136 Golden Rule, 93
as gift, 138 nativity, 80–1
lack of, 135 otherworld as Christian construct,
Bellow, Saul, 30 79
Bely, Andrei, 54 resurrection, 82, 84, 96–7
Bend Sinister, 26–8, 37, 75–6, 92, salvation, 82, 83
115, 161–78 the word of God, 78
Bend Sinister, introduction to, 76, Christianity, 4, 5, 9, 74, 79, 94–7. See
104n9, 129, 161–4, 172–4, 193 also Christian themes; God;
“Beneficence,” 94 Religion
Bergson, Henri, 5, 217 in Dostoevsky, Nabokov’s opinion
Beyle, Marie-Henri (pseud. Stendhal), of, 35, 42, 44–6
133 in imagery of Nabokov’s early
Blanchot, Maurice, 11, 129, 131, 134, stories, 4, 5, 77–9
138 in Nabokov’s poetry, 84, 95–6
The Instant of My Death, 140n7 “Christmas,” 9, 77, 79–83
Bliss “The Circle,” 24
aesthetic, 21, 23, 132–3, 167, 173, Cognitive studies, 3, 11–13. See also
198 Consciousness
 INDEX 231

Compassion, 10–11, 23, 102–3, 129, sadistic voyeurism, 119

197–8. See also Altruism; Currie, Gregory, 145, 151
Forgiveness; Goodness; Love
bad heart as metaphor for, 26–7
pathos, 93, 185–6, 210 D
pity, 8, 27, 30, 197, 210 Dante, Alighieri, 56, 101, 187
reading as a form of, 8, 28–30, Dear Bunny, Dear Volodya. See The
214 Nabokov-Wilson Letters
sympathy for the underdog, 94 Death, 94, 95, 116. See also Death
Conclusive Evidence, 89, 94, 102 penalty; Otherworld
Confession, 93, 164, 168–70, 185, killing, 169
189 murder, 25–6, 38–40, 95, 106–7,
definition of, 98 164, 213
genre of, 185 suicide, 95, 131, 169, 197–98, 216
Consciousness, 11, 92. See also Death penalty, 12, 114, 162–5,
Cognitive studies; Perception 165–70. See also Death;
embodied, 29, 173 Punishment; Sentencing
mirror neuron system and, 206 forms of execution, 165, 168
“Conversation Piece 1945,” 214 Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov’s
Creativity. See Writing attitude toward, 165
Crime, 95, 164–7. See also Evil; The Defense, 10, 89–90, 99, 110–12,
Jurisprudence; Punishment; 114, 115
Torture Derrida, Jacques, 3, 11, 129, 135–47
adultery, 91, 164 The Gift of Death, 140n10
blackmail, 164 Given Time, 135, 140n10
child molestation, 164, 188–9, Descartes, René, 135
192–3 Desire. See Passion
kidnaping, 164 Despair, 13, 92, 114, 166–9, 63,
murder, 25–6, 38–40, 95, 102–3, 176n9, 187
164 Despair, foreword to, 104n15, 171–2
rape, 163, 164 Detection, 164–7
voyeurism, 119, 200–2 Determinism, 148, 154. See also
Cruelty, 10, 23, 28, 111, 118. See Agency
also Punishment; Suffering; Dickens, Charles, 9, 119, 200
Torture Bleak House, 9
Amis’s remarks on, in Nabokov’s The Old Curiosity Shop, 119
work, 7, 178n24 Didacticism. See Moralizing
brutality, 94 Divinity. See God
callousness, 185, 190 Dodgson, Charles (pseud. Lewis
Nabokov’s indictment of, 97, 119 Carroll), 60, 162, 175n24
Nabokov’s ridicule of, 22, 174 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, 162
Rorty’s remarks on, in Nabokov’s Through the Looking-Glass, and
work, 4, 24 What Alice Found There, 60
232 INDEX

Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 8–10, 14, 33–47, Ethics, 1–4, 22, 112, 129–30, 172–3.
103, 121 See also Moral judgments; Moral
The Brothers Karamazov, 36, 38, sense; Morality
42–7 definition of, 2, 14–15n1
Crime and Punishment, 34, 42, empiricism and, 173
47n6, 34, 37–41, 43, 121 everyday, 200
The Devil, 34, 42, 47n6, 121 family love and, 132
The Double, 34, 46n1 humanism and, 3–5, 109, 129
“The Dream of a Ridiculous Man,” instinctive, 99
34 intuitive, 173
“A Gentle Creature,” 33–4 legal, 165
The Idiot, 36, 42 moral action, love as basis for,
Notes from the Underground, 34, 37, 129–30, 138–9
40–1 moral constraints, 198, 205
Oblomov, 121 moral neutralization, 198, 201
Duras, Marguerite, 131 moral responsibility, 148, 154–6,
161, 173
Nabokov as ethicist, 174
E obligatory, 173
“Easter,” 84 of reading fiction, 7, 161–72,
Eco, Umberto, 193 184–95
Eichmann, Adolf, 22 representations of sex and, 197–210
Ekphrasis, 116–19. See also Allegory; textual practice and, 61, 64
Representation “An Evening of Russian Poetry,” 40
definition of, 116, 117 Evil, 9–10, 13, 98–6, 113, 119. See
Eliot, T. S., 52 also Crime; Guilt; Morality
“The Love Song of J. Alfred as absolute, 9, 13, 91, 113
Prufrock,” 56 amorality, 1–2, 189
Empathy. See Compassion bad behavior as, 87, 103, 110–11,
Endings, 10, 163. See also Teleology 114
ambiguous, 115, 116, 167, immorality, 1, 87, 93, 189
169–70 vice, 1
circular, 72 Existentialism, 101
open-ended, 58–9 The Eye, 34, 92, 114, 129, 164, 171
suspended, 117, 120, 167–70
Epistemology, 6, 13–14, 215, 216. See
also Metaphysics F
epistemological experiments, 89 Fallacy
epistemological uncertainty, 144 intentional, 7
Nabokov’s personal epistemology, pathetic, 28
100 self-destructive, 88
 INDEX 233

Forgiveness, 120. See also Christian Gnosticism, 5, 111, 112, 115, 214
themes; Compassion God, 9, 13, 75–3. See also Religion
atonement, 170–1 Gogol, Nikolai, 22, 28, 66n20, 192
redemption, 168, 172 “The Overcoat,” 59
repentance, 91 Goncharov, Ivan, 10, 122
Free will, 9, 11, 149. See also Agency Goodness, 29, 89, 92, 114, 135–7. See
Freud, Sigmund, 30, 139n1, 199 also Altruism; Compassion;
Forgiveness; Heroism; Innocence;
Love; Morality
G as absolute, 9, 13, 93, 113
Game. See also Aesthetics; Games in good behavior as, 110, 111, 114,
Nabokov’s work; Play 115, 117, 146
art as “divine game,” 36–7 virtue, 1, 87, 103, 193, 210
art as game between reader and Gorki, Maxim, 21
writer, 54 Gratitude. See Altruism
art as infra-referential game, 145 Guilt, 91, 162, 167–9, 208. See also
torture as game, 37, 166 Crime; Jurisprudence; Moral
Games in Nabokov’s work. See also judgments; Sentencing
Game
acrostics, 24, 28, 59
anagrams, 28 H
chess, 28–9, 81, 90, 99–103, 111 Happiness. See Bliss
onomastic, 222–3 Hardy, Thomas, 113
puzzles, 14, 60 Heidegger, Martin, 3, 138
riddles, 60 Heroism, 115, 117, 146, 149–50,
wordplay, 13, 28 156–7. See also Altruism
Generosity. See Altruism Hoffman, Kurt, 22
Genette, Gérard, 93 Hughes, Robert, 33
Genre conventions, 52, 168 Hume, David, 105n20, 173
Genres in Nabokov’s work, 2, 73. See Hutcheson, Francis, 173
also Genre conventions; Narrative, Hyde, Lewis, 11
popular forms of
drama, 92
memoir, 93, 94 I
poetry, 95 Ideology, 21, 35, 97
stories, 77, 93 “In Paradise,” 96
The Gift, 10–11, 83, 129–35, 176n9, Individuality, 94, 131
197–4 Influences on Nabokov
Giving, 10, 129 Dostoevsky, 33–4, 111
as analogy for writing, 136–1 Nietzsche, 54–5
definition of the gift, 135–9 nineteenth-century Russian novel,
Glory, 27, 115–14, 122, 164, 167 34, 121
234 INDEX

Influences on Nabokov (cont.) Keats, John, 117

Silver Age, 54–5 King, Queen, Knave, 95, 99, 110,
Tolstoy, 87, 88, 121 129, 164
various intellectual traditions, 5 Kristeva, Julia, 133
Innocence, 116, 117, 162, 200. See
also Goodness; Jurisprudence;
Moral judgments L
Insanity. See Mental illness Lacan, Jacques, 3, 129, 136
Invitation to a Beheading, 8, 55–6, Laughlin, James, 64
100, 114–15, 162–8 Laughter in the Dark, 95, 115–20,
Iser, Wolfgang, 52 168, 176n9
Law and literature studies, 165. See
also Jurisprudence
J Lectures on Literature, 3, 34, 53–4, 61,
Jankélévitch, Vladimir, 134 186
Johnson, Samuel, 200 Lectures on Russian Literature, 8,
Joyce, James, 52, 97, 193 35–46, 94
Judaism. See Religion Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 135
Jurisprudence, 3, 193. See also Guilt; “A Letter that Never Reached Russia,”
Innocence; Justice; Moral 74, 197, 198
judgments; Punishment; Letters to Véra, 98
Sentencing Levinas, Emmanuel, 131
judges, 161 Liberalism, 16n10, 199
judgment, 161, 167–72, 174 Linguistics, 222
juries, 169, 171 Livingston, Paisley, 144–5
law and literature studies, 165 Lolita, 1–2, 6–7, 21–4, 29–30,
lawyers, 176n9 162–73, 183–94, 197–210
scenes of judging, 12, 163, 167, Look at the Harlequins!, 21, 93, 95,
169–70 102, 176n9
verdicts, 162, 163, 169 Love, 10–11, 89, 94, 102, 129–41, 187.
Justice, 12, 93, 162. See also See also Compassion; Goodness;
Jurisprudence Loving relationships; Passion
ethical, 100 as basis for moral action, 129–30,
illegitimate, 162–4, 168–9 138–9
poetic, 10 benevolence of, 135
rhetorical, 162, 164, 169–70 bliss and, 138
vigilante, 170 community and, 131
ethical dimensions of, 10, 129
idealization and, 133–5
K impossibility of, 131
Kafka, Franz, 26, 46n2, 113 ineffability of, 100
Kant, Immanuel, 5 nonreciprocal nature of, 131
 INDEX 235

as pharmakon, 132–3 phenomenology, 147, 148, 150, 173

as “virtuous triangle,” 130, 132–4 reality, 13, 76, 94, 99, 117, 223
Loving relationships. See also Love; spirituality, 4, 22, 29, 88
Passion; Sex teleology, 4, 92, 101
familial, 10 treatment of, in Nabokov studies,
filial, 91, 102, 132–4, 139 15n7, 73–4
friendship, 130–2 truth, 88–9, 102, 184
paternal, 91, 129 Milton, John, 193
romantic, 11 Mimesis. See Representation
Modernity
moral judgments of, 12, 213
M Nabokov’s attitude towards, 87,
Madness. See Mental illness 98–9, 213–15
Mallarmé, Stéphane, 187 Monomania. See Passion
Mandelstam, Osip, 103 Moral art, 2, 22–3, 183–94, 214. See
Mann, Thomas, 21, 97 also Aesthetics
Mary , 25, 26, 54, 105n18, 110 moral fiction, 12, 101
Master-slave morality, 8, 51. See also moral reading, theory of, 216–21
Nietzsche Nabokov as author of, 87–8, 94, 97,
definition of, 55 101–3, 118, 122
Nabokov’s relationship with readers Moral contradiction. See Moral
and, 55–7 questions
ressentiment, 65n11 “Moral in tow,” Lolita as having no, 7,
“Matter of Chance,” 104n14 45, 183–4, 192–3, 194n4. See also
Mauss, Marcel, 135 “On a Book Entitled Lolita”
McCarthy, Mary, 74 Moral judgments, 7, 10–12, 110–13,
McHale, Brian, 144 172–5. See also Ethics;
Melville, Herman, 30 Jurisprudence; Justice; Moral
Memory, 25 questions; Moral sense; Morality
traumatic, 25–6 agency and, 144, 150, 156–7
Mental illness of modernity, 13, 213
agency and, 154–5 Moral questions, 3–7, 13–14, 109–23,
monomaniacal passion as, 2, 10, 167–75, 190–2, 197–9. See also
93–4, 99 Ethics; Moral judgments;
in Nabokov’s appraisal of Rhetoric
Dostoevsky’s characters, 37–8 Moral sense, 12, 14, 161–78. See also
in Nabokov’s fiction, 7, 76, 92, 94, Moral judgments; Morality
100 definition of, 172–3
Metaphysics, 2, 4–5, 75–7, 90, 100, as duty paid “on mortal sense of
108. See also Epistemology; beauty,” 173, 177n21, 191
Otherworld; Philosophy; Religion Nabokov’s own, 161, 172, 174–5
definition of, 15n4 satisfaction of, 161, 170–4
ontology, 4 theory of, 173
236 INDEX

Morality. See also Goodness; Ethics; literary development of, 9–10,

Evil; Justice; Moral judgments; 13–14, 92, 97, 109–23
Moral questions; Moral sense literary genres used by (see Genres in
definition of, 1 Nabokov’s work)
Nabokov studies, treatment in, 1–7, “morality” as a term in relation to,
21–2, 73, 109–10 3, 6, 109, 175, 193
Nabokov’s attitude toward, 97–9, morality, attitude toward, 8, 97,
213–15 213–15
Nabokov’s personal principles of, 7, morality, perceived antipathy
23, 30, 87, 102, 122, 129 toward, 6, 21, 23, 45, 109, 120
prescriptive, 193–4 morality, public statements on, 6–7
the term “Vladimir Nabokov” and, moral principles of, 23, 30, 88, 102,
3, 6, 109, 193 122, 130
Morality play, 1, 7, 14 moral sense of, 161, 172, 174–5
Moralizing, 12, 22–3, 110, 113, readers, attitude toward (see Reader,
119–20, 191–2 the)
didacticism, 1, 3, 109, 117, 122, 193 reception of works by, 2–3, 8 (see
in Dostoevsky, Nabokov’s dislike of, also Nabokov studies)
45, 88 religious beliefs of, 9, 14, 73–4, 79,
in morality play, 1 95–7
in Russian literature, 109 social and political themes, antipathy
toward, 3, 8, 23, 115
texts in English by, 3, 92, 100
N texts in Russian by, 92, 100, 103n2,
Nabokov, Dmitri Vladimirovich (son), 111
7, 29, 77, 80, 81, 96 Nabokov, Vladimir Vladimirovich,
Nabokov, Sergey Vladimirovich works of
(brother), 25, 31n4 correspondence; Letters to Véra, 98;
Nabokov, Véra Evseevna Slonim The Nabokov-Wilson Letters, 7,
(wife), 4, 15n7, 22, 29, 57, 73 23, 56–7, 115, 184; Selected
Nabokov, Vladimir Dmitrievich Letters, 22–3, 59, 62–3, 76, 100
(father), 5, 7, 25, 30, 82–3, 96 criticism; Foreword to Despair,
attitude toward death penalty of, 165 104n15, 171–2; introduction to
political beliefs of, 16n10 Bend Sinister, 76, 104n9, 129,
Nabokov, Vladimir Vladimirovich 161–4, 172–5; Lectures on
as aesthete, 3, 7, 23, 109, 174 Literature, 3, 34, 53–4, 61, 186;
as author of moral fiction, 87–8, 94, Lectures on Russian Literature, 8,
97, 101–3, 118, 122 (see also 35–46, 94; Nikolai Gogol, 22,
Moral art) 28, 66n20, 192; “On a Book
epistemology of, 100 Entitled Lolita,” 2, 7, 21, 23, 45,
as ethicist, 174 174 (see also “Moral in tow”);
influences on (see Influences on Strong Opinions, 6–7, 9, 33, 172,
Nabokov) 174–5, 183–4
 INDEX 237

drama; The Tragedy of Mr. Morn, that Never Reached Russia,” 74,
95–6 197, 198; “Matter of Chance,”
lepidopterology; Nabokov’s 104n14; “Perfection,” 24, 26;
Butterflies, 29 “Razor,” 170–1; “Recruiting,”
memoirs; Conclusive Evidence, 89, 84n6; “Signs and Symbols,”
94, 102; Speak, Memory, 29, 97–8, 216; “Spring in Fialta,”
51, 82, 102–3, 133, 202 24, 25; “Terra Incognita,” 24;
novels; Ada, 94, 167, 173, 187, 199; “Terror,” 94; “That in Aleppo
Bend Sinister, 26–8, 37, 75–6, Once,” 215; “The Vane
92, 115, 161–78; The Defense, Sisters,” 9, 24, 58–62, 74,
10, 89–90, 99, 110–12, 114, 100, 216; “The Word,” 9,
115; Despair, 13, 92, 114, 77–9, 82
166–9, 176n9, 187; The Eye, 34, Nabokov studies, topics in
92, 114, 129, 164, 171; The allegory, 112, 121
Gift, 10–11, 83, 129–39, 176n9, metaphysics, 15n7
197–8; Glory, 27, 115–18, 122, morality, 1–7, 21–2, 73, 109–10
164, 167; Invitation to a Nabokov as “master,” 64n5
Beheading, 8, 55–6, 100, performance, 1
114–15, 162–8; King, Queen, play, 1
Knave, 95, 99, 110, 129, 164; religion, 74
Laughter in the Dark, 95, Nabokov’s Butterflies, 29
115–20, 168, 176n9; Lolita, The Nabokov-Wilson Letters, 7, 23,
1–2, 6–7, 21–4, 29–30, 162–73, 56–7, 115, 184
176n9, 183–94, 197–210; Look Names, 222–3
at the Harlequins!, 21, 93, 95, Narration, types of. See also Narrator
102, 176n9; Mary , 25, 26, 54, autodiegetic, 93, 100
101n18 110; The Original of character, 92
Laura, 7, 54, 105n28; Pale Fire, first-person, 10, 91–2, 100–3,
66n14, 74–5, 98, 143–59, 166, 164
216–21; Pnin, 26–8, 83, 98, focalized, 148, 200–1
167; The Real Life of Sebastian realist, 201–2
Knight , 25, 95, 164–6, 176Sn9, second-person, 102
187, 197; Transparent Things, third-person, 92, 93, 100
28, 176n9 unreliable, 152
poems; “Easter,” 84; “An Evening Narrative, popular forms of
of Russian Poetry,” 40; “In adventure novel, 52
Paradise,” 96; “On Angels,” case study, 185
85n12; Stikhi, 73, 96 confession, 164, 168–9, 185
stories; “The Assistant Producer,” court document, 185
214–15; “Beneficence,” 94; detective story, 164–5
“Christmas,” 9, 77, 79–83; espionage fiction, 164
“The Circle,” 24; “Conversation revenge plot, 155, 156
Piece 1945,” 214; “A Letter romance, 52
238 INDEX

Narrative, popular forms of (cont.) Parody, 12, 56, 186

suspense thriller, 164, 165 Passion, 10, 91, 93, 189.
Narrative structure, 4. See also Endings See also Love; Loving
achronological, 152–3 relationships; Sex
reverse-ordered, 24 “banal triangle of tragedy,” 130–1,
Narratology, 144–9 134
Narrator, 194. See also Narration, types monomaniacal, 2, 9, 94 (see also
of Mental illness)
in Dostoevsky, Nabokov’s awareness romantic, 130, 134, 136
of, 41, 43 spiritual, 131
in Nabokov’s English texts, 92, 100 suffering and, 135
in Nabokov’s Russian texts, 92, 100 unrequited, 11, 130
Negative capability, 117 Perception. See also Consciousness;
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 3, 8, 51, 54–65, Phenomenology
88. See also Master-slave morality; of faces, 203–5, 219–21
Will to power of sex, 197–210
Human, All Too Human, 56, 61, 63 unconscious, 203
On the Genealogy of Morality, 56 Perec, Georges, 60
Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 54 “Perfection,” 24, 26
The Will to Power, 57, 88 Personhood, 94
Perversity, 6, 122
Petrarch, 187
O Phenomenology, 147, 148, 150, 173.
“On a Book Entitled Lolita,” 2, 7, 21, See also Perception
23, 45, 174. See also “Moral Philosophy, 3–5, 103, 222. See also
in tow” Metaphysics
“On Angels,” 85n12 of action (see Action theory)
Ontology, 4, 92, 100 Dostoevskian, Nabokov’s opinion
The Original of Laura, 7, 54, 105n28 of, 40, 42
Otherworld, 4–5, 21, 25, 30, 60, 113. Enlightenment, 173
See also Metaphysics; Religion epistemological (see Epistemology)
as Christian construct, 74 ethical intuitionist, 173
communication with, 4, 27, 28, 59, existentialist, 101
113 liberal, 16n10, 199
Nabokov’s comments on, 73–4 literature and, 139n1, 141n13,
secular spirituality and, 74, 79 144–5
Véra Nabokov’s remarks on, 4, 73 moral, 150
moral sense theory (see Moral
sense)
P Nietzchean, 51, 54–8, 61, 63
Pale Fire, 66n14, 143–57, 166, ontological, 4
216–21 perspectivist, 215
 INDEX 239

phenomenological, 147, 148, 150, 173 Reader, the. See also Readers, types of;
“pig philosophy,” 110, 114 Reading; Rhetoric
poststructuralist, 3, 129, 136 Humbert’s manipulation of, 185–8
relativist, 215 morality of, 161, 67
Pity. See Compassion Nabokov’s attitude toward, 30,
Plato, 193 52–3, 161, 174
Play, 13–14, 28, 144. See also Game Nabokov’s efforts to control, 53, 58
as treated in Nabokov studies, 1 Nabokov’s representation of
Pnin, 26–7, 83, 98, 168 author’s relationship to, 52,
Poe, Edgar Allan, 186 55–7, 61–3
Politics, 5, 215, 115. See also Readers, types of, evoked in Nabokov’s
Totalitarianism work. See also Reader, the;
Nabokov’s antipathy towards, 3, 7, Reading
23, 98, 109 general, 51, 53, 59–60, 64
power, 14 good, 8, 51, 59, 61–4, 221
Poststructuralism, 3, 129, 136 gullible, 66n16
Pound, Ezra, 52 implied, 52, 62
Proust, Marcel, 97, 103, 186 moral arbiter, 161, 169–70, 173
Psychoanalysis, 129 Nietzschean, 59–61, 64
Psychology resisting, 8, 51–52, 54, 62–4
in Dostoevsky, Nabokov’s opinion subjugated, 52
of, 36, 45 Reading, 2, 7–8, 12–13. See also
Nabokov’s antipathy towards, 3, 7, Reader, the; Readers, types of
23, 98, 109 analogical, 222
Punishment, 99, 110, 161–3, 165, bad, 8, 192–3, 221–2
168, 189. See also Death penalty; compassionate, 8, 214
Sentencing ethics of, 7–8, 12–14, 29
definition of, 163 good, 29, 34, 221
divine, 10 instructions on, 35–7, 60
hypothetical, 163–5 master-slave morality and, 55–7
scenes of, 132 moral, theory of, 216–21
Pushkin, Alexsandr, 88, 99 Nabokov’s, of Dostoevsky, 34–6
Eugene Onegin, 8, 221 Nabokov’s, of his own work, 173
rereading, 8, 27, 29–8, 90, 101
suffering as focus of, 12–13, 217
Q The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, 25,
Queneau, Raymond, 30 95, 164–76, 176n9
Realism, 25, 103, 201–2, 214
realist narration, 201–2
R Reality, 13, 76, 94, 99, 117, 223
“Razor,” 170–1 representation of, 214–16
240 INDEX

“Recruiting,” 84n6 S
Redemption. See Forgiveness Sacrifice. See Altruism
Reid, John, 173 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 5, 57, 97
Relativism, 215 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 222
Religion, 4, 8, 9, 14, 95. See also Schopenhauer, Arthur, 5, 57
Christianity; God; Metaphysics; Selected Letters, 22–3, 62–3, 76, 100
Otherworld; Teleology Self-reflexivity, 113–14
agnosticism, 6, 84 Sentencing, 104n15, 161–78, 167–70.
Bible, 60 See also Death penalty;
Judaism, 4, 74 Punishment
Nabokov’s personal beliefs, 9, 13, pronouncement of sentence, 162,
74, 77, 95–7 172–3
secularity, 6 scenes of sentencing, 169–71
spirituality, 4, 22, 29, 88 Sex. See also Crime; Loving
theism, 9, 74–5 relationships; Passion
Repentance. See Forgiveness censorship of, 2
Representation. See also Ekphrasis; constraints governing depiction of,
Perception 200–3
ethics of, 11–13 ethics of representing, 12, 197–212
of judging, 12, 167, 169–70 obscenity, 202, 209–10
of moral emptiness, 2, 214–15 pleasures of anticipation and, 206,
of punishment, 189 208, 209
of reality, 214–16 pornography, 199
of self-reflexivity, 113–14 sexual acts, 198, 203–4
of sentencing, 169–70 sexually arousing acts, 198, 205,
of sex, 2, 11, 197–212 206, 208
of suffering, 11 shame and, 12, 199–201
of violence, 2 Shakespeare, William, 97, 194, 218
Rhetoric. See also Reader, the; Writing Hamlet, 5, 84n4, 118
ekphrasis as, 117 A Midsummer Night’s Dream,
eloquence of, 185–8, 190–1 84n6
rhetorical justice, 162, 164, 170–1 Othello, 216
rhetorical questions, 13, 14, 162–5, Shame, 12, 199–201. See also Guilt
170, 172, 174 (see also Moral Shelley, Percy, 191
questions) Shklovsky, Viktor, 3, 217, 222
Rimbaud, Arthur, 213 Signs, 217–18, 220–2
Rorty, Richard, 4, 9, 24, 30, 167, “Signs and Symbols,” 97–8, 216
197–8 Smith, Adam, 173
Rossini, Gioachino, 111 Sociology, 129
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 41–2, 186 Speak, Memory, 29, 51, 82, 102–3,
Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse, 41 133, 202
 INDEX 241

Spinoza, Baruch, 218 Torture, 94, 161, 163–4, 170. See also
Spirituality, 4, 22, 29, 88. See also Cruelty; Suffering
Metaphysics; Religion as game, 37, 166
“Spring in Fialta,” 24, 25 tale of, 217–18
Stendhal. See Beyle, Marie-Henri Totalitarianism, 5, 55, 114–15
Sterne, Laurence, 52 Tragedy, 11, 94, 98, 130–1, 188
Stevens, Wallace, 172 “banal triangle” of, 130–1, 134
Stikhi, 73, 96 The Tragedy of Mr. Morn, 95–6
Strong Opinions, 33, 172, 184–5 Transparent Things, 28, 176n9
Suffering, 26–7, 118–19, 161–4, Truth, 88–9, 102, 184
170–1, 198. See also Cruelty;
Punishment; Torture
children’s, 95–6, 116, 119, 164, 186 V
desire as a form of, 135 “The Vane Sisters,” 9, 24, 58–64, 74,
expectation of redress for, 168–72 100, 216
love as, 133 Vice. See Evil
reading of, 12–13, 216, 218 Virtue. See Goodness
responsibility for another’s, 173, Voloshin, Maximilian, 54
175
Rorty’s remarks on, in Nabokov’s
work, 4, 167 W
writing of, 217–18, 221 White, Katharine, 59–62, 100
Swift, Jonathan, 103 Wilde, Oscar, 119
The Picture of Dorian Gray, 59
Will to power, the, 8, 51–2. See also
T Master-slave morality; Nietzsche
Teleology, 4, 92, 101. See also definition of, 53
Endings; Religion Nabokov’s authorial tactics and, 58
“Terra Incognita,” 24 Wilson, Edmund, 55–7, 66n18, 74, 184
“Terror,” 94 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 3, 11
“That in Aleppo Once,” 215 “The Word,” 9, 77–9, 82
Tiutchev, Fyodor, 88 Writing. See also Rhetoric
Tolstoy, Leo, 3, 9, 10, 40, 87–105, composing chess problems and, 53,
121, 218 137
Anna Karenina, 40, 92, 94, 122 definition of good author, 53
Family Happiness, 93 gift as analogy for, 136–8
The Kreutzer Sonata, 93 suffering as focus of, 217–18
My Confession, 101
War and Peace, 91
What Do I Believe In?, 101 Z
What is Art? 87 Zola, Émile, 185