Nabokov and Nietzsche: Problems and Perspectives 9781501339578, 9781501339608, 9781501339592

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Nabokov and Nietzsche

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Nabokov and Nietzsche Problems and Perspectives Michael Rodgers

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BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2018 This paperback edition published 2020 Copyright © Michael Rodgers, 2018 For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p.viii constitute an extension of this copyright page. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Rodgers, Michael (College teacher), author. Title: Nabokov and Nietzsche : problems and perspectives / Michael Rodgers. Description: New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017043771 (print) | LCCN 2017045256 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501339592 (ePDF) | ISBN 9781501339585 (ePUB) | ISBN 9781501339578 (hardback: alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Nabokov, Vladimir Vladimirovich, 1899–1977–Philosophy. | Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 1844–1900–Influence. | Literature–Philosophy. Classification: LCC PS3527.A15 (ebook) | LCC PS3527.A15 Z885 2018 (print) | DDC 813/.54–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017043771 ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-3957-8 PB: 978-1-5013-5913-2 ePDF: 978-1-5013-3959-2 ePub: 978-1-5013-3958-5 Typeset by Newgen KnowledgeWorks Pvt. Ltd., Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com. and sign up for our newsletters.

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This book is dedicated to Dr John Burns, who introduced me to three of my favourite things: how literature works, Bob Dylan’s Biograph (1985) and teaching done well.

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgements viii Permissions ix List of abbreviations x

Introduction

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PART ONE Nietzschean engagements

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1 Eternal recurrence and Nabokov’s art of memory 2 The will to disempower: Nabokov and his readers

PART TWO Nietzschean readings 3 Lolita’s Nietzschean morality

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4 Pale Fire: A differing perspective

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PART THREE Beyond Nietzsche 5 Rewriting Nietzsche

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6 Nabokov’s ‘other’ world Conclusion

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Works cited 161 Index 171

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am, and forever will be, especially grateful to a number of people who have helped to sculpt this project into what it is now: Elspeth Jajdelska and Tom Furniss for their patience and perspicacity; Thomas Karshan and Rune Graulund for their scrutiny; Susan Elizabeth Sweeney for her mentorship; Haaris Naqvi, Katherine De Chant and the two anonymous reviewers at Bloomsbury for their encouragement, support and pointing out what should have been; Sonia Bates for lending her Russian eyes and ears; Barbara Bair at the Library of Congress for her prompt and invaluable help; my parents, for their continued support in all that I do; and, finally, my partner, Lucy Weir, for her unwavering belief in my writing and for providing numerous perspectives to numerous problems.

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PERMISSIONS

A short section of the introduction appeared, in a slightly different version, in ‘The Original of Laura and Nietzsche: A Zarathustran Tool?’, in Shades of Laura: Vladimir Nabokov’s Last Novel, The Original of Laura (ed. Yuri Leving, 2013). Reproduced here with kind permission of McGill-Queen’s University Press. A condensed, and slightly different, version of Chapter  2, ‘The will to disempower: Nabokov and his readers’, first appeared in Nabokov and the Question of Morality: Aesthetics, Metaphysics, and the Ethics of Fiction (ed. Michael Rodgers and Susan Elizabeth Sweeney, 2016). Reproduced here with kind permission of Palgrave Macmillan. A condensed, and slightly different, version of Chapter  3, ‘Lolita’s Nietzschean morality’, first appeared in Philosophy and Literature, Volume 35, Issue 1, April 2011, 104–20. Reproduced here with kind permission of Garry Hagberg at Philosophy and Literature. Images of Vladimir Nabokov’s notebook from 1918 entitled ‘Stikhi i skhemy’ (‘Poems and Schemes’) were sourced from Box 10, Folder 25, Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

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ABBREVIATIONS

Works by Vladimir Nabokov Ada

Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (London: Penguin Books, [1969] 2000)

BS

Bend Sinister (London: Penguin Classics, [1947] 2010).

Collected

Collected Stories: Vladimir Nabokov (London: Penguin, [1995] 2001).

Def

The Defense (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, [1930] 1964).

Des

Despair (London: Penguin Books, [1965] 2000).

Gift

The Gift (London: Penguin Books, [1963] 2001).

Invitation

Invitation to a Beheading (London: Penguin Books, [1959] 2001).

LL

Lectures on Literature (New York: Harcourt, 1980).

Lo

Lolita (London: Penguin Books, [1955] 2000).

LRL

Lectures on Russian Literature (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1981).

Mary

Mary (New York: Vintage International, [1926] 1989).

NG

Nikolai Gogol (London: Penguin Classics, [1944] 2011).

NWL

Dear Bunny, Dear Volodya: The Nabokov–Wilson Letters, 1940–1971 (Berkeley: University of California Press, [1979] 2001).

PF

Pale Fire (London: Penguin Books, [1962] 2000).

Pnin

Pnin (London: Penguin Books, [1957] 2000).

SL

Vladimir Nabokov: Selected Letters, 1940–1977 (New York: Harcourt, 1989).

SM

Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited (London: Penguin, [1967] 2000).

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ABBREVIATIONS

SO

Strong Opinions (New York: Vintage, [1973] 1990).

TOOL

The Original of Laura (London: Penguin Classics, 2009).

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Selected works related to Vladimir Nabokov VNRY

Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990).

VNAY

Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991).

Works by Friedrich Nietzsche AC

The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols, and Other Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

BGE

Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future (London: Penguin, [1886] 2003).

BT

The Birth of Tragedy (London: Penguin Books, [1872] 2003).

Day

Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, [1881] 1982).

EH

Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is (London: Penguin Classics, [1888] 2004).

GM

On the Genealogy of Morality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, [1887] 1994).

GS

The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, [1882] 2001).

HATH

Human, All Too Human (London: Penguin, [1878] 2004).

Reader

A Nietzsche Reader (London: Penguin Books, 2003).

TSZ

Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and No One (London: Penguin, [1883–1885] 1969).

UM

Untimely Meditations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, [1876] 1983).

WP

The Will to Power (New York: Vintage, [1901] 1968).

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Introduction

In the foreword to Invitation to a Beheading, Vladimir Nabokov states that ‘I could never understand why every book of mine invariably sends reviewers scurrying in search of more or less celebrated names for the purpose of passionate comparison’ (7–8). In doing so, he suggests that such comparative analysis is misinformed, even futile.1 As can be seen in Strong Opinions, Nabokov keenly insisted that his texts should be understood neither through the lens of his life, nor his reading: One may imagine, for example, two writers, A  and B, completely different but both under a certain Proustian influence; this influence goes unnoticed by reader C inasmuch as each of the three (A, B, and C) has understood Proust in his own way. It happens that a writer has an oblique influence through another writer, or that some sort of complex blending of influences takes place, and so on. One may not foresee anything in this regard. (283) Such aversion to cryptogrammatical interpretation augments his claim that, ‘Alas, I am not one to provide much sport for influence hunters’ (SO 152). Yet, although the question of literary influence is indeed potentially obfuscating – what Nabokov calls ‘a dark and unclear thing’ (ibid.) – it has value for at least three reasons. First, recognizing and identifying specific references between one text and another allows readers to theorize about both the dissemination of the earlier text and why the author of the later text would engage with the former. Second, such interpretative context can point to a broader literary context: whether, for example, it adheres to the pastoral genre or the comedic. Third, and perhaps most profoundly, the relationship between two or more authors can be seen as constitutive of texts, something articulated in T. S. Eliot’s ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1917), Mikhail Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World (1965), Harold Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence:  A Theory of Poetry (1973), Jonathan Bate’s Shakespeare

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On Nabokov’s desire to control his critics, see Maurice Couturier’s ‘The Near-Tyranny of the Author: Pale Fire’, in Julian Connolly’s The Cambridge Companion to Vladimir Nabokov (2005).

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and Ovid (1994) or Katrin Ettenhuber’s Donne’s Augustine:  Renaissance Cultures of Interpretation (2011). The introduction concentrates on the first two reasons described earlier, identifying specific references to the work of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche in Nabokov’s work, and providing an interpretative context for the book at large. In the chapters that follow, I will mostly address the third reason, the broader relationship between Nietzsche and Nabokov, although some parts of my argument rely on Nabokov’s direct and indirect references and allusions to Nietzschean ideas. Here, and throughout the following chapters, I  illustrate a background of Nietzschean assumptions in Nabokov’s work in order to make sense of a number of persistent problems in the latter’s oeuvre: the nature of the relationships between art and morality and author and reader, for example. The book therefore identifies a relationship between Nabokov’s texts and Nietzsche’s, as well as providing Nietzschean readings of Nabokov’s work. Nabokov’s contempt for the ‘literature of ideas’ seems to have largely deterred critics from ‘any attempt to press his work for seemingly distant sources in philosophy’ (Karshan 2011a: 23), yet, as Duncan White claims, ‘Nabokov was interested in philosophy, especially early in his career, and, like many modernists, he was especially interested in issues of ontology and how these issues related to the creation of literary art’ (2017:  67). Most philosophical studies of this kind have looked at the relationship between Nabokov and German idealism – a movement derived from Enlightenment thought and concerned with distinctions between the mind and reality, aesthetics and universalized ethics. In Vladimir Nabokov and the Poetics of Liberalism for example, Dana Dragunoiu looks at the relationship between Nabokov and Kant, and the interplay between art and ethics more broadly. Discussing Nabokov’s Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle for example, she claims that ‘Van’s offhand reference to Kant [  .  .  . ] provides an incisive clue about the ethical dimension of Nabokov’s work’ (2011: 143). She continues, ‘as a professor of literature in the United States, Nabokov exasperated his own students by insisting that they familiarize themselves with the source of every allusion in a given literary work. Such meticulousness makes it reasonable to guess that he held himself to the same standard’ (147). Dragunoiu’s fertile furrowing of Nabokov’s seemingly offhand allusions, as well as hypothesizing about the sources of Nabokov’s recurring interests, is adhered to in this study, as is Leona Toker’s approach in Nabokov: The Mystery of Literary Structures. Authenticating her analysis through the fact that ‘Schopenhauer and Nietzsche were widely read by Russian writers of the turn of the century’, Toker claims that Arthur Schopenhauer can improve our understanding of Nabokov’s fiction without seeking to position him as the latter’s ‘source’ (1989: 7). In Vladimir Nabokov and the Art of Play, Thomas Karshan also explores Nabokov’s links with Kant, more specifically Nabokov’s conception of

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play in relation to German idealism. He provides a thorough account of Kant’s aesthetics, suggesting that ‘its internal themes [are] replicated in Nabokov’s work’ (2011a: 26). Yet, it is often difficult to reconcile Kant’s philosophy with the literary and moral outlook of Nabokov’s protagonists and literary persona. Where Kant’s categorical imperative, for example, stresses that one should act as if it were a universal law, Nabokov’s works seem to privilege free-willed, autonomous individuals who resist all-encompassing evaluation. Similarly, where Kant values disinterested aesthetic judgement, Nabokov, in ‘Good Readers and Good Writers’, is keen to stress that, ‘we ought to remain a little aloof and take pleasure in this aloofness while at the same time we keenly enjoy – passionately enjoy, enjoy with tears and shivers  – the inner weave of a given masterpiece. To be quite objective in these matters is of course impossible. Everything that is worthwhile is to some extent subjective’ (LL 4).2 In other words, Kant’s philosophy is perhaps too objective to sit satisfactorily with Nabokov’s art. Yet, his suggestion of a genealogical progression of influence – claiming that those who influenced Nabokov (such as Friedrich Schiller, Nietzsche and Andrei Bely) were, in turn, influenced by Kant (ibid.) – is something that I advocate in this study by suggesting a kind of ‘Nietzschean osmosis’ through intermediary figures. Further, in undertaking an ethical and literary examination of a Nabokov’s entire oeuvre through the various philosophical tenets promoted by predominantly one philosopher, I take a different approach with Nietzsche than either Dragunoiu or Karshan do regarding Kant.

Nabokov and ethics Early English criticism on Nabokov, heralded by Page Stegner’s Escape into Aesthetics: The Art of Vladimir Nabokov (1966), was keen to stress his aesthetic sensibilities; his privileging of art over moral engagement. Since this publication, and perhaps as a result of it, many studies have focused on the relationship between Nabokov and ethics. Following Ellen Pifer’s Nabokov and the Novel (1980), studies such as Richard Rorty’s Contingency, Irony, Solidarity (1989), Leona Toker’s Nabokov: The Mystery of Literary Structures (1989), Michael Wood’s The Magician’s Doubts: Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction (1994) and Leland de la Durantaye’s Style Is Matter:  The Moral Art of Vladimir Nabokov (2007) offer readings that position Nabokov as a ‘hidden’ moral writer, a moral didact in disguise, whose aestheticism

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In Lectures on Literature, Nabokov claims that ‘the mind, the brain, the top of the tingling spine, is, or should be, the only instrument used upon a book’ (4) and, in Lectures on Russian Literature, that ‘the books you like must be read with shudders and gasps’ (105).

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cloaked an essentially Christian morality of virtue.3 In the last few years, at least five further studies have looked at the moral or philosophical aspect of Nabokov, all but two of which are mentioned earlier.4 My study continues this approach by looking at the question of Nabokov and ethics, but departs from them in illustrating the links between Nabokov and a philosopher who questioned not only moral parameters, but also, whether any particular kind of morality is valid at all. My approach differs in three important respects from those who have already engaged with Nabokov in a philosophical sense. First, I  make a case for the socio-historical and literary impact of a single philosopher on Nabokov. Despite Nietzsche being directly, and indirectly, referred to on numerous occasions in Nabokov’s fiction, no major study has yet focused specifically on the relationship or addressed a comprehensive range of Nietzschean ideas.5 By tracing the links between Nabokov and Nietzsche through Russian Silver Age writers and philosophers for example, I show the direct relevance of Nietzsche’s philosophy. By harnessing philosophy to explore and explain literary problems, I also open Nabokov studies more widely to philosophers and cultural and literary theorists. The study uses Nietzsche’s philosophy in order to explain some of the most pressing issues in Nabokov’s fiction:  coincidence and recurrence; reader-writer relations; Nabokov’s haughtiness; his soliciting of a multiplicity of interpretations; and the ‘otherworld’. Yet, to look simply at the aspect of socio-historical influence is, to a certain extent, to veer into literary biography, and is not my objective. Instead, socio-historical evidence is used to buttress the application of Nietzsche’s philosophical concepts to specific ‘problems’ in Nabokov’s writing. Third, and perhaps most importantly, the study does not adhere to a critical consensus in which Nabokov’s apparent faults are forged, or reinterpreted, into benevolent acts. Like Maurice Couturier, I take issue with those who ‘have tried to prove the celestial level of [Nabokov’s] moral standards’ (1996: 215). His troubling aspects, as a result, are frequently looked at as

3 Although Rorty’s Contingency, Irony, Solidarity and Wood’s The Magician’s Doubts mention Nietzsche and Nabokov only in passing, both texts were pivotal in the formulation of this project:  Rorty’s through illustrating how philosophy can shed considerable light on literary problems and Wood’s by demonstrating how Nabokov’s concealment of loss, pain and pity in his texts are integral to his art. 4 These five texts are:  Eric Naiman’s Nabokov, Perversely (2010), Muravnik’s ‘Nabokov’s Philosophy of Art’, (PhD. diss, Yale University, 2010), Karshan’s Vladimir Nabokov and the Art of Play (2011a), Dragunoiu’s Vladimir Nabokov and the Poetics of Liberalism (2011) and David S.  Rutledge’s Nabokov’s Permanent Mystery:  The Expression of Metaphysics in His Work (2011). 5 Discussion of the relationship between Nabokov and Nietzsche features in John Burt Foster’s Nabokov’s Art of Memory and European Modernism (1993), Constantine Muravnik’s PhD dissertation ‘Nabokov’s Philosophy of Art’ (2010), and Karshan’s Vladimir Nabokov and the Art of Play (2011a).

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troubling rather than simply misunderstood. This in no way suggests that I am condemning Nabokov as a writer (it is impossible, and inappropriate here, of course, to comment on the real figure).6 Rather, this study celebrates Nabokov for what I call his Nietzschean ‘revaluation of values’ – his questioning of customs, his formal and literary playfulness, and his enactment and surpassing of Nietzschean thought in exactly the way that the philosopher himself would have demanded.

Nietzsche, Soviet culture and the Russian Silver Age In 1888, Nietzsche wrote to the Danish critic Georg Brandes with the hope of acquainting foreign readers with his work. In spite of feeling that his own countrymen did not understand his writings, Nietzsche had higher hopes for French and Russian readers (despite his work being completely banned in Russia from 1872 until 1898). Although a few translations had appeared in print at the start of the 1890s, these were subject to errors, censorship and excision – Nietzsche’s name, for example, had appeared as both ‘Nitche’ and ‘Niche’. Understanding of Nietzsche’s works, therefore, already difficult in modern, accurate translations, was muddied in early twentiethcentury Russia through deleted passages and distorted translations (Clowes 1988: 47), well after the abolition of the ban in 1898.7 However, Nel Grillaert claims that ‘the Russian censors could not completely prevent the gradual and often coincidental permeation of Nietzsche’s thoughts and works into Russian intellectual circles’ (2008:  20–21). Censorship rules were relaxed when Nikolai II succeeded Aleksandr III in 1894, and there soon appeared a translation of Thus Spoke Zarathustra:  A Book for Everyone and No One by Iuly Antonovsky in 1898, followed by translations of almost all of Nietzsche’s books. Yet, even after restrictions relaxing almost completely in 1906, no accurate and complete translation of Nietzsche’s opus had been produced – Clowes observes that ‘the only critical edition of Nietzsche was begun in 1909 by a variety of philosophers and writers, among them, S. L. Frank, M. O. Gershenzon, Balmont, Briusov, Belyi, and Ivanov. Only four volumes, The Birth of Tragedy (1912), Thoughts Out of Season (1909), Human, All Too Human (1911), and The Will to Power (1910), were published before the project was abandoned’ (1988:  45–46). Early responses to Nietzsche in Russia were not immediately favourable, however. In 1892,

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As Nietzsche reminds us in Ecce Homo, ‘I am one thing, my writings are another’ (39). Clowes observes that, in the 1913 translated edition of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the chapters ‘On Priests,’ Out of Service’, ‘The Festival of the Ass’, and the second part of the chapter, ‘Awakening’, were omitted (1988: 48). 7

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although the article did much to disseminate Nietzsche’s philosophy, the editors of Voprosy Filosofii Psikhologii only published Vasilii Preobrazhenskii’s article on Nietzsche to prove to Russian readers ‘what strange and sick phenomena are presently being generated by a well-known trend in Western European culture’. Yet, a series of articles on Nietzsche by the intellectual authority and theoretician Nikolai Mikhailovskii were to ‘contribute to Nietzsche’s growing popularity among the Russian intelligentsia’ (Grillaert 2008: 24–32). The interest in Nietzsche that these late nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury Russian writers had seems to have ‘permeated fin de siècle Russia at a time when national consciousness was suffering an impasse’ (Grillaert 2008:  1). At the turn of the twentieth century, ‘critics of all different schools  – the Marxist, V.  Lvov-Rogachevsky; the historian of Russian modernism, S.  Vengerov; and the religious thinker, N.  Berdiaev  – all coloured the period in Nietzschean terms as a time of “transvaluation of values” (pereotsenka tsennostei)’ (Clowes 1988:  1). As Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal claims, ‘it was not so much the direct influence of Nietzsche’s ideas, though that was certainly found, that accounts for his continued presence in [Soviet] culture, but the persistence, in transmuted form, of ideas and images that had become embedded in the culture before the Bolshevik Revolution’ (1994:  2). She reveals the widespread appropriation of Nietzsche, from the artists and writers who hailed Nietzsche as the prophet of a new culture of art and beauty; to the intellectuals who took his ‘revaluation of all values’ as a philosophical rationale for self-assertion, artistic creativity, and enjoyment of life; to figures of the World of Art movement, such as Sergei Diaghilev, who mirrored his worship of art; to Maksim Gorky’s appropriation of the Russian superman in justifying his break with Populism; to the ‘God-seeking’ movement that encompassed Symbolist writers, Idealist philosophers, and others; to the ‘God-building’ movement after the 1905 Revolution; to Futurists and Acmeists who broke away from Symbolist movement, reading Nietzsche differently as they did so (1994: 2–6). In other words, ‘familiarity with [Nietzsche’s] basic ideas, directly and as popularized by Russian and Western artists and writers, was simply assumed’ (6).8

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As Foster claims, ‘anyone who came to intellectual maturity in Europe and much of the Americas between the 1890s and the 1930s would have had trouble avoiding contact, either direct or indirect, with [Nietzsche’s] work’ (1981: 3). Rosenthal reveals that, despite Krupskaia’s (Lenin’s widow’s) removal of Nietzsche’s works (along with those of other ‘Idealists’ such as Plato, Kant, and Soloviev), from the People’s Libraries in 1923, his ideas continued to circulate. Early Soviet intellectuals and artists retained the cultural baggage of the Silver Age (roughly 1890–1914); privately owned works by and about Nietzsche passed from hand to hand, and young people heard about his ideas from older friends and colleagues. (1994: 7)

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INTRODUCTION

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Nietzsche’s beliefs in the Dionysian principle, individualist aesthetics and his mystical and religious dimension appealed most to writers such as Vyacheslav Ivanov, Andrei Bely and Aleksandr Blok (Grillaert 2008: 35–37). For Ruth Coates, Nietzsche had ‘a powerful liberating effect on Russia’s literary elite, since he gave them permission to slough off the burden of artistic responsibility for the people and pursue personal artistic goals’ (2010: 187). The influence of Nietzsche on Russian Silver Age writers such as Ivanov, Bely, Blok, Ivan Bunin and Vladimir Mayakovsky is distinct, arguably deriving from Nietzsche’s ability to demarcate himself from conventional moralists and jolt his reader into a new awareness of moral valuation (Clowes 1988: 16). Bely’s first point of contact with Nietzsche was in 1899, with his essay ‘Friedrich Nietzsche’ appearing in 1911. John Burt Foster, in Heirs to Dionysus: A Nietzschean Current in Literary Modernism, claims that: In Moscow, around the turn of the century, as Andrei Bely tells it in his autobiography, he experienced ‘a simply crazed enthusiasm for Nietzsche’ [ . . . ] But Nietzsche also encouraged his literary ambitions: he was ‘the creator of the most vivid images, the theoretic or esthetic meaning of which was revealed only through creative emulation and not simply by following his thought . . . I saw in him . . . an artist of genius’. (1981: 24) Clowes, in turn, observes that ‘when he discovered Zarathustra in 1899 [ . . . ] Belyi was smitten with a “crazy passion” for Nietzsche’ (1988:  153). We are reminded, in Petersburg, for example, of Dudkin telling Nikolai that ‘We are all Nietzscheans [ . . . ] you too are a Nietzschean; only you will never admit it’ ([1916] 1995:  106). Bely’s ‘symbolist brother’, Alexandr Blok, also had a strong connection with Nietzsche. Clowes argues that ‘for all the considerable differences between the Symbolist poets, Merezhkovsky, Ivanov, Blok and Bely shared much the same orientation in their separate responses to Nietzsche: all were drawn to the religious-mythical aspect of Nietzsche’s inquiry, his overarching vision of life and the role of human creativity in it’ (1988: 116). Nietzsche’s initial reception in the anglophone world seemed just as unfavourable as his early Russian responses were, but for different reasons. For English-speaking readers, it is as easy to underestimate Nietzsche’s influence in Russia as it is to ignore it. For when Nietzsche did penetrate the English-speaking world, he was initially reviled for a hostile philosophy that would later become erroneously associated with Western proto-fascism, rather than valued as the aesthetic manifesto adopted by Russian symbolists.9 David Bradshaw, in A Concise Companion to Modernism, claims that 9

Oscar Levy translated the first complete English edition of Nietzsche’s Collected Works (1909– 1913), completing an unfinished English translation originally undertaken by a key figure in Anglo-German intercultural transfer, Alexander Tille (1896–97).

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Nietzsche had ‘acquired notoriety as a name and reputation before making an informed impact on the most serious and creative minds of the time. In particular, his reception suffered from lurid misrepresentation in Max Nordau’s Degeneration (translated into English in 1895), which was the first widespread source of information about him for many anglophone readers’ (2003: 56). Nietzsche’s initial anglophone reception was not helped by numerous negative reviews by critics such as F. C. S. Schiller (disagreeing with his views on race, evolution and politics) and George Santayana (in Egotism in German Philosophy [1916], he lampoons Nietzsche’s voice as being, at times, like that of a self-indulgent child). This is in sharp contrast to the way in which Nietzsche was being received in Russia just before the First World War:  as a ‘German Dostoevsky’ and even as a religious thinker (Rosenthal 2004:  137–41). When English-speaking writers did engage approvingly with the themes and ideas of Nietzsche, it was often in uncomfortable ways. Texts such as George Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman (1901), Yeats’s ‘The Second Coming’ (1920) and ‘Leda and the Swan’ (1923), and D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love (1920) would broaden Nietzsche’s readership considerably, yet perpetuate the anglophone world’s proto-fascist view of the philosopher. Nietzsche’s later reputation in the English-speaking world suffered greatly from the association with the rise of fascism in Germany. More specifically, the links between Hitler and Nietzsche’s sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche in the 1930s served to cultivate a belief that Hitler’s ideology was built on that of Nietzsche’s. Elisabeth’s censoring and distorting of Nietzsche’s unpublished works – his sister took over Nietzsche’s estate following his death – led to an uneasy association between Nazism and Nietzsche. Not only did Hitler visit Nietzsche’s house on several occasions, in order to converse with Nietzsche’s sister, but he also had a bust of Nietzsche in his study, attended Elisabeth’s funeral in 1935, and, in 1943, gave some of Nietzsche’s writings to Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. Despite writings such as Georges Bataille’s Acéphale:  Réparation à Nietzsche (January 1937), dedicated entirely to denouncing the Nazi appropriation of Nietzsche, such a link proved to be a demonizing force in the anglophone world’s interpretation of the philosopher, not helped by the fact that the three books apparently given to Nazi soldiers during the Second World War were Hitler’s Mein Kampf (1925), Alfred Rosenberg’s The Myth of the Twentieth Century (1930) and Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Astore and Showalter 2005: 99). Yet, in a letter to his sister Elizabeth dated Christmas 1887, Nietzsche declares: It is a matter of honor to me to be absolutely clean and unequivocal regarding anti-Semitism, namely opposed, as I am in my writings [ . . . ] I  have been persecuted in recent times with letters and Anti-Semitic Correspondence sheets; my disgust with this party [ . . . ] is as outspoken as possible, but the relation to Forster, as well as the after-effect of my

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former anti-Semitic publisher Schmeitzner, always brings adherents of this disagreeable party back to the idea that I  must after all belong to them. (In Kaufmann [1974] 2013: 45)

Nabokov and the Russian Silver Age Although the extent of Nietzsche’s influence on the Russian Silver Age is less well documented, the influence of Russian Silver Age writers on Nabokov is relatively well known.10 In The Philosophy Steamer: Lenin and the Exile of the Intelligentsia, Lesley Chamberlain claims that, ‘as contemporary émigré Russians knew him, Nabokov was not so much a Western modernist as the last representative of the Russian Silver Age longing for that mystical Symbolist Russia he had left behind’ (2006: 226). In Strong Opinions, Nabokov stated that his favourite novels of the twentieth century were James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), Andrei Bely’s Petersburg (1913), Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis (1915) and the first half of Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past (1913–1927) (57). Bely’s novel is by far the most marginal of these four novels, yet its position in Nabokov’s canon is both testament to his respect for the Symbolist movement and notable for its placement in the Russian Silver Age  – a highly fertile literary period straddling the nineteenth and twentieth centuries whose major exponents included Bely, Blok, Maximilian Voloshin, Maxim Gorky, Ivan Bunin, Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam and Vladimir Mayakovsky. Its literature concerned the upheaval of convention, the search for transcendence in the everyday that questioned stagnant forms and vocabularies, and privileged the role of the individual in art. Brian Boyd reveals that, ‘as a youth Nabokov devoured Symbolist verse rapturously’, by eleven, had collected a number of Symbolist, Acmeist and Futurist poets and, by fifteen, had ‘read and digested practically all of the contemporary poets’ (VNRY 93). In response to Edmund Wilson’s claim that no important Russian poetry had been written between 1900 and 1920 in Russia, Nabokov retorted that ‘the “decline” of Russian literature in 1905–1917 is a Soviet invention. Blok, Bely, Bunin and others wrote their best stuff in those days. And never was poetry so popular – not even in Pushkin’s days. I am a product of that period, I was bred in that atmosphere’ (NWL 246). This early interest in Symbolist literature increased during Nabokov’s time in the Crimea between 1917 and 1919, where he met the Symbolist poet Maximilian Voloshin  – an acquaintance of Nabokov’s father, V.  D. Nabokov, who tutored Nabokov in the art of poetry and introduced him to

10 See, for example, Vladimir E. Alexandrov’s ‘Vladimir Nabokov and the Silver Age of Russian Culture’, in Nabokov’s Otherworld (1991).

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the work and critical discussion of Bely (VNRY 149). Interestingly, Karshan claims that, ‘like all of the Russian Symbolists’, Voloshin was ‘a devotee of Nietzsche’s’ (2011a: 40). After fleeing Russia in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1919 and graduating from Cambridge in 1922, Nabokov moved to Berlin alongside almost 400,000 Russian émigrés. Boyd claims that ‘in 1922 and 1923 almost every Russian writer of note, émigré or not, was in Berlin at least briefly: Gorky, Bely, Pasternak, Mayakovsky, Remizov, Pilnyak, Aleksey Tolstoy, Ehrenburg, Khodasevich, Tsvetaeva, Zaitsev, Shklovsky, Aldanov, Adamovich, Georgy Ivanov, and many others’ (VNRY 198). It was between the 1920s and 1940s that he published predominantly under the pseudonym ‘Sirin’ – a word associated with the mythical Russian firebird. In Strong Opinions however, Nabokov reveals the name’s connection to the Symbolist movement: ‘Incidentally, circa 1910 there had appeared literary collections under the editorial title of Sirin devoted to the so-called “symbolist” movement, and I  remember how tickled I  was to discover in 1952 while browsing the Houghton Library at Harvard that its catalogue listed me as actively publishing Blok, Bely, and Bryusov at the age of ten’ (161). This ‘tickle’ derived from coincidence. We can detect Fyodor acting as raisonneur for Nabokov in The Gift when he mentions that he ‘accepted ecstatically, gratefully, completely, without critical carpings, all the five poets whose names began with “B” ’ (73–74) in his early youth. These poets – who Simon Karlinsky claims are Valery Briusov, Konstantin Balmont, Alexandr Blok, Andrei Bely and Ivan Bunin (2008) – align specifically with Nabokov’s reading.11 Barry Scherr, for example, acknowledges the extent of Nabokov’s knowledge of the Symbolists in his early love poems, seeing Blok’s imagery and vocabulary in a pair of poems in The Cluster published on his death in 1921 and noticing an epilogue from Blok in his poem ‘Vstrecha’ (‘Meeting’), as well as a poem dedicated to Ivan Bunin (in Connolly 1999: 114). As Boyd observes, ‘less suggestive to the English-speaking reader but more substantial are Nabokov’s relations in his years of European exile with friends and foes among the writers of the emigration: robust Lukash, gentle Aykhenwald, the acid and exacting Khodasevich, slippery Adamovich, envy-choked Bunin’ (VNRY 4). As evidenced by his correspondence with figures such as Nikolai Berdiaev, Ivan Bunin and Vladimir Khodasevich up until 1939,12 Nabokov’s initial tutelage under the Nietzschean Maximilian Voloshin would continue through ongoing contact with members of the Berlin emigration who also identified heavily with Nietzsche.

11 For more detail, see David M. Bethea’s ‘Nabokov and Blok’ in Vladimir E. Alexandrov’s The Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov (1995: 374–82). 12 Nabokov’s correspondence with Berdiaev (1939), Bunin (1938–1939) and Khodasevich (1937– 1938) can be found in the Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov Papers, Correspondence: 1923– 1952, Box 1, Reel 1, Letters Received, Library of Congress, Manuscript Division, Washington, DC.

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INTRODUCTION

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Nietzsche and Nabokov Although Nietzsche is cited only twice in Boyd’s Vladimir Nabokov:  The Russian Years (1990: 76, 150), Nabokov’s engagement with the philosopher appears to have been deeper than commonly thought.13 Alongside the family library containing copies of Untimely Meditations, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, and an anthology of Nietzsche published in 1910 (Sistematicheskii katalog [1904: 104]; Sistematicheskii katalog [1911: 75), Karshan, in Vladimir Nabokov and the Art of Play (2011a) also reveals that in 1918, under the tutelage of 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)’ (7). Almost sixty years later, at the end of Nabokov’s life and career, Nietzsche appears in his posthumous novel, The Original of Laura (2009):14 the art of self-slaughter TLS 16-1-76 ‘Nietz[s]che argued that the man of pure will . . . must recognise that that there is an appropriate time to die’ (265) That Nabokov alludes to Nietzsche but has spelled his name incorrectly raises some questions. Could the spelling mistake, like ‘Montherland’ (TOOL 95), be a ridiculing technique; a ‘patronizing indifference’ to the supposed source?15 Is it simply another spelling mistake among the many in the text, arguably caused by Nabokov’s failing health?16 Is it simply that ‘Nietzsche’ is a difficult Germanic name to spell, given that it has five consonants in succession? Considering that Philip Wild writes about trying not to ‘die before you are ready to die’ (TOOL 181), and that the latter part of the novel explicitly focuses on his existential experiment of ‘autodissolution’ (171), this reference takes on greater significance as we probe further. The Nietzschean passage that Nabokov alludes to actually derives

13

Boyd reveals the reading list for Nabokov’s father, V.  D. Nabokov, while spending three months in solitary confinement in St Petersburg’s Kresty prison in 1908 for signing the Vyborg Manifesto:  ‘Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Knut Hamsun, Anatole France, Zola, Hugo, Wilde, and many others’ (VNRY 76). He also reveals that, while in the Crimea, V. V Nabokov ‘drew up his own idiosyncratic reading list from the Yalta library: entomology, duels, natural-explorers, Nietzsche’ (VNRY 150). 14 The argument that I  make in this section appeared, in a slightly different form, in ‘The Original of Laura and Nietzsche:  A Zarathustran Tool?’, in Shades of Laura:  Vladimir Nabokov’s Last Novel, The Original of Laura, ed. Yuri Leving (Montreal:  McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2013). 15 John Simon, for example, asks ‘why is Montherlant misspelled “Montherland”? Out of sloppiness, patronizing indifference, or the sake of a jeering parallel with Morand?’ (2010). 16 The double use of ‘that’ in the quoted passage adds strength to such a suggestion.

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NABOKOV AND NIETZSCHE: PROBLEMS AND PERSPECTIVES

FIGURE 1 Front cover of Vladimir Nabokov’s notebook from 1918 entitled ‘Stikhi i skhemy’ [‘Poems and Schemes’], in Russian. Box 10, Folder 25, Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

from a review of Ivan Morris’s The Nobility of Failure:  Tragic Heroes in the History of Japan in an edition of the Times Literary Supplement, dated 16 January 1976, where the latter writes, ‘Nietzsche argued that the man of pure will, the man who was properly identified with the springs of his activity and not at variance with them, must recognise that there is an appropriate time to die, a time beyond which life would be merely a compromise’ (Scruton 1976: 48). In the context of the novel, one where Wild is intent on obliterating his body through ‘luxurious suicide’ (TOOL 243), Nabokov effectively harnesses what is contained in the chapter titled ‘Voluntary Death’ in Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra:  the virtuous action of ‘dying at the right time’ (97).17 From the explicit references to ‘eternal recurrence’ in his first novel, Mary, to indirect allusions in texts such as The Defense, Pnin and ‘Ultima Thule’, to his final novel, The Original of Laura, reveals Nietzsche’s continuous presence throughout Nabokov’s composition. 17

For a detailed analysis of Nietzschean themes in The Original of Laura, please see my article, ‘The Original of Laura and Nietzsche:  A Zarathustran Tool?’ in Shades of Laura:  Vladimir Nabokov’s Last Novel, The Original of Laura (ed. Yuri Leving, 2013), 114–28.

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INTRODUCTION

FIGURE 2 Inside page of Nabokov’s ‘Stikhi i skhemy’ [‘Poems and Schemes’] notebook detailing a list of ten books, three of which (including Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra [76]), are scored out and marked as read. Box 10, Folder 25, Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

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Interpreting silence Despite the selection of direct allusions to Nietzsche and Nietzschean thought across a lifetime of writing, Nabokov had very little to say directly on Nietzsche, whether as an object of hostility (such as Freud or Thomas Mann),18 or as a literary figure that he approved of (such as Pushkin or Gogol). It is always dangerous interpreting silence, and I do so here tentatively. Nabokov’s silence on topics such as the Russian Revolution, his relationships with his brother Sergey and Uncle Ruka, and the impact of the Holocaust on his life should advise readers not to be automatically dismissive, however. In one respect, Nabokov’s stance on ‘indebtedness’ serves as a prominent example of silence  – in Strong Opinions, for example, Nabokov claims that ‘I do not believe that any particular writer has had any definite influence on me’ (46). Another explanation for silence, consistent with my argument, has been touched on already. Because Nietzsche was seen by many as a forerunner of Nazism, and Nabokov had narrowly avoided the horrors of German fascism, it may have been that Nabokov wanted to distance himself from the Nazi’s appropriation of Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s spurious links to fascism, and the fact that both Nabokov’s wife Véra and son Dmitri were Jewish, may have discouraged him from open discussion of Nietzsche in his work and elsewhere. In this respect, Nabokov’s relationship with Germany, and its culture in general, is curious. In the foreword to King, Queen, Knave, Nabokov writes that, in the late 1920s, ‘I spoke no German, had no German friends, had not read a single German novel either in the original, or in translation’ (vi). His claim that he could not read German enabled him to refute suggestions of any German influence, but this does not seem entirely true.19 Aged nine, and with the help of a dictionary, Boyd claims that Nabokov had gained absolute control over the European Lepidoptera in Hofmann’s Die Grosschmetterlinge Europas and, between 1911 and 1914, learned German at the Tenishev School in St Petersburg (VNRY 77–87).20 Foster notes that ‘German was the first foreign language into which his novels of the 1920s were translated’ (2000: 212–13), while Omry Ronen reveals that Nabokov translated Goethe’s ‘Zueignung’ from Faust (2000:  247).

18 Asked about possible influence of Proust and T. S. Eliot on his writing, Nabokov remarked that they are anagrams of ‘stupor’ and ‘toilets’ respectively (NWL 241). 19 Dieter E. Zimmer, the leading German-speaking authority on Nabokov, however reveals that Nabokov’s ‘own linguistic demands were of the highest kind, and he was perfectly aware that his German could not in the least cope with his Russian, English and French’ (2016). 20 See also Strong Opinions, 189.

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INTRODUCTION

15

In the introduction to Lectures on Literature, John Updike writes that, ‘in 1969 he [Nabokov] told a BBC interviewer, “I do not know German and so could not read Kafka before the nineteen thirties” [ . . . ] two years later he told Bavarian Broadcasting, “I read Goethe and Kafka en regard as I also did Homer and Horace” ’ (xxi).21 Yet, in a note in his annotated copy of his lecture on The Metamorphosis, Nabokov claims that ‘in the original German there is a wonderful flowing rhythm here in this dreamy sequence of sentences’ (LL 258). Such discrepancies reveal his complex and curious relationship with German culture: his affection for Kafka, Rilke and Goethe (SO 165), for example, is countered by his rejection of Thomas Mann’s ‘asinine’ Death in Venice (SO 57). Ronen, for example, claims that ‘while critical of contemporary German literature, with the exception of Kafka and, possibly, Rilke, Nabokov proceeded to invent, in his novels, a series of German authors and literary situations’ (2000: 243).22 We are reminded, of course, of Fyodor’s characterization of ‘the German’ in The Gift: ‘in small numbers vulgar and in large numbers unbearably vulgar’, ‘skittle-headed’, and ‘germanically ignorant’ (79, 149–50). These, and the possible ‘guilt by association’ with fascism in the anglophone world, may help to explain, in part, his silence on a figure like Nietzsche. Yet, such silence is consistent with Nietzsche’s own tactic, in the words of Michael Tanner, of practising ‘a kind of systematic ingratitude towards those great figures who meant most to him, and how this is the only way of taking them completely seriously’ (in EH x). In this study, I argue that Nabokov’s silence on Nietzsche can be seen as respectful, rather than contemptuous or indifferent. Other figures that Nabokov is explicitly hostile or seemingly indifferent towards have been catalytic in the formation of this book. One of the most interesting comparisons in this sense is the relationship between Nabokov and Sigmund Freud – a figure the former refers to as ‘the Viennese Quack’ (BS xi) and whose lampooned presence in almost all of Nabokov’s forewords to his English-language editions was explicitly outlined as a rule (Def 10–11). Opposed to the more fraught situation of admiring someone, such as Nietzsche, (erroneously) associated with anti-Semitism, Freud’s Jewish ethnic origin did not provide immunity from Nabokov’s attacks. Geoffrey Green, Jenefer Shute and de la Durantaye are among those who have explored this fertile relationship  – one worthwhile precisely because Nabokov was

21 Ronen reveals that Alexander Dolinin has found details of other, apparently unpublished, translations of Goethe in the Nabokov archives (2000: 247). 22 See Ronen’s article ‘Nabokov and Goethe’, in Gennady Barabtarlo’s Cold Fusion: Aspects of the German Cultural Presence in Russia (2000: 241–51).

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so loquaciously keen to negate it.23 Similarly, Alexander Moudrov’s article ‘Invitation to Plato’s Beheading’ in The Goalkeeper:  The Nabokov Almanac claims that ‘Plato’s presence in Nabokov’s works is largely unexamined, in spite of the apparent affinities between the two writers and the critical interest in the metaphysical aspect of Nabokov’s prose [ . . . ] perhaps because Nabokov gave the impression that he wanted to discourage this line of inquiry’ (in Leving 2010:  61). Nabokov’s dismissal  – ‘I detest Plato, I loathe Lacedaemon and all Perfect States’ (NWL 180) – ironically illustrates his knowledge of Platonic thinking, of course. I agree that such ostensible ‘covering up’ of knowledge, or influence, is worth exploring and therefore investigate the question of Nabokov’s silence on Nietzsche. I do not claim, however, that Nabokov merely imitated Nietzsche’s philosophical concepts at particular points in his career. Rather I argue that, in some instances, Nabokov extends Nietzsche’s philosophy, and can be seen as both his model and rival. As Foster claims in Heirs to Dionysus, paraphrasing the vocabulary of Harold Bloom, ‘influence involves innovation’, whether this be ‘revision or critique, the expansion or contraction of leading concepts, the absorption of motifs into new structures, and inspired misreadings or wilful failures of understanding’ (1981: 19). Towards the end of this volume, for example, I argue that Nabokov rewrites or revises some of Nietzsche’s thought in order to, in Bloom’s vocabulary, ‘find an authoritative place for his creative output’ (1973: 16). Yet, although documenting and theorizing about the influence of Nietzsche on Nabokov is integral to this study, the relationship between the two figures is just as, if not more, important. Where the former can arguably be reductive and aligned with the puzzle-solving element in Nabokov studies, the latter can illuminate deeper problems in literary texts. As Wood claims in The Magician’s Doubts, Nabokov is a ‘sceptical modern, an heir to Schopenhauer and Nietzsche (Nabokov would have hated the association, but ghosts don’t always get to choose their company, and the connection is not arbitrary)’ (170). The range of Russian responses to Nietzsche alone  – whether Blok’s aesthetic, Berdiaev’s religious or Uspensky’s metaphysical interpretations  – signals the danger of assuming a unified version of the philosopher’s work. Instead, I have identified specific aspects of Nietzsche’s thought, which I argue feature heavily in Nabokov’s work, without implying a mechanical implant of the older writer. To do this, I have distilled Nietzsche’s project to specific philosophical tenets in order to bring cohesion to his multifarious thought. These tenets – eternal recurrence, perspectivism, transvaluation, master–slave

23 For further discussion, see Green’s Freud and Nabokov (1988); Shute’s ‘Nabokov and Freud’, in Vladimir E. Alexandrov’s The Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov (1995); and de la Durantaye’s ‘Vladimir Nabokov and Sigmund Freud, or a Particular Problem’, American Imago, 62/1 (2005: 59–73).

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INTRODUCTION

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morality, the will to power, the Übermensch, and the otherworld – are applied to particular areas in Nabokov’s work that have attracted marked uncertainty or speculation (such as the role of memory in Pnin; Nabokov’s relationship with the reader; Lolita’s morality; Pale Fire’s authorship; the frequency of ‘elevated’ protagonists; and the beyond). Structurally, the six chapters are divided into three thematic parts: ‘Nietzschean Engagements’, ‘Nietzschean Readings’, and ‘Beyond Nietzsche’. Part One is predominantly concerned with plotting, and extrapolating from, Nabokov’s more direct points of contact with Nietzsche through engaging with the former’s relationship with both memory and his readership. Part Two uses Nietzsche’s philosophy to address two other significant problems in Nabokov studies: the moral world of Lolita and internal authorship of Pale Fire. Part Three concerns Nabokov’s journey from respectful pupil to rebellious disciple and engages with his propensity for writing about both a particular kind of protagonist and his relationship with the otherworld. Part One, Nietzschean Engagements, opens with a chapter titled ‘Eternal recurrence and Nabokov’s art of memory’. Nietzsche’s concept of ‘eternal recurrence’ has been understood both as a kind of thought experiment suggesting the exact, endless repetition of events and as a quasi-scientific doctrine related to the possibility that the world’s atoms can reconfigure in the same order. For Nabokov, I  argue, eternal recurrence is a significant concern, an alarming and alluring paradox related to his conception of memory. Looking predominantly at Pnin, Mary, and The Defense, I document each novel’s contact with Nietzsche and demonstrate how certain features of the texts demonstrate deep preoccupation with eternal recurrence but also raise the issue of conflict. The second chapter, ‘The will to disempower: Nabokov and his readers’, focuses on a similar combination of rapture and fear that appears to be at work in relation to Nabokov’s writing and Nietzsche’s concepts of ‘master–slave morality’ and the ‘will to power’. I engage with a contested issue in Nabokov studies – his relationship with his readership – by illustrating the rhetorical similarity between Nabokov’s essay ‘Good Readers and Good Writers’ in Lectures on Literature and Nietzsche’s definitions of his concepts. Drawing on Bernard Reginster’s interpretation of the ‘will to power’ as a search for conflict in order to stimulate creativity, I look at two short stories – ‘Recruiting’ and ‘The Vane Sisters’ – to illustrate what I term Nabokov’s ‘will to disempower’. Where the first part explores Nabokov’s more direct engagements with Nietzsche, the second turns to the benefits of reading Nabokov’s texts through Nietzschean ideas whether he alludes to them directly or not. Following conceptually from the end of the first part, Chapter 3, ‘Lolita’s Nietzschean morality’, further illuminates reader (dis)empowerment but provides a Nietzschean reading rather than specifically tracing Nietzschean allusions. Existing readings of Lolita often equate literary and moral experience, whereas my reading depends on a similar analogy but applied

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differently. Rather than seeing Lolita as a demanding but effective school for virtue, as some critics do, I  characterize the novel as an exercise in moral disorientation. Just as Nietzsche’s philosophical remit is to undermine moral conventions, Nabokov’s Lolita can show us both how conventional reading processes and ideas on the origins of good and evil can be undermined simultaneously. Chapter 4 looks specifically at Nabokov’s novel Pale Fire, his most interpretively resistant novel. One reason for such resistance is the reader’s inability to ascribe internal authorship with absolute certainty; that is, to establish beyond doubt who has written what in the novel’s fictional world. Using Nietzsche’s concept of ‘perspectivism’, I argue that Pale Fire can be read as a number of different, but equally valid, novels. On the surface, this might seem close to a relativist account of the text, in which no reading can be considered more valid than any other. Yet, Nietzsche’s perspectivism actually allows for ‘incompatible’ readings to both mutually exist and cross-pollinate without implying critical relativism, as well as the formation of a hierarchy of values attached to these different perspectives. Part Three, Beyond Nietzsche, opens with ‘Rewriting Nietzsche’. There, I consider Nabokov as Nietzsche’s rebellious disciple, engaging in dialogue with the Nietzschean ‘master’. In this chapter, I  engage with the similarities between Nietzsche’s Übermensch  – typically characterized as a figure with ‘higher’ values than ordinary individuals  – and the common traits found in many of Nabokov’s protagonists and his own literary persona. Yet, just as Chapter  3 discusses moral disorientation, Chapter  5 explores how Nabokov frequently problematizes their Übermensch status. One way in which this occurs is through Nabokov’s representation of pity. While pity is incompatible with Übermensch status for Nietzsche, it is central to both Nabokov’s works, such as in Bend Sinister, and, indeed, himself. In his divergence, Nabokov surpasses Nietzsche in Nietzschean fashion by presenting a modified Übermensch possessing Nabokovian vulnerabilities. Chapter 6, ‘Nabokov’s “other” World’, synthesizes Nabokov’s transcendent outlook and Nietzsche’s materialist vision. Much has been made of the concept of potustoronnost in Nabokov’s works, but most criticism interprets this ‘beyond’ in spiritual fashion. This means that, at first sight, Nietzsche’s repudiation of an ‘otherworld’ should be at odds with Nabokov’s embracement of it. Yet, both writers demonstrate a marked preoccupation with this world. Given an account of Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev’s outlook in The Gift, I suggest that Nietzsche’s materialist vision can be combined with Nabokov’s otherworldly tendencies by pointing to the ‘beyond’ in the everyday. Through perception’s transformative capabilities, Fyodor is able to fuse the spiritual and the earthly, pointing to an ‘other world’ within the material one.

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INTRODUCTION

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i As a whole, the study addresses fundamental problems in Nabokov’s writing that make his work perplexing, mysterious, and frequently uneasy rather than simply focusing on the literary puzzles and mysteries which, although inherent, do not necessarily define his body of work. I suggest that Nietzsche’s philosophy provides fresh, but not always palatable, perspectives in which to understand these problems. Such a Nietzschean framework, in turn, illustrates that the uneasy aspects of Nabokov’s work are not only intelligible, but can also offer the reader manifold rewards.

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PART ONE

Nietzschean engagements

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1 Eternal recurrence and Nabokov’s art of memory

A passing allusion tacitly recognized in the middle distance of an idea, an adventurous sail descried on the horizon. ( Pnin 34) In Theories of Memory: A Reader, Michael Rossington and Anne Whitehead chronicle the extent to which memory has informed literary inquiry. From the ancient Greeks, to Enlightenment thinkers like John Locke and Georg Hegel, to twentieth-century figures such as Marcel Proust and Henri Bergson, they claim that there has been a consistent emphasis on a particular aspect of memory throughout literary history:  that of recollection (2007:  4). Recollection, describing the involuntary passive experience of the past in the mental present, has often been at the expense of ‘retrospection’, something I  define here as the active, willed survey of the past. Locke’s metaphor of memory being the ‘store-house of our Ideas’ ([1690] 2009: 87) serves as a popular example of how experiential aspects of active memory are downplayed, especially since it seems to interrelate three major modes of response to experience:  remembering, forgetting and anticipating (Thompson 1991: 17). In The Brothers Karamazov and the Poetics of Memory, Diane Thompson claims: When we speak of literary art we are concerned not so much with the storage of information about reality, but with transformations of reality by the individual imagination in its potentially creative alliance with cultural memory [ . . . ] Memory is at once a highly conservative and a highly creative mechanism. Therein lies its great significance for art. As a conservative mechanism, memory, remarks Lotman, is not only ‘panchronic, but opposed to time’. (1991: 6)

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Her conception of memory suggests that it can not only help us deal with certain situations experientially by connecting past, present and future through pattern, but also help us to better understand the topics of time and memory, the importance of pattern, and their relationship to human consciousness in Nabokov’s writing. As he declares in Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited, ‘I confess I do not believe in time’ (109). Nabokov’s narrative memoir acts as a quasi-imperative summoning of the possibilities of ‘Mnemosyne’, and describes ‘the act of vividly recalling a patch of the past is something that I seem to have been performing with the utmost zest all my life, and I have reason to believe that this almost pathological keenness of the retrospective faculty is a hereditary trait’ (SM 60). In ‘Good Readers and Good Writers’, memory is listed alongside ‘imagination’, ‘a dictionary’ and ‘artistic sense’ as an integral criterion for what constitutes a ‘good reader’ (LL 3). Yet, scholars have tended to concentrate more on Nabokov’s relationship with figures such as Marcel Proust and Henri Bergson when looking at his depictions of both time and memory, something aided by Nabokov’s inclusion of the first half of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time in what he ranked as the four twentieth-century masterpieces in prose (SM 57). John Burt Foster, for example, claims that Nabokov ‘strongly endorsed Bergson’s concern with the lived experience of time, the enriching effects of memory, and the importance of creativity’, arguing that he ‘saw Bergson as nearly identical to Proust’ in these areas (1993: 14). Although the focus on Proust and Bergson is certainly fertile, scholarship on Nabokov and these two figures fails to account for several aspects of Nabokov’s conception of memory: his belief that memory can look forward, that memories can be shared, his relationship with loss, his distinction between memory and nostalgia, and his willingness to remember pain, suffering and loss, as well as joy and happiness.1 Interestingly, although Boyd claims that ‘Nabokov heartily approved Bergson’s cutting time off from space in order to emphasise the indeterminism of the world, and he accepted Bergson’s stress on time as a richer mode of being than space’,2 he claims that ‘the insistence on the absurd contrast between a possible return in space and an impossible return in time is his own’ (VNRY 294, my emphasis). Such a suggestion can be interrogated fruitfully if we probe Nabokov’s engagement with the issue of recurrence in light of Nietzsche’s position.

1

The seeming nonsensicality of having ‘memory of the future’ is suggested by Lewis Carroll in Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871) when the Queen remarks, ‘It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards’ (in Thompson 1991: 26). In The Gift, Fyodor mentions, ‘It’s queer, I seem to remember my future works’ (55, 179). Heidegger asserts a similar proposition in his discussion of eternal recurrence: ‘We know nothing of an earlier “life” when we think back. But can we only think back? No, we can also think ahead – and that is thinking proper’ (1991: 135). 2 Boyd claims that Nabokov read Bergson ‘avidly in his years of European exile’ (VNRY 294).

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Nabokov, circular time and recurrence Just as questions of time and memory have traditionally led Nabokov critics to Proust and Bergson, discussions of coincidence and recurrence have tended to lead them to Hegel given Nabokov’s frequent references to spirals, and ideas of thesis, antithesis and synthesis.3 In Speak, Memory, for example, Nabokov claims that ‘the spiral is a spiritualized circle. In the spiral form, the circle, uncoiled, unwound, has ceased to be vicious, it has been set free. I  thought this up when I  was a schoolboy, and I  also discovered that Hegel’s triadic series (so popular in old Russia) expressed the essential spirality of all things in their relation to time’ (211). In The Models of Space, Time and Vision in V.  Nabokov’s Fiction:  Narrative Strategies and Cultural Frames, Marina Grishakova looks mainly at spatio-temporal models presented by Bergson, Proust and Lacan, but also discusses Nabokov’s ambivalence towards the circular form and the conflation of Hegelian and Nietzschean thought in his work: One of the most obvious of Nabokov’s sources is the Symbolist idea of the spiral as a spiritualized circle (SM, 275) elaborated in the polemics against the Nietzschean ‘vicious’ circle of the ‘eternal return’. In Nabokov, however, the vicious circle of logical thinking or the negative meaning of the encirclement as pressure of the material world is counterweighted by the positive meaning of the circle (see e.g. a collection of Nabokov’s dictums on the topic ‘all good things are round’ in Hayles 1984: 124; cf. also: ‘Commonsense is square, whereas all the most essential visions and values of life are beautifully round, as round as the universe or the eyes of a child at its first circus show’, CW, 22). (2006: 81)4 Indeed, although Nabokov mentions the ‘vicious’ character of the circle, Alexandrov draws attention to the idea of the ‘charmed circles of Nabokov’s fiction’ (1995: 6). For example, despite Fyodor’s ‘urge to break out of the circle’ (312) in The Gift, he makes reference to the positive effect of recurring incidences and circular motions (84, 188). Karshan, similarly, focuses on the

3

See Boyd’s Vladimir Nabokov:  The Russian Years (294–95) and Pale Fire:  The Magic of Artistic Discovery (1999:  10–13, 89–90). Boyd, however, claims that Nabokov’s idea of the ‘spiral’ comes before his exposure to either Hegel or Henri Bergson. See, also, the discussion of thesis, antithesis and synthesis in The Gift (132) and the mention of ‘thoughtful Hegelian synthesis’ in Lolita (307). Interestingly, Muravnik claims that ‘Hegel heralded the death of art if art be anything more meaningful than mere entertainment. Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Heidegger challenged Hegel’s position as they attempted to bring art back into the focus of the most important human endeavors’ (2010: 10). 4 In the poem ‘An Evening of Russian Poetry’, Nabokov writes, ‘Not only rainbows – every line is bent / And skulls and seeds and all good worlds are round’ (1959: 20).

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phrase ‘All, all turns’ in Nabokov’s unpublished 1921 poem ‘Olympicum’, claiming that Nabokov presents the circle as ‘the essential form of existence’ (2011a: 65). Talking about Nabokov’s short story ‘The Circle’, Foster claims that ‘it justifies its title by having the story curl back to its beginning, thereby creating an impressively vivid sense of eternal return’ (1993: 86). Although Foster downplays the Nietzschean element, Nabokov himself evokes the Nietzschean idea of ‘ouroboros’ when describing the story as belonging ‘to the same serpent-biting-its-tail type as the circular structure of the fourth chapter in Dar (or, for that matter, Finnegans Wake, which it preceded)’ (Collected 653). In her essay ‘Memory and Dream in Nabokov’s Short Fiction’, Barbara Wyllie claims that ‘Nabokov’s self-imposed “problem” was how to overcome the regressive, destructive forces of time’ (in Kellman and Malin 2000: 5). She continues: The potential for memory and dream to negate the linear, regressive passage of time suggests a notion of ceaseless return. An echo of Nietzsche’s doctrine of eternal return, for Nabokov this is not a retrograde process, but a liberating one. In Speak, Memory, Nabokov refers to his life as a ‘coloured spiral in a small ball of glass’. The spiral, rather than the circle, suggests a continual movement forward through time, whilst maintaining the proximity of the past and future to the present. (In Kellman and Malin 2000: 19) Like most critics, Wyllie privileges the spiral form over the circular; the Hegelian method over the Nietzschean. This, however, underplays Nabokov’s comment about spirals later becoming vicious circles again (231) in Speak, Memory – the inability for continual movement forward through time  – as well as his comment that ‘I have journeyed back in thought [  .  .  . ] to remote regions where I  groped for some secret outlet only to discover that the prison of time is spherical and without exits’ (18). It is intriguing, in this respect, that the theory of the world repeating itself ‘an infinite number of times’ ([1880] 2003: 823) is spoken by the Devil in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, and that Bely, in a 1912 article titled ‘Circular Movement (Forty-Two Arabesques)’, equates circular movement with death, claiming that Nietzsche’s idea of eternal recurrence is a falsehood which humanity has accepted.5 Yet, this connection between circularity and negativity is curiously counterpoised by Nabokov’s description of ‘the supreme achievement of memory’ at the end of chapter eight of Speak, Memory: ‘the [ . . . ] faculty of impassioned commemoration, of ceaseless return, that makes me always approach that banquet table

5

Bely’s other article of 1912 was titled ‘The Line, the Circle, the Spiral – of Symbolism’.

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from the outside, from the depth of the park – not from the house – as if the mind, in order to go back thither, had to do so with the silent step of a prodigal, faint with excitement’ (134). Similarly, in ‘The Art of Literature and Commonsense’, Nabokov writes that, although memory can create the ‘perfect fusion of past and present’, it is ‘the inspiration of genius’ that adds a third ingredient: ‘it is the past and the present and the future (your book) that come together in a sudden flash; thus the entire circle of time is perceived, which is another way of saying that time ceases to exist. It is a combined sensation of having the whole universe entering you and of yourself wholly dissolving in the universe surrounding you’ (LL 378).6 Such references to circular time, the frisson that entertaining the idea can induce and the potential dissolution of self leads us to Nietzsche, specifically his notion of ‘eternal recurrence’.

Eternal recurrence Despite Heidegger’s assertion that eternal recurrence is the ‘fundamental doctrine of Nietzsche’s philosophy’ (1991: 6), there is no single, monolithic account – the ‘doctrine’ or ‘theory’ of eternal recurrence is spread across a range of his works. In The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs, where the ‘death of God’ is first mentioned, Nietzsche introduces the concept of eternal recurrence: The Greatest Weight [ . . . ] This life as you now live it and have lived it you will have to live once again and innumerable times again, and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unspeakably small or great in your life must return to you, all in the same succession and sequence. (194) Eternal recurrence then appears in his next work, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and No One, in a chapter called ‘The Intoxicated Song’ in Part IV, where Zarathustra asks: Did you ever say Yes to one joy? O my friends, then you said Yes to all woe as well. All things are chained and entwined together, all things are in love; if ever you wanted one moment twice, if ever you said: ‘You please me, happiness, instant, moment!’ then you wanted everything to return! you wanted everything anew, everything eternal, everything chained, entwined together, everything in love, O that is how you loved the world,

6

We are reminded of the words that the dwarf uses to introduce eternal recurrence in Thus Spoke Zarathustra: ‘all truth is crooked; time itself is a circle’ (178).

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you everlasting men, loved it eternally and for all time: and you say even to woe: ‘Go, but return!’ For all joy wants – eternity! (331–32) Here, Zarathustra associates eternal recurrence with the notion of oneness, the affirmation of both joy and woe, and its apparently paradoxical nature. Referring to Thus Spoke Zarathustra in Ecce Homo:  How One Becomes What One Is, Nietzsche writes that ‘the basic conception of the work, the idea of eternal recurrence, [is] the highest formula of affirmation that can possibly be attained’ (69). In order for eternal recurrence to occur, then, Nietzsche argues that it has to function alongside what he calls amor fati or ‘a love of one’s fate’ – that is, we must want our lives to repeat endlessly with the utmost fervour in order for eternal recurrence to enact itself. In a chapter in Ecce Homo titled ‘Why I Am So Clever’, Nietzsche claims that ‘my formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be other than it is, not in the future, not in the past, not in all eternity’ (37). The notion of amor fati is present in the earlier quotation both in content (‘Yes to all woe’) and form (the use rhetorical questions, exclamation marks and italics). Michael Tanner observes that eternal recurrence ‘has proved the most riddling of all of Nietzsche’s views’. He asks whether Nietzsche devised the concept in a ‘ “What if . . . ?” spirit, or as a serious hypothesis about the nature of the cosmos’ (2000: 61). At times he seems to adopt a rather terrifying ‘strong’ form of eternal recurrence – equivalent to a reconfiguration of atoms – rather than the more endurable ‘weak’ form resembling a thought experiment. The idea of Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence as a thought experiment raises some problematic issues, however. It could be argued that we would not have any burden if eternal recurrence were to be true – according to Nietzsche’s theory, we would have already experienced the same life innumerable times before (making every action forever identical to the first in an infinite cycle). Yet, if we are to imagine the possibility of this life being the first in the sequence, we live with a huge burden given that our actions, and the consequences of those actions, would then be replicated innumerably. The ‘strong’ form is illustrated by sections 55 (35–39) and 1066 (548–49) in Nietzsche’s posthumous The Will to Power, where the theory is presented as ‘the most scientific of all possible hypotheses’ (36). Although Tanner claims that Nietzsche is most certainly advocating the latter in The Gay Science, he reveals that in The Will to Power, Nietzsche ‘tries giving proofs of it as a general theory, based on the fact that if the number of atoms in the universe is finite, they must reach a configuration that they have been in before, and that will inevitably result in the history of the universe repeating itself’ (2000:  61–62). Aligned with Henri Poincaré‘s mathematical ‘recurrence theorem’, and favoured by figures such as Gilles Deleuze, Rose Pfeffer reveals that ‘Nietzsche’s scientific theories and hypotheses have found little recognition and acceptance and have, on the whole, not been taken seriously

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by either scientists or philosophers’ (136). Walter Kaufmann himself describes Georg Simmel’s ‘elegant refutation of Nietzsche’s attempted proof’ ([1974] 2013:  327) in Nietzsche:  Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist. Tanner concedes that ‘people’s imaginations are [ . . . ] gripped by the idea’ because ‘they take up a perspective outside any one cycle, so that they can visualize it occurring again and again [ . . . ] viewing the whole thing from a god’s-eye point of view’ (2000: 62–63). So, while the ‘strong’ form of the theory is highly doubtful as a scientific hypothesis, as an intellectual challenge it is far more powerful, terrifying and irresistible than it is as a thought experiment. Nabokov’s engagement with eternal recurrence relates to both versions, so it is important to make the distinctions clear. Eternal recurrence is one of the few ideas directly attributable to Nietzsche that explicitly appears in Nabokov’s works. In Mary, Nabokov’s earliest novel, the protagonist Ganin states that he ‘once read about the eternal return’, asking, in somewhat solipsistic fashion, ‘surely it won’t all die when I do?’ (55). Thirty years later, in Pnin, Dr Bodo von Falternfels’s research topic related to ‘the influence of Nietzsche’s disciples on Modern Thought’ (116) foreshadows Joan Clements’s mention of the ‘fantastic recurrence of certain situations’ (134). In Speak, Memory, Nabokov’s narrative memoir acts as a quasi-imperative summoning of the possibilities of ‘Mnemosyne’, in which he talks about the ‘impassioned commemoration, ceaseless return’ (134) of a picnic he once had in his youth. He also suggests the notion of eternal recurrence given the reference to ‘cosmic synchronization’, in that both concepts allow us to comprehend the world’s events in one unifying pattern: ‘Vivian Bloodmark, a philosophical friend of mine, in later years, used to say that while the scientist sees everything that happens in one point of space, the poet feels everything that happens in one point of time [ . . . ] That summer I was still far too young to evolve any wealth of “cosmic synchronization” (to quote my philosopher again)’ (SM 169).7 Further, Krug’s claim in Bend Sinister recalls the dwarf’s description of eternal recurrence in Thus Spoke Zarathustra as being two straight lines that extend from the ‘gateway Moment’ (136) and become an infinite circle: We have already gone through eternity, have already non-existed once and have discovered that this néant holds no terrors whatever. What we are now trying (unsuccessfully) to do is to fill the abyss we have safely crossed with terrors borrowed from the abyss in front, which abyss is borrowed itself from the infinite past. Thus we live in a stocking which is in the process of being turned inside out, without our ever knowing

7

Nabokov’s ‘philosophical friend’ Vivian Bloodmark is, of course, an anagram of Vladimir Nabokov.

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for sure to what phase of the process our moment of consciousness corresponds. (BS 140–41) In his article ‘Transnational Authorship on the German–Slavic Border: The Examples of Nietzsche and Nabokov’, Foster astutely observes how both writers adopt similar rhetoric in addressing ‘multiplicity rather than biculturalism’ (2000: 217). In a letter that Nabokov drew up for the Doubleday editor Kenneth D.  McCormick, for example, he outlines his plans for Speak, Memory involving ‘the picturing of many different lands and people and modes of living’ (SL 69). This ‘formula’, Foster claims, ‘by accident or design neatly chimes with Zarathustra’s language in the chapter entitled “The Thousand and One Goals” ’ in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, where he ‘tries to sum up his own observations of “many lands and many people” ’ (2000: 217). Similarly, in Nabokov’s Art of Memory and European Modernism, Foster notices another parallel between Nabokov and Nietzsche, this time between the opening of the preface of The Defense and that of Thus Spoke Zarathustra: ‘Just as Nietzsche recalls first conceiving of eternal recurrence near “a powerful pyramidal rock,” so Nabokov associates the genesis of his novel with a similar scene: “I remember with special limpidity a sloping slab of rock, in the ulex and ilex-clad hills, where the main thematic idea of the book first came to me” ’ (1993: 67).8 Despite uncovering such notable similarities however, Foster, in the first instance, opts to explore the connection in terms of the relationship between ‘unusual cultural mobility’ and ‘pluralistic education’ that both figures had rather than allow Nietzsche’s philosophy to act as a means for interpreting Nabokov’s conception of memory and time. In the latter, he claims that ‘the alliterative pairing of ilex and ulex embodies just that dual logic of transformation which guided polemical parodies like Luzhin’s mad sense of repetition as a put-down of Nietzschean eternal recurrence’ (ibid). As mentioned in the introduction, Nabokov is usually coy, disingenuous even, about possible influences on his work. Because of this, the glimpses of Nietzschean allusions suggest that eternal recurrence was a significant idea for him. Indeed, eternal recurrence is important in one respect because it can help to give insight into one of the main problems in Nabokov’s oeuvre: his relationship with loss. As we will see, however, these explicit and implicit references to the theory often seem fractured between confidence and fear. Through an account of eternal recurrence as both ecstatic and terrifying, I present Nabokov as both the confident ‘enchanter’ that he claimed to be,

8

This is no isolated allusion – the mountain motif can also be seen in Nabokov’s early collection of poems, The Empyrean Path (Gornii Put’) (1923), Glory (1971; [Podvig 1932]), ‘Spring in Fialta’ (1936), and his essay ‘Good Readers and Good Writers’ in Lectures on Literature (1980).

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as well as a fearful or apprehensive ‘doubter’ (to adopt Wood’s terminology).9 I will also argue that Nabokov’s relationship with memory engages deeply with Nietzsche’s idea of amor fati and eternal recurrence. In his role as enchanter, Nabokov rejoices in both of these ideas. He uses the latter to resurrect his own past consciousness again and again, as his texts are read and reread again and again. Emigrating from Russia because of the Bolsheviks in 1919 (losing both a fortune and an estate inherited from his Uncle Ruka as a consequence), and from Germany and France because of the Nazis in 1937 and 1940 respectively, Nabokov had to abandon his ‘natural idiom, [his] untrammeled, rich, and infinitely docile Russian tongue for a secondrate brand of English’ (Lo 316–17). He also lost family members to extremist violence: most notably, his father’s assassination in 1922 and his brother Sergey succumbing to a stomach ailment, brought on by malnutrition, in a concentration camp near Hamburg in 1945 (VNAY 88). Nabokov’s conception of memory, then, can be seen to neutralize the terrible losses he and his contemporaries endured, yet also to magnify such horror through endless repetition. In his role as doubter, Nabokov has a fearful, even horror-struck, relationship with amor fati and eternal recurrence. Memory recovers what is lost, but it also allows the eternal recurrence of his own, and others’, pain. And even where memory as eternal recurrence brings back delight – ‘the shadow on the tablecloth’ (SM 134); the petal’s reflection on the water (SM 208–209) – it is only available to those possessing amor fati. As Wood claims, ‘I think that Nabokov often tries to be inhumanly secure, and confident, and happy, and unregretful [ . . . ] If he pulled that off, he would be a monster’ (in Grossman 2000). I shortly look at a range of Nabokov’s texts in which narrators and characters are faced with the challenges of amor fati and eternal recurrence. Some accept, some decline, while some are simply overwhelmed.

The ‘fantastic recurrence of certain situations’ A notable example of Nabokov engaging with eternal recurrence, both confidently and fearfully, can be found in Pnin. Written while Nabokov worked on Lolita, Pnin follows the nomadic existence of Professor Timofey Pavlovich Pnin, a Russian scholar at Waindell University, and can be read as a treatise on both the pitfalls and possibilities of memory. Nietzsche is explicitly referred to as the research topic of the sinister Austrian scholar Dr Bodo von Falternfels, the new head of the German department, who will succeed Dr Hagen:  ‘another charitable institution had come to the assistance of Dr Bodo von Falternfels, to enable him to complete “a bibliography

9

See The Magician’s Doubts: Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction, 22.

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concerned with such published and manuscript material as has been devoted in recent years to a critical appraisal of the influence of Nietzsche’s disciples on Modern Thought” ’ (Pnin 116). Shortly after, Pnin’s former landlady, Joan Clements, makes a remark at a small soirée that Pnin holds at his new flat. Just like Pnin, we are privy to the tail end of a conversation between Joan Clements and Roy Thayer:  ‘But don’t you think  – haw  – that what he is trying to do – haw – practically in all his novels – haw – is – haw – to express the fantastic recurrence of certain situations?’ (Pnin 134). The narrative indicates that Joan is talking about an unnamed male author’s habitual practice here. Readers may not give this passage enough attention, perhaps surmising that Nabokov wishes only to illustrate an ability to relay a speech impediment through the written word. In the afterword to Pnin, however, Wood claims that the reference is too obvious an allusion to Nabokov’s practice in his own novels: The remark looks like a clue – too much like a clue, because it’s hard to resist the thought that the novelist Joan is talking about is our narrator, a thought almost dizzyingly complicated by the fact that as a writer he cannot be separated from Nabokov himself, and that both of them are indeed unusually interested in the fantastic recurrence of certain situations. It’s unlike either of them to be so helpful, so they are probably teasing us. Just teasing? What we have, I think, is a curious double move, a clue which is also a cancellation; a sort of parable about how all talk about literature, even when true, is a betrayal of literature. Writers don’t ‘express’ anything, in Nabokov’s view. They invent, display, collate, observe; they create worlds. ‘Fantastic recurrence,’ however, could hardly be more precise, so the remark points us in the right direction even as it tells us not to point. (In Pnin 167–68) Wood, however, does not mention the possible reference to Nietzsche in the conversation between Clements and Thayer, despite the deeper resonance that exists in the novel the further we probe. When Pnin helps Joan Clements into a taxi after getting his teeth fixed, for example, we are told that he ‘slipped on the pavement, and the taximan said “Easy,” and took her bag from him, and everything had happened before, in this exact sequence’ (Pnin 44–45). We are reminded here of Nietzsche’s description of eternal recurrence in The Gay Science, ‘all in the same succession and sequence’ (194). Interestingly, Pnin often feels himself ‘dissolving’ into his surroundings throughout the narrative:  he feels ‘porous and pregnable’ (Pnin 17)  early in the novel, and experiences the ‘awful feeling of sinking and melting into one’s physical surroundings – sunset, red boles of trees, sand, still air’ (Pnin 109) further on. This, of course, brings us back to the narrator’s comment of it being ‘wonderful to mix with the landscape’ (Pnin 17). Although Pnin believes that these phantasmagorical experiences are simply

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‘cardiac sensations’, and critics often look at their relation to the beyond,10 an alternative to the otherworldly interpretation is to suggest its connection with the scientific, or strong, version of eternal recurrence given his preoccupation with dissolving atoms and molecules. This is bolstered not only by the image of Colette in Speak, Memory – ‘while she runs with her hoop ever faster around me and finally dissolves among the slender shadows’ (119) – and Ganin’s utterance in Mary that ‘there’s a law which says that nothing ever vanishes, that matter is indestructible’ (34), but also by a particular passage in canto one of Pale Fire: There was a sudden sunburst in my head. And then black night. That blackness was sublime. I felt distributed through space and time: One foot upon a mountaintop, one hand Under the pebbles of a panting strand, One ear in Italy, one eye in Spain, In caves, my blood, and in the stars, my brain. There were dull throbs in my Triassic; green Optical spots in Upper Pleistocene, An icy shiver down my Age of Stone, And all tomorrows in my funnybone. (PF 33; 146–56)

Nabokov and loss Nabokov’s marked preoccupation with memory aligns with numerous Russian writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In The Brothers Karamazov and the Poetics of Memory, Thompson suggests that a continuous thread of interest can be found in Russian literary scholarship, from ‘V. I. Ivanov, one of Dostoevsky’s early interpreters, to Bakhtin and to Lotman and Uspensky in the present’.11 One explanation she suggests for this preoccupation relates to the ‘Soviet policies which aimed to suppress and efface whole areas of Russian history and culture’ (1991: xiii). Nabokov’s youth, then, coincided simultaneously with a general intellectual engagement with Nietzsche and with memory. In Nietzsche and Soviet Culture: Ally and Adversary, Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal claims that ‘Russians interpreted the concept [of eternal recurrence] in a variety of ways. To occult philosophers, it meant reincarnation; to Symbolists and 10

For claims that Pnin’s experiences are a metaphysical dialogue with the hereafter, see Gennady Barabtarlo’s Phantom of Fact: A Guide to Nabokov’s Pnin (1989) and Aerial View: Essays on Nabokov’s Art and Metaphysics (1993). 11 P. D. Uspensky makes explicit reference to Nietzsche’s notion of eternal recurrence in ‘The Strange Life of Ivan Osokin’ (1915).

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Acmeists, historical cycles and the rebirth of Hellenic civilization in their own time. To the Futurists, “eternal recurrence” meant the end of history, of linear time, and even of death’ (1994: 16–17). Although Nabokov lost family, friends, homes and countries to totalitarian regimes, he persistently projected a self-image as one immune, even indifferent, to such heartbreak. As Boyd mentions in Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years, Nabokov was usually ‘unruffled, jocose, and radiantly happy’ (196). The glib descriptions of his Uncle Ruka’s and his brother Sergey’s deaths serve as examples: He [Uncle Ruka] insisted that he had an incurable heart ailment and that, when the seizures came, he could obtain relief only by lying supine on the floor. Nobody took him seriously, and after he did die of angina pectoris, all alone, in Paris, at the end of 1916, aged forty-five, it was with a quite special pang that one recalled those after-dinner incidents in the drawing room [ . . . ] the only person who memorized the music and all the words was my brother Sergey, whom he [Uncle Ruka] hardly ever noticed, who also stammered, and who is also now dead. (SM 57–60) Here, Nabokov depicts himself as neither vulnerable nor particularly concerned with the horrors he witnessed or experienced (‘after he did die’, ‘quite special pang’), but his ostensible indifference should be met with at least a sliver of scepticism. Talking about his mother earlier in Speak, Memory for example, he recollects that, ‘she cherished her own past with the same retrospective fervor that I now do her image and my past. Thus, in a way, I inherited an exquisite simulacrum – the beauty of intangible property, unreal estate – and this proved a splendid training for the endurance of later losses’ (33). The reference to ‘later losses’ is masked not only by the rhetoric of the passage but also by the faux joy that Nabokov calls his mother’s gift ‘a splendid training’. Nabokov presents himself as indifferent, even light-hearted, about the struggles he faced; the loss of Uncle Ruka’s estate is neatly negated by the estate of memory bequeathed by his mother. This fits with Rorty’s claim that ‘Nabokov seems never to have forgotten anything’ (1989: 158) and Boyd’s idea of ‘the consolation of memory’ (VNRY 5). The beautiful sadness of the writing alone can reveal this pose for what it is (similar passages exist in Speak, Memory 41, 150–51, 194, 237). As Jay Winter claims, ‘the memory boom of the late twentieth century arrived in part because of our belated but real acceptance that among us, within our families, there are men and women overwhelmed by traumatic recollection’ (2007: 384). One way to interpret Nabokov’s trumpeted indifference to the horrors he faced is to look at his depiction of memory as a negation of loss. In this respect, Nabokov’s faculty of memory is a way to secure, for the dead, their ‘reality’; to bestow on them immortality by allowing their return in the future. Talking about his mother’s photographs in Speak, Memory for

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example, Nabokov claims that ‘she did not really need them, for nothing had been lost’ (40). The first proper love of Pnin’s life, Mira Belochkin, reappears throughout the novel as a conduit to his past and affords him a sense of nostalgia for a lost love. The following passage recalls her horrifying, albeit uncertain, death at the hands of the Nazis, but also reveals something even more uncomfortable: In order to exist rationally, Pnin had taught himself, over the last ten years, never to remember Mira Belochkin  [  .  .  . ] because, if one were quite 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 possible. 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. And since the exact form of her death had not been recorded, Mira kept dying a great number of deaths in one’s mind, and undergoing a great number of resurrections, only to die again and again, led away by a trained nurse, inoculated with filth, tetanus bacilli, broken glass, gassed in a sham shower-bath with prussic acid, burned alive in a pit on a gasoline-soaked pile of beechwood. (Pnin 112–13) That Mira ‘kept dying a great number of deaths [ . . . ] and undergoing a great number of resurrections’ in Pnin’s mind is highly suggestive that his memory is functioning like that of Nietzsche’s notion of eternal recurrence. Wood’s take on the passage reads as follows: When Pnin meets up with Mira Belochkin, an old sweetheart whose memory recurs in the book like an image of what it means to be young, her features are ‘unchanged’, ‘immortal’; and as long as he remembers the meeting, she cannot change. The trouble is that this memory is not alone, and that the dead who are still alive are also endlessly dying [ . . . ] The suddenly refreshed memory of her unchanged and immortal self becomes unbearable, and Nabokov writes, in an extraordinary sentence, that ‘only in the detachment of an incurable complaint, in the sanity of near death, could one hope to retain this for a moment’. (In Pnin 169) Pnin’s description of an ‘incurable complaint’ serves to suggest the debilitating implications of what eternal recurrence allows for. Not only is Mira’s death able to occur again and again, but he experiences obvious pain in repeatedly recalling the same ‘unbearable’ memories. Not only does this suggest that he is fearful of memory’s ability to replicate the implications of

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eternal recurrence, but it also reveals an element of complicity in engendering eternal recurrence through the act of memory. In The Magician’s Doubts: Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction, Wood takes his discussion of Pnin’s memory further by claiming that ‘Nabokov always remembered such events, but his writing construed them obliquely, as a form of duelling with history: his art was an answer to what Pnin couldn’t bear to think of’ (1994: 17). Wood’s idea of memory as a fight with history is consistent with the references to memory throughout Pnin – although Pnin is said to be a ‘stickler for historical truth’, he thinks of memory as a ‘brilliant cosmos that [seems] all the fresher for having been abolished by one blow of history’ (Pnin 137, 11). The accepted world view that we experience events only once – related to the adage that ‘time can heal’ – suggests that we can come to terms with traumatic events by moving further away from them in time. But when this view is inverted through eternal recurrence, a nightmarish version of life suddenly dawns in allowing events such as Auschwitz the possibility of repeating itself: As someone asked me recently:  which is worse, a universe in which Auschwitz occurs once, or one in which it occurs infinitely many times? It seems to need, to say at least, an unfeeling person to say that it does not matter. Recurrence, even if it makes, in practical terms, no difference, still invests with a terrible weight what does happen. (Tanner 2000: 62–63)12 In Pnin, the difficulty of remembering is perhaps best summed up by Pnin’s lament that ‘the history of man is the history of pain’ (141). For Nietzsche, arguing that we must live ‘unhistorically’ in On the Genealogy of Morality, ‘there is perhaps nothing more terrible and more uncanny in all of man’s prehistory than his mnemo-technique’ (37). His belief, in ‘On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life’, that ‘it is possible to live almost without memory, and to live happily moreover, as the animal demonstrates; but it is altogether impossible to live at all without forgetting’ (UM 62)  reveals the compatibility between Nietzsche’s and Nabokov’s positions in regard to memory: ambivalence as to whether all memories are desired; whether recollection acts as a panacea for painful experience or simply as an anodyne; whether the faculty of memory functions as both the highest form of life affirmation and a burdensome reminder of what cannot be forgotten or escaped.

12 The possibility of events occurring over and over again in an infinite cycle is something that Heidegger refers to as ‘the most burdensome thought’ (1991: 25) and, like Tanner’s concept of ‘weight’, is the central theme of Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Kundera’s novel, however, suggests an inversion of the ‘burden’ – the premise of the novel is that, if eternal recurrence is indeed false, our actions may be ‘unbearably light’ and, arguably, positive ([1984] 1999).

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A crucial aspect, here, is the relationship between the involuntary nature of forgetting and the voluntary nature of retrospection. Talking about remembering his father when six years old, Nabokov describes it as his ‘first conscious return’ (SM 76). In doing so, he seems to be suggesting that there can be both willed and unwilled remembrances. Wood, for example, claims that ‘an unconscious memory, for Nabokov, would be no memory at all’ (in Pnin 165). What the passage from Pnin seems to suggest is that memory and willed imagination are complicit in Mira’s innumerable deaths; in the repeated life and death cycle. In turn, this raises issues about the benefits and difficulties of memory. In Speak, Memory, Nabokov claims that ‘the bright mental image (as, for instance, the face of a beloved parent long dead) conjured up by a wing-stroke of the will; that is one of the bravest movements a human spirit can make’ (28). He appears to go against our natural proclivity to remember positive memories while suppressing those that are negative. Rather, he immerses himself in what would be unbearably sad to most of us. Although the phrase amor fati does not appear verbatim in any of Nabokov’s works, his self-image, and many of his fictive narrators, seems to include an indefatigable zest for life, or life affirmation, in the face of pain or ugliness and a desire to consciously relive even the most difficult of memories.13 Nabokov’s ‘pathological keenness’ (SM 60)  for remembering, then, seems to act as some kind of compensation for the crushing losses he experienced throughout his life.

Reading as resurrection In Nabokov’s Art of Memory and European Modernism, Foster explores how Nabokov’s conception of memory intersects with seminal figures of modernism, specifically Proust, Bergson, Freud, Mann, Joyce and Eliot, focusing mainly on Nabokov’s writings between 1925 and 1950. Calling this aspect of Nabokov’s writing his ‘art of memory’, he claims that the term proved a ‘convenient and even unavoidable label for one key tendency in Nabokov’s memory-writing, his deliberate oscillation between fictive invention and mnemonic truth’ (1993: x), stressing the blurred boundaries between what can be considered true and what cannot. Nabokov, he claims, challenges received ideas of art as a creative discipline and memory as passive ability. Foster is shrewd in this respect – there are numerous examples in Speak, Memory where Nabokov makes explicit the interaction between

13 Such hesitancy towards life, however, can be countered by the life affirmation that, for example, the narrator in ‘A Letter That Never Reached Russia’ (1925), Martin Edelwiess in Glory, Fyodor in The Gift, and ‘the absurdly optimistic Dandilio’ (VNRY 225) in The Tragedy of Mr Morn possess.

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imagination and memory, and sometimes even acknowledges his own embellishment. Even in his spoof review at the end of the text, Nabokov’s assumed critical persona is quick to foresee the criticism of blurring two supposedly distinct realms:  ‘to stick to the truth through thick and thin and not be tempted to fill gaps with logical verisimilitudes posing as preciously preserved recollections’ (SM 239). Yet, despite Foster’s astute uncovering of the textual parallels between Nabokov and Nietzsche, he is again keen to downplay any deep affinity. He claims that Nietzsche rarely appears in Nabokov’s later work (1993: 39), suggesting that the latter only seized upon Nietzsche and eternal recurrence fleetingly before turning away toward other literary models of modernity. Yet, Nabokov’s invention and blurring the lines of truth in Speak, Memory – ‘And now comes the bicycle act – or at least my version of it’ (162) or ‘just as it was, or perhaps a little more perfect’ (167) – can be seen as attempts to escape the ‘vicious’ circle of memory, and how he engages with Nietzschean thought at a deeper level. Another way to interpret Nabokov’s ‘art of memory’ as Nietzschean is to perceive texts functioning as memorial objects. Like tombstones, statues or photographs, the ‘book as object’ forever depicts, and commemorates, particular instances of life. Books not only memorialize the real and imagined events depicted inside of them, but the depictions inside of them never change regardless of the number of times we return to them. Talking about the allusion to eternal recurrence in Nabokov’s first novel Mary, Foster claims that Ganin ‘realizes the fragility of his memories, which are weak reflections of the actual experience of summer love and will themselves vanish when he dies. He finally breaks off inconclusively. Ganin’s thoughts reveal his suspicion that memories can provide no real return, and his fear that they are in no sense eternal’ (1993: 41). Foster is correct in foregrounding the fragility of memory given its evanescent quality and that not all past experiences can be recalled. Yet his interpretation of Ganin is problematized given that, every time we open a narrative, the events are repeated in the same sequence: Ophelia will drown in every reading of Hamlet; Piggy will always fall from the cliff in Lord of the Flies. In the foreword to The Defense, Nabokov refers to this idea of ‘literary recurrence’ explicitly, bolstered by the way a piece of punctuation monumentalizes Kieseritsky’s mistake:  ‘Rereading this novel today, replaying the moves of its plot, I feel rather like Anderssen fondly recalling his sacrifice of both rooks to the unfortunate and noble Kieseritsky – who is doomed to accept it over and over again through an infinity of textbooks, with a question mark for monument’ (7). Nabokov displays an ambiguous attitude towards literature’s capacity to allow things to eternally recur. Although apprehension is evident in describing Kieseritsky as ‘doomed’ to accept the recurrence, Nabokov describes Luzhin’s excitement at noticing the repeating literary structures of Jules Verne and Conan Doyle in The Defense: ‘Only much later did he clarify in his own

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mind what it was that had thrilled him so about these two books; it was that exact and relentlessly unfolding pattern’ (26). Opposed to Foster’s claim that ‘in Mary, Nietzsche’s metaphysics of repetition proved hollow, for it merely alerted Ganin to the fragility and contingency of his memories’ (1993:  66), Nabokov’s depictions of memory can evoke equally vivid experiences in the reader which contradicts Ganin’s belief that his ‘memories [will] vanish when he dies’. Foster’s account, then, seems to understate, even miss, the extent to which Nabokov’s relationship with memory mimics Nietzsche’s theory of eternal recurrence. In Speak, Memory, Nabokov talks about a former tutor called Lenski who would put up ‘Educational Magic-Lantern Projections’ at his St Petersburg home. He observes that Lenski ‘fondly believed [the slide show] would consist of entranced boys and girls sharing in a memorable experience’ (127, my emphasis). These italicized words serve to dismiss the idea that simply projecting an image onto a screen will result in the sharing of a memorable experience. Developing this notion, Nabokov talks about his ability to describe what he perceives:  ‘I did not know then (as I know perfectly well now) what to do with such things – how to get rid of them, how to transform them into something that can be turned over to the reader in printed characters to have him cope with the blessed shiver  – and this inability enhanced my oppression’ (SM 165). As a developing writer, Nabokov’s ability to allow the reader to experience his memory seems of utmost importance. In Speak, Memory for example, he describes his worry over the description of a falling petal meeting its reflected image:  ‘one feared that the trick would not work, that the blessed oil would not catch fire, that the reflection might miss and the petal float away alone, but every time the delicate union did take place, with the magic precision of a poet’s word meeting halfway his, or a reader’s, recollection’ (208–09). One method of bringing about the reader’s experience of his recollections, then, is his coupling of descriptive power and sensory evocation. Nabokov’s predilection for life’s minutiae – one must ‘caress the details [ . . . ] the divine details’ (xxiii) we are told in Lectures on Literature – is correlated with the importance he ascribes to the senses when evoking memory. Indeed, this penchant for all things sensory is evidenced in his claim that Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past is imbued with a particular uniqueness: to recreate the past something other than the operation of memory must happen: there must be a combination of a present sensation (especially taste, smell, touch, sound) with a recollection, a remembrance, of the sensuous past [ . . . ] in other words, a nosegay of the senses in the present and the vision of an event or sensation in the past, this is when sense and memory come together and lost time is found again. (LL 249)

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One passage in which lost time is found again is where Nabokov recalls a particular vignette from his childhood in Speak, Memory – his schoolroom in Vyra: In my own case, when I  come over Sophie’s troubles again  – her lack of eyebrows and love of cream – I not only go through the same agony and delight that my uncle did, but have to cope with an additional burden – the recollection I have of him, reliving his childhood with the help of those very books. I see again my schoolroom in Vyra, the blue roses of the wallpaper, the open window. Its reflection fills the oval mirror above the leathern couch where my uncle sits, gloating over a tattered book. A sense of security, of well-being, of summer warmth pervades my memory. That robust reality makes a ghost of the present. The mirror brims with brightness:  a bumblebee has entered the room and bumps against the ceiling. Everything is as it should be, nothing will ever change, nobody will ever die. (62) Rather than simply describing his own memory, Nabokov appeals to the reader’s memory through several different techniques that conjoin in evoking a multisensory tableau. In its sensory evocations, the passage is ostensibly Proustian. We ‘taste’ through Sophie’s ‘love of cream’; ‘see’ through the immediacy of present tense (‘I see’, ‘fills’, ‘sits’, ‘gloating’, ‘pervades’, ‘makes’, ‘brims’); ‘hear’ through the alliterative play of ‘robust reality’ and the mirror that ‘brims with brightness: a bumblebee has entered and bumps against the ceiling’; and simultaneously ‘hear’, ‘touch’ and ‘smell’ through the ‘open window’, the ‘summer warmth’, and the satisfyingly archaic use of ‘leathern couch’. All of these examples serve to make the scene incredibly vivid and indelible simultaneously. Although the reader will, of course, have different memories of their childhood classroom, the process of remembering such things is so familiar that the passage becomes Proustian given that readers may involuntarily enact the same sense of nostalgia.14 Certain aspects of the scene  – the idleness available to children in the summer, their fascination with insects, running their hands against objects to appreciate touch – are common to many. As such, just as Foster talks of the simultaneous act of

14

As Wood claims in relation to Ada, ‘paradise and its loss are integral to each other. Not only that the true paradises are lost paradises, as Proust suggests, but that there is no paradise without loss, it isn’t paradise if you can’t lose it’ (1994: 219). In Dying for Time: Proust, Woolf, and Nabokov (2012), Martin Hägglund discusses Nabokov’s ‘chronophobia’ (SM 17), arguing that the main symptom of chronophobia is an apprehension of the imminent risk of loss and a concomitant desire to imprint the memory of what happens. It follows that chronophobia – in spite of what Nabokov sometimes claims – does not stem from a metaphysical desire to escape ‘the prison of time’ (Speak, Memory, 18). On the contrary, it is because one desires a temporal being (chronophilia) that one fears losing it (chronophobia). (82)

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‘readerly’ and ‘writerly’ remembrance when discussing ‘cultural memory’ in the context of unidentified allusions, ‘both character and reader, from their positions within and outside the text, are engaged in the activity of remembering’ (1993: 40). Yet, although the sensory evocation seems indebted to Proust, the implications of the scene are Nietzschean. Although Nabokov suggests a possible privileging of the past over the present by referring to the past as ‘reality’ (a word he was always wary about and usually ensnared with inverted commas),15 the final sentence, made up of three small clauses, allows for a more troubling interpretation. It could be that ‘everything is as it should be’ describes how the actual event took place (i.e. that the memory has fidelity to truth) or how Nabokov wishes the memory to be. However, it could be that this is Nabokov’s ideal version of life – some kind of halcyon time–space protected from death and change. That Nabokov is writing about himself with hindsight, but in present tense, suggests apprehension regarding change and a suggestion that memory can immobilize death’s caprices.16 Although this is effectively a static scene, Nabokov’s claim that ‘nobody will ever die’ links memory with eternal recurrence in that both act to negate the efficacy of death. As such, it reads as a poignant vignette of a child’s naivety about matters of death and horror, written by a man fully aware of them. In one sense, Nabokovian memory will forever replicate previous events in such an evocative way that the past is made present. In this way, memory functions as a coping mechanism that allows Nabokov to be undefeated by misery and possess a robust immunity to loss. In the other, Nabokov’s ability to resurrect memories is tempered by the ‘vicious’ aspect of recalling troubling memories – that people, like Sophie, will have troubles and will inevitably die. In this respect, Proustian wonder exists alongside Nietzschean torment. Nabokov’s victory is bittersweet. In rereading, as in memory, the book re-enacts both the pains and joys of life. We are reminded of the context with which Nabokov introduces his classroom in Vyra, recalling Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence through the idea of burden and alluding to literal, literary recurrence:  ‘I not only go through the same agony and delight that my uncle did, but have to cope with an additional burden – the recollection I have of him, reliving his childhood with the help of those very books’ (SM 62).

15

In the afterword to Lolita, Nabokov argues that ‘ “reality” [is] (one of the few words which mean nothing without quotes)’ (312). 16 Thompson argues that: Memory has great combinatorial potentials and this is another of its creative facets. Past experience retained in memory can freely combine with present events thereby giving rise to unexpected associations and striking juxtapositions. Thus the workings of memory erupt the flat surface of sequential events, creating new associations, connotations and connections, thereby rendering the text polysemantic, multi-dimensional. (1991: 24)

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A lack of amor fati: Mary and The Defense Discussing the following extract from Mary, Foster claims that because Ganin ‘breaks off inconclusively’ when discussing eternal recurrence, Nabokov ‘turns Nietzsche’s famous phrase upside down’ (1993: 41): After another week the event he had been waiting for happened. ‘And where is it all now?’ mused Ganin. ‘Where is all the happiness, the sunshine, where are those thick skittles of wood which crashed and bounced so nicely, where is my bicycle with the low handlebars and big gear? It seems there’s a law which says that nothing ever vanishes, that matter is indestructible; therefore the chips from my skittles and the spokes of my bicycle still exist somewhere to this day. The pity of it is that I’ll never find them again – never. I once read about the ‘eternal return.’ But what if this complicated game of patience never comes out a second time? Let me see – there’s something I don’t grasp – yes, this: surely it won’t all die when I do?’ (1993: 34) Rather than being, as Foster claims, a ‘hollow slogan’ (1993: 39) simply demonstrating a tangential link to modernity, the uncertainty that Ganin exhibits towards eternal recurrence suggests another interpretative possibility: that Ganin lacks the amor fati needed in order for eternal recurrence to occur. If we entertain this idea, then Nabokov may be suggesting that Ganin is actually someone unable to meet the threshold of Nietzsche’s group of ‘higher men’ (TSZ 328). Ganin is just one of Nabokov’s characters who flirts with the theories of eternal recurrence and amor fati but are seemingly unable to endure or fulfil the criteria needed. We have already seen this idea at play:  alongside Ganin asking ‘Where is all the happiness?’ (134) in the previous passage from Mary, we are reminded of Pnin’s struggle to remember Mira (Pnin 122–23). Another particularly salient example occurs in The Defense, a novel concerned with the growing paranoia that the protagonist Luzhin experiences as a result of his thinking that his life is condemned to be repeated like some nightmarish, infinite chess game. The image of Luzhin being ‘thrilled [by an] [  .  .  . ] exact and relentlessly unfolding pattern’ (Def 26), takes on a more sinister aspect when he talks about his son: ‘his terrible little double, little Luzhin, for whom the chess pieces had been set out, crawled over the carpet on his knees [ . . . ] All this had happened before [ . . . ] And again he had been caught, had not understood how exactly the repetition of a familiar theme would come out in practice’ (Def 172, my emphasis). On the last page of the novel, the notion of recurrence is again suggested. Referring to an unchanging world whereby Luzhin is forced to replay his moves forever (we are reminded of Nabokov’s discussion of the ‘doomed’

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Kieseritsky discussed earlier), it is arguably the notion of eternal recurrence that prompts his final move: Before letting go he looked down. Some kind of hasty preparations were under way there:  the window reflections gathered together and leveled themselves out, the whole chasm was seen to divide into dark and pale squares, and at the instant when Luzhin unclenched his hand, at the instant when icy air gushed into his mouth, he saw exactly what kind of eternity was obligingly and inexorably spread out before him. (Def 201) Luzhin serves as another example of a character that conceives of eternal recurrence, but differs from Ganin in seeing it as unbearable rather than impossible. Luzhin’s remark that ‘it seemed as though that distant world was unrepeatable’ (Def 129) is a terrified recognition that the world can allow for such recurrence. Rather than exhibiting amor fati, such abhorrence at the terrifying implications of eternal recurrence seems correlated to Luzhin’s steadily worsening mental state and, ultimately, suicide. It is important to remember, however, that this tragic ending is by no means representative.

Nabokov’s stance? The short story ‘A Letter That Never Reached Russia’ (1925), an early version of a never-written novel entitled Happiness [Schastie], also written while Nabokov resided in Berlin, is highly suggestive of amor fati and its moral difficulties. The unnamed protagonist in the story observes the aftermath of an old lady’s suicide on the grave of her recently deceased husband, noticing the ‘mysterious and enchanting [ . . . ] crescent-shaped prints left by her heels’ (Collected 140). He goes on to express his happiness to an unnamed lover immediately after: Listen, I am ideally happy. My happiness is a kind of challenge. As I wander along the streets and the squares and the paths of the canal, absently sensing the lips of dampness through my worn soles, I carry proudly my ineffable happiness. The centuries will roll by, and schoolboys will yawn over the history of our upheavals; everything will pass, but my happiness, dear, my happiness will remain, in the moist reflection of a streetlamp, in the cautious bend of stone steps that descend into the canal’s black waters, in the smiles of a dancing couple, in everything with which God surrounds human loneliness. (ibid.) Most noticeable here is the divergence from what would normally be expected in such a scene; the problematizing of the reader’s moral

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response by having to reconcile harrowing content with aesthetic appreciation. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in the chapter titled ‘The Intoxicated Song’, Zarathustra outlines a similarly difficult scenario:  ‘All joy wants the eternity of all things, wants honey, wants dregs, wants intoxicated midnight, wants graves, wants the consolation of graveside tears, wants gilded sunsets’ (332). Just as Zarathustra asks us, then, to embrace the notion of amor fati in order to joyfully accept both the zeniths and nadirs of one’s experiences, Nabokov’s text presents us with the incongruous image of joyful recognition in death. The paradox of the narrator’s feeling of joy despite his meagre, exiled existence is suggestive of a level of lifeaffirmation close to that of Nietzsche’s amor fati (we are reminded here of Nabokov’s ‘utmost zest’ and ‘pathological keenness’ in Speak, Memory when it comes to recalling the past). Nietzsche’s thought in The Birth of Tragedy can help us to interpret Nabokov’s passage here: ‘As an aesthetic phenomenon existence is still bearable to us, and art furnishes us with the eye and hand and above all the good conscience to be able to make such a phenomenon of ourselves’ (104). Ultimately, ‘A Letter That Never Reached Russia’ may be paradigmatic of Nabokov’s theoretical stance towards amor fati; it is uncertain whether the story acts as a defiant declaration of the concept or as a horrified, ironic, critique of it (as with protestations of happiness in Nabokov’s works more generally). The frequent references and suggestions to ‘eternal recurrence’ in Nabokov’s works suggest a rare indebtedness, yet, as we have seen, his works are ambivalent towards, but entangled in, the concepts of eternal recurrence and amor fati. Although his authorial persona is one ‘undefeated by misery’, the hesitancy of Nabokov’s characters towards eternal recurrence and common depiction of characters lacking amor fati, suggests being caught at a midway point somewhere between horrified respect and unbridled fear of it being possible. Indeed, that Nabokov’s engagement with Nietzsche’s concepts of eternal recurrence and amor fati and his opting to articulate fictional (i.e. Pnin) over familial (i.e. Uncle Ruka, Sergey) trauma suggests his being Nietzsche’s champion as much as frightened pupil.

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2 The will to disempower: Nabokov and his readers

In the fourth chapter of his autobiography, Speak, Memory, Nabokov warns:  ‘The following passage is not for the general reader, but for the particular idiot who, because he has lost a fortune in some crash, thinks he understands me’ (59).1 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, experienced readers of Nabokov will probably not classify themselves with that grouping either, instead raising themselves still further, perhaps to something akin to the ‘good’ readers he describes in Lectures on Literature.2 Yet, by declaring at the end of the section that ‘the general reader may now resume’ (59), Nabokov effectively brands all readers as merely ‘general’, 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 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 1

A shortened version of this chapter appeared, in a slightly different form, in Nabokov and the Question of Morality: Aesthetics, Metaphysics, and the Ethics of Fiction (ed. Michael Rodgers and Susan Elizabeth Sweeney, 2016, 51–69). 2 See Nabokov’s essay ‘Good Readers and Good Writers’ in Lectures on Literature (1–6). In ‘Where Is the Anti-Nietzsche?’, Malcolm Bull writes, ‘the juxtaposition of “the highest, most gifted human individuals” to whom Nietzsche addressed himself, and the “mediocre, the foolish, and the mad” who claimed what was not rightfully theirs, encourages readers to distance themselves from the former category and identify with the “gifted human individuals” who, it is implied, passed up the opportunity that Nietzsche offered’ (2000: 125).

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interpretation of the will to power as the ‘activity of overcoming resistance’ (in Leiter and Sinhababu 2007:  36), itself based on Nietzsche’s answer of ‘the feeling that power is growing, that some resistance has been overcome’ to his own question, ‘What is happiness?’ (AC 4), the chapter claims that the readerly resistance engendered by the distinction between elevated author and subjugated reader is both an anticipated and 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 playfulness, for example, such as the kind of direct readerly address found in Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman ([1759] 1997).3 The custom of some Victorian writers was to address the reader as friend or confidant – Jane Eyre’s announcement, ‘Reader, I married him’ (Brontë [1847] 1994: 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. However, the author–reader relationship changed in the early twentieth century; the writings of high modernists such as T.  S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and James Joyce seem instead to be concerned with lamenting the cultural and religious ‘wasteland’ of their age and demanding, to use Wolfgang Iser’s term, ‘implied readers’ who are attentive, educated and well-versed in literary tradition.4 The relationship between author and reader arguably shifted again with the advent of postmodernism. In describing the writer’s interaction with the reader to be ‘like shooting fish with a slingshot in the dark’ (Atwood 2010) 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 2012: iv), authors and critics such as Margaret Atwood and Kathryn Hume effectively frame the relationship as one based on combat, belligerence or even antagonism. This development suggests that twentiethcentury authors may perceive the reader as an opponent or a threat. If

3

David Lodge raises a similar point in regard to the passage in The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman where the narrator tells the implied reader, ‘Madam,’ to ‘read the whole chapter over again’ (1997 [1759]:  48) for having been inattentive. Lodge argues, ‘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’ (1992: 83). 4 For further discussion of this idea, see John Carey’s The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice amongst the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880–1939 (1993).

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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 published statements about ‘the reader’. On the one hand, he claims that ‘the author is perfectly indifferent to the capacity and condition of the reader’s brain’ (Tribute 122)  and that ‘nervous publishers of popular novels pamper the “average reader” – who should not be made to think’ (SM 98). Such remarks have given rise to interpretations like those found in de la Durantaye’s Style is Matter: The Moral Art of Vladimir Nabokov: 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. (2007: 30) On the other hand, even though de la Durantaye claims that Nabokov displayed ‘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). As Duncan White notes, ‘for all his professed authorial hauteur, Nabokov’s poetics was one that depended on the collaboration of the reader in the aesthetic project’ (2017: 106). Viewing this relationship as more equal or reciprocal in nature – rather than uneven – makes sense when thinking of the correlation between Nabokov’s fiction writing and his delight in composing chess problems.5 Other critics, perhaps more fruitfully, claim that ‘Nabokov actually “dramatizes” his reader within his text and makes him

5 In Speak, Memory, Nabokov writes: ‘I remember one particular [chess] problem I had been trying to compose for months [. . .] It was meant for the delectation of the very expert solver [. . .] The pleasant experience of the roundabout route [. . .] would amply reward him for the misery of the deceit’ (223–24).

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a frequent presence in the narrative. He talks to his reader, plays with his expectations, teases him’ (Connolly 1999: 44). In his essay on ‘Good Readers and Good Writers’, in Lectures on Literature, Nabokov simultaneously conveys both his indictment of ‘general’, ‘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’ (LL 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.6 Although ostensibly helpful, Nabokov’s definition of the proper way to read actually attempts to limit readers’ autonomy and govern their behaviour. His essay goes on to hypothesize distinct personas not only for good readers, but for good authors as well: 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) Although Nabokov professes to want readers and writers to ‘embrace’ at the top of a mountain – an alliance related to the ‘artistic harmonious balance between the reader’s mind and the author’s mind’ (LL 4)  – his repeated references to himself as ‘the master’ set himself above the ‘panting and happy’ reader, zoomorphized into a loyal, docile creature.7 Indeed, the passage’s rhetoric is noticeably close to that of Thus Spoke Zarathustra 6

Naiman argues that we display ‘certain uneasiness at having pleased the teacher by divining and responding to pedagogic desire’ (2010: 108). 7 In Nabokov, Perversely, Eric Naiman describes a Wesleyan University undergraduate who posted a query on NABOKV-L, an online forum dedicated to Nabokov, several years ago. The post details the student’s fear and apprehension in doubting his own understanding of Nabokov’s texts: ‘I still feel without reward or at least without comprehension having read and “reread,” as he would require, most of his books’ (2010: 109). Naiman’s response suggests that the student is not alone: ‘This post captures 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 a single 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

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in evoking notions of ‘noble caste’, the creation of values and ascending a mountain.8 In commenting that ‘for better or worse the reader enters into the spirit of the game’ (LL 4), 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.9

Nietzsche’s ‘master–slave’ and Nabokov’s ‘author–reader’ Nietzsche was especially concerned with interpretation and evaluation. His dissatisfaction with traditional Christian morality, for example, was partly based on what he deemed as incorrect value judgements. His theorization of master–slave morality involves a dialectic between two opposing value systems – the former privileging such qualities as pride, intelligence and power; the latter privileging the (commonly Judeo-Christian) virtues of the common good, modesty and humility.10 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 (725) and Leona Toker (726). The caption ‘The Master in his seventies’ adorns one of the photos contained in Vladimir Nabokov: Selected Letters, 1940–77 (294). 8 Another possible influence for the mountain motif may have been through Mikhail Lermontov. Although Nabokov thought that Lermontov’s prose was often poor, he translated A Hero of Our Time (1840), some of Lermontov’s poetry, and published an essay on his work. A Hero of Our Time contains a famous duel scene where Pechorin dispatches his ‘enemy’ Grushnitsky after having led him on to combat on a precarious mountain ledge, a scene which some critics have seen as having explicit Nietzschean references. In Nabokov’s The Gift, Fyodor remarks, ‘I shall experience a certain satiation of suffering – perhaps on the mountain pass to a kind of happiness which it is too early for me to know (I know only that when I reach it, it will be with pen in hand)’ (31). 9 See the beginning of Chapter  5 for more discussion on the rhetorical similarity between Lectures on Literature and Nietzsche’s writing. 10 Nietzsche’s concept seems to be derived from Hegel’s theorization of the ‘master-slave dialectic’ in The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807).

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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’ (Invitation 5).11 Given the antitotalitarian stance early on 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’ (Invitation 8). Given that readers now know that Delalande is a fictitious creation, they may quickly realize that Nabokov’s epigraph is parodying the very convention 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’ ([1915] 1964). Appropriating, and parodying, this convention is one way in which Nabokov claims the status of ‘master’. Nabokov goes even further, however – he later mentions something once said by his ‘favourite author (1768–1849)’ (Invitation 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.12 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 deceitful and

11

This figure also makes an appearance in Nabokov’s The Gift (282, 332). 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). 12

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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.13 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’ (HATH 116), seems very much akin to Nabokov’s literary practice. Nabokov’s most impassioned ripostes were reserved for his better readers – not only in his exchanges with Edmund Wilson about Bend Sinister (NWL 209–12) or his translation of Eugene Onegin (NWL 374–77; 492–94), for example, but also his description of Jean-Paul Sartre’s ‘remarkably silly article’ in response to the latter’s critique of Despair (NWL 10).14 Such quarrels seem to be instances of Nietzschean ‘ressentiment’,15 but between masters rather than between masters and slaves. As readers, 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).16 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 critiques. He wrote to Wilson on one occasion, for example, saying 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

13

For instances of ‘honest deception’, see Rowe (1974). See ‘Sartre’s First Try’ in The New York Times Book Review, 24 April 1949 and Vladimir Nabokov: Selected Letters, 1940–1977, 217. 15 ‘Slave revolt’ is an important element in Nietzsche’s master-slave morality. 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 condition 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’ (2011: 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. 16 In his review of Nabokov’s translation of Eugene Onegin titled ‘The Strange Case of Pushkin and Nabokov’, Wilson mentions ‘the perversity of [Nabokov’s] tricks to startle or stick pins in the reader’ (1965: 3–6). 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. 14

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criticism exhilarating’ (NWL 338). Such exchanges suggest both a relishing of resistance and a reluctance to relinquish his masterly status.17

Nietzsche’s will to power In his essay ‘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 dominate’ (2007: 32). Refashioning 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 ethics are about ‘self-creation’, Reginster believes that Nietzsche’s ‘ethics of creativity’ is a ‘paradigmatic manifestation’ (2007:  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 boundaries 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, despite claiming, in the introduction to Bend Sinister, that: ‘I am not “sincere,” I  am not “provocative,” I  am not “satirical” ’ (xiii). 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

17 Nabokov’s note to the short story ‘Details of a Sunset’ (1924) further demonstrates his seeming pleasure at the difficulty it will cause: ‘I have now given it a new title, one that has the triple advantage of corresponding to the thematic background of the story, of being sure to puzzle such readers as “skip descriptions,” and of infuriating reviewers’ (Collected 646).

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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’ (in Norman and White 2009: 232–33; my emphasis).

Theorizing power and the death of God: ‘Recruiting’ There is widespread assumption by critics, writers, and theorists that not only must certain conventions exist in the reading of literature but also, to an especially high degree in the twentieth century, an agreement about what they are. One strand of twentieth-century literary theory, for example, has been dominated by the attempt to understand literary texts through sets of objective constraints, such as not referring to authors’ intentions or allowing the role of the reader to impact upon interpretation. In movements or theories such as Russian Formalism, New Criticism, structuralism, and reader–response theory, there tends to be a preference for understanding literary communication in terms of prescriptive theory. Each movement frames the text with sets of theoretical paradigms before the text is opened: where Russian Formalism focuses on the artistic effects of language rather than on content, for example, New Criticism looks at ambiguity and organic complexity over origin or effect. Where structuralism concentrates on ‘binary opposites’ and the reflection of culture through language, reader–response theory privileges readerly reaction over the work itself. Such theories are undeniably helpful in understanding texts from more than one perspective, yet they can also be reductive in positing their criteria as the most profitable set. Nabokov may or may not have been conscious that his work pastiches different models of reading or differing theoretical movements  – we are reminded, as Paul Morris points out, that ‘as a poet and author, Nabokov was uninterested in, indeed emphatically avoided, identification with movements or schools of thought’ (2010: 104). But he certainly seems to be aware that readers are understood to assume the presence of conventions, including the adoption of certain roles by writer and reader. More specifically, Nabokov’s work can be related to two poles of the reading model: those of the implied author and the reader. Wayne Booth and Wolfgang Iser are among the theorists who teach that we cannot infer conclusions from textual locations such as from the author’s or reader’s perspective. A  reader’s conclusions, it is claimed, are erroneous if he or she does not properly understand who to attribute certain remarks to, or grasp, for example, that the author is not the speaker in a dramatic monologue. This, of course, is hardly controversial. But the approach perpetuates the idea of a predefined model that most readers adhere to; a kind of prescriptive formulation for how literature operates.

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Written in Berlin in 1935, ‘Recruiting’ is initially concerned with an old man called Vasiliy Ivanovich (V.I.), his attendance at Professor D.’s funeral and his subsequent thoughts on his deceased sister. Soon, however, with the introduction of a ‘nonpracticing lawyer’, the narrator informs us that this character ‘was also of little use to anyone except me’ (Collected 402), a comment that heralds the start of the narrator’s intrusive comments and the story’s use of mise en abyme. After V.I. attends Professor D.’s funeral, the narrator goes on to question the reasoning behind V.I.’s happiness – suggesting his omniscience – given the numerous losses that V.I. has suffered. Relaying V.I.’s thoughts on his dead sister once more, the narrator then mentions a ‘man with the local Russian newspaper’ whom he finds difficult to describe given that a ‘self-portrait is seldom successful’ (404). Having therefore disclosed that the newspaper-carrying figure is actually the narrator himself, he then explains how the plot of the story has been fabricated (‘I made her his sister’), writing that, ‘at all costs I had to have somebody like him [V.I.] for an episode in a novel with which I have been struggling for more than two years’ (404). The story’s penultimate paragraph concludes with the idea that V.I. has been forever captured in the narrator’s words, ‘doomed to appear for a moment in the far end of a certain chapter, at the turning of a certain sentence’ (405).18 The supposed clarification of the story’s conception, and V.I.’s existence, however, is then muddied as an anonymous narrator proceeds to usurp the novel-writing ‘narrator’ in the final paragraph: ‘[M]y representative, the man with the Russian newspaper, was now alone on the bench and, as he had moved over into the shade where V.I. had just been sitting, the same cool linden pattern that had anointed his predecessor now rippled across his forehead’ (405). One effect of ‘Recruiting’, then, is to unsettle our habitual conceptions of narration. Narrators are normally described through first-person, omniscient, intrusive, and unreliable categorization. Initially, it seems as though we can categorize the narrator of ‘Recruiting’ as the ‘intrusive’ type: a narrator deemed as omniscient but who offers further comments on characters and events. He makes the kind of ‘universal’ claims found in Tolstoy or Austen (‘had reached the point of his life’; ‘as happens in such cases’), is privy to otherwise unknown knowledge (‘tumour in his stomach’), and also has access to characters’ inner thoughts (‘his thoughts nevertheless kept slipping off into that corner of his memory’). Simply labelling the narrator as ‘intrusive’, however, oversimplifies things – he often seems uncertain of particular facts (‘I think’; ‘if I am not mistaken’; ‘unknown origin’) and is unable to understand why V.I. remains so happy despite his losses (402).19 This inability to understand V.I.’s happiness, coupled with his more general

18

See again Nabokov’s reference to the ‘doomed’ Kieseritsky in Chapter 1. This again connotes Nietzsche’s idea of amor fati.

19

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uncertainty, now suggests that he is also of the ‘unreliable’ type – bolstered by the extent to which the narrator is openly deceitful about the story’s conception. However, given that the narrator is finally described as ‘my representative’, this figure ultimately ends up as a character in the text. The modulation between numerous narrative roles can be shown as follows: Omniscient narrator (universals, privy to unknown information) → Intrusive narrator (‘of no use to anyone except me’) → Unreliable narrator (‘I think’, ‘it seems’) → Character (‘My representative’) When the representative equates himself and V.I. by mentioning ‘whenever he [V.I.] and I experienced such fits of happiness’ (404) and remarking that V.I.’s ‘face [ . . . ] was made up to look like that of a reader’ (405), narrator, character and reader are conflated. In allowing the representative to fall down the narratological ladder in this way (and preventing the ‘real’ reader from being able to designate set narrative roles), Nabokov thwarts the reader’s conventional narrative processing, disempowering him or her as a consequence. In Nomi Tamir-Ghez’s article ‘The Art of Persuasion in Nabokov’s Lolita’, she illustrates how Humbert (conjured through Nabokov) is so effective in seducing the reader to side with the protagonist. Tamir-Ghez devises the following formula in order to explain her point: ‘A [s (c ↔ c) Ad] R’, where ‘A= author, s  =  speaker, c  =  character, Ad  =  addressee, R  =  reader, [ ], () = embedding’ (1979: 67). Her formula is helpful in understanding the differing textual levels that Nabokov is working on, given that oscillation between narrative roles makes it much harder to process the narrative.20 In this respect, the disruption of the reader’s ability to differentiate between narrator and character in ‘Recruiting’ can be equated with disempowerment. Roland Barthes’s comment, that ‘the essence of writing (the meaning of the work which constitutes writing) is to prevent any reply to the question: who is speaking?’ (1977: 132) is particularly apt here in being diametrically opposed to Nabokov’s practice in ‘Recruiting’. The dizzying and disempowering narration of ‘Recruiting’ is aligned with both dramatic irony and authorial intrusion. The anonymous narrator’s appearance in the last part of the narrative allows for dramatic irony to operate – normally effective by affording the reader a sense of omnipotence. There are two levels of dramatic irony functioning. We are aware that the callous representative does not know that he is a character – the irony is that he thinks he is free in his creation while readers, knowing that his 20

It is worth noting that another Nabokov short story, ‘Cloud, Castle, Lake’ (1937), beginning with the sentence ‘One of my representatives’ (Collected 430), has a protagonist with the name Vasiliy Ivanovich, and combines narrator and V.I.: ‘We both, Vasiliy Ivanovich and I’ (432). Thus, it can be argued that being able to slot the V.I. of ‘Recruiting’ into a defined narrative role is further problematized once having read the later story.

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strings are being pulled from above, laugh at his folly. Nabokov therefore allows the reader to feel the detached superiority that dramatic irony can produce – we are afforded a feeling of omnipotence in knowing that he is merely a character. Yet readers are not allowed to feel completely satisfied with this dramatic irony, because they are unable to properly attribute narrative roles: the narration, and implied presence of Nabokov, ensures that readers are uncertain as to where the level of regression finishes. The second level of dramatic irony is far less obvious, and relates to the anonymous narrator. The narration in the last paragraph is relatively free of any personal comment that would allow ‘characterization’ to function (although the anonymous figure does call the ‘previous’ narrator ‘my representative’). Despite the anonymous narrator appearing as all-powerful at the end of the narrative for example, his power is implicitly undermined in that he is yet another of the implied (and ‘real’) author’s creations. Not only does the story’s mise en abyme technique (‘had to have him for a novel’) suggest the self-reflexive presence of an implied author but the presence of another, anonymous narrator in the final paragraph serves to also end the story on the very notion of the implied author. Without explicitly stating it, Nabokov therefore introduces the theme of his own ‘terrible power’ (405) by undermining the supposed omnipotence of the anonymous figure. The Russian title of the story, ‘набор’ (‘Nabor’) for example, meaning ‘recruitment’ in Russian, parades his dominance over the text by explicitly evoking Nabokov’s name and reminding us of who has ultimate control.21 This sense of dominance over different presences in specifically foregrounded in Nietzsche’s writing when describing ‘various forms of asceticism’:  ‘Some men have such an intense need to exercise their strength and love of power that, lacking other objects or because they have always otherwise failed, it finally occurs to them to tyrannize certain parts of their own being, as if they were sections or stages of their selves’ (HATH 95). Although ‘the reader has no business bothering about the author’s intentions’ (SO 122), it is fruitful to position Nabokov’s desire for control alongside the notion of the death of the author, ‘most famously chronicled by Roland Barthes in an essay of 1968 and modelled on the death of God’ (Wood 1994: 11). We are reminded not only of John Shade’s acknowledgement of this idea in Pale Fire  – ‘My God died young. Theolatry I  found/ Degrading, and its premises, unsound’ (32; 99–100) – but also Wood’s ideas about how nature is simultaneously beautiful and indifferent:  ‘The snag for Nietzsche, and I think Nabokov, is that the prodigious creator is dead, scarcely available even as a metaphor; the handiwork is unowned. Much

21

The idea that Nabokov was keenly aware of the pun of the title is strengthened by his appendage to his short story ‘Orache’: ‘Its English name, orache, by a miraculous coincidence, renders in its written form the “ili beda,” “or ache,” suggested by the Russian title’ (Collected 652).

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of Nabokov’s art is devoted to lending quirky artificial life to this defunct figure: not as an achieved resurrection or an article of confirmed faith, but as a provocative question’ (1994: 171). The implied authors in Nabokov’s texts are usually learned, difficult, self-assured litterateurs with concern for detail, wordplay and coincidence; more often than not, as in ‘Recruiting’, they are Russian émigrés. By inviting this conflation of fictitious creation and author, both implied and real, Nabokov rallies not only against the death of the author by inveigling readers to bring him into their interpretations but also, as previously mentioned in regard to Barthes’s notion of the essence of writing, by cajoling readers to mistake narrators or speakers for himself. Such behaviour suggests an author intent on making the assignment of narrative roles incredibly difficult – the death of an author who puts so much ‘emphasis on authorial conceptualization and control’ (Green 2008) is not going to be quiet, especially if this emancipates the reader. Commenting on Nabokov’s claim that, ‘every character follows the course I imagine for him. I am the perfect dictator in that private world insofar as I alone am responsible for its stability and truth’ (SO 69), White argues that ‘Nabokov sought to exercise absolute authorial control [ . . . ] not just over the iconographic arrangement of the words on the page but also, as much as he could, over the reception of those words’ (2017: 13).

The will to disempower: ‘The Vane Sisters’ Although Nabokov cannot control readers directly, he can influence them, whether it is emotionally, psychologically or intellectually. One example of such influence appears in his notorious short story, ‘The Vane Sisters’ (1959). 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 centring on their developing relationship. Their romance eventually ended, however, due to their competing views of the occult and the narrator’s scepticism about an afterlife. Referring back to the narrator’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: ‘I could isolate, consciously, little. Everything seemed blurred, yellowclouded, yielding nothing tangible. Her inept acrostics, maudlin evasions,

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theopathies  – every recollection formed ripples of mysterious meaning. Everything seemed yellowly blurred, illusive, lost’ (Collected 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).22 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’ [Collected  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’ [620]). The acrostic effectively 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 scepticism 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.23 In Nikolai Gogol, Nabokov hypothesizes about three different types of reader of ‘The Overcoat’ (1842) in ascending order of rank: the ‘superficial’, the ‘solemn’ and the ‘creative’ reader (118). In a similar fashion, I suggest three ways in which the final paragraph of ‘The Vane Sisters’ might be read, corresponding to three different kinds of readers. The first reading 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 normally 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 in ‘The Vane Sisters’ 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

22 In the preface to The Anti-Christ, Nietzsche writes that ‘this book belongs to the very few [. . .] these are my only readers, my true readers, my predestined readers: and who cares about the rest of them? – The rest are just humanity’ (3). 23 Three years after the publication of ‘The Vane Sisters’, Nabokov devised similarly elusive wordplay in the assemblage of apparently random letters in 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 (1999: 129–49). Boyd takes the repeated references as validation of the theory that Hazel Shade’s ghost helps Kinbote’s composition.

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Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) (an inference strengthened by an earlier allusion 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 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 littérateur 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’ (Collected 619). Similarly, this reader is probably familiar with the ‘otherworld’ motif that runs through Nabokov’s fiction (see Alexandrov 1991), and also with his fondness for literary deception. An experienced Nabokovian, even one reading the story for the first time, may surmise that some of the sentences in this passage – for example, ‘every recollection formed ripples of mysterious meaning’ (619) – are most likely meta-clues that refer to the text itself.24 Indeed, given the earlier references to Cynthia’s fascination with encoded messages from beyond (624–26), 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 Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871), or even the Oulipan writing of Georg Perec  – and will probably notice the metafictive details, emphasis on the occult, and allusions to secret writing 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 (see next section). 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

24

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’ (2008).

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also likely to be frustrated by the text’s baffling conclusion, until learning about the existence of the acrostic from elsewhere. Yet, rather than simply 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 2010:  108). Recognizing that the story questions traditional reading behaviour through audacious and destabilizing means, he or she may even refuse to consider the acrostic as the text’s most important feature. 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 questions 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 particular trick can be tried only once in a thousand years of fiction. Whether it has come off is another question’ (Collected 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 foreshadows Nabokov’s fear 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 listeners 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 style to another. He alluded to the possibility of an acrostic by having his

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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’ (Collected 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’ (631),25 and he even embedded a reference to ‘acrostics’ in the passage itself (631). Nevertheless, Katharine 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.26 White’s rejection of ‘The Vane Sisters’ could be said to be an ultimate 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

25

Indeed, the reference to ‘gullible readers’ (Collected 626) may be an offhand remark alluding to the very people reading the story. 26 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. (Collected 624–26) 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.

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so much and admire have completely failed me as readers in the present case. (SL 117)27 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’.28 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 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 chagrined 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’ (1995: 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 suggestion that puzzle-minded readers may be interested in looking for a coded message that occurs on the last page of the story.29 Announcing the solution to the text’s riddle before the text itself acts to facilitate readers’ understanding 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:

27

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 (1978). 28 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. 29 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).

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The genius’s sorrows and their value. The artistic genius wants to give pleasure, 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 collected 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’ experience, as Nabokov wistfully imagines it. Curiously, 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, readers may feel vulnerable having utterly failed to notice the ‘various allusions to trick-reading’ and other clues that Nabokov had carefully inserted into the story.

i In a letter to his first American publisher, James Laughlin, Nabokov explained that ‘in modern Russian literature, [he occupied] the particular 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.30 Nabokov’s tendency to ‘lure the reader this way and that and then tickle him behind the ear just to see him whirl around’ (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 ‘superficial’ 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. As Thomas Karshan claims in his article ‘Nabokov in Bed’ in the Times

30

Nabokov’s innovation in ‘The Vane Sisters’ sits alongside, for example, the intrusion of the implied author as an ‘anthropomorphic deity’ in Bend 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). In Ecce Homo, Nietzsche declares, ‘I have many stylistic possibilities – the most multifarious art of style that has ever been at the disposal of one man’ (44).

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Literary Supplement, ‘from Bend Sinister (1947) onwards, Nabokov’s novels all establish a powerful authorial presence, only to equate it with tyranny and cruelty, and to set against it the possibility of a subversive counterreading which must endure the derision which that authorial presence orchestrates’ (2011b: 3–4).

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PART TWO

Nietzschean readings

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3 Lolita’s Nietzschean morality

For some, Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita is the definitive example of the aesthete’s outlook, with its combination of the narrator’s sordid actions and his iridescent wordplay – not to mention Nabokov’s own endorsement of the novel as a locus for ‘aesthetic bliss’ (Lo 314).1 In more recent years, criticism of Lolita has challenged this supposed l’art pour l’art status by suggesting that its aesthetic qualities are inextricably coupled with moral questions.2 The moral aspect of Lolita was first given in-depth treatment by Ellen Pifer in Nabokov and the Novel (1980) which, emphasizing Nabokov’s humane side, stressed the text’s moral commitment rather than amoral aestheticism. David Rampton’s Vladimir Nabokov: A Critical Study of the Novels (1984) also discusses Lolita’s moral fabric, while Leona Toker’s Nabokov:  The Mystery of Literary Structures (1989) explores the interplay between the moral and aesthetic dimensions of Nabokov’s texts and their form and content. In the same year, Rorty’s Contingency, Irony, Solidarity engaged with the following extract from Nabokov’s afterword to Lolita: I am neither a reader nor a writer of didactic fiction, and, despite John Ray’s assertion, Lolita has no moral in tow. 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, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm. (314–15) Rorty’s essay is devoted to the case that ‘Lolita does have a “moral in tow” ’ (1989: 164) and thus serves to highlight a problem with the novel and the

1 A shortened version of this chapter appeared, in a slightly different form, in Philosophy and Literature 35 (1), April 2011. 2 See de la Durantaye’s Style Is Matter: The Moral Art of Vladimir Nabokov (2007) for extended discussion of this coupling.

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issue of morality. For Wood, morality ‘is the realm of the unspeakable for Nabokov, but it is nonetheless (or for that very reason) everywhere implicit in his work’ (1994: 7). This chapter examines the theories of critics who treat Lolita as a moralizing text, among them Leona Toker, Colin McGinn and Richard Rorty. I investigate the assumptions behind their suggestions that Lolita is a text which advocates, or directs, the reader towards virtue. Toker (1994), McGinn (1999) and Rorty (1989) are among several subtle and sophisticated critics who suggest, in different ways, that Lolita is a normative text that can educate its readers; that it can teach virtue. In many ways this is a boldly contrarian position, defying satirical elements in the text itself, not to mention Nabokov’s own pronouncements. For example, the spoof foreword by John Ray Jr makes fun of the kind of reader who could finish Lolita and reflect on our obligations to provide better children’s services (Raine in Lo 320). Critics like Toker and Rorty are, of course, better readers than that. Instead, their account of reading Lolita as an exercise in moral education draws on a distinctive feature of Nabokovian writing: the buried clue. Nabokov is fond of throwing important details into texts in a way that the reader, carried along by the plot and style, is almost certain to miss. Sometimes these details are signposts to the suffering of a particular character, such as the acrostic in the last paragraph of ‘The Vane Sisters’ as discussed in the last chapter, or Brian Boyd’s suggestion that Hazel Shade’s ghost inhabits Vanessa atalanta butterflies in Pale Fire. In the case of Lolita, Rorty discusses the case of a barber who appears for only a paragraph in the text, and who has no impact on characters or plot, but whose dead son is a poignant echo of Dolores’s dead brother (1989: 163). Rorty’s critical case for Lolita as a didactic text relies on the lesson learned by the reader who fails to notice these details during a first reading. The assumption lying behind each of these critics’ accounts is that failure to scrutinize a novel for details which are irrelevant to the plot, atmosphere or characterization, can be compared with a failure to be alert to the needs of the real people we encounter every day. Although there is certainly a case to be made for careful reading of literature as a moral exercise, it is important to point out that what is being discussed here is not ‘close reading’ as understood in the tradition, for example, of I. A. Richards in Practical Criticism (1929). What Nabokov demands is almost an anti-literary exercise, treating the text like a crossword puzzle rather than an organic work of art. Students trained to disregard the matter of L.  C. Knights’s question ‘How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?’ (1933), for example, can excel as close readers, but fail as vigilant observers of Nabokovian clues. Conversely, it is easy to imagine a reader who spots the anagram in ‘Vivian Darkbloom’ (Lo 4), but who fails to notice the weeping child who is raped in The Enchanted Hunters (Lo 176), or the woman who accomplishes a

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magnificent generosity as an adult wife (Lo 273–80). In this chapter, then, I do not contest the claim that Lolita immerses the reader in a moralized encounter, but I do query the assumption that there is an equation between sensitivity to real fellow human beings and defensive vigilance in reading the text for authorial traps. This chapter’s aims are to show how existing theories about Lolita fail to account for the gulf between a somewhat eccentric mode of reading fiction and ‘real world’ morality, and then to propose a new theory of the novel’s relationship with morality. This theory demonstrates the parallels between Nietzsche’s philosophy and Lolita’s interactions with the reader. I suggest that Nabokov’s text has a far more unsettling relationship with morality than previously thought of, because it forces us to inhabit a Nietzschean world. It is important, however, to distinguish between the kind of Nietzschean reading I  advocate here and any attempt to portray Humbert as an admirable and Nietzschean Übermensch. Surprisingly, not all critics have found it obvious that Humbert’s behaviour is unspeakably cruel and beyond defence. Lionel Trilling, for example, talks of the beauties of a ‘passion–love’ story and how the reader ‘comes to see the situation as less and less abstract and moral and horrible, and more and more as human and “understandable” ’ (1958: 9–19). I reject this position entirely, both as an account of the text and as an account of the responsibilities of adults towards children. On the contrary, there is clear evidence that Humbert can be identified as a monster of solipsism, vanity and cruelty and, notwithstanding his seductive narrative voice, few readers have trouble identifying these moments (Lo 21, 29, 60, 125, 161, 308). The moral problem is not whether we should admire Humbert, then, but how to reconcile both our aesthetic delight in the work he is portrayed as creating and our readerly enjoyment of what Wood calls his ‘tacky charm’ (in Pifer 2003: 181), with what should be moral and emotional distress at the relentless suffering of his victim. Nietzsche can help here not by justifying Humbert, but by providing a model for a text of fruitful but painful moral disorientation. When treated as the product of an aesthete, Lolita seems to be a novel that, rather than positing traditional Christian values such as charity, compassion or kindness, advocates that such traditional moral responses should be subjugated to aesthetic ideals such as beauty, daring and individuality. This is indeed an unsettling moral challenge within the text, and it is understandable why critics have sought to escape such a conclusion by reference to Nabokovian clues which make manifest the author’s value for compassion. But it is possible to read Lolita as a Nietzschean challenge not to these traditional values as such, but to our account of where they come from. In other words, it can be argued that the novel’s apparent aestheticism confronts the reader not with complicity in Humbert’s crimes through inattentive reading, but with an inadequate account of moral life, one which

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substitutes codified conventions for the will to confront and question the nature and origins of good and evil. It is specifically this transgressive revaluation I seek to explore here. My account of Lolita as a text which disorients us by undermining our moral foundations has a parallel in the interests of twentieth- and twenty-first-century moral philosophers. Moral theory, or normative ethics, has evolved radically from algorithmic approaches such as Hobbes’s idea that ‘morality is the solution to a problem’, or John Rawls’s idea that ‘justice is the solution to a problem’, or Bernard Williams’s idea of using convergence between science and ethics to come to an agreement between the subjects in question (in Korsgaard 2003: 100–06). Virtue ethics, for example, practiced by G. E. M. Anscombe (1958) or Alasdair MacIntyre (1981), does not seek to provide tools for the resolution of moral dilemmas as, say, utilitarianism does, but instead investigates morality as a whole as a defining human quality. Using literature to comment on morality (and vice versa) allows for a more inclusive dialogue on both sides. Rorty highlights the issue of methodology concisely. Asking ‘Is it right to deliver n innocents over to be tortured to save the lives of m x n other innocents?’, he declares that ‘anybody who thinks that there are wellgrounded theoretical answers to this sort of question  – algorithms for resolving moral dilemmas of this sort – is still, at heart, a theologian or a metaphysician’ (1989: xv). Throughout this chapter, I  refer to two kinds of theory for Lolita’s moral status. What I  call the ‘didactic theory’ views Lolita as a text with ‘the ability to morally educate its readers’. When speaking of the ‘didactic theory’ (implicitly underlying the work of Rorty, McGinn and Toker, for example), I  refer to the shared characteristics of a significant strand in scholarship on Lolita:  the claim that not only does the novel ‘teach’ us, but also that reading the novel with vigilant attention for Nabokovian traps and puzzles is equivalent to lived experience in regard to being held morally culpable for failure. By referring to these critics’ views under the umbrella term of the ‘didactic theory’, I hope to show that, although there are differences between these critics’ interpretations of Lolita, they can be seen to exhibit certain common features. Where Rorty describes Lolita as allowing us to ‘redescribe ourselves’ (1989: xvi), Toker claims that the novel can ‘modify our attitudes’ (1989: 202), that our ‘ “vigilance” is, or should be, introspective, directed to the potential vulnerability of the reader’s own system of values’ (1989:  199). Similarly, McGinn argues that ‘we emerge [from Lolita] with a better understanding of human sin and its consequences’ (1994: 38–39). What I propose, in opposition to the ‘didactic theory’, is the ‘critique theory’: an account of Lolita as a work that both exposes, and satirizes, everyday unexamined accounts of what morality is and where it comes from.

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Lolita: The moral problem Owing partly to Graham Greene’s endorsement of the novel in The Sunday Times (Christmas, 1955) just after its publication, Lolita remains Vladimir Nabokov’s cause célèbre. Superficially, the text is a quasi-memoir written by the paedophilic Humbert Humbert, detailing his demands upon the pubescent Dolores Haze and displaying his dazzling command of language. Beneath the surface, it is revealed how Humbert tries to reconcile what he knows is wrong with what he loves (Lo 284), and a prolonged identity crisis that leads to the novel’s wonderfully bathetic climactic scene involving Humbert’s doppelganger Clare Quilty (Lo 293–305). The novel’s structure is made up of John Ray Jr’s foreword, Humbert’s first-person narrative, and Nabokov’s afterword (appended a year after its initial publication). As we shall see, in some respects, this framing structure supports the Nietzschean account I provide in that the real-life author’s afterword acts as a problematic counterweight to the austere foreword of fictitious John Ray – Lolita’s mock voice of authority, an ironized voice that condemns Humbert from the conventional point of view. Through coupling child molestation with resplendent language, Lolita problematizes the reader’s response by coercing us into empathizing with its vile anti-hero and narrator Humbert Humbert. The moral difficulty at the heart of the text is that the narrative flair and verbal art with which Nabokov endows Humbert arguably seduces us into enjoying the performance of a narrator who perpetrates evil. This dual response to the text is not the same as Aristotle’s catharsis through tragedy, as in A. D. Nuttall’s Why Does Tragedy Give Pleasure? (1996), however. While tragedy provides terror followed by relief, Lolita generates simultaneous disgust and aesthetic enjoyment. When enjoyment and disgust are elicited simultaneously by the same text, we have difficulty in reconciling them, a difficulty that can be related to ‘cognitive dissonance’.3 Developed by Leon Festinger (1957), cognitive dissonance is defined as ‘a motivational state that impells the individual to attempt to reduce and eliminate it. Because dissonance arises from inconstant knowledge, it can be reduced by decreasing or eliminating the inconsistency’ (Wicklund and Brehm 1976:  1). Festinger’s theory can be related to the ‘didactic theory’ of Lolita. He argues that people have a motivational drive to reduce dissonance by changing their attitudes, beliefs and/ or behaviour. The didactic theory tries to reduce the dissonance of aesthetic delight and moral horror in Lolita by taking an aesthetic tool – Nabokov’s buried clues – and recasting it as a moral tool, used to instruct. It will emerge that there are two problems with this approach. Although literature can

3

McGinn also talks about the relationship between aestheticism and cognitive dissonance in Ethics, Evil, Fiction (2003: 117).

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provide rich material for the discussion of moral issues (Williams 2002: 13), there is no evidence that I know of to show that reading literature of any kind categorically influences behaviour. Second, the kind of reading required to spot Nabokov’s moral traps and buried clues involves defensiveness and vigilance, a cautious refusal to be caught up in the story and the style, in case the author is playing a trick on us. These hardly seem the traits to teach us greater virtue. Such a style of reading is also unlikely to help the reader respond emotionally to Dolores herself. More importantly, it is not at all clear how learning to read about fictional people in this way could help readers respond with greater compassion to the suffering they encounter in real people. I now want to look at the interpretations of Toker, McGinn and Rorty in more detail in order to distil certain similarities in their criticism; this, in turn, will provide a robust foundation for discussing what I have called the ‘didactic theory’ of Lolita. Toker, for example, argues that, underneath the obvious parody, Ray’s foreword is integral to the text’s morality: Lolita does, in a sense, improve one’s ‘vigilance and vision’, yet it does not merely call upon ‘parents, teachers and social workers’ to instill more solid values into the younger generation and protect it from prowlers. The desired ‘better generation’ is not even the moldable younger generation; it is the current generation of readers themselves. (1989: 199) She explains how the text improves moral ‘vigilance and vision’ by claiming that ‘the cathartic effect of Lolita derives from its promotion of our temporary sympathy for Humbert and inattentiveness to Dolly Haze and then in its making us modify our attitudes’ (1989: 202). Notably, she also argues that Lolita’s ‘trap’ works ‘not in encouraging a lack of attention to narrative clues but, conversely, in producing a too diligent imaginative collaboration with them’ (1989:  212). In doing so, Toker identifies a problem with the wrong kind of vigilant reading, but vigilance of a different kind is at the heart of the reader’s moral education. McGinn makes a case for the edifying aspect of Lolita by saying that ‘we emerge from reading it with a better understanding of human sin and its consequences’ (1994: 38–39). Here, he stresses the lesson we supposedly learn from Humbert’s actions given that we are ‘meant to take seriously John Ray’s prefatory denunciation of Humbert’ (38). Importantly, McGinn echoes Toker in talking of the need to remain vigilant when reading the text: The naive reader of Lolita sees only the bare bones of the pedophilic plot and deplores what he reads; the sophisticated reader puts aside all moral concerns and simply enjoys the beauty of the work; but the ‘astute’ reader (as he is occasionally addressed in the book) sees that this is a work in

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which morality and art are intermingled in original and challenging ways. (1994: 39) With respect to Lolita’s foreword, both McGinn and Toker view Ray as a subject of ridicule, but they also claim that his voice nonetheless articulates the truth. Both critics, then, identify a learnable moral lesson from the text, whether through catharsis (Toker), or an understanding of sin (McGinn). Rorty introduces the idea of ‘curiosity’ as a solution to the moral problem of Lolita. His discussion draws on the following two brief episodes which show Humbert’s incuriosity about two deaths – the death of a son endured by a barber he encounters briefly when passing through a small town, and the death of Dolores’s own little brother: In Kasbeam a very old barber gave me a very mediocre haircut: he babbled of a baseball-playing son of his, and, at every explodent, spat into my neck, and every now and then wiped his glasses on my sheet-wrap, or interrupted his tremulous scissor work to produce faded newspaper clippings, and so inattentive was I that it came as a shock to realize as he pointed to an easeled photograph among the ancient gray lotions, that the mustached young ball player had been dead for the last thirty years. (Lo 213) What I present here is what I remember of the letter, and what I remember of the letter I  remember verbatim (including that awful French). It was at least twice longer. I have left out a lyrical passage which I more or less skipped at the time, concerning Lolita’s little brother who died at 2 when she was 4, and how much I would have liked him. Let me see what else can I say? Yes. There is just a chance that ‘vortex of the toilet’ (where the letter did go) is my own matter-of-fact contribution. (Lo 68) It is easy to overlook the significance of both passages. The passage recalling the barber of Kasbeam consists of several clauses, the last of which finally reveals the point of the passage. The cognitive processing that the reader has to go through in recognizing the importance of the final clause is complicated by Humbert’s description  – ‘babbled’, ‘spat’ and ‘interrupted’ continually remind the reader just how much irritation the barber is giving Humbert. The use of a long noun phrase – ‘mustached young ball player’ instead of ‘son’  – also disrupts the intensity with which we consider Humbert’s realization, as does the lack of reflection on the incident which, instead, is followed by a new paragraph listing banal details such as Humbert’s ‘cup of hot flavorless coffee’ (Lo 68). Importantly, this reference to the barber of Kasbeam’s dead son is the only one in the entire narrative, and so the likelihood of retaining the incident in mind is significantly lessened.

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We overlook the significance of the passage concerning Dolly’s little brother for slightly different reasons. Perhaps the most noticeable effect of the passage is the blatant, but humorous, contradiction between what is said to have been relayed and what actually is (‘verbatim’ and ‘vortex of the toilet’). This comic retelling extends also to the characteristically laconic, derisory wit of Humbert (‘that awful French’ and ‘where the letter did go’). The possibility of the comic voice carrying the reader along and distracting him or her from the details is coupled with the fact that the revelation of the existence of Dolores’s little brother is placed in a subordinate clause in the middle of a paragraph, relegating this information to the realm of an aside. Finally, the fact that this passage immediately succeeds Charlotte’s letter declaring her undying love for Humbert (which is of undeniable structural importance to the plot) prevents the reader from attributing much significance to this particular passage. However, unlike the barber of Kasbeam’s son, the presence of Dolly’s little brother can be seen elsewhere in the text (Lo 80). In a parody of what Humbert described himself as omitting from Charlotte’s letter, he draws attention to Dolly’s dead little brother through heavy alliteration (‘blurred, blond male baby’) to produce an overly lyrical description of a harrowingly sombre subject. Why the reader might miss the detail however is arguably due to its placement next to one of the most obscene passages in the text when he imagines the possible consequences of Dolores’s mother’s pregnancy: ‘a nice Caesarean operation and other complications in a safe maternity ward sometime next spring, would give me the chance to be alone with my Lolita for weeks, perhaps  – and gorge the limp nymphet with sleeping pills’ (Lo 80). If the reader has managed to acknowledge the reference to Dolores’s little brother, the memory of the reference is more than likely significantly reduced once he or she has finished the same paragraph. If not, the reader must possess a chilling indifference to Humbert’s plans for Dolores. For Rorty, fiction like Nabokov’s ‘gives us the details about what sorts of cruelty we ourselves are capable of, and thereby lets us redescribe ourselves’ (1989: xvi). He suggests that the reader mimics Humbert’s incuriosity when he or she fails to recognize the presence of Dolly’s little brother or the barber of Kasbeam’s son in the text. Rorty claims that he ‘was just as inattentive to that month-long sentence, and to that dead moustached son, as Nabokov suspected he had been’ (1989: 163).4 Rorty’s interpretation is inextricably related to the idea of curiosity, the idea that Lolita’s readers are likely to be 4

Rorty argues that the ‘fact that Humbert does not make the connection himself, is exactly the sort of thing Nabokov expects his ideal readers – the people who he calls “a lot of little Nabokovs” – to notice. But ruefully and contemptuously aware that most of his readers will fall short, he tells us in the Afterword what we have missed’ (1989:  163). See the previous chapter’s discussion of ‘The Vane Sisters’ in this respect.

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as unperceptive as Humbert in failing to notice the deaths of these (one is careful not to say ‘minor’) characters. Indeed, Rorty thinks that ‘the reader, suddenly revealed to himself as, if not hypocritical, at least cruelly incurious, recognises his semblable, his brother, in Humbert’ (1989: 163). Through the reader’s acknowledgment of these deaths, whether from initial recognition or, more likely, with the benefit of rereading, Rorty argues that the reader can be said to start demonstrating improved moral virtue because his or her newly found attentiveness can be applied to real life.5 Toker rightly observes that Rorty ‘puts most literary critics to shame by connecting the scattered references to Dolly’s dead little brother with the reference to happy normal child Avis Bird’s chubby little brother at home’ (2005:  197). Moreover, most literary scholars would surely be happy to endorse the value of close reading to uncover the potential meaning of a text. Yet, there are problems with both Rorty’s account and the other accounts which relate virtue to stubbornly careful reading. Rorty implies that only through careful reading will the text have any morality to impart, because it is only this kind of reading which demonstrates the virtuous quality of curiosity. Thus, a somewhat exclusive correlation seems to arise between ‘astute readers’ and morality, suggesting that those who skim past the aforementioned sections are effectively not conscious of the moral lesson that Rorty describes. However, there is surely a difference between ‘close reading’ and ‘vigilant reading’. A close reader is sensitive to form and its relationship to content, interested in the work as a whole constructed from multiple aspects. He or she can identify formal patterns in the text and is interested in these, rather than in apparently contingent details of plot and background. A  vigilant reader, on the other hand, might be quite indifferent to form and have a simple inability to discriminate between foreground and background elements in the story. This reader, instead, may start off with the assumption that the author is out to trap him or her and concentrates on avoiding the trap. Further, this reader may spot the link between Dolores’s dead brother and the barber of Kasbeam, but will not necessarily be alive to the poignant beauty of those passages where we catch a glimpse of Dolores’s sadness and learn to pity her: In the gay town of Lepingville I bought her four books of comics, a box of candy, a box of sanitary pads, two cokes, a manicure set, a travel clock with a luminous dial, a ring with a real topaz, a tennis racket, roller skates with white high shoes, field glasses, a portable radio set, chewing gum, a transparent raincoat, sunglasses, some more garments – swooners, shorts, all kinds of summer frocks. At the hotel we had separate rooms, but in

5

For more detail, see Rorty’s Contingency, Irony, Solidarity, 167, n34.

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the middle of the night she came sobbing into mine, and we made it up very gently. You see, she had absolutely nowhere else to go. (Lo 141–42) Although the passages which reveal Dolores’s suffering are fairly rare, they are, unlike the passages referring to the barber of Kasbeam or Dolly’s little brother, quite hard to miss. This passage remains in the reader’s memory given its location in the text. Not only does ‘she had absolutely nowhere else to go’ end the paragraph (consisting of three steadily decreasing sentencelengths), but it also ends the first part of the novel. Given that readers are accustomed to bestowing significance to particular areas or pointers of texts (Loines 1991), this particular ‘hotspot’ blends a sorrowful statement with an informal delivery (‘You see’) – a stylistic choice that attempts to dilute the magnitude of what has been said, but ultimately fails to mask the sadness. The irony of the last sentence, which plays against the materialism of the first, adds to the supposed poignancy. As Karshan reminds us, however, readers should remain conscious of the fact that it is Humbert who has arranged the ostensibly moving revelation (2011a:  176). Passages of this kind, similar to Humbert’s mention of Dolores’s ‘sobs in the night – every night, every night’ (Lo 175–76), are exactly the kind of engineered revelations that more sentimental critics often take at face value. Rorty is not alone in his approach. Brian Boyd makes a similar case with respect to Lucette’s role in Ada (in Ada 481–82). But, if we can only recognize the kind of details that Rorty and Boyd draw our attention to through vigilant rereading, how can this be compared with our responses to real people? After all, we do not necessarily get a chance to revisit a particular moral challenge in the real world. And it is hard to imagine that paying equal attention to all the information before us about the real people we encounter – equating, for example, a piece of news about a stranger heard thirdhand with a direct appeal for help from someone we know – would lead to more virtuous lives. It may be possible to be a reader for the plot (and skip the details), yet simultaneously be a kind person – a person like Mrs Holigan in Lolita, a ‘kindly and harmless woman [who] had . . . a rather bleary eye that missed details’ (Lo 180). Conversely, it is not hard to imagine a vigilant reader of Nabokov’s texts, who is callous about the suffering of those around him or her. Rorty argues that ‘just insofar as one is preoccupied with building up to one’s private kind of sexual bliss, like Humbert, or one’s private aesthetic bliss, like the reader of Lolita who missed the sentence about the barber the first time around, people are likely to suffer still more’ (1989: 164).Yet, this leaves little room for careless readers who skim-read but who are also good people. To be fair, Rorty does not explicitly point to a correlation between aesthetic excellence and good behaviour. But it is a corollary of his argument that failing to notice Nabokov’s buried clues has implications for a reader’s moral sensitivity. And there is also an aesthetic problem with the argument. If all readers were to read like this consistently,

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it would be difficult to process the narrative at all given that we would have to accord all incidents equal importance. Here, the distinction between close reading and vigilant reading is important. The first can indeed be morally enriching, in that it allows us to uncover complexity and nuance in order to effectively comprehend complex moral matters. The latter, however, is effectively asking us to read ‘upstream’. Kintsch and Rawson, for example, argue that ‘a good reader must maintain [the following] in working memory: crucial fragments of the prior text, including its macrostructure, linguistic knowledge, relevant world knowledge, reading goals’ (in Snowling and Hulme 2005: 224). If, as Rorty urges, we are expected to retain the deaths of Dolly’s little brother and the barber of Kasbeam’s son, it is extremely unlikely that we will retain this information in our long-term memory. As Snowling and Hulme claim, ‘an assumption common to all models of comprehension is that all information processing must take place in a finite capacity working memory’ (2005: 224). Thus, the expectation that we will be able to retain small pieces of information in mind is extremely unrealistic, unless they are reinforced through other semantic information. Indeed, Masson argues that ‘the reader must be able to determine which information is relevant to his or her goal and must be able to focus processing efforts on that information’ (1982: 400). Despite the possibility that readers’ goals differ, it would be unlikely that readers would privilege the deaths of Dolly’s little brother and that of the barber of Kasbeam’s son over more general information about Lolita’s macrostructure. Even if we did, it is not obvious why this would translate to having greater sensitivity to real people. There is a second problem with the didactic accounts of Toker, McGinn and Rorty in that they all rely on some sense of self-recognition as the reader contemplates Humbert. Like the narrator, we are not curious enough to immediately notice the barber of Kasbeam’s suffering. Humbert himself plays on the idea that he reflects the reader, for example, when readers are accosted as ‘Bruder!’ (Lo 262). However, there are problems with the suggestion that Lolita’s typical reader learns to perceive him or herself as on the same moral level as Humbert. For one thing, the focalized account of the narrative (we are reminded that Humbert relays his highly unreliable information to us after the events have taken place) means that the reader is more likely to become aware that Humbert is using words like ‘Bruder’ and ‘reader’ manipulatively. In the following passage, Humbert refers to himself in the third person (preceded, again, by ostentatious pre-head modifiers): ‘Please, reader: no matter your exasperation with the tenderhearted, morbidly sensitive, infinitely circumspect hero of my book, do not skip these essential pages! Imagine me; I  shall not exist if you do not imagine me’ (Lo 129). Humbert appears to be simultaneously manipulating the reader through an intimate and pitiful plea and making the mechanism of manipulation explicit by referring to himself in the third person, hinting at his own fictionality. By doing so, he distances the reader and effectively pre-empts any sense that the

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reader sees in Humbert his or her reflection. Although Rorty’s idea of unwelcome identification has affinities with Stanley Fish’s theory of ‘entanglement’ (something he argues readers experience in being seduced by Satan’s rhetoric when reading Paradise Lost [1667]), his argument cannot be equated with Fish’s. Where Fish argues that the reader’s ‘mistake, correction, instruction’ (1967: 42) is the intended effect of Milton’s text, Rorty’s interpretation of Nabokov’s text as making the reader morally culpable is suspect given that our ‘mistake’ lacks the equivalent moral scaffolding that is needed: we are all innately sinful according to Milton’s world view, for example, but we are not all child abusers. As Noël Carroll suggests, ‘the moral implications attributed to artworks are not supported by the kind of argumentation that one typically expects to accompany and to authenticate ethical claims in the realm of moral debate and contestation’ (in Kivy 2004: 128). As Flaubert, Arnold and Eliot have suggested, this is not to say that literature cannot provoke moralized responses or reflections on morality. McGinn argues plausibly that fiction can effectively engage with real-life philosophical problems; that ‘in reading fiction [ . . . ] moral judgements flow more spontaneously, more authentically’ (1994: 40). Similarly, Halliwell develops McGinn’s approach with reference to modernism (2006:  18). Rorty, like McGinn, makes a case for fiction (and specifically Nabokov’s fiction) as a medium for moral inquiry, which does not depend on the ‘curiosity’ argument outlined earlier. My dispute here, then, is with the specific account of Lolita as teaching morality through experiencing one’s own failure to be curious about the suffering of others in the text, and thereby recognizing one’s moral continuity with Humbert.6

Nietzsche and ethics For an alternative approach to the moral problem of Lolita, I  turn to Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s philosophical writings on ethics deliver trenchant critiques of the dominant ethical positions of his day, notably, Christianity, Kantianism and utilitarianism. His ethical stance derives largely from his condemnation of traditional morality and religion and his desire for a ‘revaluation of all values’ (EH 96). As Brian Leiter puts it, ‘Nietzsche attacks morality, most simply, because he believes its unchallenged cultural dominance is a threat to human greatness’ (2002: 26). Yet, Nietzsche was neither a libertine nor a nihilist: ‘It goes without saying that I do not deny – unless I am a fool – that many actions called immoral ought to be avoided and resisted, or that many called moral ought to be done and encouraged – but

6 For a more detailed discussion of fiction and ethics, see Carroll’s essay ‘Art and the Moral Realm’ in The Blackwell Guide to Aesthetics (1994: 126–51).

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I think the one should be encouraged and the other avoided for other reasons than hitherto’ (Day 60). This and other passages make clear that, in many cases, his dissatisfaction was not with any given prohibition as such, but with the reasons given in its support. Simon May conveniently summarizes the overall conception of morality rejected by Nietzsche in six principal ideas (1999: 105–06). Alasdair MacIntyre’s analysis echoes May’s, distilling Nietzsche’s moral philosophy into just three tasks: ‘to exhibit the historical and psychological causes of the vacuum’; to ‘unmask false candidates for the role of the new morality’; and ‘ “by a transvaluation of values,” to prophetically introduce a new way of life’ ([1967] 1998: 216). Even more concisely, Aaron Ridley suggests that Nietzsche ‘identifies an ill, suggests its origins, and tries to prescribe a cure’ (1998: 3). Some of the most influential voices in recent Nietzschean scholarship therefore give us a workably robust account of Nietzsche’s ideas about morality despite his somewhat capricious views on the subject throughout his work.7 May, MacIntyre and Ridley portray a vision which is certainly disturbing in its desire to dismantle the schemes by which we measure value, but which by no means provides a manifesto for the cruelties of Humbert.

The moral vacuum and the conventional reading process In the afterword, Nabokov describes Lolita as a ‘highly moral affair’ and laments the ‘idiotic accusation of immorality’ levelled against the book (Lo 315). I  suggest that the moral aspect of Lolita is a Nietzschean disorientation which operates first by violating the reading contract and then by implicating the reader in a satirical attack on the banal moral discourse which emerges in the face of relentless evil. Nabokov can be seen to effectively mimic Nietzsche’s critique of a schematic approach to good and evil – an approach which reduces them to mere social norms. Nabokov’s attitude to social norms concerning literature provides one such instance of this Nietzschean critique of the ‘moral vacuum’. In the following extract from Lolita, Humbert visits the now seventeenyear-old Dolores (or the newly named Mrs Dolly Schiller) towards the end of the novel: Carmencita, lui demandais-je . . . ‘One last word,’ I said in my horrible careful English, ‘are you quite, quite sure that  – well, not tomorrow, 7

This summarized account is in contrast to perhaps the more familiar image of a laudable superman, whose contempt for the weak is supposed to be admired – a view held by W. H. Mallock, for example (Bridgwater 1972: 16).

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of course, and not after tomorrow, but  – well  – some day, any day, you will not come to live with me? I will create a brand new God and thank him with piercing cries, if you give me that microscopic hope’ (to that effect). ‘No,’ she said smiling, ‘no.’ ‘It would have made all the difference,’ said Humbert Humbert. Then I pulled out my automatic – I mean, this is the kind of fool thing a reader might suppose I did. It never even occurred to me to do it. ‘Good by-aye!’ she chanted, my American sweet immortal dead love; for she is dead and immortal if you are reading this. I mean, such is the formal agreement with the so-called authorities. (280) Although there may be a more explicit Nietzschean reference in this passage, it is arguably the Carmen (1845) allusion that demonstrates how Nabokov’s writing enacts Nietzsche’s view of morality. We are reminded of how Don José kills Carmen in Prosper Mérimée’s novella because of her liaisons with Lucas. Playing on this reference, Humbert then uses American slang for describing his supposed murder weapon – choosing ‘automatic’ instead of ‘gun’. The use of ‘automatic’ not only suggests what our reading behaviour might be being referred to, but also something that could potentially harm us. The hint is further strengthened by the privileging of ‘fool’ rather than ‘foolish’ – is the act of acknowledging, and projecting, an allusion (in order to foresee another text) the entirety, the ‘full’ extent, of how readers deal with such a reference? We might also ask who the ‘fool’ reader is meant to refer to. Toker suggests that ‘the episode is usually interpreted as making fun of the reader who, under the influence of Merimee’s Carmen (to which the allusion is made several lines before), expects Humbert to kill his unfaithful love’ (1989: 216). If Toker is correct in saying that all readers are implicated, then the reader is being punished for those very skills which literary, reader–response, and reception theorists put at the heart of reading: recognizing an allusion and extrapolating from it. Perhaps, however, there is a reader who is one step ahead of the reader who simply recognizes allusions, an ‘informed’ reader who paradoxically expects that expectations may be confounded, a kind of reader imagined, for example, by Sartre in his essay ‘Why Write?’ (1947).8 Alfred Appel certainly seems to assume two such different readers in his footnote to the Carmen section in The Annotated Lolita:  ‘ “fool thing a reader . . . suppose”: especially a consumer of pulp fiction and movies, or a learned reader who has kept Carmen in mind. The several Carmen allusions on nearby pages serve as very fresh bait’ (443). In Appel’s reading, both the

8

In What Is Literature? And Other Essays (ed.) Steven Ungar (1988).

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learned and the less distinguished reader fall into the trap, whether they are lured by the bait of pulp fiction or by knowledge of Carmen, and thus both readers are victims of mockery. In a similar example, Humbert gives a mock rendition of ‘Carmen’ early on in the novel, while a lodger at the Haze house: O my Carmen, my little Carmen! Something, something those something nights, And the stars, and the cars, and the bars and the [barmen – And, O my charmin’, our dreadful fights. And the something town where so gaily, arm in Arm, we went, and our final row, And then the gun I killed you with, O my Carmen, The gun I am holding now. (Lo 61–62) Using ‘Oh My Darling, Clementine’ (1884) as a further allusive template, these two verses are followed by Humbert suggesting that the male lead character ‘Drew his .32 automatic, I  guess, and put a bullet through his moll’s eye’ (Lo 62). Humbert, in the act of guessing, assumes the role of the informed reader in that he is drawing inferences from his literary knowledge. But, because he draws on two allusions, his expectations are both correct and incorrect (the female in ‘Oh My Darling, Clementine’ drowns, whereas Carmen is stabbed because of Don José’s jealousy). Humbert’s games of allusions, then, carefully documented by Appel, undermine both sets of readers: both the uninformed and informed readers are the subject of ridicule. In Daybreak, Nietzsche declares that ‘morality [Sittlichkeit] is nothing other (therefore no more!) than obedience to customs [Sitten], of whatever kind they may be; customs, however, are the traditional way of behaving and evaluating’ (10). This can be compared with Nabokov’s games around literary tradition in Lolita. Readers who follow literary tradition will be lured into the comforting sense that they can understand the text through allusion, only to be mocked and confounded again and again (Lo 70, 173, 211). In this respect, allusion binds fresh thought into existing customs of speech and thus is analogous to traditional moral custom as Nietzsche understands it. By mocking obedience and tradition, Nietzsche implies that we must address or engage with morality through new modes of thought rather than being content with customary approaches. What is supposed to replace this, however, can only really be thought of as a vague allusion to a ‘revaluation of all values’ (EH 96), Nietzsche’s overriding approach to morality. It is habitual in Nietzsche’s writings not to give a detailed corrective to the ideas

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that he critiques. Although a remedy is not explicitly set forth in his writings, Philippa Foot argues that this encapsulates Nietzsche’s special objection to Christian morality, with its teaching of the virtues of humility and compassion, and its rejection of ‘this world’.9 She claims that Nietzsche’s idea of a ‘healthy egoism’ (1978: 82–84) is the alternative to the critiques. Analogously, Nabokov punishes readers for following literary custom obediently, without providing an explicit alternative. So far, this would merely suggest that Lolita has a disorienting effect on our aesthetic vision comparable to the effect Nietzsche aims to have on our moral vision. But I would further argue that there is a moral aspect to this reading experience in that Lolita goes beyond the challenging of readerly expectations to undermine the reader’s faith in the author’s respect for the reader. The ‘Carmen’ episode, and the many similar episodes in which Humbert uses allusion as ‘bait’, can be viewed as a violation of the ‘reading contract’. This can be defined as ‘an imagined agreement between reader and author governing all things anticipated and met throughout the textual experience, on both sides’. This is not the same as reception theory or reader–response theory. Reception theory, especially associated with Hans Robert Jauss and Wolfgang Iser, draws on a phenomenological approach whereby reading is deemed an experiential process. For example, sentences can be seen as conversant with those next to them in such a way as to influence readerly understanding and how differences in the time of reading can impact upon interpretation. Reader–response theory, developed by critics such as Stanley Fish, focuses more on the dialogue between reader and text; privileging individual responses rather than the text-oriented theories of New Criticism. Both these theories, to some extent, resemble a social contract in that some kind of implicit textual agreement is assumed between abstract persons (writer and reader), who will never normally meet and do not know one another. However, the ‘reading contract’ I  suggest here goes beyond these theories in focusing on the idea of a more explicit relationship between writer and reader. This relationship recalls the elements of Paul Grice’s idea of the ‘cooperative principle’ (1975) which have been developed by game theorists as ‘common knowledge’: ‘our talk exchanges [  .  .  . ] are characteristically, to some degree at least, cooperative efforts; and each participant recognizes in them, to some extent, a common purpose or set of purposes, or at least a mutually accepted direction [  .  .  . ] at each stage, some possible conversational moves would be excluded as conversationally unsuitable’ (1989:  26). The reading contract assumes a desire (consistent with Grice’s theory) on the part of the writer that the reader should ultimately understand the text, however difficult that might be. It further assumes that the reader knows of this expectation in the writer,

9

See Chapter 6 for a discussion of the relationship between ‘otherworldly’ and ‘other worldly’.

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that the writer knows that the readers know, and so on. This is common knowledge in the sense given earlier that ‘something is common knowledge if everybody knows it, everybody knows that everybody knows it, everybody knows that everybody knows that everybody knows it; and so on’ (Binmore 2007: 43). Difficulty might, of course, be seen as a rewarding part of the reading experience; indeed relevance theory, which builds on and modifies Grice’s account of communication, suggests that creative texts are those which generate a higher than usual number of possible meanings or, in other words, ‘a putative creative author who seeks to make manifest a number of weak implicatures’ (in Green 1997:  137). This multiplicity of meanings is understood by the reader in relevance theory not as a failure to be clear (a violation of Grice’s maxim of clarity) but as a necessary part of rich utterances. However, there is no implication in Grice’s or Green’s work that difficulty should be understood as the writer’s (or speaker’s) hostility towards the reader. Indeed, it is arguable that the only reason the reader is willing to persist with difficult texts, which depart from tradition or developed conventions, is because they assume a desire on the part of the author that the reader should understand.10 And this desire implies some kind of reciprocity, of mutual respect, between author and reader. Lolita constantly undermines this mutual respect, and consequently, the reader’s faith in the terms of the contract. Lolita also challenges the reader’s expectations in more usual ways, for example, in its use of a highly wrought and poetic style as the medium for sordid and cruel thoughts. When Dolores is suffering from fever while in Humbert’s ‘care’, he reports that, ‘her brown rose tasted of blood [ . . . ] She complained of a stiffness in the upper vertebrae – and I thought of poliomyelitis as any American parent would’ (Lo 240). We defer our initial repulsion as we struggle to comprehend what is actually occurring. Our ability to process what is happening is significantly delayed because of the verbosity in which he gives us the obscene information – Raine argues that Humbert performs cunnilingus on the youngster, only taking her to hospital because of the impossibility of having intercourse with her (in Lo 323). Nabokov arguably infuses Humbert’s description with morbid humour in an attempt to throw the reader: not only do we feel inclined to laugh at the idea that every parent, American or not, would think of polio (let alone its full medical name) in this situation, but the ambiguity as to why Dolores shakes from head to toe is unsettling. The sense of a norm (‘as any American parent would’) being both embedded and satirized is obvious here. But Lolita goes beyond this challenging of readerly expectations. For example, the mechanism of reception theory, where departure from convention creates literary

10 We are reminded of Nabokov’s pronouncements regarding ‘The Vane Sisters’ as discussed in the previous chapter.

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possibilities, is both used and repeatedly mocked by Humbert. He explicitly foregrounds this reading process and specifically addresses, and lampoons, how his readers typically approach texts. Nabokov continually manipulates the reading contract through this undermining of the reader, implying that literary construction is not a cooperative process between author and reader but a chore:  ‘A few words about Mrs. Humbert while the going is good (a bad accident is to happen quite soon)’ (Lo 79) or ‘I think I had better describe her right away, to get it over with’ (Lo 37). Elsewhere, Humbert’s manipulative relationships with other characters mirror the author’s violations of the contract with the reader, as in the argument between Humbert and Dolores’s mother Charlotte Haze, caused by Charlotte’s wanting to go to England as a couple. Humbert pleads, No, please, wait. When you decorate your home, I do not interfere with your schemes. When you decide – when you decide all kinds of matters, I may be in complete, or in partial, let us say, disagreement – but I say nothing. I ignore the particular. I cannot ignore the general. I love being bossed by you, but every game has its rules. I am not cross. I am not cross at all. Don’t do that. But I am one half of this household, and have a small but distinct voice. (Lo 91) The experience of ‘being bossed’, the idea that ‘every game has its rules’, and feeling that one has a ‘small but distinct voice’ may be suggestive of a reader’s sentiments. Humbert plays at championing the justice which readers need at the hands of authors. Yet, this is inevitably undermined when we consider that Charlotte, far from being a despotic ruler who does not acknowledge or respect Humbert’s wishes, is, in fact, his victim. Nabokov’s undermining of the reader sits side by side with Humbert’s. When Humbert quips, ‘as greater authors than I have put it: “Let readers imagine” etc. On second thought, I may as well give those imaginations a kick in the pants’ (Lo 65), he simultaneously challenges the reader’s ability to conjure up a scene (in favour of his own description) while lauding himself as different, and implicitly better, than the great authors he parodies. The all-encompassing ‘etc.’, in this respect, serves to subsume their pronouncements in Humbert’s mind. Similarly, when Humbert observes that ‘the reader remembers that “Know–Your–Child” book’ (Lo 107), we are only too aware of why he equates the reader’s knowledge of child education with Charlotte’s. A  presumption made earlier on in the novel, however, is arguably the most pointed. Describing the beginning of his advances towards Dolores, Humbert detects that the learned reader’s ‘eyebrows [ . . . ] have by now traveled all the way to the back of his bald head’ (Lo 48). Not only does Nabokov allow Humbert to make fun of the reader (by presuming that his readers are learned, male, bald, and will be shocked by his pronouncements), but he also allows Humbert to make an early allusion

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to Clare Quilty, that, as yet, neither the reader nor Humbert, recognizes. Only by rereading does this acknowledgement occur. The realization that Nabokov has deceived his readership strengthens the extent to which he can be seen to be acting in bad faith.

Unmasking false candidates Having seen how Nietzsche’s idea of a ‘moral vacuum’ is comparable with Nabokov’s view of the conventional reading process, the role of satire illustrates how Nabokov adheres to Nietzsche’s second task; something MacIntyre describes as unmasking ‘false candidates for the role of the new morality’ ([1967] 1998: 216). Nabokov does this by satirizing certain characters’ moral perspectives within Lolita. Frank S. Meyer was an early reader who responded to this aspect of the text when he declared that ‘satire, I am sure, considering his ability and the quality of what he has written, was Mr Nabokov’s intention’ (in Bloom 1993: 147). In the preface to Lolita, John Ray Jr, the supposed voice of authority who introduces Humbert’s memoir, concludes: In this poignant personal study there lurks a general lesson; the wayward child, the egotistic mother, the panting maniac  – these are not only vivid characters in a unique story; they warn us of dangerous trends; they point out potent evils. Lolita should make all of us – parents, social workers, educators – apply ourselves with still greater vigilance and vision to the task of bringing up a better generation in a safer world. (Lo 5–6) As previously mentioned, although we are ‘meant to take seriously John Ray’s prefatory denunciation of Humbert’ (McGinn 1994: 38), the safe, sterile description in the foreword makes it evident that he is the subject of ridicule. As Wood observes, ‘John Ray, Jr stands for all the idiot readers and critics who think that such stuff matters in literature’ (1994:  107). Compared to the mercurial language used within the main body of the text, John Ray encapsulates the ‘common’ language and values of parents, social workers, educators – ‘a better generation in a safer world’ – at the expense of personalized and individual vocabulary. As I mentioned earlier in this chapter, and as many critics have observed, Nabokov gives us more than enough material to understand and pity Dolores’s suffering (Lo 176, 308). So the text cannot be said to advocate or justify Humbert’s acts. Yet, the preface attacks the moral discourse normally used to identify them as cruel. It is undeniable that Ray articulates many truths in the foreword:  his stance on the evils of child abuse is self-evidently correct. However, there

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are several factors that show how Ray’s words are satirized to problematize the truths that he voices, despite McGinn’s argument (1994: 38). Not only does the quasi-scientific tone of the passage (‘12% of American adult males’) distance the reader’s engagement with what Ray says (notably quoting ‘Dr Blanche Schwarzmann’ whose name is as much an aesthetic mirroring as John Ray Jr’s initials), but the blandness of the foreword, viewing Lolita as just another anthropological case study of paedophilia, highlights the fact that Ray is not intent on pondering where evil arises from, but would rather document it instead. Furthermore, Ray’s high opinion of himself – he informs us that ‘the editor of his choice [i.e., John Ray himself] had just been awarded the Poling Prize for a modest work (“Do the Senses make Sense?”)’ (Lo 3) – is coupled with a lame attempt at coercion. His idea of the urgent ‘ethical impact the book should have on the serious reader’ (Lo 5) is also being satirized given who his appeal is directed to: a reader who would, ironically, detect the ridiculing of Ray’s character. For the reader, the satire is unsettling. We laugh at Ray, and yet, it is hard for any reader with ordinary levels of compassion to actually disagree with what he says. More than ever, in an era which puts great stress on transparency and accountability in public life, it would be fair to think that most of Lolita’s readers laugh at Ray while, at the same time, being entirely in favour of ‘greater vigilance’ to protect children. In accepting the invitation to laugh at Ray, the reader is in a disconcerting position because what he says is true. In ‘On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense’ (1873), it is exactly the idea of truth that Nietzsche rebels against. He argues that ‘truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions; they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force; coins which have lost their embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer as coins’ (in Magnus et al. 1993: 15). The problem with Ray, then, is not specifically the proposition that, for example, social workers should aim to protect children from kidnappers and paedophiles. Rather, it is that this is the sound of authority responding to evil in automatic terms. The mock authority of Ray parallels Nietzsche’s conviction that ‘the belief in authorities is the source of the conscience: it is therefore not the voice of God in the heart of man but the voice of some men in man’ (Reader 85).11 Ray is explicitly opposed to the author through an echo of the foreword in Nabokov’s afterword. In the foreword, Ray notes that ‘the robust philistine who is conditioned 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’ (Lo 4). Interestingly, in the afterword, Nabokov declares

11

In a letter to his brother Kirill, Nabokov warned: ‘and, above all, beware of platitudes, i.e., word combinations that have already appeared a thousand times [ . . . ] every person sees things in an individual way and must find his own words’ (SL 8).

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that ‘nothing is more exhilarating than philistine vulgarity’ (Lo 315). Ray and Nabokov both feel the need to mention philistinism. But while Ray defines a philistine as someone who enjoys banal novels and anticipates ribald language, Nabokov gives the term positive connotations. What is at stake here are competing ideas as to why this is a potentially shocking text; ideas which are situated in two different moral discourses. For Ray, it seems that the novel may shock because it is about, and at times represents, sex. He assumes that this is why the novel will attract philistines who will be disappointed in the absence of violations of a different taboo: that of profane language. So, the non-philistine reader is encouraged by Ray to read a text otherwise of interest to philistines because, despite the depictions of sex, that reader will learn about preventing such abuses in the future and, in addition, they will not be confronted with coarse language. Nabokov, in the afterword, almost seems to welcome both the philistine reader and the ‘wise, sensitive, and staunch people who understood my book’ (Lo 315) precisely because both groups are free from Ray’s rationalization of evil as a failure in the system of social care. Philistines are to be preferred to dealers in ‘coins which have lost their pictures’, as Nietzsche would put it.12 Dolores’s mother, Charlotte, serves a similar function in being another ‘false candidate’ for the role of a ‘new morality’ in Nietzsche’s terms. Charlotte positions herself as the moral superior of some of her neighbours through the exercise of taste and culture. The reader is invited to laugh at her banality, mispronunciation of French phrases, clichéd expressions and religious zeal. Humbert’s description of Charlotte’s front hall illustrates this supposed lack of substance: ‘The front hall was graced with door chimes, a white-eyed wooden thingamabob of commercial Mexican origin, and that banal darling of the arty middle class, van Gogh’s “Arlésienne.” [ . . . ] She was, obviously, one of those women whose polished words may reflect a book club or a bridge club, or any other deadly conventionality’ (Lo 36–37). Although supposedly cultured and proper, the objects used to give a sense of Charlotte’s character clearly suggest the opposite. Her taste in paintings is yet another kind of socialization ridiculed by Humbert, akin to that of the book or bridge club. Not only does Humbert’s word choice (the satirical ‘graced’, the nondescript ‘thingamabob’, or the derisory ‘commercial’) serve to undermine Charlotte’s way of life to the reader, but the allusion to Van Gogh’s ‘Arléssienne’ – that ‘banal darling of the arty middle class’ – evokes Eliot’s banal women in ‘The Love Song of J.  Alfred Prufrock’ who ‘come and go, talking of Michelangelo’ ([1915] 1964:  11; 13–14). These female

12 Constantine Muravnik claims that ‘notwithstanding the abundance of caustic eloquence directed at philistines, Nabokov usually keeps them in the background of his fictional narratives’ (2010:  97). Such background status, however, does not necessarily qualify them as unimportant.

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presences, wanting to be seen to have an interest in or knowledge of high art, are being satirized as unaware of the triteness of their own actions. This undermining of available moral discourses extends beyond Charlotte. Describing his relationship with his first wife Valerie, the ‘animated merkin’ (Lo 25), Humbert is quick to release a venomous attack on her character. He notes that Valerie paints ‘cubistic trash’ and refers to her as both a ‘poodle’ and an ‘idiot’ (Lo 25–27). Perhaps most revealingly, Humbert, annoyed at her sudden change of character (because of the presence of Valerie’s new lover Mr Maximovich), details that she ‘was quite out of keeping with the stock character she was supposed to impersonate’ (Lo 27). Although the scene where Valerie and Mr Maximovich explain their goings-on to Humbert appears to give them the upper hand in their exchange, Humbert is quick to inform his readers that the couple were found, ten years later, taking part in a social experiment where they were made to be ‘in a constant position of all fours’ (Lo 30). Jettisoning the subject of Valerie, Humbert’s Parthian shot completes his view of them as vulgar, animalistic persons lacking an ‘upright’ moral discourse. Dolores, importantly, is also subjected to ridicule of her morals and taste, despite being a child and an ostensibly beloved victim. Describing her as ‘disgustingly conventional’ (Lo 148), Humbert lampoons her way of life by listing the banal things that interest her (‘sweet hot jazz, gooey fudge sundaes, musicals’), a sickly-sweet itinerary of the vapid interests of popular American culture of the period. He goes on to describe her as ‘the ideal consumer, the subject and object of every foul poster’ (Lo 148). It seems that Dolores is Charlotte in the making given that the daughter’s penchant for all things commercial is reflected in her mother’s hallway. Not only, then, are we invited to laugh at Ray’s institutionalized recommendation of improved ‘vigilance’ in the face of monstrous evil, but also at a variety of moral discourses:  the morality of Dolores; Charlotte’s vapidity and conventionality; Humbert’s first wife Valerie (Lo 25–27, 36–37, 148). Laughing at these characters by no means commits us to endorsing Humbert’s actions. But it does put us in the difficult – and Nietzschean – position of leaving us morally unarmed against Humbert, with our usual tools for moral judgement mocked as unfit, worn out and irrelevant. What is more, the reader is implicated in this Nietzschean attack on conventional moral discourse because readers are, to varying degrees, confronted with themselves in these characters. As Pifer points out, ‘many of us have heard ourselves talking like John Ray Jr on too many occasions’ (2003: 191). Her claim relates to the description of Charlotte – if we read her description as satirical, we recognize how pervasive her perspective is in our society. If satire is at work, the expectation we usually have is of a rounded thirdperson narrator mocking somebody for acting stupidly or immorally, as in Voltaire’s Candide (1759) or Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1931). However, if the satirical voice comes from the perspective of a character or

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narrator not aligned with accepted cultural norms, it jolts us into a more powerful understanding of satire through estrangement; the recognition of scenarios close to home yet immeasurably removed. Charlotte’s satirist is a heartless libertine, whose moral vision is damnably worse than her own. If readers laugh with Humbert, they are forced also either to laugh at themselves or to abandon moral discernment altogether, albeit temporarily. Toker asks, ‘Isn’t there a moment, reading John Ray, when we are almost nodding in approval or ready to write “How true” in the margin? Some of our laughter has to do with the narrowness of our escape’ (1989: 106). Here, she presumably means our escape from being the subject of ridicule for adopting such clichéd moral positions. However, given the inevitable similarities between the general reader and John Ray that Nabokov suggests, it can be argued that we do not in fact achieve this escape.

The revaluation of values Nietzsche’s third task, that of a ‘revaluation of all values’, is explained by Clowes as follows: ‘The purpose of his [Nietzsche’s] hostility is partly to distinguish himself from the conventional moralists of the past and to shock the reader into a new awareness of the process of moral valuation’ (1988: 16). If, as I am suggesting, Nabokov is forcing the reader of Lolita to inhabit a Nietzschean world, the idea of accepting our own moral blindness is particularly unnerving with regard to the paedophilic Humbert Humbert. For, although his actions towards Dolores are indefensible, those aspects of his moral outlook, concerned with the ‘violation of cultural codes’ (Rampton 1993: 81), are harder to condemn. Nabokov’s outlook is not quite identical to that which Nietzsche practised  – tenderness is not part of the Nietzschean programme, for example. But in Ecce Homo for example, it is clear that Nabokov’s high value for individuality, pride, aestheticism and intelligence all follow Nietzsche (34, 40, 96). In Strong Opinions, Nabokov foretold that, ‘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, ridiculing the vulgar and cruel  – and assigning sovereign power to tenderness, talent, and pride’ (193). But I do not read Humbert as the traditional Nietzschean Übermensch.13 Instead, I am suggesting that he is a vehicle for questioning the rules and codes of society – a kind of limiting case, as when he discusses the problems of law and morality in ‘a civilization which allows a man of twenty-five to court a girl of sixteen but not a girl of twelve’ (Lo 18).

13 See Chapter  5 for a detailed account of the representation of the Übermensch figure in Nabokov’s work.

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As McGinn points out, ‘bravery, imagination, and individuality can also constitute a virtuous character  – and I  would say of the most attractive kind. Certainly, mindless conformity is no part of a proper conception of virtue’ (2003:  117). So, how can the contradiction between those parts of Humbert’s character which are potentially virtuous  – particularly on a Nietzschean view – and the vicious nature of his actions, be resolved? One possible answer lies in Humbert’s solipsism. In The Annotated Lolita, Appel defines solipsism with reference to Humbert as an ‘epistemological theory that the self knows only in its present state and is the only existent thing, and that “reality” is subjective; concern with the self at the expense of social relationships’ (336). Evidence of Humbert’s solipsism permeates the text (Lo 21, 60, 125, 161). So the potentially admirable qualities of Humbert’s character – ‘bravery, imagination, individuality’ – are locked in a view of the world which, by definition, excludes the reader. His difference from us is simultaneously menacing and otherly and alluring in its defiance, like the ‘total atheist who lives a happy and useful life, and dies in his sleep at the age of 106’ (Lo 314). We are reminded, in this respect, that a ‘real’ author ‘has no given values at his disposal:  he must create them himself’ (LL 2). Humbert appears to act as the vehicle for a demonstration of a Nietzschean ‘revaluation of all values’ which privileges an aesthetic outlook on morality. At the start of this chapter, I outlined the moral problem with Lolita: that our enjoyment of the novel is interwoven with the aesthetic sensitivity and charming and charismatic personality of a monstrous narrator. The aestheticist aspects of the novel let it operate as a Nietzschean critique of morality, without acting as a manifesto for cruelty. As mentioned in the introduction, Toker claims that the aesthetic philosophy that Nabokov adheres to resembles that of Schopenhauer,14 in that he shares his view that ‘the power of aesthetic enjoyment is to put to sleep the insistent urgings of the malevolent will’ (1989:  108). However, this notion also suggests that ‘pleasure is nothing more than the temporary cessation of pain’ (Tanner 2000: 56). But, as Toker argues in The Cambridge Companion to Vladimir Nabokov, there also appears to be an ‘ethical value [also] in aesthetic experience’ (in Connolly 2005: 232) in Nabokovian prose, implying something beyond the mere ‘cessation of pain’. Here, I suggest that Nabokov, like Nietzsche, advocates an ‘aestheticization of morality’ (Tanner 2000: 94) through his literary texts. In The Gay Science, we remember, Nietzsche argues that ‘as an aesthetic phenomenon existence is still bearable to us, and art furnishes us with the eye and hand and above all a good conscience to be able to make

14

See Toker’s Nabokov :  The Mystery of Literary Structures (1989) and her essay ‘Liberal Ironists and the “Gaudily Painted Savage”: On Richard Rorty’s Reading of Vladimir Nabokov’ (1994).

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such a phenomenon of ourselves’ (104). Discussing the relationship between Nabokov and Nietzsche (and commenting directly on the above statement from The Gay Science), Wood argues that ‘aesthetic [ . . . ] implies not art for art’s sake but a pointed contrast to the moral (and specifically Christian) interpretation of existence and the world’ (1994: 170). Nabokov’s portrayal of Humbert, in certain limited ways, as morally superior to more conventional characters is a pervasive and disconcerting, but revealing, facet of the novel. Once we reach the afterword, we realize that Nabokov’s ‘initial shiver of inspiration’ is related to an ape’s sketch that ‘showed the bars of the poor creature’s cage’ (Lo 311). Rather than be read as pity for the way that Humbert is trapped within a morally blind outlook, instead, it reads as a parable for the restrictions that are imposed on him that prevent him from living life as he would like to. Wood remarks, ‘Humbert sees plenty of bars but also some remarkable perspectives on the zoo’ (1994: 117).15 In Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche writes that ‘to be moral, correct, ethical means to obey an age-old law or tradition [ . . . ] To be evil is to be “not moral” (immoral), to practice bad habits, go against tradition, however reasonable or stupid it may be’ (66). Similarly, rather than being seen as a writer completely removed from morality, or a writer with ‘evil’ intent, Nabokov joins with Nietzsche in ‘making strange’ the relationship of ethics to good and evil, addressing it from a new perspective and throwing off the inheritance of the past.

i Lolita’s relationship with morality can be seen to have affinities with what Louise Rosenblatt calls ‘sublimation’:  a ‘term most often invoked when we have imaginatively shared in actions forbidden or frowned upon in our own culture’ (1994: 145). It is arguably this idea that allows Martin Amis to conclude that readers ‘read Lolita sprawling limply in [their] chair, ravished, overcome, nodding scandalized assent’ (2002:  261). The implications of this, perhaps, are what are most unnerving. Unlike the figure of Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment (1866), who anticipates a Nietzschean outlook on life only to turn to the salvation of Christianity, there is no suggestion that Lolita’s protagonist goes on a ‘moral journey’. In this respect, I query any argument which claims that noticing our own carelessness as readers constitutes a moral journey for the reader. The Nietzschean moral outlook is not a packaged set of ideas illustrated by the text. Instead, it is an experience of moral disorientation which leaves us in no confusion about the extent of Humbert’s cruelty but in considerable confusion about where that cruelty comes from, how we can account for it, and what responses we have to it.

15

See Appel’s The Annotated Lolita, 432.

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4 Pale Fire: A differing perspective

Noted cruces of interpretation, like the fourth book of Gulliver’s Travels, Moliere’s Misanthrope, Don Quixote, and the place of Satan in Paradise Lost have [ . . . ] made it equally obvious that literature may be understood in a variety of different ways, none provably right or wrong, by different audiences bringing different attitudes to the work. (Boyd 1999: 100) Since at least the time of William Empson, twentieth-century criticism has adopted the idea of interpretative ambiguity comfortably, enthusiastically even. But the idea of ambiguous implied authorship is less familiar. This chapter explores Nabokov’s Pale Fire using the concept of ‘implied internal authorship’: that is, the figure who readers believe has articulated the words in the fictional world of the narrative. Implied internal authorship is something that readers often take for granted in most fictions. Although we are aware of a real person who has written and arranged the words in any given text, we are also aware, unconsciously or not, of an implied author, or authors, residing in the text. For example, we normally accept a signature below a block of text as an indicator that the preceding words belong to the named person  – we enter into a trusting, reciprocal relationship whereby we entertain these fictional narratives as words coming from the named source. Modernism and postmodernism have taught us to be sceptical readers in many respects yet, despite an increased awareness of authorial deception, this trusting relationship still survives:  the meaning and value attributed to the text depends on this information (Barthes 1977: 21). For many, perhaps most, readers of Pale Fire, this is still the case  – there is no apparent mystery about which fictional character has written particular sections of the text. My discussion therefore applies only to those diligent readers who work hard enough to discover

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Nabokov’s planted textual anomalies which make this correlation between sections of the text to fictional authors less than straightforward. With this in mind, we need to query the implications of a text, or any given section of a text, that presents itself as the product of more than one possible internal author. For instance, what might we make of well-known dialogue suddenly being attributed to the person whom we thought was being addressed? The idea that Lear’s words might actually be Cordelia’s and vice versa, for example, is almost unfathomable. Engaging with Nietzsche’s theories of ‘perspectivism’ and ‘untruth’, this chapter illustrates how a perspectivist outlook can help us to reframe the problematic issue of ambiguity when it comes to the implied internal authorship of Pale Fire. The issue of internal authorship in the text is a contentious one in Nabokov studies and has engendered much writing on who the internal author might be, based largely on the identification of clues and puzzles within the text.1 The problem that Pale Fire poses, more specifically, is that there are five plausible, yet incompatible, main theories concerning the internal implied authorship. Unlike, for example, Julio Cortázar’s novel Hopscotch (1963) where the reader can choose to formulate the plot of the text through utilizing expendable chapters or not,2 Pale Fire seems to offer at least five different interpretations as to whom the internal implied author of any given section is. Like Nabokov’s short story ‘Recruiting’ as discussed in Chapter 2, Pale Fire seems to flagrantly defy Barthes’s idea that ‘the essence of writing (the meaning of the work which constitutes writing) is to prevent any reply to the question: who is speaking?’ (1977:  132). In other words, where Barthes sees the essence of écriture as ensuring that the speaking voice is unambiguous, Nabokov appears to make the ambiguity of who is speaking the locus of his novel. Indeed, in relation to Beckett’s phrase ‘what matter who’s speaking, someone said, what matter who’s speaking’ (1974: 16), Foucault claims that ‘we must recognize [this question] as one of the fundamental ethical principles of contemporary writing’ (1977: 14–15). Writing about the difficulty of establishing the ‘truth’ in Pale Fire, Peter Rabinowitz asks:

1

Boyd’s Pale Fire: The Magic of Artistic Discovery (1999) is paradigmatic of the ‘Russian-doll’ analyses focused on solving Nabokov’s riddles. Such analysis suggests that these riddles and anagrams (e.g. Jack Gradus, Jacques d’Argus, Sudarg of Bokay) act as solutions to the novel rather than as aesthetic games or potential traps. 2 Another similar choice is given in B. S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates (1969) where the twentyfive chapters between the first and last are designed to be read in any order. Interestingly, such choices can also be found in children’s books, such as in Edward Packward’s Choose Your Own Adventure (1979–1998) series and R. L. Stine’s Give Yourself Goosebumps (1995–2000) series.

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How then is one to read the book? The only way, I suppose, is to make an arbitrary choice about which narrative audience one wants to join – or to read the novel several times, making a different choice each time. As in a game, we are free to make several opening moves; what follows will be dependent upon our initial decision. Simply with respect to the questions suggested above, we can generate four novels, all different but all couched, oddly, in the same words. (1977: 140) Before discussing the four different authorial attributions that Rabinowitz mentions, as well as the later Boydian theory of ‘inspiration beyond the grave’, I first wish to pursue the issues that Rabinowitz raises. By invoking choice, he suggests that options are available to the reader to make sense of the novel: that we can accept any of the (at Rabinowitz’s time of writing) four theories assigning fictional authors to all or part of the text as true, if incompatible. He also suggests the presence and power of the reader, privileging not only the reader’s freedom in making sense of the text, but also his or her capacity to allow other potentially valid authorship interpretations or readings to exist. I develop this reading to argue that we can read Pale Fire, not only as five different novels but also as five equally valid novels, depending on who we decide the fictional author(s) are. Nietzsche’s theory of ‘perspectivism’ and his difficulty with ‘all-encompassing’ explanations allows for Pale Fire’s internal authorship  – and its relationship with truth  – to be thought of in a different light if we are to accept multiple solutions before starting to privilege. Just as I argued in Chapter 3 that Lolita corrals its readers into adopting a disorientating moral world, I suggest here that Pale Fire appears to be pushing the reader into perspectivism by providing multiple possibilities of internal authorship. This might, at first sight, appear to be an egalitarian, relativist reading, but I complicate this by examining how, while all five perspectives are valid, some perspectives may be considered more valid than others (a paradox that exists in Nietzsche’s ‘perspectivism’). Each internal authorship theory is supported by enough textual evidence to be statable, but with potentially serious consequences for our conception of literary truth. As Rabinowitz claims, ‘the answer to this question, of course, must come prior to any satisfactory discussion of the overall meaning of the novel: until we know what is going on, we can hardly interpret it, much less evaluate it’ (1977: 122). Building on Karshan’s reading of Pale Fire as symptomatic of the ‘literary game’, ‘recognised, if at all, only as a dimension of “Menippean satire”, a term discussed by Mikhail Bakhtin in Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (1929) [  .  .  . ] its essence [being] an intricate play of ironies which alternate between praising and satirising folly’ (2011a: 198), I claim that the interpretative impasse can

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be traversed without being reductive or sentimental, as Boyd’s (1999) solution can arguably be said to be. It is important to remember that both Pale Fire and the Nietzschean position I put forth should be thought of as embodying Bakhtin’s idea of the ‘dialogic’ work of literature, something that not only recognizes the multiplicity of voices and perspectives, but also the matrix of past and future responses. Nabokov’s fourteenth novel, his fifth written in English, is described by Mary McCarthy as a ‘Jack-in-the-box, a Faberge gem, a clockwork toy, a chess problem, an infernal machine, a trap to catch reviewers, a cat-andmouse game, a do-it-yourself kit’ (1962: 21). Pale Fire, posing as a critical edition of a poem, consists of a foreword, an eponymous poem, critical commentary on that poem and an index. The foreword is attributed to a Dr Charles Kinbote, a colleague and neighbour of the American poet John Shade, both of whom teach at Wordsmith College and live in New Wye, Appalachia. Readers are met with a foreword that, initially academic in tone, soon alerts them to Kinbote’s unorthodox editorial approach given the intrusion of personality on what should be formal exposition: ‘Canto Two, your favourite’ (PF 13). A  999-line poem follows, also called ‘Pale Fire’, seemingly written by Shade. Written in heroic couplets and in four cantos, it blends the styles of Robert Frost and Alexander Pope and concerns Shade’s childhood, his grief over the suicide of his daughter Hazel, his neardeath experience, and thoughts about life after death. Kinbote’s commentary on the poem follows, becoming increasingly removed from the rigour one would normally expect in critical commentary. Initial academic exposition is usurped by lengthy, but wonderfully comic, description of the tribulations of a certain King Charles II Xavier, the disposed king of Zembla, who Kinbote broadly hints is himself. Pale Fire ends with an index that contains entries for numerous characters and events in the poem and commentary, albeit in a selective and disproportionate fashion (two pages, for example, are devoted to Kinbote, while the entry for Shade’s wife Sybil is comprised of just three words). To most readers, the attribution of material to Kinbote and Shade respectively is simple: Kinbote has written the foreword, commentary and index, while Shade has written the poem. But the numerous underlying echoes that scholarly readers have noticed between sections, the ‘impossible’ knowledge of certain facts that either Shade or Kinbote are privy to, for example, have problematized such easy attribution of internal authorship. Because of the interplay between these sections, five major theories now exist in regard to authorial attribution in Pale Fire. The ‘dual authorship’ theory is the obvious solution as to who is accountable for each section of Pale Fire. Adherents of this view believe simply that the names appended to each section reveal who has written each section of text; that the text’s internal authorship is exactly as it seems. This view has been advanced by Ellen Pifer and David Lodge, as well as Robert Alter: ‘There is no reason to doubt the existence of the basic fictional data – the Poem and

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its author, on the one hand, and the mad Commentary and its perpetrator on the other, inverted left hand’ (1978: 186). The view is supported by the disparity between Shade’s stylistic formality and Kinbote’s haphazardness, Shade’s introverted nature and Kinbote’s extroverted one, Shade’s imaginative quest and Kinbote’s suspect exegesis (Boyd 1999: 116). Yet, there are problems with this attribution; numerous resonances exist between the poem and commentary that would supposedly be unknown to either Shade or Kinbote. The ‘Shadean’ reading, first proposed by Andrew Field in 1967, is by far the most popular theory of those critics who favour single-author explanations. Critics and translators endorsing this view include Andrew Field, Gennady Barabtarlo, Chris Ackerley and Sergey Il’yn.3 The poem’s self-reflexive content is the most obvious evidence for attributing the authorship of Pale Fire to Shade. Lines such as ‘I was the shadow of the waxwing slain [ . . . ] I lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky’ (PF 29; 1–4), and ‘Man’s life as commentary to abstruse / Unfinished poem. Note for further use’ (PF 57; 939–940) suggest to some that Shade is ‘projecting himself imaginatively beyond death’ (Boyd 1999:  123). Further, there are constant references to ‘Pale Fire’ in the commentary:  the allusion to Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens refers to a passage describing the moon as a thief of the sun’s fire: ‘The moon’s an arrant thief / And her pale fire she snatches from the sun’ ([1623] 1997: 4.3, 430–31). Its rich metaphorical relationship to the novel, of course, implies that Kinbote steals his inspiration from Shade’s poem. It cannot be known by Kinbote, however, because he only has a Zemblan version of the play, bereft of the phrase ‘pale fire’. His translation reads: ‘The moon is a thief: / he steals his silvery light from the sun’ (PF 66). Yet, there are other serious problems with the Shadean reading. If Shade did write the commentary and attributed it to an invented figure called Kinbote, his character would be notably egomaniacal, given that the latter praises Shade both highly and frequently. Shade would also have to be completely insensitive to use his daughter’s death as a foil for Kinbote’s creative fantasies.4 Page Stegner first proposed the ‘Kinbotean’ reading in 1966, and its other advocates include Pekka Tammi and Charles Nicol. It starts from a similar point as the Shadean reading. Although Kinbote does not have a faithful translation of Timon of Athens, he makes a number of apparent allusions to the key phrase in Shakespeare’s play: ‘the pale fire of the

3

For more detail, see Boyd’s Pale Fire:  The Magic of Artistic Discovery (1999:  114); Chris Ackerley’s ‘Pale Fire: Three Notes Towards a Thetic Solution’, Nabokov Studies 2 (1995: 87– 103); Gennady Barabtarlo’s Aerial View: Essays on Nabokov’s Art and Metaphysics (1993); NABOKV-L, 9 January 1998; Andrew Field’s Nabokov:  His Life in Art (1967); and Il’yn, Sergey. NABOKV-L, 19 December 1997. 4 Boyd counters this by relating the parallels between Pale Fire and Nabokov’s father’s death. He also asks, if Shade has invented his death scene, who is to say that he has not also invented his life (1999: 123–25).

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incinerator’ (PF 15); ‘I [  .  .  . ] have caught myself borrowing a kind of opalescent light from my poet’s fiery orb’ (PF 67); and ‘any fire (even a ‘pale’ one!)’ (PF 191). If Kinbote does allude to Shakespeare’s play, this would suggest that he is an invented character of Shade’s. Boyd, for example, claims that if he ‘has the imagination to invent the outlandish world of Zembla; why could he not also add the demurer world of Appalachia?’ (1999: 116). However, there are several important points that undermine the idea of Kinbote concocting the poem. For one, Kinbote’s constant selfaggrandizing does not extend to his ability to write verse: ‘I am a miserable rhymester’ (PF 227). Also, if Kinbote did write the poem, why does he not simply write ‘Solus Rex’, the text that he desperately tries to see in ‘Pale Fire’ (PF 232)? As Boyd points out, Kinbote seems genuinely pained that Zembla does not appear to be in Shade’s poem and he is not only ‘too misogynistic to talk about John and Sybil Shade’, but also ‘frequently makes himself look stupid’ (1999: 116–17). A subsidiary authorship theory of the Kinbotean reading is that a character named Professor V. Botkin has written the story and that Kinbote is his alter ego. The ‘Botkin’ theory is advocated by such critics as Mary McCarthy, Alfred Appel and D. Barton Johnson. Textual details in the commentary, such as ‘she [Sybil Shade] used to call me “an elephantine tick; a king-sized botfly [ . . . ] the monstrous parasite of a genius” ’ (PF 138), the fact that Botkin is a near anagram of Kinbote (PF 210), and that Nabokov himself, in an interview in 1962, stated that ‘the nasty commentator is not an ex-King of Zembla nor is he professor Kinbote. He is professor Botkin, or Botkine, a Russian and a madman’ (Dolbier 1962: 5) add significant weight to this theory. This identification, of course, does not solve the question of whether Kinbote or Botkin has written the entire text. The fourth possible major reading is that of ‘undecidability’, advocated by critics such as Alvin B.  Kernan, Brian McHale, Michael Wood, Peter Rabinowitz, George Steiner, Nigel Dennis and Frank Kermode. In the case of Pale Fire, they suggest, there is no way of knowing who is unreliable, no ‘ground-level’ reference point in which to adequately decide on the meaning, no entirely reliable hook, as Wood puts it, on which to hang our interpretative coats.5 One possible, and perhaps now obvious, response to these problems then is to say that they are undecidable. Because of the conflicting internal evidence that the novel seems to provide, critics compare Pale Fire to the Rubens Vase or to Wittgenstein’s ‘duck/rabbit’ paradigm ([1953] 1997: 194), with Brian McHale claiming that ‘Pale Fire [ . . . ] is a text of absolute epistemological uncertainty’ (1987: 18). Given Kinbote’s remark that ‘you will never find our crown, necklace and scepter [ . . . ] All this is

5 From Wood’s paper ‘Modern Mimesis’ given at the Nabokov and Morality Symposium held at the University of Strathclyde on 6 May 2011.

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the rule of a supernal game, all this is the immutable fable of fate’ (PF 192), Karshan provides a newer take on the ‘undecidability’ reading in claiming that ‘the rule is that the treasure will never be found, the puzzle will never be solved, and this is what makes Pale Fire a game, not a puzzle, though it certainly contains many beautiful puzzles’ (2011a:  205). Boyd disparages the undecidability reading as symptomatic of a modern age of relativism and our tendency to view art as removed from explanatory ‘grand narratives’: Because it invites us to discovery, Pale Fire also prompts us to disagree radically about what we think we have found. Nabokov’s finest novel has become a paradigm of literary elusiveness, a test case of apparent undecidability [ . . . ] That seems to suit our muddled times, when “advanced” thinkers claim we must all accept as a universal truth that there is no such thing as truth, only local versions. (1999: 3) The relativistic connotations Boyd ascribes to Pale Fire’s ‘apparent undecidability’ are, however, at odds with at least one kind of Nietzschean interpretation. Rather than embracing all five interpretations, perspectivism would suggest the possibility of each, but resolutely declare a privileging of viewpoint for any given reader. According to the Nietzschean view, this would be dependent on a particular critic’s ‘interest’ after having weighed up the ‘pros’ and ‘cons’ (GM 92) of each theory. Previously a Shadean, Boyd significantly altered his view in Pale Fire: The Magic of Artistic Discovery. He formulated a new argument, claiming that the ghost of John Shade’s daughter, Hazel, inhabits the Vanessa atalanta butterflies that roam around Shade’s and Kinbote’s gardens and which, in turn, provide Kinbote and Shade with imaginative inspiration. This theory is largely based on the fact that the word ‘atalanta’ appears three times in an excerpt described by Kinbote as a ‘jumble of broken words’ in the barn section of Pale Fire: ‘pada ata lane pad not ogo old wart alan ther tale feur far rant lant tal told’ (151). Boyd likens literary discovery to scientific discovery in that clues about the text lead on ad infinitum. However, what we must remember is that a limit on the number of clues must exist in something wrought by human hands:  riddles or puzzles become senseless without the idea of someone, like us, sharing our assumptions. Although the ‘butterfly’ theory is a rigorous and convincing piece of close reading and coherent enough to be possible, Wood sees Boyd’s solution as reductive and sentimental given that the internal inspiration for Pale Fire’s existence comes down to a ghost, inhabiting butterflies, being able to somehow communicate with the living; that we might not actually die but, like Hazel, be able to infiltrate the real world and provide a catalyst for writing in the afterlife. Boyd writes, ‘[Wood] expresses his reluctance to accept my proposal in

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this way:  “The trouble with it is its cost, what you have to take with it and give up because of it [  .  .  . ] Death itself is diminished, its horror is cancelled, and a desperate sentimentality beckons” ’ (1999: 257). Presumably by ‘kind’, Wood’s reservation is based not only on the idea that art is commonly inspired by the dead, but also that it attempts definitive interpretation, a school of ‘monomania’ that fails to negotiate any aesthetically complex discussion as to why the two halves of the novel seem to complement one another. Boyd’s approach, quite rightly, privileges the textual detail, yet it also seems to subjugate the book’s aesthetic delight.

Nietzsche’s perspectivism Pale Fire’s status as an equivocal text, in which two or more of the apparently conflicting interpretations just outlined are simultaneously true, parallels Nietzsche’s concept of perspectivism. In The Gay Science, Nietzsche summarizes a particular problem that he feels is symptomatic of the modern age: ‘It is still a metaphysical faith upon which our faith in science rests – that even we knowers of today, we godless anti-metaphysicians, still take our fire, too, from the flame lit by the thousand-year-old faith, that Christian faith which was also Plato’s faith, that God is truth; that truth is divine’ (201). Perspectivism, instead, is a theory that attempts to show the plurality of truth and is integral to much of Nietzsche’s philosophy. Perspectivism advocates the privileging of the individual perspective, negating the idea of hegemonic interpretations able to give meaning to the world that transcends perspective. Linked inextricably with his statement that ‘God is dead’, Nietzsche’s concept of perspectivism not only privileges individuals’ beliefs, but also ‘derives from the idea that morality has been invented by human beings’ (Magnus and Higgins 1996:  32). Nietzsche’s problem with objective knowledge is concisely put in his posthumous The Will to Power: ‘In so far as the word “knowledge” has any meaning, the world is knowable; but it is interpretable otherwise, it has no meaning behind it, but countless meanings. – “Perspectivism” ’ (267). In On the Genealogy of Morality, he expands upon this theory by detailing how it differs from simple relativism:  ‘not as “contemplation [Anschauung] without interest” (which is, as such, a non-concept and an absurdity), but as having in our power our “pros and cons”: so as to be able to engage and disengage them so that we can use the difference in perspectives and affective interpretations for knowledge’ (92). For Nietzsche, each individual has been selective in choosing to believe in a particular perspective. His idea of each individual ‘having in our power’ the ability to see the ‘pros and cons’ of a given perspective suggests not blinkered, unwavering belief in any particular view being correct, but a

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perspective derived only from acknowledging other positions before coming to an interpretation. Bernd Magnus condenses Nietzsche’s perspectivism into four criteria, that: 1. no accurate representation of the world as it is in itself is possible; 2. there is nothing to which our theories stand in the required correspondence relation to enable us to say that they are true or false; 3. no method of understanding our world – the sciences, logic, or moral theory – enjoys a privileged epistemic status; 4. human needs always help to ‘constitute’ the world for us. (in Magnus and Higgins 1996: 4) I suggest that these four criteria provide a model for the ways in which Pale Fire can be understood. Just as Magnus claims that ‘no accurate representation of the world [ . . . ] is possible’, we can similarly claim that no accurate representation of Pale Fire is possible. Where he claims that there is nothing to say that our theories are true or false, we can remind ourselves of the longevity and resilience of Pale Fire’s various and (ostensibly) incompatible interpretative theories in that each is internally consistent enough to be statable. Magnus’s account of Nietzsche’s argument that no method of understanding our world enjoys privileged status echoes different theorists’ views of Pale Fire. Is, for example, the Shadean theory somehow more creditable than the dual authorship theory because Shadeans focus on minute textual details? Is the dual authorship theory more convincing than Boyd’s because dual authorship theorists want to take the text at face value? Ultimately, it is impossible to say, categorically, which should privileged and so it is the individual reader that must decide, based on both the ‘pros and cons’ and interests that he or she draws from the text. This, in turn, correlates with Magnus’s fourth feature of Nietzschean perspectivism:  that our readerly behaviour(s) help to constitute the texts we read. On the surface, Boyd’s theory, unlike the others, is consistent with what Nietzsche describes as prerequisites for a perspectivist outlook. His consideration of the existing internal authorship theories on Pale Fire, for example, resembles the weighing up of ‘pros and cons’ that Nietzsche advocates  – the tripartite structure of his book, mimicking the Hegelian triad of thesis, antithesis and synthesis, evidences this. And since, for Boyd, discovering textual details through rereading is central to a novel, he displays genuine ‘interest’ in his chosen approach. Further, his concession that his theory, like the others, is not necessarily decisive is also consistent with a perspectivist outlook: ‘In employing the Popperian analogy, I imply that although other hypotheses proposed for Pale Fire now seem demonstrably wrong, my own new hypothesis, which I suggest explains more of the book than

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other interpretations directed at the same problem, should also be open to challenge, extension, complication, refutation’ (Boyd 1999: 256). However, the difficulty with Boyd’s theory is that, although it ostensibly leaves individual readers to agree or disagree about its robustness, it attempts to completely resolve the book’s tensions and leave nothing for the ‘forcing, adjusting, shortening, omitting, filling-out, inventing, falsifying and everything else [that is] essential to interpretation’ (GM 119). What seems problematic about Boyd’s theory is that, despite making several references to Karl Popper’s ‘suspicious’ view of knowledge and the importance of Thomas Kuhn’s ‘paradigm shifts’ within his text, he presents his theory as an allencompassing one that effectively solves the internal authorship problem, while foregrounding the stance that none of the previous theories seem up to scratch with his own.6 For Nietzsche, as he claims in Human, All Too Human, ‘there are no eternal facts, nor are there any absolute truths’ (15). For him, ‘the more eyes, various eyes, we are able to use for the same thing, the more complete will be our “concept” of the thing, our “objectivity” ’ (GM 92), and so problematizes methodological dogmatism. We are also reminded of the constraints that a ‘solution’ has over an interpretation. Where Karshan rightly claims, ‘after all, if it were a soluble puzzle, its art would be exhausted once the puzzle was solved, and Pale Fire equates ending with death’ (2011a:  205), Will Norman and Duncan White argue that, ‘one of the costs of solution-orientated scholarship in Nabokov studies has been felt in the diminishment of his readers’ interpretative autonomy’ (2009:  10). In Boyd’s case, this is the autonomy to adopt a Nietzschean perspective where all theories are valid. Yet, although his theory effectively questions the vibrancy of Pale Fire’s multiple internal authorship, he does touch on an aspect of interpretation which specifically relates to a key feature of Nietzsche’s perspectivism: ‘Each effort to reach absolute reality, to find the truth of things and discover whether Kinbote is sane or insane, is an effort to confirm our own reading of the evidence by relating it to or showing it to be in conformity with some truth outside the circle of our own subjectivity’ (Boyd 1999:  116). Similar to Bakhtin’s notion of ‘heteroglossia’, the Nietzschean perspective thrives on the fertile coexistence and conflict between different types of speech. Indeed, when deciding on a particular internal authorship theory of Pale Fire to align themselves with, readers, in their ideological positioning, execute the very ‘extra-linguistic’ quality that Bakhtin makes reference to by weighing up the ‘pros and cons’ of each and deciding what they take most interest in. Such perspectives, and their resulting implications, are inextricably bound and bred within the literary and real-life contexts that have engendered them.

6 For more discussion of these issues, see Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) and Popper’s The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1934).

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Pale Fire as five different novels, some more valid than others Rabinowitz has called Pale Fire ‘a frustrating novel to read, and in some respects an impossible one [  .  .  . ] the ambiguities seem intentional’ (1977: 139). Our inability to determine what facts are ‘real’ and what are not, he goes on to say, makes it impossible for us to join the ‘narrative audience’ given that we do not know what is expected of us. He explores the possibility of reading the novel, at the time of his argument, as four different novels but puts more weight on the undecidability theory, arguing that it is impossible to choose between each theory. Building on this idea in relation to Nietzsche’s perspectivism, I argue that all of the five major theories (the four Rabinowitz engages with, plus Boyd’s) are potentially valid but to different degrees depending on individuals’ interests. Pale Fire invites each reader to decide what is true in the novel based on how a particular theory’s ‘pros and cons’ match up. This is not an interpretative free-for-all, of course – a Nietzschean approach requires the reader’s decision to be based on what they find most appropriate and what they most have interest in. In Structural Poetics: Structuralism, Poetics, and the Study of Literature, Jonathan Culler reflects on ‘how it is that a work can have a variety of meanings but not just any meaning whatsoever or how it is that some works give an impression of strangeness, incoherence, incomprehensibility’ ([1975] 2002: 142). Thus, to adopt the viewpoint that Humbert Humbert has internally authored Pale Fire cannot be ruled out, but has absolutely no evidence to validate it. As such, it would be considered a poor perspective based on this notably major ‘con’. However, in discussing Nietzsche’s perspectivism, Alexander Nehamas argues that To engage in any activity, and in particular in any enquiry, we must inevitably be selective. We must bring some things into the foreground and distance others into the background. We must assign a greater relative importance to some things than we do to others, and still others we must completely ignore. We do not, and cannot, begin (or end) with “all the data”. (1985: 49) Although Boyd is obviously correct to stress the importance of textual evidence, Nehamas is also correct that it is impossible to amalgamate all evidence simultaneously. The idea of some perspectives being more valid than others seems strange given that perspectivism ostensibly denies the privileging of any epistemic status. However, although perspectivism values the plurality of viewpoints, it also allows for hierarchy. For Nietzsche, a perspective that is self-conscious of its being a perspective is privileged (Nehamas 1985: 2, 66). Perspectives that attempt to dominate reality and

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posit theirs as the only way in which to view the world, as Boyd’s theory can arguably be said to do, are less valid than those that accept their own conditionality. In addition, certain viewpoints that hold particular moral views (for example, in the opposition of good and evil) and a priori judgements are less privileged than others (BGE 42). There are certainly problems with Nietzsche’s conception of perspectivism – that perspectivism is a perspective itself (otherwise known as the ‘liar’s paradox’), and that moral choices conflicting with Nietzsche’s own are subjugated – but it does offer a way to traverse the current critical impasse around Pale Fire’s internal authorship problem.7 Although multiplicity of interpretation is a hallmark of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writing – whether through Wilde’s claim that ‘imaginative beauty make[s] all interpretations true and no interpretation final’ (2000: 265–66), Mallarmé’s idea of a potential infinity of interpretation, or the ‘aporias’ (Henke [1990] 2016:  16) of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake – Nietzsche’s perspectivism, seen as a more violent version of fin-de-siecle aestheticism, is also privileged here because of the insight that readers gain when reflecting on the implications of their chosen theory.

Truth Pale Fire’s relationship with truth is, at times, explicitly Nietzschean. John Shade’s wavering faith in the afterlife, for example, echoes Nietzsche’s statement that God is dead in The Gay Science:  ‘My God died young. Theolatry I  found / Degrading, and its premises, unsound / No free man needs a God; but was I free?’ (PF 32; 99–101). Nabokov also makes explicit reference to Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, another text that addresses God’s death and its consequences ([1880] 2003:  309–21, 749–64). Interestingly, its fifth book is entitled ‘Pro and Contra’ – exactly 7

René Alladaye, in his wonderfully inventive book The Darker Shades of Pale Fire:  An Investigation into a Literary Mystery (2013), turns to ‘anamorphosis’, looking specifically at how distortion in Holbein’s painting The Ambassadors (1533) can help us to interpret Pale Fire ekphrastically. More specifically, the revelation of the anamorphic skull in the middle of Holbein’s painting, Alladaye argues, causes us to look again at the ‘dead centre’ (152) of Nabokov’s novel and reformulate our ideas about the novel’s internal authorship. Alladaye’s perspective, categorically defined as such in the quotation below and based on the ‘pros and cons’ of existing internal authorship theories, can be thought of as Nietzschean in intent: It is essential to emphasize again that without these predecessors this book would not exist: they deserve nothing but respect and gratitude [ . . . ] it also goes without saying that selecting these passages meant not selecting others, potentially as interesting and telling, maybe, a different story. The word ‘solution’ is therefore used with the utmost modesty, and a smile, because it is, clearly, excessively ambitious [ . . . ] whatever happens, somebody, somewhere, a bigger, more respectable, more competent commentator will open up meaning again and turn this finishing line into a new beginning. (175–76)

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what Nietzsche describes weighing up when formulating one’s perspective.8 Further, in Canto Three, predominantly concerned with the idea of an afterlife, Shade mentions ‘Fra Karamazov, mumbling his inept / All is allowed, into some classes crept’ (PF 48; 641–42). Shade’s comment that Fra Karamazov’s ‘All is allowed’ is deficient as a world view suggests that, despite God’s death and the loss of divine truth or a world view, vulgar relativism, at the opposite end of the spectrum, is not desired either. Instead, Shade, in the passage included in Kinbote’s commentary about the possibility of ‘Higher Intelligence’, claims that ‘there are rules in chess problems: interdiction of dual solutions, for instance’ (PF 179). The Nietzschean model of truth, then, specifically the theory of perspectivism, can be seen as a fertile tool to understand Nabokov’s novel. In Canto Four, for example, a previously mentioned couplet is foregrounded both for its stand-alone stanza status and its self-reflexive nature: ‘Man’s life as commentary to abstruse / Unfinished poem. Note for further use’ (PF 57; 939–40). Dual authorship theorists, in accepting internal authorship at face value, would attribute this couplet to John Shade but be perplexed, first, as to how he could know that his poem would remain unfinished and, second, how he could have foreseen Kinbote’s mass of endnotes. For dual authorship theorists, the couplet is steeped in dramatic irony; it is an eerie coincidence that Shade does not get to finish his poem and that Kinbote’s commentary sits alongside it. Shadeans, however, would be suspicious of the coincidence and, thinking that the commentary is also written by Shade, read this couplet as evidence that he has staged his fictive death in order to, first, allow readers to think he has some mystical foresight and, second, create a foil in order to write about himself self-aggrandizingly. Kinboteans would assume that Shade is an invented character and that Kinbote has written the poem (the earlier couplet included). If so, the themes of death and suffering that the invented character of John Shade describes are used simply as aesthetic devices. Further, Kinbote would have included a couplet nodding to his commentary – the idea of man’s life as a commentary to an unfinished abstruse poem suggests that Shade’s life, or essence, is encapsulated in the commentary (which, somewhat cruelly, actually concerns Kinbote and his numerous aliases) and, absurdly, that the poem is actually more abstruse than the commentary. Kinbote himself thinks that ‘human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece’ (PF 214). Such disparity shows how differently we can read Pale Fire depending on the perspective we adopt. An interesting parallel can be found in Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost, where Fish talks about the importance of reading the same passage in different ways and the experience for the

8

Further discussion of Nabokov’s relationship with Dostoevsky can be found in Chapter 5.

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reader: ‘In each of the sonnets we have considered, the significant word or phrase occurs at a line break where a reader is invited to place it first in one and then in another structure of syntax and sense. This moment of hesitation, of semantic or syntactic slide, is crucial to the experience the verse provides’ (1967: 155). Fish’s ‘syntactic slide’ can occur in Pale Fire if readers adopt different views of who the internal author is. The ‘moment of hesitation [ . . . ] crucial to the experience the verse provides’ is strikingly similar to how Pale Fire works – where Fish can be seen to embrace interpretative ambiguity, Nabokov’s novel seems to be asking us to embrace ‘internal authorship ambiguity’. For Fish, this means having several different interpretations of one individual work, while, for Nabokov, this means having several different interpretations of several different works: all, as Rabinowitz reminds us, ‘couched, oddly, in the same words’. Yet, Rabinowitz’s belief that readers ‘make an arbitrary choice about which narrative audience one wants to join’ (1977: 140, my emphasis) is specifically contested here. As Shade argues in Pale Fire, ‘different people see different similarities and similar differences’ (PF 208). How, then, can the different authorship theories be related to a hierarchy of Nietzschean perspectives? Keeping the criteria of perspectivism in mind, dual authorship theorists view Pale Fire at face value. They choose to enjoy the opposition between Shade’s control and Kinbote’s chaos rather than to focus on problematic textual details or echoes that ripple through both sections, perhaps because this vision of humanity satisfies something else about human nature. For example, readers might derive emotional and aesthetic pleasure from the interplay between Shade’s formality and Kinbote’s creative haphazardness, Shade’s indebtedness to literary precursors and Kinbote’s sheer inventiveness, and their sympathy for Shade in regard to his loss and pity for Kinbote in his failings. Dual authorship theorists would also view Pale Fire as a novel that poses as, and effectively critiques, academic practice. Perhaps most importantly, they would be more interested in the human aspects of the story Nabokov expresses. Boyd, for example, claims that Ellen Pifer, an advocate of the dual authorship theory, ‘made a powerful case for approaching his [Nabokov’s] novels not as mere literary games but as stories that involve characters and concerns that matter’ (1999: 122). If we are Shadeans, on the other hand, our perspective aligns to an interest in the interplay between text and commentary; in the internal evidence and problematizing details that positions Pale Fire as a puzzle needing to be solved. We, as Shadeans, enjoy discovering hidden patterns in the text and being rewarded for our curiosity. We would view Pale Fire as a novel devised by John Shade that poses as a piece of criticism, and enjoy the dizzying implications of a fictional character, an imagined persona of an imagined persona, lampooning academic practice. We would also see Shade as a self-aggrandizing character: Kinbote’s lauding of Shade seems repellently arrogant if we are to think of Shade inventing a critic to praise both him

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and his poem. If we are Kinboteans, we are also interested in the interplay between text and commentary, in the internal evidence and problematizing details in treating Pale Fire as a piece of trickery needing to be solved. However, from the perspective which assumes that Kinbote has written ‘Pale Fire’, the distress and anguish that John Shade articulates (and the empathy that is consequently evoked) is hollow if merely employed as an aesthetic device. Kinbote’s depiction of death and suffering for aesthetic means seems contemptible given the callousness he shows towards it. Kinboteans accept that art is privileged over life; that death and suffering are subjugated to aesthetics. By accepting passages such as Kinbote’s statement that he has ‘no desire to twist and batter an unambiguous apparatus criticus into the monstrous semblance of a novel’ (PF 71) at face value, they turn acute dramatic irony into self-reflexivity. What perspective then informs the undecidability theory? Perhaps unwittingly, the undecidability theory declares that there is not enough evidence in Pale Fire to support any internal authorship theory categorically. The ‘undecidable’ camp, occupying a relativistic, postmodern, sceptical viewpoint, is therefore content to see the text’s content coming from oscillating internal authors, rather than the acutely problematic effect of having to determine what one of the multiple voices is articulating words at a certain time. Finally, if we are Boydians, we believe that a text can be definitively solved through detailed reading, rereading, and re-rereading, that anagrams and hidden clues are the blueprint of the novel, and, at least in the world of the novel, that the dead can provide artistic inspiration from beyond the grave. Boyd’s feelings about the Shadean theory, which he once thought of as correct, are glossed over:  words that he once thought of as voiced by Shade, and which have now changed, are not given the necessary attention. The perspectives associated with existing accounts can be characterized as follows: the dual authorship perspective privileges humanity in art and the aesthetic representation of the richness of human emotions, executed here through a pattern of contrast and similarity between the two men. The Shadean perspective privileges the challenge of problem solving in art and the cognitive pleasures of perceiving multiple layers of deceit. Such a perspective can cleave aesthetic pleasure from human emotion, allowing readers to enjoy the artistry in representing an unlikeable, yet clever, man. Like the Shadean perspective, the Kinbotean perspective also privileges problem solving in aesthetic experience, but combines this with an almost stoic approach to death and the vanity, and hubris, of human desire. The undecidability perspective privileges the pleasures of doubt and uncertainty of the ineffable and the aesthetic skill in representing more than one perspective simultaneously. Finally, the Boydian perspective privileges a readerly work ethic, relishing the prospect of a world where the reader’s toil will eventually reap rewards. Such a perspective is perhaps indifferent to the price paid for a world run on these lines in that the potential absurdity or sentimentality of

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the rewards are less important than the fact that they might exist. Perhaps more revealingly, this is a perspective from which human immortality can give life meaning. As Norman and White argue: Perhaps more than any other canonical texts of the twentieth century, Nabokov’s writings have been the focus of passionate debate about the most fundamental issues of criticism, concerning the intentions and ethical responsibilities of the author, the possibility of ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ readings, the value of historicist and of postmodern approaches to literature. His fiction has a particular ability to help us reflect on our own critical practices, to tell us what kind of readers we are, where we have come from and where we might be going. (2009: 11) By pushing us to acknowledge these perspectives and the different values attached to them, Nabokov forces us towards a Nietzschean vision of truth as an experience, and not just the logical elimination of falsehood but as an assertion of value. My argument here, then, is that whatever internal authorship theory we decide to eventually adopt for Pale Fire effectively reveals, in Norman and White’s words, ‘what kind of readers we are’ (2009, my emphasis). A Nietzschean approach to truth, as developed by Bernard Williams, demonstrates how Nabokov both anticipated and rejected outright relativism, pushing us instead towards the Nietzschean account of truth as experience, inseparable from the question of human value and perspective.

Untruth On a meta-level, the relationship between the written word and truth is what Pale Fire seems to be continually engaged with: the entire premise of the novel is that, as a piece of academic criticism, the commentary is supposed to represent or give objective details about the poem in question, to be the hallmark of a truthful enterprise.9 We are reminded of Nietzsche’s definition of truth in ‘On Truth and Lies in a Non-Moral Sense’: ‘What then is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding’ (in Magnus et al. 1993: 84). 9 Like Pale Fire, texts such as Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman (1967), Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine (1988), and David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996) are notable examples for their use of Gérard Genette calls ‘paratexts’: ‘a zone between texts and off-text, a zone not only of transition but also of transaction: a privileged place of a pragmatics and a strategy, of an influence on the public, an influence that – whether well or poorly understood and received – is at the service of a better reception for the text and a more pertinent reading of it’ (1997: 2).

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Here, Nietzsche uses literary devices as a familiar means to explain, and privilege, the amorphousness of truth over the assumption that it is an unchanging entity, an objective reality independent of human thought. In Truth and Truthfulness, Bernard Williams draws on Nietzsche to provide not a theory of truth but an account of ‘the value of truth’ (2002: 6) that can be differentiated from postmodern relativism. He focuses on the concepts of accuracy and sincerity and uses a fictional genealogy, heavily indebted to Nietzsche, to explain our need for truth and truthfulness, starting from the assumption that cooperation is needed in order for humans to flourish. For Williams, lying is pernicious because of the betrayal of trust and the exertion of power – he appeals to the Kantian notion of not treating people as a means but always as the ends and discusses humans’ ‘demand for truthfulness’ or our ‘reflex against deceptiveness’ (2002: 1). It is commonsensical for humans to be driven towards truth, to ‘demand’ truth in order that they can make sense of the world. Williams refers to the passage in The Gay Science quoted earlier. He claims that ‘the reasons for not wanting to be deceived, [Nietzsche] goes on to say, are prudential; seen in that light, wanting to get things right in our intellectual studies and in practical life will be a matter of utility’ (2002: 14). This utilitarian preoccupation with ‘getting things right’ has, in the literary realm, arguably impacted on the interpretative framework of critics who, in the case of Pale Fire, promote the view that there is only one ‘correct’ assignation of authorship. As Gregory Currie writes in an article entitled ‘Fictional Truth’: There are various views that one might subscribe to as versions of interpretative relativism, because they are opposed to interpretative absolutism:  the view that for every fictional work there is a unique correct interpretation of that work. An extreme view is this: since a text has no meaning in itself, any interpretation is as good as any other. In so far as I understand him, this is what Derrida is telling us. (1986: 208) Yet, Nietzsche offers us a path in-between interpretative absolutism and relativism: ‘the falseness of a judgment is to us not necessarily an objection to a judgement [ . . . ] The question is to what extent it is life-advancing, lifepreserving, species-preserving, perhaps even species-breeding’ (BGE 4). Not only does Nietzsche’s statement relate to Wood’s objection about the ‘kind’ of interpretation that Boyd raises (that ‘death is diminished’; that a solution rather than a robust interpretation jeopardizes the ‘life’ of the text), but it also relates to Boyd’s discussion of the benefits of other internal authorship theories: ‘Isn’t a theory, even if mistaken, worthwhile because of the knowledge it engenders?’ (1999: 256). As Nietzsche suggests, the traditionally negative implications that traditionalists would uphold of ‘false’ judgements evaporate if they offer the possibility of life affirmation or new knowledge. Expanding on this notion in The Gay Science, Nietzsche asks:

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This unconditional will to truth – what is it? Is it the will not to let oneself be deceived? Is it the will not to deceive? For the will to truth could be interpreted in this second way, too  – if “I do not want to deceive myself” is included as a special case under the generalization “I do not want to deceive”. But why not deceive? But why not allow oneself to be deceived? (200) Rather than thinking of truth as seeking the ‘correct’ or ‘true’ set of facts about a particular object or event then, Nietzsche thinks of truth as an activity, one which can be more than a mere defensive mechanism arising from ‘a need not to be deceived’ or to deceive. Effectively, actively entertaining others’, non-privileged, viewpoints affords us an increased sense of the holistic whole, and is thus a ‘species-breeding’ activity. One pertinent example can be found in Pale Fire’s specific engagement with the notion of truth and untruth in Shade’s ‘experience’ of the afterlife. Having had some sort of seizure after his lecture at ‘The Crashaw Club’, Shade notes that ‘dreadfully distinct / Against the dark, a tall white fountain played’ (PF 50; 706–07). He describes how ‘My vision reeked with truth. It had the tone, / The quiddity and quaintness of its own / Reality. It was.’ (PF 51; 737–39). Shade then reads about a report in a newspaper about a woman who has seemingly seen a fountain in her near-death experience too. He writes, Our fountain was a signpost and a mark Objectively enduring in the dark, Strong as a bone, substantial as a tooth, And almost vulgar in its robust truth! (PF 51; 763–67) Having asked the reporter to locate the transcript of the interview however, Shade discovers that ‘There’s one misprint – not that it matters much: / Mountain, not fountain. The majestic touch’. His response, ‘Life Everlasting – based on a misprint!’ (PF 53; 801–03) is the culmination of a section that effectively questions the legitimacy of truth and the cruelty with which this imagined truth peters out. Nabokov intertwines the notions of the afterlife and writing as the chief vehicles to illustrate scepticism about truth and reality, but not the scepticism of postmodernism. David Rampton, for example, claims that ‘Nabokov anticipates both the methods of post-structuralist critics and their preoccupations, the notion of language as a play of differences, the revealing of self-referential paradox and self-conscious indeterminability, the emphasis on interpretation and misinterpretation, the arbitrariness of the boundaries between truth and falsity, sense and nonsense, reason and madness, central and marginal’ (1984: 108). Yet, Dmitri Nabokov’s observation that ‘his father thought the idea that either Shade or Kinbote could have invented the other barely less absurd than the idea that each could have

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invented the other’ (Boyd 1999: 115) suggests Nabokov’s disdain for total relativism. As Wood suggests, Nabokov usually anticipates even the moves we think are pretty clever (1994: 178). In this respect, it is unsurprising that Nabokov opts to precede a definitive concept of truth not only with ‘vulgar’, but also ‘reeked’ (PF 51, line 737) slightly earlier. The implication is that the mistake – ‘it had the tone / The quiddity and quaintness of its own / Reality. It was’ – is a valuable one in that it created an experience of truth despite arising from random error. Nabokov seems to illustrate the apparent fragility of a conception of truth divorced from human experience through the use of coincidences and mistakes. In Lectures on Literature, Nabokov argues that: Literature is invention. Fiction is fiction. To call a story a true story is an insult to both art and truth. Every great writer is a great deceiver, but so is that arch-cheat Nature. Nature always deceives. From the simple deception of propagation to the prodigiously sophisticated illusion of protective colors in butterflies or birds, there is in Nature a marvellous system of spells and wiles. The writer of fiction only follows Nature’s lead. (5)10 Pale Fire differentiates ‘truth as external reality’ from ‘truth as human experience’ by building some of its most powerful experiences on externalities arising from chance and error. Truth is thus disguised as coincidence and a mistake. As Nietzsche argues in Beyond Good and Evil, ‘perhaps nobody has been truthful enough about what “truthfulness” is’ (73).

i Rather than undermining the idea of truth, fictional or otherwise, Pale Fire acts both to deepen its conception and raise the stakes surrounding it. As Wood argues, ‘what we discover in a persuasive reading of a novel is a range of new understandings, rather than a new settled truth’ (in Boyd 1999: 256). Adopting Nietzsche’s approach in relation to the internal authorship problem of Pale Fire has a significant bearing on how we experience the text. It not only allows all theories to mutually coexist, but, more importantly, through privileging a particular theory and implicitly asking readers to contemplate why they have chosen that theory in favour of the rest, can also reveal the hidden interests that govern our reading practice. Indeed, given readers’ ability to choose which author is responsible for the text with Nietzsche’s approach, it is apt to think of Shade’s comment of ‘not text, but texture’ as a partially obscured articulation of ‘the real point’ (PF 53; 807–08) of

10

The opening image of Pale Fire, ‘I was the shadow of the waxwing slain / By the false azure of the windowpane’ (PF 29; 1–2) is highly suggestive of the shadow-play of Plato’s Cave and the illusory nature of reality.

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Pale Fire: ‘not text, but your text’. As we will see in the next chapter, the Nietzschean denial of the solidity of knowledge in Pale Fire is something that the numerous philosophers in Nabokov’s work – The Tragedy of Mr Morn’s Dandilio, Bend Sinister’s Krug, or Falter in ‘Ultima Thule’ – have, at their centre. The Nietzschean approach to Pale Fire’s engagement with truth is also revealing at both the micro and macro level in relation to the dangers of interpretation. At the micro level, John Shade’s comment about the ‘demons of our pity’ (PF 38; 327) is framed as one kind of human interpretation that is full of danger. At the macro level, Nabokov’s hostility towards people like Freud seems to derive from the latter’s privileging of stubborn, wilful, denials of truths over more individualistic interpretations. In both accounts, Nabokov can be seen to replicate Nietzsche’s privileging of interpreting human experience only in life-affirming ways.

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PART THREE

Beyond Nietzsche

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5 Rewriting Nietzsche

In Contingency, Irony, Solidarity, Rorty claims that ‘Freud was the one person Nabokov resented in the same obsessive and intense way that Heidegger resented Nietzsche. In both cases, it was resentment of the precursor who may have already have written all one’s best lines’ (1989: 153–154). Leland de la Durantaye, in Style Is Matter: The Moral Art of Vladimir Nabokov, extends Rorty’s point: ‘Though this is something that Rorty does not discuss, there is a strong possibility that Freud believed that Nietzsche had already written all of his best lines – something that Freud was not unaware of and which motivated his refusal to reread Nietzsche later in life, or to approve of projected psychoanalytical analyses of Nietzsche proposed by his students’ (2007: 133). Syllogistically, and symbiotically, a case can therefore be made for Nabokov fearing Nietzsche having already written all of his ‘best lines’. In the introduction to this volume, I discussed the nature and extent of Nietzsche’s influence on Nabokov, direct and indirect, and indicated that one text in particular – Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and No One – was arguably a rich source of metaphor for Nabokov throughout his writings. In this chapter, I wish to put forth the suggestion that, via Fyodor Dostoevsky, Nabokov ‘goes beyond’ Nietzsche through parodying and modifying the latter’s conception of the Übermensch: Zarathustra’s central theme and the idealized model of what man can become. Although the figure of the ‘superior’ individual is a distinct feature of Nabokov’s art, and individualism a pervasive feature in Nabokovian criticism, the representation of his ‘individual genius’ has not yet been fully explored in relation to Nietzsche’s figure of the Übermensch.1 Comparing Nabokov’s superior individual with Nietzsche’s theoretical being not only allows us to see both

1

For discussions on the role of the individual in Nabokov’s works, see Leona Toker’s essay, ‘The Dead are Good Mixers: Nabokov’s Versions of Individualism’ in Julian Connolly’s Nabokov and his Fiction:  New Perspectives (1999:  92–108) and Brian Boyd’s Stalking Nabokov (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011: 159–202).

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connections and divergences, but also how Nabokov’s art ‘keeps glancing backwards as it innovates’ (Foster 1993: 51). The conformity suggests what Nabokov may have thought admirable in this figure, while the divergence suggests a way to make sense of the difficult, ostensibly callous, protagonists that pervade his fiction. By using parody in order to undermine the celebratory nature of his protagonists’ Übermensch characteristics, Nabokov limits the extent to which readers may identify with them. The chapter also looks at the divergence between Nabokov’s and Nietzsche’s relationships with pity. For Nietzsche, pity is his biggest danger, a negative emotion preventing man from pushing forward (GS 220). Nabokov, however, is on record as viewing pity differently. This departure from Nietzschean doctrine, I argue, reworks Nietzsche’s Übermensch and suggests not only a rebellion on the part of Nabokov the pupil, but also indebtedness through effectively echoing and surpassing Nietzschean ideas in a way recommended by Nietzsche himself.

The Übermensch Nietzsche’s attack on convention and tradition is arguably at its most intense when it comes to its impact on the individual. For him, systems of thought or belief such as Christianity, Kantianism or liberalism not only had inherent failings in their own right, but are linked through their privileging of egalitarianism. For Nietzsche, bourgeois Christian Germany in the second half of the nineteenth century was characterized by the fear of everything individual (Day 12). Such fear, he insisted, prevented those with most potential from ‘overcoming’ themselves  – something Zarathustra believes to be the ‘meaning of the earth’ (TSZ 238). In the prologue to Thus Spoke Zarathustra for example, he proclaims ‘I teach you the Superman. Man is something that should be overcome’ (41).2 As John Burt Foster observes, Nietzsche’s ‘prose abounds with terms such as “über,” “um,” and “jenseits,” all of which signal the need to move above and beyond received conceptions’ (2000: 214). The concept of the Übermensch is central to almost all other facets of Nietzsche’s philosophy, whether it is the need for meaning in a godless world, the notion of amor fati and eternal recurrence, perspectivism or the will to power. The Übermensch is conscious of objective truth being a falsehood

2

Rather than Thomas Common’s translation of Übermensch as ‘superman’, Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche’s main translator and biographer, prefers ‘Overman’ – see his note to the first part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in The Portable Nietzsche (115). I follow Michael Tanner’s example, who, finding ‘ “superman” absurd and “overman” unnatural’ (2000: 30), leaves Übermensch untranslated.

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and that values relating to the development of the self are of more importance than those of mass society.3 In Thus Spoke Zarathustra for example, Zarathustra proclaims, ‘Overcome, you Higher Men, the petty virtues, the petty prudences, the sand-grain discretion, the ant-swarm inanity, miserable ease, the “happiness of the greatest number!” ’ (298). Yet, although Zarathustra himself may be seen to embody many Übermensch characteristics, it is very much apparent that he is not this figure. Ironically paralleling the role of John the Baptist, Zarathustra instead refers to himself simply as a prophet who heralds the coming of the Übermensch, stressing that such a figure does not yet exist. In The Gay Science, Nietzsche pre-empts his conception of the Übermensch:  ‘Let us therefore limit ourselves to the purification of our opinions and evaluations and to the creation of our own new tables of what is good that are new and all our own [ . . . ] We, however, want to become those we are – human beings who are new, unique, incomparable, who give themselves laws, who create themselves’ (265–66). Interestingly, Nietzsche’s appeal to jettison old values and be active in the creation of the new is remarkably similar to Nabokov’s rhetoric when describing ‘authentic’ authors in Lectures on Literature. Having already included himself as one of the ‘writers of genius’ referred to in ‘Good Readers and Good Writers’ for example, Nabokov writes: ‘But the real writer, the fellow who sends planets spinning and models a man asleep and eagerly tampers with the sleeper’s rib, that kind of author has no given values at his disposal: he must create them himself’ (LL 2).4 By specifically equating ‘real’ writers’ practices with biblical events, Nabokov makes an obvious comment on the ‘God-like’ capacities that ‘real writers’ possess. This connection follows from Lectures on Russian Literature, where he claims that ‘[art] is divine because this is the element in which man comes nearest to God through becoming a true creator in his own right’ (106). Such allusions, of course, are ironic given Nabokov’s continual debunking of a Christian God and the specific values that the Christian faith upholds (for just one example, see LRL 110). As Boyd claims, Nabokov’s ‘scepticism is ruthless, his indifference to any religion complete’ (VNRY 295), he ‘always remained aloof to “Christianism,” as he called it, utterly indifferent “to organized mysticism, to religion, to the church – any church” ’ (VNAY 72). Yet, this indifference

3

In Strong Opinions, Nabokov writes that ‘a work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual, and only the individual reader is important to me. I don’t give a damn for the group, the community, the masses and so forth’ (33). 4 In Ecce Homo, Nietzsche writes, ‘Revaluation of all values: this is my formula for an act of supreme coming-to-oneself on the part of mankind which in me has become flesh and genius’ (96). In Lectures on Russian Literature, Nabokov claims that ‘I approach literature from the only point of view that literature interests me – namely the point of view of enduring art and individual genius’ (98).

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and aloofness towards organized religion belies an interest in the construction of value systems, something, he insisted, ‘real’ writers must enact. We are reminded of Nabokov’s statement: ‘I do not give a damn for public morals, in America or elsewhere’ (‘The Art of Fiction’ 1967). Such a process, of course, is not always easy. In the afterword to Lolita, Nabokov describes the hostility directed towards the novel due to its engagement with one of three societal taboos (these being paedophilia; successful interracial marriages; and the long, happy lives of atheists). Such hostility towards the challenging of existing values is reminiscent of the attitudes that Zarathustra himself encounters in society: ‘Behold the good and the just! Whom do they hate most? Him who smashes their tables of values, the breaker, the lawbreaker – but he is the creator’ (TSZ 51). In the introduction to Lectures on Literature, John Updike claims that, rather than being content with art simply mirroring the outside world, Nabokov would turn harshly impatient if the ‘shimmer of the gratuitous, of the superhuman and nonutilitarian’ (xxv) were not present. Such Nietzschean sentiments are echoed at the end of Lectures on Literature, in the last sentence of the short essay titled ‘L’Envoi’, where Nabokov claims that, ‘we are liable to miss the best of life if we do not know how to tingle, if we do not learn to hoist ourselves just a little higher than we generally are in order to sample the rarest and ripest fruit of art which human thought has to offer’ (382). Nabokov’s farewell comment to his students stresses that the ‘best of life’ can only be realized, or understood, if they are willing to go beyond conventional readerly responses and ‘hoist’ both their outlook and abilities above the status quo. Such an appeal implies a critique of the mediocre in both society and literature – synonymous with what Nabokov called poshlust – and the assumption that the advice provided throughout the lectures describes how to achieve this.5

Despair, Dostoevsky and parody Like his engagement with Nietzsche, Nabokov’s engagement with Fyodor Dostoevsky started young and continued throughout his career. In Vladimir Nabokov and the Art of Play, Karshan notes that ‘Nabokov had read Dostoevsky as a teenager, and though he became known for mocking and satirizing Dostoevsky, there is no other author in any language with whom Nabokov’s novels engage more deeply, if only in a spirit of combat’

5

See Nabokov’s essay ‘Philistines and Philistinism’ for more discussion of this phrase (LRL 313). In the foreword to Lolita: A Screenplay, Nabokov writes, ‘there is nothing in the world that I loathe more than group activity, that communal bath where the hairy and the slippery mix in a multiplication of mediocrity’ (x).

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(2011a:  40). Indeed, although Nabokov takes issue with Dostoevsky’s ‘moral and artistic stupidity’ (LRL 113 fn), Julian Connolly reminds us that, Nabokov incorporated and reworked may important themes and concepts found in Dostoevsky’s work. These include variations 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. (In Rodgers and Sweeney 2016: 33–34)6 Nabokov’s novel Despair, for example, focuses on the protagonist Hermann Karlovich and his ploy to kill his supposed doppelganger Felix – a homeless man whom we are led to believe bears an uncanny resemblance to Hermann. In Despair, Hermann displays a marked inner conviction of his abilities – ‘If I  were not perfectly sure of my power to write and of my marvellous ability to express ideas with the utmost grace and vividness’ (13)  – and frequently suggests that he belongs to a higher order: ‘Did my adolescence [  .  .  . ] secrete the possibility of producing a lawbreaker of genius?’ (49). Hermann’s fervent disbelief in religion  – ‘so why then did I  mention the name of a nonexistent God?’ (Des 63) – is as markedly explicit as his perception of being outside of conventional moral conduct: Let us suppose I kill an ape. Nobody touches me. Suppose it is a particularly clever ape. Nobody touches me. Suppose it is a new ape – a hairless, speaking species. Nobody touches me. By ascending these subtle steps circumspectly, I may climb up to Leibnitz or Shakespeare and kill them, and nobody will touch me, as it is impossible to say where the border has been crossed, beyond which the sophist gets into trouble. (Des 175) For many, if not most, Hermann’s character traits are analogous with Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov, the protagonist of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Yet, although Davydov is right in claiming that Hermann is a caricature of Raskolnikov, he also describes Raskolnikov being, in turn, a caricature of Nietzsche’s Übermensch (1982: 159). Alexander Dolinin, in ‘Caning of Modernist Profaners: Parody in Despair’, also deduces Nietzsche’s ‘Gott ist tot’ when Hermann laments ‘God does not exist, as neither does our hereafter’ (2008). Yet, we are reminded that Crime and Punishment’s

6

Although Nabokov had planned to translate Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov in 1950, he had to relinquish the project after being hospitalized (SL 97).

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publication in 1866 was nineteen years before Nietzsche’s first published use of Übermensch in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. It is also worth remembering, however, that the idea of an ‘overman’ does not derive from Dostoevsky either: the Übermensch figure has had many transmutations throughout literature, whether in the Prometheus legend, Goethe’s Faust (1808), Emerson’s idea of the ‘oversoul’ and ‘Beyond-man’ or Byron’s ‘Manfred’ (1817). In Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre, Walter Kaufmann reveals that Nietzsche only discovered Dostoevsky in 1887:  ‘I did not even know the name of Dostoevsky just a few weeks ago [  .  .  . ] An accidental reach of the arm in a bookstore brought to my attention L’esprit souterrain, a work just translated into French [ . . . ] The instinct of kinship (or how should I name it?) spoke up immediately; my joy was extraordinary’ (1975: 52). Such kinship is helpful in seeing Dostoevsky’s ‘proto-Nietzscheanism’. In the following sections, I propose a number of reasons why Nabokov might opt to parody, rather than laud, Dostoevsky’s figure, especially if Raskolnikov is thought of, by many, as analogous with Nietzsche’s Übermensch.

Nabokov’s objections Alexander Dolinin agrees with most critics in assuming that ‘Dostoevsky is [Despair’s] chief parodic target’ (2008). Indeed, Hermann is not just another of Nabokov’s unreliable narrators (it transpires that Hermann and Felix do not, in fact, look anything like one another). Hermann is unsuccessful in his attempt to murder Felix, which, if successful, would have meant him getting his hands on an insurance payout as a result of their supposed likeness. He frequently questions his own capabilities, and what waits for him after death: If I am not master of my life, not sultan of my own being, then no man’s logic and no man’s ecstatic fits may force me to find less silly my impossibly silly position [ . . . ] There are, however, grounds for anxiety: God does not exist, as neither does our hereafter, that second bogey being as easily disposed of as the first. (Des 91) The pompous register at the beginning of the passage, as well as the repetition of the childish adjective ‘silly’ in describing such grandiose themes is, of course, highly suggestive of parody. This idea is furthered by Hermann viewing God and the afterlife as codependent – such lazy, or simplistic, thinking is unlikely to have been endorsed by Nabokov himself. This Christian aspect of Dostoevsky’s figure suggests one reason why Nabokov opts for parody. Raskolnikov’s flirtation with the idea of God not existing – ‘there may not be any God’ ([1866] 2003: 382) – mirrors Smerdyakov voicing what Ivan

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Karamazov has preached to him in The Brothers Karamazov: ‘All things are lawful [ . . . ] if there is no infinite God’ ([1880] 2003: 808). Both, however, eventually accept Christianity. This religious closure, a kind of ‘deliberate moralizing’ (SL 56), is anathema to Nabokov’s viewpoint and suggests a parody of the simple interpretation of Hermann as a ‘higher’ individual or ‘literary genius’ (SL 17). Talking about Despair in 1936, Nabokov remarked that ‘my book is essentially concerned with the subtle dissections of a mind anything but “average” or “ordinary”: nature had endowed my hero with literary genius, but at the same time there was a criminal taint in his blood; the criminal in him, prevailing over the artist, took over those very methods which nature had meant the artist to use’ (17). Nabokov’s second objection, then, arguably derives from Raskolnikov’s ‘criminal’ aspect, concentrated enough for him to commit murder. The opening of Despair seems to cement the correlation between Hermann and Raskolnikov’s criminality: ‘at this point I  should have compared the breaker of the law which makes such a fuss over a little spilled blood, with a poet or a stage performer’ (3). For both Hermann and Raskolnikov, murder is permitted because of their supposed ‘higher’ status. Davydov quotes Raskolnikov’s idea in chapter five of part three of Crime and Punishment: ‘If such a person [one of these extraordinary men] finds it necessary, for the sake of his idea, to step over a dead body, over a pool of blood, then he is able within his own conscience to give himself permission to do so’ (Dostoevsky [1866] 2003: 310). Interestingly, in a footnote referring to Raskolnikov’s use of the phrase ‘step across’, David McDuff observes that ‘the Russian word is pereshagnut’, closely related to perestupat’ (“to step over”, “to transgress”), which in turn is closely related to the Russian word for “crime”  – prestuplenie. To a Russian reader the connection is immediately clear’ (in Dostoevsky [1866] 2003:  665). This idea of transgression is important. When Hermann asks ‘Is it that I dare not make the leap?’ (Des 13), Nabokov can be seen to be putting Nietzschean terminology in the mouth of a protagonist unable to fulfil Nietzsche’s idea of ‘going beyond’. The declaration, in The Birth of Tragedy, that ‘we must take a bold leap into a metaphysics of art, repeating our earlier assertion that existence and the world seem justified only as an aesthetic phenomenon’ (115) triangulates the thought of Nabokov, Dostoevsky and Nietzsche by suggesting that Hermann is unable to enact Nietzsche’s idea of ‘going beyond’; of embracing the leap as would be fulfilled by Nietzsche’s lifeaffirming Übermensch. In his essay, ‘Dostoevsky and Nabokov:  The Morality of Structure in Crime and Punishment and Despair’, for example, Sergey Davydov claims that ‘Raskolnikov, in his moral depravity, constructs a theory according to which some extraordinary individuals are exempted from all civil and possibly also from all ethical laws. These extraordinary men have the “right to transgress” the taboos considered sacred by ordinary men’ (1982: 159).

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Although Hermann and Raskolnikov are capable of moral transgression, their criminal actions and relationships with Christianity (Raskolnikov’s eventual rediscovery; Hermann’s cynical invocations to God) prevent them from ever transgressing aesthetically. Davydov continues: ‘For Nabokov, any socio-political or religious message would betray the nonutilitarian maxims of art which he so ardently defended in his works. It should not, therefore, come as a surprise that from Nabokov’s point of view both Dostoevsky and Chernyshevskij would fall into a similar category if judged by the criteria of pure esthetics alone’ (1982: 168). We can begin to understand why Fyodor, discussing his planned book about Chernyshevsky in The Gift, wants ‘to keep everything as it were on the very brink of parody’ (184). In Lectures on Russian Literature, Nabokov devotes several paragraphs to Raskolnikov’s inner workings: But he [Raskolnikov] also committed this murder in order to prove to himself that he was not an ordinary man abiding by the moral laws created by others, but capable of making his own law and of bearing the tremendous spiritual load of responsibility [ . . . ] Note the curiously fascist ideas developed by Raskolnikov in an ‘article’ he wrote: namely that mankind consists of two parts – the herd and the supermen7 – and that the majority should be bound by the established moral laws but that the few who are far above the majority ought to be at liberty to make their own law. (113) This passage clearly expresses Nabokov’s revulsion at Raskolnikov’s act – as he quite rightly says shortly after, ‘a healthy human nature would inevitably balk before the perpetration of a deliberate murder’ (LRL 114). Although Nabokov’s description of Raskolnikov’s ‘ordinary’ and ‘extraordinary’ men as ‘herd’ and ‘supermen’ here recalls Nietzsche’s philosophical concepts of both ‘master–slave morality’ and the Übermensch, nowhere in the latter’s writings, of course, did he advocate killing. His distinctions, instead, were to frame where our conceptions of ‘good and evil’ derive from and to suggest the ways in which Christianity has perpetrated, in his opinion, the ‘greatest moral coup ever’ (Tanner 2000: 83) that the world has ever seen. To complicate matters further, Fredson Bowers includes a deleted section to the preceding passage in Lectures on Russian Literature:  ‘VN deleted the next sentence: “It is further no accident that the rulers of Germany’s recently fallen regime based on the theory of Superman and his special rights were, too, either neurotics or ordinary criminals, or both” ’ (114). In light of the preceding paragraph, Nabokov’s choice to delete this particular sentence presents different possibilities. He reveals that he knows

7

Nietzsche never referred to this noun in the plural.

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about the Nazi appropriation of the theory of the ‘Superman’, yet, as mentioned in the introduction, it was Nietzsche’s thought that Hitler misappropriated. Because he has been talking about Dostoevsky, however, and no explicit mention of Nietzsche is made, it may simply be that Nabokov thought that the Nazis appropriated Dostoevsky’s thinking. Regardless, the aspect of neurosis and criminality are the defining features of the paragraph. Here, it is useful to remind ourselves of the differences between Raskolnikov and Nietzsche’s Übermensch. Where the latter is physically healthy, mentally sure, anti-utilitarian and atheistic, Dostoevsky’s anti-hero is physically unwell, mentally unstable, seeks to execute his actions for the ‘good of humanity’ and, at the novel’s conclusion, has a clear faith in God.8 Nabokov’s combined fascination and contempt for Dostoevsky may allude to his own fears and anxieties about where his own Nietzschean tendencies could lead. For example, Nabokov’s labelling of Raskolnikov’s ‘herd’ and ‘superman’ distinctions as ‘fascist’ is curious given Nietzsche’s use of ‘master’ and ‘slave’ labels. Yet, as can be seen in the forewords to novels such as Invitation and Bend Sinister, Nabokov is always keen to distance himself from fascism and all its convolutions. Nabokov may be reacting against Raskolnikov’s demarcation of humanity because it potentially contaminates his own division between ‘ordinary’ and ‘extraordinary’ readers and writers. It is not only the aspect of criminality, however, that hallmarks these figures, but also the idea of mental illness  – specifically what the discussion leading up to these points has been about (LRL 107–09). Nabokov’s tone when claiming that Dostoevsky’s criminal heroes are not quite sane continues in the deleted passage on the Nazis as ‘neurotics or ordinary criminals, or both’. Indeed, Raskolnikov’s article concerning the supposed ‘inner right’ of figures such as Napoleon to cause bloodshed if it is in their cause is seen by many as a critique of ‘solitary egoism’, something akin to ‘a kind of cultural depravity or sickness’ (Aho in Pederson and Altmann 2015: 66). Yet, although Nabokov describes Raskolnikov’s ideas as ‘absurd’ (LRL 114), he also suggests ways in which Dostoevsky’s project could have been bettered: ‘If you hate a book, you still may derive artistic delight from imagining other and better ways of looking at things, or, what is the same, expressing things, than the author you hate does’ (LRL 105). Indeed, although Nabokov seems to have been intrigued by Dostoevsky’s idea of a ‘higher’ man challenging existing value systems, he appears to balk at both Raskolnikov’s Christian salvation and the idea of criminality prevailing over both artist and aestheticism. The authorial role of overcoming predecessors consists both of conflict and tribute. As Nabokov states, ‘My position in regard to Dostoevski is a

8

See Nabokov’s comments in Lectures on Russian Literature (109–15).

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curious and difficult one’ (98). In his lecture on Dostoevsky in Lectures on Russian Literature, he says: I am too little of an academic professor to teach subjects that I dislike. I am very eager to debunk Dostoevski. But I realize that readers who have not read much may be puzzled by the set of values implied [ . . . ] I do not like this trick his characters have of ‘sinning their way to Jesus’ or, as 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. (198–204) One curious aspect here that connects Nabokov, Dostoevsky and Nietzsche, as well as puzzlement over the values implied, is through the use of the term ‘prophet’. Commenting on The Double, Nabokov claims that ‘it hardly exists for the followers of Dostoevski the Prophet [ . . . ] its imitation of Gogol is so striking as to seem at times almost a parody’ (LRL 104). Here, ‘prophet’ is used pejoratively in that, because Nabokov thinks of The Double as both Dostoevsky’s best work and his most underappreciated, the cult of Dostoevsky exalts a writer inexorably linked with Christian teaching. Similarly, in Strong Opinions, Nabokov argues that Dostoevsky ‘was a prophet, a claptrap journalist and a slapdash comedian’ (42). Although the latter two descriptions are quite obviously disparaging, here the term ‘prophet’ is more ambiguous, especially given its presence in Lectures on Literature and the role that Nietzsche’s Zarathustra assumes. ‘Prophet’, for example, appears in Nabokov’s essay ‘Good Readers and Good Writers’, specifically where he claims that there are ‘three points of view from which a writer can be considered [ . . . ] as a storyteller, a teacher, and an enchanter’ (LL 5). He defines the storyteller as someone we turn to for entertainment or emotional excitement and the teacher, having ‘a slightly different though not necessarily higher mind’, as giving us moral education and direct knowledge. This ‘teacher’ figure is further subcategorized into ‘propagandist, moralist, prophet – this is the rising sequence’ (LL 5). Not only is it interesting that ‘prophet’ comes after ‘moralist’ in the rising sequence, but, because it does so, also evokes Nietzsche’s ‘prophet’ Zarathustra  – someone anathema to conventional morality. Here, there seems to be the suggestion that a Christian prophet – perhaps the sermonizing Dostoevskian prophet – is someone to be lampooned, whereas a prophet beyond the moralist, something akin to Zarathustra, could be someone to be lauded. The teacher, of course, is only the second of Nabokov’s triad of how a writer can be considered. The last view, he claims, is that of an ‘enchanter’: ‘Finally, and above all, a great writer is always a great enchanter and it is here that we come to the really exciting part when we try to grasp the individual magic of his genius and to study his style, the imagery, the pattern of his novels’

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(LL 6).9 Just as the Übermensch is the next transmutation of the ‘prophet’ Zarathustra in terms of what man might theoretically become, Nabokov describes the ‘enchanter’ as the highest form of a storyteller. Indeed, the great writer, or enchanter, and the Übermensch are linked through their questioning of conventionality, their emphasis on the importance of raising ourselves ‘higher’, and their privileging of the aesthetic perspective. Yet the three are not identical – Nabokov may be suggesting that the enchanter goes further than Nietzsche’s figure in unifying strength and weakness.

‘Ultima Thule’: Critiquing the Übermensch? In ‘Nabokov’s Philosophy of Art’, Constantine Muravnik writes: ‘It is only appropriate that Nabokov’s playful admission of the only influence on him involved a philosopher. It is another story that this influence, the French philosopher Pierre Delalande, was the one whom Nabokov invented himself (SO 71) thus circumventing the annoying question of influence’ (2010: 102). Nabokov’s playful claim can be read as much a ruse of distraction as a compliment to philosophy. Where Nabokov outspokenly lampoons Dostoevsky (as evidenced in Despair or Lectures on Russian Literature) and incessantly attacks Freud, his relationship with Nietzsche exists only through integrated allusions and concepts harnessed, almost always, in respectful fashion. As John Burt Foster summarizes in Heirs to Dionysus: A Nietzschean Current in Literary Modernism, however, influence is not simply regurgitating what the ‘precursor’ poet has said: Both Bloom and the formalists have succeeded in showing that influence necessarily involves innovation. They ask that a critic consider how a writer transformed Nietzsche in any number of ways, such as revision or critique, the expansion or contraction of leading concepts, the absorption of motifs into new structures, and inspired misreadings or willful failures of understanding. Hence my emphasis on metaphors of inheritance, which help to highlight these dynamic possibilities: if some people seek piously to preserve a legacy, others take possession of what a previous generation gives them and exploit it for their own purposes. Among those of Nietzsche’s heirs who understood him best, this second attitude was to be almost mandatory. (1981: 19)10 9

Interestingly, in a letter to Lady Gregory, W. B. Yeats called Nietzsche ‘that strong enchanter’ (1994: 284). 10 Foster claims that ‘writers begin by feeling an intense identification with Nietzsche but later discover that it threatens their sense of artistic integrity and originality. The philosopher has become a rival’ (1981: 34).

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Foster’s suggestions, based on ‘transformative’ rather than ‘imitative’ influence, reflect what I  take to be Nabokov’s stance in regard to Nietzsche’s Übermensch:  Nabokov’s short story ‘Ultima Thule’, for example, can be seen to engage with Nietzsche’s Übermensch differently than in Despair.11 The character of Falter (meaning ‘butterfly’ in German) is one of Nabokov’s most intriguing characters, a figure who, it is claimed, has discovered ‘the riddle of the universe’ (Collected 509)  and has had ‘the essence of the world’ revealed to him (513). Playing the readerly role in his interrogation of Falter, the learned narrator–character of Sineusov is envious of Falter’s supposed newly acquired knowledge. Falter’s Übermensch characterization is explicit throughout. Sineusov tells us how Falter ‘survived the bomb of truth [and] became a god’ (500),12 characterizes him as having ‘seerhood’ (500), and compares him to a ‘Tibetan sage’ (509). Further, Sineusov describes himself as ‘madly envious of Falter’s basic trait: the passion and power of his “volitional substance” – poor Adolf put it in quite a different context’ (504). Not only does this sentence invoke Nietzsche’s idea of ‘will to power’ (a prerequisite for the Übermensch), but it seems highly likely an allusion to Adolf Hitler – a figure, as previously mentioned, known for his misappropriation of Nietzsche’s ideas.13 Falter’s Nietzschean scepticism towards God – ‘since there is no need for God, no God exists’ (517) – is similar to that of Pale Fire’s John Shade’s realization that his ‘God died young’ (PF 32; 99). Sineusov continues to give a distinctly Übermensch impression to Falter’s character by thinking that he ‘stands outside our world, in the true reality’ (Collected 500), and remarking that, ‘I think with envy that if my nerves were as strong as his, my soul as resilient, my willpower as condensed, he would have imparted to me nowadays the essence of the superhuman discovery he recently made’ (505). Such characteristics place Falter in a supposedly higher order than the rest of humanity; a figure endowed with capacities distinct from the rest of society. Indeed, not only does Falter align himself with this higher order by referring to ‘humans’ in the third person (515), but he also ridicules Sineusov’s interrogation by saying that his ‘mind will construe any answer of mine exclusively from a utilitarian viewpoint’ (520). We are reminded, here, of Zarathustra’s

11 The title of the short story can be defined as a distant remote region, as well as the limit of travel and discovery. 12 The story’s utilization of Nietzschean rhetoric is notably explicit:  Sineusov remarks how unlike Falter is to the ‘dust raised by the herd at sunset’ (Collected 500)  and that his child was ‘posthumously born’ (502). We are reminded of Nietzsche’s description of himself in Ecce Homo:  ‘[M]y time has not yet come. Some are born posthumously’ (39). For more discussion of this term, see Peter R. Sedgwick’s Nietzsche: The Key Concepts (New York: Routledge, 2009: 57–58). 13 This is an interesting counterpoint to the discussion of the deleted footnote that Bowers includes in Lectures on Russian Literature.

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proclamation, ‘Overcome, you Higher Men [ . . . ], the “happiness of the greatest number!” ’ (TSZ 298). Yet, by Sineusov claiming that this ‘type has been done to death’ (Collected 504), Nabokov reveals his engagement with the Übermensch figure to be more conflicted than first thought. For Nietzsche, the Übermensch is one who consciously strives to overcome mankind and demonstrates extreme difficulty in becoming ‘who he is’. The fact that Falter ‘accidentally solved the riddle of the universe’ (509) is therefore at odds with Nietzsche’s figure in its suggestion that Falter has had no volition in bringing about his own transformation. He remarks that ‘it was by chance that it struck me’ (515), stressing that his insight has not been obtained through will. Because this knowledge appears to have been bestowed unconsciously rather than achieved then, Nabokov seems to compromise the representation of the Übermensch, even undermine or parody the figure as in Despair. Indeed, despite Sinuesov’s initial ‘othering’ of Falter (‘not quite ordinary’, ‘seer/sorcerer’, ‘superhuman’), he begins to bring Falter down to a human level. Sineusov, for example, claims that Falter ‘did not aim high’ (505) and describes him as a ‘hard-nosed, not quite ordinary, but superficial man [ . . . ] Falter, like me, was an amateur’ (506). He also wonders how ‘a person like Falter, rather average when you come down to it, had actually and conclusively learned that at which no seer, no sorcerer had ever arrived’ (510), asking Falter ‘How does superhuman knowledge of the ultimate truth combine in you with the adroitness of a banal sophist who knows nothing?’ (521). It may be, of course, that Sineusov is intent on simply undermining Falter’s supposed self-belief and knowledge because of envy – after all, Sineusov’s ‘attempt to go beyond’ (520) sits in opposition to Falter supposedly having already achieved this. Falter’s description of himself as the monkey who pulls out the winning lottery numbers (514) sits alongside three similar images throughout ‘Ultima Thule’: ‘Although you and I did have an inkling of why everything disintegrated at one furtive touch  – words, conventions of everyday life, systems, persons – so, you know, I think laughter is some chance little ape of truth astray in our world’ (503); ‘as a chimpanzee might do’ (512); and ‘I happen to be that monkey’ (514). This image is a notable feature in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, where Zarathustra writes:  ‘What is the ape to men? A laughing stock or a painful embarrassment. And just so shall man be to the Superman: a laughing stock or a painful embarrassment’ (41). The simian image seems to be a recurring image in Nabokov’s fiction when talking about possible transgression: we are reminded of Hermann’s quote about incrementally increasing evolution (Des 175), the ‘bars of [Humbert’s] cage’ discussed in Chapter 3 (itself connoting Shade’s statement in Pale Fire that ‘we are most artistically caged’ [32; 114]), as well as Nabokov’s own statement in ‘The Art of Literature and Commonsense’, where he suggests that ‘the meek prophet, the enchanter in his cave, the indignant artist, the

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nonconforming little schoolboy, all share in the same sacred danger. And this being so, let us bless them, let us bless the freak; for in the natural evolution of things, the ape would perhaps never have become man had not a freak appeared in the family’ (LL 372). It may be that, in ‘Ultima Thule’, Nabokov is suggesting hybridity in characterizing Falter as both superhuman and bestial; a figure who blends Nietzschean strength with what could be labelled Nabokovian weakness. ‘Ultima Thule’, in this respect, seems to both champion Nietzsche’s concept of amor fati and negate it. Where Zarathustra asks his potential followers ‘to redeem the past and to transform every “It was” into an “I wanted it thus!” ’ (TSZ 161), Falter talks about uttering a ‘distinct “Yes” ’ (Collected 504), having ‘All your nerves answer Yes!’ (515), living ‘every moment like a cocked pistol’, and ‘unfailingly achieving today’s aim, and tomorrow’s’ (505). However, in claiming that ‘Yet, all I do is deny’ (518), Falter revokes the requirement of amor fati and, in doing so, recalls the dilemmas of Pnin and Luzhin as discussed in Chapter  1. The possibility of undiscovered knowledge keeps Sineusov intrigued throughout, while Falter’s Socratic responses keep him infuriated by facetiousness throughout. In response to Falter’s death at the end of the narrative, Sineusov remarks: I received a note from Falter himself, from the hospital: he wrote, in a clear hand, that he would die on Tuesday, and that in parting he ventured to inform me that – here followed two lines which had been painstakingly and, it seemed, ironically, blacked out. I  replied that I  was grateful for his thoughtfulness and that I wished him interesting posthumous impressions and a pleasant eternity. (Collected 522) Sineusov thinks of the ‘blacked out’ part of the letter as ironic given that Falter may finally have conceded and revealed the ‘riddle of the universe’ after their exchange. Yet, the blacked-out lines seem to be Falter’s point:  where Sineusov surmises that the missing words are what matters, Falter goads Sineusov by ‘painstakingly’ refusing to reveal stable ‘knowledge’. The real irony of the story is whether or not Falter really does possess the secret of the universe, or if it is an elaborate hoax; a paradigm of futile human desire and curiosity.14 Both Falter and Bend Sinister’s philosopher Krug can be categorized as Nietzschean, in this respect, in their denial of solidity to knowledge. As Marina Grishakova claims, ‘If the work of Nabokov’s artists balances on the verge of parody, 14 We are reminded here of Hermann’s claim in Despair: ‘All this divine business is, I presume, a huge hoax for which priests are certainly not to blame; priests themselves are its victims. The idea of God was invented in the small hours of history by a scamp who had genius; it somehow reeks too much of humanity’ (90).

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his philosophers (e.g. Krug or Van Veen) seem to be critical philosophers or Nietzscheans, cultivating philosophy as “discourse critique” devoid of any “positive” substance’ (2006: 200). There are numerous examples in Nabokov’s works where characters perpetuate the Nietzschean values of pride, daring, intelligence, aesthetic inclination, a seeming indifference to the welfare of others, and distrust, disregard even, of social conventions – remarkably similar to what Fredrick Appel calls Nietzsche’s ‘uncompromising repudiation of both the ethic of benevolence and the notion of the equality of persons in the name of a radically aristocratic commitment to human excellence’ (1999: 2). John Updike, for example, claims that: Nabokov has never shied from characters who excel. In Pale Fire he presumed to give us a long poem by an American poet second only to Frost; Adam Krug in Bend Sinister is the leading intellectual of his nation; no doubt is left that Fyodor Godunov Cherdyntsev of The Gift is truly gifted. Luzhin’s ‘recondite genius’ is delineated as if by one who knows. (1964: 18) Examples from Nabokov’s fiction include Franz and Martha in King, Queen, Knave, Luzhin in The Defense, Smurov in The Eye, Martin Edelweiss in Glory, Axel Rex in Laughter in the Dark, Cincinnatus in Invitation to a Beheading, V in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Adam Krug in Bend Sinister, Humbert Humbert in Lolita, Charles Kinbote in Pale Fire, Van Veen in Ada or Ardor, Vadim Vadimovich in Look at the Harlequins!, and Philip Wild in The Original of Laura. Yet, there is seldom neat assimilation with Nietzsche’s views  – none of these protagonists fully succeed in convincing the reader of a robust superiority or irrevocable difference from the rest of society. It is true that almost all of Nabokov’s protagonists can be categorized as learned or ‘different’, but their divergences suggest that Nabokov does not simply glorify the conception of the Übermensch. The following passage from ‘Ultima Thule’ illustrates a particular way in which Nabokov can be seen to specifically critique, rather than parody, Nietzsche’s Übermensch: One look at Falter was sufficient to understand that one need not expect from him any of the human feelings common in everyday life, that Falter had utterly lost the knack of loving anyone, of feeling pity, if only for himself, of experiencing kindness and, on occasion, compassion for the soul of another, of habitually serving, as best he could, the cause of good, if only that of his own standard, just as he had lost the knack of shaking hands or using his handkerchief. And yet he did not strike one as a madman – oh, no, quite the contrary! (511–12)

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Here, Nabokov’s lengthy exposition about Falter’s inability to feel pity is interesting not only in its evocation of pity itself, but also how it demonstrates an engagement with a feature, supposedly antithetical to Nietzsche’s Übermensch, that enacts the very activity of ‘overcoming’ that Nietzsche himself recommends.

Pity Nietzsche’s views on pity are undeniably explicit: it negates the ‘Yes-saying’ of life and encourages a ‘looking back’ rather than a concentration of effort and energy into ‘overcoming’. In The Gay Science, Nietzsche answers the questions ‘What does your conscience say?’ and ‘Where are your greatest dangers?’ with conspicuous brevity: ‘You shall become the person you are’ and ‘In pity’ (219–20), respectively. The idea of pity as an obstacle to ‘becoming’ oneself continues in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, where Nietzsche portrays pity as that which has brought the downfall of God: ‘Woe to all lovers who cannot surmount pity. God is dead; God has died of his pity for man’ (114). Nietzsche’s sustained attack on pity derives largely from its importance to Christian thought: ‘What good is my pity? Is not pity the cross upon which he who loves man is nailed? But my pity is no crucifixion!’ (238). As he writes in Beyond Good and Evil, the majority are at one in the religion of pity, in sympathy with whatever feels, lives, suffers (down as far as the animals, up as far as ‘God’ – the extravagance of ‘pity for God’ belongs in a democratic era –); at one, one and all, in the cry and impatience of pity, in mortal hatred for suffering in general [ . . . ]; at one in their faith in the morality of mutual pity, as if it were morality in itself and the pinnacle, the attained pinnacle of man, the sole hope of the future [ . . . ]; at one, one and all, in their faith in the community as the saviour, that is to say in the herd, in ‘themselves’ . . . (125–26) While pity is resolutely condemned in Nietzsche’s writings when it comes to its connection to Christianity, it arguably plays a more complex role in Nabokov’s. Rorty deliberates at length over the role of pity in Nabokov’s work by suggesting reasons as to why the latter assembled general ideas only to attack them: The first, and most important, was an oversize sense of pity. His eccentrically large capacity for joy, his idiosyncratic ability to experience bliss so great as to seem incommensurable with the existence of suffering and cruelty, made him unable to tolerate the reality of suffering. Nabokov’s capacity to pity others was as great as Proust’s capacity to pity himself – a capacity which Proust was, amazingly, able to harness to his attempt

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at self-creation. Bliss began early for Nabokov. He had no occasion for self-pity and no need for self-creation [ . . . ] [Nabokov’s] otherworldly metaphysics is what one might imagine being written by a contemporary of Plato’s, writing in partial imitation of, and partial reaction against, the Phaedo – a contemporary who did not share Plato’s need for a world in which he could not feel shame, but did need a world in which he would not have to feel pity. (1989: 154–56) Central to Rorty’s case is that, although pity permeates Nabokov’s work, there is no occasion where the latter appears to indulge in self-pity: ‘[Nabokov] seems never to have suffered a loss for which he blamed himself, never to have despised, distrusted, or doubted himself’ (1989: 154–55). This persona relates both to Chapter 1’s discussion of survivor guilt and Chapter 2’s argument that Nabokov presented an implausibly imperturbable façade. In his lecture on Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, Nabokov writes that ‘Beauty plus pity  – that is the closest we can get to a definition of art. Where there is beauty there is pity for the simple reason that beauty must die: beauty always dies, the manner dies with the matter, the world dies with the individual’ (LL 251). His claim seems to refute the possibility of readers experiencing pity in the way that they normally would. Instead, Nabokov describes pity in a rhetorical fashion in order to suggest that it is the death of beauty that we pity rather than death itself. The distinction is crucial: it is the difference between ‘pity that’ and the presumably more virtuous ‘pity for’. Nabokov’s ambivalent relationship with pity acts as a fault line in the criticism on his moral outlook discussed in Chapter 3 of this volume. For example, Leona Toker summarizes Nabokov as showing that ‘the education of the senses means learning to perceive not only the “useless” beauty but also the “irrelevant” pain of another human being, that which appeals to pity’ (in Connolly 2005: 236).15 Other Nabokov scholars argue that small clues (such as the curiosity or details that Rorty mentions) reveal his true, if sometimes carefully concealed, respect for pity as conventionally understood. For example, de la Durantaye, drawing on Nabokov’s own praise for the ‘divine throb of pity’ (LL 87) which is necessary for an understanding of Dickens, claims that ‘the activities Nabokov imagined proper to the artist were curiosity, empathy, pity’ (2007: 55). Indeed, there are numerous links to pity and ‘divine details’ strewn among his work if we look hard enough (Gift 152). Boyd, similarly, claims that Nabokov ‘sought pity in particulars’ (VNRY 92). Yet, it is hard to square these accounts with Nabokov’s approach to pity elsewhere, for example, in his comments on Dostoevsky’s

15 Toker’s suggestion effectively argues against Nabokov’s supposed solipsistic side. In describing another’s pain as ‘irrelevant’ is true insofar as it is not actually our pain. Yet, the capacity to pity demonstrates an awareness of the pain of those outside our immediate being.

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‘gloating pity for people – pity for the humble and the humiliated – this pity was purely emotional and his special lurid brand of the Christian faith by no means prevented him leading a life extremely removed from his teachings’ (LRL 138). It seems as if Nabokov engages with pity but not in the Christian sense; he criticizes the exercise of pity while being fascinated by the concept itself. In other words, Nabokov appears to be criticizing Dostoevsky for a pity which is purely Christian and emotional rather than something that could be called ‘aesthetic’. Nietzsche’s own writings suggest something similar. In The Gay Science, he suggests the possibility of cultivating pity rather than simply eradicating it: ‘What we are at liberty to do. – One can dispose of one’s drives like a gardener and, though few know it, cultivate the shoots of anger, pity, curiosity, vanity as productively and profitably as a beautiful fruit tree on a trellis’ (225). Here Nietzsche can be seen to outline the ways in which Christian pity can be conquered and aesthetic pity cultivated. Pity, as an abstract idea, has a high status in Nabokov’s art (LL 251), but a low status when manifested by real readers in their emotional engagement with characters (LL 4). Whether through the bullying narrator of Pnin, the feeling of loss that Fyodor experiences in The Gift, or the hopeless predicament of Cincinnatus in Invitation, Nabokov frequently arouses feelings of pity in his fiction, but does so in peculiar fashion. In Bend Sinister, for example, the philosopher Krug rallies against the ‘party of the average man’, poshlust and horrifying egalitarianism. At the end of the novel, Nabokov alludes to the abominable suffering of Adam Krug’s son through a case of mistaken identity caused by a misplaced file. Yet, the narrator of Bend Sinister opts to relieve Krug senior of his suffering by intruding into the narrative: ‘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’ (171). Effectively, Krug’s madness is induced as if to relieve him of the horror of reflecting on the death of his son. As Ellen Pifer writes, ‘the techniques of self-declared artifice prevent us from identifying with Adam Krug and his world’ (1980: 95). The presence of the ‘anthropomorphic deity’ that saves Krug from suffering suggests a unique instance of Nabokov displaying pity ‘in person’. Yet, his intervening presence prevents readers from fully pitying Krug by bringing the narrative to a premature close, rather than allowing readers to pity the protagonist’s suffering. Nabokov, here, effectively rescues Krug both from his own pity and the reader’s. In fact, the pity of the reader is merely an addition to the character’s sufferings, one which the author, through his own pity, may wish to have spared the character. Something similar occurs at the end of Nabokov’s short story ‘A Letter That Never Reached Russia’ (see Chapter 1 of this volume). In both cases, the apparent transformation of Christian pity into aesthetic pity correlates with Nietzsche’s idea of life being justified only as an aesthetic phenomenon; that suffering cannot only be used for aesthetic means but (apparently) diffused

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by it also. In this way, art is an expression both of ‘pity that’ and ‘pity for’; through artistic means the author, motivated by pity, can spare the character the humiliation of the reader’s pity. In Lolita, our pity, at least in part, is directed at the figure that has caused the suffering of an innocent victim rather than at the victim. Nabokov does not allow us to pity in the way that it would normally happen in fiction or in the real world. Humbert’s intense pity for Dolores (Lo 14, 30, 38) drives him to protect her from the reader’s more sentimental and intrusive pity and diverts us to the more challenging task of deciding if, or how much, to pity him (see Chapter 3 of this volume). This puts the reader in a difficult, even frustrating, position  – especially when we see Dolores pitying Humbert. Nabokov thus denies some of the responses normally found when reading literature. Characters such as Hazel Shade in Pale Fire, Lucette in Ada or the barber of Kasbeam in Lolita, for example, are relatively minor in terms of narrative space but peculiarly major in preventing conventional responses from being fully indulged. In Nabokov’s textual worlds, it seems pity is both an essential condition of life and a barrier to affirming it. If humans were to pity every death for example, our constant grieving would prevent us from living, and enjoying, life.16 Thus, although, as Toker claims, ‘the education of the senses means learning to perceive not only the “useless” beauty but also the “irrelevant” pain of another human being, that which appeals to pity’ (in Connolly 2005: 236), it seems that a limitation of pity is necessary for survival but that acknowledging, articulating, and acting on this idea suggests a markedly callous side to the human character. Although Christian pity is incompatible with Übermensch status, aesthetic pity is something to be cultivated. For Nabokov, such pity is central to the extent that the author’s pity for the character protects the character from, and denies the reader the sentimental pleasure of, the reader’s pity. There is an obvious paradox here in recognizing the dangers of pity, despising it even, while also accepting it as undeniable property of both life and art. As the narrator of The Defense claims, ‘it seemed as if without this pity inside her there would be no life either’ (118). Boyd interprets Nabokov’s short story ‘Grace’ (1924) in similar fashion: Looking at a poor old woman waiting in vain for customers at her roadside kiosk, he understands the tenderness of things, the tangible goodness of all that surrounds him, the pity in every particle of the world – a skirt hem comically caught in a gust, the iron howl of the wind, the coffee a guard hands the woman. ‘I understood that the world is not at all a struggle, not a sequence of rapacious accidents, but a flickering joy, a benign excitement, an unvalued gift’. (VNRY 229)

16

See Stanley Cohen’s States of Denial: Knowing About Atrocities and Suffering (2001).

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i This chapter has considered Nabokov as Nietzsche’s rebellious disciple, with a selection of his texts interpreted as in dialogue with the ‘master’. Although Nabokov’s portrayal of ‘higher individuals’ frequently aligns with the values of Nietzsche’s Übermensch, never do they completely embody all of Nietzsche’s tenets. Indeed, in his divergence from Nietzsche, Nabokov surpasses him in the very way that Zarathustra insists that the Übermensch must surpass man (TSZ 237). In this respect, Nabokov appears to be an earnest disciple of Nietzschean thought by pointing to a new kind of Übermensch:  someone displaying Nietzschean values yet stricken with Nabokovian vulnerability. As R. J. Hollingdale claims, ‘Nietzsche embodied this conception of a non-metaphysical transcendence in the Übermensch: the “superman” who is at once the actuality and symbol of sublimated will to power and thus the supreme advocate of life-affirmation through acceptance of the totality of life’ (2003: 11). Hollingdale neatly summarizes the importance of the Übermensch as the embodiment of all that Nietzsche thought of as value-laden through ‘non-metaphysical transcendence’. This ability to ‘go beyond’ firmly in the realms of the material world can, in turn, be connected with recognizing Nabokov’s ‘otherworld’, often interpreted as a spiritual realm, as resolutely fixed in the material. As Boyd claims in his discussion on the short story ‘Gods’, Nabokov can be seen to be ‘in the act of searching for a means to render the extraordinary behind the ordinary, the superhuman bursting in on the human’ (VNRY 219).

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6 Nabokov’s ‘other’ world

Studies such as W.  W. Rowe’s Nabokov’s Spectral Dimension (1981), D.  Barton Johnson’s Worlds in Regression:  Some Novels of Vladimir Nabokov (1985) and Vladimir E.  Alexandrov’s Nabokov’s Otherworld (1991) help to demonstrate the extent to which critics identify the ‘otherworld’ as one of Nabokov’s preoccupations. Already a difficult term in Russian, potustoronnost has been anglicized into such terms as ‘the hereafter’, ‘transcendence’ and ‘the beyond’.1 As D. Barton Johnson points out, ‘Nabokov’s first use of the term potustoronnost, the “hereafter,” occurs as a preliminary to his discussion of [Rupert] Brooke’s poem “The Life Beyond” ’ (in Connolly 1999:  187). Yet, one of the main problems with Nabokov’s interest is the commonly held critical assumption that it points to another realm, distanced in both time and space, coming after this life and existing elsewhere, and spiritual if not necessarily religious. Although references to an ‘otherworld’ of some sort or another are widely dispersed, they are also varied, conflicting even. In texts such as ‘The Vane Sisters’ and Transparent Things, for example, the presence of ghosts is a distinct possibility. In Invitation to a Beheading, doubts over whether Cincinnatus has been executed or not – ‘[he] made his way in that direction where, to judge by the voices, stood beings akin to him’ (191) – suggest that he has entered a more mysterious, spiritual dimension. Timofey Pnin’s feelings of being ‘porous and pregnable’ (Pnin 17), of having ‘an awful feeling of sinking and melting into one’s physical surroundings’ (109), as discussed in Chapter 1, suggest yet another kind of otherworldliness. As mentioned in the previous chapter, this also extends to the plight of Adam Krug who is saved from the

1

In Russian, potustoronnyy mir means ‘the other world’. Nabokov’s wife, Véra, claimed that it not only ‘saturated everything he wrote’ but ‘gave him his imperturbable love of life [zhizneradostnost] and lucidity even during life’s most difficult trials’ (Alexandrov 1991: 4). This ‘imperturbable love of life’ is suggestive of Nietzsche’s concept of amor fati as discussed in Chapter 1 of this volume.

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pain of losing his son in Bend Sinister by an ‘anthropomorphic deity’ (171), from a world where his fictional creator resides. So Nabokov’s relationship with, and depiction of, potustoronnost seems to be a blending of heterogeneous ideas – dualism, reality, consciousness, language and death – rather than a straightforward synonym for the supernatural. Yet, in a review of Alexandrov’s Nabokov’s Otherworld, Boyd stresses the danger of critics focusing on Nabokov’s otherworldly references: ‘[Nabokov] was interested in the physical world, in the world of heart and imagination, and in whatever might lie beyond the human mind. To stress one of these as fundamental distorts and reduces Nabokov’ (1992: 477–78). But critical work often tries to construct a coherent metaphysics of Nabokov’s otherworld. Ellen Pifer, for example, remarks about ‘how vociferously Nabokov rejected theological notions of a “Next-Installment World” ’ (1980: 155), while Alexandrov claims that Nabokov had some kind of ‘sui generis faith in a transcendent, timeless, and beneficent realm that appears to affect everything in the material world and to provide for personal immortality’ (in Connolly 1997: 93). This chapter seeks to reconcile the positions of ‘Nabokov as materialist’ and ‘Nabokov as otherworldly’ by exploring the concept of the otherworld in his work through the Nietzschean notion of earthly value. As Paul Morris claims, ‘Nabokov demonstrated his early admiration for [Rupert] Brooke not only as a poet of the “otherworld,” but, just as importantly, a poet of the physical wonder of the world’ (2010: 170). For Nietzsche, the notion of an otherworld diminished earthly value, and had a deplorable effect on the actions and ambitions of people: ‘I entreat you, my brothers, remain true to the earth, and do not believe those who speak of superterrestrial hopes!’ (TSZ 42). Yet, despite the Russian Symbolist movement’s infatuation with Nietzschean thought, Boyd stresses, alongside an ‘allegiance to the primacy of the individual’, its exploration of the ‘metaphysical possibilities materialism flatly denies’ (VNRY 23). This correlates with David Bethea’s claim that Russian Symbolism saw, in genuine art, ‘the truth of dvoemirie, or the mythical correspondences between “this” and the “other” world’ (1998:  191). Looking primarily at Nabokov’s last Russian novel, The Gift, I  examine the extent to which perception affords the protagonist Fyodor a chance to experience a ‘transformed world’ through conscious contemplation of the material environment around him. I propose that Nabokov’s deep love of the material and keenly attuned perception makes fresh, defamiliarizes, and thereby transforms the material world, insofar as to turn it into an ‘other world’ rather than an afterworld. I do not, however, gloss over the fact that Nabokov’s writings and own remarks seem to suggest an interest in both ghosts and the ghostly.2 But 2

Different examples of this abound both in his work and discussion of it: in Speak, Memory, for example, Nabokov mentions a ‘thrill of gratitude to whom it may concern – to the contrapuntal genius of human fate or to tender ghosts humoring a lucky mortal’ (110), while Boyd’s

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I  do suggest that this spiritual dimension blended with a wholehearted Nietzschean belief in this world in order to engage with what Nabokov called ‘the highest terrace of consciousness’ (SM 41). Nabokov introduces the transcendent, it seems, as a way to critique the ‘debased coins’ of both materialist scepticism and our everyday understanding of perception. In doing so, Nabokov combines the material and the transcendent through situating perception as an act of artistic will; as a means of ‘material transcendence’. Nabokov’s divergence from Nietzsche in regard to his relationship with the ‘otherworld’ again can be seen to both follow and surpass his predecessor: as Nietzsche informs readers in Ecce Homo, ‘one repays a teacher badly if one remains only a pupil’ (6).

The Gift For English-speaking readers, The Gift, composed in Russian, is arguably the least well known and discussed of Nabokov’s major novels. Ostensibly, the novel is a Künstlerroman concerned with the development of a young Russian émigré writer, Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev, in Berlin. Split into five chapters, it deals initially with Fyodor’s childhood and his early poetry, as well as his plan to attempt to write a biography of his father, the famous explorer and naturalist Konstantin Godunov-Cherdyntsev. The Gift also introduces us to Fyodor’s friendships with Alexander and Mme. Chernyshevski and his thoughts on their deceased son Yasha, whose ghost appears to haunt his father, and his development as a writer moving from ‘Pushkin Avenue to Gogol Street’ (Gift 136). Then, in apparent opposition to his literary and moral leanings, Fyodor embarks on a ridiculing biography of the nineteenth-century materialist writer and philosopher Nikolay Chernyshevsky, which serves as chapter four of the novel. The last chapter deals, self-reflexively, with Fyodor’s ambition to write his own novel about these events, as well as his developing relationship with the daughter of his second landlady, Zina Mertz. Although the events described in The Gift are compatible with traditional realist narrative, the novel continually engages with what can commonly be seen as an ‘otherworld’. Critics such as Neil Cornwell claim that the novel has ‘various dealings with a putative spirit world’, one where ‘modernist epistemological preoccupation brushes against ontological flickers, glimpses argument, in Pale Fire: The Magic of Artistic Discovery (1999), concerning Hazel’s ghost and Vanessa atalanta butterflies is a well-known critical example. In The Gift, Fyodor claims that ‘this belief in ghosts seems to me something earthly, linked with the very lowest earthly sensations and not at all the discovery of a heavenly America’ (283). As Duncan White claims, ‘that Nabokov was concerned with metaphysical issues is beyond doubt and his fictions demonstrate a fascination with the supernatural, from ghosts to gnostic otherworlds’ (2017: 10).

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of the unusual lining of life, or perhaps the beyond’ (2002). The idea of ghostly or ‘unreal’ conversation permeates the text. This often takes the form of imagined conversations with those no longer living: Fyodor imagining Alexander Chernyshevski imagining Yasha in chapter one, for example, or the conversation between Yasha’s ghost and Alexander Chernyshevski, the ‘Chairman of the Society for Struggle With the Other World’ (Gift 88– 89), or Fyodor’s imagining of a conversation between himself and the writer Koncheyev (70–75). The otherworldly is also consistently evoked through the evocation of Fyodor’s late father, a figure whom his son continually imagines returning to his family. Yet, by claiming in the foreword that the world of The Gift is ‘as much of a phantasm as most of my other worlds’ (9), Nabokov not only alludes to the traditional idea of an ‘otherworld’, but also to that of multiple (albeit fictional) material worlds. Splitting ‘otherworld’ into ‘other worlds’ has interpretative consequences in its suggestion of other continuous worlds rather than one spiritual, or indeed distinctly different, from the one that we currently inhabit. The relative status of the real and the imaginary is complicated through The Gift’s narration. The novel frequently switches from direct speech to free indirect speech, from first person to third person, often without warning.3 Alexandrov, in this respect, claims that: Such unsignalled transitions between events that are real on the one hand, and dreamed or imagined on the other have the important ancillary effect of blurring the distinction between imagination and reality. By initially placing both on the same level in the text, and by describing what happens in his mind’s eye in the same detail as what he actually perceives, Fyodor grants a mode of reality to imagined events that persists even when their true nature is revealed. (1991: 129) Here, I develop Alexandrov’s point that The Gift asks readers to question the rigidity with which they are able to discern the real from the imaginary; the everyday from the ‘otherworldly’, as well as Johnson’s suggestion that Nabokov’s ‘two-world’ cosmology does not necessarily suggest incommensurable realms (1985: 155). Indeed, The Gift revolves around the connection between Fyodor’s ‘divine excitement’ and ‘human world’ (143); the relation between Fyodor’s marked concern of perceiving the natural and man-made worlds (Cornwell 2002). By consciously creating an ‘other’ world through heightened perception, I  argue that Nabokov combines ‘otherworldliness’

3

See chapter one of The Gift (70–75). The imagined conversation happens again while Fyodor is in the Grunewald (this time with a young German). The style of narration acts to blend our world with the imaginary through a lack of demarcation. Such playful blurring of fiction and reality is a distinguishing feature of Speak, Memory.

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with Nietzschean materialism in order to suggest ‘material transcendence’. Similar to how he uses biblical rhetoric ironically in order to undermine Christian beliefs, Nabokov’s hybrid notion effectively allows him to refute and resist the cultural and religious interpretations of the otherworld. For Nietzsche, the otherworld is that of the immaterial; for Nabokov, the idea of an ‘otherworld’ is inherently part of the material. Yet, by making his ‘other worlds’ materially continuous with this one, Nabokov imbues the material with Nietzschean value.

Perception as gift and burden Perception, I suggest, is the vehicle which makes this possible. Whether in Smurov’s preoccupation with eyesight in the novelette The Eye or his account of Gogol’s vision in Lectures on Russian Literature, perception is a constant motif in Nabokov’s writing.4 In The Gift, Nabokov bestows Fyodor with an unusually keen eye for detail; a ‘gift of sight’ (15) that the protagonist foregrounds continually throughout the novel: ‘What vision the author has!’ (32); ‘Everything that had just been imagined with such pictorial clarity’ (78); ‘he saw with ineffable vividness’ (81); ‘I can conjure up with particular clarity’ (111).5 This gift of vision, however, cannot be broken down easily into real and metaphorical vision. For example, it is claimed that Fyodor’s youthful attempts at Georgian poetry at the start of the novel are miniatures, but they are executed with a phenomenally delicate mastery that brings out clearly every hair, not because everything is delineated with an excessively selective touch, but because the presence of the smallest features is involuntarily conveyed to the reader by the integrity and reliability of a talent that assures the author’s observance of all the articles of the artistic covenant. (Gift 32) The bringing out of ‘every hair’ cannot be distinguished here from the artistic perception which lets him render this experience in words. Fyodor’s nascent

4

The anecdote in The Gift concerning the Kirghiz fairy tale – ‘ “That”, she said, “is a human eye – it wants to encompass everything in the world” ’ (126–27) – is reminiscent of Smurov’s desire in The Eye. In Nikolai Gogol, Nabokov remarks: The difference between human vision and the image perceived by the faceted eye of an insect may be compared with the difference between a half-tone block made with the very finest screen and the corresponding picture as represented by the very coarse screening used in common newspaper pictorial reproduction. The same comparison holds good between the way Gogol saw things and the way average readers and average writers see things. (86)

5

Fyodor’s name effectively translates as ‘gift from God’.

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talent is equated with an ‘artistic covenant’, something recalling Ardalion’s comment in Despair that ‘what the artist perceives is, primarily, the difference between things’ (44), as well as Boyd’s comment that, ‘readers admire Nabokov’s gift for vivid detail, his evident love of the things of this world’ (1992: 478). Through the lens of artistic contemplation, Fyodor’s ability to see and comprehend is equated with viewing the world differently. Noticing a shopkeeper’s buttons and bald spot while buying tobacco in chapter one for example, Fyodor remarks that ‘Yes, all my life I  shall be getting that extra little payment in kind to compensate my regular overpayment for merchandize foisted on me’ (13). Later in the novel, perpetuating the idea that his sight affords him a new way of looking at the world, Fyodor asks: Where shall I put all these gifts with which the summer morning rewards me – and only me? Save them up for future books? Use them immediately for a practical handbook:  How to Be Happy? Or getting deeper, to the bottom of things, behind the play, the sparkle, the thick, green grease-paint of the foliage? For there really is something, 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. (Gift 299) Although Fyodor links his perception to reward and happiness, the passage also suggests a ‘donor’ who has given Fyodor his perceptual abilities. The implied donor is quite obviously Nabokov himself yet, unlike Krug in Bend Sinister, Fyodor never gets to meet his Maker despite alluding to his presence.6 At the beginning of chapter two, Fyodor remarks that ‘he got the impression that all these cold, slippery eyes [were] looking at him as if he were carrying an illegal treasure (which his gift was effectively)’ (Gift 79). The idea that Fyodor possesses something rare, precious and at odds with societal tradition suggests the value of his gift. This, of course, is his perception – an idea strengthened by the others’ ‘cold, slippery, eyes’. Opposed to his disparaging comments towards the ‘unobservant’ that suggest their lack of vision prevents them from experiencing the world fully (see pages 32 and 288 of The Gift), Fyodor believes that ‘destiny enriches the life of observant men’ (184) and it is a group which he feels he fully belongs to.7 In Speak,

6 The meta-presence of the narrator’s own interest in perceptual matters strengthens the idea that a fictional creator has bestowed Fyodor with their own perceptual talent: ‘some day, he thought, I must use such a scene to start a good thick old-fashioned novel. The fleeting thought was touched with a careless irony; an irony, however, that was quite unnecessary, because somebody within him, on his behalf, independently from him, had absorbed all this, recorded it, and filed it away’ (Gift 11). 7 In Nabokov’s short story ‘An Affair of Honour’, Leontiev is referred to as ‘a pessimist and, like all pessimists, a ridiculously unobservant man’ (Collected 218).

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Memory, Nabokov suggests that through thorough, conscious perception, his verbal art is able to render the earthly as both beautiful and ‘otherly’ for his readers: As I focused my eyes upon a kidney-shaped flower bed (and noted one pink petal lying on the loam and a small ant investigating its decayed edge) or considered the tanned midriff of a birch trunk where some hoodlum had stripped it of its papery, pepper-and-salt bark, I really believed that all this would be perceived by the reader through the magic veil of my words such as utrachennïe rozï or zadumchivoy beryozï. (171–72)8 Yet, Fyodor also describes this gift as a burden. Although seemingly happy with the way in which he comprehends the things that he sees, he incurs a responsibility because of it. Fyodor’s comprehension of the intricacy of his perceptible world implies design and therefore a creative’s indebtedness to a creator. As Wood asks in The Magician’s Doubts: Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction in relation to the ‘prodigious creator’ now being dead, ‘Can we really imagine or tolerate the undesigned world – the world which has no particular designs for us – which is probably the world we have?’ (1994: 171). Fyodor’s meticulous observation at times leads to speculation over a Maker’s hand; that nature’s mimicry is ‘precisely for the intelligent eyes of man’ (Gift 105). His comment that he ‘suddenly felt – in this glassy darkness – the strangeness of life, the strangeness of its magic, as if a corner of it had been turned back for an instant and he had glimpsed its unusual lining’ (169) illustrates a recognition or awareness of an ‘other world’, yet one that is more transcendent than religious. This idea is returned to later on in the novel, where Fyodor claims that, he felt that all this skein of random thoughts, like everything else as well – the seams and sleaziness of the spring day, the ruffle of the air, the coarse, variously intercrossing threads of confused sounds – was but the reverse side of a magnificent fabric, on the front of which there gradually formed and became alive images invisible to him. (287) The material metaphor of fabric indicates that the two ‘worlds’ are woven from the same physical thread, but with two different patterns.9 Importantly, however, it exists in the same material fabric he inhabits. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche writes ‘but that “other world”, that 8

The English translations of the Russian phrases here are ‘lost roses’ and ‘thoughtful/pensive birch trees’. 9 In his essay ‘The Art of Literature and Commonsense’, Nabokov writes that ‘the pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible’ (LL 379).

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inhuman, dehumanized world which is a heavenly Nothing, is well hidden from men’ (59). Zarathustra plays on the common idea of there being only glimpses of the otherworld available to us. Yet such thinking, for him, fosters more searching which, in turn, perpetuates an error:  ‘under the rule of religious ideas, one has got used to the idea of “another world (behind, below, above)” [ . . . ] But what led to the belief in “another world” in primordial times was not a drive or need, but an error in the interpretation of certain natural events, an embarrassing lapse of the intellect’ (GS 131).

The earthly as the source of the ineffable Fyodor’s thinking can be seen as an ironic, and Nietzschean, affirmation of the wonder of physicality or materiality. In the introduction to Thus Spoke Zarathustra, R. J. Hollingdale claims that Nietzsche’s task is ‘to abolish the “higher” world, the metaphysical, by accounting for all its supposed manifestations in terms of the human, phenomenal, and even animal world’ (in TSZ 13). As we progress through The Gift, a tendency to describe a conventional otherworld through materialist metaphors becomes apparent. Describing the effect that Yasha’s death has on his father, for example, Fyodor writes that the partition dividing the room temperature of reason from the infinitely ugly, cold, ghostly world into which Yasha had passed suddenly crumbled, and to restore it was impossible, so that the gap had to be draped in makeshift fashion and one tried not to look at the stirring folds. Ever since that day the other world had begun to seep into his life (Gift 52) Here, Fyodor resorts to material metaphors in order to describe the immaterial, ghostly world.10 The use of ‘partition’, ‘crumbled’, ‘gap’, ‘draped’, ‘stirring folds’ and ‘seep’ is suggestive of both division and continuity between such worlds. The idea of the two worlds seeping into one another is referred to again by Fyodor later on in the novel where he paraphrases Pierre Delalande (the fabricated philosopher who acts as the dedicatee of Invitation to a Beheading):

10 In chapter four of the novel, we are told that the materialist philosopher Nikolay Chernyshevsky thinks tangible objects act ‘much more strongly than the abstract concept of it’ (Gift 223). The idea of articulating the otherworld through the material is strengthened by the idea of Chernyshevsky being ‘afraid of space, or more exactly, he was afraid of slipping into a different dimension – and in order to avoid perishing he clung continuously to the safe, solid – with Euclidean pleats – skirt of Pelageya Nikolaevna Fanderflit (née Pypin)’ (271). Nabokov, here, appears to satirize Chernyshevsky’s supposed inability to entertain the transcendent possibilities of matter.

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The unfortunate image of a ‘road’ to which the human mind has become accustomed (life as a kind of journey) is a stupid illusion:  we are not going anywhere, we are sitting at home. The other world surrounds us always and is not at all at the end of some pilgrimage. In our earthly house, windows are replaced by mirrors; the door, until a given time, is closed; but air comes in through the cracks. (Gift 282–83) This extract illustrates how the earthly and otherworldly, in a conventional sense, dovetail. The claim that ‘we are not going anywhere’ undermines the notion that we are on some kind of linear journey. Instead, the suggestion that the ‘other world surrounds us always’ reinforces the idea of the earthly and spiritual being contiguous:  the ‘door’ and ‘cracks’ metaphors suggest the conflation of these two worlds, perhaps indicating that the concealed can eventually be revealed if contemplated sufficiently.11 It may, it seems, be possible to consciously ‘open this door’ for ourselves before death, by contemplating the outside from inside through willed aesthetic perception. Fyodor is explicit that the otherworld surrounds us always, and echoes his previous remarks on how it makes its presence known through the tangible (‘windows’, ‘mirrors’, ‘door’, ‘air’, ‘cracks’ etc.). Fyodor’s talk of the otherworld, in this respect, may seem profoundly anti-Nietzschean. Yet, his belief that, ‘in our earthly house [ . . . ] windows are replaced by mirrors’ aligns with Nietzsche’s thought in at least two ways. First, it implies that the other can be found by looking in rather than out: the assumption as to where we might see or interact with the otherworld (i.e. outside and beyond) is ironically subverted by suggesting that such this realm exists in the very things we are closest to. As Alfred Appel claims, ‘[Nabokov’s] characters continually confront mirrors where they had hoped to find windows [ . . . ] the attempt to transcend solipsism is one of Nabokov’s major themes’ (AL 378). Second, through Fyodor’s continued paraphrase of Delalande – ‘the philosopher of the hereafter’ (VNRY 445) – and the irony of his concluding thought: ‘For our stay-at-home senses the most accessible image of our future comprehension of those surroundings which are due to be revealed to us with the disintegration of the body as the liberation of the soul from the eyesockets of the flesh and our transformation into one complete and free eye, which can simultaneously see in all directions, or to put it differently: a supersensory insight into the world accompanied by our inner participation.’ (Ibid, p. 64). But all this is only symbols – symbols which become a burden to the mind as soon as it takes a close look at them. (Gift 283)

11 Boyd claims that, ‘the good rereader who ventures far enough finds another door concealed in what had seemed that solid landscape outside, a door into a new world beyond’ (VNRY 5).

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Delalande effectively describes the very thing that allows Fyodor to interact with the ‘other world’  – opposed to the ‘stay-at-home senses’ that others possess (effectively ‘humdrum’ perception), Fyodor is in possession of what Delalande describes as ‘a supersensory insight into the world accompanied by [ . . . ] inner participation’. Yet, Fyodor effectively critiques Delalande’s thought by dismissing his words as merely ‘symbols’: he laments the limiting effect of such customary, crude vocabulary when describing the otherworld. Not only does irony reside in the fact that Fyodor says this having provided ‘house’, ‘windows’, ‘doors’ and ‘cracks’ for his own description of the other world, but also that his dismissal has thwarted his recognition of Delalande describing the very ‘gift’ he possesses. The supposedly debilitating effect of ‘customary’ thought and vocabulary when discussing the possibility of a metaphysical world explicitly recalls Nietzsche’s thought in Human, All Too Human: Metaphysical world. It is true, there could be a metaphysical world; one can hardly dispute the absolute possibility of it. We see all things by means of our human head, and cannot chop it off; though it remains to wonder what would be left of the world if indeed it had been cut off [ . . . ] But all that has produced metaphysical assumptions and made them valuable, horrible, pleasurable to men thus far is passion, error, and self-deception. The very worst methods of knowledge, not the very best, have taught us to believe in them. When one has disclosed these methods to be the foundation of all extant religions and metaphysical systems, one has refuted them! (18) In drawing our attention to the blind customs that shape our metaphysics, Nietzsche’s passage is reminiscent of the protagonist’s predicament in Invitation to a Beheading  – only once Cincinnatus is (ostensibly) decapitated is he able to move towards ‘beings akin to him’ apparently residing in some kind of spiritual world.12 Both writers effectively seem to suggest that losing the human head, effectively a metaphor for the worn-out customs that shape our metaphysics, would be beneficial.

Doubt and belief in the otherworld In Ecce Homo, Nietzsche makes the following remark in the paragraph titled ‘Have I Been Understood?’: ‘The concept “God” invented as the antithetical concept to life – everything harmful, noxious, slanderous, the whole

12 In Invitation to a Beheading, Nabokov employs sous rature [‘under erasure’] in crossing out the word ‘death’, signifying that Cincinnatus’ death has both happened and not happened (176).

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mortal enmity against life brought into one terrible unity! The concept “the Beyond”, “real world” invented so as to deprive of value the only world which exists – so as to leave over no goal, no reason, no task for our earthly reality!’ (103). Here, and elsewhere, Nietzsche makes a clear correlation between a belief in a religious otherworld and the negation of life and the material.13 By believing in a spiritual realm, Nietzsche claims, our belief in this world is nullified; our ability to perceive the value of the material world masked by a spurious understanding of what happens after we die. Using ‘God’ as a metonym for ‘the Beyond’, his project exposes the shaky foundations of such a belief in order to emphasize earthly value. In The Gift, Fyodor is often uncertain about whether an otherworld exists or not. In describing a past love, for example, he asks ‘what would happen now if she were resurrected’, but quickly interrupts himself to say ‘I don’t know, you should not ask stupid questions’ (140). Similarly, imagining what it would be like to meet his father again, Fyodor asks: ‘Was it admissible that life could perform not only miracles, but miracles necessarily deprived (otherwise they would be unbearable) of even the tiniest hint of the supernatural? The miracle of this return would consist in its earthly nature, in its compatibility with reason, in the swift introduction of an incredible event into the accepted and comprehensible linkage of ordinary days’ (85).14 Here, Fyodor’s discussion of his father transforms into a dialogue about how the everyday and the supernatural interact; how the supernatural becomes the natural. In asking whether certain miracles are ‘admissible’, he is contemplating the validity of miracles and trying to impose rational thought on instances, from an objective view at least, that are completely irrational.15 Yet, he describes the possibility of such ‘earthly’ miracles as ‘unbearable’, something that recalls the difficulty that Pnin displays when remembering Mira and the notion of eternal recurrence (see Chapter 1 of this volume). Fyodor’s ambivalence towards an ‘afterlife’ is manifested by a particular instance in the text. Towards the end of the novel, where Alexander Chernyshevski has been admitted to hospital, readers learn that: The following day he died, but before that he had a moment of lucidity, complaining of pains and then saying (it was darkish in the room because of the lowered blinds):  ‘What nonsense. Of course there is nothing

13

See, for example, Human, All Too Human (90–94), Daybreak (39–42), The Gay Science (131) and Beyond Good and Evil (86–87). 14 British mathematician J. E. Littlewood argued that miracles are such events that happen one in a million times. Because, he argues, humans are witness to one event per second, the likelihood of perceiving a ‘miracle’ is actually quite common – around once a month. This is known as ‘Littlewood’s Law’. 15 In Strong Opinions, Nabokov mentions that ‘poetry involves the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words’ (55).

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afterwards.’ He sighed, listened to the trickling and drumming outside the window and repeated with extreme distinctness: ‘There is nothing. It is as clear as the fact that it is raining.’ And meanwhile outside the spring sun was playing on the roof tiles, the sky was dreamy and cloudless, the tenant upstairs was watering the flowers on the edge of her balcony, and the water trickled down with a drumming sound. (285) The passage is one permeated with irony. Chernyshevski, in a ‘moment of lucidity’, reveals his belief in there being nothing to follow his earthly existence by equating his assertion with a conviction that it is raining at the time of the utterance. Given that this inference has actually resulted from somebody watering flowers, Nabokov simultaneously undermines Chernyshevski’s certainty in it both raining and there being ‘nothing afterwards’ through dramatic irony. The distanced, omniscient narration taking place in the passage strengthens this suggestion in allowing readers to deduce that Chernyshevski’s thinking is erroneous – he may yet meet with the dead Yasha, or have already encountered his deceased son, but only at the conclusion of the passage. Chernyshevski’s conviction, rather than Fyodor’s scepticism, is the position vulnerable to commonsense refutation simply by looking outside and seeing what the weather is like. Fyodor’s uncertainty, then, is not necessarily about the possible existence of the otherworld, but about how it is both manifested and perpetuated. This position is similar to that taken by Nabokov in his fiction and nonfiction, where he makes it clear that post-death existence is simultaneously speculation and impossible to resist. De la Durantaye, for example, claims that ‘it is a curious fact that though Nabokov rejected the idea of a heaven, purgatory, and hell for men, he accepted it for literary characters’ (2007: 49). In ‘The Art of Literature and Commonsense’, Nabokov makes it clear that the latter term of the title is something vulgar: ‘commonsense at its worst is sense made common, and so everything is comfortably cheapened by its touch’ (LL 372). When, therefore, he claims that ‘only commonsense rules immortality out’ (LL 377), it is imbued with the same sense of irony as the opening to Speak, Memory: ‘the cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for’ (17). Just as the thought of there being ‘nothing afterwards’ is undermined in The Gift then, Nabokov’s own views hint at the possibility of some kind of otherworld existing without explicitly saying so. It is only the experienced Nabokov reader’s knowledge of his dismissal of common sense, of course, that allows for such an interpretation. This conflation of the otherworldly and the earthly is, however, made explicit in a passage elsewhere from Speak, Memory:

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Whenever in my dreams I see the dead, they always appear silent, bothered, strangely depressed, quite unlike their dear, bright selves. I am aware of them, without any astonishment, in surroundings they never visited during their earthly existence, in the house of some friend of mine they never knew. They sit apart, frowning at the floor, as if death were a dark taint, a shameful family secret. It is certainly not then – not in dreams – but when one is wide awake, at moments of robust joy and achievement, 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. (41, my emphasis) In Ecce Homo, Nietzsche claims that ‘those things which mankind has hitherto pondered seriously are not even realities, merely imaginings, more strictly speaking lies from the bad instincts of sick, in the profoundest sense injurious natures  – all the concepts “God”, “soul”, “virtue”, “sin”, “the Beyond”, “truth”, “eternal life” . . . But the greatness of human nature, its ‘divinity’, has been sought in them’ (36). Yet, Nietzsche’s admission that ‘we cannot look around our own corner: it is a hopeless curiosity that wants to know what other kinds of intellects and perspectives there might be’ (GS 374), corresponds with Nabokov’s predilection for entertaining thoughts about a spiritual otherworld  – curiosity, we remember, is one of the four terms that he uses to define art (Lo 314–15).

Transformative perception The opening of The Gift shows us how Nabokov renders the ostensibly banal in minute detail, challenging conventional perception, and suggesting ways of seeing the world that might only arise from conscious physical contemplation.16 The scene depicts a removal van attached to a tractor with the name of the company on its side: One cloudy but luminous day, towards four in the afternoon on April the first, 192– [ . . . ] a moving van, very long and very yellow, hitched to a tractor that was also yellow, with hypertrophied rear wheels and a shamelessly exposed anatomy, pulled up in front of Number Seven Tannenberg Street, in the west part of Berlin. The van’s forehead bore a star-shaped

16 For an incredibly detailed close reading of the opening passage to The Gift, see Yuri Leving’s Keys to The Gift: A Guide to Vladimir Nabokov’s Novel (2011), 343–66.

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ventilator. Running along its entire side was the name of the moving company in yard-high blue letters, each of which (including a square dot) was shaded laterally with black paint: a dishonest attempt to climb into the next dimension. On the sidewalk, before the house (in which I too shall dwell), stood two people who had obviously come out to meet their furniture (in my suitcase there are more manuscripts than shirts). The man, arrayed in a rough greenish-brown overcoat to which the wind imparted a ripple of life, was tall, beetle-browed and old, with the grey of his whiskers turning to a russet in the area of the mouth, in which he insensitively held a cold, half-defoliated cigar butt. The woman, thickset and no longer young, with bowlegs and a rather attractive pseudo-Chinese face, wore an astrakhan jacket; the wind, having rounded her, brought a whiff of rather good but slightly stale perfume. They both stood motionless and watched fixedly, with such attentiveness that one might think they were about to be short-changed, as three red-necked husky fellows in blue aprons wrestled with their furniture. (11)17 This passage is marked not only by its engagement with the physical, but also its representation of this through incongruity or contradiction, specifically through the idea of cognitive dissonance and the presence of both anthropomorphism and zoomorphism. The incongruity relies on upsetting our traditional understanding of the quotidian; how we might express the everyday. Nabokov’s word choice, for example, uses particular descriptors in a notably consistent way. For the inanimate objects (the van, tractor, letters on the van, cigar, wind and furniture), Nabokov opts for conspicuously animate words such as ‘hitched’, ‘hypertrophied’, ‘shamelessly’, ‘anatomy’, ‘forehead’, ‘dishonest’, ‘climb’, ‘meet’, ‘imparted’, ‘rounded’, ‘brought’ and ‘wrestled’, bestowing on them a keen sense of animacy or volition. In other words, he inverts the semantic assumptions that we would normally ascribe to inert objects by imbuing them with life. Nabokov continues this inversion by describing the man as ‘beetle-browed’ and having ‘whiskers’, having the woman wear an ‘astrakhan jacket’, and calling the ‘three rednecked fellows’ ‘husky’ (simultaneously implying both low, hoarse voices as well as working dogs).18 Not only is he consistent in zoomorphizing the human characters in the scene, but he also further undermines the

17 In his close reading of this passage, Leving has the following to say in relation to the word ‘bore’: ‘BORE (lit. – WAS SEEN). In the fair copy Nabokov uses the word vidnelas’ (was seen), with the root “vid,” instead of the neutral auxiliary verb byla (was), thus reinforcing the motif of vision. This is further strengthened by an anagram of the word for vision (zrenie) contained in the last word of the sentence, dimension (izmerenie)’ (348–49). 18 In the Russian, the ‘three red-necked husky fellows’ is ‘troe krasnovyynykh molodtsov’. Although the English sense of ‘husky’ in Russian is ‘eskimosskaya layka’ (literally, Eskimo husky), ‘molodnyaka’ can be used to refer to both people and animals.

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couple’s ‘human’ characteristics by describing them as both ‘motionless’ and watching ‘fixedly’.19 Having to reconcile ‘human as animal or insect’ is not the only example of cognitive dissonance in the passage, of course. Nabokov opens the passage with a description of a ‘cloudy but luminous’ sky, for example, combining ostensibly contradictory adjectives to give a distinct picture of a sky suggestive of, or near to, a lambent grey; a sky that could most certainly exist, but one not in sync with how we might normally describe our experience of reality. Phrases such as ‘square dot’ and the gerund-play of ‘moving van’ work in a similar fashion:  squares combine with circles; adjectives transform into nouns. As Leving claims, ‘turning a circle into a square is, in essence, a manifestation of the notorious “next dimension” ’ (2011: 349). Although a more conventional otherworldliness is suggested through the lettering’s shadow play being described as a ‘dishonest attempt to climb into the next dimension’, here this is on a resolutely spatial, rather than spiritual, plane.20 Yet, by using the ostensibly mundane and resolutely material task of moving house, Nabokov evokes an ‘other world’ contained within the material through the very nature by which he undermines traditional notions of perception. By effectively presenting the reader with a defamiliarized perspective on how we view material objects and processes in the familiar world, he disturbs our conventional categorization and semantic demarcations. Fyodor, then, has the ability to readily perceive an alternative world in the fabric of the one that we inhabit: we are reminded of his earlier statement that ‘in our earthly house [ . . . ] windows are replaced by mirrors’ (Gift 283). This ability to absorb, comprehend, and rearticulate the data of his senses – what I term ‘willed aesthetic perception’ – is the ‘gift’ of aesthetic transcendence consistently alluded to throughout the novel. As Connolly claims, Fyodor possesses ‘the capacity to perceive, reshape, and arrange impressions derived from living experience to create new, unique works of art’ (2005:  149). We are reminded here of the impressionist Camille Pissarro’s claim that, ‘Blessed are they who see beautiful things in humble places where other people see nothing’. Just as Nietzsche puts value on the earthly realm, asking us not to dismiss the value inherent in it, Nabokov places similar value on the material but through a perceptual, aesthetic, and verbal reorganisation of it that offers material transcendence. In this respect, the twin ‘gifts’ of perception and its verbal rendering make visible an ‘other world’ on the other side of this world’s fabric. 19

Although there is a distinction between animate and inanimate nouns in Russian, humans and animals form one grammatical categorisation. It is interesting that, in the Russian, Nabokov opts for ‘boroda’ (‘wattles’), rather than the ‘whiskers’ in the English translation, however both imply the same interpretation. 20 See footnote 10.

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i Boyd claims that Nabokov’s ‘interest in the beyond stems not from any denigration or repudiation of the here and now. Quite the contrary’ (VNRY 10). This chapter has illustrated two models that Nabokov has in dealing with the ‘beyond’:  one of a quasi-spiritual nature, concerned with ghosts and crude manifestations of the otherworld, and one that presented Nabokov’s alternate world view; the ability to see the metaphorical ‘beyond’ in the everyday by transforming physical perception through an act of aesthetic will. Although both models seem to exist simultaneously, I privilege the latter model not because the first is untrue, but because the latter provides a sense of how the transcendent assists in artistic perception – a gift from the otherworld, albeit one not alienated from this one. As Fyodor remarks, ‘anything which comes into the focus of human thinking is spiritualized’ (Gift 257). Such an engagement with the physical is consistent with Nietzsche’s celebration of the value of this world rather than the ‘otherworldly’. Yet, Nabokov goes beyond Nietzsche’s stance by engaging simultaneously with the metaphysical. This too can be seen as a challenge to the ‘debased coin’ of twentieth-century scepticism, just as Nietzsche reacted to that of nineteenthcentury religious and philosophical discourse. Nabokov illustrates the nearineffable wonder that this world can offer by rendering perception through vivid and unfamiliar means. This is where both figures align in their assumption that verbal art acts as the highest manifestation of consciousness. Just as Nabokov claims ‘how small the cosmos (a kangaroo’s pouch would hold it), how paltry and puny in comparison to human consciousness, to a single individual recollection, and its expression in words’ (SM 21), Nietzsche proposes that ‘the development of language and the development of consciousness [ . . . ] go hand in hand’ (GS 213).

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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 moralising which to me kills every vestige of art in a work however skilfully written. ( SO 56–57) In Speak, Memory, Nabokov writes that ‘across the dark sky of exile, Sirin passed, to use a simile of a more conservative nature, like a meteor, and disappeared, leaving nothing much else behind him than a vague sense of uneasiness’ (221). The uneasiness that Nabokov suggests seems to have manifested itself threefold:  the uncertainty as to whom this figure was, the arguable superiority of his prose in relation to his contemporaries, and, perhaps most importantly, the ways in which he engaged with particular ideas contained in his fiction. Such uneasiness, however, did not disappear after Nabokov jettisoned his nom de plume – we need only think of Fyodor’s estranging perception in The Gift, readerly identification with Humbert Humbert in Lolita, or readers’ subjugated position in Lectures on Literature or ‘The Vane Sisters’ to see that Nabokov continued making readers feel uncertain about how to engage with his texts far past the name change. Although this study has focused on both long-standing and more nascent problems in Nabokov studies, I wish to amalgamate the many issues that have been covered in its chapters under the theme of ‘uneasiness’ that Nabokov raises. I  also wish, however, to divide this uneasiness into two strands, both of which have clear counterparts in Nietzsche: ethics and aesthetics. First, there is a system of disconcerting antonyms which Nabokov uses to structure the relationship between these two realms in order to create a nexus of aesthetic and ethical values which makes it difficult to map onto a comparable, or recognizable, moral schema that the reader is likely to share. The second strand of uneasiness is Nabokov’s approach to the idea that the world can be seen as a work of fiction. Entertaining these apparent antonyms as harmonious, as well as recognizing that the world has the potentiality of fiction, has a payoff for the reader which can be characterized as Nietzschean.

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Nabokov’s engagement with moral and ethical matters is paradigmatic of what Michael Wood labels the many ‘forms of contradiction or difficulty Nabokov wants to sustain rather than do away with’ (in Norman and White 2009: 232). In Style Is Matter: The Moral Art of Vladimir Nabokov, for example, de la Durantaye addresses the following paradox: ‘If Lolita has “no moral in tow,” how could Nabokov claim that it is a “moral book”?’ (2007: 189). He makes a persuasive and sensible case as to how to reconcile this apparent contradiction, first by agreeing with Nabokov’s assertion that Lolita does not, indeed, contain ‘ideological freight’ (188) and so is not of the ‘deliberate moralizing’ camp that Nabokov so frequently derided. Second, he claims that because Lolita engages with moral questions and themes throughout – asking the reader to decide what is proper and what is not, for example – it is, of course, intrinsically moral. Nabokov’s statements on Lolita’s morality produce uneasiness specifically because of the ambiguity in how to respond to the text appropriately. Such enduring difficulty can be seen in the statement that Nabokov gave seventeen years after his afterword to Lolita: ‘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, ridiculing the vulgar and cruel – and assigning sovereign power to tenderness, talent, and pride’ (SO 193). This proclamation has frequently been used to nullify accusations that Nabokov is some sort of amoral, or immoral, aesthete; that, if readers look closely enough, they should be able to discern a robust sense of morality in his fiction aligning him with something equivalent to ‘goodness’.1 Leona Toker observes that ‘that day dawned earlier than Nabokov had expected. It was already heralded by the work of Andrew Field and Alfred Appel, whose analysis of Nabokov’s themes and intricate texture proceeded from the assumption that the author’s heart was, so to say, in the right place’ (1989: 3).2 Rather than retain such discomfort as a way to avoid ‘worn-out metaphors’ then, critics, or ‘reappraisers’, such as Rorty, Toker and McGinn have transformed Nabokov’s difficult and contradictory assertions by aligning them with the values of virtuous Christian morality. Entertaining a system of antonyms in art and ethics that is difficult to map onto our own can lead to some uneasy responses, but it can also invite the Nietzschean experience

1

Julian Connolly claims that Nabokov’s ‘prediction came true’, observing critics that were to deem him ‘if not [a] “rigid moralist,” then [a] “highly ethical” writer’ (2005:  1). D.  Barton Johnson and Brian Boyd similarly, talk about ‘the perceptual shift from the cold, calculating virtuoso to the warm gooey moralist Nabokov’ (2002: 21). 2 Dana Dragunoiu, similarly, claims that the ‘reappraisers of the kind imagined by Nabokov [ . . . ] have focused on the powerful moral vision of [his] fiction’ (2011: 28). The reappraisers that she claims Nabokov imagines include Brian Boyd, Leland de la Durantaye, Zoran Kuzmanovich, Ellen Pifer, David Rampton, Leona Toker and Michael Wood.

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of thinking and living the world anew. Indeed, if readers accept Wood’s positioning of Nabokov as ‘neither the aesthete [  .  .  . ] nor the plodding moralist’ (1994: 7) and explore the consequences of such middle ground, it suggests an uneasiness that not only permeates his work in general, but is also integral to our understanding of it. In the extract from Strong Opinions, Nabokov appears to scoff at the notion of being characterized as a ‘frivolous firebird’, instead supplying a term at the opposite end of the ethical spectrum: ‘rigid moralist’. In looking at the syntactic similarity of adjective and noun, Nabokov refashions playfulness as robustness; aesthete as one concerned with, and conscious of, moral considerations. By remodelling himself as a ‘moralist’ and taking issue with ‘sin’ then, Nabokov engages explicitly with Christian semantics through biblical rhetoric only to undermine its agenda, recalling Nietzsche forcefully. The concepts that follow – ‘stupidity’, ‘vulgarity’, and ‘cruelty’ – are processed through this Christian lens but, being belittled, are deemed antithetical to that system. Nabokov’s verb choice in establishing his moral remit  – ‘kicking’ sin, ‘cuffing’ stupidity, ‘ridiculing’ the vulgar and cruel  – appears to violate the initial label in that no ‘rigid moralist’, in a traditional Christian sense, would advocate violence towards the things that he or she wants to banish. Rather than ‘forgiving’ sin, as taught in Scripture, Nabokov invites readers to interpret ‘kicking sin’ as a humorous oxymoron given its explicit irony, but also leaves them uneasy if desiring clarity on his moral schema. Sin, then, is not being used here in a conventional sense: like ‘moralist’, it has an estranging effect in not adhering to prescribed definitions. In this respect, Nabokov can be seen to echo Nietzsche’s idea that our use of language mimics ‘metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins’ (in Magnus et al. 1993: 15).3 Rorty claims that ‘the trajectory of Nabokov’s career, like that of Heidegger’s, was shaped by the attempt to avoid being didactic, to avoid the use of words which had been tarnished, reduced to near transparency, by common use’ (1989: 161). Knowing that readers will bring their moral cache to the interpretative table, Nabokov smuggles in deviant definitions behind a cloak of familiarity, exploiting readers’ ‘traditional way of behaving and evaluating’ (Day 10) through cliché and custom.4 By prescribing values that may not be concomitant with readers’, Nabokov’s tactics are decidedly dialectical. For some, like Julian Connolly, we may choose to simply recognize the humour

3

Of course, ‘morality’ is just one concept among many that Nabokov takes issue with: ‘reality’ (SO 10–11), ‘commonsense’ (LL 372) and ‘goodness’ (LL 375) are obvious others. As Nabokov reminds us, ‘commonsense is fundamentally immoral, for the natural morals of mankind are as irrational as the magic rites that they evolved since the immemorial dimness of time’ (LL 372). 4 For more on Nabokov’s use of cliché, see David Rutledge’s Nabokov’s Permanent Mystery: The Expression of Metaphysics in His Work (2011: 15–33).

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in the ‘firebird’ statement rather than the uneasiness.5 Humour, of course, is more than present here: Nabokov himself is the reappraiser he imagines; his jump from ‘firebird’ to ‘moralist’ is lengthy, but perhaps laughably lengthy to ‘rigid moralist’. But an alternative approach to viewing Nabokov as a humorist, or a traditionally virtuous moralist, is to look for, and analyse, the pattern in his statements. Seeing such pattern, in turn, transforms ostensibly irreverent humour into uncomfortable laughter. Looking at the antonyms of the capacities Nabokov takes issue with in Strong Opinions  – ‘virtue’, ‘intelligence’, ‘decency’, and ‘kindness’ as inversely opposed to ‘sin’, ‘stupidity’, ‘vulgarity’ and ‘cruelty’  – broadens the scope of what we know he explicitly privileged alongside ‘tenderness, talent, and pride’. Such traits, in turn, take us back to Nabokov’s afterword to Lolita: ‘Despite John Ray’s assertion, Lolita has no moral in tow. 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, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm’ (314–15). It is hard to object here to Nabokov’s definition of art given its precise articulation of intrinsic ideas about what art is and how it operates: one’s desire to know about the world, to recognize and depict those around us, and to foreground readers’ delight when intellectually stimulated. His pithy definition of such a nebulous topic is simultaneously valid, fresh, and unique. As Nabokov claims, things such as ‘time and space, the colors of the seasons, the movements of muscles and minds [ . . . ] are not traditional notions which may be borrowed from the circulating library of public truths but a series of unique surprises which master artists have learned to express in their own unique way’ (LL 2). Yet, his list of moral values in Strong Opinions seems less palatable. Readers are likely to be more familiar, for example, with the moral directives of the Ten Commandments or the Seven Deadly Sins than with what art might constitute. Consequently, Nabokov’s ideas about what we should value morally, rather than artistically, invite provocation. Such a response, however, should be seen as ‘positive discomfort’ in facilitating debate on issues thought of as fixed or lapidary and inviting readers to entertain viewpoints likely to be radically different from their own. As Wood claims, ‘Nabokov changed his topics and his angles, but he scarcely changed his mind at all’ (in Norman and White 2009:  231). We can see such continuity if we compare what is privileged in the quotation from Lolita – ‘curiosity’, ‘tenderness’, ‘kindness’, ‘ecstasy’ – and, in Strong Opinions, ‘tenderness’, ‘talent’, ‘pride’ alongside ‘virtue’, ‘intelligence’, ‘decency’ and ‘kindness’ (given what he ‘kicks’, ‘cuffs’ and ‘ridicules’). Although values concerning human decency abound in the extracts from

5

See Connolly (1997: 37).

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Lolita and Strong Opinions, so are those concerned with the capacities of the self. In other words, Nabokov implores readers to question existing value sites while advocating values relative to the individual’s relationship with others. While such hybridization, or coexistence, has been observed by several critics already, whether what Leona Toker labels Nabokov’s ‘rational individualism’ (in Connolly 2005: 237) or de la Durantaye’s claim that Nabokov asks us to ‘balance fierce independence of vision with the necessity of seeing the world from the standpoint of others’ (2007: 182), it seems more important to think about why Nabokov opts to reveal what he privileges in such a way, as well as what such strategies engender. ‘Pride’, for example, is deemed worthy enough to be included as one of only three explicit examples given for what Nabokov values. This term, of course, is antithetical to Christianity’s teaching, yet Nietzsche’s definition of the term adheres to that of the ancients’: ‘the deification of passion, of revenge, of cunning, of anger, of voluptuousness, of adventure, of knowledge’ (WP 221). Problematizing accepted conceptual thinking in relation to notions such as the ‘laudable’ self or the abstract notion of pride is a strategy used by both Nietzsche and Nabokov to inject vitality into such concepts. One corollary of the notion of uneasy antonyms in Nabokov’s work is worth exploring here. In his ‘Barber of Kasbeam’ essay, Rorty defines Humbert and Kinbote as a ‘particular sort of genius-monster  – the monster of incuriosity – [which] is Nabokov’s contribution to our knowledge of human possibilities’ (1989: 161–62). If we follow Rorty’s line of argumentation, that ‘the reader, suddenly revealed to himself as, if not hypothetical, at least wholly incurious, recognises his semblable, his brother, in Humbert and Kinbote’ (1989: 163), the implication gains particular significance when we consider the rhetoric that Nietzsche uses in Ecce Homo: ‘When I picture a perfect reader, I always picture a monster of courage and curiosity, also something supple, cunning, cautious, a born adventurer and discoverer’ (43). Ostensibly, we have two figures diametrically opposed to one another:  Rorty’s ‘monster of incuriosity’, deemed as the worst kind of reader, and Nietzsche’s ‘monster of curiosity’, deemed as the best kind. The former’s wholly negative use of the term is problematized by the unsettling, yet rewarding, idea of rebuilding the ‘monster’ label as something apparently positive. Rorty makes the claim that ‘I suspect that only someone who feared that he was executing a partial self-portrait could have made that particular contribution’ (1989:  161–62).6 The implication of this claim  – that Nabokov himself could be defined as a ‘genius–monster’ – is touched on in Strong Opinions, where he is keen to downplay any suggestion that the characters in his fiction should be mistaken for their creator: ‘Some of my characters are, no doubt, pretty beastly, but I really don’t care, they are

6

See Wood’s comment, in Grossman (2000), in Chapter 1 of this volume

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outside my inner self like the mournful monsters of a cathedral facade  – demons placed there merely to show they have been booted out’ (19). The ‘merely’ here is revealing. Leaving aside their pragmatic use, and etymological derivation, in allowing water to run off from the roofs of buildings, gargoyles’ symbolic use also acts to ward off evil spirits from entering. For Nabokov, writing may have been a way for him to ‘boot out’ the monsters plaguing his unconscious; a way to show how he has sublimated, if not mastered, his transgressive desires. As such, the chimerical quality of such a noun acts to hybridize those at opposite sides of the reading spectrum. We are reminded of Nietzsche’s warning, that ‘he who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you’ (BT 102). Accepting Nabokov’s values as harmonious with one another is difficult because of their ostensible incompatibility. Yet, in seeing them as compatible, we glimpse a system that makes the striving for explicit self-development as paramount as a marked concern for others. Authors’ emphases, of course, are normally associated with aspects of human relationships: the duplication of ‘tenderness’ in the excerpts given from Lolita and Strong Opinions indicates an implicit commitment to such things. Nabokov makes this clear in ‘The Art of Literature and Commonsense’:  ‘He must be a pretty foolish and shortsighted author who renounces the treasures of observation, humor, and pity which may be professionally obtained through closer contact with his fellow men’ (LL 371). Yet, he also describes discomforting, typically Nietzschean, values in his writing by questioning the capacities of what ‘great authors’ should do in constructing proud, conscious, intelligent creations in a world surrounded by the wonders of human relations. As Boyd claims, Nabokov stressed ‘the need to follow the special rules of the self while the crowd around “is being driven by some common impulse to some common goal” ’ (VNAY 31). In this respect, Nabokov seems to echo what Tanner calls Nietzsche’s ‘aestheticization of morality’ (2000: 94) rather than adhere to his ‘revaluation of all values’ (EH 96), albeit in a modified sense. Nabokov does not jettison, or ‘go beyond’, the themes of human decency but, instead, gives them equal status to more aestheticized values. The other manifestation of uneasiness that Nabokov raises is thinking of the world as a work of fiction. In the earlier discussion of the conclusion, I  ostensibly conflated two different realms:  in the quotation from Lolita, Nabokov’s idealized view of art and, in the quotation from Strong Opinions, his idealized view of morality. Yet, the description of each reveals continuity. In both the afterwords of Lolita and Strong Opinions, Nabokov does not perpetuate traditional, imbibed notions of what ‘art’ or ‘moral’ may mean to the anglophone reader. Indeed, given that Nabokov’s idealized description of art  – ‘(curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy)’ (Lo 315)  – are what readers would typically deem moral nouns, he echoes

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Wittgenstein not only in the idea that ‘ethics and aesthetics are one’ ([1922] 2009:  105), but, through ‘exists only insofar’, also that the limits of his language are the limits of his moral world. We are reminded of Fyodor’s declaration in The Gift that ‘definition is always finite, but I keep straining for the faraway. I search beyond the barricades (of words, of senses, of the world) for infinity, where all, all the lines meet’ (300). Similar to Humbert’s role as a Nietzschean vehicle in Lolita, Nabokov’s stance questions readers’ moral and aesthetic certainty by dovetailing their traditional responses to literature and life and questioning what they choose to privilege, both as readers and people. In Lolita, Humbert illustrates how difficult it is to embrace this concept: he perpetrates some of his worst cruelties arguably because he mistakes reality for art. De la Durantaye expands on this idea, claiming that ‘Nabokov has Humbert fail to observe the line that divides art from life’ (2007:  182). But, again, there is a reward for the reader in seeing both the world and literature in unusual ways. Nabokov claimed that ‘the art of writing is a very futile business if it does not imply first of all the art of seeing the world as the potentiality of fiction’ (LL 2). In asking students to think of the world as literature, and by providing a version of what should be privileged in literature, Nabokov effectively projects his literary values onto the real world. Such an idea is laden with transformative possibilities, especially since Nabokov is keen to express his dismay at ‘minor authors’ who are only concerned with ‘the ornamentation of the commonplace . . . [and who] do not bother about any reinventing of the world’ (LL 2). Alexander Nehamas, in Nietzsche: Life as Literature, argues that such a process is symptomatic of Nietzsche’s work: ‘[He] looks at the world in general as if it were some kind of artwork; in particular, he looks at it as if it were a literary text’ (1985:  3). This process relates to what Nabokov, later in Lectures on Literature, calls ‘vostorg’ and ‘vdokhnovenie’, or ‘rapture’ and ‘recapture’. He claims that vostorg ‘has no conscious purpose in view but [ . . . ] is all-important in linking the breaking up of the old world with the building up of the new one’. When the writer goes about writing, he relies on vdokhnovenie to “recapture and reconstruct the world” ’ (LL 378–379). Such a process – similar to the interplay between Apollonian order and Dionysian chaos in Nietzsche’s work – is, of course, discomforting in its destructiveness, yet it is more than compensated for by the creation of the new amid the chaos.7 We are reminded here of the connection that Thomas Karshan astutely identifies between the end of King, Queen, Knave, containing ‘two children rebuilding a sandcastle, constantly

7

Nabokov furthers this idea:  ‘[L]unatics are lunatics just because they have thoroughly and recklessly dismembered a familiar world but have not the power – or have lost the power – to create a new one as harmonious as the old’ (LL 377).

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repairing it as the waves sweep its structures away’ (90), and a passage near the end of Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy: The striving for infinity, the wingbeat of of longing, that accompanies the supreme delight of clearly perceived reality, reminds us that both states are aspects of a Dionysiac phenomenon:  over and over again it shows us the spirit that playfully builds and destroys the world of individuals as the product of a primal pleasure: similarly, dark Heraclitus compares the force that builds worlds to a child placing stones here and there, and building sandcastles and knocking them down again. (115) The uneasy quality of Nabokov’s works has been addressed in each chapter of the book. As discussed in Chapter 1’s exploration of the relationship between Nabokov’s representation of memory and Nietzsche’s concepts of eternal recurrence and amor fati, Nabokov engages defiantly with the horrifying recurrence of suffering through representing it both aesthetically and affirmatively. Chapter 2 questioned the readerly position of compliantly solving puzzles in order to resist subjugation and stressed a strained relationship whereby it is difficult to read his texts without looking over our shoulders or deliberately avoiding distressed responses. As mentioned earlier in the conclusion, Chapter 3 discussed the ways in which Lolita makes readers uneasy in presenting certain values of the paedophilic narrator as hard to condone, but also laudable. The chapter suggested that the reader’s stance is crucial in understanding Lolita and that Nietzsche’s philosophy allows just one way to change our stance when thinking of the interplay between morality and fiction. Such moral disorientation should be seen as beneficial in that it asks us not to be as exclusive when thinking about how to engage with such topics. As Noël Carroll claims, texts like this ‘give us moral insight into behaviours that we might not otherwise comprehend and, for lack of comprehension, morally condemn out of hand’ (in Kivy 2004:  133). Chapter  4’s discussion of Pale Fire’s internal authorship problem strived to push past the interpretative impasse that exists in the novel; opening new doors of inquiry through looking at how readers’ responses, and what they choose to privilege, dictate how the novel is read and what kind of readers they are. Such a strategy, however, comparable to a litmus or Rorschach test for readers, may reveal privileging techniques that are difficult to accept by foregrounding their readerly behaviour. The chapter’s methodology and findings, of course, ultimately impact on more general twentiethcentury problems of narrative voice, truth and interpretation in literature. Nabokov’s engagement with pity, the subject of Chapter 5, allowed us to see how typical responses to such a concept were thwarted by narrative technique. Although pity is frequently invoked in his fiction, Nabokov plays with readerly expectations by undermining anticipated scenarios

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and his own conflicted responses to the topic are arguably reflected in the readers’. Finally, Chapter 6’s discussion of Nabokov’s ability to defamiliarize perception of the world so as to render it transcendental rather than religious, not only challenges the abundance of ‘otherworldly’ criticism on Nabokov, but suggests what readers may be missing when perceiving the tangible world around them. By evoking the same kind of celestial response however, those of a religious bent do not suffer immeasurably from my argument – by embracing Fyodor’s thinking, in other words, all readers are afforded proximity to the ‘gift’ described by Nabokov.

i This volume has demonstrated some of the ways in which Nabokov makes readers uneasy through both his literary and philosophical associations with Nietzsche’s often uncomfortable thought. Addressing narrative problems in Nabokov’s writing through Nietzsche’s philosophy seems apt given his frequent adoption as a discomforting companion to numerous groups, whether socialist, feminist or, indeed, Christian (Bull 2000: 121). The recognition of such discomfort aims to wrestle power from Nabokov’s hands into the reader’s, allowing us to ‘argue back’ rather than simply being patted on the head for puzzle-solving. In numerous ways, Nabokov offers us unique opportunities to experience the unsettling but exhilarating visions of Nietzschean philosophy. Adopting a Nietzschean position not only engenders more fertile readings of Nabokov’s work, but also more ‘panting and happy’ readers who, made to feel uneasy through questioning where, why and how we derive value, are continuously rewarded through such an experience.

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171

INDEX

Ackerley, Chris 97 Acmeism 6, 9, 34 Adamovich, Georgy 10 aestheticism 3, 67, 69, 71, 89–90, 104, 107, 123, 132 Akhmatova, Anna 9 Aldanov, Mark 10 Aleksandr III 5 Alexandrov, Vladimir E. 9 n.10, 10 n.11, 16 n.23, 25, 59, 135–6, 138 Alladaye, René 104 n.7 Alter, Robert 96 Amis, Martin 47, 91 amor fati (Nietzsche’s concept) 28, 31, 37, 42–4, 55 n.19, 116, 128, 135 n.1, 158 Anscombe, G. E. M. 70 Antonovsky, Iuly 5 Appel, Alfred 80–1, 90, 91 n.15, 98, 143, 152 Appel, Fredrick 129 Arnold, Matthew 78 Atwood, Margaret 46 Austen, Jane 54 Aykhenwald, Yuly 10 Baker, Nicholson 108 n.9 Bakhtin, Mikhail 1, 33, 95–6, 102 Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics  95 Rabelais and His World 1 Balmont, Konstantin 5, 10 Barabtarlo, Gennady 15 n.22, 33 n.10, 62, 97 Barthes, Roland 55–7, 94 Batailles, Georges 8 Bate, Jonathan Shakespeare and Ovid 1 Beckett, Samuel 94

Bely, Andrei 3, 5, 7, 9–10, 26 Petersburg 7, 9 Berdiaev, Nikolai 6, 10, 16 Bergson, Henri 23–5, 37 Bethea, David 10 n.11, 136 Blok, Alexandr 7, 9–10, 16 Bloom, Harold 1, 16, 125 Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry 1 Bolshevik Revolution 6, 10, 31 Booth, Wayne 53 Bowers, Fredson 122, 126 n.13 Boyd, Brian 9–10, 11, 25 n.3, 34, 58 n.23, 68, 76, 94–100, 106, 115 n.1, 117, 131, 133–4, 136, 140, 143, 150, 152 n.1, 152 n.2, 156 Bradshaw, David 7 Brandes, Georg 5 Briusov, Valery 5, 10 Bull, Malcolm 45 n.1 Bunin, Ivan 7, 9–10, 124 Byron, George ‘Manfred’ 120 Calvino, Italo 47 Carey, John 46 n.4 Carroll, Lewis 24 n.1, 59 Carroll, Noël 78, 158 Carroll, William 47 Chamberlain, Lesley 9 Chernyshevsky, Nikolay 122, 137, 142 n.10 Christianity 4, 49, 51 n.15, 69, 78, 82, 91, 100, 116–17, 120–4, 130, 132–3, 139, 152–5, 159 John the Baptist 117 Clowes, Edith W. 5, 7, 89 Coates, Ruth 7

172

172

INDEX

Common, Thomas 116 n.2 Conan Doyle, Arthur 38 Connolly, Julian 1 n.1, 115 n.1, 119, 149, 152–4 The Cambridge Companion to Vladimir Nabokov 1 n.1 Nabokov and His Fiction: New Perspectives 115 n.1 Cornwell, Neil 137 Cortázar, Julio 94 Couturier, Maurice 1 n.1, 4 Culler, Jonathan 103 Currie, Gregory 109 Davydov, Sergey 119, 121–2 De la Durantaye, Leland 3, 15, 16 n.23, 47, 67 n.2, 115, 131, 146, 152, 155, 157 Deleuze, Gilles 28 Dematagoda, Udith 48 n.7 Dennis, Nigel 98 Diaghilev, Sergei 6 Dickens, Charles 131 Dolinin, Alexander 15 n.21, 119–20 Dostoevsky, Fyodor 8, 11 n.13, 26, 33, 104, 105 n.8, 115, 118–25, 131–2 The Brothers Karamazov 26, 104–5, 119 n.6, 121 Crime and Punishment 91, 119–21 The Double 124 Dragunoiu, Dana 2–3, 5 n.4, 152 n.2 Ehrenburg, Ilya 10 Elder, Donald B. 63 n.30 Eliot, T. S. 14 n.18, 37, 46, 50, 78, 87 ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ 1 ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ 50, 87 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 120 Empson, William 93 eternal recurrence (Nietzsche’s concept) 12, 16–17, 23–44, 116, 145, 158 Ettenhuber, Katrin Donne’s Augustine: Renaissance Cultures of Interpretation 1

fascism 7–8, 14–15, 122–3 Festinger, Leon 71 Fetterley, Judith 62 n.27 Field, Andrew 97, 152 Fish, Stanley 78, 82, 105–6 Flaubert, Gustave 78 Foot, Philippa 82 Förster-Nietzsche, Elisabeth 8 Foster, John Burt 4 n.5, 6 n.8, 14, 16, 24, 26, 30, 37–40, 42, 116, 125–6 Foucault, Michel 94 France, Anatole 11 n.13 Frank, S. L. 5 Freud, Sigmund 14–15, 37, 112, 115, 125 Frost, Robert 96, 129 futurism 6, 9, 34 Genette, Gérard 108 n.9 German idealism 2–3 Germany Nabokov’s relationship with 14–15, 123 Nietzsche’s relationship with 8, 116 Gershenzon, M. O. 5 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 14–15 Faust 120 Gogol, Nikolai 14, 62 n.29, 124, 139 ‘The Overcoat’ 58 Golding, William Lord of the Flies 38 Gorky, Maxim 6, 9–10 Green, Geoffrey 15–16 Green, Keith 83 Greene, Graham 71 Gregory, Lady 125 n.9 Grice, Paul 82–3 Grillaert, Nel 5–6 Grishakova, Marina 25, 128 Hägglund, Martin 40 n.14 Halliwell, Martin 78 Hamsun, Knut 11 n.13 Hegel, Georg 23, 25–6, 49 n.10, 101 Heidegger, Martin 24 n.1, 25 n.3, 27, 36 n.12, 115, 153 Hitler, Adolf 8, 123, 126

173

INDEX

Hobbes, Thomas 70 Holbein 104 n.7 Hollingdale, R. J. 134, 142 Holocaust 14, 31 Auschwitz 36 Homer 15 Horace 15 Hugo, Victor 11 n.13 Hulme, Charles 77 Hume, Kathryn 46 Huxley, Aldous 88 Il’yn, Sergey 97 internal authorship 17–18, 93–6, 101–2, 104–9, 111, 158 Iser, Wolfgang 46, 53, 82 Ivanov, Georgy 5, 10 Ivanov, Vyacheslav 7, 33 Jauss, Hans Robert 82 Johnson, B. S. 94 n.2 Johnson, D. Barton 98, 135, 138, 152 n.1 Joyce, James 9, 37, 46, 104 Finnegans Wake 26, 59 n.24, 104 Ulysses 9 Kafka, Franz 9, 15, 131 The Metamorphosis 9, 15, 131 Kant, Immanuel 2–3, 6 n.8, 78, 109, 116 Karlinsky, Simon 10 Karshan, Thomas 2–3, 5, 10–11, 25, 63–4, 76, 95, 99, 102, 118, 157 Kaufmann, Walter 29, 116 n.2, 120 Kermode, Frank 98 Kernan, Alvin B. 98 Khodasevich, Vladimir 10 Kintsch, Walter 77 Knights, L. C. 68 Kuhn, Thomas 102 Kundera, Milan 36 n.12 Kuzmanovich, Zoran 152 n.2 Lacan, Jacques 25 Laughlin, James 63 Lawrence, D. H. 8 Leiter, Brian 78

173

Lermontov, Mikhail 49 n.8 Leving, Yuri, 147 n.16, 148 n.17, 149 The Gift: A Guide to Vladimir Nabokov’s Novel 147 n.16, 148 n.17 The Goalkeeper: The Nabokov Almanac 16 Levy, Oscar 7 n.9 Littlewood, J. E. 145 n.14 Locke, John 23 Lodge, David 46 n.3, 96 loss 4 n.3, 24, 30–1, 33–7, 40 n.14, 41, 131, 132 Lotman, Juri 23, 33 Lukash, Ivan 10 Lvov-Rogachevsky, V. 6 MacIntyre, Alasdair 70, 79, 85 Magnus, Bernd 101 Mallarmé, Stephane 104 Mallock, W. H. 79 n.7 Mandelstam, Osip 9 Mann, Thomas 14–15, 37 Masson, M. E. 77 master–slave morality (Nietzsche’s concept) 16, 17, 45, 49–52, 122–3 May, Simon 51 n.13, 79 Mayakovsky, Vladimir 7, 9–10 McCarthy, Mary 96, 98 McCormick, Kenneth D. 30 McDuff, David 121 McGinn, Colin 68, 70–3, 77–8, 86, 90, 152 McHale, Brian 98 memory 17, 23–44, 48, 74, 76–7, 158 Merezhkovsky, Dmitry 7 Mérimée, Prosper 80 Carmen 80–2 Meyer, Frank S. 85 Mikhailovskii, Nikolai 6 Milton, John 78 Paradise Lost 78, 93 modernism 2, 6, 9, 37, 46, 78, 93, 137 Morris, Ivan 12 Morris, Paul 53, 136 Moudrov, Alexander 16 Muravnik, Constantine 4 n.4, 4 n.5, 25 n.3, 87 n.12, 125

174

174

INDEX

Nabokov, Dmitri (son) 14, 110 Nabokov, Elena (mother) 34–5 Nabokov, Kirill (brother), 86 n.11 Nabokov, Sergey (brother) 14, 31, 34, 44 Nabokov, V. D. (father) 9, 11 n.13, 31, 37, 97 n.4 Nabokov, Véra (wife) 14, 51, 135 n.1 Nabokov, Vladimir (works) Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle 2, 40 n.14, 76, 129, 133 ‘An Affair of Honour’ 140 n.7 Bend Sinister 18, 29, 51–2, 63 n.30, 64, 112, 123, 128–9, 132, 136, 140 ‘The Circle’ 26 ‘Cloud, Castle, Lake’ 55 n.20 The Cluster 10 The Defense 12, 17, 30, 38, 42–3, 129, 133 Despair 51, 118–28, 140 ‘Details of a Sunset’ 52 n.17 The Empyrean Path 30 n.8 Eugene Onegin (translation of) 51 ‘An Evening of Russian Poetry’ 25 n.4 The Eye 119, 129, 139 The Gift 10, 15, 18, 24 n.1, 25, 37 n.13, 47, 49 n.8, 50 n.11, 50 n.12, 122, 129, 132, 136–42, 145–7, 151, 157, 159 Glory 30 n.8, 37 n.13, 129 ‘Gods’ 134 ‘Grace’ 133 Happiness 43 Invitation to a Beheading 1, 49–50, 123, 129, 132, 135, 142, 144 King, Queen, Knave 14, 129, 157 Laughter in the Dark 129 Lectures on Literature 3 n.2, 15, 17, 30 n.8, 39, 45, 48, 49 n.9, 59, 111, 117–18, 124, 151, 157 ‘The Art of Literature and Commonsense’ 27, 127, 141 n.9, 146, 156 ‘Good Readers and Good Writers’ 3, 17, 24, 30 n.8, 45 n.1, 48, 117, 124 ‘L’Envoi’ 118

Lectures on Russian Literature 3 n.2, 117, 122–6, 139 ‘Philistines and Philistinism’ 118 n.5 ‘A Letter that Never Reached Russia’ 37 n.13, 43–4, 132 Lolita 17–18, 25 n.3, 31, 41 n.15, 62 n.27, 67–91, 95, 119, 129, 133, 147, 151–8 Lolita: A Screenplay 118 n.5 Look at the Harlequins! 129 Mary 12, 17, 29, 33, 38–9, 42 Nabokov’s Quartet 60 Nikolai Gogol 58, 62 n.29, 139 n.4 ‘Olympicum’ 26 ‘Orache’ 56 n.21 The Original of Laura 11–12, 129 Pale Fire 17–18, 33, 56, 58 n.23, 63 n.30, 68, 93–112, 126–7, 129, 133, 158 Pnin 12, 17, 29, 31, 32–7, 42, 132, 135, 145 Poems and Schemes 12 The Real Life of Sebastian Knight 129 ‘Recruiting’ 17, 53–7, 94 Speak, Memory 24–6, 29–30, 33–4, 37–40, 44, 45, 47 n.5, 63 n.30, 136 n.2, 138 n.3, 141, 146, 151 ‘Spring in Fialta’ 30 n.8 Strong Opinions 1, 9–10, 14, 89, 117 n.3, 124, 145 n.15, 153–6 The Tragedy of Mr Morn 37 n.13, 112 Transparent Things 135 Tyrants Destroyed and Other Stories 60 ‘Ultima Thule’ 12, 112, 125–30 ‘The Vane Sisters’ 17, 57–63, 68, 74 n.4, 83 n.10, 135, 151 Naiman, Eric 4 n.4, 48 n.6, 48 n.7 Nazism 8, 14, 31, 35, 123 Nehamas, Alexander 52, 103, 157 New Criticism 53, 82 Nicol, Charles 97 Nietzsche, Friedrich The Anti-Christ 58 n.22 Beyond Good and Evil 11, 111, 130, 145 n.13

175

INDEX

The Birth of Tragedy 5, 44, 121, 158 Daybreak 81, 145 n.13 Ecce Homo 5 n.6, 28, 63 n.30, 89, 117 n.4, 126 n.12, 137, 144, 147, 155 The Gay Science 27–8, 32, 90–1, 100, 104, 109, 117, 130, 132, 145 n.13 Human, All Too Human 5, 60, 62, 91, 102, 144, 145 n.13 On the Genealogy of Morality 36, 50, 51 n.15, 100 ‘On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life’ 36 ‘On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense’ 86 Thoughts Out of Season 5 Thus Spoke Zarathustra 5, 7–8, 11–13, 27, 29–30, 44, 48, 115–18, 120, 124–8, 130, 134, 141–2 Untimely Meditations 11 The Will to Power 5, 28, 52, 100 Nikolai II 5 Nordau, Max 7 Norman, Will 48 n.7, 102, 108 Nuttall, A. D. 71 Oates, Joyce Carol 47 O’Brien, Flann 108 n.9 ‘Oh My Darling, Clementine’ 81 the otherworld 4, 17–18, 33, 59, 82 n.9, 131, 134, 135–9, 142–50, 159 Packward, Edward 94 n.2 Pasternak, Boris 10 Perec, Georg 59 perspectivism (Nietzsche’s concept) 16, 18, 94–5, 99–106, 116 Pfeffer, Rose 28 philistinism 86–7 Pifer, Ellen 3, 67, 88, 96, 106, 132, 136, 152 n.2 Pilnyak, Boris 10 Pissarro, Camille 149 pity 4 n.3, 18, 42, 75, 86, 91, 106, 112, 116, 129–33, 156, 158

175

Plato 6 n.2, 16, 111 n.10, 131 Poincaré, Henri 27 Pope, Alexander 96 Popper, Karl 102 postmodernism 46, 93, 107–10 Pound, Ezra 45 Preobrazhenskii, Vasilii 6 Proffer, Carl 47, 50 n.12 Proust, Marcel 14 n.18, 23–5, 37, 40–1, 130 Remembrance of Things Past 9, 24, 39 Pushkin, Alexsandr 9, 14 Rabinowitz, Peter 94–5, 98, 103, 106 Raguet-Bouvart, Christine 59 Raine, Craig 83 Rampton, David 67, 110, 152 n.2 Rawls, John 70 Rawson, Katherine A. 77 reader-response theory 53–4, 80, 82 reception theory 82 Reginster, Bernard 45, 52 Remizov, Aleksey 10 Richards, I. A. 68 Ridley, Aaron 79 Rilke, Rainer Maria 15 Ronen, Omry 14, 15 Rorty, Richard 3, 5 n.1, 34, 47, 67–8, 70, 72, 74–7, 115, 130–1, 152–3, 155 Rosenberg, Alfred 8 Rosenblatt, Louise 91 Rosenthal, Bernice Glatzer 6, 8, 33 Rossington, Michael 23 Rowe, William 51 n.13, 135 Rukavishnikov, V. I. (Nabokov’s uncle) 14, 31, 34, 44 Russian Formalism 53 Russian Silver Age 4, 5–10 Russian symbolism 6, 7, 9, 10, 25, 33, 136 Rutledge, David S. 5 n.2 Santayana, George 8 Sartre, Jean-Paul 51, 80 Scherr, Barry 10

176

176

INDEX

Schiller, F. C. S. 8 Schiller, Friedrich 3 Schopenhauer, Arthur 2, 16, 25 n.3, 52, 90 Scruton, Roger 12 Shakespeare, William Hamlet 38 King Lear 94 Timon of Athens 97 Shaw, George Bernard 8 Shklovsky, Viktor 10 Shute, Jenefer 15, 16 n.23 Simmel, Georg 29 Simon, John 11 n.15 Snowling, Margaret J. 77 Soloviev, Vladimir 6 n.8 Stegner, Page 3, 97 Steiner, George 98 Sterne, Laurence 46 Stine, R. L. 94 n.2 structuralism 53, 103 Tamir-Ghez, Nomi 55 Tammi, Pekka 97 Tanner, Michael 15, 28–9, 36 n.12, 116 n.2, 156 Thompson, Diane 23, 33, 41 n.16 Tille, Alexander 7 n.9 Times Literary Supplement 12 Toker, Leona 2, 3, 49 n.7, 67–8, 70, 72, 75, 77, 80, 89–90, 115 n.1, 131, 133, 152, 155 Tolstoy, Aleksey 10 Tolstoy, Leo 54 transvaluation (Nietzsche’s concept) 6, 16, 78, 81, 89–90, 117, 156 Trilling, Lionel 69 Tsvetaeva, Marina 10

Übermensch (Nietzsche’s concept) 17–18, 69, 89, 115–30, 133–4 untruth (Nietzsche’s concept) 94, 108–11 Updike, John 15, 118, 129 Uspensky, P. D. 16, 33 utilitarianism 70, 78 Van Gogh, Vincent 87 Vengerov, Semyon 6 Verne, Jules 38 Voloshin, Maximilian 9–11 Voltaire 88 Wallace, David Foster 108 n.9 White, Duncan 2, 47, 57, 102, 108, 136 n.2 White, Katharine 58, 61–3 Whitehead, Anne 23 Wilde, Oscar 11 n.13, 59, 104 The Picture of Dorian Gray 59 the will to power (Nietzsche’s concept) 17, 45–6, 52, 116, 126, 134 Williams, Bernard 70, 108–9 Wilson, Edmund 9, 51, 62 n.27, 62 n.28 Winter, Jay 34 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 98, 157 Wood, Michael 3, 5 n.1, 16, 31–2, 35–7, 40 n.14, 52 n.17, 56, 68–9, 85, 91, 98–100, 109, 111, 141, 152–5 Wyllie, Barbara 26 Yeats, W. B. 8, 125 n.9 Zaitsev, Boris 10 Zimmer, Dieter E. 14 n.19 Zola, Émile 11 n.13

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