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BIB: 1959 TNR review of Invitation to a Beheading
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Jansy Mello sends the following:
Nabokov's Beheading by John Wain, The New Republic Published: December
21, 1959
Invitation to a Beheading
By Vladimir Nabokov
Translated by Dmitri Nabokov
In his review John Wain notes that in his autobiography (here under the
title "Conclusive Evidence") Vladimir Nabokov mentions the names of the
emigre Russian writers he knew in Berlin and Paris ( Bunin, Poplavski,
Rodasevich), to call our attention to Nabokov's admission that "the
author that interested me most was naturally Sirin. He belonged to my
generation. Among the young writers produced in exile he turned out to
be the only major one." This most fascinating Russian writer made his
debut in 1925 and, fifteen years later, he "vanished as strangely as he
had come."
Wain handsomely quotes from Nabokov's enthussings: Sirin's "work kept
provoking an acute and rather morbid interest on the part of critics.
Just as Marxist publicists of the eighties in old Russia would have
denounced his' lack of concern with the economic structure of society,
so the mystagogues of emigre letters deplored his lack of religious
insight and of moral preoccupation. Everything about him was bound to
offend Russian conventions and especially that Russian sense of decorum
which, for example, an American shocks so dangerously today, when in the
presence of Soviet military men of distinction he happens to lounge with
both hands in his trouser pockets. Conversely, Sirin's admirers made
much, perhaps too much, of his unusual style, brilliant precision,
functional imagery and that sort of thing. Russian readers who had been
raised on the sturdy straightforwardness of Russian realism and had
called the bluff of decadent cheats, were impressed by the mirror-like
angles of his clear but weirdly misleading sentences and by the fact
that the real life of his books flowed, in his figures of speech, which
one critic has compared to 'windows giving upon a contiguous world . . .
a rolling corollary, the shadow of a train of thought.' 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. His best works are those in which
he condemns his people to the solitary confinement of their souls." Next
he explains that Sirin "is, of course, Nabokov himself in his
Russian-writing days," and that the quoted lines are "typical of the
elaborately joking manner which he likes to assume...and which one
suspects is a very Russian kind of humor which English and American
readers find amusing and irritating in about equal proportions. The
quotation from "a critic" is no doubt all part of the joke, since
"windows giving upon a contiguous world" is exactly the kind of
pretentious phrase, reverberative but totally meaningless, which abounds
in the Higher Reviewing."
John Wain concludes that, behind the banter, "the passage no doubt
represents an attitude which Nabokov seriously holds." He agrees that
both the "Marxist" and non-Marxist critics would judge him frivolous (
for his making light of social causes and ideologies, or for his lack of
religion and moral questioning) expressing his views with an excess of
subjectivity, the "memory" as one of its chief expressions. Wain
adds:"Mr. Nabokov is fascinated by the workings of his own memory, and
thence in the psychology of memory in general. All his books are
punctuated with little vignettes drawn from his recollections of the
sights, sounds and tactile sensations, of those first twenty years, and
some of the "stories" collected in Nabokov's Dozen (1958) are not
stories at all but simply slabs of remembered detail."
In a conversation Wain held with Nabokov, in London, he heard the writer
state that his objets trouves, lying about haphazard in the memory, were
jewels, to be taken out, fondly lingered over before they are returned
to their box. For Wain, in fact, stories like "First Love" are veritable
gems. As also "Mademoioften noticed that after I had bestowed on the characters of my novels
some treasured item of my past, it would pine away in the artificial
world where I had so abruptly placed it. Although it lingered on in my
mind, its personal warmth, its retrospective appeal had gone and,
presently, it became more closely identified with my novel than with my
former self, where it had seemed to be so safe from the intrusion of the
artist. Houses have crumbled in my memory as soundlessly as they did in
the mute films of yore; and the portrait of my old French governess,
whom I once lent to a boy in one of my books, is fading fast, now that
it is engulfed in the description of a childhood entirely unrelated to
my own. The man in me revolts against the fictionists and here is my
desperate, attempt to save what is left of poor Mademoiselle."
Admitting that "once the jewels of memory are cut into the required
shape to fit into an alien pattern...are spoilt." Wain concludes that
this would be the reason that Nabokov, for the last ten years, tried "to
stop his ears against the song of memory and concentrate on the American
present tense of his life, rather than the European past. Pnin and
Lolita are both essentially critiques of American life which, come
naturally from a sensibility nourished in the Old World."
Nabokov's ceaseless care to refine "an absolutely individual style,
which will convey the thousand and one idiosyncratic nuances suggested
by his imagination" will enable him to bring his "linguistic instrument
to the pitch of utter perfection." Wain finds it remarkable that Nabokov
didn't try to develop "a style in which ordinary generalized thought
(political opinions, for instance) can be conveyed. When he modulates
from distilled impressions into the ordinary statement of an opinion,
his writing plummets abruptly from the height of felicity into vagueness
and fumbling....no doubt owing to Nabokov's distaste for anything so
crude, so common, to all men, as political opinions-the prose
collapses." Waine quotes, as an example from "Conclusive Evidence":
"I soon became aware that if my views, the not unusual views of Russian
democrats abroad, were received with pained surprise or polite sneers by
English democrats in situ, another group, the English
ultraconservatives, rallied eagerly to my side but did so from such
crude reactionary motivation that I was only embarrassed by their
despicable support. Indeed; I pride myself with having discerned even
then the symptoms of what is so clear today, when a kind of family
circle has gradually been formed, linking representatives of all
nations--jolly Empire-builders in their jungle clearings, the
unmentionable German product, the good old church-going Russian or
Polish pogromshchik, the lean American lyncher, the man with the bad
teeth who squirts anti-minority stories in the bar or the lavatory, and,
at another point of the same sub-human circle, those ruthless,
paste-faced automatons in singularly wide trousers and high-shouldered
coats, those Sitzriesen whom--or shall I say which?--the Soviet State
has brought out on such a scale after thirty years of selective
breeding."
Wain is shocked because he apparently disagrees with Nabokov's ideas
when they show "that people who oppose individual human freedom can be
found at any point on the political spectrum, and that under their
much-advertised differences resemble each other far more than they
resemble the person who respects freedom..." Although he admits that
Nabokov has always been a favorite writer of his, in the long run his
effort "to read a number of his books one after another in preparation
for this article" fatigued him because it felt like he'd been
"exercising one set of muscles while keeping the rest of my body still.
There is too little break to his intolerable deal of sack. The author's
passion for analyzing the minutiae of sensation and emotion will not
allow him to go in a straight line from A to B. In the midst of an
account of his studies at Cambridge, which he was haunted by the fear of losing "the only thing I had
salvaged from Russia--her language," he will break off to describe the
exact process of "drawing" a coal fire with a sheet of newspaper." He
continues (after another long quote from Nabokov's works) that Nabokov's
writing can be superb and unfailingly make him "feel a tingle of
delight. But that tingle, endlessly repeated, becomes a kind of Chinese
torture."
Although Wain says that he doesn't want to present Nabokov as "a mere
aesthetic trifler," as one who "may not be very interested in opinions,"
he concedes that "a strong set of attitudes is clearly visible in his
work, and the fatiguing, cloying flavor of his books is due more to an
over-elaborate surface than to an inner emptiness." For him, like
Nabokov's "real life," lepidoptery and butterflies, Nabokov "cannot fly
in a straight line. A butterfly's purposes are as serious as yours and
mine, but it is condemned to give this impression of frivolity by the
protective wavering of its flight. So with Nabokov. He cannot, under any
circumstances, 'get on'." Wain entertain the fancy that "when Mr.
Nabokov's oeuvre can be seen as a whole, the books of his 'American
period' will prove to have more substance, less of a ghost-like quality,
than his 'European' work. For one thing, America has given Mr. Nabokov a
more stable and workaday life. Academic society may be artificial, but
it can hardly be as artificial as the life of the emigre Russian colony
in Berlin in the twenties, or the more dispersed and etiolated version
of the same life in Paris a decade later."
A curious line on "expatriates" might express irony, but I think Wain is
dead serious when he observes that America's society "is not yet
tightly-woven enough to present a hard, impenetrable surface to the
"foreigner"; even an Englishman can assimilate, and a cosmopolitan
European more easily still."
He quotes Marc Slonim, another emigre in America: ""Nabokov laughs at
the smooth facade of American middle-class gentility which finds
everything perfectly wonderful, at the routine of wonderful. . . He hits
at the monotony and dullness of hotels and motels which encircle the
vast continent, he derides the mixture of puritanism, Freudianism and
shallowness which infects American colleges, and he debunks the big
myths of a commercialized society of sellers, buyers, athletes and
entertainers: the myth of youth which turns into perversion, the myth of
optimism which refuses to face reality, and the myth of quantity which
has drowned the idea of excellence in all areas of human endeavor.
Lolita herself becomes a typical image of the American starlet--a
mixture of external attractiveness and basic vulgarity, of sound
rationality and senseless violence," to emphasize the positive change
life in America has wrought upon the aristocratic Nabokov.
Wain considers "Pnin" as, "perhaps, the most perfect of Nabokov's books"
because it successfully mocks campus life but also creates "an
unforgettable picture of a profound commentary on racial character: an
old-fashioned liberal Russian patiently building a life on the alien
planet of modern America." For him, Pnin is not a satire since he "is
homeless not because America cannot provide homes, but because for him
the very idea of home has vanished--or...the reality to which it
corresponds has been destroyed." Pnin is therefore "absurd, touching
and lovable, while never ceasing to have genuine grandeur."
Wain sees Nabokov as "a dreamy, insubstantial writer, strong on the
psychology of memory, on the less familiar reaches of the emotional
life, and on certain imponderables such as the confrontation of
different temperaments, racial and otherwise" but with the accretion of
another "indeed, blazing-emotion of a straight-forward, non-refined
character" his glowing hatred of tyranny. The reviewer explains his
choice of the word "tyranny," instead of any other "20th century term
such as 'totalitarianism,' because the quality of Nabokov's feeling here
seems to me immemorial, even archaic; as an artist ... he hates the
thought of a world in which the individual is denied the right to live
and develop in his own way." He cites the example of Nabokov's early
short story, Cloud, Castle, Lake (1937) and its hero's despairing
comment: "I shall complain," wailed Vassili Ivanovich. "Give me back my
bag. I have the right to remain where I want. Oh, but this is nothing
less than an invitation to a beheading."
The "phrase forced from Vassili's lips as they drag him away is like a
sign-post pointing backward to the novel, written three or four years
previously. Evidently the theme is one that haunts Nabokov's
imagination, or did until he exorcised it." Wain considers Sirin to have
been a devotee of Kafka and his "literary debt to The Trial and The
Castle." but for him "Invitation to a Beheading is a book that haunts
the memory... In his autobiography, Nabokov calls it 'the most haunting'
of Sirin's books, "which deals with the incarceration of a rebel in a
picture-postcard fortress by the buffoons and bullies of a Communazist
state." He finds an "interesting anticipation of Lolita, in the shape of
Emmie, the daughter of the prison governor, who has exactly that blend
of depravity and genuine childishness." and it is Emmie who "leads
Cincinnatus back to his captivity and execution, just as Lolita pilots
Humbert down into the slough of his neurosis."
Copyright © 2007 The New Republic. All rights reserved.
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/
Nabokov's Beheading by John Wain, The New Republic Published: December
21, 1959
Invitation to a Beheading
By Vladimir Nabokov
Translated by Dmitri Nabokov
In his review John Wain notes that in his autobiography (here under the
title "Conclusive Evidence") Vladimir Nabokov mentions the names of the
emigre Russian writers he knew in Berlin and Paris ( Bunin, Poplavski,
Rodasevich), to call our attention to Nabokov's admission that "the
author that interested me most was naturally Sirin. He belonged to my
generation. Among the young writers produced in exile he turned out to
be the only major one." This most fascinating Russian writer made his
debut in 1925 and, fifteen years later, he "vanished as strangely as he
had come."
Wain handsomely quotes from Nabokov's enthussings: Sirin's "work kept
provoking an acute and rather morbid interest on the part of critics.
Just as Marxist publicists of the eighties in old Russia would have
denounced his' lack of concern with the economic structure of society,
so the mystagogues of emigre letters deplored his lack of religious
insight and of moral preoccupation. Everything about him was bound to
offend Russian conventions and especially that Russian sense of decorum
which, for example, an American shocks so dangerously today, when in the
presence of Soviet military men of distinction he happens to lounge with
both hands in his trouser pockets. Conversely, Sirin's admirers made
much, perhaps too much, of his unusual style, brilliant precision,
functional imagery and that sort of thing. Russian readers who had been
raised on the sturdy straightforwardness of Russian realism and had
called the bluff of decadent cheats, were impressed by the mirror-like
angles of his clear but weirdly misleading sentences and by the fact
that the real life of his books flowed, in his figures of speech, which
one critic has compared to 'windows giving upon a contiguous world . . .
a rolling corollary, the shadow of a train of thought.' 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. His best works are those in which
he condemns his people to the solitary confinement of their souls." Next
he explains that Sirin "is, of course, Nabokov himself in his
Russian-writing days," and that the quoted lines are "typical of the
elaborately joking manner which he likes to assume...and which one
suspects is a very Russian kind of humor which English and American
readers find amusing and irritating in about equal proportions. The
quotation from "a critic" is no doubt all part of the joke, since
"windows giving upon a contiguous world" is exactly the kind of
pretentious phrase, reverberative but totally meaningless, which abounds
in the Higher Reviewing."
John Wain concludes that, behind the banter, "the passage no doubt
represents an attitude which Nabokov seriously holds." He agrees that
both the "Marxist" and non-Marxist critics would judge him frivolous (
for his making light of social causes and ideologies, or for his lack of
religion and moral questioning) expressing his views with an excess of
subjectivity, the "memory" as one of its chief expressions. Wain
adds:"Mr. Nabokov is fascinated by the workings of his own memory, and
thence in the psychology of memory in general. All his books are
punctuated with little vignettes drawn from his recollections of the
sights, sounds and tactile sensations, of those first twenty years, and
some of the "stories" collected in Nabokov's Dozen (1958) are not
stories at all but simply slabs of remembered detail."
In a conversation Wain held with Nabokov, in London, he heard the writer
state that his objets trouves, lying about haphazard in the memory, were
jewels, to be taken out, fondly lingered over before they are returned
to their box. For Wain, in fact, stories like "First Love" are veritable
gems. As also "Mademoioften noticed that after I had bestowed on the characters of my novels
some treasured item of my past, it would pine away in the artificial
world where I had so abruptly placed it. Although it lingered on in my
mind, its personal warmth, its retrospective appeal had gone and,
presently, it became more closely identified with my novel than with my
former self, where it had seemed to be so safe from the intrusion of the
artist. Houses have crumbled in my memory as soundlessly as they did in
the mute films of yore; and the portrait of my old French governess,
whom I once lent to a boy in one of my books, is fading fast, now that
it is engulfed in the description of a childhood entirely unrelated to
my own. The man in me revolts against the fictionists and here is my
desperate, attempt to save what is left of poor Mademoiselle."
Admitting that "once the jewels of memory are cut into the required
shape to fit into an alien pattern...are spoilt." Wain concludes that
this would be the reason that Nabokov, for the last ten years, tried "to
stop his ears against the song of memory and concentrate on the American
present tense of his life, rather than the European past. Pnin and
Lolita are both essentially critiques of American life which, come
naturally from a sensibility nourished in the Old World."
Nabokov's ceaseless care to refine "an absolutely individual style,
which will convey the thousand and one idiosyncratic nuances suggested
by his imagination" will enable him to bring his "linguistic instrument
to the pitch of utter perfection." Wain finds it remarkable that Nabokov
didn't try to develop "a style in which ordinary generalized thought
(political opinions, for instance) can be conveyed. When he modulates
from distilled impressions into the ordinary statement of an opinion,
his writing plummets abruptly from the height of felicity into vagueness
and fumbling....no doubt owing to Nabokov's distaste for anything so
crude, so common, to all men, as political opinions-the prose
collapses." Waine quotes, as an example from "Conclusive Evidence":
"I soon became aware that if my views, the not unusual views of Russian
democrats abroad, were received with pained surprise or polite sneers by
English democrats in situ, another group, the English
ultraconservatives, rallied eagerly to my side but did so from such
crude reactionary motivation that I was only embarrassed by their
despicable support. Indeed; I pride myself with having discerned even
then the symptoms of what is so clear today, when a kind of family
circle has gradually been formed, linking representatives of all
nations--jolly Empire-builders in their jungle clearings, the
unmentionable German product, the good old church-going Russian or
Polish pogromshchik, the lean American lyncher, the man with the bad
teeth who squirts anti-minority stories in the bar or the lavatory, and,
at another point of the same sub-human circle, those ruthless,
paste-faced automatons in singularly wide trousers and high-shouldered
coats, those Sitzriesen whom--or shall I say which?--the Soviet State
has brought out on such a scale after thirty years of selective
breeding."
Wain is shocked because he apparently disagrees with Nabokov's ideas
when they show "that people who oppose individual human freedom can be
found at any point on the political spectrum, and that under their
much-advertised differences resemble each other far more than they
resemble the person who respects freedom..." Although he admits that
Nabokov has always been a favorite writer of his, in the long run his
effort "to read a number of his books one after another in preparation
for this article" fatigued him because it felt like he'd been
"exercising one set of muscles while keeping the rest of my body still.
There is too little break to his intolerable deal of sack. The author's
passion for analyzing the minutiae of sensation and emotion will not
allow him to go in a straight line from A to B. In the midst of an
account of his studies at Cambridge, which he was haunted by the fear of losing "the only thing I had
salvaged from Russia--her language," he will break off to describe the
exact process of "drawing" a coal fire with a sheet of newspaper." He
continues (after another long quote from Nabokov's works) that Nabokov's
writing can be superb and unfailingly make him "feel a tingle of
delight. But that tingle, endlessly repeated, becomes a kind of Chinese
torture."
Although Wain says that he doesn't want to present Nabokov as "a mere
aesthetic trifler," as one who "may not be very interested in opinions,"
he concedes that "a strong set of attitudes is clearly visible in his
work, and the fatiguing, cloying flavor of his books is due more to an
over-elaborate surface than to an inner emptiness." For him, like
Nabokov's "real life," lepidoptery and butterflies, Nabokov "cannot fly
in a straight line. A butterfly's purposes are as serious as yours and
mine, but it is condemned to give this impression of frivolity by the
protective wavering of its flight. So with Nabokov. He cannot, under any
circumstances, 'get on'." Wain entertain the fancy that "when Mr.
Nabokov's oeuvre can be seen as a whole, the books of his 'American
period' will prove to have more substance, less of a ghost-like quality,
than his 'European' work. For one thing, America has given Mr. Nabokov a
more stable and workaday life. Academic society may be artificial, but
it can hardly be as artificial as the life of the emigre Russian colony
in Berlin in the twenties, or the more dispersed and etiolated version
of the same life in Paris a decade later."
A curious line on "expatriates" might express irony, but I think Wain is
dead serious when he observes that America's society "is not yet
tightly-woven enough to present a hard, impenetrable surface to the
"foreigner"; even an Englishman can assimilate, and a cosmopolitan
European more easily still."
He quotes Marc Slonim, another emigre in America: ""Nabokov laughs at
the smooth facade of American middle-class gentility which finds
everything perfectly wonderful, at the routine of wonderful. . . He hits
at the monotony and dullness of hotels and motels which encircle the
vast continent, he derides the mixture of puritanism, Freudianism and
shallowness which infects American colleges, and he debunks the big
myths of a commercialized society of sellers, buyers, athletes and
entertainers: the myth of youth which turns into perversion, the myth of
optimism which refuses to face reality, and the myth of quantity which
has drowned the idea of excellence in all areas of human endeavor.
Lolita herself becomes a typical image of the American starlet--a
mixture of external attractiveness and basic vulgarity, of sound
rationality and senseless violence," to emphasize the positive change
life in America has wrought upon the aristocratic Nabokov.
Wain considers "Pnin" as, "perhaps, the most perfect of Nabokov's books"
because it successfully mocks campus life but also creates "an
unforgettable picture of a profound commentary on racial character: an
old-fashioned liberal Russian patiently building a life on the alien
planet of modern America." For him, Pnin is not a satire since he "is
homeless not because America cannot provide homes, but because for him
the very idea of home has vanished--or...the reality to which it
corresponds has been destroyed." Pnin is therefore "absurd, touching
and lovable, while never ceasing to have genuine grandeur."
Wain sees Nabokov as "a dreamy, insubstantial writer, strong on the
psychology of memory, on the less familiar reaches of the emotional
life, and on certain imponderables such as the confrontation of
different temperaments, racial and otherwise" but with the accretion of
another "indeed, blazing-emotion of a straight-forward, non-refined
character" his glowing hatred of tyranny. The reviewer explains his
choice of the word "tyranny," instead of any other "20th century term
such as 'totalitarianism,' because the quality of Nabokov's feeling here
seems to me immemorial, even archaic; as an artist ... he hates the
thought of a world in which the individual is denied the right to live
and develop in his own way." He cites the example of Nabokov's early
short story, Cloud, Castle, Lake (1937) and its hero's despairing
comment: "I shall complain," wailed Vassili Ivanovich. "Give me back my
bag. I have the right to remain where I want. Oh, but this is nothing
less than an invitation to a beheading."
The "phrase forced from Vassili's lips as they drag him away is like a
sign-post pointing backward to the novel, written three or four years
previously. Evidently the theme is one that haunts Nabokov's
imagination, or did until he exorcised it." Wain considers Sirin to have
been a devotee of Kafka and his "literary debt to The Trial and The
Castle." but for him "Invitation to a Beheading is a book that haunts
the memory... In his autobiography, Nabokov calls it 'the most haunting'
of Sirin's books, "which deals with the incarceration of a rebel in a
picture-postcard fortress by the buffoons and bullies of a Communazist
state." He finds an "interesting anticipation of Lolita, in the shape of
Emmie, the daughter of the prison governor, who has exactly that blend
of depravity and genuine childishness." and it is Emmie who "leads
Cincinnatus back to his captivity and execution, just as Lolita pilots
Humbert down into the slough of his neurosis."
Copyright © 2007 The New Republic. All rights reserved.
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/