Subject
Speak, Nabokov ...
From
Date
Body
Issue #1373 (37), Friday, May 16, 2008
http://www.times.spb.ru/index.php?action_id=2&story_id=26007
Speak, Nabokov
Can Vladimir Nabokov guide Russia toward a better future?
By James Marson
Staff Writer
For The St. Petersburg Times
The Russian-American writer Vladimir Nabokov, whose life and work offers Nina Khrushcheva a way out of Russia's cultural impasse in her new book, which mixes literary criticism, biography, personal memoir and an imagined conversation with the writer.
In 1956, Nikita Khrushchev famously told the West, “We will bury you.” Over 50 years later, in her new book “Imagining Nabokov,” titled “V Gostyakh U Nabokova” in Russian, his great-granddaughter, Nina Khrushcheva, suggests that Russians need to bury the centuries-old myth of their own uniqueness.
“Russians need to stop being obsessed with being so overwhelmingly Russian,” Khrushcheva said in a telephone interview from New York last week. “Russia is a Western country, but it is afraid to be one.”
The idea that Russia has a special messianic status has pervaded the country’s culture for centuries, from the notion of Moscow as the Third Rome to Russian imperialism. “You can’t understand Russia with the mind,” wrote the 19th-century poet Fyodor Tyutchev. “You can only believe in Russia.”
This belief in the greatness of the Russian soul, Khrushcheva argues, is simply smoke and mirrors used to excuse the country’s backwardness. Russians prefer to fall back on this dreamy myth rather than take responsibility for their own lives. Rational individualism has never taken hold with Russians, and it is instead external forces such as fate and the state that provide meaning to their lives. Living in an idealized, poetic world — “a childish Russian paradise” — they are unable and unwilling to engage in practical activity.
The Russian-American novelist Vladimir Nabokov, Khrushcheva writes, offers a way out of this backward state through the example of his own life and his characters. As a member of a wealthy family, he went into exile after the Revolution. His past and country destroyed, Nabokov was forced to rely on himself and create his own meaning for his life.
The book mixes literary criticism with biography, personal memoir and an imagined conversation with the writer in Switzerland. It is filled with copious quotations, and Khrushcheva seems determined to let Nabokov speak for himself. “The genre is not important,” she said. “I hope I somehow touched something in Nabokov’s universe.”
Khrushcheva’s reading of Nabokov comes through her personal story, which she compares to that of the writer. She left Russia in 1991 and enrolled in graduate school at Princeton University. “It was an exciting time,” she remembered. “It was like another universe that was not supposed to be open, especially to a Khrushchev.” It was Nabokov who helped her escape from “the vast undifferentiated Russian collective” and adapt to the new world by taking responsibility for her actions, much like a character in one of his novels.
For Khrushcheva, Nabokov represents “the next step after Chekhov in Russian literature, its Westernization and rationalization.” Wallowing in a dreamy, poetic world, blaming fate for their problems, the characters of Russian literature, from Dostoevsky to Chekhov, are defined by their pensiveness and suffering. Nabokov, however, placed his heroes in “normal” life. “[He] forced them to live as people live from day to day ... refusing to perceive suffering as a sign of great spiritual depth.”
Khrushcheva contrasts Western and Russian attitudes to happiness. “In the West, happiness ... is not the passive patience of Russian literature, but Western perseverance. Happiness in an evolutionary striving forward, and you have to gain it and create it yourself.”
The book, which was published under the title “Imagining Nabokov. Russia Between Art and Politics,” met with a series of positive reviews on its U.S. release in November. In Russia, where a translation was published last month, her views on Nabokov have been received with a mixture of hostility and puzzlement.
“When I spoke in St. Petersburg in 2006,” Khrushcheva said, “I was almost shouted off the stage.” People were asking who she, someone living in the United States, was to comment on Russia. Furthermore, Russians are used to reading Nabokov as an apolitical author, she said. “His dissidence was an escape to another, pure universe and people didn’t like my attempt to interpret him politically.”
At a recent book presentation in Moscow, the reaction was more one of confusion. “The first question was, ‘What is happiness?’” she said. “This just wouldn’t happen in the United States. Sometimes we are unhappy and life stinks, but the American attitude is, ‘OK, moving on now.’ It’s not that they’re shallow — they just don’t need to think about these things 24 hours a day.”
There are differences between the Russian and the English versions, Khrushcheva said. “The English version reads more like a story. In Russia it is more of a message. I tell things as they are, and people can decide for themselves whether to listen or not.” One chapter in the Russian version emphasizing the difference between patience and perseverance was not included in the U.S. version. “To Americans, this idea is obvious,” she said. “But not to Russians.”
Khrushcheva fell in love with New York, where she now teaches international affairs at the New School. Like Nabokov, she believes that she has remained a Russian, but has become a Westerner at the same time. “I am as Russian as they come,” she said. “But I am also as New York as they come.”
This political argument is at the center of her book: Russia does not need to become American, but to combine its Russianness with aspects from other countries. “Russians don’t need to give up their Russianness, so much as give up the totality of their Russianness.”
Khrushcheva’s idea is certainly not new. In the 1830s and 1840s, two groups of philosophers clashed over Russia’s future. The Westerners argued against the nationalist Slavophiles — propagators of the idea of Russian uniqueness — that rational individualism offered the best way forward.
But the individualism of these great thinkers, such as Alexander Herzen and Vissarion Belinsky, had limited resonance with the Russian population. And this is the main problem with Khrushcheva’s idea — How can it be transmitted to Russian people?
Nabokov wrote, “I am the perfect dictator in that private world insofar as I alone am responsible for its stability and truth.” But he was a strong spirit, a man who refused to bow to the blows of chance and external forces. Khrushcheva herself notes, “It is hard just to live for yourself when life itself seems to have turned away from you.” To escape from the comforting support of a national idea and to take responsibility for oneself is not an easy task, and Nabokov and Khrushcheva both had to move abroad to achieve it. But Khrushcheva is encouraged by Russians’ love of reading and their veneration of writers, and she hopes that this enthusiasm can be harnessed for Nabokov. In 2001, she spent a semester at MGU teaching a course on Nabokov. “The students understood the message,” she said. “They themselves said we need to learn from Nabokov.”
If the philosophical idea at the center of Khrushcheva’s work is not strikingly original, the approach to it through Nabokov certainly is, and the text is refreshing in its avoidance of the didacticism and dryness of a political or philosophical tract. And its publication is certainly timely, as Russians continue to search for a way to reconcile their own history with the possibilities of democracy. “Around 20 years ago, communist commonality was replaced by democratic individualism,” she writes. “Now the time has come to turn away from Dostoevsky to new examples to follow and new authors to canonize.”
“Imagining Nabokov” is published in Russian as “V Gostyakh U Nabokova” by Vremya.
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/