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 "Mademoiselle O," whose inital lines he quotes: "I have often 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, in those first years of exile in 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."
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