In one of the latest video presentations in which Vladimir Nabokov is being
interviewed he mumbles, with a lowered head: "I'll not surrender." I found
a printed interview for BBC, in 1962, (SO,Vintage, p.9/10) where VN replies to
"Would you ever go back to Russia?" saying that he "will never go back, for the simple reason that all the Russia I
need is always with me: literature, language, and my own Russian
childhood. I will never return. I will never
surrender..." VN gives us to understand that he
cannot become an exile since he carries the artist's passport and
that his native country is a state of mind. In this context, what does
it mean "I'll not surrender"?
I found one of VN's very clever comments about Ilf and
Petrov (SO,pg87/88): "Ilf and Petrov, two
wonderfully gifted writers, decided that if they had a rascal adventurer as
protagonist, whatever they wrote about his adventures could not be criticized
from a political point of view, since a perfect rascal, or a madman or a
delinquent or any person who was outside Soviet society - in other words, any
picaresque character - could not be accused either of being a bad Communist or
not being a good Communist. Thus Ilf and Petrov, Zoshchenko, and Olesha managed
to publish some absolutely first-rate fiction under that standard of complete
independence, since these characters, plots, and themes could not be treated as
political ones. Until the early thirties they managed to get away with it. The
Poet had a parallel system. They thought , and they were fight at first, that if
they stuck to the garden - to pure poetry, to lyrical imitations, say, of gypsy
songs, such as Ilya Selvinski's - that then they were safe. Zabolotski
found a third method of writing, as if the 'I' of the poem were a perfect
imbecile, crooning in a dream, distorting words, playing with words as a
half-insane person would..."
In his next answer to the same interviewers, he expands on his
six Russian plays and about "The Exploit" in particular. His summary
reminded me of the adventures of Ganin in the 1930/32 "Glory,"
and even the later fantastic "The Visit to the Museum" (1938).
His
closing lines about his play mention how the character "a lover of adventure for adventure's sake...for the pure thrill of
it decides one day to cross illegally into Soviet Russia, and then cross back to
exile. Its mains theme is the overcoming of fear, the glory* and rapture of that
victory."
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* In the same 2008 issue of The Nabokovian (n.61)
carrying Rachel Trousdale interpetation of Ada's reference
to Manfield Garden, there's an interesting discussion about
translation (by another poet or by the autor-poet) and Nabokov's variations
on "Glory" and "Fame" (Cf. "A Note on the Translation of Nabokov's 'Slava'
" by Matthew Walker.)