Subject
Nabokov & the Gulag
From
Date
Body
EDITOR's NOTE: Leona Toker (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem), author
of NABOKOV: THE MYSTERY OF LITERARY STRUCTURES (Cornell, 1989) is the
leading Israeli Nabokov specialist. Indiana University Press has just
published her new book _Return from the Archipelago: Narratives of Gulag
Survivors_." Below is an extract from a long note entitled "Nabokov and
the Gulag." The full note text will appear in the "Notes and Queries"
section of the next issue of "The Nabokovian.
-------------------------------
Leona Toker <toker@h2.hum.huji.ac.il>
Nabokov and the Gulag (extract)
In Chapter 4 of Speak, Memory, Nabokov recollects "kerchiefed peasant
girls weeding a garden path on their hands and knees or gently raking
the sun-mottled sand" as seen through the window of his schoolroom in
Vyra. In the Russian version, Drugie berega, instead of the local-color
pastoral "kerchiefed peasant girls," we find the more neutral "female
day laborers" (podenshchitsy). In both versions, however, this is
followed by a note that preempts or parries his readers' potential
resentment of his family's leisure-class "exploiter" status: Nabokov
reminds us, in parenthesis, that "the happy days when [these girls]
would be cleaning streets and digging canals for the State were still
beyond the horizon." Here the reference is to forced labor which, since
the late twenties, was associated with practically lethal imprisonment,
in, for instance, the region of the White-Sea Baltic Canal constructed
in 1931-33 and later in the sites of the Moscow-Volga and Volga-Don
canals. In the Russian version, the reference takes a briefer
word-to-the-wise shape: "this is still long before the digging of state
canals" ("do rytia gosudarstvennykh kanalov esche daleko"). Some of the
Nabokovs' paid day laborers were, no doubt, destined to turn into
convict-slaves (especially since the construction of the first of the
canals by convict labor began soon after the start of the forced
collectivization of agriculture).
The first section of Chapter 6 of Speak, Memory contains the famous
passage about a rare Swallowtail, who survived "domestic naphtalene"
overnight in the wardrobe yet, "with a mighty rustle" flew out of the
imprisoning wardrobe when its door was opened in the morning,
Then made for the open window, and presently was but a golden fleck
dipping and dodging and soaring eastward, over timber and tundra, to
Vologda, Viatka and Perm, and beyond the gaunt Ural range to Yakutsk and
Verkhne Kolymsk, and from Verkhne Kolymsk, where it lost a tail, to the
fair Island of St. Lawrence, and across Alaska to Dawson ┘ to be finally
overtaken and captured, after a forty-year race, on an immigrant
dendelion under an endemic aspen near Boulder.
All the Soviet locations mentioned in this passage would eventually
become centers of the concentration-camp empire, where Nabokov might
have followed the Swallowtail had he failed to emigrate. Not
accidentally, it is in Kolyma, the region of the grimmest of those camp
clusters, that Nabokov imagines the butterfly to have lost a tail. One
of the reasons why the island of St. Lawrence is imagined as "fair" may
lie in that it is beyond the borders of the Soviet empire.
In Nabokov's earlier work, Invitation to a Beheading, the authorities'
demand that the prisoner collaborate with his executioners is clearly
reminiscent of Stalin's Grand Charades-the show trials where the accused
were made to "confess," heap accusations on themselves and their
associates, and express the willingness to suffer the consequences or
make pleas for mercy. Cincinnatus's prison is described as "hastily
assembled." This is most usually read as a self-reflexive remark: the
author's imagination is unwilling to compete with that of the more
thorough prison-builders in the extratextual world. Yet the
metadescriptive epithet may also reflect Nabokov's awareness of the
deceptively makeshift appearance of the early Soviet concentration
camps. The cheapness and ramshackle character of the barrack-type
facilites at first seemed to signal that the camps were but a temporary
measure of the transitional period. However, the very same features-the
cheapness and the neglect of the prisoners' physical needs-actually
turned out to be conducive to the proliferation of the camps and to
their harshness as punitive institutions.
In Nabokov's Bend Sinister, often viewed as a companion-piece to
Invitation to a Beheading, Krug's painter neighbors have been deported
(as befits artists in a dystopian state ever since Plato's Republic) to
a remote prison camp-a collective allusion to both the Nazi Lagers and
the Soviet forced-labor facilities. Yet Ember's complaint about prison
latrines echoes the records of the similar indignity in memoirs of
sundry veterans of Soviet prisons and camps. The erstwhile Ministry of
Justice (cf. "The Ministry of Love" in Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four)
has been transformed into a hotel. This is not only a sign of the
absence of justice in Paduk's state but also a satirical mirror-reversal
of the transformation of a comfortable hotel that an insurance agency
used to run on Moscow's Lubianskaya square into the central torture
prison of the Soviet secret police, the notorious "Lubianka."
of NABOKOV: THE MYSTERY OF LITERARY STRUCTURES (Cornell, 1989) is the
leading Israeli Nabokov specialist. Indiana University Press has just
published her new book _Return from the Archipelago: Narratives of Gulag
Survivors_." Below is an extract from a long note entitled "Nabokov and
the Gulag." The full note text will appear in the "Notes and Queries"
section of the next issue of "The Nabokovian.
-------------------------------
Leona Toker <toker@h2.hum.huji.ac.il>
Nabokov and the Gulag (extract)
In Chapter 4 of Speak, Memory, Nabokov recollects "kerchiefed peasant
girls weeding a garden path on their hands and knees or gently raking
the sun-mottled sand" as seen through the window of his schoolroom in
Vyra. In the Russian version, Drugie berega, instead of the local-color
pastoral "kerchiefed peasant girls," we find the more neutral "female
day laborers" (podenshchitsy). In both versions, however, this is
followed by a note that preempts or parries his readers' potential
resentment of his family's leisure-class "exploiter" status: Nabokov
reminds us, in parenthesis, that "the happy days when [these girls]
would be cleaning streets and digging canals for the State were still
beyond the horizon." Here the reference is to forced labor which, since
the late twenties, was associated with practically lethal imprisonment,
in, for instance, the region of the White-Sea Baltic Canal constructed
in 1931-33 and later in the sites of the Moscow-Volga and Volga-Don
canals. In the Russian version, the reference takes a briefer
word-to-the-wise shape: "this is still long before the digging of state
canals" ("do rytia gosudarstvennykh kanalov esche daleko"). Some of the
Nabokovs' paid day laborers were, no doubt, destined to turn into
convict-slaves (especially since the construction of the first of the
canals by convict labor began soon after the start of the forced
collectivization of agriculture).
The first section of Chapter 6 of Speak, Memory contains the famous
passage about a rare Swallowtail, who survived "domestic naphtalene"
overnight in the wardrobe yet, "with a mighty rustle" flew out of the
imprisoning wardrobe when its door was opened in the morning,
Then made for the open window, and presently was but a golden fleck
dipping and dodging and soaring eastward, over timber and tundra, to
Vologda, Viatka and Perm, and beyond the gaunt Ural range to Yakutsk and
Verkhne Kolymsk, and from Verkhne Kolymsk, where it lost a tail, to the
fair Island of St. Lawrence, and across Alaska to Dawson ┘ to be finally
overtaken and captured, after a forty-year race, on an immigrant
dendelion under an endemic aspen near Boulder.
All the Soviet locations mentioned in this passage would eventually
become centers of the concentration-camp empire, where Nabokov might
have followed the Swallowtail had he failed to emigrate. Not
accidentally, it is in Kolyma, the region of the grimmest of those camp
clusters, that Nabokov imagines the butterfly to have lost a tail. One
of the reasons why the island of St. Lawrence is imagined as "fair" may
lie in that it is beyond the borders of the Soviet empire.
In Nabokov's earlier work, Invitation to a Beheading, the authorities'
demand that the prisoner collaborate with his executioners is clearly
reminiscent of Stalin's Grand Charades-the show trials where the accused
were made to "confess," heap accusations on themselves and their
associates, and express the willingness to suffer the consequences or
make pleas for mercy. Cincinnatus's prison is described as "hastily
assembled." This is most usually read as a self-reflexive remark: the
author's imagination is unwilling to compete with that of the more
thorough prison-builders in the extratextual world. Yet the
metadescriptive epithet may also reflect Nabokov's awareness of the
deceptively makeshift appearance of the early Soviet concentration
camps. The cheapness and ramshackle character of the barrack-type
facilites at first seemed to signal that the camps were but a temporary
measure of the transitional period. However, the very same features-the
cheapness and the neglect of the prisoners' physical needs-actually
turned out to be conducive to the proliferation of the camps and to
their harshness as punitive institutions.
In Nabokov's Bend Sinister, often viewed as a companion-piece to
Invitation to a Beheading, Krug's painter neighbors have been deported
(as befits artists in a dystopian state ever since Plato's Republic) to
a remote prison camp-a collective allusion to both the Nazi Lagers and
the Soviet forced-labor facilities. Yet Ember's complaint about prison
latrines echoes the records of the similar indignity in memoirs of
sundry veterans of Soviet prisons and camps. The erstwhile Ministry of
Justice (cf. "The Ministry of Love" in Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four)
has been transformed into a hotel. This is not only a sign of the
absence of justice in Paduk's state but also a satirical mirror-reversal
of the transformation of a comfortable hotel that an insurance agency
used to run on Moscow's Lubianskaya square into the central torture
prison of the Soviet secret police, the notorious "Lubianka."