Download PDF of Number 72 (Spring 2014) The Nabokovian.
THE NABOKOVIAN
Number 72 Spring 2014
CONTENTS
News 3
by Stephen H. Blackwell
Notes and Brief Commentaries 4
by Priscilla Meyer
Pale Fire’s “The Land Beyond the Veil” 4
and The Aeneid’s “The Land Which Earth Conceals”
Gerard de Vries
Morris Bishop, His Wife, and the Mural in Pnin 12
Priscilla Meyer
Pnin’s Cinderella: His History 15
Gerry Cahill
Solving “Signs and Symbols” 20
Frances Peltz Assa
Annotations to Ada, 38: Part 1 Chapter 38 (Part 2) 26
by Brian Boyd
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News
This is a year of transition for the society in several ways. Stephen Jan Parker, to whom both of this year’s issues are dedicated, stepped down from editing The Nabokovian, which he created thirty-five years ago, originally as the Vladimir Nabokov Research Newsletter. This modest publication has been the venue for more than its share of remarkable discoveries, and Nabokovians everywhere owe Steve a debt of gratitude for making their appearance possible. I’m very thankful to Steve for the generous and helpful reception he gave me when I went to Lawrence to be instructed on how to manage the Society’s affairs for the year.
In January, Leland de la Durantaye took on the presidency, and Zoran Kuzmanovich was appointed vice-president by general acclamation, in a one-time delay of the usual alternation between English- and Slavic-studies-based scholars. Zoran has undertaken to coordinate the creation of a new Society web site that will have many members-only features, including a concordance as well as old issues of The Nabokovian. He also continues to edit Nabokov Studies, which is now published exclusively in electronic format via ProjectMUSE. Jeff Edmunds has ceased updating the ZEMBLA web site, which no longer seeks member donations (though the Society does seek them!).
Other transitions are afoot: as readers of Nabokv-L will know, the society’s Board voted to discontinue print publication of the journal after this year, with electronic publication as part of the web site still under debate. Print-on-demand may be an option, if demand exists. Either way, this year will mark the launch of the new web site, which will take the Society into a new era of information publication and sharing. The not-yet-active domain will be: www.nabokovsociety.org.
Membership has reversed its decline, and as of this writing there are 101 Society members, as well as 83 institutional subscribers.
Other News: Letters to Véra, ed. and trans. by Olga Voronina and Brian Boyd (with help from Gennady Barabtarlo) will be published by Penguin and Knopf on September 3rd. Fine Lines: Nabokov’s Scientific Art (edited by me and Kurt Johnson), a collection of about 150 of Nabokov’s scientific drawings, along with several scholarly essays, has been delayed and will be published by Yale UP next spring.
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Thanks are due to Margaretta Jolly and Jillian Piccirrilli for providing and allowing publication of the images accompanying Priscilla Meyer’s Note.
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Notes and Brief Commentaries
By Priscilla Meyer
Submissions, in English, should be forwarded to Priscilla Meyer at pmeyer@wesleyan.edu. Please send attachments in .doc or .docx format. All contributors must be current members of the Nabokov Society. Deadlines are April 1 and October 1 respectively for the Spring and Fall issues. Notes will be sent, anonymously, to a reader for review. If accepted for publication, some slight editorial alterations may be made. References to Nabokov's English or Englished works should be made either to the first American (or British) edition or to the Vintage collected series. All Russian quotations must be transliterated and translated. Please observe the style (footnotes incorporated within the text, American punctuation, single space after periods, signature: name, place, etc.) used in this section.
Pale Fire’s “The Land Beyond the Veil” and The Aeneid’s “The Land Which Earth Conceals”
I
The many allusions in Nabokov’s prose deserve much attention and increasingly so when his imagery looks unsuspicious. Usually one follows an interpretive guidance for approaching his rich textual adornments. But in the present case the coherence of some allusions is so dominant that it makes sense to start with their identification before formulating an hypothesis regarding how their meaning fit into the whole.
When John Shade has finished his poem, the reader is informed in great detail about what happened during the very last minutes of his life. He sees “[p]art of [Sybil’s] shadow near the shagbark tree;” “a dark Vanessa … that [w]heels in the low sun” and “the flowing” and “ebbing” of shade and light. He hears that “somewhere horseshoes are being tossed, Click. Clink” and most likely he hears also “the ecstatic barking” of a dog, mentioned by Kinbote.
Invited by Kinbote to join him for dinner, Shade “descended” and starts “crossing” the lane that is filled with the tidal flow of light and shade. All these particulars—Sybil, the (shag)bark, the butterfly, the
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water that lends its movements to the lights in the lane, the descent, the crossing, and the barking dog—recall Aeneas’ descent into the “Underworld” as described by Virgil in “Book VI” of The Aeneid. In fact, all these images but one (the butterfly) appear in lines 400-415 of this “Book” (The Aeneid. Trans. C. Day Lewis, Oxford: OUP, 1986, 169). In the preceding “Book” Aeneas is urgently requested by his dead father, who speaks to him in “a vision,” to come and see him in Elysium, green pastures watered by the Lethe, where he “dwell[s]” among the “Blessed” (147-48). Aeneas is then brought to the shore of Cumae by his comrades, where he meets the “holy Sibyl, Foreseer of future things.” Together they proceed until they arrive at the banks of the Styx and hear Cerberus, the watch-dog on the other side of the river, barking loudly and scaring Charon, “the ferryman,” who refuses to convey a living man. But upon Sibyl’s showing him “the golden bough,” he complies and they safely cross the river. After drugging the dog, they continue and Aeneas sees numerous dead souls, many old acquaintances among them (164). Finally they reach the “green valley” where the “souls who are destined for Reincarnation” live (179, 181). Here they meet Aeneas’ father who explains that the cosmos can exist because “immanent Mind, flowing/ Through all its parts and leavening its mass, make the universe work” (181). This is comparable to Kinbote’s dictum that “somehow Mind is involved as a main factor in the making of the universe” (227).
The horseshoes might refer to the “horse’s hoof” which, in Greek mythology, is a “proof against the poisonous water” of the Styx (Robert Graves. The White Goddess. London: Faber and Faber, 1986, 368). (Actually it was the Nabokovs who caused the metallic melodies by pitching horseshoes—see Stacy Schiff, Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov. [New York: Random House, 1999, 217].)
The Cumae Sibyl used to write her oracles on leaves, but Aeneas asks her “to speak them aloud,” “[l]est they become the sport of whisking winds and are scattered” (157). “[I]f perchance at the opening of the door the wind rushed in and dispersed the leaves … the oracle was irreparably lost,” writes Thomas Bulfinch (The Golden Age of Myth and Legend. Ware: Wordsworth Editions, 1994, 336). This is probably the reason why Sybil Shade “hated the wind” (90). (The Cumae Sibyl is one of the many sibyls, “women who acted as mouthpieces of the ancient miracles.” From the 12th C. onwards the name was used as a given name, of which Sybil is a “misspelling,” “common to the present
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day.” [E.G. Withycombe, The Oxford Dictionary of English Christian Names. Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1946, 118].)
Shade has his last vision of his wife when she is near the shagbark tree, a nut-tree, also called hickory (or shagbark hickory). This tree’s Latin name is Carya ovata, after Carya, venerated by the ancient Greeks as goddess of nut-trees (Robert Graves, The Greek Myths. London: Penguin Books, 1992, 289), just as Sybil Shade is “worshipped” by her husband (42). And the shagbark points to Charon’s ferry, a “bark” as it is called in The Gift (75).
Aeneas is successful in seeing the soul of his father, and Shade sees a “dark Vanessa,” which represents, as Brian Boyd has persuasively argued, the soul of Shade’s deceased daughter Hazel (Nabokov’s Pale Fire. The Magic of Artistic Discovery. Princeton: PUP, 1999, 129-145). The mythological rendering of souls as winged apparitions (like bats, birds and butterflies) is discussed in detail by Emily Vermeule (Aspects of Death in Early Greek Art and Poetry. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981). The first “psyche,” Greek for “soul,” shown as a winged image, she has found on one of the “big Tanagra coffins” (65). In a variant, “discovered” by Kinbote, Shade asks where the dead abide or whether they perish like “Tanagra dust” (231).
Aeneas’ descent into the Underworld is regarded as “the keystone of the whole poem” and the “symbol of the golden bough” as “the supreme motif of the story” as it represents “the power of poetic faith and vision” (Maud Bodkin, Archetypal Patterns in Poetry. London: OUP, 1974, 123;133;136). In The Golden Bough, a vast anthropological study, dating from the 19th C., showing how the sciences supersede magic cults and religious beliefs, James Frazer argues that the Golden Bough is a mistletoe. At the same time he gives the main reason why it is not, as “Virgil does not identify but only compares it with a mistletoe” (703 of the 1922 edition, abridged by the author, Ware: Wordsworth Editions, 1993). From a botanic point of view, Nabokov offers a better alternative. Virgil emphasizes thrice that the bough is a golden one, because its leaves have the colour of this metal (lines 137, 144, 208). Although it is not the shagbark which provides this bough, it is this tree, the hickory, that does direct the way. In Shade’s poem the shagbark is associated (in line 49 and line 990) with the deceased Hazel and with Sybil, while Kinbote in his commentary to lines 49 and 90-93 connects this tree with ancient Greece (with “Hebe,” Zeus’ cup-bearer [line 49], and with a “sarcophagus,” a coffin [line 90-93]). Virgil calls his bough with the golden leaves “sacred” (159), and Nabokov’s (or Shade’s)
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golden leaves also belong to a “Sacred Tree” as this is the title of a poem from which Kinbote quotes a quatrain:
The ginkgo leaf, in golden hue, when shed,
A muscat grape,
Is an old-fashioned butterfly, ill-spread,
In shape.
A ginkgo tree is not, like Virgil’s bough, a parasite, and it was non-existent in Europe in Virgil’s time. But the autumnal color of its leaves (that is, after the tree has shed its nuts) are distinctly bright yellow. And it offers a likeness with a butterfly (see Brian Boyd, “Notes.” Novels 1955-1962 by Vladimir Nabokov, Library of America, 1996, 894).
Virgil compares the leaves of the Golden Bough with “gold-foil” which “rustle[s]” in a “gentle wind” (159; 162). Another translator, J. W Mackail, renders this as “the foil tinkled in the light breeze” (Virgil’s Works. New York: The Modern Library, 1934, 109). This image brings to mind “the glitter and rattle of the so-called feuilles-d’alarme” and “the flashing in tinfoil scares” in Pale Fire (152; 201). On the same hillside where these tinfoil scares produce their “antiphonal” chants, the “Clink and tinkle of distant masonry work” is heard, while a “heraldic butterfly” presents itself, a setting so very similar to that of Shade’s last minutes (although the “train” is replaced by “trucks”) that one seems to be invited to recollect this tinfoil when reading that scene, thus completing the Aeneid-like context with the (leaves of the) golden bough (202; 293. The “heraldic” butterfly is a Vanessa atalanta, see Dieter E. Zimmer, A Guide to Nabokov’s Butterflies and Moths 2001, 275).
No less than Shade’s death does King Charles’s flight through the secret passage evoke burial rites in ancient Greece. He passes a statue of “Mercury, conductor of the souls to the Lower World” and a “sick bat” (133). Mercury is the Latin name of the Greek god Hermes. When at the very end of Homer’s Odyssey, Penelope’s suitors are killed, their souls, “squeaking like bats” are led by Hermes “down the dark paths of decay” (Trans E. V. Rieu. London: Penguin Books, 1991, 355). The impression the king gets of “an Egyptian child’s tame gazelle” brings to mind the “bulls and deer and goats… protected in rustic sanctuaries” depicted on Greek coffins. The adjective “Egyptian” refers to the influence of Egypt, as it “had the grandest, most monumental, and most detailed funerary traditions of the ancient world” (Vermeule 66 and 69). The playing of
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board games is such an “Egyptian theme converted to a Greek funerary imagery” and the “krater with two black figures shown dicing” that King Charles sees is very similar to the picture on an Attic amphora that is reproduced by Vermeule ( although the “palm” is missing) (see Vermeule 77 and fig. 35). Why is King Charles’ dash for freedom presented with so many sepulchral tokens? It seems as if the king fears that once he is expelled, he is doomed to expire.
Exile presented as a passing away is also the subject of the closing passages of the first Chapter of The Gift. The Sibyl’s Golden Bough is here a minatory “crooked bough” which “looms near the ferry” pushed by “Charon with his boathook” (75). These quoted phrases are spoken by Koncheyev, when he joins Fyodor in finishing a poem. This poem germinates from Fyodor’s musings while he is buying shoes. Then he grows aware that it is “in his feet that he had the feeling of Russia.” In the shop his feet are X-rayed and Fyodor sees its phalanges: “[w]ith this, with this I’ll step ashore. From Charon’s ferry” (64). The morbid turn Koncheyev gives to Fyodor’s lines is not at all what he has been dreaming of and he cancels the poetical trip: “Homeward, homeward!”
It can be concluded that the image of the “descent into the Underworld,” as employed in ancient times, is used twice in Pale Fire: as a sub-text for King Charles’ exile, and as an analogue for Shade’s departure from earthly life. The antidote seems in both cases identical as well: to retrieve or to retain what one fears will be lost—the remembrances of the life one had in the past. To Kinbote exile seems disastrous unless he will be successful in his endeavours to revive his lost kingdom in Shade’s art. And Shade “turn[s] down eternity unless” the richness of earthly life, “stored in the stronghold through the years,” can be recollected in “Heaven” (53).
The paradoxical pairing of parting and perpetuation is beautifully expressed in the image of the “wheelbarrow” in Shade’s poem, line 999. In The Gift this vehicle is more simply called a “barrow” (359). The two meanings of “barrow,” corresponding with two different etymological origins, covers the two aspects of a farewell discussed here: the ending and the continuation of (part of) one’s life with what one has been able to take along. “Barrow,” as derived from the Old English “beorg” (the German “berg” [mountain]), means “tumulus,” “hill” or “grave-mound.” “Barrow,” as derived from the Old Teutonic “beran,” meaning “bear,” is the equivalent of the “wheelbarrow.” (The Concise Oxford Dictionary. Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1929. The 10th Merriam-Webster’s
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Collegiate Dictionary elaborates on the first “barrow:” “a large mound of earth…over the remains of the dead.”)
The first time Nabokov uses this motif is in King, Queen, Knave at what might be called the turning point of the protagonists’ lives: Martha’s discovery of her doomed desire for Franz. A “Red Admirable” appears, and the souls of the dead are congregated in the title of the book Dreyer is reading, “Die toten Seelen by a Russian author,” Gogol’s Dead Souls. In Glory it is a “luggage cart” which marks the beginning and the end of Martin’s stay in Molignac, where he decides to make his fated expedition (158, 165). On the platform with the luggage cart a “dark moth” is swirling “around a milky white arc light” (158). Electric light may represent the souls of the dead, as John Shade speculates in his poem “The Nature of Electricity,” in which with perfect foresight he gives a “brightly beaming” streetlamp the same number as the last line of his great poem (192, see also Rachel Trousdale, “‘Faragod Bless Them’: Nabokov, Sprits, and Electricity.” Nabokov Studies 7 (2002/2003): 119-128). The wheelbarrow in Pale Fire is unfortunately empty instead of being loaded with all that had been “stored” by Shade “through the years.” But luckily the gardener, during the few minutes that Shade is still alive after having written line 999, is actively engaged with his wheelbarrow. And the reader is also told that “simultaneously” with the firing of the bullet that killed Shade, the gardener dealt Gradus “a tremendous blow on the pate” with his “spade” (294). The immediacy of the gardener’s action strongly suggests that he, when he hears the shooting, was using his spade loading the wheelbarrow with earth (and maybe this word must be written with a capital “E”).
II
Because Aeneas leaves his father through one of the “two gates of Sleep,” it has been suggested that his “descent into the Underworld was in a way analogous to a dream” (187; Jasper Griffin, “Notes” The Aeneid, op.cit., 427). Because in The Gift Fyodor’s meeting with his father turns out to be a dream (it is still unclear whether his father “had perished at all” [136]), it is tempting to find out whether the allusions to Aeneas’ journey might be related to Nabokov and his father. Starting from the “bark” from Pushkin’s poem “Arion,” Maria Malikova discusses the connection Nabokov makes in his poetry and The Gift “between his father’s death and the image of a boat,” which has, she argues, its origin in “Charon ferrying the souls of the dead across the
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Styx” and Anna Akhmatova’s poem “And Our Lady of Smolensk celebrates today her saint’s day.” (“V.V.Nabokov and V.D. Nabokov: His Father’s Voice.” Jane Grayson, Arnold McMillin and Priscilla Meyer, eds, Nabokov’s World. Volume 2: Reading Nabokov. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002 [15-26] 21-22.) Several critics have observed that Pale Fire has many autobiographical aspects, and some of these point to Nabokov’s father’s tragic death (see i.a. Robert Alter “Autobiography as Alchemy in Pale Fire.” Cycnos 10, 1 (1993): 135-41 and Gerard de Vries “Pale Fire, Pushkin, Belkin, Botkin and Kinbote.” Nabokovskii sbornik 1 (2011): 104-15).
But Nabokov’s overall appreciation of Virgil does not really support the pursuit of this subject. Brian Boyd has quoted a paragraph from Nabokov’s unpublished papers in which he classifies writers in two groups according to their originality. To the group of writers “who have adopted a popular point of view” belong “all second-rate writers from [Virgil,] the minor poet of Rome [,] to Mr. Hemingway of Spain.” And to the second group belong “all great writers from William Shakespeare to James Joyce” (Stalking Nabokov. New York: Columbia UP, 2011, 45). (Territorial boundaries [Nabokov invented Zembla and Antiterra] seem however more relevant for Joyce’s Dublin than Virgil’s “land which earth conceals” [159].) Nabokov “crossed out” this passage, but what he wrote some decades later is no less surprising. In his “Commentary” to Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin he calls Virgil (Dante’s guide and one of Milton’s sources for their hypogene journeys) “insipid” (2, 55). The “criticism” of French writers who “accused Theocritus of affection and of giving his Sicilian goatherds more grace of expression” than they might have possessed, is “more applicable” to Virgil’s “pale pederasts” (2, 55). When discussing the name of “Phyllis” Nabokov mentions its use by “[t]he overrated Virgil” whose shepherds “when not burning for some young assistant shepherd, court[.] an occasional shepherdess” (2, 232). Here Nabokov refers to Virgil’s Eclogue II: “The shepherd Corydon burned for fair Alexis” (Virgil’s Works 268). In Lolita Virgil is also mentioned as one “who could the nymphet sing in single tone, but preferred a lad’s perineum” (19). The first part of this sentence has been clarified by S. E. Sweeney (“Nymphet-Singing in Singleton.” The Nabokovian 15 [1985]: 17-18). If the second part is not meant to asperse Virgil, then it is an inappropriate way to criticize the scarce incidents of Greek love in Virgil’s work. And the word “perineum,” the least visible part of the human body, is one which would never, if a Latin equivalent had existed, have been used by
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the decorous Virgil, as I have been told by scholars who know their Virgil.
This makes it understandable that the name of Virgil could not have been mentioned by Shade. Then Kinbote could not have refrained from feasting on these pale pederasts and shepherds in fire, which would have it made quite difficult to appreciate the allusions to Aeneas’ crossing unbiased. And Aeneas’ journey to the underworld, so firmly embedded in Greek mythology, has become such a canonized literary icon, that its recognition does not need the author’s name. J. W. M. Turner’s famous painting, The Golden Bough (1843), and Henry Purcell’s opera Dido and Aeneas (1689) are examples of the numerous, no less famous, artists who have been inspired by Virgil’s art.
It is, however, most courteous that the invitation extended by Tityrus to his friend, the exiled king whose “realm sunk to a poor cabin,” to sup with him in the low sun on “mellow apples and soft chestnuts and curdled milk [cheese],” is reciprocated by Kinbote when he welcomes his friend to a crepuscular dinner with “a knackle of walnuts, a couple of tomatoes, and a bunch of bananas” (Virgil’s Works 267 [Eclogue I] ; Pale Fire 288).
(I gratefully acknowledge the helpful comments I have received on the various drafts of this note from Wiebe Hogendoorn, Stephen Blackwell and Priscilla Meyer.)
—Gerard de Vries, Voorschoten, Netherlands
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Morris Bishop, His Wife, and the Mural in Pnin
Morris Bishop was one of the first Americans to recognize Nabokov’s genius, and was instrumental in bringing him to Cornell in 1948. Bishop’s obituary in The New York Times says that “Mr. Nabokov considered Professor Bishop as one of his closest friends in the United States and as a sort of spiritual father. They shared a fondness for exactitude in language and for japery as well as a common commitment to literature” [Whitman, Alden (1973): “Morris Bishop, Scholar and Poet, Dies.” The New York Times, November 22, 1973, p. 40].
The Nabokovs regularly spent time with the Bishops during their ten years at Cornell. Bishop was responsible for getting Nabokov salary increases, helping him to find lodgings every semester, and eventually, when Nabokov was transferred from the Division of Literature to Romance Literatures in 1951, was the chair his department. The two occasionally exchanged limericks, which Bishop enjoyed composing as well as other forms of light verse (Boyd, AY, 135, 205).
Bishop’s wife was the painter Alison Mason Kingsbury. They met in 1925 when Alison was assistant to the muralist Ezra Winter. Winter was commissioned by Cornell University to decorate the main lobby of its student union, Willard Straight Hall, with a fresco cycle. She accompanied Winter to Ithaca, where Bishop began courting her as she worked, perched on the scaffolding. They married in 1927, the year the project was completed.
In Pnin, Nabokov describes a mural in Frieze Hall on Waindell College’s campus:
[President Poore] came, a figure of antique dignity, moving in his private darkness to an invisible luncheon, and although everybody had long grown accustomed to his tragic entrance, there was inevitably the shadow of a hush while he was being steered to his carved chair and while he groped for the edge of the table; and it was strange to see, directly behind him on the wall, his stylized likeness in a mauve double-breasted suit and mahogany shoes, gazing with radiant magenta eyes at the scrolls handed him by Richard Wagner, Dostoevski, and Confucius, a group that Oleg Komarov, of the Fine Arts Department, had painted a decade ago into Lang’s celebrated mural of 1938, which carried all around the dining room a pageant of historical figures and Waindell faculty members. (Pnin, 71)
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Winter’s mural is accompanied by a placard:
As a theme for the mural in the lobby of Willard Straight Hall, commissioned artist Ezra Winter chose to represent phases of human character. Each group in the continuous frieze symbolizes an ideal character trait.
The mural makes reference to aspects of the life of Willard Dickerman Straight '01, after whom the building is named, and reflects his diplomatic and business career in China, his broad interests in the arts, and his overall enthusiasm for life.
Waindell College’s mural in Frieze Hall resembles the frieze in Cornell’s Willard Straight Hall in that it incorporates President Poore into its allegorical setting, just as Winter incorporates the donor’s life and works into the idealized representation of “phases of human character.”
Mikhail Efimov recently analyzed Nabokov’s choice of mural characters, showing them to be linked via Alexander Blok’s writings to anti-Semitism (Dostoevsky, Wagner) and Aryanism (Confucius) [M. O. Efimov, “O prisutstvii Rikharda Vagnera v romanakh V. Nabokova (k teme ‘Nabokov i Blok’), Russkaia literatura, n. 2, 2014, forthcoming)]. If Nabokov’s mural is inspired by Winter’s frieze, then Confucius also refers to Willard Straight’s business career in China. In both cases the mundane references comically undercut the mural’s idealization, making a mockery of the faculty members consorting with historical figures by juxtaposition.
Nabokov’s affection for Morris and Kingsbury and the tale of their courtship on the mural scaffolding would have kept him from making fun of the kitschy representations of human qualities in togas; it did not however keep him from having his laugh in Pnin, where he heightens the kitsch in Frieze Hall’s (only apparently) ill-sorted and naively chosen quartet of a Russian novelist, a Chinese sage, a German composer and the blind president of a small and ridiculous American college. Efimov’s analysis suggests that the august assemblage implicitly provides a critique of the naïve pinko politics on American campuses that Nabokov deplored.
Nabokov’s use of Ezra Winter’s frieze in Pnin raises the question of whether he incorporated Bishop and Kingsbury themselves into his depiction of the Waindell faculty. The most positively depicted couple
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in the novel is Lawrence and Joan Clements. Lawrence and Joan think Lawrence resembles the Canon van der Paele in Jan van Eyck's “Virgin and the Canon van der Paele”:
“The publisher of my new book on the Philosophy of Gesture wants a portrait of me, and Joan and I knew we had seen somewhere a stunning likeness by an Old Master…Well, here it is…” (162)
Kingsbury’s portraits of Bishop are from 1930, but Bishop was twenty years older by the time Nabokov was writing Pnin, by which time he too may have had “the knotty temple, the sad musing gaze, the folds and furrows of facial flesh, the thin lips, and even the wart on the left cheek” (154).
And if Nabokov intends this resemblance, then he may be playing with the ecclesiastical relationship of Bishop’s name to the Canon’s title.
Alison Mason Kingsbury had lived in New York City in the 1920s, where she studied at the Art Students' League. In 1922, she went to Europe and joined the École des Beaux-Arts at Fontainebleau, where she studied fresco, sculpture and mural composition, later following one of her teachers to the French School in Rome. She would have been, then, more cosmopolitan than many of the Cornell faculty wives of the 1950s.
In Pnin, Nabokov describes Joan Clements as more sophisticated than the women around her. She “wore an old black silk dress that was smarter than anything other faculty wives could devise, and it was always a pleasure to watch good old bald Tim Pnin bend slightly to touch with his lips the light hand that Joan, alone of all the Waindell ladies, knew how to raise to exactly the right level for a Russian gentleman to kiss” (154). She is “dark blue-eyed, long-lashed, bob-haired.”
Details from Bishop’s life might be espied in Nabokov’s later works: like Humbert Humbert, who is writing a “comparative history of French literature for English-speaking students” (Lolita, 32), Bishop published a Survey of French Literature (1955), which he would have been working on while Nabokov was writing Lolita, and a poem: “How to Treat Elves,” that would have been useful to John Shade.
While the resemblances of the portraits can only be speculative, the Waindell frieze has enough relationship to Ezra Winter’s to suggest how
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the facetious narrator in Pnin transforms some of the material from Nabokov’s experience while teaching at Cornell.
Permission to publish the paintings of Alison Mason Kingsbury is generously granted by her granddaughter, Margaretta Jolly. They, and the mural, were photographed by Jillian Piccirilli, who kindly provided high-resolution images.
—Priscilla Meyer, Middletown, CT
Pnin’s Cinderella: His History
In a letter he wrote about Pnin, Nabokov explained that the book’s “inner core” is built on a “whole series of organic transitions” [Vladimir Nabokov, Selected Letters, 1940–1977 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1989) 156–9]. Pnin’s main character is himself an author writing about how the “concatenations” of small events mirror those of larger events, how La Petite Histoire mirrors La Grande Histoire [Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin (1957; New York: Vintage International, 1989) 76]. Together these two ideas address the “inner core” of the book; it is a series of “organic transitions”—“concatenations”—that mirror one another in large and small ways.
These “organic transitions” can be found in the book’s treatment of the Cinderella tale. The story of Cinderella, like all fairy tales, has been passed down orally from person to person, from country to country, from generation to generation. New tellers change the story as they tell it; the story thus undergoes its own “series of organic transitions.” Timofey Pnin, the book’s main character, explains such transitions in the Cinderella tale: Cinderella, he says, began in Russia; there, the heroine wore slippers of squirrel fur (Russian veveritsa; in French—vair); when the tale transitioned to France, the homonym vair-verre turned the slippers from fur to glass (verre). The squirrel fell out of the story, a loss invisible in English translation. When the tale reaches America from Russia via France, the squirrel slippers have become glass slippers (88).
In the novel Pnin, then, the history of Cinderella has two defining features: 1) it moves from Russia to France to America and 2) squirrel fur becomes glass. These “organic transitions” or “concatenations” are not only seen in the history of Cinderella; they are seen throughout Pnin in large and small ways.
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Pnin’s first love is Mira Belochkin. Her last name means “little squirrel.” Pnin knew her in Russia. She married a fur dealer of Russian descent (133-35). She went to France where the author imagines her being killed in a concentration camp by an injection of broken glass (135). Pnin then sees her shade while he is in America. The pattern in Pnin’s life is thus the same as in the Cinderella tale: squirrel to glass; Russia to France to America.
The pattern applies to the much-discussed motif of the squirrels that appear throughout the book. Viewing their appearances chronologically, the same “organic transitions” emerge. The first squirrel is painted on the wall of Pnin’s childhood home in St. Petersburg (23-24). The second squirrel sits beside a map of Russia (177). The third squirrel “departs without the least sign of gratitude” on the Waindell campus (58). The fourth runs up a tree and becomes “invisible” (73). The fifth follows a letter written “in beautiful French” (88). The sixth is present but unseen and unmentioned (115). The final squirrel, at a dinner party in America, does not appear at all, but Victor’s glass bowl is said to be the color of squirrel fur. Again the pattern emerges: squirrel to glass; Russia to France to America.
The pattern repeats itself in different ways. The squirrels in Cinderella mirror the squirrels in the life of Pnin (Belochkin killed by glass), and these mirror the squirrels in the book of Pnin (squirrel to glass). In each situation, a squirrel goes to glass, and a transition is made from Russia to France to America. The squirrels are a connecting thread between the fairy tale, the novel and Pnin himself.
* * *
This same “organic transition” can also be seen in the scene where Pnin is walking to the college library. Earlier Pnin’s dentures have been described as a “firm mouthful of America” and later Cinderella’s glass slippers as having a “bluish . . . columbine, shade—from columba, Latin for pigeon” (38, 158). With this in mind, consider the following “concatenation” of events: Pnin is walking towards the library. He hears a train whistling as mournfully “as in the steppes.” He sees a squirrel. It dashes up a tree. Pigeons sweep by overhead. The squirrel now is said to be “invisible.” Then Pnin gently “champ[s] his dentures” (74-75). This passage, then, through a series of emblems, creates the same journey from Russia to France to America (steppes, squirrel, dentures) and squirrel to glass (squirrel, invisible, columba). La Petite Histoire mirrors La Grande Histoire.
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Walking to the library, Pnin is carrying a Russian book: Sovetskiy Zolotoy Fond Literatury, in English The Soviet Gold Fund of Literature (66). The passage refers to the book in abbreviated form as Zol. Fond Lit. Zol., the abbreviation of Zolotoy, “gold,” could also, however, allude to Zolushka, the Russian name of “Cinderella,” from zola, ash. It is as if Pnin, in his journey, carries with him a collection of Cinderella literature and as if, in Pnin’s hands, Cinderella is gold—Zolushka is zolotoy.
Here the journey of Timofey and that of Cinderella do not just mirror each other. They are the same journey. Cinderella travels with Pnin.
* * *
Pnin does not just travel with a single tale of Cinderella. Instead, he travels with Zol. Fond Lit., that is, Pnin travels with a fund, a collection, of Cinderella tales. Indeed, the novel Pnin takes pains to explain that there is not a single Cinderella tale but, rather, there are many different variations of the tale. Cinderella tales appear throughout Europe (Russia, France, America, etc.); their main characters have had many different names (Cinderella, Cendrillon, Aschenputtel, Zolushka, etc.); the main character has had many different distinctive features (slippers, dresses, jewelry, slender feet, etc.). In short, Cinderella takes many different forms.
Some of these different forms appear throughout Pnin. Cinderella herself is mentioned at certain points in the book. In addition, Pnin himself is a Cinderella figure with his “curiously small” “almost feminine feet” (7, 131), his unappreciative taskmasters, and his transformation “sometime after midnight” when he decides to leave the town of Waindell for good (189). Mira Belochkin is yet another Cinderella figure. Pnin’s former sweetheart has a “slenderness of arm and ankle,” as opposed to his two other possible romantic partners—his former wife with her “thickness of ankle and wrist” and his former student Betty Bliss who is described as “plump” (9, 44, 134).
The cook at the Pines, Praskovia, is yet another Cinderella figure. She tends chickens, owns a dress of rhinestones, and has a husband who likes to kill small forest animals (119). In certain variants of the Cinderella tale, the main character watches over her family’s chickens, owns a dress (not slippers), and finds her prince while he is hunting animals through the forest [See Cox, Marian Roalfe, ed. Cinderella: Three Hundred and Forty-Five Variants of Cinderella, Catskin, and
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Cap O’Rushes. London: Folk-Lore Society, 1893. 432, 434, etc. (chickens), 62, 101, 353, etc. (hunting), passim (dress)]. In a variant published by Friedrich von der Hagen (Prenzlau, 1825), called “The Three Sisters,” Cinderella’s suitor has a little dog who identifies the stepsisters as false claimants, and the youngest as the right one [Cox, 243-44]. Pnin by his kindness wins the loyalty of the little dog who accompanies him when he leaves Waindell.
The name “Praskovia” is also significant: it is the same name as one of Russia’s real-life Cinderellas, an eighteenth-century serf actress who fell in love with and married a wealthy Russian count.
Pnin is thus a collection of Cinderella tales. It contains multiple Cinderellas: Pnin, Cinderella, Mira, Praskovia. While Pnin the character carries a volume of collected Cinderellas, Pnin the novel is a collection of Cinderellas, itself a Zol. Fond Lit.
But would there really be a collection of the same sort of characters in a single novel? The book suggests that there would. In fact, the narrator himself explains that there are often what appeared to be “twins” or “triplets” among the staff at college campuses and that at one intensive language school there were “as many as six Pnins” (148).
One of the great compilers and popularizers of fairytales in the English language was Andrew Lang. In Pnin, it is “the great Lang” who created the “celebrated mural . . . a pageant of historical figures and Waindell faculty members” in Frieze Hall (71, 188). By the book’s end, Nabokov has added the image of Pnin to this pageant. He is now in the Valhalla of fairytale characters.
Nabokov has replaced the basic structure of a novel—beginning, middle, end—with a different kind of structure: a structure based on interlocking “organic transitions” and mirroring “concatenations” of events. Nabokov has not just created a new novel; he has, perhaps, created a new way of creating novels.
Nabokov was striving for something more profound in his writing of these concatenations. The first time squirrels are mentioned in the book, they appear in a recurring pattern on wallpaper, and the key to unlocking that pattern, the narrator explains, “must be precious as life itself” (23).
Perhaps the narrator’s explanation of this pattern applies to Nabokov’s novel. Perhaps unlocking this pattern can indeed be considered precious as “life itself.” For what Nabokov is exploring through these interlocking patterns is nothing less than the meaning of mortality. What does it mean to die? What are mortality’s limitations?
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What are its possibilities? Is there hope—is there future—is there life—in the transition from one stage to the next? Is death a simple stop? Or, like a caterpillar turning into a butterfly or a fairytale changing its form over time, is death merely a grading from one form into the next with a continued, enduring existence?
Nabokov searches for the answers to these questions by exploring the Cinderella tale. Cinderella changes over time, as it goes from one place to another, from one language to another. It changes but endures. It changes but does not die. Indeed, its ability to transform itself is part of its strength. It is part of Pnin’s as well; he is able to change, and so he is able to survive: in Russia, in France, in America. Transformation is key—perhaps the key—to continued life.
It is no coincidence that Pnin lives in the town of Waindell, a name similar to Wandel, the German word for change or transition. In German Wandel is pronounced “Vandel,”; Pnin himself calls the town “Vandal” and the university there had built structures on a nearby hill copied from a “the ancient little burg of Vandel” (34, 140).
* * *
The character Pnin undergoes metamorphosis much the same way as the Cinderella tale does: he changes, and endures, with each new narrator who tells his story. The book Pnin starts with the narrator describing Pnin going to address the Cremona Women’s Club. The book ends with another narrator about to tell a variant of Pnin’s going to address the Cremona Women’s Club. His story, delivered orally like Cinderella’s, will be told again, and change again, with a new narrator, the novel’s narrator who, like the European recorders of oral tales, will transcribe and alter the oral tale in the process.
But Pnin’s story does not end with the book Pnin. He resurfaces in Nabokov’s later novel, Pale Fire. In Pnin, the narrator describes Pnin as “beloved,” “benevolent,” and “good-natured” (11-13). The narrator of Pale Fire describes Pnin as a “regular martinet” and “grotesque perfectionist.” Pnin’s transformations are similar to those in Cinderella: he has changed because his narrator has changed. In this way, the character, once again, mirrors the tale; Pnin is a new variant of Cinderella.
The squirrels in Cinderella show how a story can transform itself from one place to another while still maintaining its identity. Something may be lost during its transition from one culture and language to another (veveritsa becomes verre). But one can still detect the tale’s
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Russian origins even today. Vair does not simply die; it continues in an altered form. It is perhaps not surprising that Mira Belochkin, the little squirrel, is repeatedly described as being “immortal” (27, 134). For, in a sense, nothing can kill her. She changes and endures.
The same is true for Pnin. Something may be lost during his periods of transition, but something essential lives on. Indeed, it may be the very act of change and transition that allows the man to live on. It is therefore fitting that date on which Pnin leaves Waindell for good—the date on which he moves yet again—the date on which his tale is to be told by yet another new narrator—is also the date of his birthday (21, 186) [Charles Nicol “Pnin's History,” Novel, Spring 1971, 207-08]. For his departure suggests a new transition—and, in the process, the birth of a new Pnin and a new version of the tale.
* * *
They all change, and they all endure—Cinderella, Pnin, squirrels, Mira Belochkin. None of them simply end or die. They all endure, in one form or another, by means of their own “organic transitions.”And if they can escape the simple finality of death, then there exists some “faint hope” that we might escape it as well. A fairytale? Exactly. Cinderella, to be precise.
I would like to thank Priscilla Meyer for her help with this note.
—Gerry Cahill, Boston, MA
Solving “Signs and Symbols”
“Surely the saddest story that Vladimir Nabokov ever wrote” is how John Banville described “Signs and Symbols” (“The Saddest Story,” in Yuri Leving, ed., Anatomy of a Short Story: Nabokov's Puzzles, Codes, “Signs and Symbols,” New York, Continuum, 2012, 332). Nabokov’s story merely describes a very bad day in the life of an old immigrant couple with a disturbed suicidal son, and ends without resolving the fate of the young man. He leaves that to the reader. By the end of the tale, the reader is so subtly terrorized by its unnerving implications, that he finds himself forced to resolve the son’s fate by examining the multitude of clues Nabokov has planted in the text, especially the final scene when the father’s attempt to enjoy the jellies is interrupted by three telephone calls. Just before the third call, the father
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begins to read the “eloquent labels” of the “the luminous yellow, green, red little jars” of jellies, (a near rainbow of colors) starting with “apricot,” and continuing with “grape, beech plum, quince. He had got to crab apple, when the telephone rang again.”
Nabokov says that the father “spelled out” the names on the jars. Surely he didn’t speak each individual letter. He may have slowly savored each name, as he “reexamined with pleasure” the jars. “A-pri-cot”: three equal definite beats.—like the rapping of a gavel bringing order to the court: be quiet and pay attention. Could there be a message in the meter of the words? As a poet, Nabokov was interested in scansion, and engaged in verbal fencing matches in his correspondence with Edmund Wilson over metric issues.
We are told that the son’s “inmost thoughts are discussed at nightfall, in manual alphabet, by darkly gesticulating trees.” Morse code is a manual alphabet. It is also a binary system that uses long and short beats, as does the scansion of poetry; but in the case of Morse code each unique combination of long and short pulses, called dashes and dots, signifies a letter of the alphabet. Using an on-line Morse Code translator, at http://morsecode.scphillips.com/jtranslator.html , I entered the long or short (dash or dot) length of each syllable of the jelly names. I did not use stresses, but rather the length of syllables: a long syllable being one that takes longer to pronounce than a short syllable, as with Classical Latin and Classical Greek poetry, because that seemed to correspond with the long and short beats of Morse code.
For example, APRICOT presents either three equally short beats (a tribrach in scansion) or, rather unlikely, but logically, three equally long ones. Short beats would be DOT DOT DOT or letter S. As long beats, apricot is DASH DASH DASH, or letter O. Which letter is preferable? Well, normally one would not pronounce “apricot” with lengthened syllables. But curiously, if one follows the mother’s instructions to the caller to avoid dialing O, we find that the O would cancel out to zero, leaving only the S option. I proceeded much the same way through the rest of the fruitful names, as indicated in the Appendix. All the logical possibilities of applying the Morse code breaker are summarized in the following table:
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[FOR TABLE, SEE PDF ABOVE]
Notice that the five flavors produce only two variations of five letters: either STENI or SDENI. The remaining letters are repetitions. STENI rearranged yields I SENT. SDENI rearranged yields I SEND.
Shawn James Rosenheim, author of The Cryptographic Imagination: Secret Writing from Edgar Poe to the Internet (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1997) discusses the use of cryptography (a term he says was invented by Edgar Allan Poe) in fiction. Nabokov greatly admired Poe. According to Rosenheim, Poe’s famous story, “The Gold Bug,” was the first to attempt a cryptographic solution to a plot, and met with such enormous success that it catapulted Poe’s reputation.
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Interestingly, the story not only inspired other fiction writers, quite possibly Nabokov, it had important, if unlikely, historical repercussions. Two cryptographers, a married couple, William and Elizabeth Friedman, who began their cryptographic careers assisting with a study of Francis Bacon as the possible author of Shakespearean works, went on to crack the Japanese cipher Purple used during World War II, “an achievement of the same magnitude as the Polish and British solution of the Enigma,” according to Rosenheim (11). William Friedman attributed his interest in ciphers to his youthful reading of Poe’s “The Gold Bug.” Rosenheim also quotes the author Joseph Wood Krutch (whom Nabokov amusingly and pedantically corrected in his lectures, with reference to the number of wins and losses chalked up by Don Quixote) as saying that ‘nothing contributed to a greater extent than did Poe’s connection with cryptography to the growth of the legend which pictured him as a man at once below and above ordinary human nature (11).’ ”
The cracking of the cryptography of “Apricot ... Crab Apple” by means of Morse Code involved a fairly simple application. The identification and interpretation of the message sent is far more challenging. A message strongly appears to have arrived by means of the errant caller who twice calls the parents looking for “Charlie.”
Rearranging the letters of “Charlie” yields two interesting words: “chialer” and “heliarc.” “Chialer” is an informal, usually derogatory term meaning “to cry” in French, and “to complain” in French Canadian. “Heliarc” is a concoction not to be found in a dictionary, from “helios,” the Greek word for sun, and arc. “Helio” as a prefix appears in words like heliograph, defined by Webster’s Dictionary (1971) as “1. An apparatus for telegraphing by means of the sun’s rays thrown from a mirror”—a magnificent word for a man with Nabokov’s interests in reflections, mirrors and rays; and it brings to mind the telegraph.
The importance of the sun in the story cannot be overstated. Mrs. Sol (Latin for sun, and also related to the Russian word for nightingale, solovei, a meaning that has eclipsed that of the sun in the literature) arises early in the story, with a face “all pink and mauve with paint” like a sunrise in artifice. She wears a “cluster of brookside flowers” on her hat. One notes that the flowers, unlike her facial coloring, are not branded as artificial. Flowers and pinkness also figure in the name of Aunt Rosa, who, although named for a hardy perennial, perished in the Nazi death camps, like Mira in Pnin. The multiple references to the sun continue with the name of the father’s physician Dr. Solov and the
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mother’s memory of a friend’s daughter who “married one of the Soloveichiks.”
In “heliarc” the combination of helio and arc presents a stunning image in a story where rain and darkness are ever present, and the sun is banished, winking only from the names of acquaintances. The arc produced by the sun is the rainbow, a symbol as old as story-telling. The flood (note the constant rain in Nabokov’s story) was not the destruction of the earth, but a cataclysm, to be followed by the re-flowering of the earth. This would be the third reference to Genesis in Nabokov’s tale. The allusion to the story of Adam and Eve, a story of “the origin of human suffering” has been noted by Joanna Trzeciak in “The Last Jar,” (in Leving, Yuri, Anatomy of a Short Story, 143). She points out that the Russian name for crab apple, raiskoe iabloko, means “paradise apple.” The second reference to Genesis is the unfortunate birthmark on the father’s head (the mark of Cain.)
If there is a hidden solution, in the form of a message from the son, is it a complaint (“chialer”), but at the same time, a vision of the rainbow signifying that all will be well, the sun also rises, and real flowers will grow? Or is it a message of death and possible resurrection?
Surely a story of an old couple suffering “endless waves of pain” being struck down by the death of their child on his birthday, just as they are about to take steps to bring him home is simply cruel, is worthy only of Elsa’s “bestial beau.” There is more than sufficient evidence that a living son, or possibly the trees, on his behalf, (trees that discuss his inmost thoughts “at nightfall, in manual alphabet”) sent a message to the parents, and the reader, that he is “all right.” This interpretation aligns with Nabokov’s own aversion to pain and suffering and his grief for the humanity grossly obliterated in the Holocaust. Nabokov used his art not to realistically portray suffering, but to urge the reader’s compassion and understanding through more subtle means. At the same time he has shown great sympathy for his own suffering creations. In Bend Sinister and Invitation to a Beheading, Nabokov spares the sufferer (by madness in the former and artfulness in the latter) as well as the reader.
As the narrator says in Pnin: “if one were quite sincere with oneself [referential mania? –FA], no conscience, and hence no consciousness, could be expected to subsist in a world where such things as Mira’s death were possible. One had to forget,” and if forgetfulness is not possible, one transforms, with art. “Signs and Symbols” challenges the reader to find the rainbow, or reassurance, for
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the couple by means of cryptography, just as the characters of Poe’s “The Gold Bug” found Captain Kidd’s buried gold.
Appendix
GRAPE is either one DASH (T) or one DOT (E). I thought the shorter syllable preferable. However, one should keep in mind that T is still a possibility.
BEECH PLUM. The two syllables clearly are not of the same length. BEECH, especially with a double “e” is more drawn out than the unavoidably short PLUM. Thus, the word sounds like DASH DOT. Entering BEECH PLUM as DASH DOT gives the letter N. Another option is to treat each word separately. BEECH alone is DASH (T) but possibly DOT (E); Plum, being shorter, has the opposite preference of DOT (E), with DASH (T) as a secondary possibility.
QUINCE, like grape, sounds short, or a DOT (E), but one cannot rule out DASH (T.)
CRAB APPLE: Like Beech Plum, gives us the option of considering the words separately, or as a unit. The syllables of APPLE sounds short, DOT DOT. In contrast CRAB is longer—DASH. Together, DASH DOT DOT make letter D. Separating the words yields a different result. CRAB, alone, is DASH (T) or possibly DOT (E). APPLE is DOT DOT, or (I).
—Frances Peltz Assa, Milwaukee, WI