Subject
Essay: The Black Swan of Lac Lemann
Date
Body
EDITOR's NOTE. In my boundless egotism, I offer the original text of an
article of mine that first appeared in German in "Neue Zurcher Zeitung" in
the Saturday-Sunday issue (24-25 April, 1999, p. 81) as part of a special
Nabokov centennial presentation. I thank the NZZ for allowing me to
reprint the piece. A listing of the other Nabokov articles has appeared
on NABOKV-L. Due to the limitation of E-mail, the article is unformatted.
Lac Lemn is the French name for "Lake Geneva."
-----------------------------
Nabokov and “Mlle O”:
The Black Swan of Lac Leéman and Mlle Miauton
“The Black Swan of LacLeéman” was one of the titles bestowed on
Nabokov during his Swiss years. It is exceedingly apt. Not only did
Nabokov write all or part of five novels on the shores of Lac Leéman, but
his love affair with one of his three “native” tongues, was rooted there.
Nabokov'’s French governess, eécile Miauton, a native of Lausanne, was to
become the subject of his only French story, the 1936 “Mlle O.” Resident
in the Nabokov household from 1906 until 1914, the monolingual
“quakingmass” of Mademoiselle Miauton alternately enchanted the young
Nabokov with her lovely and fluid reading aloud of French novels and
repelled him with her chronic unhappiness and incessant nostalgia for her
native Switzerland. Even a chance phrase such as “Il pleut toujours en
Suisse” brought forth a stream of tears. Nabokov’s last meeting with his
former governess was in December 1921 when, as a Cambridge student on a
skiing holiday, he visited her in her Lausanne retirement. Mlle O, who had
spent her Russian years longing for Switzerland, now felt herself yearning
for her Russian “home.” As Nabokov wanders along the lake after his
awkward visit, he sees an aged swan clumsily and vainly struggling to
climb from the water onto a boat. Some years later when he hears of the
death of his governess, this is the first image that comes to him.
Nabokov not only inserted bits and pieces of his one-time
governess into The Defense and, more importantly, into Ada, where she (as
Mlle Lariviére) is “promoted” from French reader to hack French writer. It
was, however, in his memoir that Mademoiselle Miauton, the embodiment of
exile and longing, assumed ever greater substance as she evolved from her
French “original” through her later incarnations in the English Speak,
Memory and the more aptly titled Russian, Drugie berega (Other Shores).
Just as “Mademoisell"O"” was Nabokov’s first French pro subject, she
appears in his first English-language novel, The Real Life of Sebastian
Knight, written in Paris shortly before the NabokovsÂ’ move to America.
Here, the old governess is visited in Lausanne by the novelÂ’s Russian
narrator who is vainly probing the past of his English half- brother, the
novelist Sebastian Knight. Once again, she longs for the lost Russian
paradise where, in fact, she passed her years bewailing her exile from
Switzerland. The 1936 French story was long assumed to be “Mademoiselle
O”’s first literary incarnation, but a recently discovered Russian story,
“EasterRain,” written in 1924, places it among Nabokov’s earliest prose
publications. Here the former governess is named “Josephine,” and it is
she who sees the struggling swan. “Mademoiselle O” is one of the most
persistent images in Nabokov’s oeuvre. Nabokov styles Speak, Memory “a
new kind of autobiography.” It is, he said, “an investigation of the
elements which formed me as a writer.” Each chapter focuses on a person or
phenomenon that contributed to that end. “Mlle O” is the only person,
other than his parents and “Tamara,” his first love, to be the subject of
their own chapter in Speak, Memory. Her occurrence and recurrence in
NabokovÂ’s work from 1924 at least through the 1969 Ada also attests the
importance of her role in his life and art. At first sight, this
prominence seems odd. Neither the young nor the adult Nabokov much liked
his lachrymose Franco-Swiss governess, and her duties, readings apart,
were soon restricted to brother Sergey, and then to the two younger
sisters. What was her role in creating the writer and his themes? The
French language and its literature are, of course, one of the themes that
“Mlle O” embodies. Significantly, “her” chapter immediately follows one
entitled “My English Education,” and a still earlier one in which the boy
is presented with colored Russian alphabet blocks. The three languages and
cultures were to be central to NabokovÂ’s career as a writer. The figure
of CĂ©cile Miauton not only introduces one of NabokovÂ’s three languages and
cultures, but one of his great themes—exile and nostalgia. The combined
themes of exile and nostalgia assume many forms throughout the oeuvre,
running from its overt expression in the early poetry to heavily
fictionalized and fantasized versions in the late novels. Almost all of
Nabokov’s novels involve the exile or émigré and his or her longing for a
former place and time The bygone time or place maybe real or delusional,
idealized or demonized. The fictive geography can assume many forms:
countries, fantasized worlds, abstractions such as “there” versus “he”
present versus past, and so on. In each context there is a point of
transition, a border crossing —between the two “worlds”: a national
border, the boundary between sanity and madness, waking/sleeping,
consciousness /nothingness, and life/death.
For Russians, as for many others, Switzerland has long stood
forthe idea of refuge and neutrality. It provided temporary haven not only
for political figures, such as Alexander Herzen and Lenin, but many
Russian writers have chosen Switzerland as a place to work. Nabokov paid
tribute to some of them in his late “Swiss” novella, Transparent Things,
where Nikolai GogolÂ’s Dead Souls lurks below the surface tension of the
present. Closer in time is the Symbolist writer Andrei Bely whose haunting
novel Saint Petersburg was one of NabokovÂ’s choices for great books of the
XXth century; and, still closer, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who penned his
Lenin in Zurich during his Swiss years. NabokovÂ’s identification of
Switzerland as one of the symbolic representations of his theme of exile
and nostalgia is expressed in two of his Russian novels. In the 1932
Glory, perhaps his most autobiographical novel, his half-Swiss,
half-Russian hero, Martin Edelweiss, a refugee from the Russian
Revolution, comes to a realization: “During the sumptuous Swiss autumn he
felt for the first time that he was, after all, an exile, doomed to live
far from home. That word ‘exile’ had a delicious sound.” It is precisely
this involuntary alienation that prompts Martin (and Nabokov) to recreate
in memory and imagination “his” Russia— something he would not have done
had he remained in Russia.
For Nabokov, Switzerland constituted a particularly apt setting
because of the countryÂ’s long history as a neutral haven. This is
expressed directly in his finest and most “Russian” novel, The Gift. The
Gift is, among other things, an exploration of Russian cultural (and
socio-political) history. It raises the question: Where did Russian
social and aesthetic thought go wrong? Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev, the
young eémireé writer, finds the villain in the journalist, novelist, and
political martyr, Nikolai Chernyshevsky, whose biography forms one of The
GiftÂ’s chapters. Chernyshevsky, the radical social-utilitarian critic who
formulated the credo of evaluating art (and all else) in political terms,
is singled out as the bad seed. And, in truth, the well-intentioned
ChernyshevskyÂ’s views were to find their fullest embodiment in Soviet
Russia and “Socialist Realism.” The title of Nabokov’s Gift refers to the
gift of unfettered art both from the beyond and, via the artist, to his
readers. Since ChernyshevskyÂ’s time in the turbulent 1860s through the end
of Nabokov’s life, this “anti-aesthetic” was dominant in Russian society.
“Neutrality,” “detachment” did not, could not, be tolerated. Yet, freedom
from external constraint was the essence of NabokovÂ’s art. And, no less
so, his politics. The right of the artist, the scientist, the individual,
was paramount. The realities of social upheaval and war were resented
(and, where possible, ignored) by the artist and scientist.
The figure counterpoised to Chernyshevsky in The Gift is FyodorÂ’s
father, the famed explorer and entomologist, Konstantin
Godunov-Cherdyntsev, who is missing and presumed dead on an collecting
expedition to Tibet during WW I and the Revolution. Godunov-Cherdyntsev
considers the war merely an inconvenience that pointlessly hampers his
work. Fyodor writes: “….how Russian public opinion would have wrung its
little hands had it learned that at the height of the war
Godunov-Cherdyntsev had traveled to Geneva to meet a fat, bald,
extraordinarily jovial German professor (a third conspirator was also
present, an old Englishman wearing thin-rimmed spectacles and a roomy
suit), that they had come together Â…. [to discuss]Â…a work of many volumes,
stubbornly continuing publication in Stuttgart, with long-standing
cooperation of foreign specialists on separate groups of butterflies.”
Nabokov himself lamented the unwelcome intrusion of history into his
fiction. One of his bĂŞtes noires was the view that historical cataclysms
somehow defined their generation. For Nabokov, “generation” suggested
“generic,” a mass phenomenon, whereas for him, only the individual and
his/her imagination were crucial. Nabokov could have settled anywhere
(except Russia) for his final exile. After his Russian youth, he had spent
three years in England; fifteen years in Germany; three years in
France;and nearly twenty years in America. When, after Lolita, he left for
Europe, he had no firm plans about his future residence. In addition to
its historic image of non-involvement and stability, several things
eventually drew him to Switzerland. One was family—a sister in Geneva and
a son in nearby Milan; another was alpine butterflies,—in part because of
their congruence with the northern lepidoptera of his Russian youth.
SwitzerlandÂ’s high mountains recreated the harsh climatic conditions
(short summers/long, cold winters) of the Saint Petersburg area, located
so much farther north. Also, Nabokov wanted to “borrow” some Swiss scenery
for Pale FireÂ’s Nova Zembla. An arrangement that was at first thought
temporary gradually became permanent. In part, the unrest and political
turbulence of the American Sixties may have reminded Nabokov of earlier
upheavals and his serial exiles. Switzerland offered natural beauty,
comfort, and stability.
Exile has played a large role in the lives of many
twentieth-century writers, and, for Nabokov, more than most. Exile was
NabokovÂ’s most constant theme. Not only literal, political exile, but
exile in all of its manifold dimensions. Mary, Glory, and Pnin deal
directly with exile and longing. The actions of the protagonist proceed
immediately from their “unhoused” situation. Mary’s Ganin mentally
relives a piece of his (and MaryÂ’s) past romance, assimilates it, and,
instead of resuming the affair, moves onward from Berlin. The dreamy exile
Martin Edelweiss of Glory conceives of his secret (and fatal) escapade
across the Soviet border as a gratuitous act of valor—evidence that
knightly derring-do still exists in his drab, demoralized generation (and
also to impress a girl). Professor Pnin, amiably floundering in an
American college, creates the old Russia with his Petite Histoire of
Russian culture.
Ada and, less obviously, Lolita are classical myths of exile. Van
and Ada, sibling lovers, are expelled from “the arbors and ardors of
Ardis,” the Eden that first nourishes their love, after their father
discovers their secret sin. The novel is the aging VanÂ’s attempt to
recover those moments. The gardens of Ardis also echo those of Vyra, the
Nabokov familyÂ’s country estate near Petersburg where the young Nabokov
had his first romance. In Lolita, Humbert is driven by the compulsion to
return to that “Kingdom by the Sea” first shared with Annabel Leigh. The
careful reader will find that “kingdom” contains many echoes of its
biblical origins Other novels pose exile as a psychological (or perhaps
“philosophical”) state—a personality split into two selves, the new one
“exiled” from the old. In The Eye and in Look at the Harlequins!, the
narrator only intermittently suspects the identity of his other self. The
humiliated narrator of The Eye shoots himself. His surviving
consciousness, he attributes to psychic inertia. This shadowy surviving
“eye” watches the progress of a young man among a circle of new friends,
but sees him only through the wildly varying impressions of the others.
Which image is the real one? Who is he? The answer, of course, is that he
is the narrator. Despite his derision of the shop-worn Doppelgänger theme,
Nabokov often drew on its variants. A narrator tells of his world whose
delusional nature is subtly revealed to the (careful) reader by coded
references to a “real” world. In these novels the hero has exiled himself
into his fantasy world. Despair is narrated by a man who believes a tramp
to be his identical look-alike. On this basis, he contrives a scheme of
murder, body substitution, and insurance fraud—all in vain since his
double bears no resemblance to him. Pale Fire is also based upon the
double theme. The narrator, Professor Charles Kinbote, thinks himself the
exiled King of Nova Zembla and the target of revolutionary terrorists. He
incorporates his fantasy kingdom into the scholarly footnotes to “Pale
Fire,” the work of a just slain poet, John Shade. At length the reader
infers that Kinbote himself is the delusional identity of an obscure
academic named Botkin. Nabokov biographer, Brian Boyd, has recently put
forward the view that the composition of KinboteÂ’s saga is, in part,
guided by the spirit of the late poet, John Shade.
Look at the Harlequins! offers yet another variation of the
double. Vadim Vadimich, an Anglo-Russian writer (and self-parody of
Nabokov), tells of his life and work. Behind his account, one can make out
a real world in which people are well aware of the narratorÂ’s long periods
of delusion. The Real Life of Sebastian Knight also partakes of the émigré
double theme. The Russian narrator attempts to write the biography of his
English half-brother, the late novelist Sebastian Knight. As the story
progresses, the line between the two figures becomes increasingly murky.
In all of these novels the split narrator has exiled a part of himself.
The theme of “exile” finds expression in still other arenas. In Nabokov’s
two surreal “political” novels, Invitation to a Beheading, and Bend
Sinister, the heroes are prisoners of bizarre revolutionary regimes. In
the former, Cincinnatus finds himself condemned to death for the crime of
“gnostical turpitude” in the world he has mistakenly fallen into. At the
moment of his execution, he climbs down from the scaffold and moves off he
direction of voices akin to his own, as the prison world crumbles around
him. Cincinnatus, as one of Nabokov’s “positive” artist heroes, has been
able to detect the hand of his Creator, the author, and ascends into His
universe. This cosmology, latent in Invitation to a Beheading, becomes
overt at the end of Bend Sinister, the first novel written in America. Its
philosopher hero, Krug, senses the invisible hand of his maker. Pressed
beyond his endurance to proclaim his endorsement of a new, revolutionary
government, he charges into a hail of bullets. But the “anthropomorphic
deity” behind the scenes, who has granted Krug an ameliorative madness,
gathers him up into the world of the author, thus returning him from his
cruel exile.
Many of NabokovÂ’s novels are built upon the image of two worlds:
one—the world of the characters; the other—the hidden world of their
creator, the author, who leaves tantalizingly obscure clues of his
presence and his world for his fictional favorites. This foundation serves
as a platform for two closely related questions that haunt Nabokov's
oeuvre. NabokovÂ’ characters (with the partial exception of his rare
“favored” heroes) live in a world of limited consciousness which they use
to probe the mysteries of their existence. Occasionally, the favored few
have indistinct glimmers of insight. Revelation comes only with death,
the moment of transition from the constrained consciousness of life on
their world to the full enlightenment of their CreatorÂ’s world. Implicit
in this cosmogony is that their Creator stands in the same state of
limited consciousness vis-aĂ -vis his Creator who, in turn, provides faint
traces of His presence. NabokovÂ’s characters are launched on their search
for ultimate significance by the presence of death— usually that of a
loved one; hence the question: “Does individual consciousness, i.e.,
personal identity, survive death?” Within the framework of Nabokov’s
fictional universe, the answer would seem to be “yes,” if only for the
favored few. The mysterious Baron R., Swiss resident and covert narrator
of Transparent Things, writes his tale from beyond the grave. But is this
a fictive conceit or a personal credo ? George Steiner, one-time
Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Geneva, has
offered a theory about several outstanding literary figures of the
Twentieth Century. Steiner, himself a native speaker of German, French,
and English, coined the term “extraterritoriality” in reference to the
writings of such figures as Nabokov, Samuel Beckett, Jorge Borges, and
Ezra Pound. Steiner suggests that much of the singularity of their
literary styles may derive from the filtration of one language through the
grammatical, lexical, and cultural world- view of a second language. He
conjectures that their writings in each of two languages may somehow be
“meta-translations” of the other—a phenomenon that presumably underlies
their dazzling virtuosity. Much of NabokovÂ’s work, Steiner asserts, may be
read “as a meditation—lyric, ironic, technical, parodistic—on the nature
of human language, on the enigmatic coexistence of different,
linguistically generated world visions and of a deep current underlying,
and at times conjoining, the multitude of diverse tongues.” To this, one
should, of course, add the interaction of three distinct literary
cultures—Russian, English, and French. Switzerland is, appropriately, a
multilingual nation that has been host and haven to writers of all three
literatures, although rarely, if ever before, embodied in a single author.
That the Russo-English writer Nabokov and his French governess CĂ©cile
Miauton, “Mlle O,” both lie buried on the shores of Lake Geneva beggars
plausibility: Mademoiselle O, emblem of exile as that bedraggled swan
struggling to find a place of rest, and Nabokov (who lived in the Montreux
Palace’s “Le Cygne” wing), the rara avis, the Black Swan of Laac Léman.
--------------------------------
D. Barton Johnson
Department of Germanic, Slavic and Semitic Studies
Phelps Hall
University of California at Santa Barbara
Santa Barbara, CA 93106
Phone and Fax: (805) 687-1825
Home Phone: (805) 682-4618
article of mine that first appeared in German in "Neue Zurcher Zeitung" in
the Saturday-Sunday issue (24-25 April, 1999, p. 81) as part of a special
Nabokov centennial presentation. I thank the NZZ for allowing me to
reprint the piece. A listing of the other Nabokov articles has appeared
on NABOKV-L. Due to the limitation of E-mail, the article is unformatted.
Lac Lemn is the French name for "Lake Geneva."
-----------------------------
Nabokov and “Mlle O”:
The Black Swan of Lac Leéman and Mlle Miauton
“The Black Swan of LacLeéman” was one of the titles bestowed on
Nabokov during his Swiss years. It is exceedingly apt. Not only did
Nabokov write all or part of five novels on the shores of Lac Leéman, but
his love affair with one of his three “native” tongues, was rooted there.
Nabokov'’s French governess, eécile Miauton, a native of Lausanne, was to
become the subject of his only French story, the 1936 “Mlle O.” Resident
in the Nabokov household from 1906 until 1914, the monolingual
“quakingmass” of Mademoiselle Miauton alternately enchanted the young
Nabokov with her lovely and fluid reading aloud of French novels and
repelled him with her chronic unhappiness and incessant nostalgia for her
native Switzerland. Even a chance phrase such as “Il pleut toujours en
Suisse” brought forth a stream of tears. Nabokov’s last meeting with his
former governess was in December 1921 when, as a Cambridge student on a
skiing holiday, he visited her in her Lausanne retirement. Mlle O, who had
spent her Russian years longing for Switzerland, now felt herself yearning
for her Russian “home.” As Nabokov wanders along the lake after his
awkward visit, he sees an aged swan clumsily and vainly struggling to
climb from the water onto a boat. Some years later when he hears of the
death of his governess, this is the first image that comes to him.
Nabokov not only inserted bits and pieces of his one-time
governess into The Defense and, more importantly, into Ada, where she (as
Mlle Lariviére) is “promoted” from French reader to hack French writer. It
was, however, in his memoir that Mademoiselle Miauton, the embodiment of
exile and longing, assumed ever greater substance as she evolved from her
French “original” through her later incarnations in the English Speak,
Memory and the more aptly titled Russian, Drugie berega (Other Shores).
Just as “Mademoisell"O"” was Nabokov’s first French pro subject, she
appears in his first English-language novel, The Real Life of Sebastian
Knight, written in Paris shortly before the NabokovsÂ’ move to America.
Here, the old governess is visited in Lausanne by the novelÂ’s Russian
narrator who is vainly probing the past of his English half- brother, the
novelist Sebastian Knight. Once again, she longs for the lost Russian
paradise where, in fact, she passed her years bewailing her exile from
Switzerland. The 1936 French story was long assumed to be “Mademoiselle
O”’s first literary incarnation, but a recently discovered Russian story,
“EasterRain,” written in 1924, places it among Nabokov’s earliest prose
publications. Here the former governess is named “Josephine,” and it is
she who sees the struggling swan. “Mademoiselle O” is one of the most
persistent images in Nabokov’s oeuvre. Nabokov styles Speak, Memory “a
new kind of autobiography.” It is, he said, “an investigation of the
elements which formed me as a writer.” Each chapter focuses on a person or
phenomenon that contributed to that end. “Mlle O” is the only person,
other than his parents and “Tamara,” his first love, to be the subject of
their own chapter in Speak, Memory. Her occurrence and recurrence in
NabokovÂ’s work from 1924 at least through the 1969 Ada also attests the
importance of her role in his life and art. At first sight, this
prominence seems odd. Neither the young nor the adult Nabokov much liked
his lachrymose Franco-Swiss governess, and her duties, readings apart,
were soon restricted to brother Sergey, and then to the two younger
sisters. What was her role in creating the writer and his themes? The
French language and its literature are, of course, one of the themes that
“Mlle O” embodies. Significantly, “her” chapter immediately follows one
entitled “My English Education,” and a still earlier one in which the boy
is presented with colored Russian alphabet blocks. The three languages and
cultures were to be central to NabokovÂ’s career as a writer. The figure
of CĂ©cile Miauton not only introduces one of NabokovÂ’s three languages and
cultures, but one of his great themes—exile and nostalgia. The combined
themes of exile and nostalgia assume many forms throughout the oeuvre,
running from its overt expression in the early poetry to heavily
fictionalized and fantasized versions in the late novels. Almost all of
Nabokov’s novels involve the exile or émigré and his or her longing for a
former place and time The bygone time or place maybe real or delusional,
idealized or demonized. The fictive geography can assume many forms:
countries, fantasized worlds, abstractions such as “there” versus “he”
present versus past, and so on. In each context there is a point of
transition, a border crossing —between the two “worlds”: a national
border, the boundary between sanity and madness, waking/sleeping,
consciousness /nothingness, and life/death.
For Russians, as for many others, Switzerland has long stood
forthe idea of refuge and neutrality. It provided temporary haven not only
for political figures, such as Alexander Herzen and Lenin, but many
Russian writers have chosen Switzerland as a place to work. Nabokov paid
tribute to some of them in his late “Swiss” novella, Transparent Things,
where Nikolai GogolÂ’s Dead Souls lurks below the surface tension of the
present. Closer in time is the Symbolist writer Andrei Bely whose haunting
novel Saint Petersburg was one of NabokovÂ’s choices for great books of the
XXth century; and, still closer, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who penned his
Lenin in Zurich during his Swiss years. NabokovÂ’s identification of
Switzerland as one of the symbolic representations of his theme of exile
and nostalgia is expressed in two of his Russian novels. In the 1932
Glory, perhaps his most autobiographical novel, his half-Swiss,
half-Russian hero, Martin Edelweiss, a refugee from the Russian
Revolution, comes to a realization: “During the sumptuous Swiss autumn he
felt for the first time that he was, after all, an exile, doomed to live
far from home. That word ‘exile’ had a delicious sound.” It is precisely
this involuntary alienation that prompts Martin (and Nabokov) to recreate
in memory and imagination “his” Russia— something he would not have done
had he remained in Russia.
For Nabokov, Switzerland constituted a particularly apt setting
because of the countryÂ’s long history as a neutral haven. This is
expressed directly in his finest and most “Russian” novel, The Gift. The
Gift is, among other things, an exploration of Russian cultural (and
socio-political) history. It raises the question: Where did Russian
social and aesthetic thought go wrong? Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev, the
young eémireé writer, finds the villain in the journalist, novelist, and
political martyr, Nikolai Chernyshevsky, whose biography forms one of The
GiftÂ’s chapters. Chernyshevsky, the radical social-utilitarian critic who
formulated the credo of evaluating art (and all else) in political terms,
is singled out as the bad seed. And, in truth, the well-intentioned
ChernyshevskyÂ’s views were to find their fullest embodiment in Soviet
Russia and “Socialist Realism.” The title of Nabokov’s Gift refers to the
gift of unfettered art both from the beyond and, via the artist, to his
readers. Since ChernyshevskyÂ’s time in the turbulent 1860s through the end
of Nabokov’s life, this “anti-aesthetic” was dominant in Russian society.
“Neutrality,” “detachment” did not, could not, be tolerated. Yet, freedom
from external constraint was the essence of NabokovÂ’s art. And, no less
so, his politics. The right of the artist, the scientist, the individual,
was paramount. The realities of social upheaval and war were resented
(and, where possible, ignored) by the artist and scientist.
The figure counterpoised to Chernyshevsky in The Gift is FyodorÂ’s
father, the famed explorer and entomologist, Konstantin
Godunov-Cherdyntsev, who is missing and presumed dead on an collecting
expedition to Tibet during WW I and the Revolution. Godunov-Cherdyntsev
considers the war merely an inconvenience that pointlessly hampers his
work. Fyodor writes: “….how Russian public opinion would have wrung its
little hands had it learned that at the height of the war
Godunov-Cherdyntsev had traveled to Geneva to meet a fat, bald,
extraordinarily jovial German professor (a third conspirator was also
present, an old Englishman wearing thin-rimmed spectacles and a roomy
suit), that they had come together Â…. [to discuss]Â…a work of many volumes,
stubbornly continuing publication in Stuttgart, with long-standing
cooperation of foreign specialists on separate groups of butterflies.”
Nabokov himself lamented the unwelcome intrusion of history into his
fiction. One of his bĂŞtes noires was the view that historical cataclysms
somehow defined their generation. For Nabokov, “generation” suggested
“generic,” a mass phenomenon, whereas for him, only the individual and
his/her imagination were crucial. Nabokov could have settled anywhere
(except Russia) for his final exile. After his Russian youth, he had spent
three years in England; fifteen years in Germany; three years in
France;and nearly twenty years in America. When, after Lolita, he left for
Europe, he had no firm plans about his future residence. In addition to
its historic image of non-involvement and stability, several things
eventually drew him to Switzerland. One was family—a sister in Geneva and
a son in nearby Milan; another was alpine butterflies,—in part because of
their congruence with the northern lepidoptera of his Russian youth.
SwitzerlandÂ’s high mountains recreated the harsh climatic conditions
(short summers/long, cold winters) of the Saint Petersburg area, located
so much farther north. Also, Nabokov wanted to “borrow” some Swiss scenery
for Pale FireÂ’s Nova Zembla. An arrangement that was at first thought
temporary gradually became permanent. In part, the unrest and political
turbulence of the American Sixties may have reminded Nabokov of earlier
upheavals and his serial exiles. Switzerland offered natural beauty,
comfort, and stability.
Exile has played a large role in the lives of many
twentieth-century writers, and, for Nabokov, more than most. Exile was
NabokovÂ’s most constant theme. Not only literal, political exile, but
exile in all of its manifold dimensions. Mary, Glory, and Pnin deal
directly with exile and longing. The actions of the protagonist proceed
immediately from their “unhoused” situation. Mary’s Ganin mentally
relives a piece of his (and MaryÂ’s) past romance, assimilates it, and,
instead of resuming the affair, moves onward from Berlin. The dreamy exile
Martin Edelweiss of Glory conceives of his secret (and fatal) escapade
across the Soviet border as a gratuitous act of valor—evidence that
knightly derring-do still exists in his drab, demoralized generation (and
also to impress a girl). Professor Pnin, amiably floundering in an
American college, creates the old Russia with his Petite Histoire of
Russian culture.
Ada and, less obviously, Lolita are classical myths of exile. Van
and Ada, sibling lovers, are expelled from “the arbors and ardors of
Ardis,” the Eden that first nourishes their love, after their father
discovers their secret sin. The novel is the aging VanÂ’s attempt to
recover those moments. The gardens of Ardis also echo those of Vyra, the
Nabokov familyÂ’s country estate near Petersburg where the young Nabokov
had his first romance. In Lolita, Humbert is driven by the compulsion to
return to that “Kingdom by the Sea” first shared with Annabel Leigh. The
careful reader will find that “kingdom” contains many echoes of its
biblical origins Other novels pose exile as a psychological (or perhaps
“philosophical”) state—a personality split into two selves, the new one
“exiled” from the old. In The Eye and in Look at the Harlequins!, the
narrator only intermittently suspects the identity of his other self. The
humiliated narrator of The Eye shoots himself. His surviving
consciousness, he attributes to psychic inertia. This shadowy surviving
“eye” watches the progress of a young man among a circle of new friends,
but sees him only through the wildly varying impressions of the others.
Which image is the real one? Who is he? The answer, of course, is that he
is the narrator. Despite his derision of the shop-worn Doppelgänger theme,
Nabokov often drew on its variants. A narrator tells of his world whose
delusional nature is subtly revealed to the (careful) reader by coded
references to a “real” world. In these novels the hero has exiled himself
into his fantasy world. Despair is narrated by a man who believes a tramp
to be his identical look-alike. On this basis, he contrives a scheme of
murder, body substitution, and insurance fraud—all in vain since his
double bears no resemblance to him. Pale Fire is also based upon the
double theme. The narrator, Professor Charles Kinbote, thinks himself the
exiled King of Nova Zembla and the target of revolutionary terrorists. He
incorporates his fantasy kingdom into the scholarly footnotes to “Pale
Fire,” the work of a just slain poet, John Shade. At length the reader
infers that Kinbote himself is the delusional identity of an obscure
academic named Botkin. Nabokov biographer, Brian Boyd, has recently put
forward the view that the composition of KinboteÂ’s saga is, in part,
guided by the spirit of the late poet, John Shade.
Look at the Harlequins! offers yet another variation of the
double. Vadim Vadimich, an Anglo-Russian writer (and self-parody of
Nabokov), tells of his life and work. Behind his account, one can make out
a real world in which people are well aware of the narratorÂ’s long periods
of delusion. The Real Life of Sebastian Knight also partakes of the émigré
double theme. The Russian narrator attempts to write the biography of his
English half-brother, the late novelist Sebastian Knight. As the story
progresses, the line between the two figures becomes increasingly murky.
In all of these novels the split narrator has exiled a part of himself.
The theme of “exile” finds expression in still other arenas. In Nabokov’s
two surreal “political” novels, Invitation to a Beheading, and Bend
Sinister, the heroes are prisoners of bizarre revolutionary regimes. In
the former, Cincinnatus finds himself condemned to death for the crime of
“gnostical turpitude” in the world he has mistakenly fallen into. At the
moment of his execution, he climbs down from the scaffold and moves off he
direction of voices akin to his own, as the prison world crumbles around
him. Cincinnatus, as one of Nabokov’s “positive” artist heroes, has been
able to detect the hand of his Creator, the author, and ascends into His
universe. This cosmology, latent in Invitation to a Beheading, becomes
overt at the end of Bend Sinister, the first novel written in America. Its
philosopher hero, Krug, senses the invisible hand of his maker. Pressed
beyond his endurance to proclaim his endorsement of a new, revolutionary
government, he charges into a hail of bullets. But the “anthropomorphic
deity” behind the scenes, who has granted Krug an ameliorative madness,
gathers him up into the world of the author, thus returning him from his
cruel exile.
Many of NabokovÂ’s novels are built upon the image of two worlds:
one—the world of the characters; the other—the hidden world of their
creator, the author, who leaves tantalizingly obscure clues of his
presence and his world for his fictional favorites. This foundation serves
as a platform for two closely related questions that haunt Nabokov's
oeuvre. NabokovÂ’ characters (with the partial exception of his rare
“favored” heroes) live in a world of limited consciousness which they use
to probe the mysteries of their existence. Occasionally, the favored few
have indistinct glimmers of insight. Revelation comes only with death,
the moment of transition from the constrained consciousness of life on
their world to the full enlightenment of their CreatorÂ’s world. Implicit
in this cosmogony is that their Creator stands in the same state of
limited consciousness vis-aĂ -vis his Creator who, in turn, provides faint
traces of His presence. NabokovÂ’s characters are launched on their search
for ultimate significance by the presence of death— usually that of a
loved one; hence the question: “Does individual consciousness, i.e.,
personal identity, survive death?” Within the framework of Nabokov’s
fictional universe, the answer would seem to be “yes,” if only for the
favored few. The mysterious Baron R., Swiss resident and covert narrator
of Transparent Things, writes his tale from beyond the grave. But is this
a fictive conceit or a personal credo ? George Steiner, one-time
Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Geneva, has
offered a theory about several outstanding literary figures of the
Twentieth Century. Steiner, himself a native speaker of German, French,
and English, coined the term “extraterritoriality” in reference to the
writings of such figures as Nabokov, Samuel Beckett, Jorge Borges, and
Ezra Pound. Steiner suggests that much of the singularity of their
literary styles may derive from the filtration of one language through the
grammatical, lexical, and cultural world- view of a second language. He
conjectures that their writings in each of two languages may somehow be
“meta-translations” of the other—a phenomenon that presumably underlies
their dazzling virtuosity. Much of NabokovÂ’s work, Steiner asserts, may be
read “as a meditation—lyric, ironic, technical, parodistic—on the nature
of human language, on the enigmatic coexistence of different,
linguistically generated world visions and of a deep current underlying,
and at times conjoining, the multitude of diverse tongues.” To this, one
should, of course, add the interaction of three distinct literary
cultures—Russian, English, and French. Switzerland is, appropriately, a
multilingual nation that has been host and haven to writers of all three
literatures, although rarely, if ever before, embodied in a single author.
That the Russo-English writer Nabokov and his French governess CĂ©cile
Miauton, “Mlle O,” both lie buried on the shores of Lake Geneva beggars
plausibility: Mademoiselle O, emblem of exile as that bedraggled swan
struggling to find a place of rest, and Nabokov (who lived in the Montreux
Palace’s “Le Cygne” wing), the rara avis, the Black Swan of Laac Léman.
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D. Barton Johnson
Department of Germanic, Slavic and Semitic Studies
Phelps Hall
University of California at Santa Barbara
Santa Barbara, CA 93106
Phone and Fax: (805) 687-1825
Home Phone: (805) 682-4618