Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0000799, Mon, 30 Oct 1995 19:07:34 -0800

Subject
RJ: "Tyrants Destroyed" (fwd)
Date
Body
EDITORIAL NOTE. British Nabokovian Roy Johnson continues his weekly
series of essays on Nabokov's short stories. Your comments are invited.

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This week's story - TYRANTS DESTROYED
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'Tyrants Destroyed' (June 1938) was a twin to 'Cloud, Castle,
Lake' but took quite a different narrative approach to the same
theme. For this, Nabokov returned to the Dostoyevskian form of
the quasi-philosophic monologue - the outpouring of rage,
frustration, and neurosis which pretends to no particular
structure, does away with characterisation and plot, and
concentrates on an *idea*: in this case, the hatefulness of
tyrants.

The unnamed narrator is a typical man-from-underground, a
schoolteacher who has led "a hard, lonely life, always
indigent, in shabby lodgings" (TD,p.6). He has become an
insomniac and is totally obsessed with his hatred of his
country's dictator who he knew personally as a youth. This hatred
has grown into a neurosis which obliterates everything else from
his life.

The narrative takes the form of an analysis of dictators - their
mediocrity, vulgarity, shabbiness, cruelty, and their moral
degeneracy. Nabokov takes the fairly commonplace view that
dictators are petty-bourgeois nonentities seeking revenge on
others for their own shortcomings, and what they perceive to be
the injustices that life has meted out to them. From a fictional
point of view the problem is that this portrait is generalised
rather than specific. The dictator is an identikit figure, as
Nabokov himself hints: "Hitler, Lenin, and Stalin dispute my
tyrant's throne in this story" (p.2). Narrative interest
therefore focuses not so much on the dictator as on the narrator
himself and what he will do to overcome his obsession.

Fuelled by his hatred, he decides that the tyrant must die, but
cannot bring himself to commit the act on the grounds that murder
is a shabby, vulgar act only worthy of the very type he wishes
to eliminate. Instead, in typically Dostoyevskian manner, he
contemplates suicide: "By killing myself I would kill him, as he
was totally inside me, fattened on the intensity of my hatred"
(p.33). But on re-reading the notes which constitute his
narrative he feels that the mockery and scorn he has poured onto
the dictator constitute a sort of triumph over him, and that they
will exist to be of help to others in similar need: "This is an
incantation, an exorcism, so that henceforth any man can exorcise
bondage" (p.36).

This is not an altogether convincing argument. It rests on the
myth that "the pen is mightier than the sword". [This might be
true in the very long historical term, but in the short it can
be seen - especially so far as the victims are concerned - as an
almost cruel rationalisation of passivity. However, it is a neat
resolution to the problem of the narrative itself, though the
story is not one of his best.

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Next week's story - A VISIT TO THE MUSEUM
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