Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0000860, Wed, 13 Dec 1995 09:03:41 -0800

Subject
Re: RJ: LIK
Date
Body
EDITORIAL NOTE. Roy Johnson <Roy@mantex.demon.co.uk> continues his series
of discussions on VN's short stories. THey are drawn from his book
manuscript. Comments are invited from subscribers to NABOKV-L.

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This week's story - LIK
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Perhaps in keeping with the mood of the decade's end, 'Lik'
(November 1938) is one of the most sombre and unremittingly
serious of Nabokov's stories. In it he sticks to a plain third
person narrative mode and does not bring into play any of his
customary literary amusements. The setting might be the French
Riviera, but the subject matter is pain, exile, and death.

Lavrentiy Ivanovich Kruzhevnitsyn, whose initials give the story
its title and him his nickname, is a frail and hypersensitive
emigre who is scratching a living as an actor in a theatrical
company. They are currently touring *L'Abime*, a French melodrama
in which he plays the (badly-written) part of a stage Russian.
He feels himself to be one of life's permanent outsiders, and he
also has a weak heart. Whilst resting between performances he
meets a distant relative Koldunov who bullied him as a schoolboy
but who has now sunk into a pitiful state of dejection and
poverty. Koldunov tries to borrow money from him and oppresses
him with boorish behaviour.

Just before Lik's last performance they meet again. Koldunov
takes him back to his squalid lodgings, tries to get him drunk,
delivers a tirade which catalogues the injustices he has
suffered, and demands to know why fate treats the two of them so
differently. Lik escapes from this moral harassment, feeling that
he is about to have a heart attack. But then he has to turn back
because he has left behind a recently purchased pair of shoes.
When he arrives at the room however Koldunov has shot himself -
after putting on the shoes.

If there is any authorial sleight of hand here it occurs in two
instances both of which are related to the story's themes. The
first is in the opening of the story where Nabokov offers a sort
of false beginning by describing the plot of *L'Abime* in a way
which leads the reader to expect that this will be the subject
of the story: "the young man of the play threatens to be somewhat
colourless, and it is in a vain attempt to touch him up a little
that the author has made him a Russian" (TD,p.72). The play is
a melodrama, and it is gently mocked for dealing in the
stereotypes of what the public supposes to be 'the Russian
character'. But 'Lik' as a story is itself melodramatic on the
surface, so the play parallels the story, whose own "young man"
is Russian - though the play is a paler parodic version of the
story. For 'Lik' is Russian in a manner which goes straight back
to Dostoyevski, who is even acknowledged in the text.

The other instance of Nabokov misleading the reader occurs at the
end of the story when Lik has escaped from the importunate
demands of Koldunov. He is agitated, ill, and he senses an attack
coming on: "everything began to spin; his heart was reflected as
a terrifying globe on the dark inner side of his eyelids. It
continued to swell agonisingly" (p.97). The reader is given every
reason to believe that Lik will die. But he does not: Koldunov
dies instead. The justification for the sleight of hand in this
instance is that the two men are in fact alternative versions of
each other - doubles in a very subtle manner.

Lik is a double outsider - an emigre, and a man alone. He is
described in a manner which echoes many characters from Russian
nineteenth century fiction: "he had...the feeling of being
superfluous, of having usurped somebody else's place" (p.75). He
lives on his own, has no friends, and feels a painful sense of
separation from his fellow men - even his fellow actors - which
borders on paranoia. This, in addition to his illness, makes him
hypersensitive. He realises that if he had not lost both parents
and been forced into the life of an emigre he could have been
more stable and enjoyed a normal life. As it is he feels death
calling him, and that even this might at least give his life some
meaning: "If death did not present him with an exit into true
reality, he would simply never come to know life" (p.80).

He also has an artistic sensibility which he applies to this
problem, reflecting on the possibility of moving his existence
from the real world into that of art:

"Lik might hope, one vague and lonely night, in the
midst of the usual performance, to tread...on a
quicksandy spot: something would give, and he would
sink forever into a newborn element...developing the
play's threadbare themes in a way altogether new"
(p.77)

Using Lik's hypersensitivity as a justification, Nabokov is here
toying with the metaphysical notion of an 'existence' which can
slip between one level of reality and another.

Koldunov at first sight appears to be quite unlike Lik: he is
vulgar, clumsy, "an idler, a drunkard and a boor" (p.89). But he
is related by family to Lik, and Nabokov provides a series of
subtle hints, parallels and twinnings which invite us to view him
as Lik's double - the other development of Lik's possible life
chances. Even Lik himself is vaguely aware of this: "With
Koldunov's resurrection, he had to admit the possibility of two
parallel lines crossing after all" (p.82)

Koldunov like him is in exile, is poor, and he too feels that his
life has become so desperate that it must be near its end. He
torments Lik, hinting at suicide: "the other day I was thinking
that all *was* lost. Do you understand what I am saying" (p.88).
His life has gone onto a downward trajectory, but in a way which
is not altogether unlike Lik's: "heavy cycles of ignoble
idleness and ignoble toil" (p.92). And this plunge into the lower
depths prompts him, in a clearly Dostoyevskian manner, to pose
philosophic questions about it, and in doing so he uses a
theatrical metaphor which echoes the 'part' Lik is employed to
play: "Why have I been assigned the part of some kind of
miserable scoundrel who is spat on by everybody, gypped, bullied,
thrown into jail?" (p.94).

We take it from his vulgar behaviour, the quarrels he picks, and
his insensitivity, that some of this misfortune is probably of
his own making, but there is a sense in which he has every right
to pose these questions. Lik himself is poor enough, but Koldunov
is even poorer: why *does* the world treat him this way? Just
because he is shabby and vulgar, this is no justification. He
goes back as a literary conception to the downtrodden little men
of nineteenth century fiction. To 'poor Yevgeni' of Pushkin's
'The Bronze Horseman':

"But my poor, poor
Yevgeni! ... Alas! his confused mind could not endure
The shocks he had suffered ...
... He grew
A stranger to the world"
(Pushkin,p.255)

Or to Gogol's Akaky Akakievich whose overcoat is stolen and who
can find no justice in life:

"A human being whom no one ever thought of protecting,
who was dear to no one, in whom no one was the least
interested, not even the naturalist who cannot resist
sticking a pin into a common fly and examining it
under the microscope" (Gogol,p.102)

And of course to so many of Dostoyevski's furious individuals who
rant against the injustices of life.

The double theme is woven into the story by a number of hints,
repetitions, and events which echo each other. Koldunov is
mentioned to Lik for instance by

"a loquacious old Russian (who had managed on two
occasions already to recount to Lik the story of his
life, first in one direction, from the present to the
past, and then in the other, against the grain,
resulting in two different lives, one successful, the
other not)" (p.81)

This of course describes the lives of Lik and Koldunov as
presented by the story, and the link between the two of them is
firmly underscored at the end by the fact that Koldunov has put
on Lik's shoes before shooting himself.

'Lik' stands alongside 'Spring in Fialta' and 'The Return of
Chorb' as one of Nabokov's major achievements in the short story
form, and it illustrates in both theme and treatment the
continuing strength of his links with the Russian literary
tradition at a time when he was about to begin his third stage
of exile from his native country and about to start writing in
a language which was 'foreign' to him.

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Next week's story - VASILIY SHISHKOV
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