Some time ago I inquired about VN's statement
that "nymphets do not occur in polar regions" and Lolita's death
in Gray Star. Later our discussions skimmed over VN's "hereafter"
- as it is described in "Pale Fire": Will Shade's musings correspond to VN's own conceptions about a
hereafter or are they a parody of this belief? Is "everything permitted" in the worlds of fiction?
Those two "polar" issues make their appearance
in the Nabokovian site "Zembla", together with the Nietzschean
"God is Dead" in Russian fiction and "creative dreams projected
onto malleable reality" ( mathematician's dreams or scientific
reality? Cf. S K-Bottle, J.Aisenberg and J. Freeman - August 2008
exchanges).
Alexander Dolinin( The Caning of Modernist
Profaners: Parody in Despair) writes: "Despair can be read as a double-edged lampoon aimed simultaneously
at both waves of "dostoevshchina." . Dolinin's comparison
proceeds from "Hermann's initial idea of committing a perfect murder that
would be aesthetically comparable with the greatest artistic creations parodies
the Symbolist philosophy of "zhiznetvorchestvo" (life-creation) and decadent
writings based on the concept of the artist as a Nietzschean superman standing
"beyond good and evil" and projecting his "creative dreams"onto "malleable
reality," and he adds: "one text that is
especially worth mentioning, since it seems to have provided Nabokov with a
model for both the central character of Despair and parts of its imagery and
plot: Leonid Andreev's story "The Thought" ("Mysl'")[...] Striking parallels to
Andreev's story can be found on various levels of Despair. Both texts, for
example, reproduce the narrative structure and intonations of Dostoevsky's Notes
from Underground* --a soliloquy which, in Nabokov's words, "presupposes the
presence of a phantom audience" jeering at the narrator who tries "to thwart
their mockery and denunciations by the shifts, the doubling back, and various
other tricks of his supposedly remarkable intellect." (Lectures on Russian
Literature, 115-16) [...]Despair evidently develops a number of themes and
motifs originating in "The Thought." Hermann's assertion that "God does not
exist, as neither does our hereafter" connected with his recurrent dream of
something "unimaginably terrible; to wit, a perfectly empty, newly whitewashed
room" correspond to Anton's paraphrase of the famous Nietzschean proclamation
that Gott ist tot."
Hop-scotching from artistic creation to
'real-life': "an Israeli guard in a Jerusalem prison gave a
copy of ''Lolita" to Adolf Eichmann, who was awaiting trial. An indignant
Eichmann returned the book two days later, calling it ''a very unwholesome
book." The sulphurous halo of Nabokov's novel was still burning brightly in the
popular consciousness of 1960 and it seems that Eichmann's guard gave the book
to him as an experiment--a sort of litmus test for radical evil: to see whether
the real-life villain, he who impassively organized the transport towards
certain death of countless innocents, would coldly, or even gleefully, approve
the various and vile machinations of Nabokov's creation."**
He didn't. After all, "moral life has its poles" -
and the Third Man is but a shadow of Quilty, a Kinbotean shade -
and no Uebermensch/Superman yet has evolved from our base Mankind
with the help of either artistic or unimaginative murderers,
nor thanks to scientific implementa towards a
mechanical perfection.
......................................................................................................................................
* -Another self-indulgent parallel both murderers
draw is to contemporary Polar explorers. Anton exclaims, "You would not dare
call Nansen, that great man of the past century, mad. Moral life, too, has its
poles, and I wanted to reach one of them. You are dismayed by the lack of
jealousy, vengefulness, greed, and other truly stupid motives [...] But then,
you men of science will condemn Nansen, along with the fools and ignoramuses who
regard his enterprise as madness" (ibid., 69). Cf. in Despair: "Somebody told me
once that I looked like Amundsen, the Polar explorer. Well, Felix, too, looked
like Amundsen. But it is not every person that can recall Amundsen's face. I
myself recall it but faintly, nor am I sure whether there had not been some
mix-up with Nansen."
**- this information doesn't appear in
Dolinin's article and I couldn't locate it, but it appeared in an
internet discussion about Kubrick's
movie.