I would certainly have [my gardener] attired according to the old romanticist notion of a Moorish prince, had I been a northern king--or rather had I still been a king (exile becomes a bad habit). --l. 998
I may assume other disguises, other forms, but I shall try to exist. I may turn up yet, on another campus, as an old, happy, healthy heterosexual Russian, a writer in exile, sans fame, sans future, sans audience, sans anything but his art. I may join forces with Odon in a new motion picture: Escape from Zembla (ball in the palace, bomb in the palace square). I may pander to the simple tastes of theatrical critics and cook up a stage play, an old-fashioned melodrama with three principles: a lunatic who intends to kill an imaginary king, another lunatic who imagines himself to be that king, and a distinguished old poet who stumbles by chance into the line of fire, and perishes in the clash between the two figments. Oh, I may do many things! History permitting, I may sail back to my recovered kingdom, and with a great sob greet the gray coastline and the gleam of a roof in the rain. I may huddle and groan in a madhouse. --l. 1000
Whatever it may have been when the Erie Canal was being dug, upstate New York during the Nabokov years included a lot of scrawny and marginal countryside. A few big dairy farms flourished, there were vineyards yielding white wine that I thought pale and bitter; but many of the little homestead farms were being overgrown with brush or abandoned outright.
One crop, though, continued to flourish—a rich harvest of spiritual seers and religious visionaries. That had been true for a long time. Cornell itself was nonsectarian to the point of having once enjoyed the name of "the godless university." But the green slopes and valleys around it were alive with spiritual influences. Just down Highway 20 stands the Hill of Cumorah, where the angel Moroni revealed to Joseph Smith the golden tablets (sorry, no sampling allowed) on which were inscribed the teachings of Mormonism. From the machicolated battlements of their watchtower in North Lansing, a band of Jehovah's Witnesses kept vigilant watch for the approach of Armageddon. On at least one occasion the Millerites of Syracuse had turned out in their night-gowns amid the snowdrifts to await the Second Coming. And less than fifty years before, the university itself had been visited by a spectral figure from Russia—none other than H.P.B. herself, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, who spent some four years on and around the campus.
Her mission was double, to do the research for Isis Unveiled, which bears many marks of having been composed in the Cornell Library, and to bring solace to the life of Hiram Corson, the professor of English, who was grieving the loss of a cherished daughter. How Madame Blavatsky put the professor in touch with the pneuma of his adored lost child we should not ask too closely; but for the years in which she made up part of his family, she cannot have failed to leave a mark. That Nabokov knew this story, hardly less colorful than that of Pale Fire, is only a guess; but his best friend in Ithaca was the poet Morris Bishop, who knew so much about the university that in his last years he was named official Cornell historian.
Because it was relatively small and very remote from any big cities, Cornell in Nabokov's day had many administrative hideaways and cubbyholes, where people could cultivate private gifts or special interests in almost complete isolation. The main medical school was, of course, in New York City; the Ithaca campus devoted itself very largely to premedical training of undergraduates. But the professor of anatomy nurtured a private passion for Marcello Malpighi (1628–1694), and after decades of study published in four immense volumes a Life narrated in connection with a history of the University of Padua and the general history of embryology. (Among other things, the biography reports the results of reduplicating every single experimental observation made by Malpighi in the course of his life. One single footnote in this gigantic opus—so similar to Nabokov's outsize annotations of Eugene Onegin—covered a thousand pages.)
Not all these private ventures ended triumphantly. The professor of astronomy—another one-man department in those distant days—developed reclusive habits, to the point that all the astronomical journals had to be kept under lock and key in his private office. Perhaps he was sheltering the slowly developing line of calculation which led him gradually and then explicitly to reaffirm a geocentric design for the universe. A professor of architecture developed, half seriously, the model of an imaginary civilization, Vulcania; out of broken farm machinery, sculch from junk shops, and miscellaneous familiar objects, he assembled a mock-archaeological excavation in which (as I know) it was all too easy to get lost.
Search the archive | Contact the Editors | Visit "Nabokov Online Journal" |
Visit Zembla | View Nabokv-L Policies | Manage subscription options |