Man From the USSR & Other Plays
Page 3
In an age when I, for one, find it hard to disapprove of capital punishment as a means of protecting our society from its more ruthless and demonstrably guilty members, Father steadfastly opposed it, as had his father Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov. It was Father’s conviction that the remotest possibility of erroneously destroying even a single human life makes the death penalty fundamentally wrong. (I recall that his first concern upon seeing the bruised Oswald under guard was that he might have been arrested and beaten up unjustly.)
Nabokov makes his point, in The Grand-dad, more effectively than the most socially “involved” contemporary author. Granted that he was interested in the combinational possibilities of whatever subject he chose. But a viewpoint is a viewpoint, and true art is perhaps the most effective medium for its expression.
A condemned man who has escaped the guillotine through pure luck has a chance encounter, many years later, with his executioner. The latter is possessed by his need to complete the interrupted task: society has made him so, for new murderers are generated by the process of execution. He is obsessed by the urge to kill until his final moment. And here the artist takes over to explore the patterns the situation can create.
The creative process revealed in The Grand-dad is the necessary key, perhaps, for those who do not fully understand Nabokov, who criticize him for artistic aloofness, Schadenfreude, sterile gamesmanship, lack of concern, and so forth.
The executioner, so deeply tainted by the society in which he lived, reveals, like the despot Paduk in Bend Sinister, like the invisible manipulators of power in Invitation to a Beheading, a very profound involvement on Father’s part. Who is to say that his involvement is less genuine or less effectual because it is refracted through the artistic prism?
Speaking of what Prof. Donoghue defines as Nabokov’s “aesthetic relation to Russian literature and thè tensions it exerts between art and propaganda,”12 Alfred Kazin has pointed out that Nabokov perpetuates and develops the tradition of certain Russian formalist poets and scholars who were “very much concerned with art in a very special sense.” It was not “art for art’s sake” with the traditional connotations, but rather “the idea of art as a new reality,...an idea Nabokov never lost....He felt—in this he was a prophet—that....Lenin was aiming at something very different from social reform or even social revolution.... [Nabokov] understood that Lenin wanted a separate reality. And we now know, for example, that one of the reasons for the absolute murderousness of totalitarianism is [the insistence].... that communism is a separate reality that has entirely replaced capitalism [and] anyone who even [questions this] becomes an enemy of the system, so that we have an exclusive idea of salvation, which is quite frightful. And Nabokov understood this.”13
It is too bad that the climate of the times and the limitations of Nabokov’s audience prevented his prophecies from affecting the course of events. But if art is indeed reality, and a part of that reality is opinion on public matters, can one justly accuse Nabokov of lacking a social consciousness?
Nabokov identified beauty with pity, with the poetry and patterns of life itself. He detested brutality and injustice, whether toward a group or an individual. He had the same compassion for the victim of a crime as for someone unjustly punished for that crime. The outrage of a didactic tract, whether or not it purports to be literature and whatever its viewpoint, is hollow. The compassion of the true artist is sometimes poignant to the point of discomfort, which may be what bothers certain critics.
In translating the verse plays, I have deliberately tried for an accurate reproduction of the pentameter and the iambic foot wherever it was possible to reconcile them with reasonably natural speech patterns. It is true that Father’s approach to the translation of poetry, as exemplified in his version of Eugene Onegin and other late translations of his own and others’ verse, attained a literal purity wherein meter and (if present) rhyme were abandoned in the search for absolute accuracy of sense, nuance, and connotation. Where possible, however, he did strive for rhythm and alliteration. While Nabokov’s more complex verse, with some of which I am grappling now, does dictate greater sacrifices to literality, I believe that, in the case of these wonderful, youthful verse compositions, the relative straightforwardness of language would have led Nabokov to decide that there was no need, as a rule, to scrap the basic structure. Hence, while precision, of course, received absolute priority, I found it possible to preserve the overall metric scheme and the individual stresses with considerable accuracy (if one accepts, as in the Russian, the ad libitum use of an unaccented final syllable with the resultant feminine ending).
In the two prose plays there are certain deliberate departures from the original texts: in the case of wordplays, references, or special expressions that were untranslatable literally, or that, had they been translated, would have proved meaningless to the English-speaking reader or theatregoer.
In both the prose and the verse plays the possibility of performance has been kept in mind. I have tried to keep transliteration as straightforward as possible. “A” is of course sounded as in “ma,” “e” as in “hey,” “i” as “ee,” “o” as something between “oh” and “aw” when stressed and as “uh” when not, “u” as in “put” with a bit of “boot,” and “y” (except when used alone) is a purely auxiliary symbol denoting a diphthong sound, and is to be passed over as rapidly as possible. The soft-signed letters “1’ ” and “n’,” in Russian, sound like the French “1” and “n” when the latter are followed by the vowel “i.” The soft-signed final “v’ ” of “Lyubov’ ” is almost a French “f ” when the latter is followed by “i.” In addition to a one-time indication of stresses for Russian characters listed in the casts, stresses of diminutives as well as names and patronymics of persons mentioned in the text but not listed in Cast of Characters are indicated (in cases where there might be a doubt) at their first occurrence. The stress and transliteration business is purely utilitarian here, and has therefore been deliberately simplified.
It seems appropriate, in view of the variations that abound, to add that the author’s name is stressed Vladimir Nabokov.
The four plays I have translated for this volume will soon be published by Ardis as part of a collection of Father’s dramatic works in the original Russian.
Chronology
A BRIEF CHECKLIST OF DRAMATIC WORKS BY VLADIMIR NABOKOV
(For more details regarding the history of the four plays included in this volume, see individual introductory notes.)
In the early 1920s Vladimir Nabokov wrote a couple of humorous playlets for a Russian variety theatre in Berlin; he also translated, for the same theatre, some imitation folk chastushki (a kind of Russian limerick).
Skital’tsy (The Wanderers). A supposed translation of the first act of a play by the nonexistent English author “Vivian Calmbrood” (anagram). Berlin, Grani, March 1923.
Smert’ (Death). A verse drama in two acts. Berlin, Rul’, 14 and 20 May 1923.
Dedushka (The Grand-dad). A verse drama in one act. Berlin, Rul’, 14 October 1923.
Agasfer.“A dramatic monolgue written as a prologue to a staged symphony” (VN’s subtitle). Berlin, Rul’, 2 December 1923. Performed once in Berlin.
Traghediya Gospodina Moma (The Tragedy of Mr. Mom). A verse drama in five acts. Excerpt published Berlin, Rul’, 6 April 1924. Otherwise unpublished. Read by VN at a literary club meeting, early April 1924.
Polyus (The Pole). A verse drama in one act. Berlin,Rul’, 14 and 16 August 1924.
Chelovek iz SSSR (The Man from the USSR). Act one only: Berlin, Rul’, 1 January 1927. Staged in Russian in Berlin, 1926.
Sobytie (The Event). A “dramatic comedy” (VN’s subtitle) in three acts. Paris, Russkie zapiski (Annales russes), April 1938. Staged in Russian in various countries.
Izobretenie Val’sa (The Waltz Invention). A drama in three acts. Paris, Russkie zapiski, November 1938. English translation by Dmitri Nabokov (New York: Phaedra, 1966); Dutch and Spanish trans
lations. Staged in Russian and English in various countries.
Rusałka (The Water Nymph).“A concluding scene to Pushkin’s Rusałka” (VN’s subtitle). New York, Novy zhumal (The New Review), No. 2, 1942.
Lolita: A Screenplay. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974. Used only in part for the 1962 Kubrick-Harris film based on the novel.
Note: This chronology is based partly on the same source material as sections of Andrew Field’s Nabokov. A Bibliography(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1973), which, though flawed, was of some help in this instance.
The Man from the USSR
DRAMA IN FIVE ACTS
Program for the 1926 Berlin world premiere of The Man from the USSR, produced by The Group in Russian.
INTRODUCTORY NOTE
The Man From the USSR was written in Berlin in 1925-1926. The first act only was published in Rul’ on 1 January 1927. The entire play had been staged by a Russian theatrical company called Gruppa (The Group) at the Grotrian-Steinweg Saal in Berlin in 1926. For the present translation I have used the manuscript text preserved in one of my grandmother’s albums.
NB: “Kuznetsoff’ is a deliberate departure from normal transliteration.
CAST OF CHARACTERS1
Alexéy Matvéyevich (Alyósha) Kuznetsóff, a businessman Ólga Pávlovna (Ólya), his wife
Víctor Iv´novich (Vítya) Oshivénski, proprietor of a small tavern, former landowner
Yevghénia Vasílyevna (Zhénya, Mrs. Oshivenski), his wife
Mariánna Sergéyevna Tal’, a film actress
Lyúlya, her friend
Baron Nikoláy Kárlovich (Kólya) Táubendorf, waiter, former officer
Fyódor Fyódorovich, waiter, former officer
The Assistant Director
émigrés, film extras, stagehands, and passing legs
ACT ONE
Small tavern in a basement. In the back, a narrow horizontal window—a strip of glass spanning almost the entire length of the room. Since the window is at sidewalk level, only the legs of passers by are visible. On the left*, a door, curtained with blue cloth; its threshold is level with the bottom edge of the window, and a visitor must descend six blue steps to reach the basement. To the right of the window, an obliquely situated bar; behind it, along the right wall, shelves with bottles and, downstage of them, a low door leading into the cellar. The proprietor has evidently attempted to give the tavern a Russian atmosphere by means of blue babas and peacocks painted on the rear wall above the strip of window, but his imagination has stopped there. It is about nine o'clock on a spring evening. Life has not yet begun in the tavern: tables and chairs stand haphazardly; here and there the angular white shapes of spread tablecloths strike the eye. Fyodor Fyodorovich, a waiter, is bent over the bar, arranging fruit in two baskets. There is an evening dimness in the tavern, and that makes Fyodor Fyodorovich's face and his white smock seem especially pale. He is about twenty-five, with fair hair slicked down very thoroughly. His profile is angular, and his movements are not devoid of a certain careless swagger. Victor Ivanovich Oshivenski, owner of the tavern, a slightly chubby, neat old man with a short gray beard and a pince-nez, is nailing to the wall, to the right of the window, a large white sheet, on which one can distinguish the inscription “Gypsy Chorus!’ From time to time legs pass from left to right and from right to left in the strip of window. They stand out against the yellowish background of evening with a two-dimensional clarity, as if cut out of black cardboard. If one compared the action onstage to music, these silhouettes would serve as black quavers and semiquavers. Of course they do not pass continuously, but at considerable intervals. From the opening curtain until the moment when Fyodor Fyodorovich lowers the blinds at Kuznetsoff’s appearance, only ten pairs of legs pass, of which two cross from opposite directions, two follow each other in rapid succession, and the rest pass individually.
Oshivenski pounds, for a certain length of time, then drops his hammer with a spasm of pain.
OSHIVENSKI
Damn!...Right on my thumbnail....
FYODOR FYODOROVICH
Mustn’t be so careless, Victor Ivanovich. That really hurts, doesn’t it?
OSHIVENSKI
I’ll say it does.... The nail will probably come off.
FYODOR FYODOROVICH
Here, let me hammer. The lettering is well done, though, if I do say so myself. I admit I tried very hard. Those letters are a dream.
OSHIVENSKI
These gypsies are just an extra expense anyway. They won’t bring in any new customers. It’s only a matter of days before my little place ... what do you think—maybe I should soak it in cold water?
FYODOR FYODOROVICH
Yes, that helps. There, it’s ready! Right where it strikes the eye. The effect isn’t bad at all.
OSHIVENSKI
...It’s only a matter of days before my little place folds. And that will mean running around this damned city of Berlin again, searching, trying to think something up....And meanwhile, like it or not, I’m pushing seventy. And how tired I am, how very tired....
FYODOR FYODOROVICH
I think it’ll look better this way: green grapes with the oranges, red with the bananas. Simple and appetizing.
OSHIVENSKI
What time is it?
FYODOR FYODOROVICH
Going on nine. I suggest we arrange the tables differently today. Anyway, next week when the gypsies get going we’ll have to clear a space over there.
OSHIVENSKI
I’m beginning to think that there is a hidden flaw in the concept itself. At first it seemed to me that this kind of nighttime tavern, a basement place something like the “Stray Dog,” would have a particularly attractive atmosphere. The very fact that legs flit by on the sidewalk, and that special kind of—what’s the word—oh, you know, coziness, and so forth. Don’t crowd them together too much, though.
FYODOR FYODOROVICH
No, I think it works out nicely like this. Here’s a tablecloth that needs changing. Wine got spilled on it last night. Turned it into a regular map of the world.
OSHIVENSKI
I’ll say. And the laundering doesn’t come cheap, either. Anything but. That’s a perfect example: it would probably have been better to open up not a tavern but just a café, a little restaurant, something very ordinary, and don’t you sniff with indifference, Fyodor Fyodorovich.
FYODOR FYODOROVICH
Why should I sniff? Sniffing only creates drafts. Don’t you worry, Victor Ivanovich, we’ll make a goof it somehow. Personally I don’t care what I do, and I even think it’s fun being a waiter. For over two years now I’ve enjoyed the most humble professions—no matter that I was once an artillery captain.2
OSHIVENSKI
What time is it?
FYODOR FYODOROVICH
As I told you, it’s close to nine. Soon they’ll start gathering.
Those legs are heading here.
(There appears, in the strip of window, a pair of legs, which first cross from left to right, then stop, then go in the opposite direction, then stop again, then change direction again. They belong to Kuznetsoff, but are seen in silhouette form, i.e., two-dimensional and black, like black cardboard cutouts. Only their outline is reminiscent of his real legs, which [tn gray pants and sturdy, tan shoes] will appear onstage together with their owner two or three speeches later.)
OSHIVENSKI
And one fine day nobody will gather at all. Listen, old chap, pull down the blind and turn on some lights. Yes ... one fine day....A colleague of mine in the tavern business—what’s his name ... Meyer—was telling me everything was going fine, his place was flourishing—then, suddenly, what do you know: nobody shows up.... Ten o’clock, eleven, midnight—nobody....Matter of chance, of course.
FYODOR FYODOROVICH
I told you those legs were coming here.
(The blue cloth covering the door begins to bulge.)
OSHIVENSKI
A matter of chance all right, but an amazing one. Nobody came at all that
whole night.
(Pushing aside the cloth, Kuznetsoff appears and pauses on the top step. He is dressed for travel: gray suit, no hat, tan raincoat draped over his arm. He is a man of average height with an unprepossessing clean-shaven face, with narrowed myopic eyes. His hair is dark and slightly thinning at the temples, and he wears a polka-dot bow tie. At first sight it is hard to tell if he is a foreigner or a Russian.)
FYODOR FYODOROVICH
(jauntily)
Guten abend.
(He turns on the lights and lowers the blue blinds. The passing legs disappear from view.)
OSHIVENSKI
(in a low-pitched drawl)
Guten abend.
KUZNETSOFF
(cautiously negotiating the stairs)