Man From the USSR & Other Plays

by Vladimir Nabokov

  (Juliette bursts in, laughing boisterously.)

  JULIETTE

  Mother!

  Oh, Mother! You’ll die laughing!

  WIFE

  What’s the matter?

  JULIETTE

  Grand-dad ... out there ... the basket....Oh! (laughs)

  WIFE

  Come on,

  let’s hear it properly....

  JULIETTE

  You’ll die.... See, Mother,

  I was just going—I was going through

  the garden to pick cherries.... Grand-dad sees me,

  gets in a crouch, then snatches at my basket—

  the new one, the one with the oilcloth lining,

  already stained with juice—he snatches it,

  and heaves it all the way into the stream....

  By now the current’s carried it away.

  PASSERBY

  How very odd. God only knows in what

  directions, in his brain, the thoughts make bridges....

  Could be that ... no.(laughs) Sometimes I tend myself

  to strange associations....Like that basket,

  its oilcloth lining with the cherries’ juice

  incarnadined—it brings to mind....Good God,

  what chilling nonsense! You’ll permit me not

  to finish....

  WIFE

  (not listening)

  What’s got into him? Your father

  will be angry. Twenty sous, that basket, (leaves with her daughter)

  PASSERBY

  (looking out the window)

  They’re bringing him....It’s funny how he sulks,

  the old man.... Just like an offended child....

  WIFE

  (They return with Grand-dad.)

  Here, Grand-dad, we’ve a guest....Just look at him....

  GRAND-DAD

  I do not want that basket here. There must

  not be such baskets....

  WIFE

  It’s all right, my dear....

  It isn’t there. It’s gone. It’s gone for good.

  Come on, calm down....Good sir, perhaps you could

  distract him for a while....I have to go

  and start preparing supper....

  GRAND-DAD

  Who is this?

  No, I don’t want...

  WIFE

  (in the doorway)

  But that’s our guest. He’s kind.

  Sit down, sit down. What stories he has told us!

  About the executioner in Lyon,

  the guillotine, the fire! It’s fascinating.

  Tell it again, sir. (leaves with her daughter)

  GRAND-DAD

  What? What was that she

  just said? That’s strange....The executioner,

  the fire...

  PASSERBY

  (aside)

  There, now he’s frightened. Silly woman—

  why did she ever have to tell him that?

  (full voice)

  It was a joke, Grand-dad....Tell me instead,

  what do you chat about out there with flowers,

  with trees?...Why do you look at me like that?

  GRAND-DAD

  (staring at him intently)

  Where are you from?

  PASSERBY

  Oh ... simply passing by...

  GRAND-DAD

  Wait,

  just wait, don’t go away, I’ll be right back. (goes out)

  PASSERBY

  (pacing the room)

  Odd character! Either he’s had a fright

  or he’s remembered something.... I’ve an eerie,

  a troubled feeling—I don’t understand....

  The wine they have here must be strong. Tra-ram,

  tra-ra....(sings) What’s wrong with me? I seem to feel

  some kind of vague oppression....Ugh! How stupid....

  GRAND-DAD

  (enters)

  And here I am....I’m back....

  PASSERBY

  Hello, hello....

  (aside)

  Look how he’s grown all nice and cheery now.

  GRAND-DAD

  (shifting from foot to foot, hands behind his back)

  Here’s where I live. Right in this house. I like

  it here. For instance, over there, look at

  that wardrobe....

  PASSERBY

  Beautiful....

  GRAND-DAD

  You know, that’s an

  enchanted wardrobe....Oh, the things, the things that

  go on inside! You see that chink, that keyhole?

  Peek through it ... Eh?

  PASSERBY

  Enchanted? I believe you....

  It’s beautiful.... You didn’t tell me, though,

  about the lilies, and your talks with them.

  GRAND-DAD

  Peek through the chink....

  PASSERBY

  I can see fine from here....

  GRAND-DAD

  No, take a closer look.

  PASSERBY

  I can’t—that table

  is in the way....

  GRAND-DAD

  Lie on the table—lie

  on it, face down....

  PASSERBY

  Oh, come, it isn’t worth it.

  GRAND-DAD

  Don’t want to do it?

  PASSERBY

  ...Look, look at that sunshine!

  And your whole garden sparkling....

  GRAND-DAD

  You don’t want to?

  A shame....A real shame. It would be much

  more comfortable.

  PASSERBY

  More comfortable? For what?

  GRAND-DAD

  For what? (swings with thet axe he has been holding behind his back)

  PASSERBY

  Hold on there! Stop!

  (They struggle.)

  GRAND-DAD

  No.... Wait....You must

  not interfere.... It is decreed.... My duty....

  PASSERBY

  (knocks him down)

  Enough!

  There—there, that’s it—that madness.... God!...

  I didn’t expect it.... He was mumbling, purring—

  then suddenly...

  What is this? I think it

  already happened once....Or did I dream it?

  The same way, just the same, I struggled.... Up!

  Enough, get up! Reply!...Look how he stares,

  and stares....Look at those fingers, naked, blunt....

  I’ve seen them once before, I know! You’ll answer,

  you will!...That stare....(bends over the prostrate figure)

  No, he will tell me nothing.

  JULIETTE

  (in the doorway)

  What have you done to Grand-dad?...

  PASSERBY

  Juliette...

  You’d ... better go.

  JULIETTE

  What have you done....

  CURTAIN

  ESSAYS

  Introduction

  The lectures “The Tragedy of Tragedy” and “Playwriting” were composed for a course on drama that Nabokov gave at Stanford during the summer of 1941. We had arrived in America in May of 1940; except for some brief guest appearances, this was Father’s first lecturing engagement at an American university. The Stanford course also included a discussion of some American plays, a survey of Soviet theatre, and an analysis of commentary on drama by several American critics.

  The two lectures presented here have been selected to accompany Nabokov’s plays because they embody, in concentrated form, many of his principal guidelines for writing, reading, and performing plays. The reader is urged to bear in mind, however, that, later in life, Father might have expressed certain thoughts differently.

  The lectures were partly in typescript and partly in manuscript, replete with Nabokov’s corrections, additions, deletions, occasional slips of the pen, and references to previous and subsequent installments of the course. I have limited
myself to what editing seemed necessary for the presentation of the lectures in essay form. If Nabokov had been alive, he might perhaps have performed more radical surgery. He might also have added that the gruesome throes of realistic suicide he finds unacceptable onstage (in “The Tragedy of Tragedy”) are now everyday fare on kiddies’ TV, while “adult” entertainment has long since outdone all the goriness of the Grand Guignol. He might have observed that the aberrations of theatrical method wherein the illusion of a barrier between stage and audience is shattered—a phenomenon he considered “freakish”—are now commonplace: actors wander and mix; the audience is invited to participate; it is then applauded by the players in a curious reversal of roles made chic by Soviet performers ordered to emulate the mise-en-scène of party congresses; and the term “happening” has already managed to grow obsolescent. He might have commented that the quest for originality for its own sake has led to ludicrous excesses and things have taken their helter-skelter course in random theatre as they have in random music and in random painting.

  Yet Nabokov’s own plays demonstrate that it is possible to respect the rules of drama and still be original, just as one can write original poetry without neglecting the basic requirements of prosody, or play brilliant tennis, to paraphrase Robert Frost, without taking down the net.

  There were those who considered Father’s professorial persona odd and vaguely improper. Not only was he unsympathetic to the intrusion of administrative matters on the academic and to the use of valuable time for jovial participation in campus life, but he lectured from carefully composed texts instead of chattily extemporizing. “All of a sudden,” says Nabokov, “I realized that I was totally incapable of public speaking. I decided to write in advance a good hundred lectures....Thanks to this method I never fumbled, and the auditorium received the pure product of my knowledge.”1 I suspect that, since the day when the various Nabokov lectures, resurrected from notes made more than three decades before, began to appear in print, at least some of those objectors have realized that Father’s single-mindedness and meticulous preparation had their advantages.

  There were even those who resented Nabokov’s being allowed to teach at all, lest the bastions of academic mediocrity be imperiled. Which brings to mind Roman Jakobson’s uneasy quip when Nabokov was being considered for a permanent position at Harvard: “Are we next to invite an elephant to be professor of zoology?” If the elephant happens also to be a brilliant scholar and (as his former Cornell colleague David Daiches put it) a lecturer whom everyone found “irresistible,” why not? Anyway, time has put things in perspective: those who (attentively) attended Nabokov’s lectures will not soon forget them. Those who missed them regret it but have the published versions to enjoy. As for Professor Jakobson (and I intend no malice), I have been racking my brain but cannot, for the life of me, recall whether or not I took a course of his at some point during my four years at Harvard. Perhaps what I need is the memory of an elephant.

  DMITRI NABOKOV

  Playwriting

  The one and only stage convention that I accept may be formulated in the following way: the people you see or hear can under no circumstances see or hear you. This convention is at the same time a unique feature of the dramatic art: under no circumstances of human life can the most secret watcher or eavesdropper be absolutely immune to the possibility of being found out by those he is spying upon, not other people in particular, but the world as a whole. A closer analogy is the relation between an individual and outside nature; this, however, leads to a philosophical idea which I shall refer to at the end of this lecture. A play is an ideal conspiracy, because, even though it is absolutely exposed to our view, we are as powerless to influence the course of action as the stage inhabitants are to see us, while influencing our inner selves with almost superhuman ease. We have thus the paradox of an invisible world of free spirits (ourselves) watching uncontrollable but earthbound proceedings, which—a compensation—are endowed with the power of exactly that spiritual intervention which we invisible watchers paradoxically lack. Sight and hearing but no intervention on one side and spiritual intervention but no sight or hearing on the other are the main features of the beautifully balanced and perfectly fair division drawn by the line of footlights. It may be proved further that this convention is a natural rule of the theatre and that when there is any freakish attempt to break it, then either the breaking is only a delusion, or the play stops being a play. That is why I call ridiculous the attempts of the Soviet theatre to have the spectators join in the play. This is connected with the assumption that the players themselves are spectators and, indeed, we can easily imagine inexperienced actors under slapdash management in the dumb parts of attendants just as engrossed in watching the performance of the great actor in the major part as we, ordinary spectators, are. But, besides the danger of letting even the least important actor remain outside the play, there exists one inescapable law, a law (laid down by that genius of the stage, Stanislavsky) that invalidates all reasoning deriving from the delusion that the footlights are not as definite a separation between spectator and player as our main stage convention implies. Roughly speaking, this law is that, provided he does not annoy his neighbors, the spectator is perfectly free to do whatever he pleases, to yawn or laugh, or to arrive late, or to leave his place if he is bored with the play or has business elsewhere; but the man on the stage, however inactive and mute he is, is absolutely bound by the conspiracy of the stage and by its main convention: that is, he may not wander back into the wings for a drink or a chat, nor may he indulge in any physical exuberance that would clash with the idea of his part. And, vice-versa, if we imagine some playwright or manager, brimming over with those collectivist and mass-loving notions that are a blight in regard to all art, making the spectators play, too (as a crowd, for instance, reacting to certain doings or speeches; even going so far as to hand round, for instance, printed words that the spectators must say aloud, or just leaving these words to our own discretion; turning the stage loose into the house and having the regular actors mingle with the audience, etc.), such a method, apart from the ever-lurking possibility of the play’s being wrecked by the local wit or fatally suffering from the unpreparedness of impromptu actors, is an utter delusion to boot, because the spectator remains perfectly free to refuse to participate and may leave the theatre if he does not care for such fooling. In the case of his being forced to act because the play refers to the Perfect State and is running in the governmental theatre of a country ruled by a dictator, the theatre in such case is merely a barbarous ceremony or a Sunday-school class for the teaching of police regulation—or again, what goes on in theatre is the same as goes on in the dictator’s country, public life being the constant and universal acting in the dreadful farce composed by a stage-minded Father of the People.

  So far I have dwelt chiefly on the spectator’s side of the question: awareness and nonintervention. But cannot one imagine the players, in accordance with a dramatist’s whim or thoroughly worn-out idea, actually seeing the public and talking to it from the stage? In other words, I am trying to find whether there is really no loophole in what I take to be the essential formula, the essential and only convention of the stage. I remember, in fact, several plays where this trick has been used, but the all-important thing is that, when the player stalks up to the footlights and addresses himself to the audience with a supposed explanation or an ardent plea, this audience is not the actual audience before him, but an audience imagined by the playwright, that is, something which is still on the stage, a theatrical illusion which is the more intensified the more naturally and casually such an appeal is made. In other words, the line that a character cannot cross without interrupting the play is this abstract conception that the author has of an audience; as soon as he sees it as a pink collection of familiar faces the play stops being a play. To give an instance, my grandfather, my mother’s father, an exceedingly eccentric Russian who got the idea of having a private theatre in his house and hirin
g the very greatest performers of his time to entertain for him and his friends, was on a friendly footing with most of the actors of the Russian stage and a regular theatregoer. One night, at one of the St. Petersburg theatres, the famous Varlamov was impersonating someone having tea on a terrace and conversing the while with passersby who were invisible to the spectators. The part bored Varlamov, and that night he brightened it up with certain harmless inventions of his own. Then at one point he turned in the direction of my grandfather, whom he espied in the front row, and remarked, quite naturally, as if speaking to the imaginary passersby: “By the way, Ivan Vasilich, I’m afraid I shall be unable to have luncheon with you tomorrow.” And just because Varlamov was such a perfect magician and managed to fit these words so naturally into his scene, it did not occur to my grandfather that his friend was really and truly canceling an appointment; in other words, the power of the stage is such, that even if, as sometimes has happened, an actor in the middle of his performance falls in a dead faint or, owing to a blunder, a stagehand is trapped among the characters when the curtain goes up, it will take the spectator much longer to realize the accident or the mistake than if anything out of the ordinary happens in the house. Destroy the spell and you kill the play.