by Alex Beam
Wilson’s myopic and ideologically skewed vision of Russian literature was entirely of his own making. Ironically, it was the eccentric double émigré D. S. Mirsky, a Russian nobleman (full name: Dmitry Petrovich Svyatopolk-Mirsky) who first introduced Wilson to Pushkin’s poetry in Russian, and to Russian literature in general. Mirsky fought with the White Army against the Bolsheviks, and eventually landed in Great Britain, where he wrote his masterpiece, A History of Russian Literature: From Its Beginnings to 1900, which Nabokov praised as the best book of its kind in English or Russian.
In England, Mirsky taught at the University of London and turned toward Marxism, joining the British Communist Party. He reemigrated to the USSR in 1932, with the help of a pardon obtained by the writer Maxim Gorky. When Mirsky took his farewells of his London friends, Virginia Woolf confided to her diary: “I thought as I watched his eyes brighten and fade—soon there’ll be a bullet through your head.”
She wasn’t far off. Wilson spent a great deal of time with Mirsky in Moscow in 1935, and disguised his identity, not very adroitly, in his published journals. Both men knew that the aristocratic anti-Bolshevik–turned–Communist was under constant suspicion in Stalin’s Russia. In 1937 the inevitable happened. The secret police arrested Mirsky as a British spy and sent him to the gulag, to the frozen wilds of Kolyma in the northeast corner of Siberia. He died in 1939.*4
Russia again divided Wilson and Nabokov a decade later, as Nabokov started cheerleading for America in its Cold War struggle against Nikita Khrushchev’s Soviet Union. As Wilson became more and more disenchanted with American politics, Nabokov—flush with Lolita earnings and living in Switzerland—became a flag-waving Yankee. (Did he think America could “win” the Cold War, topple Soviet power, and restore him to the childhood fairyland of Speak, Memory? Perhaps.) Wilson had evolved into a ban-the-bomb-style enemy of the national security state, but Nabokov was all for bombs, the more the merrier. He would gladly have loaned the Strategic Air Command his maps of Moscow and St. Petersburg if he thought that would hasten the demise of what he had always viewed as the “evil empire.”
Wilson began his career as a man of the Left, and by the mid-1950s he had become reenergized in his disdain for American capitalism. There is an early inkling of what later became an obsession in a 1955 letter to the Italian critic and scholar Mario Praz. Wilson half-jokingly claimed he might be “vaporized” because he had discovered that his Talcottville house in upstate New York sat next to a radar station, and that “there is a mysterious ‘government project’ not far away, enclosed in an iron fence….In my opinion, the inhabitants of the United States ought to strike against paying the income tax till the government ceases to spend money on this insanity.”13
Wilson developed some kooky political notions in the 1950s and 1960s, among them that 69 percent of the government’s budget was devoted to military spending, which was not true. Notoriously, he had been pursuing his own tax boycott of the U.S. Treasury since 1941. For many years he didn’t pay taxes because he preferred to spend his money on foreign travel, sumptuous meals, and private schools for his children. During the fat year of Hecate’s best-sellerdom, he had plenty of cash, but continued to stiff the IRS. Wilson thought he “could always attend to this obligation later,” and the one time he decided pay a tax bill—his 1955 book on the Dead Sea Scrolls sold well—his check bounced.
Even though he admitted in a moment of weakness that “my original delinquency was due not to principle but to negligence,”14 Wilson started bruiting his antigovernment principles far and wide. In his 1962 introduction to Patriotic Gore, an overview of Civil War literature, Wilson plunged even more deeply into America-loathing. Comparing Abraham Lincoln to Lenin (“parallel imperialists”) was provocative, but he didn’t stop there. He again accused “the United States of Hiroshima” of spending 70 percent of its revenues on nuclear and bacteriological weapons. He added, decades before most Americans had ever heard of the National Security Agency: “We are, furthermore, like the Russians, being spied upon by an extensive secret police, whose salaries we are required to pay.” Wilson’s tax-related radicalism brought a knowing smile to friends’ faces. “What are you going to say?” Jason Epstein asked, rhetorically. “ ‘I felt like cheating the government all those years?’ You have to turn it into some kind of statement.”
In his review of Wilson’s 1963 philippic The Cold War and the Income Tax, Epstein alluded to a powerful character trait that ran in the Wilson family: cussedness. As mentioned, Wilson’s father had refused to own stocks, considering them to be empty speculations. Wilson was never vaccinated; no one knows why. Certain things he did not do: He did not accept an honorary degree from Harvard, and he did not accept a life-extending pacemaker when his heart started to fail him. He did not pay his taxes, and it caused him no end of grief.
In his income tax jeremiad, Wilson concluded, “I have finally come to feel that this country, whether or not I continue to live in it, is no longer any place for me.”
Nabokov, by contrast, loved the United States, especially since he savored the luxury of not living there, thus avoiding many of those taxes that were so bedeviling his old friend. Enriched beyond his wildest dream by the international sales of Lolita, he took the money and ran, eventually coming to rest in Montreux, Switzerland, on the shores of Lake Geneva. In January 1964, Edmund and Elena Wilson, returning their daughter Helen to school in Gstaad, traveled to Nabokov’s digs at the Montreux Palace Hotel to spend a few evenings socializing.
Their famous correspondence and their frequent meetings had been in abeyance. This was Wilson’s first trip to Europe since Nabokov had left the United States. Their disagreements over Lolita and Doctor Zhivago had dampened their earlier, ebullient exchanges.
“We found Volodya Nabokov living, as Elena said, like a prince of the old regime,” Wilson wrote in his journal. “He was a more amiable and a more genial host than I had ever known him to be. The ready money had made all the difference. But they live as they have always lived, in modest enough rooms. He hunts butterflies in the summer and in the winter they see almost nobody. Volodya, but not Vera, has a certain nostalgia for the States.”15
Nabokov’s German publisher Heinrich Ledig-Rowohlt came to dinner, and Wilson sold him the German rights to Hecate County “on excellent terms.” Rowohlt later marveled to Vera at the two men’s “conversational fireworks…on the virtues of literature.”16 That was business as usual for Wilson and Nabokov, of course. “He and I disagree on everything in literature except Pushkin,” Wilson told an interviewer not long before this, their final meeting.17
Pushkin would be the last to go.
* * *
*1 More like a CIA plant, really. “We—the CIA—published the first Russian language version of Dr. Zhivago in the West,” the Chavchavadzes’ son David (a CIA officer) told his daughter Sasha for her family memoir, Museum of Matches. “We hoped that it would be read by as many people as possible in the Soviet Union and abroad. I gave Edmund Wilson his first copy of the book. I saw no reason not to.”
*2 Not for the last time, Wilson seized hold of the wrong end of the language stick, accusing others of failing to master Russian. After the death of Zhivago’s cotranslator, Max Hayward, Patricia Blake—his frequent collaborator, companion, and devotee—decided to set the record straight: American editors “translating” Hayward’s English edition introduced several of the mistakes that Wilson complained about. Then she struck: “The worst howler [a favored Nabokovism] was committed by Wilson himself in his review,” she wrote in the 1983 introduction to Hayward’s Writers in Russia. Wilson botched the allusion na tom svete (in this world) and accused the translators of distorting Pasternak’s cosmology, which Wilson had elevated into the Second Coming of the Christian Novel. Blake acidly and correctly accused Wilson of misunderstanding a “simple and straightforward” phrase that “would be clearly understood by a first-year Russian student.”
But wait—she wasn’t done. “So gross a mi
stake raised the question—later to be pursued with a vengeance by Vladimir Nabokov—of Wilson’s proficiency in Russian. It would seem that this most erudite man’s great weakness was that he loved to display linguistic expertise he scarcely possessed.” But this story had a happy ending. The bibulous Hayward, who “went on a bender in Cambridge that landed him in the hospital” after reading Wilson’s New Yorker putdown of his translation, later “cheerfully agreed to meet with Wilson over cocktails in Boston. They never discussed the Doctor Zhivago translation and soon became drinking buddies.” Blake neglected to mention that Hayward acted, ineptly, as one of Wilson’s Russian-language advisers in the ensuing Onegin brouhaha.
*3 As we shall see, Nabokov liked to mock his enemies by inserting them as recognizable caricatures in his fiction. So we are not surprised that “Dr. Mertvago” surfaces in his 1969 novel, Ada. The root of Zhivago’s name is zhiv, meaning “life” in Russian. “Myortvy,” spelled with an e, pronounced “yo,” in Russian, means “dead.”
*4 Mirsky’s fate remained unknowable until after Stalin’s death in 1953. In Nabokov’s collected letters, there is a 1949 inquiry from the Knopf editor Robert Glauber, soliciting a blurb for a new edition of Mirsky’s famous History. Nabokov answered: “Yes, I am a great admirer of Mirsky’s work. In fact, I consider it to be by far the best history of Russian literature in any language including Russian. Unfortunately, I must deprive myself of the pleasure of writing a blurb for it, since the poor fellow is now in Russia and compliments from such an anti-Soviet writer as I am known to be might cause him considerable unpleasantness.” Nabokov could not have known that Mirsky had been dead for ten years.
5
Meet Eugene Onegin
It is almost impossible to explain to non-Russian speakers what Eugene Onegin is, and why Russians regard it as the unrivaled masterpiece of their literary canon. To educated Russians, Onegin is simply everything, as if all of Shakespeare’s comedies and tragedies were supercollided into a narrative poem of five-thousand-plus lines, which many of them can quote at extraordinary length.
Onegin is everywhere, once you start to look. There is a famous passage from Eugenia Ginzburg’s memoir, Journey into the Whirlwind, describing her interminable train trip to the gulag in 1937. As a diversion on the hellish journey, she recited poetry to her fellow inmates in the crowded railway car. A furious guard assumed she was reading from a concealed book, and to prove him wrong, she recited all of Eugene Onegin from memory. “As I went on reciting, I kept my eyes fixed on the two guards,” Ginzburg wrote. “The Brigand at first wore a threatening expression: she’d get stuck in a minute, and then he’d show her! This gave place by degrees to astonishment, almost friendly curiosity, and finally ill-concealed delight.”1
Perhaps you or I have read a half dozen of the Russian classics, such as Ivan Turgenev’s A Sportsman’s Sketches, or Leo Tolstoy’s two epic novels, War and Peace and Anna Karenin (as Nabokov insisted on calling it*1). Or Fyodor Dostoyevsky, for instance the marvelous, immersive The Idiot, or The Devils, a discursive, seemingly endless meditation on nineteenth-century progressive and revolutionary ideologies.
Then we pick up Eugene Onegin: A Novel in Verse, a slender volume of eight verse chapters, sometimes called cantos, in translation. There’s not much to it. Some editions include a short canto called “Eugene’s Journey,” a rambling travelogue of czarist Russia, originally intended to be chapter 8, which Pushkin cut from the final poem. Thus the former chapter 9 became the current final chapter 8. Some editions include portions of a chapter 10, which reintroduces Eugene after the unresolved finale to the “real” chapter 8, and plunges him into post–Decembrist Uprising politics. (Several of Pushkin’s friends participated in that half-baked revolt, aborted at birth in St. Petersburg’s Senate Square in 1825.) Chapter 10’s picaresque fate mirrored that of its storm-tossed author. Its opening lines about Czar Alexander I—“A ruler weak and wily / A baldish fop, a foe of toil”—guaranteed it would never see the light of day. Pushkin apparently burned the eighteen fragments of the chapter after committing them to memory. He recorded portions of it among his papers, albeit partly enciphered in a code that was decrypted only in 1910.
Further doubt attends the “final” or actual structure of the poem, because the perpetually broke, fast-living Pushkin composed the chapters out of order, published each one separately for ready cash, and even mortgaged certain chapters to pay gambling debts.*2 Honoring a convention of Romantic poetry, Pushkin waxed endlessly about his “muse.” But it was not some goddess in a diaphanous gown who wielded the greatest influence on the composition of Onegin, it was the czar’s censor.*3 Most Onegin editions have blank swaths of text in place of the missing stanzas, either deleted by the censor or by the poet anticipating censorship, or, in some cases, by a playful Pushkin pretending to have been censored. Czar Nicholas I famously appointed himself to be Pushkin’s censor, but in practice his chief of police Alexander von Benckendorff reviewed the poet’s work. Any intimations of “freedom,” even those wrapped in the most convoluted metaphors or euphemisms, were unlikely to appear in print.
Onegin is a peripatetic tale, transporting the reader from St. Petersburg to the gentryfolk’s country estates, to Moscow and back to Petersburg. Thanks to censorship, that was the story of its creation. Pushkin composed most of Onegin while in exile, serving penance for verses championing the liberation of the serfs or some equally unpalatable idea.
Onegin does not sing in translation. The translations aren’t as awful as Nabokov insisted they were, but they’re not great, either. Translations, it has been said, are like one’s mistress. She can be beautiful or she can be faithful, but she cannot be both. Onegin is the object lesson here.
It is also hard to explain what Eugene Onegin is about. Yes, it’s the story of a few years in the life of the young dandy Onegin, a spoiled society rake who swans around St. Petersburg, sampling the finest things the “Paris of the North” has to offer. The famous first chapter reads like the old Neiman-Marcus catalog of luxury extravagances, bristling with what we could call product placements. More than once in the poem, Eugene checks his elegant, French-made Breguet watch, still advertised in the pages of Vanity Fair today. He looks in at Pierre Talon’s fashionable restaurant on the Nevsky Prospekt to drink some “comet” champagne, the famous vintage of 1811, when astronomers tracked the so-called Great Comet for almost nine months.
Page 527 of Nabokov’s “bedside Pushkin,” in which he sketches out a chess move mentioned in Onegin 4.27—the distracted, lovelorn Vladimir Lensky intends to move his pawn but takes his own rook instead. (Princeton University Library)
From chapter 1 Eugene repairs to the country estate he has inherited from his uncle, to launch into what passes for the novel’s plot. He meets the beautiful Larin sisters, the dreamy, naive poet Lensky, and we move on from there. The characters are thinly drawn, ideal for the well-known Tchaikovsky opera (“The vile Tchaikovsky opera”—Nabokov) but too insubstantial to feature in the great European novels of the later nineteenth century. Tchaikovsky hits the high notes: the serf girls’ lyrical madrigal; the lovestruck Tatiana’s pleading letter to Eugene; the duel with Lensky, and the unsatisfying ending in which none of the main players lives happily ever after—least of all Lensky, whom Eugene killed in their duel.
Leaving aside the rickety plot, there arises the question of what and who shows up in Pushkin’s “free novel.” Pushkin includes himself as a character in the book, as well as many of his Petersburg friends and occasional celebrities. In one example of “reality”—the word Nabokov insisted could appear only between quotation marks—intruding into Onegin, Pushkin’s friend Prince Peter Vyazemsky sits down next to Tatiana at a Moscow soiree and “begins to beguile her mind.” The debauched Vyazemsky was notoriously bad company, and one of Pushkin’s favorite sources of obscene epigrams. A clued-in reader would peruse 7.49, and think: Watch out, Tatiana!
Pushkin evinces admiration for Laurence Sterne’s Tristram
Shandy by wandering off into unprovoked, gorgeous digressions about ladies’ feet, about the quality of winter frost, or the mating habits of provincial nobodies. Onegin revels in tricks we would today call postmodern. Pushkin dismissively includes his “Invocation to the Muse” at the end of chapter 7, writing:
That’s all, and I am glad it’s over,
My debt to classicism paid:
Though late, the Invocation’s made.
In chapter 5 he mocks his own digressions, specifically:
Dear girlish feet, it’s time no more
On your slim trail to court distraction:
[And] keep this Chapter Five as free
Of such digressions as may be.
The twentieth-century writer and critic Andrei Sinyavsky accused Pushkin of “writing a novel about nothing.” He couldn’t abide the poem’s digressive flights: “The author loses the thread of his narration, wanders off, marks time, beats around the bush and sits it out in the underbrush, the background of his own story.”2
The critic Vissarion Belinsky (“the famous but talentless Vissarion Belinski,” according to the unrelenting Nabokov3), who championed Pushkin to a later generation, memorably called Onegin “an encyclopedia of Russian life.” But it is not. With the original “political” chapter 10—or was that 9?—expunged, there is zero political and precious little socioeconomic content or commentary in the novel at all. Nabokov gets this right: Eugene Onegin “is not ‘a picture of Russian life,’ ” he wrote:
It is at best the picture of a little group of Russians, in the second decade of the last century, crossed with all the more obvious characters of Western European romance and placed in a stylized Russia, which would disintegrate at once if the French props were removed, and if the French impersonators of English and German writers stopped prompting the Russian-speaking heroes and heroines.4
