Look at the Harlequins!

by Vladimir Nabokov

  I saw no point in prolonging my visit, but he produced a bottle of cognac, and I accepted a drink, for I was beginning to tremble again.

  “Your Camera,” he said, consulting a ledger “has been selling not badly in my shop, not badly at all: twenty-three—sorry, twenty-five—copies in the first half of last year, and fourteen in the second. Of course, genuine fame, not mere commercial success, depends on the behavior of a book in the Lending Department, and there all your titles are hits. Not to leave this unsubstantiated, let us go up to the stacks.”

  I followed my energetic host to the upper floor. The lending library spread like a gigantic spider, bulged like a monstrous tumor, oppressed the brain like the expanding world of delirium. In a bright oasis amidst the dim shelves I noticed a group of people sitting around an oval table. The colors were vivid and sharp but at the same time remote-looking as in a magic-lantern scene. A good deal of red wine and golden brandy accompanied the animated discussion. I recognized the critic Basilevski, his sycophants Hristov and Boyarski, my friend Morozov, the novelists Shipogradov and Sokolovski, the honest nonentity Suknovalov, author of the popular social satire Geroy nashey ery (“Hero of Our Era”) and two young poets, Lazarev (collection Serenity) and Fartuk (collection Silence). Some of the heads turned toward us, and the benevolent bear Morozov even struggled to his feet, grinning—but my host said they were having a business meeting and should be left alone.

  “You have glimpsed,” he added, “the parturition of a new literary review, Prime Numbers; at least they think they are parturiating: actually, they are boozing and gossiping. Now let me show you something.”

  He led me to a distant corner and triumphantly trained his flashlight on the gaps in my shelf of books.

  “Look,” he cried, “how many copies are out. All of Princess Mary is out, I mean Mary—damn it, I mean Tamara. I love Tamara, I mean your Tamara, not Lermontov’s or Rubinstein’s. Forgive me. One gets so confused among so many damned masterpieces.”

  I said I was not feeling well and would like to go home. He offered to accompany me. Or would I like a taxi? I did not. He kept furtively directing at me the electric torch through his incarnadined fingers to see if I was not about to faint. With soothing sounds he led me down a side staircase. The spring night, at least, felt real.

  After a moment of rumination and an upward glance at the lighted windows, Oks beckoned to the night watchman who was stroking the sad little dog of a dog-walking neighbor. I saw my thoughtful companion shake hands with the gray-cloaked old fellow, then point to the light of the revelers, then look at his watch, then tip the man, and shake hands with him in parting, as if the ten-minute walk to my lodgings were a perilous pilgrimage.

  “Bon,” he said upon rejoining me. “If you don’t want a taxi, let us set out on foot. He will take care of my imprisoned visitors. There are heaps of things I want you to tell me about your work and your life. Your confrères say you are ‘arrogant and unsocial’ as Onegin describes himself to Tatiana but we can’t all be Lenskis, can we? Let me take advantage of this pleasant stroll to describe my two meetings with your celebrated father. The first was at the opera in the days of the First Duma. I knew, of course, the portraits of its most prominent members. From high up in the gods I, a poor student, saw him appear in a rosy loge with his wife and two little boys, one of which must have been you. The other time was at a public discussion of current politics in the auroral period of the Revolution; he spoke immediately after Kerenski, and the contrast between our fiery friend and your father, with his English sangfroid and absence of gesticulation—”

  “My father,” I said, “died six months before I was born.”

  “Well, I seem to have goofed again (opyat’ oskandalisya),” observed Oks, after taking quite a minute to find his handkerchief, blow his nose with the grandiose deliberation of Varlamov in the role of Gogol’s Town Mayor, wrap up the result, and pocket the swaddle. “Yes, I’m not lucky with you. Yet that image remains in my mind. The contrast was truly remarkable.”

  I was to run into Oks again, three or four times at least, in the course of the dwindling years before World War Two. He used to welcome me with a knowing twinkle as if we shared some very private and rather naughty secret. His superb library was eventually grabbed by the Germans who then lost it to the Russians, even better grabbers in that time-honored game. Osip Lvovich himself was to die when attempting an intrepid escape—when almost having escaped—barefoot, in bloodstained underwear, from the “experimental hospital” of a Nazi concentration camp.

  5

  My father was a gambler and a rake. His society nickname was Demon. Vrubel has portrayed him with his vampire-pale cheeks, his diamond eyes, his black hair. What remained on the palette has been used by me, Vadim, son of Vadim, for touching up the father of the passionate siblings in the best of my English romaunts, Ardis (1970).

  The scion of a princely family devoted to a gallery of a dozen Tsars, my father resided on the idyllic outskirts of history. His politics were of the casual, reactionary sort. He had a dazzling and complicated sensual life, but his culture was patchy and commonplace. He was born in 1865, married in 1896, and died in a pistol duel with a young Frenchman on October 22, 1898, after a card-table fracas at Deauville, some resort in gray Normandy.

  There might be nothing particularly upsetting about a well-meaning, essentially absurd and muddled old duffer mistaking me for some other writer. I myself have been known, in the lecture hall, to say Shelley when I meant Schiller. But that a fool’s slip of the tongue or error of memory should establish a sudden connection with another world, so soon after my imagining with especial dread that I might be permanently impersonating somebody living as a real being beyond the constellation of my tears and asterisks—that was unendurable, that dared not happen!

  As soon as the last sound of poor Oksman’s farewells and excuses had subsided, I tore off the striped woollen snake strangling me and wrote down in cipher every detail of my meeting with him. Then I drew a thick line underneath and a caravan of question marks.

  Should I ignore the coincidence and its implications? Should I, on the contrary, repattern my entire life? Should I abandon my art, choose another line of achievement, take up chess seriously, or become, say, a lepidopterist, or spend a dozen years as an obscure scholar making a Russian translation of Paradise Lost that would cause hacks to shy and asses to kick? But only the writing of fiction, the endless re-creation of my fluid self could keep me more or less sane. All I did finally was drop my pen name, the rather cloying and somehow misleading “V. Irisin” (of which my Iris herself used to say that it sounded as if I were a villa), and revert to my own family name.

  It was with this name that I decided to sign the first installment of my new novel The Dare for which the émigré magazine Patria was waiting. I had finished rewriting in reptile-green ink (a placebo to enliven my task) a second or third fair copy of the opening chapter, when Annette Blagovo came to discuss hours and terms.

  She came on May 2, 1934, half-an-hour late, and as persons do who have no sense of duration, laid the blame for her lateness on her innocent watch, an object for measuring motion, not time. She was a graceful blonde of twenty-six years or so, with very attractive though not exceptionally pretty features. She wore a gray tailor-made jacket over a white silk blouse that looked frilly and festive because of a kind of bow between the lapels, to one of which was pinned a bunchlet of violets. Her short smartly cut gray skirt had a nice dash about it, and all in all she was far more chic and soignée than an average Russian young lady.

  I explained to her (in what struck her—so she told me much later—as the unpleasantly bantering tone of a cynic sizing up a possible conquest) that I proposed to dictate to her every afternoon “right into the typewriter” (pryamo v mashinku) heavily corrected drafts or else chunks and sausages of fair copy that I would probably revise “in the lonely hours of night,” to quote A. K. Tolstoy, and have her retype next day. She did not remove her close-fi
tting hat, but peeled off her gloves and, pursing her bright pink freshly painted mouth, put on large tortoiseshell-rimmed glasses, and the effect somehow enhanced her looks: she desired to see my machine (her icy demureness would have turned a saint into a salacious jester), had to hurry to another appointment but just wanted to check if she could use it. She took off her green cabochon ring (which I was to find after her departure) and seemed about to tap out a quick sample but a second glance satisfied her that my typewriter was of the same make as her own.

  Our first session proved pretty awful. I had learned my part with the care of a nervous actor, but did not reckon with the kind of fellow performer who misses or fluffs every other cue. She asked me not to go so fast. She put me off by fatuous remarks: “There is no such expression in Russian,” or “Nobody knows that word (vzvoden’, a welter)—why don’t you just say “big wave” if that’s what you mean? When anger affected my rhythm and it took me some time to unravel the end of a sentence in its no longer familiar labyrinth of cancellations and carets, she would sit back and wait like a provocative martyr and stifle a yawn or study her fingernails. After three hours of work, I examined the result of her dainty and impudent rattle. It teemed with misspellings, typos, and ugly erasures. Very meekly I said that she seemed unaccustomed to deal with literary (i.e. non-humdrum) stuff. She answered I was mistaken, she loved literature. In fact, she said, in just the past five months she had read Galsworthy (in Russian), Dostoyevski (in French), General Pudov-Usurovski’s huge historical novel Tsar Bronshteyn (in the original), and L’Atlantide (which I had not heard of but which a dictionary ascribes to Pierre Benoît, romancier français né à Albi, a hiatus in the Tarn). Did she know Morozov’s poetry? No, she did not much care for poetry in any form; it was inconsistent with the tempo of modern life. I chided her for not having read any of my stories or novels, and she looked annoyed and perhaps a little frightened (fearing, the little goose, I might dismiss her), and presently was giving me a curiously erotic satisfaction by promising me that now she would look up all my books and would certainly know by heart The Dare.

  The reader must have noticed that I speak only in a very general way about my Russian fictions of the Nineteen-Twenties and Thirties, for I assume that he is familiar with them or can easily obtain them in their English versions. At this point, however, I must say a few words about The Dare (Podarok Otchizne was its original title, which can be translated as “a gift to the fatherland”). When in 1934 I started to dictate its beginning to Annette, I knew it would be my longest novel. I did not foresee however that it would be almost as long as General Pudov’s vile and fatuous “historical” romance about the way the Zion Wisers usurped St. Rus. It took me about four years in all to write its four hundred pages, many of which Annette typed at least twice. Most of it had been serialized in émigré magazines by May, 1939, when she and I, still childless, left for America; but in book form, the Russian original appeared only in 1950 (Turgenev Publishing House, New York), followed another decade later by an English translation, whose title neatly refers not only to the well-known device used to bewilder noddies but also to the daredevil nature of Victor, the hero and part-time narrator.

  The novel begins with a nostalgic account of a Russian childhood (much happier, though not less opulent than mine). After that comes adolescence in England (not unlike my own Cambridge years); then life in émigré Paris, the writing of a first novel (Memoirs of a Parrot Fancier) and the tying of amusing knots in various literary intrigues. Inset in the middle part is a complete version of the book my Victor wrote “on a dare”: this is a concise biography and critical appraisal of Fyodor Dostoyevski, whose politics my author finds hateful and whose novels he condemns as absurd with their black-bearded killers presented as mere negatives of Jesus Christ’s conventional image, and weepy whores borrowed from maudlin romances of an earlier age. The next chapter deals with the rage and bewilderment of émigré reviewers, all of them priests of the Dostoyevskian persuasion; and in the last pages my young hero accepts a flirt’s challenge and accomplishes a final gratuitous feat by walking through a perilous forest into Soviet territory and as casually strolling back.

  I am giving this summary to exemplify what even the poorest reader of my Dare must surely retain, unless electrolysis destroys some essential cells soon after he closes the book. Now part of Annette’s frail charm lay in her forgetfulness which veiled everything toward the evening of everything, like the kind of pastel haze that obliterates mountains, clouds, and even its own self as the summer day swoons. I know I have seen her many times, a copy of Patria in her languid lap, follow the printed lines with the pendulum swing of eyes suggestive of reading, and actually reach the “To be continued” at the end of the current installment of The Dare. I also know that she had typed every word of it and most of its commas. Yet the fact remains that she retained nothing—perhaps in result of her having decided once for all that my prose was not merely “difficult” but hermetic (“nastily hermetic,” to repeat the compliment Basilevski paid me the moment he realized—a moment which came in due time—that his manner and mind were being ridiculed in Chapter Three by my gloriously happy Victor). I must say I forgave her readily her attitude to my work. At public readings, I admired her public smile, the “archaic” smile of Greek statues. When her rather dreadful parents asked to see my books (as a suspicious physician might ask for a sample of semen), she gave them to read by mistake another man’s novel because of a silly similarity of titles. The only real shock I experienced was when I overheard her informing some idiot woman friend that my Dare included biographies of “Chernolyubov and Dobroshevski”! She actually started to argue when I retorted that only a lunatic would have chosen a pair of third-rate publicists to write about—spoonerizing their names in addition!

  6

  I have noticed, or seem to have noticed, in the course of my long life, that when about to fall in love or even when still unaware of having fallen in love, a dream would come, introducing me to a latent inamorata at morning twilight in a somewhat infantile setting, marked by exquisite aching stirrings that I knew as a boy, as a youth, as a madman, as an old dying voluptuary. The sense of recurrence (“seem to have noticed”) is very possibly a built-in feeling: for instance I may have had that dream only once or twice (“in the course of my long life”) and its familiarity is only the dropper that comes with the drops. The place in the dream, per contra, is not a familiar room but one remindful of the kind we children awake in after a Christmas masquerade or midsummer name day, in a great house, belonging to strangers or distant cousins. The impression is that the beds, two small beds in the present case, have been put in and placed against the opposite walls of a room that is not a bedroom at heart, a room with no furniture except: those two separate beds: property masters are lazy, or economical, in one’s dreams as well as in early novellas.

  In one of the beds I find myself just awoken from some secondary dream of only formulary importance; and in the far bed against the right-hand wall (direction also supplied), a girl, a younger, slighter, and gayer Annette in this particular variant (summer of 1934 by daytime reckoning), is playfully, quietly talking to herself but actually, as I understand with a delicious quickening of the nether pulses, is feigning to talk, is talking for my benefit, so as to be noticed by me.

  My next thought—and it intensifies the throbbings—concerns the strangeness of boy and girl being assigned to sleep in the same makeshift room: by error, no doubt, or perhaps the house was full and the distance between the two beds, across an empty floor, might have been deemed wide enough for perfect decorum in the case of children (my average age has been thirteen all my life). The cup of pleasure is brimming by now and before it spills I hasten to tiptoe across the bare parquet from my bed to hers. Her fair hair gets in the way of my kisses, but presently my lips find her cheek and neck, and her nightgown has buttons, and she says the maid has come into the room, but it is too late, I cannot restrain myself, and the maid, a beauty in her own
right, looks on, laughing.

  That dream I had a month or so after I met Annette, and her image in it, that early version of her voice, soft hair, tender skin, obsessed me and amazed me with delight—the delight of discovering I loved little Miss Blagovo. At the time of the dream she and I were still on formal terms, super-formal in fact, so I could not tell it to her with the necessary evocations and associations (as set down in these notes); and merely saying “I dreamt of you” would have amounted to the thud of a platitude. I did something much more courageous and honorable. Before revealing to her what she called (speaking of another couple) “serious intentions”—and before even solving the riddle of why really I loved her—I decided to tell her of my incurable illness.

  7

  She was elegant, she was languid, she was rather angelic in one sense, and dismally stupid in many others. I was lonely, and frightened, and reckless with lust—not sufficiently reckless, however, not to warn her by means of a vivid instance—half paradigm and half object lesson—of what she laid herself open to by consenting to marry me.

  Milostivaya Gosudarynya

  Anna Ivanovna!

  [Anglice Dear Miss Blagovo]

  Before entertaining you viva-voce of a subject of the utmost importance, I beg you to join me in the conduct of an experiment that will describe better than a learned article would one of the typical facets of my displaced mental crystal. So here goes.

  With your permission it is night now and I am in bed (decently clad, of course, and with every organ in decent repose), lying supine, and imagining an ordinary moment in an ordinary place. To further protect the purity of the experiment, let the visualized spot be an invented one. I imagine myself coming out of a bookshop and pausing on the curb before crossing the street to the little sidewalk café directly opposite. No cars are in sight. I cross. I imagine myself reaching the little café. The afternoon sun occupies one of its chairs and the half of a table, but otherwise its open-air section is empty and very inviting: nothing but brightness remains of the recent shower. And here I stop short as I recollect that I had an umbrella.