Lectures on Russian literature

by Vladimir Nabokov

  "Of course I remained. I drank sherry and Lafitte by the glassful in my discomfiture. Being unaccustomed to it, I was quickly affected. My annoyance increased as the wine went to my head. I longed all of a sudden to insult them all in a most flagrant manner and then go away. To seize the moment and show what I could do, so that they would say: 'He's clever, though he's absurd,' and . . . and ... in fact, damn them all! . . .

  " 'Why, aren't you going to drink the toast?' roared Trudolyubov, losing patience and turning menacingly to me. . . .

  82

  Vladimir Nabokov: Lectures on Russian literature

  " 'Lieutenant Zverkov, Sir,' I began, 'let me tell you that I hate phrases, phrasemongers, and men who wear corsets—that's the first point, and there's a second one to follow it.'

  "There was a general stir.

  " 'The second point is: I hate loose talk and loose talkers. Especially loose talkers! The third point: I love justice, truth, and honesty.' I went on almost mechanically, for I was beginning to shiver with horror myself and had no idea how I had come to be talking like this. T love thought, Monsieur Zverkov; I love true comradeship, on an equal footing and not—h'm! I love—but, however, why not? I'll drink your health, too, Monsieur Zverkov. Seduce the Circassian girls, shoot the enemies of the fatherland, and—and here's to your health, Monsieur Zverkov!'

  "Zverkov got up from his seat, bowed to me, and said:

  " 'I'm very much obliged to you.' He was frightfully offended and had turned pale.

  " 'Damn the fellow!' roared Trudolyubov, bringing his fist down on the table.

  " 'Well, he ought to get a punch in the nose for that,' squealed Ferfichkin.

  " 'We ought to turn him out,' muttered Simonov.

  " 'Not a word, gentlemen, not a move!'cried Zverkov gravely, checking the general indignation. T thank you all, but I am able to show him myself how much value I attach to his words.'

  " 'Mr. Ferfichkin, you will give me satisfaction tomorrow for your words just now!' I said aloud, turning with dignity to Ferfichkin.

  " 'A duel, you mean? Certainly,' he answered. But probably I was so ridiculous as I challenged him, and it was so out of keeping with my appearance, that everyone, including Ferfichkin, was prostrate with laughter.

  " 'Yes, let him alone, of course! He's quite drunk,' Trudolyubov said with disgust. ... I was so harassed, so exhausted, that I would have cut my throat to put an end to it. I was in a fever; my hair soaked with perspiration, stuck to my forehead and temples.

  " 'Zverkov, I beg your pardon,' I said abruptly and resolutely. 'Ferfichkin, yours, too, and everyone's, everyone's; I have insulted you all!'

  " 'Aha! A duel is not in your line, old man,' Ferfichkin got out venomously through clenched teeth.

  "It sent a sharp pang to my heart.

  " 'No, it's not the duel I'm afraid of, Ferfichkin! I'm ready to fight you tomorrow, after we're reconciled. I insist upon it, in fact, and you cannot refuse. I want to show you that I am not afraid of a duel. You'll fire first and I'll fire into the air.' . . .

  "They were all flushed; their eyes were bright; they had been drinking heavily.

  T ask for your friendship, Zverkov; I insulted you, but—' 'Insulted? You insulted we? Understand, Sir, that you never, under any circumstances, could possibly insult me.'

  'And that's enough for you. Out of the way!' concluded Trudolyubov. . . .

  83

  Vladimir Nabokov: Lectures on Russian literature

  "I stood there as though they had spat upon me. The party went noisily out of the room. Trudolyubov struck up some stupid song. . . . Disorder, the remains of the dinner, a broken wineglass on the floor, spilt wine, cigarette ends, fumes of drink and delirium in my brain, an agonizing misery in my heart and finally the waiter, who had seen and heard all and was looking inquisitively into my face.

  "'I'm going there!' I cried. 'Either they'll all go down on their knees to beg for my friendship or I'll give Zverkov a slap in the face!'

  After the great chapter 4 the mouseman's irritation, humiliation, etc., become repetitious, and soon a false note is introduced with the appearance of that favorite figure of sentimental fiction, the noble prostitute, the fallen girl with the lofty heart. Liza, the young lady from Riga, is a literary dummy. Our mouseman, to get some relief, starts the process of hurting and frightening a fellow creature, poor Liza (Sonya's sister). The conversations are very garrulous and very poor, but please go on to the bitter end. Perhaps some of you may like it more than I do. The story ends with our mouseman emitting the idea that humiliation and insult will purify and elevate Liza through hatred, and that perhaps exalted sufferings are better than cheap happiness. That's about all.

  The Idiot (1868)

  In The Idiot we have the Dostoevskian positive type. He is Prince Myshkin, endowed with the kindness and the capacity to forgive possessed before him by Christ alone. Myshkin is sensitive to a weird degree: he feels everything that is going on inside other people, even when these people are miles away. Such is his great spiritual wisdom, his sympathy and understanding for the sufferings of others. Prince Myshkin is purity itself, sincerity, frankness; and these qualities inevitably bring him into painful conflicts with our conventional artificial world. He is loved by everyone who knows him; his would-be murderer Rogozhin, who is passionately in love with the heroine Nastasya Filipovna, and is jealous of Myshkin, winds up with admitting Myshkin into the house where he has just murdered Nastasya, and seeks under the protection of Myshkin's spiritual purity to reconcile himself to life and to appease the storm of passions in his own soul.

  Yet Myshkin is also a half-imbecile. Since his early childhood he has been a backward child, unable to speak until he was six, a victim of epilepsy, constantly threatened with complete degeneration of the brain unless he leads a quiet relaxed life.

  (Degeneration of the brain eventually overtakes him in the wake of the events described in the novel.) Unfit to marry anyway, as the author takes care to make clear, Myshkin is nevertheless torn between two women. One is Aglaia, the innocently pure, beautiful, sincere young girl, unreconciled to the world or rather to her lot as daughter of a wealthy family destined to marry a successful and attractive young man and "live happily ever after." What exactly it is that Aglaia wants, she does not know herself; but she is supposed to be different from her sisters and family, "crazy" in the benevolent Dostoevskian sense of the word (he very much prefers crazy people to the normal ones), in a word a personality with a "quest" of her own, thus with a God's spark in her soul. Myshkin (and to a certain extent Aglaia's mother) are the only people who understand her; while her intuitive and naive mother is only worried by her daughter's unusualness, Myshkin feels with Aglaia the hidden anxiety of her soul. With the obscure urge to save and protect her by blazing for her a spiritual path in life, Myshkin agrees to Aglaia's desire to marry him. But then the complication begins: there is also in the book the demoniac, proud, wretched, betrayed, mysterious, adorable, and, in spite of her degradation, incorruptibly pure Nastasya Filipovna, one of those completely unacceptable, unreal, irritating characters with which Dostoevski's novels teem. This abstract woman indulges in the superlative type of feeling: there are no limits either to her kindliness or to her wickedness. She is the victim of an elderly playboy who, after having made her his mistress and enjoyed her company for several years, has decided to marry a decent woman. He blandly decides to marry Nastasya Filipovna off to his secretary.

  All the men around Nastasya know that at bottom she is a decent girl herself; her lover is alone to blame for her irregular position. This does not prevent her fiancé (who is by the way very much in love with her) from despising her as a "fallen"

  woman and Aglaia's family from being profoundly shocked when they discover that Aglaia has established some clandestine communication with Nastasya. In fact, it does not prevent Nastasya from despising herself for her 84

  Vladimir Nabokov: Lectures on Russian literature

  "degradation" and
from deciding to take it out on herself by turning into an actual "kept woman." Myshkin alone, like Christ, sees no fault in Nastasya for what is happening to her and redeems her with his profound admiration and respect.

  (Here again is a hidden paraphrase of the story of Christ and of the fallen woman.) At this point I shall quote a very apt remark by Mirsky about Dostoevski: "His Christianity ... is of a very doubtful kind. ... It was a more or less superficial spiritual formation which it is dangerous to identify with real Christianity." If we add to this that he kept throwing his weight about as a true interpreter of Orthodox Christianity, and that for the untying of every psychological or psychopathic knot he inevitably leads us to Christ, or rather to his own interpretation of Christ, and to the holy Orthodox Church, we shall better understand the truly irritating side of Dostoevski as "philosopher."

  But to come back to the story. Myshkin at once realizes that of the two women who claim him, Nastasya needs him more, being the more unfortunate. So he quietly leaves Aglaia to save Nastasya. Then Nastasya and he try to outdo each other in generosity, she trying desperately to release him in order that he can be happy with Aglaia, he not releasing her so that she would not "perish" (a favorite word of Dostoevski's). But when Aglaia upsets the apple cart by deliberately insulting Nastasya in her own house (going there on purpose), Nastasya sees no further reason for sacrificing herself for her rival's sake and decides to carry off Myshkin to Moscow. At the last moment the hysterical woman changes her mind again, feeling incapable of allowing him to "perish" through her, and runs away, almost from the very altar, with Rogozhin, a young merchant who squanders upon her the inheritance to which he has just succeeded. Myshkin follows them to Moscow. The next period of their life and doings is cunningly covered with a veil of mystery. Dostoevski never betrays to the reader what exactly happened in Moscow, only keeps dropping here and there significant and mysterious hints. Some great spiritual sufferings are endured by both men because of Nastasya, who is growing more and more insane, and Rogozhin becomes Myshkin's brother in Christ by exchanging crosses with him. We are given to understand that he does this to save himself from the temptation of murdering Myshkin out of jealousy.

  Well, eventually Rogozhin, being the most normal of the three, cannot bear it any longer and kills Nastasya. Dostoevski furnishes him with extenuating circumstances: Rogozhin while committing his crime was running a high fever. He spends some time in a hospital and then is sentenced to Siberia, that storeroom for Dostoevski's discarded waxworks. Myshkin, after spending the night in the company of Rogozhin by the side of the murdered Nastasya, suffers a final relapse into insanity and returns to the asylum in Switzerland where he had spent his youth and where he ought to have stayed all along. All this crazy hash is interspersed with dialogues destined to depict the respective points of view of different circles of society upon such questions as capital punishment or the great mission of the Russian nation. The characters never say anything without either paling, or flushing, or staggering on their feet. The religious aspects are nauseating in their tastelessness. The author relies completely on definitions without bothering to support them with proofs: e.g., Nastasya, who is, we are told, a paragon of reserve and distinction and refinement of manner, behaves occasionally like a furious bad-tempered hussy.

  But the plot itself is ably developed with many ingenious devices used to prolong the suspense. Some of these devices appear to me, when compared to Tolstoy's methods, like blows of a club instead of the light touch of an artist's fingers, but there are many critics who would not agree with this view.

  The Possessed (1872)

  The Possessed is the story of Russian terrorists, plotting violence and destruction, and actually murdering one of their own number. It was denounced as a reactionary novel by the radical critics. On the other hand, it has been described as a penetrating study of people who have been sidetracked by their ideas into a bog where they sink. Note the landscapes:

  "A mist of fine drizzling rain enveloped the whole country, swallowing up every ray of light, every gleam of color, and transforming everything into one smoky, leaden, indistinguishable mass. It had long been daylight yet it seemed as though it were still night." (The morning after Lebyadkin's murder.)

  85

  Vladimir Nabokov: Lectures on Russian literature

  "It was a very gloomy place at the end of the huge park. . . . How sinister it must have looked on that chill autumn evening!

  It lay on the edge of an old wood belonging to the Crown. Huge ancient pines stood out as vague sombre blurs in the darkness. It was so dark that they could hardly see each other two paces off. . . .

  At some unrecorded date in the past a rather absurd-looking grotto had for some reason been built here of rough unhewn stones. The table and benches in the grotto had long decayed and fallen. Two hundred paces to the right was the bank of the third pond of the park. These three ponds stretched one after another for a mile from the house to the very end of the park. " (Before Shatov's murder.)

  "The rain of the previous night was over, but it was damp, grey and windy. Low, ragged, dingy clouds moved rapidly across the cold sky. The tree-tops roared with the deep droning sound and creaked on their roots; it was a melancholy day."

  I mentioned before Dostoevski's method of dealing with his characters is that of a playwright. When introducing this or that one, he always gives a short description of their appearance, then hardly ever refers to it any more. Thus his dialogues are generally free from any intercalations used by other writers—the mention of a gesture, a look, or any detail referring to the background. One feels that he does not see his characters physically, that they are merely puppets, remarkable, fascinating puppets plunged into the moving stream of the author's ideas.

  The misadventures of human dignity which form Dostoevski's favorite theme are as much allied to the farce as to the drama. In indulging this farcical side and being at the same time deprived of any real sense of humor, Dostoevski is sometimes dangerously near to sinking into garrulous and vulgar nonsense. (The relationship between a strong-willed hysterical old woman and a weak hysterical old man, the story of which occupies the first hundred pages of Tbe Possessed, is tedious, being unreal.) The farcical intrigue which is mixed with tragedy is obviously a foreign importation; there is something second-rate French in the structure of his plots. This does not mean, however, that when his characters appear there are not sometimes well written scenes. In The Possessed there is the delightful skit on Turgenev: Karmazinov, the author à la mode, "an old man with a rather red face, thick grey locks of hair clustering under his chimney-pot hat and curling round his clean little pink ears. Tortoise-shell lorgnette, on a narrow black ribbon, studs, buttons, signet ring, all in the best form. A sugary but rather shrill voice. Writes solely in self-display, as for instance in the description of the wreck of some steamer on the English coast. 'Look rather at me, see how I was unable to bear the sight of the dead child in the dead woman's arms etc.' " A very sly dig, for Turgenev has an autobiographical description of a fire on a ship—incidentally associated with a nasty episode in his youth which his enemies delighted in repeating during all his life.

  "The next day . . . was a day of surprises, a day that solved past riddles and suggested new ones, a day of startling revelations and still more hopeless perplexity. In the morning ... I was, by Varvara Petrovna's particular request, to accompany my friend Stepan Trofimovich on his visit to her and at three o'clock in the afternoon I had to be with Lizaveta Nikolavna in order to tell her—I did not know what—and to assist her—I did not know how. And meanwhile it all ended as no one could have expected. In a word, it was a day of wonderful coincidences."

  At Varvara Petrovna's the author, with all the gusto of a playwright tackling his climax, crams in, one after the other, all the characters of The Possessed, two of them arriving from abroad. It is incredible nonsense, but it is grand booming nonsense with flashes of genius illuminating the whole gloomy and mad farce.

&nb
sp; Once collected in one room, these people trample on each other's dignity, have terrific rows (which translators insist on rendering as "scandals," misled by the Gallic root of the Russian "skandal" term) and these rows just fizzle out as the narrative takes a sharp new turn.

  It is, as in all Dostoevski's novels, a rush and tumble of words with endless repetitions, mutterings aside, a verbal overflow which shocks the reader after, say, Lermontov's transparent and beautifully poised prose. Dostoevski as we know is a great seeker after truth, a genius of spiritual morbidity, but as we also know he is not a great writer in the sense Tolstoy, Pushkin, and Chekhov are. And, I repeat, not because the world he creates is unreal—all the worlds of writers are unreal—but because it is created too hastily without any sense of that harmony and economy which the most irrational masterpiece is 86

  Vladimir Nabokov: Lectures on Russian literature

  bound to comply with (in order to be a masterpiece). Indeed, in a sense Dostoevski is much too rational in his crude methods, and though his facts are but spiritual facts and his characters mere ideas in the likeness of people, their interplay and development are actuated by the mechanical methods of the earthbound and conventional novels of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

  I want to stress again the fact that Dostoevski was more of a playwright than a novelist. What his novels represent is a succession of scenes, of dialogues, of scenes where all the people are brought together—and with all the tricks of the theatre, as with the scène à faire, the unexpected visitor, the comedy relief, etc. Considered as novels, his works fall to pieces; considered as plays, they are much too long, diffuse, and badly balanced.

  He has little humor in the description of his characters or their relations, or in the situations, but sometimes he displays a kind of caustic humor in certain scenes.