Lectures on Russian literature

by Vladimir Nabokov

  "He did not know whether it was late or early. The candles had all burned out. . . . He sat listening to the doctor's small talk.

  . . . Suddenly there came an unearthly shriek from Kitty's room. The shriek was so awful that he did not even start but gazed in terrified inquiry at the doctor. The doctor put his head on one side, listened, and smiled approvingly. Everything was so extraordinary that nothing could strike Lyovin as strange. . . . Presently he tiptoed to the bedroom, edged around the midwife [Elizaveta] and Kitty's mother, and stood at Kitty's pillow. The scream had subsided but there was some change now. What it was he did not see and did not understand, and had no wish to see or understand. . . . Kitty's swollen and agonized face, a tress of hair clinging to her moist temple, was turned to him. Her eyes sought his eyes, her lifted hands asked for his hands. Clutching his cold hands in her hot ones, she began squeezing them to her face.

  " 'Don't go, don't go! I am not afraid, I am not afraid. Mamma, take off my earrings, they bother me. . . .' [List these earrings with the handkerchief, the frost on the glove, and other little objects that Kitty handles in the course of the novel.] Then suddenly she pushed him away. 'Oh, this is awful, I am dying, go away,' she shrieked. . . .

  "Lyovin clutched at his head and ran out of the room.

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  " 'It's all right, everything is all right,' Dolly called after him. [She had gone through it seven times herself.]

  ' 'But,' thought Lyovin, 'they might say what they liked.' He knew now that all was over. He stood in the next room, his head leaning against the door-post, and heard someone emitting shrieks, howls, such as he had never heard before and he knew that this howling thing had been Kitty. But now he had long ago ceased to wish for the child, by now he loathed this child.

  He did not even wish for her life now. All he longed for was the end of this awful anguish.

  " 'Doctor, what is it, what is it? Good Lord!' he said, snatching at the doctor's arm as the latter came out.

  " 'Well,' said the doctor, 'it's the end,' and the doctor's face was so grave as he said it that Lyovin took the end as meaning her death. " [Of course, what the doctor meant was: it will be over in a minute now.]

  Now comes the part that stresses the beauty of this natural phenomenon. Mark incidentally that the whole history of literary fiction as an evolutionary process may be said to be a gradual probing of deeper and deeper layers of life. It is quite impossible to imagine either Homer in the ninth century b.c. or Cervantes in the seventeenth century of our era—it is quite impossible to imagine them describing in such wonderful detail childbirth. The question is not whether certain events or emotions are or are not suitable ethically or esthetically. The point I want to make is that the artist, like the scientist, in the process of evolution of art and science, is always casting around, understanding a little more than his predecessor, penetrating further with a keener and more brilliant eye—and this is the artistic result.

  "Beside himself he hurried to the bedroom. The first thing he saw was the face of the midwife. It was even more frowning and stern. Kitty's face was not there. In the place where it had been was something that was fearful in its strained distortion and in the sounds that came from it. [Now comes the beauty of the thing.] He fell down with his head on the wooden framework of the bed, feeling that his heart was bursting. The awful scream never paused, it became still more awful, and as though it had reached the utmost limit of terror, suddenly it ceased. Lyovin could not believe his ears, but there could be no doubt; the scream had ceased and he heard a subdued stir and bustle, and hurried breathing, and her voice, gasping, alive, tender, and blissful, uttered softly, 'It's over!'

  "He lifted his head. Exhausted, with her hands lying on the quilt, most lovely and serene, she looked at him in silence and tried to smile, and could not.

  "And suddenly, from the mysterious and awful far-away world in which he had been living for the last twenty-two hours, Lyovin felt himself all in an instant borne back to the old every-day world, now flooded by such a radiance of happiness that he could not bear it. The strained strings snapped, sobs and tears of joy which he had never foreseen rose up with such violence that his whole body shook. . . . Falling on his knees before the bed, he held his wife's hand before his lips and kissed it, and the hand, with a weak movement of the fingers, responded to his kiss. [The whole chapter is magnificent imagery.

  What slight figures of speech there are, shade into direct description. But now we are ready for a summation by means of a simile.] And meanwhile, there at the foot of the bed, in the deft hands of the midwife, like a flickering light on the oil of a lamp, there flickered the life of a human being which had never existed before and which would now . . . live and create in its own image."

  We shall mark later the image of the light in connection with Anna's death, in the chapter of her suicide. Death is the delivery of the soul. Thus childbirth and soulbirth (death) are expressed in the same terms of mystery, terror, and beauty.

  Kitty's delivery and Anna's death meet at this point.

  The birth of faith in Lyovin, the pangs of faith birth.

  "Lyovin with big steps strode along the highroad, absorbed not so much in his tangled thoughts as in his spiritual condition, unlike anything he had experienced before. . . .

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  [A peasant with whom he had been talking had said of another peasant that he—that other peasant—lived for his belly, and then had said that one must not live for one's belly, but for truth, for God, for one's soul.]

  " 'Can I have found a solution for myself, can my sufferings be over?' thought Lyovin striding along the dusty road. . . . He was breathless with emotion. He turned off the road into the forest and sat down on the grass in the shade of an aspen. He took his hat off his hot head and lay propped on his elbow in the lush fluffy woodland grass [which Mrs. Garnett has trampled upon with flat feet: it is not 'feathery grass.']

  " 'Yes, I must make it clear to myself,' he thought as he followed the movements of a small green bug creeping up a blade of witch-grass: it was interrupted in its progress by a leaf of gout-wort. 'What have I discovered?' he asked himself [referring to his spiritual condition] and bending aside the leaf out of the beetle's way and turning down another blade of grass to help it cross over onto it. 'What is it makes me glad? What have I discovered?'

  " 'I have only found out what I knew all along. I have been set free from falsity, I have found the Master.' "

  But what we must mark is not so much the ideas. After all we should always bear in mind that literature is not a pattern of ideas but a pattern of images. Ideas do not matter much in comparison to a book's imagery and magic. What interests us here is not what Lyovin thought, or what Leo thought, but that little bug that expresses so neatly the turn, the switch, the gesture of thought.

  We now come to the last chapters of the Lyovin line—to Lyovin's final conversion—but again let us keep an eye on the imagery and leave the ideas to pile up as they please. The word, the expression, the image is the true function of literature.

  Not ideas.

  At Lyovin's estate the family and the guests had been on an

  outing. Then it is time to go back.

  "Kitty's father and Sergey, Lyovin's half brother, got into the

  small cart and drove off; storm clouds were gathering; the

  rest of the party hastened homeward on foot.

  "But the storm-rack, now white, then black, moved upon

  them so quickly that they had to walk fast to get home

  before the rain. The foremost clouds, lowering and as black

  as soot-laden smoke, moved with extraordinary swiftness

  over the sky. The party was two hundred paces from the

  house, the wind of the storm was already blowing and now

  every second the downpour might come.

  "The children ran a
head with frightened and gleeful yells.

  Dolly, struggling as best she could with her skirts that

  clung round her legs, was more running than walking, her

  eyes fixed on the children. The men holding onto their hats

  strode with long steps beside her. They were just at the

  steps of the porch when a big raindrop fell and splattered

  on the rim of the iron gutter. The children ran into the

  shelter of the house talking excitedly.

  Nabokov's notes on Anna Karenin, part eight, chapter 12,

  with his caution that "literature isnot a pattern of ideas ..."

  'Is my wife home?' Lyovin asked of the housekeeper who

  had met them in the hall with kerchiefs and lap-robes that she was about to send to the picnickers.

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  " 'We thought she was with you,' she said.

  " 'And the baby?'

  " 'They must be all in the grove, the nurse too.'

  "Lyovin snatched up the lap-robes and coats and ran towards the grove.

  "In that brief interval of time the thunderhead had engulfed the sun so completely that the day was as dark as during an eclipse. Stubbornly the wind tried to stop him as though insisting on its rights [the pathetic fallacy of the wind, as on Anna's train trip; but direct imagery will now turn into a comparison], and tearing the leaves and flowers off lime-trees, and turning back the foliage of the white birch branches so as to reveal, hideously and strangely, their nakedness, the wind twisted and tossed everything to one side—acacias, flowers, burdocks, long grass, tall tree-tops. The peasant girls working in the garden ran shrieking into the shelter of the servants' quarters. The downpour had already flung its livid veil over all the distant forest and over half the near fields, and was rapidly swooping down upon the grove. The wet of the rain as it spurted up in tiny drops upon touching the ground could be smelled in the air. Bending his head* and struggling with the wind that strove to snatch the wraps he was carrying away from him [pathetic fallacy continued], Lyovin was nearing the grove, and had just caught sight of something white from behind an oak-tree, when there was a sudden flash, the whole earth seemed on fire, and the sky seemed to split in two. Opening his blinded eyes, Lyovin gazed through the thick veil of rain and to his horror the first thing he saw was the uncannily changed position of the green crest of the familiar oak-tree in the middle of the grove. [Compare the scene of the race, Vronski feeling "his changed position" when his horse broke its back while jumping an obstacle in the race.]

  " 'Can it have been struck?' he hardly had time to think when, moving more and more rapidly, the foliage of the oak vanished behind other trees, and he heard the crash of the great tree falling upon the others.

  "The blaze of lightning, the sound of thunder and the sudden chill that ran through him were all merged for him in one pang of terror. 'My God, my God, not on them,' he said.

  "And though he thought at once how senseless was his prayer that the falling oak should not have killed them since it had already fallen, he repeated it, knowing that he could do nothing better than utter this senseless prayer. . . .

  "They were at the other end of the grove, under an old lime-tree; they were calling him. Two figures in dark dresses (the dresses had been of a light color when they had started out)† stood bending over something. They were Kitty and the nurse. The rain had almost stopped. It was beginning to clear up when he reached them. The nurse's skirt was dry but Kitty was drenched, and her soaked clothes clung to her. Both stood bending in the same position as when the storm broke, over a baby carriage protected by a green umbrella. 'Alive? Safe? Thank God,' he said. His soaked boots slipped and sloshed in the puddles as he ran up to them. . . . [He was angry with his wife.] They gathered up the baby's wet diapers." [Wet from the rain? This is not clear. Note how Jove's shower has been transformed into a beloved babe's wet diaper. The forces of nature have surrendered to the power of family life. The pathetic fallacy has been replaced by the smile of a happy family.]

  The Baby's Bath : "With one hand Kitty was supporting the head of the chubby baby: he was floating on his back in the bath and diddling his legs. With her other hand she squeezed the sponge over him, and the muscles of her forearm contracted in measured motion. ..." (Again mistranslated by Gar-nett, who leaves out all reference to the muscles.)

  *

  The Garnett translation reads: "Holding his head bent down before him," on which VN fastidiously notes, "Mark that Mrs. Garnett has decapitated the man." Ed.

  †

  VN interjects: "The point of this is of course messed up by Garnett," who writes, "they had been light summer dresses when they started out." Ed.

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  The nurse supporting him with one hand under his little belly, lifted him out of the bath, poured a jugful of water over him, he was wrapped in towels, dried and after some piercing screams handed over to his mother.

  " 'Well, I am glad you are beginning to love him,' said Kitty to her husband, when she had settled comfortably in her usual place, with the baby at her breast. 'You remember you said you had no feeling for him.'

  ' 'Really? Did I say that? Oh—I only said I was sort of disappointed.'

  " 'In him?'

  " 'Not in him but well—in my own feeling. I had somehow expected more, some new delightful emotion, a big surprise, and then instead—disgust, pity.'

  "She listened attentively looking at him over the baby while she put back on her slender fingers the rings she had taken off while giving the baby his bath. . . . [Tolstoy never misses a gesture.]

  "Lyovin on leaving the nursery and finding himself alone,* went back in thought to the blurry something in his mind.

  Instead of going into the drawing-room where he heard voices, he stopped on the terrace and leaning his elbows on the parapet gazed at the sky. It was quite dark now. The south was free of clouds which had drifted on towards the opposite side. There were flashes of lightning and distant rumbles from that quarter. He listened to the measured drip-drip from the lime-trees in the garden and looked at the triangle of stars he knew so well and the milky way with all its ramifications.

  [Now comes a delightful comparison to be marked with love and foresight.] At each flash the Milky Way and even the bright stars vanished but as soon as the lightning died away, they reappeared in their places as though a hand had thrown them back with careful aim. [Is this delightful comparison clear?]

  " 'Well, what is perplexing me?' Lyovin said to himself. 'I am wondering about the relationship to God of all the different religions of all mankind. But why do I bother? [Why indeed, murmurs the good reader.] To me individually, personally, to my own heart has been revealed a knowledge beyond all doubt, and unattainable by reason, and here am I obstinately trying to use my reason.... The question of other creeds and their relations to Divinity I have no right to decide, no possibility of deciding.'

  " 'Oh, you have not gone in,' said Kitty's voice all at once as she went by through the terrace on her way to the drawing-room. 'What is the matter?' she said, looking intently at his face in the starlight.

  "But she could not have seen his face if a flash of lightning had not hidden the stars and revealed it. In that flash she saw his face clearly and seeing him happy and calm, she smiled at him. [This is the functional after effect of the delightful comparison we have noticed. It helps to clear matters.]

  " 'She understands,' he thought. 'Shall I tell her? Yes.' But at that moment she began speaking. 'Do me a favor,' she said. 'Go into that guest room and see if they have fixed it right for Sergey [his half brother]. I can't very well. See if they have put the new wash-stand there.'

  " 'O.K.,' said Lyovin and gave her a kiss. 'No, I had better not speak of it,' he thought. 'It is strictly for me alone, vitally for me alone, and not to be put into words.

  'This new feeling has not changed me,
has not made me happy as I had dreamt it would in regard to that feeling for my child. No surprise in this either. But faith or no faith this feeling has come to stay.'

  *

  In a note VN objects to Mrs. Garnett's phrasing of this opening, "Going out of the nursery and being alone again." Ed.

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  'I shall go on, in the same old way, losing my temper with the coachman, falling into angry discussions, being tactless.

  There will still be the same wall of reticence between my soul and other people, even between me and my wife. I shall still go on blaming her for my own fears and regretting it. I shall still be as unable to understand with my reason why I pray, and I shall still go on praying; but my whole life now, apart from anything that may happen to me, every minute of it is no longer meaningless as it was before. It has acquired now the positive meaning of good which I have the power to give it.'

  Thus the book ends, on a mystic note which seems to me rather a part of Tolstoy's own diary than that of the character he created. This is the background of the book, the Milky Way of the book, the Lyovin-Kitty family life line. We shall presently turn to the pattern of iron and blood, to the Vronski-Anna pattern that stands in awful relief against this star-dusted sky.

  Although he is mentioned earlier, Vronski makes his first appearance in part one, chapter 14, at the Shcherbatskis.

  Incidentally, it is here that starts an interesting little line, the line of "spiritualism," table tilting, entranced mediums, and so on, a fashionable pastime in those days. Vronski in a light-hearted mood wishes to try out this fashionable fad; but much later, in chapter 22 of part seven, it is, curiously enough, owing to the mediumistic visions of a French quack who has found patrons among Petersburg society people, it is owing to him that Karenin decides not to give Anna a divorce—and a telegram to that effect during a final period of tragic tension between Anna and Vronski helps to build up the mood that leads to her suicide.