Lectures on Russian literature

by Vladimir Nabokov

synchronized with the Lyovin and Kitty episodes and that the various events in the two sets of lives happen at more or less the same time. The reader is aware, of course, that we shuttle in space, from Germany to Central Russia, and from the countryside to Petersburg or Moscow and back again; but he is not necessarily aware that we also shuttle in time—forward for Vronski-Anna, backward for Lyovin-Kitty.

  In the first five chapters of part four we attend the developments of the Vronski-Karenin theme in St. Petersburg. It is now mid-winter 1873, and Anna is going to have a baby, Vronski's child. In chapter 6 Karenin visits Moscow on political business, and at the same time Lyovin comes to Moscow too, after his visit abroad. Oblonski in chapters 9 to 13 arranges a dinner at his house, first week of January 1874, where Lyovin and Kitty meet each other again. The chalk writing scene occurs, as this time-keeper will tell you, exactly two years after the beginning of the novel; but somehow for the reader, and for Kitty (see various references in her conversation with Lyovin at the card table while they fiddle with the chalk) only a year has passed. We are thus confronted by the following marvelous fact: there exists a tell-tale difference between the Anna physical time on one side and the Lyovin spiritual time on the other.

  By part four, exactly in mid-book, all the seven lives are abreast again as they were in the beginning, February 1872. It is now January 1874 by Anna's and my calendar but 1873 by the reader's and Kitty's calendar. The second half of part four (chapters 17 to 23) shows us Anna in Petersburg almost dying in childbed, and then Karenin's temporary reconciliation with Vronski and Vronski's attempt to commit suicide. Part four ends in March 1874: Anna breaks with her husband; she and her lover go to Italy.

  Part five consists of thirty-three chapters. Not for long have the seven lives been abreast. Vronski and Anna in Italy again take the lead. This is quite a race. Lyovin's marriage in the first six chapters takes place in early spring 1874; and when we see the Lyovins again, in the country and then at Lyovin's brother's deathbed (chapters 14-20), it is the beginning of May 1874. But Vronski and Anna (sandwiched in between these two sets of chapters) are two months ahead and somewhat insecurely enjoying a southern July in Rome.

  The synchronizing link between the two time-teams is now the mateless Karenin. Since there are seven major people involved and since the action of the novel depends upon pairing them, and since seven is an odd number, one person will obviously be out and bound to be without a mate. In the beginning Lyovin was the outcast, the superfluous one; now it is Karenin. We go back to the Lyovins in the spring of 1874 and then we attend to Karenin's various activities, and this brings us gradually to as late as March 1875. By now Vronski and Anna have returned to Petersburg after a year in Italy. She visits her little son on his tenth birthday, say, March 1, a pathetic scene. Soon after, she and Vronski go to live on Vronski's country estate which very conveniently is in the same district as the Oblonski and Lyovin country places.

  Lo and behold, our seven lives are abreast again in part six, which consists of thirty-three chapters, from June to November 1875. We spend the first half of the summer of 1875 with the Lyovins and their relatives; then in July Dolly Oblonski gives us a lift in her carriage to Vronski's estate for some tennis. Oblonski, Vronski, and Lyovin are brought together in the rest of the chapters at some country elections on the second of October 1875, and a month later Vronski and Anna go to Moscow.

  Part seven consists of thirty-one chapters. It is the most important one in the book, the book's tragic climax. We are now all abreast in Moscow, end of November 1875: six of us are in Moscow, three pairs, the insecure, already embittered Vronski-Anna, the breeding Lyovins, and the Oblonskis. Kitty's baby is born, and in the beginning of May 1876 we visit, with Oblonski, Karenin in St. Petersburg. Then back again to Moscow. Now begins a series of chapters, from 23 to the end of part seven, devoted to Anna's last days. Her death, by suicide, is in mid-May 1876. I have already given my account of those immortal pages.

  Part eight, the last one, is a rather cumbersome machine, consisting of nineteen chapters. Tolstoy uses a device that he has used several times in the course of the novel, the device of having a character move from one place to another place and 124

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  thus transfer the action from one set of people to another.* Trains and coaches play a significant part in the novel: we have Anna's two train journeys in the first part, from Petersburg to Moscow and back to Petersburg. Oblonski and Dolly are at various points the traveling agents of the story, taking the reader with them wherever Tolstoy wants the reader to be. In fact, Oblonski is finally given a soft job with a big salary for services rendered to the author. Now in the first five chapters of the last, eighth, part, we have Lyovin's half-brother Sergey travel on the same train with Vronski. The date is easy to establish because of the various allusions to war news. The Slavs of Eastern Europe, the Serbians and Bulgarians, were fighting the Turks. This is August 1876; a year later Russia will actually proclaim war with Turkey. Vronski is seen at the head of a detachment of volunteers leaving for the front. Sergey, on the same train, is on his way to visit the Lyovins, and this takes care not only of Vronski but also of Lyovin. The last chapters are devoted to Lyovin's family life in the country and to his conversion when he gropes for God with Tolstoy giving directions.

  From this account of the structure of Tolstoy's novel it will be seen that the transitions are far less supple, far less elaborate, than the transitions from group to group in Madame Bovary within chapters. The brief abrupt chapter in Tolstoy replaces the flowing paragraph in Flaubert. But it will be also noted that Tolstoy has more lives on his hands than had Flaubert. With Flaubert a ride on horseback, a walk, a dance, a coach drive between village and town, and innumerable little actions, little movements, make those transitions from scene to scene within the chapters. In Tolstoy's novel great, clanging, and steaming trains are used to transport and kill the characters—and any old kind of transition is used from chapter to chapter, for instance beginning the next part or next chapter with the simple statement that so much time has passed and now this or that set of people are doing this or that in this or that place. There is more melody in Flaubert's poem, one of the most poetical novels ever composed; there is more might in Tolstoy's great book.

  This is the moving skeleton of the book, which I have given in terms of a race, with the seven lives at first abreast, then Vronski and Anna pressing forwards, leaving Lyovin and Kitty behind, then again all seven are abreast, and again with the funny jerking movement of a brilliant toy Vronski and Anna take the lead, but not for long. Anna does not finish the race.

  Of the six others, only Kitty and Lyovin retain the interest of the author.

  I M A GE R Y

  Imagery may be defined as the evocation, by means of words, of something that is meant to appeal to the reader's sense of color, or sense of outline, or sense of sound, or sense of movement, or any other sense of perception, in such a way as to impress upon his mind a picture of fictitious life that becomes to him as living as any personal recollection. For producing these vivid images the writer has a wide range of devices from the brief expressive epithet to elaborate word pictures and complex metaphors.

  1) Epithets. Among these to be noted and admired are the "limply plopping" and "scabrous" as applied so magnificently to the slippery insides and rough outsides of the choice oysters Oblonski enjoys during his restaurant meal with Lyovin. Mrs.

  Garnett omitted to translate these beautiful shlyupayushchie and sbershavye; we must restore them. Adjectives used in the scene of the ball to express Kitty's adolescent loveliness and Anna's dangerous charm should also be collected by the reader. Of special interest is the fantastic compound adjective, literally meaning "gauzily-ribbonly-lacily-iridescent"

  ( tyulevo-lento-kruzhevno-tsvetnoy), used to describe the feminine throng at the ball. The old Prince Shcherbatski calls a flabby type of elderly clubman, shlyupik, pulpy thing, a child's word for a hardboiled
egg that has become quite pulpy and spongy from too much rolling in a Russian Easter game where eggs are rolled and knocked at each other.

  2) Gestures. Oblonski, while his upper lip is being shaved, answering his valet's question (Is Anna coming with her husband or alone) by lifting one finger; or Anna, in her talk with Dolly, illustrating Steve's spells of moral oblivion by making a charming blurred gesture of obliteration before her brow.

  *

  VN interlines but deletes a remark to the class, "You remember what we called the 'sifting agent.' "The reference is to his Dickens lecture the preceding semester where he analyzed the structural function of characters whom he called "perries," used chiefly to bring characters together or to provide information by conversing with them. See the first volume, Lectures on Literature, p. 98. Elsewhere he calls Oblonski a kind of "perry."—Ed.

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  3) Details Of Irrational Perception. Many examples in the account of Anna's half dream on the train.

  4) Colorful Comedy Traits. As when the old Prince thinks he is mimicking his wife as he grotesquely simpers and curtseys when speaking of matchmaking.

  5) Word Pictures. These are innumerable: Dolly miserably sitting at her dressing table and the rapid deep-chested voice in which, disguising her distress, she asks her husband what he wants; Grinevich's convexedly-tipped fingernails; the old sleepy blissful hound's sticky lips—are all delightful and unforgettable images.

  6) Poetical Comparisons. Seldom used by Tolstoy, appealing to the senses, such as the charming allusions to diffuse sunlight and a butterfly, when Kitty is described on the skating rink and at the ball.

  7) Utilitarian Comparisons. Appealing to the mind rather than to the eye, to the ethical sense rather than to the esthetical one. When Kitty's feelings before the ball are compared to those of a young man before a battle, it would be ridiculous to visualize Kitty in a lieutenant's uniform; but as a rational black-and-white verbal scheme the comparison works nicely and has the parable note that Tolstoy cultivates so assiduously in certain later chapters.

  Not all is direct imagery in Tolstoy's text. The parable comparison grades insensibly into the didactic intonations with their meaningful repetitions that characterize Tolstoy's accounts of situations and states of mind. In this respect, the direct statements of chapter openings should be especially marked: "Oblonski had learned easily at school" or "Vronski had never had any real home life."

  8) Similes And Metaphors. The old curly birches of the gardens, with all their branches weighed down by snow, seemed decked in new festive vestments (Part one, chapter 9).

  But for Lyovin she was as easy to find in that crowd as a wild rose among nettles. Everything was made bright by her. She was the smile that shed light on all around her. The place where she stood seemed to him a holy shrine. . . . He walked down, for a long while avoiding looking at her as at the sun, but seeing her, as one does the sun, without looking (Chapter 9).

  He felt as though the sun were coming near him (Chapter 9).

  like the sun going behind a cloud, her face lost all its friendliness (Chapter 9).

  The Tatar . . . instantly, as though worked by springs, laying down one bound bill of fare, he took up another, the list of wines (Chapter 10).

  she was unable to believe it, just as she would have been unable to believe that, at any time whatever, the most suitable playthings for children five years old ought to be loaded pistols (Chapter 12).

  Kitty experienced a sensation akin to the sensation of a young man before battle (Chapter 13).

  Anna speaking: "I know that blue haze like the mist on the mountains in Switzerland. That mist which covers everything in that blissful time when childhood is just ending, and out of that vast circle, happy and gay [there is a path growing narrower and narrower]" (Chapter 20).

  the rustle of movement like an even humming stir as from a hive (Chapter 22).

  this air she had of a butterfly clinging to a grass blade, and just about to flutter up again with iridescent wings spread (Chapter 23).

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  And on Vronski's face . . . she [Kitty] saw that look that had struck her . . . like the expression of an intelligent dog when it has done wrong (Chapter 23).

  But immediately as though slipping his feet into old slippers, he [Vronski] dropped back into the light-hearted, pleasant world he had always lived in (Chapter 24).

  Comparisons may be similes or metaphors, or a mixture of both. Here are some models of comparison: The simile model:

  Between land and sea the mist was like a veil

  This is a simile. Such links as "like" or "as" are typical of the simile: one object is like another object.

  If you go on to say the mist was like the veil of a bride, this is a sustained simile with elements of mild poetry; but if you say, the mist was like the veil of a fat bride whose father was even fatter and wore a wig, this is a rambling simile, marred by an illogical continuation, of the kind Homer used for purposes of epic narration and Gogol used for grotesque dream-effects.

  Now the metaphor model:

  The veil of the mist between land and sea.

  The link "like" has gone; the comparison is integrated. A sustained metaphor would be: The veil of the mist was torn in several places

  since the end of the phrase is a logical continuation. In a rambling metaphor there would be an illogical continuation.

  The Functional Ethical Comparison.

  A peculiar feature of Tolstoy's style is that whatever comparisons, whatever similes, or metaphors, he uses, most of them are used not for an esthetical purpose but for an ethical one. In other words his comparisons are utilitarian, are functional.

  They are employed not to enhance the imagery, to give a new slant to our artistic perception of this or that scene; they are employed to bring out a moral point. I call them, therefore, Tolstoy's moral metaphors or similes—ethical ideas expressed by means of comparisons. These similes and metaphors are, I repeat, strictly functional, and thus rather stark, and constructed according to a recurrent pattern. The dummy, the formula, is: "He felt like a person who. ..." A state of emotion—this is the first part of the formula—and then a comparison follows: "a person who . . ."etc. I shall give some examples.

  (Lyovin thinking of married life.) At every step he experienced what a man would experience who, after admiring the smooth, happy course of a little boat on a lake, should enter that little boat himself. He discovered that it was not enough to sit still, keeping balance; that one had also to maintain, without a moment's inattention, the right direction, that there was water underneath and one had to row, that one's unaccustomed hands hurt; and that only looking at it had been easy; but that doing all this, though very delightful, was very difficult (Part five, chapter 14).

  (During a tiff with his wife.) He was offended for the first instant, but the very same second he felt that he could not be offended by her, that she was himself. During that first instant he felt as a man feels when, having suddenly received a violent blow from behind, he turns round, angry and eager to avenge himself, to look for his antagonist, and finds that he has merely struck himself accidentally, and there is no one to be angry with, and he must endure and soothe the pain (ibid.).

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  To remain under such undeserved reproach was a wretched situation, but to make her suffer by justifying himself was worse still. Like a man half-awake in an agony of pain, he craved to tear out and fling away the aching part, and upon awaking, felt that the aching part was himself, (ibid.).

  . . . the saintly image of Madame Stahl which she [Kitty] had carried for a whole month in her heart, vanished, never to return, just as a human figure seen in some clothing carelessly thrown on a chair vanishes the moment one's eye unravels the pattern of its folds (Part two, chapter 34).

  He [Karenin] experience
d a feeling like a man who, after calmly crossing a precipice by a bridge, should suddenly discover that the bridge was dismantled, and that there was an abyss below (Part two, chapter 8).

  He experienced a feeling such as a man might have, returning home and finding his own house locked up (Part two, chapter 9).

  Like an ox with head bent, submissively he awaited the blow [of the obukh] which he felt was lifted over him (Part two, chapter 10).

  He [Vronski] very quickly perceived that though society was open to him personally, it was closed to Anna. Just as in the parlor game of cat and mouse [with one person in a circle of players and the other outside], the linked hands raised for him were lowered to bar the way for her (Part five, chapter 28).

  He could not go anywhere without running into Anna's husband. So at least it seemed to Vronski, just as it seems to a man with a sore finger continually, as though on purpose, grazing his sore finger on everything (ibid.).

  N AME S

  In speaking to a person, the most ordinary and neutral form of address among cultured Russians is not the surname but the first name and patronymic, Ivan Ivanovich (meaning "Ivan, son of Ivan") or Nina Ivanovna (meaning "Nina, daughter of Ivan"). The peasant may hail another as "Ivan" or "Vanka," but otherwise only kinsmen or childhood friends, or people who in their youth served in the same regiment, etc., use first names in addressing each other. I have known a number of Russians with whom I have been on friendly terms for two or three decades but whom I would not dream of addressing otherwise than Ivan Ivanovich or Boris Petrovich as the case may be; and this is why the ease with which elderly Americans become Harrys and Bills to each other after a couple of highballs strikes formal Ivan Ivanovich as impossibly absurd.

  A man of parts whose full name is, say, Ivan Ivanovich Ivanov (meaning "Ivan, son of Ivan, surnamed Ivanov"; or in American parlance, "Mr. Ivan Ivanov, Jr.") will be Ivan Ivanovich (often contracted to "Ivan Ivanych": "y" pronounced as "u" in