There have since been other echoes of Struve’s theory in several publications in Europe and in the United States.
One can cite numerous deficiencies in Agheyev’s style—blatantly incorrect forms, for instance, like “zachifynul” (for “sneezed”) or “ispol ’zovyvat’ ” (for “to use”)—that are obvious to anyone with a knowledge of Russian. It is amazing that a Sorbonne specialist in Russian language and literature like Struve, or a London University professor of Slavonic studies like Graffy could have confused the incompletely educated Agheyev’s often vulgar or incorrect locutions with Nabokov’s precise and subtle style. As Dmitri Savitzky notes in an article refuting Struve’s theory in Russian Thought (Paris, 8 November 1985), Nabokov’s Russian possesses the impeccable rhythm of classical poetry, while Agheyev’s is “contrived, jolting, uneven.” One look at Agheyev’s style precludes the need to rebut the rest of Struve’s arguments.
In his 1986 book Field ventilates the hypothesis that Novel with Cocaine might have been a deliberate mystification by Nabokov or by someone else. He ends by affirming, nonetheless, that “it can be said with absolute certainty… that there is some link between the work of Agheyev and Sirin,” because there happens to be a partial assonance between the names of Agheyev’s character Sinat[12] and Nabokov’s Cincinnatus in Invitation to a Beheading.
The Sinat-Cincinnatus connection falls into the same category of scholarship as, say, Field’s overblown claptrap about an extramarital affair, the total tripe about secret heavy drinking, the nonsensical conjectures about Father’s death, or the contention that Nabokov, in his letters to his mother, addressed her as “Lolita” (whereon Field constructs a typical house of marked cards). In the latter case his reasoning goes as follows: Father, with the natural reserve of a gentleman, had preferred to omit the term of endearment with which he habitually addressed his mother, whose name was Hélène, from the copies of the letters he showed to Field before Field revealed his true colors. Field, after having consumed, I suppose, many magnifying glasses, gleaned the trace of the “tail or hat” of a Cyrillic t at the edge of the blank space where the salutation had been excised (incidentally, the handwritten lowercase Cyrillic t generally resembles a small Roman m, and is, therefore, tailless and hatless). For that reason, and because the missing word was “about seven letters long,” and also because Father had told him that “Lyolya” was a perfectly normal Russian diminutive for “Hélène,” and God knows for what other reasons, Field concludes (not without a trace of personal outrage), that it was “Lolita, surely,” and, characteristically, proceeds to refer to this absurdity as an established fact further on in his book.
Not only does “Lolita” have only six letters; not only would the Latin derivation have been unthinkable within the parameters of Russian etymology, where Spanish cognates did not enjoy the same favor as French or English ones; but the word deleted out of a sense of privacy and out of respect for the memory of a beloved mother was the Russian “radost’” (“joy,” “dearest”). It was Nabokov’s habitual salutation to his mother, and, of course, we have the original letters to prove it. And “Lolita Haze” was “Juanita Dark” in Father’s drafts of the novel until very late in the game. So much for “Lolita, surely.”
But let us leave Field among his ruins and revisit another corner of the scrap heap briefly to bury the Agheyev matter, whose relevance here is the dramatic dissimilarity between that author’s work and The Enchanter.
Research by Frank Williams, who originally reviewed the English version of the Agheyev book in the TLS on 5 July 1985; by the French literary journalist Alain Garric who went all the way to Istanbul while preparing a lengthy article on the subject for Libération; and by others, has confirmed the following sequence of events.
After Novel with Cocaine originally appeared in Numbers and aroused a certain curiosity in émigré circles, a Russian lady in Paris named Lydia Chervinskaya was asked to track down “Agheyev” with the help of her parents, who happened to live in Istanbul, whence the manuscript had originally been sent. Chervinskaya found him there, confined to a mental institution because of tremors and convulsions. After being rescued by the lady’s father, Agheyev became a friend of the family and grew close to Chervinskaya, to whom he confided his real name—Mark Levi—and his complex and motley history, which included the killing of a Russian officer, flight to Turkey, and obsession with drugs.
Levi-Agheyev went with Chervinskaya to Paris but, after a sojourn there, returned to Istanbul, where he died, presumably from the consequences of cocaine abuse, in 1936.
V. S. Yanovsky, who was associated with Numbers when the manuscript was first received in Paris, and who now lives in a suburb of New York City, confirmed in an interview reported in The New York Times (8 October 1985) that, when the manuscript arrived for publication in Russian, it bore the unequivocally Jewish signature “Levi,” and that, somewhere along the line, it was decided to substitute “a more Russian-sounding name.” Finally, inquiries by the translator of the French version of the novel that appeared in 1982, cited by Williams, reveal that “a Mark Abramovich Levi was buried in the Jewish cemetery of Istanbul in February 1936.”
While no literary adventurer would have a leg to stand on if he were to question the authorship of The Enchanter, Professor Struve appears determined to persist in his benighted and quixotic campaign to ascribe the Agheyev work, as well, to VN, who, except for a brief contribution on a very different subject to its first issue, submitted no material to Numbers, which had rudely attacked him shortly thereafter; had never visited Moscow, where the novel is set, with a considerable amount of local detail; never used cocaine or other drugs; and wrote, unlike Agheyev, in pure, correct St. Petersburg Russian. Furthermore, if indeed there had been any connection between Nabokov and Novel with Cocaine, someone among his literary acquaintances would have had an inkling of it, and, if not, then his wife, first reader, and typist Vera Nabokov would surely have known.
The stucco parapet of the Florida terrace where I am writing at this moment—the kind with white paint covering a deliberately uneven surface—is full of random patterns. It takes only a pencil stroke here and there to complete an excellent hippopotamus, a stern Flemish profile, a busty showgirl, or any number of friendly or disconcerting little free-form monsters.
This is what Nabokov, who early in life had seriously considered becoming a painter, could do so well with an ornate lampshade, for example, or some repetitively flowered wallpaper. Comical faces, nonexistent but plausible butterflies, and grotesque little creatures of his own invention gradually came to inhabit hospitable designs of the quarters at the Montreux-Palace Hotel, where he lived and worked, and some of them happily survive to this day, preserved either on our express instructions or by the limited capacity for observation of the cleaning teams that storm, like a defensive football line, through those rooms every afternoon. A few particularly good ones have, alas, long since been deterged from the tiles adjacent to the bathtub that, to Field’s apparent consternation, Father used every day.
Such enhancement and recombination of chance patterns are, in a larger sense, an essential part of Nabokov’s creative synthesis. The fortuitous observation, the reported or imagined psychological anomaly, elaborated by the artist’s fantasy, assumed a harmonious growth of their own as the infant work was gradually weaned from the image, the news item, or the reverie that had jolted its cells into the process of multiplication.
Like certain of Nabokov’s other works, The Enchanter is the study of madness seen through the madman’s mind. Aberrations in general, both physical and psychological, were among the diverse sources of raw material that nurtured Nabokov’s artistic fantasy. The criminal pedophilia of the protagonist—like that of the later Humbert in a new work and a different setting; like the murderous delusion of Hermann in Despair; like the sexual anomalies that are but one element of Pale Fire and other works; like the madness of the chess master Luzhin[13] and the musician Bachmann;[14] like the deformati
ons of the Potato Elf,[15] and of the Siamese twins in “The Double Monster”[16] —was one among many themes Nabokov selected for the creative process of fictional recombination.
Perhaps what matters is not the human pain or joy at all but, rather, the play of shadow and light on a live body, the harmony of trifles assembled… in a unique and inimitable way
writes Nabokov in the concluding sentence of his 1925 short story “The Fight.”[17] This early expression, forthright yet undogmatic, of what was to remain an enduring aspect of his aesthetic approach, is, I suspect, destined to be quoted often, and not always in context.
“Perhaps,” the word with which Nabokov introduced the thought, is an important qualifier. As a creative writer rather than a journalist, social commentator, or psychoanalyst, Nabokov chose to examine the phenomena of his surroundings through the refractive lens of artistry; at the same time his codex for literary creation is no less precise than the scientific purity of his lepidopterological investigations. But even if his emphasis is on the “combinational delights” in which an artist is privileged to indulge, by no means does it follow that Nabokov was indifferent to the horrors of tyranny, murder, and child molestation; to the tragedy of social or personal injustice; or to the plight of those who have somehow been shortchanged by Fate.
It is not indispensable to have known Father personally in order to understand this; it is enough to have read his books with reasonable care. For the poet in Nabokov the vehicle of choice was the concrete artistic experience rather than the abstract declaration. However, if one is in quest of quotable bits of credo, the miniature Socratic dialogue of the 1927 story “The Passenger”[18] concedes another rare peek into the essence of his ethos. “Life is more talented than we,” says the first character, the writer. “How can we compete with that goddess? Her works are untranslatable, indescribable.” Hence,
All that’s left to us is to treat her creations as a film producer does a famous novel, altering it beyond recognition… for the sole purpose of having an entertaining film unfold without a hitch, punishing virtue in the beginning and vice at the end,… with an unexpected but all-resolving outcome…. We think that Life’s performance is too sweeping, too uneven, that her genius is too untidy. To indulge our readers we cut out of Life’s untrammeled novels our neat little tales for the use of schoolchildren. Allow me, in this connection, to impart to you the following experience….
At the story’s end, his interlocutor the wise critic replies:
There is much in life that is casual, and there is also much that is unusual. The Word is given the sublime right to enhance chance and to make of the transcendental something that is not accidental.
But the writer’s concluding thought expresses two further distinct, if undivorceable, considerations—artistic curiosity and human compassion:
The trouble is that I did not learn, and shall never learn, why the passenger cried.
One suspects, early on in The Enchanter, that things will not end well, that the cynical, contemptible protagonist will get his due, and, if an obvious moral is needed, this premonition is it. However, besides being part horror story, this is also part mystery thriller: Fate toys with the madman, now thwarting, now abetting, now providing a hair-raising close call; as events unfold we do not yet know from which direction disaster will strike, but we sense increasingly that it is imminent.
The man is a dreamer like others, although in this case a very rotten dreamer. Distasteful as he may be, though, one of the most poignant levels of this story is that of his—occasionally objective—introspection. One might even go so far as to say that the story resides in the introspection; and through this introspection on the basically evil protagonist’s part Nabokov succeeds in transmitting compassion not only for the victims but, to a degree, for the villain himself. A yearning for decency gleams now and then through the man’s single-minded cynicism, and prompts pathetic attempts at self-justification; although the borderlines dissolve under the impetus of his compulsion, he cannot escape the fleeting realization that he is a monster. And while the woman he marries may be a repellent means to a criminal end, and the girl an instrument for his gratification, other nuances emerge. The viewpoint of the text—like many other aspects of the story—may sometimes be deliberately ambiguous, but the madman himself cannot avoid perceiving, in stunned moments of lucidity, the pathetic side of both mother and daughter. His pity for the former transpires, with a kind of reverse Russian, through the very revulsion on which he harps; and there is a moving instant of compassion when we see her, through his eyes, as pregnant “with her own death.” As for the girl, there exists a fragile, decent sliver of his soul that would like to feel a genuinely paternal love for her.
The Enchanter, evil conjuror though he may be, lives partially in an enchanted world. And, common madman or not, he perceives himself on a special, poetic plane as a mad king (for he knows that he is, in any case, mad)—a king who is fleetingly reminiscent of other, thematically related, lone Nabokovian monarchs and is, at the same time, a kind of lecherous Lear living in fairy-tale seclusion by the sea with his “little Cordelia,” whom, for a flicker of an instant, he imagines as an innocent, innocently loved daughter. But, as always, the paternal shades rapidly into the infernal, and the beast within him plunges into a pedophilic fantasy so intense that its consequences cause a female fellow-passenger to change compartments.
In agonizing moments of introspection he recognizes the beast and tries to will it away. Ingeniously appropriate images recur in bestial counterpoint—hyenas in every hygiene; onanistic tentacles; the lupine leer in place of the intended smile; the licking of chops at the thought of his defenseless, sleeping prey; the whole leitmotif of the Wolf about to devour his Red Riding Hood, complete with its eerie final echo. This dark beast within him, this bête noire of his, must always be construed as the protagonist’s implicit self-perception, and, in his rational moments, it is what the Enchanter fears most; thus, catching himself in an absentminded smile, he posits, with pathetic, flimsy hope, that “only humans are capable of absentmindedness” and that therefore he too might after all be human.
The stratification of the story is most striking in its double- and triple-bottomed imagery. It is true, in a sense, that some delicate passages are more explicit than elsewhere in Nabokov. But at other moments the sexual undercurrent is no more than the glinting facet of a simile or the momentary derailment of a train of thought headed for a quite different destination. Multiple levels and senses, as is known, occur often in Nabokov. Yet the line he treads here is razor thin, and the virtuosity consists in a deliberate vagueness of verbal and visual elements whose sum is a complex, otherwise undefinable, but totally precise unit of communication.
An analogous kind of ambiguity, whose purpose and synthesis are again the exact expression of a complex concept, is at times employed to convey the concurrent—and conflicting—thoughts racing through the protagonist’s brain. As a limpid instance of what I mean, let me cite one such passage, whose paradoxes, at first sight, challenge reader and translator alike, but, when approached without selectively closing the switch on tracks of thought parallel to what at first seems the main line, again reward one with a crystalline whole that is greater than the sum of its parts; the openness of receptivity required here, which would perhaps represent overkill in dealing with more conventional writing, is akin to that which a sensitive ear will apply to the counterpoint of Bach or the thematic texture of Wagner, or which a stubborn eye will force upon a recalcitrant brain when their possessor perceives that the same elements of a tricky design can simultaneously yield, say, an ape peering wistfully out of its cage and a beach ball bobbing, hopelessly out of reach, amid the reflections of a sunset on the repetitious ripples of an azure sea.
The protagonist, rather than face his odious nuptial obligations, has gone roaming in the night. He has considered various alternatives of disposing of his newly acquired, already superfluous spouse, who is promisingly ill, but every
moment of whose existence keeps him from the girl he craves. He has pondered poison, presumably entered a pharmacy, perhaps made a purchase. On his return he sees a strip of light under the door of the “dear departed” and says to himself “Charlatans… We’ll have to stick to the original version.” The concurrent ideas here can be listed thus:
1. He is disappointed that she has not gone to sleep.
2. He had half-consciously been equating sleep with death.
3. Our seeing her, through his eyes, as the “dear departed” connotes his sarcastic reaction to her being
a. awake
b. alive.
4. Or the term “dear departed” signifies that, in his mind, she is already dead or as good as dead.
5. He must now either satisfy his unappetizing bride or find a plausible excuse to say good night and go to bed (the “original version”).
6. His access to the girl remains as problematic as ever.
7. The “charlatans” are
a. the pharmacists whose potion he did not buy;
b. the pharmacists whose potion he did buy but did not use;
c. the pharmacists whose potion his obsessed imagination has meanwhile administered, expecting to find the woman dead, equating, as we have seen, wakefulness with life (for “pharmacists” read the whole establishment of forensic medicine that has somehow let him down);
d. the pangs of conscience and/or fear that have made him discard the idea of poison and/or murder in general; or
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