The Gift

by Vladimir Nabokov

  He liked the blueness and transparency of the Neva—what an abundance of water in the capital, how pure that water was (he quickly ruined his stomach on it); but he particularly liked the orderly distribution of the water, the sensible canals: how nice when you can join this with that and that with this; and derive the idea of good from that of conjunction. In the mornings he would open his window and with a reverence still heightened by the general cultural side of the spectacle, would cross himself facing the shimmering glitter of the cupolas: St. Isaac’s, in the process of construction, was all in scaffolding—we’ll write a letter to Father about the “fired gold leaf” of the domes, and one to Grandmother about the locomotive.… Yes, he had actually seen a train—to which poor Belinski (our hero’s predecessor) had so recently looked forward when, with wasted lungs, ghastly, shivering, he had been wont to contemplate for hours through tears of civic joy the construction of the first railway station—that same station, again, on whose platform a few years later the half-demented Pisarev (our hero’s successor), wearing a black mask and green gloves, was to slash a handsome rival over the face with a riding crop.

  In my work (said the author), ideas and themes continue to grow without my knowledge or consent—some of them fairly crookedly—and I know what is wrong: “the machine” is getting in the way; I must fish this awkward spillikin out of an already composed sentence. A great relief. The subject is perpetual motion.

  The pottering with perpetual motion lasted about five years, until 1853, when—already a schoolteacher and a betrothed man—he burned the letter with diagrams that he had once prepared when he feared he would die (from that fashionable disease, aneurysm) before endowing the world with the blessing of eternal and extremely cheap motion. In the descriptions of his absurd experiments and in his commentaries on them, in this mixture of ignorance and ratiocination, one can already detect that barely perceptible but fatal flaw which gave his later utterances something like a hint of quackery; an imaginary hint, for we must keep in mind that the man was as straight and firm as the trunk of an oak, “the most honest of the honest” (his wife’s expression); but such was the fate of Chernyshevski that everything turned against him: no matter what subject he touched there would come to light—insidiously, and with the most taunting inevitability—something that was completely opposed to his conception of it. He, for instance, was for synthesis, for the force of attraction, for the living link (reading a novel he would kiss the page where the author appealed to the reader) and what was the answer he got? Disintegration, solitude, estrangement. He preached soundness and common sense in everything—and as if in response to someone’s mocking summons, his destiny was cluttered with blockheads, crackbrains and madmen. For everything he was returned “a negative hundredfold,” in Strannolyubski’s happy phrase, for everything he was backkicked by his own dialectic, for everything the gods had their revenge on him; for his sober views on the unreal roses of poets, for doing good by means of novel writing, for his belief in knowledge—and what unexpected, what cunning forms this revenge assumed! What if, he muses in 1848, one attached a pencil to a mercury thermometer, so that it moved according to the changes in temperature? Starting with the premise that temperature is something eternal—But excuse me, who is this, who is this making laborious notes in cipher of his laborious speculations? A young inventor, no doubt, with an infallible eye, with an innate ability to fasten, to attach, to solder inert parts together, having them give birth in result to the miracle of movement—and lo! a loom is already humming, or an engine with a tall smokestack and a top-hatted driver is overtaking a thoroughbred trotter. Right here is the chink with the nidus of revenge, since this sensible young man, who—let us not forget—is only concerned with the good of all mankind, has eyes like a mole, while his blind, white hands move on a different plane from his faulty but obstinate and muscular mind. Everything that he touches falls to pieces. It is sad to read in his diary about the appliances of which he tries to make use—scale-arms, bobs, corks, basins—and nothing revolves, or if it does, then according to unwelcome laws, in the reverse direction to what he wants: an eternal motor going in reverse—why, this is an absolute nightmare, the abstraction to end all abstractions, infinity with a minus sign, plus a broken jug into the bargain.

  We—consciously—have flown ahead; let us return to that jogtrot, to that rhythm of Nikolay’s life to which our ear had already become attuned.

  He chose the philological faculty. His mother went to pay her respects to the professors in order to cajole them: her voice would acquire flattering overtones and gradually she would begin to wax tearful and blow her nose. Out of all the St. Petersburg products she was most struck by articles made of crystal. Finally “they” (the respectful pronoun he used in speaking of his mother—that wonderful Russian plural which, as later his own aesthetics, “attempts to express quality by quantity”) returned to Saratov. For the road she bought herself an enormous turnip.

  At first Nikolay Gavrilovich went to live with a friend, but subsequently he shared an apartment with a cousin and her husband. The plans of these apartments, as of all his other abodes, were drawn by him in his letters. The exact definition of the relations between objects always fascinated him and therefore he loved plans, columns of figures and visual representations of things, the more so since his agonizingly circumstantial style could in no way compensate for the art of literary portrayal, which for him was unattainable. His letters to his relatives are the letters of a model youth: instead of imagination he was prompted by his obliging good nature as to what another would relish. The reverend liked all sorts of events—humorous or horrible incidents—and his son carefully fed him with them over a period of several years. We find mentioned therein Izler’s entertainments, his replicas of Carlsbad—minerashki (miniature spas) at which venturesome St. Petersburg ladies used to ascend in captive balloons; the tragic case of the rowboat overturned by a steamer on the Neva, one of the victims being a colonel with a large family; the arsenic intended for mice, which got into some flour and poisoned over a hundred people; and of course, of course the new fad, table-turning—all gullibility and fraud in the opinion of both correspondents.

  Just as in the somber Siberian years one of his principal epistolary chords was the assurance addressed to his wife and children—always on the same high, but not quite correct note—that he had plenty of money, please don’t send money, so in his youth he begs his parents not to worry about him and contrives to live on twenty rubles a month; of this, about two and a half rubles went on white bread and on pastries (he could not bear tea alone, just as he could not bear reading alone; i.e., he invariably used to chew something with a book: over gingerbread biscuits he read The Pickwick Papers, over zwiebacks, the Journal des Débats), while candles and pens, boot polish and soap came to a ruble: he was, let us note, unclean in his habits, untidy, and at the same time had matured grossly; add to this a bad diet, perpetual colic plus an uneven struggle with the desires of the flesh, ending in a secret compromise—and the result was that he looked sickly, his eyes had dimmed, and of his youthful beauty nothing remained except perhaps that expression of a kind of wonderful helplessness which fugitively lit up his face when a man he respected had treated him well (“he was kind to me—a youth timorous and submissive,” he later wrote of the scholar Irinarch Vvedenski, with a pathetic Latin intonation: animula vagula, blandula …); he himself never doubted his unattractiveness, accepting the thought of it but fighting shy of mirrors: even so, when preparing to make a visit sometimes, especially to his best friends, the Lobodovskis, or wishing to ascertain the cause of a rude stare, he would peer gloomily at his reflection, would see the russety fuzz which looked as if stuck onto his cheeks, count the ripe pimples—and then begin to squeeze them, and at that so brutally that afterwards he did not dare to show himself.

  The Lobodovskis! His friend’s wedding had produced on our twenty-year-old hero one of those extraordinary impressions, which in the middle of the night caus
e a youth to sit down in nothing but his underwear to write in his diary. This exciting wedding was celebrated on May 19, 1848; that same day sixteen years later, Chernyshevski’s civil execution was carried out. A coincidence of anniversaries, a card index of dates. That is how fate sorts them in anticipation of the researcher’s needs; a laudable economy of effort.

  He felt joyful at this wedding. What is more, he derived a secondary joy from his basic one (“That means I am able to nourish a pure attachment to a woman”)—yes, he was always doing his utmost to turn his heart so that one side was reflected in the glass of reason, or, as his best biographer, Strannolyubski, puts it: “He distilled his feelings in the alembics of logic.” But who could have said that he was occupied at that moment with thoughts of love? Many years later in his flowery Sketches from Life this same Vasiliy Lobodovski made a careless error when he said that his best man at the wedding, the student “Krushedolin,” looked as serious “as if he were subjecting in his mind to an exhaustive analysis certain learned works from England that he had just read.”

  French romanticism gave us the poetry of love, German romanticism the poetry of friendship. The young Chernyshevski’s sentimentality was a concession to an epoch when friendship was magnanimous and moist. Chernyshevski cried willingly and often. “Three tears rolled down,” he notes with characteristic accuracy in his diary—and the reader is tormented momentarily with the involuntary thought, can one have an odd number of tears, or is it only the dual nature of the source which makes us demand an even number? “ ‘Remind me not of foolish tears that many times I shed, alas, when my repose oppressive was,’ ” writes Nikolay Gavrilovich in his diary, addressing his wretched youth, and to the sound of Nekrasov’s plebeian rhymery he really does shed a tear: “At this spot in the manuscript there is the trace of a spilled tear,” comments his son Mihail in a footnote. The trace of another tear, far hotter, bitterer and more precious, has been preserved on his celebrated letter from the fortress; but Steklov’s description of this second tear contains, according to Strannolyubski, certain inaccuracies—which will be discussed later. Then, in the days of his exile and especially in the Vilyuisk dungeon—But hold! the theme of tears is expanding beyond all reason … let us return to its point of departure. Now, for example, a funeral is being conducted for a student. In the light blue coffin lies a waxen youth. Another student, Tatarinov (who looked after him when he was ill but who had hardly known him before that) bids him farewell: “He looks long at him, kisses him, and looks again, endlessly …” The student Chernyshevski, jotting this down, is himself faint with tenderness; and Strannolyubski, commenting on these lines, suggests a parallel between them and the sorrowful fragment by Gogol, “Nights at a Villa.”

  But to tell the truth … young Chernyshevski’s dreams in connection with love and friendship are not distinguished for their refinement—and the more he yields to them the more clearly comes out their fault—their rationality; he was able to bend the silliest daydream into a logical horseshoe. Musing in detail over the fact that Lobodovski, whom he sincerely admires, is developing tuberculosis, and that in consequence Nadezhda Yegorovna will remain a young widow, helpless and destitute, he pursues a particular aim. He needs a dummy image in order to justify his falling in love with her, so he substitutes for it the urge to assist a poor woman, or in other words sets his love upon a utilitarian foundation. For otherwise the palpitations of a fond heart are not to be explained by the limited means of that rough-hewn materialism, to whose blandishments he had already hopelessly succumbed. And then, only yesterday, when Nadezhda Yegorovna “was sitting without a shawl, and of course her ‘missionary’ [a plain dress] was slit a little at the front and one could see a certain part just below her neck” (a turn of phrase bearing an unusual resemblance to the idiom of literary characters in Zoshchenko’s impersonations of Soviet-bred Philistine simpletons), he had asked himself with honest anxiety whether he would have looked at “that part” in the early days after his friend’s wedding. And so, gradually burying his friend in his dreams, with a sigh, with an air of unwillingness and as if submitting to a duty, he sees himself deciding to marry the young widow—a melancholy union, a chaste union (and all these dummy images are repeated even more fully in his diary when he subsequently obtains the hand of Olga Sokratovna). The actual beauty of the poor woman was still in doubt, and the method which Chernyshevski selected in order to verify her charms predetermined the whole of his later attitude to the concept of beauty.

  At first he established the best specimen of grace in Nadezhda Yegorovna: chance provided him with a living picture in an idyllic vein, albeit somewhat cumbersome. “Vasiliy Petrovich knelt on a chair facing its back; she approached and began to tilt the chair; she tilted it a little and then laid her little face against his chest … A candle stood on the tea table … and the light fell well enough on her; i.e., a half-light, because she was in her husband’s shadow, but clear.” Nikolay Gavrilovich looked closely, trying to find something that would not be quite right; he did not find any coarse features, but he still hesitated.

  What should one do next? He was constantly comparing her features with the features of other women, but the defectiveness of his eyesight prevented the accumulation of the live specimens essential to a comparison. Willy-nilly he was forced to have recourse to the beauty apprehended and registered by others; i.e., to women’s portraits. Thus from the very beginning the concept of art became for him—a myopic materialist (which in itself is an absurd combination)—something subsidiary and applied, and he was now able by experimental means to test something which love had suggested to him: the superiority of Nadezhda Yegorovna’s beauty (her husband called her “dearie” and “dolly”), that is Life, to the beauty of all other “female heads,” that is Art (“Art”!).

  On the Nevski Avenue poetic pictures were exhibited in the windows of Junker’s and Daziaro’s. Having studied them thoroughly he returned home and noted down his observations. Oh, what a miracle! The comparative method always provided the necessary result. The Calabrian charmer’s nose in the engraving was so-so: “Particularly unsuccessful was the glabella as well as the parts lying near the nose, on both sides of its bridge.” A week later, still uncertain whether the truth had been sufficiently tested, or else wishing to revel once again in the already familiar compliancy of the experiment, he went once more to the Nevski to see if there were not some new beauty in a shop window. On her knees in a cave, Mary Magdalene was praying before a skull and cross, and of course her face in the light of the lampad was very sweet, but how much better was Nadezhda Yegorovna’s semi-illumined face! On a white terrace over the sea were two girls: a graceful blonde was sitting on a stone bench with a young man; they were kissing, while a graceful brunette kept a lookout, holding aside a crimson curtain “which separated the terrace from the remaining parts of the house,” as we remark in our diary, for we always like to establish what relation a given detail bears to its speculative environment. Naturally Nadezhda Yegorovna’s little neck is far more pleasing. Hence comes an important conclusion: life is more pleasing (and therefore better) than painting, for what is painting, poetry, indeed all art, in its purest form? It is “a crimson sun sinking into an azure sea”; it is picturesque folds in a dress; it is the “rosy nuances which the shallow writer wastes on illuminating his glossy chapters”; it is garlands of flowers, fays, fauns, Phrynae … The further it goes the cloudier it gets: the rubbishy idea grows. The luxury of feminine forms now implies luxury in the economic sense. The concept of “fantasy” appears to Nikolay Gavrilovich in the shape of a transparent but ample-breasted Sylphide, corsetless and practically naked, who, playing with a light veil, flies down to the poetically poeticizing poet. A couple of columns, a couple of trees—not quite cypresses and not quite poplars—some kind of urn that holds little attraction for Nikolay Gavrilovich—and the supporter of pure art is sure to applaud. Contemptible fellow! Idle fellow! And indeed, rather than all this trash, how could one not prefer an hon
est description of contemporary manners, civic indignation, heart-to-heart jingles?