The Gift

by Vladimir Nabokov

  One can safely assume that during those minutes when he was glued to the shop windows his disingenuous master’s dissertation, “The Aesthetic Relations of Art to Reality,” was composed in its entirety (it is no wonder that he subsequently wrote it right down, straight from the shoulder, in three nights; but it is more of a wonder how, even after a wait of six years, he nonetheless received a master’s degree for it).

  There were languorous and dim evenings when he lay supine on his dreadful leathern couch—a thing of lumps and rents with an inexhaustible (just pull) supply of horsehair—and “my heart beat somehow wondrously from Michelet’s first page, from Guizot’s views, from thoughts of Nadezhda Yegorovna, and all this together,” and then he would begin to sing off-key, in a ululant voice—he sang “the song of Marguerite,” simultaneously thinking of the Lobodovskis’ relations with one another—and “gently tears rolled from my eyes.” Suddenly he would rise from his couch with the decision to see her immediately; it was, we imagine, an October evening, clouds flew overhead, a sour stench came from the saddlers’ and carriage-makers’ workshops on the ground floors of houses painted a dreary yellow, and merchants in smocks and sheepskin coats, keys in hand, were already locking up their stores. One bumped into him but he passed quickly by. A ragged lamplighter, his hand-cart rumbling over the cobbles, was bringing lamp oil to a bleary lamp on a wooden post; he wiped the glass with an oily rag and moved on creakily to the next—a long way off. It was beginning to drizzle. Nikolay Gavrilovich flew along with the swift gait of a poor Gogolian character.

  At night he was unable to sleep for a long time, tormented by the questions: would Vasiliy Petrovich Lobodovski manage to educate his wife sufficiently so that she might be a helper to him; and in order to stimulate his friend’s feelings, should he not send, for example, an anonymous letter which would inflame her husband with jealousy? This already foretells the methods used by the heroes of Chernyshevski’s novels. Similar, very carefully calculated but boyishly absurd schemes were thought up by exiled Chernyshevski, old man Chernyshevski, for attaining the most touching objectives. Look how this theme takes advantage of a momentary lack of attention and blossoms out. Halt, roll up again. There is, in fact, no need to go so far ahead. In the student diary one can find the following example of calculation: to print a false manifesto (proclaiming the abolition of conscription) in order to stir up the peasants by a trick; but then he himself abjured it, knowing as a dialectician and a Christian that an inner rot must eat away the whole of a created structure, and that a good end, justifying bad means, will only reveal its fatal kinship with them. Thus politics, literature, painting, even vocal art, were pleasantly entwined with Nikolay Gavrilovich’s amorous emotions (we have returned to the point of departure).

  How poor he was, how dirty and sloppy, how far removed from the lure of luxury … Attention! This was not so much proletarian chastity as the natural disregard with which an ascetic treats the prickle of a permanent hair shirt or the bite of sedentary fleas. Even a hair shirt, however, has at times to be repaired. We are present when the inventive Nikolay Gavrilovich contemplates darning his old trousers: he turned out to have no black thread, so what there was he undertook to soak in ink; an anthology of German verse was lying nearby, open at the beginning of William Tell. As a result of his waving the thread about (in order to dry it), several drops of ink fell on the page; the book did not belong to him. He found a lemon in a paper bag behind the window and attempted to get the blots out, but he only succeeded in dirtying the lemon, plus the windowsill where he had left the pernicious thread. Then he sought the aid of a knife and began to scrape (this book with the punctured poems is now in the Leipzig University library; unfortunately it has not been possible to ascertain how it got there). Ink, indeed, was the natural element of Chernyshevski (he literally bathed in it), who used to smear with it the cracks in his shoes when he was out of shoe polish; or else, in order to disguise a hole in his shoe, he would wrap his foot in a black tie. He broke crockery, soiled and spoiled everything. His love for materiality was not reciprocated. Subsequently, during penal servitude, he turned out to be not only incapable of doing any of a convict’s special tasks but also was famous for his inability to do anything at all with his hands (at the same time he was constantly butting in to help his fellow man: “Keep out of what does not concern you, you pillar of virtue,” the other convicts used to say gruffly). We have already glimpsed the confusedly hurrying youth being shoved on the street. He rarely grew angry; once, however, not without pride, he noted how he had revenged himself upon a young cabdriver who had caught him a blow with his shaft: wordlessly diving across the sled between the legs of two startled merchants, he tore out a tuft of his hair. In general, however, he was mild and open to insults, but secretly he felt himself capable of “the most desperate, the most crazy” actions. On the side he began dabbling in propaganda by conversing with mujiks, with an occasional Neva ferryman or an alert pastry cook.

  Enter the theme of pastry shops. They have seen a good deal in their time. It was there that Pushkin gulped down a glass of lemonade before his duel; there that Sophia Perovski and her companions each took a portion (of what? history did not quite manage to …) before proceeding to the Canal Quay to assassinate Alexander II. Our hero’s youth had been bewitched by pastry shops, so that later, while on hunger strike in the fortress, he—in What to Do?—filled this or that speech with an involuntary howl of gastric lyricism: “Do you have a pastry shop in the vicinity? I wonder if they have ready-made walnut tarts—to my taste they’re the best of the tarts, Maria Alexeyevna.” But in contradiction to his future recollection, pastry shops and cafés seduced him not at all with their victuals—not with puff pastry made with rancid butter and not even with cherry-jam doughnuts; newspapers, gentlemen, newspapers, that is what they seduced him with! He tried various cafés—choosing such as had the most newspapers, or places where it was simpler and freer. Thus at Wolf’s “both last times, instead of his [read: Wolf’s] white bread I had coffee with a [read: my] five-kopeck-twist, the last time not hiding”-i.e., the first of these last two times (the punctilious detail of his diary causes an itching in the cerebellum) he hid, not knowing how they would accept pastry brought from outside. The place was warm and quiet and only now and then did a southwest little wind blowing from the newspaper pages cause the candle flames to vacillate (“disturbances have already touched the Russia entrusted to us” as the Tsar put it). “May I have the Indépendance belge? Thank you.” The candle flames straighten up, it is quiet (but shots ring out on the Boulevard des Capucines, the révolution is nearing the Tuileries—and now Louis Philippe takes to flight: along the Avenue de Neuilly, in a fiacre).

  And afterwards he was plagued by heartburn. In general he fed on all sorts of odds and ends, being indigent and impractical. Nekrasov’s ditty is appropriate here:

  Since delicacies tougher

  Than tinware I would eat,

  Such bellyaches I’d suffer

  That death itself seemed sweet.

  I’d walk miles with that feeling,

  I’d read until day broke.

  My room had a low ceiling

  And goodness how I’d smoke!

  Nikolay Gavrilovich, incidentally, did not smoke without reason—it was precisely Zhukov cigarettes that he used for relieving indigestion (and also toothache). His diary, particularly for the summer and autumn of 1849, contains a multitude of most exact references as to how and where he vomited. Besides smoking, he treated himself with rum and water, hot oil, English salts, centaury with bitter-orange leaves, and constantly, conscientiously, with a kind of odd gusto, employed the Roman method—and probably he would ultimately have died of exhaustion if he (graduated as a candidate and retained at the university for advanced work) had not gone to Saratov.

  And then in Saratov … But no matter how much we should like to lose no time in getting out of this back alley, to which talk of patisseries has led us, and cross over to the sunny side of
Nikolay Gavrilovich’s life, still (for the sake of a certain hidden continuity) we must hang around here a little longer. Once, in great need, he rushed into a tenement house on the Gorohovaya (there follows a wordy description—with afterthoughts—of the house’s location) and was already adjusting his dress when “a girl in red” opened the door. Catching sight of his hand—he had wanted to hold the door—she let out a cry, “as is usually the case.” The heavy creak of the door, its loose, rusty hook, the stink, the icy cold—all this is dreadful … and yet the queer fellow is quite prepared to debate with himself about true purity, noting with satisfaction that “I didn’t even try to discover whether she was good-looking.” When dreaming, on the other hand, he looked with a keener eye, and the contingency of sleep was kinder to him than his public destiny—but even here, how delighted he is that when in his dream he thrice kisses the gloved hand of “an extremely fair-haired” lady (the mother of a presupposed pupil sheltering him in his dream, all this in the style of Jean-Jacques), he is unable to reproach himself for a single carnal thought. His memory, too, turned out to be keen-eyed when he recalled that circuitous young yearning for beauty. At the age of fifty in a letter from Siberia he evokes the angelic image of a girl he had once noticed in his youth at an exhibition of Industry and Agriculture: “Now there was a certain aristocratic family walking along,” he narrates in his later, Biblically slow style. “She appealed to me, this girl, verily she appealed to me … I walked alongside about three paces away and admired her … They belonged obviously to the highest society. Everyone saw this from their extraordinarily nice manners [there is a little Dickensian fly in this treacly pathos, as Strannolyubski would remark, but still we must not forget that this is being written by an old man half-crushed by penal servitude, as Steklov would justly put it]. The crowd gave way before them … I was quite free to walk at about three paces distance without taking my gaze off that girl [poor satellite!]. And this lasted for an hour or more.” (Oddly enough, exhibitions in general, for instance the London one of 1862 and the Paris one of 1889, had a strong effect on his fate; thus Bouvard and Pécuchet, when undertaking a description of the life of the Duke of Angoulême, were amazed by the role played in it … by bridges.)

  It follows from all this that upon arriving in Saratov he could not help but fall in love with the twenty-year-old daughter of Doctor Sokrat Vasiliev, a gypsyish young lady with earrings hanging from the long lobes of her ears, which were half-concealed by folds of dark hair. A teasing, affected creature, “the cynosure and ornament of provincial balls” (in the words of a nameless contemporary), she seduced and stupefied our clumsy virgin with the rustle of her sky-blue choux and the melodiousness of her speech. “Look, what a charming little arm,” she would say, stretching it out toward his misted glasses—a bare, dusky arm with a glistening bloom along it. He rubbed himself with attar of roses and shaved bloodily. And what serious compliments he thought up! “You should be living in Paris,” he said earnestly, having learned elsewhere that she was a “democrat”; Paris for her, however, meant not the hearth of science but the kingdom of strumpets, so that she was offended.

  Before us is “The Diary of my Relations with Her Who now Constitutes my Happiness.” The easily carried-away Steklov refers to this unique production (reminding one most of all of an extremely conscientious business report) as “an exultant hymn of love.” The maker of the report draws up a project for declaring his love (which is accurately put into effect in February, 1853, and approved without delay) with points for and against marriage (he feared, for example, lest his restive spouse should take it into her head to wear male dress—in the manner of George Sand) and with an estimate of expenses when married, which contains absolutely everything—two stearine candles for the winter evenings, ten kopecks’ worth of milk, the theater; and at the same time he notifies his bride that in view of his way of thinking (“I am frightened neither by dirt nor by [setting loose] drunken peasants with clubs, nor by slaughter”) sooner or later he is “sure to get caught,” and for greater honesty he tells her about the wife of Iskander (Herzen), who being pregnant (“excuse me for going into such details”), upon hearing the news that her husband had been arrested in Italy and sent to Russia, “fell dead.” Olga Sokratovna, as Aldanov might have added at this point, would not have fallen dead.

  “If some day,” he wrote further, “your name is stained by rumor, so that you cannot hope to have any husband … I will always be ready at one word from you to become your husband.” A chivalrous position, but based on far from chivalrous premises, and this characteristic turn leads us back at once to the familiar path of those earlier quasi fantasies of love, with his detailed thirst for self-sacrifice and the protective coloration of his compassion; which did not prevent him from having his pride smart when his bride warned him that she was not in love with him. His betrothal period had a German touch about it, with Schillerian songs, with a countinghouse of caresses: “I undid at first two and then three buttons on her mantilla …” He urgently wanted her to place her foot (in its blunt-toed, gray bottekin stitched with colored silk) on top of his head: his voluptuousness fed on symbols. Sometimes he read to her from Lermontov or Koltsov; he read poetry in the monotone of a Psalter lector.

  But that which occupies the place of honor in the diary and which is particularly important for an understanding of much of Nikolay Gavrilovich’s fate is his detailed account of the joke ceremonies with which the Saratov evenings were richly adorned. He could not polka nimbly and was a bad dancer of the Grossvater, but on the other hand he loved clowning, for even the penguin is not above a certain playfulness when he surrounds the female he courts with a ring of pebbles. Young people, as the phrase goes, would get together, and setting in motion à device of coquetry fashionable in those days and among that set, Olga Sokratovna would feed one or another of the guests at table from a saucer, like a child, while Nikolay Gavrilovich, miming jealousy, would press a napkin to his heart and threaten to pierce his breast with a fork. In her turn she would pretend to be cross with him. He would then beg forgiveness (all this is horribly unfunny) and kiss the exposed parts of her arms, which she tried to hide, saying: “How dare you!” The penguin assumed “a serious, mournful look, because indeed it was possible that I had said something which would have given offense to another (i.e., a less bold girl) in her place.” On holidays he played tricks in the Temple of God, amusing his bride-to-be—but the Marxist commentator (i.e., Steklov) errs in seeing in this “a healthy blasphemousness.” As the son of a priest Nikolay felt quite at home in church (thus the young prince who crowns a cat with his father’s crown is decidedly not expressing any sympathy with popular government). Even less can one reproach him with mocking the Crusaders because he chalked a cross upon the back of everyone in turn: the mark of Olga Sokratovna’s lovesick admirers. And after some more horseplay of the same sort there takes place—let us remember this—a mock duel with sticks.

  Now a few years later when he was arrested, the police confiscated this old diary, which was written in an even hand with little striggles and was in a homemade code, with such abbreviations as weakns! sillns! (weakness, silliness), lbrty, =ty (liberty, equality) and ch-k (chelovek, man,—not Cheka, Lenin’s police).

  It was deciphered by people who were evidently incompetent, since they made a number of mistakes: for example, they read dzrya as druzya (friends) instead of podozreniya (suspicions), which twisted the sentence “I shall arouse strong suspicions” into “I have strong friends.” Chernyshevski grasped at this and began to maintain that the whole diary was the draft of a novel, a writer’s invention, since he, he said, “did not then have any influential friends, whereas this was obviously a character with powerful friends in the government.” It is not important (although the question is interesting in itself) whether he remembered the actual words in his diary exactly; what is important is that subsequently these words are given a curious alibi in What to Do? where their inner “draft” rhythm is fully worked out
(for instance in the song of one of the girls at the picnic: “Oh maid, I dwell in gloomy woods, I am an evil friend, and perilous will be my life, and sad will be my end”). Lying in prison and knowing that the dangerous diary was being deciphered, he hastened to send the Senate “examples of my manuscript drafts”; i.e., things which he had written exclusively in order to justify his diary, turning it ex post facto also into some draft for some novel. (Strannolyubski makes the direct supposition that it was this that impelled him to write in jail What to Do?—dedicated, by the way, to his wife, and begun on St. Olga’s day.) Therefore he could express his indignation over the fact that a judicial meaning was being given to scenes he had invented. “I place myself and others in various positions and develop them quite fancifully … One ‘I’ speaks of the possibility of arrest, another ‘I’ is beaten with a stick in front of his fiancée.” He hoped, recalling this part of his old diary, that the detailed account of all sorts of parlor games would be regarded in itself as “fanciful,” since a sedate person would hardly … The sad thing was that in official circles he was considered not a sedate person, but precisely a buffoon, and it was in the very buffoonery of his journalist devices in The Contemporary that they detected a fiendish infiltration of harmful ideas. And for a complete conclusion of the theme of the Saratov petits-jeux let us move on still further, as far as the penal servitude, where their echo still lives in the playlets he composes for his comrades and especially in the novel The Prologue (written at the Alexandrov works in 1866), where there are both a student who unfunnily plays the fool, and a young beauty feeding her admirers. If we add to this that the protagonist (Volgin), when talking to his wife of the danger threatening him, refers to a warning he has given her before marriage, then it is impossible not to conclude that here finally we have a late piece of truth inserted by Chernyshevski to prop up his ancient assertion that his diary was merely an author’s draft … for the very flesh of The Prologue, through all the dross of the feeble invention, now seems indeed to be a novelistic continuation of the Saratov jottings.