The Gift

by Vladimir Nabokov

  The fifties are now in full fan. It is permitted to smoke on the streets. One may wear a beard. The overture to William Tell is thundered out on every musical occasion. Rumors spread that the capital is being moved to Moscow; that the old calendar is going to be replaced by the new. Under this cover Russia is busily gathering material for Saltikov’s primitive but juicy satire. “What is this talk of a new spirit in the air, I’d like to know,” said General Zubatov, “only the flunkeys have grown rude, otherwise everything has stayed the way it was.” Landowners and notably their wives began to dream terrible dreams not listed in dream books. A new heresy appeared: Nihilism. “A scandalous and immoral doctrine rejecting everything that cannot be palpated,” says Dahl with a shudder, in his definition of this strange word (in which “nihil,” nothing, corresponds as it were to “material”). Persons in holy orders had a vision: an enormous Chernyshevski strides along the Nevsky Prospect wearing a wide-brimmed hat and carrying a cudgel.

  And that first rescript in the name of the Vilno governor, Nazimov! And the Tsar’s signature, so handsome, so robust, with two full-blooded, mighty flourishes, which were to be later torn off by a bomb! And the ecstasy of Nikolay Gavrilovich: “The blessing promised to the meek and the peacemakers crowns Alexander the Second with a happiness which no other of Europe’s sovereigns has yet known.…”

  But soon after the provincial committees were formed, Chernyshevski’s ardor cooled: he was incensed by the self-seeking of the nobles in most of them. His final disillusionment came in the second half of 1858. The size of the compensation! The smallness of the allotments! The tone of The Contemporary became sharp and frank; the expressions “infamous” and “infamy” began pleasantly to enliven the pages of this dullish magazine.

  Its director’s life was not rich in events. For a long time the public did not know his face. Nowhere was he seen. Already famous, he remained as it were in the wings of his busy, talkative thought.

  Always, as was the custom then, in a dressing gown (spotted even behind with candle grease) he sat all day long in his little study with its blue wallpaper—good for the eyes—and its window overlooking the yard (a view of the log-pile covered with snow), at a large desk heaped with books, printer’s proofs and cuttings. He worked so feverishly, smoked so much and slept so little that the impression he produced was almost frightening: skinny, nervy, his gaze at once blear and piercing, his hands shaky, his speech jerky and distracted (on the other hand he never suffered from headache and naively boasted of this as a mark of a healthy mind). His capacity for work was monstrous, as was, for that matter, that of most Russian critics of the last century. To his secretary Studentski, a former seminarist from Saratov, he dictated a translation of Schlosser’s history and in between, while the latter was taking it down, he himself would go on writing an article for The Contemporary or would read something, making notes in the margins. He was pestered by callers. Not knowing how to escape from an importunate guest, he would, to his own chagrin, get more and more involved in a conversation. Leaning his elbow on the mantelpiece and fiddling with something, he would talk in a shrill, squeaky voice, but whenever his thoughts wandered, he would drawl and chew monotonously, with an abundance of “well’s.” He had a peculiar quiet chuckle (causing Leo Tolstoy to break into a sweat), but when he laughed out loud he went off into fits and roared deafeningly (at which Turgenev, hearing these roulades from afar, would take to his heels).

  Such methods of knowledge as dialectical materialism curiously resemble the unscrupulous advertisements for patent medicines, which cure all illnesses at once. Still, such an expedient can occasionally help with a cold. There was quite definitively a smack of class arrogance about the attitudes of contemporary wellborn writers toward plebeian Chernyshevski. Turgenev, Grigorovich and Tolstoy called him “the bedbugstinking gentleman” and among themselves jeered at him in all kinds of ways. Once at Turgenev’s country place, the first two, together with Botkin and Druzhinin, composed and acted a domestic farce. In a scene where a couch was supposed to catch fire, Turgenev had to come out running with the cry … here the common efforts of his friends had persuaded him to utter the unfortunate words which in his youth he had allegedly addressed to a sailor during a fire on board ship: “Save me, save me, I am my mother’s only son.” Out of this farce the utterly talentless Grigorovich subsequently concocted his completely mediocre School of Hospitality, where he endowed one of the characters, the splenetic writer Chernushin, with the features of Nikolay Gavrilovich: mole’s eyes looking oddly askance, thin lips, a flattened, crumpled face, gingery hair fluffed up on the left temple and a euphemistic stench of burnt rum. It is curious that the notorious wail (“Save me,” etc.) is attributed here to Chernushin, which gives color to Strannolyubski’s idea that there was a kind of mystic link between Turgenev and Chernyshevski. “I have read his disgusting book [the dissertation]” writes the former in a letter to his fellow mockers. “Raca! Raca! Raca! You know that there is nothing in the world more terrible than this Jewish curse.”

  “This ‘raca’ or ‘raka,’ ” remarks the biographer superstitiously, “resulted seven years later in Rakeev (the police colonel who arrested the anathematized man), and the letter itself had been written by Turgenev on precisely the 12th of July, Chernyshevski’s birthday …” (it seems to us that Strannolyubski is stretching it a bit).

  That same year Turgenev’s Rudin appeared, but Chernyshevski attacked it (for its caricature of Bakunin) only in 1860, when Turgenev was no longer necessary to The Contemporary, which he had left as a result of Dobrolyubov’s directing a snake hiss at his “On the Eve.” Tolstoy could not tolerate our hero: “One keeps hearing him,” he wrote, “hearing that thin, nasty little voice of his saying obtuse, nasty things … as he keeps waxing indignant in his corner until someone says ‘shut up’ and looks him in the eye.” “The aristocrats turned into coarse ruffians,” remarks Steklov in this connection, “when they talked with inferiors or about people who were inferior to them socially.” “The inferior,” however, did not remain in debt; knowing how much Turgenev prized every word spoken against Tolstoy, Chernyshevski, in the fifties, freely enlarged upon Tolstoy’s poshlost (vulgarity) and hvastovstvo (bragging)—“the bragging of a thickheaded peacock about a tail which doesn’t even cover his vulgar bottom,” etc. “You are not some Ostrovski or some Tolstoy,” added Nikolay Gavrilovich, “you are an honor to us” (and Rudin was already out—had been out for two years).

  The other literary reviews picked at him as much as they could. The critic Dudyshkin (in The National Commentator) huffily aimed his dudeen at him: “Poetry for you is merely chapters of political economy transposed into verse.” His ill-wishers in the mystical camp spoke about Chernyshevski’s “evil lure,” about his physical resemblance to the Devil (for instance, Prof. Kostomarov). Other journalists, of a plainer cast, like Blagosvetlov (who considered himself a dandy and despite his radicalism had as footboy a real, undyed blackamoor) talked about Chernyshevski’s dirty rubbers and German-cum-sexton’s style of dress. Nekrasov stood up for the “sensible fellow” (whom he had got for The Contemporary) with a limp smile, admitting that he had managed to lay the stamp of monotony on the magazine by stuffing it with mediocre tales denouncing bribe-taking and policemen; but he praised his colleague for his fruitful labors: thanks to him the magazine had 4,700 subscribers in 1858 and three years later—7,000. Nikolay Gavrilovich’s relations with Nekrasov were friendly but no more; there is a hint concerning some financial arrangements which displeased him. In 1883, in order to divert the old man, his cousin Pypin suggested that he should write some “portraits of the past.” Chernyshevski depicted his first meeting with Nekrasov with the meticulousness and laboriousness already familiar to us (giving a complex plan of all their mutual movements about the room including practically the number of footsteps), a detailism sounding like an insult inflicted on Father Time and his honest work, if one remembers that thirty years had elapsed since these maneuvers took place. He
placed Nekrasov the poet above all others (above Pushkin, above Lermontov and Koltsov). La Traviata made Lenin weep; similarly, Chernyshevski, who confessed that poetry of the heart was even dearer to him than poetry of ideas, used to burst into tears over those of Nekrasov’s verses (even iambic ones!) which expressed everything he himself had experienced, all the torments of his youth, all the phases of his love for his wife. And no wonder: Nekrasov’s iambic pentameter enchants us particularly by its hortatory, supplicatory and prophetic force and by a very individual caesura after the second foot, a caesura which in Pushkin, say, is a rudimentary organ insofar as it controls the melody of the line, but which in Nekrasov becomes a genuine organ of breathing, as if it had turned from a partition into a pit, or as if the two-foot part of the line and the three-foot part had moved asunder, leaving after the second foot an interval full of music. As he listened to these hollow-chested verses, to this guttural, sobbing articulation—

  Oh, do not say the life you lead is dismal,

  And do not call a jailer one half-dead!

  Before me Night yawns chilly and abysmal.

  The arms of Love before you are outspread.

  I know, to you another is now dearer,

  It irks you now to spare me and to wait.

  Oh, bear with me! My end is drawing nearer,

  Let Fate complete what was begun by Fate!

  —Chernyshevski could not help thinking that his wife should not hasten to deceive him; could not help identifying the nearness of the end with the shadow of the prison already stretching out toward him. And that was not all: evidently this connection was felt—not in the rational but in the Orphic sense—also by the poet who wrote these lines, for it is precisely their rhythm (“Oh, do not say”) that was echoed with a bizarre haunting quality in the poem he subsequently wrote about Chernyshevski:

  Oh, do not say he has forgotten caution,

  For his own Fate himself he’ll be to blame …

  Thus Nekrasov’s sounds were pleasing to Chernyshevski; i.e., they happened to satisfy that elementary aesthetic for which he mistook all along his own circumstantial sentimentality. Having described a large circle, having taken in many matters concerning Chernyshevski’s attitude to various branches of knowledge, and yet not having impaired for a moment our smooth curve, we have now returned with new forces to his philosophy of art. Now it is time to sum it up.

  Like all the rest of our radical critics having a weakness for easy gain, he eschewed courtly compliments to lady writers, and energetically demolished Evdokia Rastopchin or Avdotia Glinka. “An incorrect and careless patter” (as Pushkin puts it) left him unmoved. Both he and Dobrolyubov flayed literary coquettes with gusto—but in real life … Well, look what was done to them, look how they were twisted and tortured with peals of laughter (water nymphs laugh thus along streams flowing close to hermitages and other places of salvation) by the daughters of Doctor Vasiliev.

  His tastes were eminently solid. He was épaté by Hugo. He was impressed by Swinburne (which is not at all strange, come to think of it). In the list of books which he read in the fortress the name of Flaubert is spelled with an “o”—and, indeed, he placed him below Zacher-Masoch and Spielhagen. He loved Béranger the way average Frenchmen loved him. “For goodness’ sake,” exclaims Steklov, “you say that this man was not poetic? Why, do you not know that he would declaim Béranger and Ryleyev with tears of rapture?!” His tastes only congealed in Siberia—and by a strange delicacy of historical fate, Russia did not produce during the twenty years of his banishment a single genuine writer (until Chekhov) whose beginning he had not seen for himself during the active period of his life. From conversations with him in the eighties in Astrakhan it becomes apparent that: “Yes, sir, it is the title of count that made one consider Tolstoy ‘a great writer of the Russian land’ “; and when bothersome visitors asked him whom he thought the best living writer he named a complete nonentity: Maxim Belinski.

  In his youth he noted in his diary: “Political literature is the highest literature.” In the fifties when discussing at length Belinski (Vissarion, of course), something the government disapproved of, he followed him in saying that “literature cannot fail to be the handmaiden of one or another ideological trend,” and that writers “incapable of being animated by sympathy toward what is being accomplished around us by the force of historical movement … will never in any circumstances produce anything great,” for “history does not know of any works of art that were created exclusively from the idea of beauty.” In the forties Belinski maintained that “George Sand can unconditionally be included in the roll of European poets (in the German sense of Dichter), while the juxtaposition of Gogol’s name with those of Homer and Shakespeare offends both decency and common sense” and that “not only Cervantes, Walter Scott and Cooper, as artists pre-eminently, but also Swift, Sterne, Voltaire and Rousseau have an incomparably and immeasurably greater significance in the whole history of literature than Gogol.” Belinksi was seconded three decades later by Chernyshevski (when, it is true, George Sand had already ascended to the attic, and Cooper had descended to the nursery), who said that “Gogol is a very minor figure in comparison, for example, with Dickens or Fielding or Sterne.”

  Poor Gogol! His exclamation (like Pushkin’s) “Rus!” is willingly repeated by the men of the sixties, but now the troika needs paved highways, for even Russia’s toska (“yearning”) has become utilitarian. Poor Gogol! Esteeming the seminarist in the critic Nadezhdin (who used to write “literature” with three “t”s), Chernyshevski found that his influence on Gogol would have been more beneficial than Pushkin’s, and regretted that Gogol was not aware of such a thing as a principle. Poor Gogol! Why, that gloomy buffoon Father Matvey had also adjured him to renounce Pushkin.…

  Lermontov came off luckier. His prose jerked from Belinski (who had a weakness for the conquests of technology) the surprising and most charming comparison of Pechorin to a steam engine, shattering all who were careless enough to get under its wheels. In his poetry the middle-class intellectuals felt something of the sociolyrical strain that later came to be called “Nadsonism.” In this sense Lermontov was the first Nadson of Russian literature. The rhythm, the tone, the pale, tear-diluted idiom of “civic” verse up to and including “as victims you fell in the fateful contest” (the famous revolutionary song of the first years of our century), all of this goes back to such Lermontov lines as:

  Farewell, our dear comrade! Alas, upon earth

  Not long did you dwell, blue-eyed singer!

  A plain cross of wood you have earned, and with us

  Your memory always shall linger.…

  Lermontov’s real magic, the melting vistas in his poetry, its paradisial picturesqueness and the transparent tang of the celestial in his moist verse—these, of course, were completely inaccessible to the understanding of men of Chernyshevski’s stamp.

  Now we are approaching his most vulnerable spot; for it has long become customary to measure the degree of flair, intelligence and talent of a Russian critic by his attitude to Pushkin. And this is how it will remain until Russian literary criticism discards its sociological, religious, philosophical and other textbooks, which only help mediocrity to admire itself. Only then will you be free to say what you please: You may then criticize Pushkin for any betrayals of his exigent muse and at the same time preserve both your talent and your honor. Upbraid him for letting one hexameter creep into the pentameters of Boris Godunov (ninth scene), for a metrical error in the twenty-first line of “The Feast During the Plague,” for repeating the phrase “every minute” (pominutno) five times within sixteen lines in “The Blizzard,” but for God’s sake stop that irrelevant chitchat.

  Strannolyubski sagaciously compares the critical utterances of the sixties concerning Pushkin with the attitude to him, three decades earlier, of the chief of police Count Benckendorff or that of the director of the third section, Von Fock. In truth, Chernyshevski’s highest praise for a writer, like that of the r
uler Nicholas I or the radical Belinski, was: sensible. When Chernyshevski or Pisarev called Pushkin’s poetry “rubbish and luxury,” they were only repeating Tolmachyov, author of Military Eloquence, who in the thirties had termed the same subject: “trifles and baubles.” When Chernyshevski said that Pushkin was “only a poor imitator of Byron,” he reproduced with monstrous accuracy the definition given by Count Vorontsov (Pushkin’s boss in Odessa): “A poor imitator of Lord Byron.” Dobrolyubov’s favorite idea that “Pushkin lacked a solid, deep education” is in friendly chime with Vorontsov’s remark: “One cannot be a genuine poet without constantly working to broaden one’s knowledge, and his is insufficient.” “To be a genius it is not enough to have manufactured Eugene Onegin” wrote the progressive Nadezhdin, comparing Pushkin to a tailor, an inventor of waistcoat patterns, and thus concluding an intellectual pact with the reactionary Count Uvarov, Minister of Education, who remarked on the occasion of Pushkin’s death: “To write jingles does not mean yet to achieve a great career.”

  Chernyshevski equated genius with common sense. If Pushkin was a genius, he argued perplexedly, then how should one interpret the profusion of corrections in his drafts? One can understand some “polishing” in a fair copy but this was the rough work itself. It should have flowed effortless since common sense speaks its mind immediately, for it knows what it wants to say. Moreover, as a person ridiculously alien to artistic creation, he supposed that “polishing” took place on paper while the “real work”—i.e., “the task of forming the general plan”—occurred “in the mind”—another sign of that dangerous dualism, that crack in his “materialism,” whence more than one snake was to slither and bite him during his life. Pushkin’s originality filled him with fears. “Poetic works are good when everyone [my italics] says after reading them: yes, this is not only verisimilar, but also it could not be otherwise, for that’s how it always is.”