Volodya in Paradise

https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/

VOLODYA IN PARADISE

It was 1970 or thereabouts, and I was an undergraduate of middling achievements.  On my own, not for a class, I had just read Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire—the whole mad thing: the forward, the poem, the commentary, and even the index, with its haunting coda, “A distant northern land.” I felt as if borne by a whirlwind to a strange and lonely wilderness where the stars burned with arctic clarity and a foreboding band of red sunset lurked on the horizon. 

Pale Fire, published in 1962, is a hybrid novel comprised of two main parts: a 999-line poem of four cantos written by John Shade, whom Nabokov loosely modeled on Robert Frost, and a commentary by a crackpot academic named Charles Kinbote, who thinks the poem is all about him—specifically, about his fantasized life as an exiled king hiding from assassins. 

Surfeited with delight by the quaintness of the poem’s modern voice appareled in eighteenth-century couplets, the insane commentator’s dazzling prose, and the novel’s labyrinthine plot, I wanted a better understanding of the book, and in particular of what Nabokov thought about the afterlife, a concept that I suspected had more meaning for him than its mere efficacy as a literary device. Full measure, after all, was given to Shade’s anguish over the suicide of his daughter, Hazel, and his hope that her cherished quiddity had not been lost forever in the chaos of the void. Even the poet’s surname implied that something uncanny was afoot. I therefore hunted down two bright English majors of my acquaintance who had recently studied Nabokov in a senior seminar. They were sipping hot beverages at an on-campus hangout called The Rathskeller. I pulled up a chair and explained the nature of my quest.

“Oh my god!” cried Ms. X, a young woman headed for graduate studies at an Ivy League University. “That poem is so hilariously dreadful!”

Her friend, Ms. Y, the recipient of several academic honors, agreed.  “All those corny rhymes!  I kept thinking, what’s next, moon in June?’”

“Yes, of course,” said I, cowardly Mr. Z, the nodding collaborator who, up to that moment, had foolishly thought the rhymes clever and charming. “Obviously Nabokov intended that the poem should be bad.” Both looked at me as if I had proclaimed that the sky was blue. 

“Do you have a specific question?” asked Ms. X.                                     

“Well,” I said, lamely, “there sure is a lot of stuff in the poem about the afterlife.”

Ms. Y shrugged.  “And?”

Ms. X intervened, a look of sudden insight on her comely face. “No, he’s right to question it.  Nabokov is often guilty of shooting fish in a barrel.  Is there an easier target than the ridiculous belief in a hereafter?  Pale Fire is a masterpiece of postmodernist game-playing and satire. But think how much better it would be without all that drivel about poltergeists and spooky white fountains.  Or mountains.”  She looked at Ms. Y.  “Which was it again?”

“Both,” said Ms. Y.

The fountain or mountain mix-up is from a section of the poem describing Shade’s near death experience, when he beholds a mystical white fountain. Afterwards he seeks corroboration from a woman interviewed in a magazine about having the same experience, but she tells him it was a misprint, and that her spectral vision had been of a white mountain.

“Okay,” I said, rising quickly from my seat, “thanks for clearing that up.”

Ms. X furrowed her well-plucked eyebrows. “Wait.  Clearing what up?”

“Oh, you know.  Just all of it.”  I gave them a silly little wave.  “All right, then, off I go.”

And off I went, convinced by two postmodernist brainiacs that I was all wet about Nabokov’s views on the afterlife. 

Until now. 

After a lifetime of reading almost every word written by Vladimir Nabokov, I have arrived at the rather surprising conclusion that he believed in the existence of the soul—a real thing, not some cockamamie symbol—and of its survival of bodily death.  I say surprising because Ms. X and Ms. Y were only two of the many scholars I met during my academic odyssey who subscribed to rigid atheism, and considered Nabokov a kindred soul.  Or kindred un-soul, as it were. Postmodernism by then was firmly entrenched, and anything that gave off a whiff of the occult had been relegated to the funhouse. Typical was a statement in 1979 by art theorist Rosalind Krauss, who wrote: “now we find it indescribably embarrassing to mention art and spirit in the same sentence.” Blithely risking embarrassment, in graduate school I asked a professor if he thought Nabokov had believed there might be more to existence than the materialistic here and now. He dismissed the notion with a tolerant smile, saying that a man of Nabokov’s genius would hardly have bothered about such nonsense.  I respectfully demurred, pointing out that in Nabokov’s vast body of work there are repeated references to the soul, and in his first English novel, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, the narrator posits an afterlife in which the departed amuse themselves by entering into and even becoming other souls.  The professor threw up his hands.  “He was Russian!  They can’t go for more than an hour without babbling about the soul. Even your hardline commies, after enough vodka.” He ended our brief discussion of life’s meaning by quoting John Cage: “No why. Just here.” 

But as I read onward—not just in the oeuvre, but in many critical and biographical studies—the evidence for a Nabokovian teleology mounted.  In the novels, the short stories, the poems, there were often glimpses of a life to come. Even in Lolita, as godless a work as Nabokov ever created, told by a predatory fiend who had traded his soul, if he had one, for a feast of forbidden carnal delicacies, the question of an afterlife arises at several turns of the page. When, following the death of Lolita’s mother, Humbert says he fears her ghost, it feels like more than a cursory nod to his guilty conscience. Later he imagines himself a specter appearing as a cloud of black smoke to rend Lolita’s tormentors nerve by nerve. But Humbert, inhabiting by his own admission “a world of total evil,” is unlikely to propose the existence of a realm in which he would, by moral fiat, occupy its sulfurous depths. His final words aver that “the refuge of art” is “the only immortality” he can share with his beloved Lolita, leaving readers of Nabokov’s most famous book to assume that he was simply not concerned with metaphysics.

In fact, the opposite was true. More than once, Vera Nabokov stated that the hereafter was a major theme in her husband’s work.  Not, however, with the usual trimmings.  Churchgoing and religious instruction were mostly absent from Volodya’s childhood. His father, V.D. Nabokov, a St. Petersburg jurist and journalist, a statesman with progressive ideas who was also conventional in many ways, often attended Greek Catholic services with his children in tow.  On the way home from mass one Sunday, nine-year-old Volodya told his father that he found church boring, whereupon VDN said, “You don’t have to come then.”     

Nabokov’s profound sense of the numinous had two sources: the first, his natural wonderment at the remarkable objects and images (a butterfly, a raging sunset) placed within our domain by an unseen benefactor; and the second, his mother’s open-minded spirituality, independent of scripture and dogma. Elena Ivanovna Nabokov was interested in paranormal phenomena but did not embrace trendy alternative religions such as Theosophy. She was a generalist whose belief in another world was tempered by her certainty that it could not be properly grasped from an earthbound perspective. 

Born in 1899, Nabokov entered adulthood just in time for the Bolshevik revolution. His detractors sneered that he hated the Reds because they blew up his life of wealth and privilege—an inheritance had brought him cash and property in excess of a million rubles. During his impoverished years in exile he airily dismissed that notion, separating himself from St. Petersburg elites who mourned for lost furniture. This distancing could become so jaunty that even his admirers might raise an eyebrow at the idea that a handsome and brilliant bon vivant of eighteen would fail to rue the loss of a great fortune with all the pleasures it offered, including a well-equipped expedition to central Asia for the hunting of rare butterflies. Nabokov would never make it to central Asia, but he vividly imagined such a glorious adventure in his final Russian Novel, The Gift.  In the same novel he devoted an entire chapter to a biography of Nikolay Chernyshevsky, whose novel What Is to Be Done reflected the author’s nihilistic materialism and provided a blueprint for the future Soviet state. Nabokov satirized Chernyshevsky’s thesis that both aesthetics and metaphysics are irrelevant for the triumph of the common man. Earlier, Turgenev had made the same point in Fathers and Sons, presenting Bazarov, a leader of the sons, as a harsh and dogmatic medical student whose credo, “two and two is four and everything else is rubbish,” leaves no room for metaphysical speculation.  The idea that all the mysteries of life could be laid bare by the vivisection of scientific and mathematical scrutiny, and that other planes of being simply did not exist, led to reactionary fin de siècle Spiritism—with its séances and Ouija Boards—that appealed to seekers such as Elena Nabokov. Volodya had no use for séances, but strict materialism would certainly be abhorrent to an enthusiastic explorer of woods and meadows for whom nature’s esoteric patterns (as found, say, on the face of a caterpillar) strongly suggest an intelligent—and transcendent—designer. 

Also in The Gift, Nabokov doubles down on the folly of absolute belief in materialism. A man on his deathbed remarks, “What nonsense.  Of course there is nothing afterwards…It is as clear as the fact that it is raining.”  But he says this unaware that the day outside is sunny and dry, for an upstairs tenant has been watering the flowers on her balcony, and the runoff splashes like a cloudburst on the windowpane.

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Nabokov had his share of troubles. The Revolution and exile. Economic hardships exacerbated by the Great Depression. And of course the rise of Hitler, which forced him to move his Jewish wife and their son, Dmitri, first from Berlin to Paris, and then from Paris to America when German troops invaded France. There were personal struggles as well, including an affair that threatened the stability of his otherwise storybook marriage, and the tragic death at a political rally in 1922 of his father, shot in the heart as he courageously tried to disarm a monarchist would-be assassin of the main speaker.  Yet through all of this Nabokov not only stayed afloat, but thrived, helping to support his family by tutoring and giving lessons in languages, tennis, and boxing. And he wrote—steadily and joyously—producing eight novels in Russian that would later be translated into English. A combing of Nabokov’s oeuvre for references to the hereafter would yield enough material for a supplement to the Handbook for the Recently Deceased, a title known to fans of the film Beetlejuice.

In his novella The Eye, a mysterious Russian émigré named Smurov mouses through Weimar Berlin believing that he’s a ghost whose mind is creating an afterlife from moment to moment. When, with a “floating mechanical motion” he approaches a German bookshop, “Russian books, instantly printed to humor me, promptly appeared in the window. For a fraction of a second some of the titles still seemed hazy. I focused on them and the haze cleared.” Cincinnatus, trapped in the bizarre world of Invitation to a Beheading, rises at the narrative’s end from the chopping block of his titular execution with his head somehow intact, and walks toward the voices of people comfortingly similar to himself, unlike the malevolent marionettes and cardboard cutouts that have abused him throughout the novel. Krug, the hero of Bend Sinister, driven mad by the sadistic murder of his son, is relieved of his agony by dissolution into nothingness; the agent of this merciful stroke is the novel’s godlike author, who suddenly appears at his writing desk. With these three vignettes Nabokov evokes the inviting malleability of an ectoplasmic hereafter, and two modes of solace for the departed—communing with other souls, and the blessed absence of pain that attends the obliteration of consciousness.

Read on, and the metaphysical musings multiply. Nabokov’s penultimate novel, Transparent Things, is narrated by a ghost, with input from a committee of ghosts.  The title refers not to disembodied spirits, but to the earthly objects they observe, with disturbing results, since anything composed of matter becomes see-through, and they risk being sucked down into its dizzying history. Thus, a mere pencil may trap a ghost into sitting still for an unwanted slideshow featuring every minuscule step of the item’s manufacture, including a view of the pine tree from which is hewn the slab that eventually becomes the rudimentary stick that is shaved and shaped into a No. 2 writing instrument, and all of this performed by a “cutter” named Elias Borrowdale, and surely the hapless spirits of Nabokov’s novel are caught in a hell of eternal boredom in which they are not even spared the utterly trivial name of a forgettable factory worker.

In the short story “The Vane Sisters,” a professor is given signs from the other world transmitted by two dead sisters, one of whom had been his student. The story culminates in a final paragraph that is an acrostic in which the first letters of each word spell out a message revealing that two of the most vivid images in the tale were placed in the professor’s path by each of the sisters in turn. Nabokov later commented that this kind of literary trick “can be tried only once in a thousand years of fiction.” 

Professor Timofey Pnin, the eponymous hero of Nabokov’s most beloved novel, has an unsuccessful meeting with his ex-wife, Liza, whom he still loves despite her flaws. After seeing her off at a bus station, he walks gloomily through a park and wonders if he will meet her again in the afterlife, and asks himself, “how shall I stop it from creeping upon me, that shriveled, helpless, lame thing, her soul? Pnin’s worry about Liza’s unappealing soul suffocating him in the afterlife is reminiscent of a horror story by Robert Hichens. “How Love Came to Professor Guildea” is the tale of a man haunted in just such a manner—not in the afterlife, but in this one—by the “brainless worship of an idiot” who plagues him with treacly, cooing endearments and even the occasional ghostly caress.  To make things worse, the professor is a cold-hearted scientist who abhors sentimentality. Had Volodya read the story?  We may never know—at least not in this life.

Of all the novels, Pale Fire is the most haunted. John Shade’s fertile mind touches on almost every conceivable aspect of the hereafter, such as the possibility that a person might be reborn as a toad in a road, unaware that he’s about to be smushed by a truck.  In this case Nabokov is having fun with the idea of interspecies reincarnation, which sophisticated believers reject as simpleminded.  There are Hazel’s poltergeists—lights dancing and darting on the interior walls of a barn. She takes them seriously, but there is mention of college students who have been known to employ flashlights for the pranking of gullible ghost hunters.  Wry humor spices most of Nabokov’s takes on the afterlife. Shade is offered a lectureship at the Institute of Preparation for the Hereafter, IPH, for short. The joke is in the pronunciation—if there’s a hereafter. Nabokov, a god who constructs the faux worlds of his novels, lacks omniscience within the real world, and is hedging his bets. 

          In his biography of Nikolai Gogol, Nabokov writes, “From the comic to the cosmic is a distance of one sibilant.”  It would be a mistake, however, to conclude that he shies away from serious thoughts about the question of life after death. He begins his autobiography, Speak, Memory, with a deeply sobering observation: "The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.”  So much for pie in the sky.  But the battle was joined early on, and Nabokov spent his life widening that crack of light to a supernova that threw even the smallest details of his prose and poetry into blazing relief.  In fact, his passion for detail may represent the closest he ever came to embracing a personal religion. While known primarily for his literary achievements, Nabokov was also a well-respected entomologist who worked for several years at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology, peering through a microscope at the genitalia of butterflies and moths.  Since childhood, his fascination with insects had enabled him to find enchantment in even the most trivial particulars, such as the method by which a dung beetle rolls its treasure from one place to another. He once demonstrated this to an acquaintance, turning himself, for the nonce, into a lurching behemoth of the species. He regarded this capacity to marvel at such particulars (“footnotes in the volume of life,” he called them), as the mark of a highly evolved consciousness. In Speak, Memory he shows contempt for the precisely opposite viewpoint, expressed by a village schoolmaster who, during an “instructive” walk with his students, responded to a question thus: “Oh, just a small bird—no special name.” Nabokov loved particularity so much that he made it a lynchpin of his aesthetic. His works are marbled with trifles that delight his readers—a single raindrop falling on Humbert’s knuckle, a lacy-winged green insect circling above Pnin’s bald head as he stands by the kitchen sink in tears, thinking he has broken a cherished glass bowl. Some critics were less than delighted by these side trips from the main road where a tight plot was expected to trudge onward with a central idea tied to its back, but Volodya didn’t care, for if God existed, He was in the details. John Updike had a similar view: “The Old Testament God repeatedly says he wants praise, and I translate that to mean that the world wants describing.”  

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In March 1928 a Nabokov poem called “To My Soul” appeared in ‘Rul, a Berlin émigré newspaper.  The title of the poem was later changed to “In Paradise.” It tells of the poet’s passage into the afterlife, where his soul encounters a sleeping blue angel with beautiful wings that resemble a peacock’s tail feathers. Ecstatic at his discovery, the soul is poised to study this extraordinary creature, and to describe and categorize it for the blissful appreciation of other souls who will read about it in heaven’s scientific journals. But he suddenly realizes that there are no journals in Paradise.  In fact, there are no books nor any kind of reading matter, no readers, and not even a museum.  In the poem’s last line the soul looks through his tears at the angel’s “unnamed wings.”  For an ardent naturalist, a region of the afterlife in which things are not named is far from heaven. And no books?  Unacceptable! One recalls the scorn of Charles Lamb for the idea that in the afterlife knowledge would be acquired “by some awkward process of intuition” instead of through his cherished books.

Of “In Paradise,” Nabokov’s first biographer, Andrew Field, wrote, “My particular affection for this beautiful and wry little poem is probably based upon the fact that I take it as the very epigraph of Nabokov’s artistic career.”  An epigraph arguably not just of his art, but of his religious beliefs also, such as they were.  Nabokov said that Lolita was his love affair with the English language, and his devoted readers might quibble with Vera that love, not the hereafter, was the overarching theme of his work.  From his autobiography, his interviews, his correspondence, we know that he dearly loved his wife and son, his parents, his siblings, and certain close friends.  Some critics find him harsh and cold, even cruel, in his relationship to the characters he created.  But that claim is specious, for verisimilitude in art requires a fair portion of cruelty, which nature offers in abundance. 

Timofey Pnin is invented, but in the minds of smitten readers he is as vivid as a beloved uncle from the old country.  Dolores Haze never existed in this world, but her sobs in the night pierce our actual beating hearts. Nabokov claimed to have shed tears when writing the scene in which Humbert meets with Lolita for the last time. The author knew that his frail young thing, so happy at that moment to receive a large and much needed sum of money, would die in childbirth soon afterwards.  Nabokov’s playfulness, his humor, his scientist’s unsparing eye, took a back seat to the emotion he invested in the characters that feel most alive to us, and this backtracks to the question of whether or not the poem “Pale Fire” is mere doggerel.

The answer lies in the personhood of Hazel Shade.  Like her father, Hazel is plump, homely, nearsighted, ungainly. In her school play, she is the only child not cast as a fairy or an elf. Given a broom and slop pail, she is Mother Time, bent like a washerwoman. Heartbroken, John Shade weeps in the men’s room.

The poet and his wife, Sybil, hope that their daughter might grow out of her ugly duckling phase, but it never happens. There are no boyfriends in high school. They send her to France, but she returns with lachrymose memories of further rejections. 

Shade’s portrait of Hazel is not limited to her unfortunate looks. She is a well-drawn character who plays Mah-jongg with her parents, tries on her mother’s furs (which make her “almost fetching”) and is clever with words. 

As Canto Two nears its end, Hazel is set up with a blind date. Upon seeing her, the young man suddenly remembers another commitment and subtracts himself from the foursome. Hazel boards a bus bound for home, but gets off at a stop near a frozen lake. The story of this calamitous blind date and its aftermath is drawn out, interspersed with scenes at the Shade house, where John and Sybil are watching TV and worrying about their daughter. 

The night is windy and raw, but warm enough for the ice to begin melting, and after the bus has left, “A blurry shape stepped off the reedy bank/Into a crackling swamp, and sank.”

Of this scene, Brian Boyd wrote: “I have watched [it] evoke tears on a bus near Novgorod, in a kitchen in Toronto, in a classroom in Auckland. I wonder how many other modern poems could produce an effect like that.”  Boyd, the world’s foremost biographer and scholar of Nabokov, has provided the answer to the question of doggerel. There is too much integrity and genuine feeling in this long poem, this extended meditation on the meaning of life and death, for it to have been fashioned as a sing-song joke. 

The story of Hazel Shade is a remarkable portrait—both of a girl who suffers because she is not slender and pretty, and of her parents who feel every pang of that suffering in their own hearts.  And all the more remarkable because Nabokov, his wife, and his son, were blessed with physical beauty.  They never had to worry about lonely nights when the phone would fail to ring. Volodya and Vera had each other, and Dmitri had grown into an imposing figure of a man who would never want for a woman’s company. If Nabokov was inclined to accept any of Freud’s statements, it might have been that anatomy is destiny, at least in regard to the polonaise of romantic love. He understood why Shade would sob in the men’s room, and poor Hazel step into a thawing lake on a blustery spring night. 

Contemporary readers may recoil from the idea that any person will be judged by arbitrary standards of physical beauty.  Such judgments are cruel and unfair, and belong to a time far less enlightened than our own.  But the elevation of pretty things over the Quasimodos of the world has been occurring since the dawn of history; Nabokov knew this and worked accordingly. To others is left the debate whether the human hive-mind can ever be scrubbed free of lookism. 

Shade vows to reject eternity if it fails to include all the little things he has loved, such as the way his wife smiles at dogs, and the spoor of silver slime left on flagstones by snails. Love and particularity are the supporting masts of Nabokov’s sacred scaffolding. And two lines near the end of “Pale Fire” provide perfect closure for the question of the afterlife. Having thoroughly, sorrowfully considered the painful circumstances, the defeats and spurnings, that led his daughter to take her young life, Shade writes, “I’m reasonably sure that we survive/ And that my darling somewhere is alive.”

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