Number 60 (Spring 2008) The Nabokovian

Download PDF of Number 60 (Spring 2008) The Nabokovian

                                                   CONTENTS

Number 60                                                                                                   Spring 2008

___________________________________________

News                                                                                                                             3
by Stephen Jan Parker

“ The Last Supper”                                                                                                 6
by Vladimir Nabokov
translation by Dmitri Nabokov

‘“Grattez le Tartar...’ or Who Were the Parents                                        8
of Ada's Kim Beauharnais?” Part Two.
by Alexey Sklyarenko

Notes and Brief Commentaries                                                                      18
by Priscilla Meyer

“Zoological Label as Literary Form”                                                          18
Victor Fet

“Baudelaire, Melmoth, and Laughter”                                                      26
David Rutledge

“Cynthia Vane: A Source in Propertius, Elegies 4:7”                            31
Brian Boyd

“The Artist and The Ape. On Luxura  and Lolita”                                    38
Leland de la Durantaye

“The Bridges in Nabokov’s Bend Sinister                                                     44
and in ÖdönVon Horváth’s Him and Her
(Back and Forth)”
Nassim W. Balestrini

“A New or Little-Known Subtext in  Lolita"                                              51
Stephen H. Blackwell

“A Blinking Demon: The Astronomy of                                                      55
Nabokov’s Antiterra”
Logan Norris

Annotations to Ada  29: Part I                                                                          60
Chapter 29
by Brian Boyd

Note on content:

This webpage contains the full content of the print version of Nabokovian Number 60, except for:

• Brian Boyd’s “Annotations to Ada” (because superseded by, updated, hyperlinked and freely available on, his website AdaOnline).
   

[3]

News
by Stephen Jan Parker

Nabokov Society News

In 2007, the Society had 144 individual members (103 USA,
41 abroad) and 90 institutional members (75 USA, 15 abroad). Income from society membership/subscription and purchase of Nabokovian past issues in 2007 was $5,273; expenses were $5,500. Thanks to the generosity of its members, in 2007 the Society forwarded $275 to The Pennsylvania State University for support of the Zembla website.

*****

Update on some Nabokov works in English
Forthcoming publication

Verses and Versions
Three Centuries of Russian Poetry Selected and Translated by Vladimir Nabokov.
Edited by Brian Boyd and Stanislav Shvabrin. Introduction by Brian Boyd. Harcourt, Fall 08.
Approximately 450 pages running from Lomonosov to Okudzhava, with some otherwise uncollected pieces on translation. Includes all of VN’s significant post-1922 translations from Russian verse to English and a couple of late translations from French to English. The originals appear en regarde in Cyrillic in the book, and in stress-marked transliteration on a website that is now being prepared.
[4]

Upcoming publications

“Natasha”. Unpublished Russian story from the early 1920s; translated by Dmitri Nabokov. Initially published in Dmitri Nabokov’s Italian translation in Corriere della Sera (22
September 2007) and in Vladimir Nabokov: A Russian Beauty and Other Stories, Adelphi, Milan, 2008, edited by Dmitri Nabokov.

The Original of Laura, unpublished novel.

In process

Think, Write, Speak. Unpublished/uncollected materials organized as VN materials on family, on exile in America, on publishing, and publishers. Editor, Brian Boyd.

Under consideration

Lectures on early Russian literature
Lectures on Russian drama and poetry
Letters to Vera and other letters
Critical editions
New editions of works out-of-print

*****

Just published in Russian. Tragediia gospodina Morna. P’esy. Lektsii o drame. St. Petersburg, “Azbuka klassika,” 2008. Editor and introduction by Andrei Babikov.
 

*****

The 2008 PEN/Nabokov Award, conferred by PEN American Center (located in New York, NY), was awarded to Cynthia Ozick. Award judges were Brian Boyd, Mary Gordon, and

[5]

Richard Price. The previous award recipients and judges were
as follows:

2000 William H. Gass
Judges: Edward Hirsch, Charles Johnson, Cynthia Ozick

2002 Mario Vargas Llosa
Judges: William Gass, Michael Scammell, Jean Strouse

2004 Mavis Gallant
Judges: Edward Hirsch, Margot Livesey, James McCourt

2006 Philip Roth
Judges: Richard Ford, Stacy Schiff, Michael Wood

*****

With this issue we complete the thirtieth year of publication. Throughout these many years Ms. Paula Courtney has provided the essential support and assistance in the production of The Nabokovian. Personally, and on behalf of the Vladimir Nabokov Society, I offer her our deepest gratitude and appreciation.

[6]

The Last Supper

The hour is pensive, the supper severe,
the predictions are treason and parting.
The nocturnal pearl bathes with its light
the petals of the oleander.

Apostle inclines toward apostle.
The Christ has silvery hands.
The candles pray lucidly, and on the table
creep the winged insects of night.

June 12, 1920
by Vladimir Nabokov
Translated by Dmitri Nabokov

© Copyright 2008 by the estate of Vladimir Nabokov

[7]

Час задумчивый строгого ужина,
Предсказанья измен и разлуки.
Озаряет ночная жемчужина 
олеандровые лепестки.

 

Наклонился апостол к апостолу 
У Христа—серебристые руки. 
Ясно молятся свечи, и по столу

ночные ползут мотыльки

[8]

“GRATTEZ LE TARTARE..OR WHO WERE THE PARENTS OF ADA’S KIM BEAUHARNAIS?
PART TWO

by Alexey Sklyarenko

Besides the “avian,” another important theme in Ada, that of illegitimacy, can be traced back to The Adolescent. Its hero-narrator, Arkady Dolgoruky, is the illegitimate son of his former master Versilov. By a strange irony, Arkady’s surname (received from his mother’s legitimate husband, Versilov’s former serf Makar Dolgoruky) happens to be much more famous than that of his gentleman father. The princely Dolgoruky family has played a prominent part in Russian history. Its founder, Prince Yuri Dolgoruky (1091-1157), has also founded (in 1147) Moscow. It is, of course, amusing that a bastard in Dostoevsky’s novel should have a glorious princely name, but it is much funnier that an offspring of a Dolgoruky turns out to be in Ada (if my hypothesis is correct) a Beauharnais! For this surname (no less “historical” than Dolgoruky) hints at Napoleon in whose life and career Moscow has played a fatal role! In fact, the Moscow fire of 1812 was the beginning of his end. Napoleon occupied Moscow that had been deserted by the Russians but could not profit from it in any way, because the city was set on fire, as Napoleon believed, by the order of its general-governor, Count Rostopchin (whom Vyazemsky calls patrioticheskii Erostrat, “the patriotic Herostratos”). Napoleon’s army found itself in the middle of the devastating fire that lasted for several weeks. The fire in Ada, in the Night of the Burning Bam, is less destructive, but a certain connection seems to exist between it and the Great Moscow fire.

In the night that becomes the apotheosis in the amorous relationship between Van and Ada, both of them are aroused in their bedrooms by the cry in French “au feu!” (1.19):

Who cried? Stopchin cried?

[9]

According to Vivian Darkbloom, author of the “Notes to Ada," Mile Stopchin is a representative of Mme de Ségur, née Rostopchine, author of Les Malheurs de Sophie nomenclatorially occupied on Antiterra by Les Malheurs de Swann). Mile Stopchin, whose book Les Sophismes de Sophie in the Bibliothèque Vieux Rose series was mentioned in the preceding paragraph of Ada, naturally couldn’t cry “aufeu!’ at Ardis. But that cry might have been emitted by the thirteen-year-old Sonya Rostopchin, the daughter of the Moscow governor and the future writer of children books Mme de Ségur, when she saw the glow of the Moscow fire. The mention of Mile Stopchine, who is a representative of Mme de Ségur, née Rostopchine, in the beginning of this chapter seems to link Ada's Burning Bam to the Moscow fire (see also Carolyn Kunin’s post to Nabokv-L of 23.09.2003). Also, it seems relevant that we first see Kim Beauharnais, or at least his shadow, in this chapter (he will next be glimpsed only when Van leaves Ardis: 1.25).

Interestingly, Kim's name is first mentioned at the very beginning of Ada – in the novel’s first scene set in the attic of the Ardis Hall. Among other things that Van and Ada find here is what later turns out to be, according to Kim, a microfilm of tremendous length (1.1). By this time. Van and Ada, who are naked here, must be lovers, which fact means that the Night of the Burning Bam chronologically precedes the scene in the attic. The Burning Barn chapter begins, nevertheless, as follows: “A sort of hoary riddle (Les Sophismes de Sophie by Mlle Stopchin in the Bibliothèque Vieux Rose series): did the Burning Bam come before the Cockloft or the Cockloft come first.” That this riddle can have another solution (if by “Cockloft” we understand not attic but erection, the erected cock, then the Cockloft, of course, preceded the Burning Bam), which actually turns it into a sophism, is at present irrelevant. More important for us is the fact that the very first mention of Kim in the novel, in the attic scene, links him (thanks to Sophie’s sophism) to the fire in the Burning Bam chapter. In another fire (set by Van and mentioned in Ada only in passing: 2.11) Kim’s house at Kalugano where he kept his negatives and most of the

[10]

Kalugano forest were burnt. Cruel Van put out Kim’s shameless eyes with an alpenstock.

Van fell into rage because Kim, who surreptitiously followed on his and Ada’s heels and photographed their lovemaking, decided to blackmail Ada. Taking advantage of Van’s and Ada’s long separation, Kim visits Ada during her stay at Ardis in the autumn of 1892. He has changed considerably in the years she has not seen him: “the-light-footed, lean lad
with the sallow complexion had become a dusky colossus, vaguely resembling a janizary in some exotic opera, stomping in to announce an invasion or an execution” (2.7). It seems to me that Kim’s resemblance to a janizary is an allusion to an episode in The Golden Calf (1931), the second of the two brilliant novels by Ilf and Petrov admired by Nabokov. When
Ostap Bender visits the secret Soviet millionaire Koreiko and offers him, for one million rubles, the folder of compromising materials illustrated with photographs (Chapter XXII, “It’s me who will command the parade”), he several times calls himself “a descendent of janizaries.” On his breast, the descendent of janizaries has a tattoo: Napoleon holding a beer mug. Now, if we try to scratch this tattoo - that is, Napoleon (who grows red, as if he were drunk, when, at one moment, Bender and Koreiko wrestle for possession of the precious folder) - off Ostap’s breast, we’ll find beneath it the strong healthy flesh of “the son of a Turkish subject.”

This seems to confirm, in a comical way, the rightness of Bismarck’s words: “Scratch a Frenchman and you will find a Turk.” But Ostap Suleiman Ibragim Berta Maria Benderbey is only dressed up as a Turk by his creators - in order to make him a more colorful character, the classical hero of a picaresque novel. His origin (at the beginning of the novel, Ostap gives himself out to be the son of lieutenant Shmidt, the famous hero of the 1905 Revolution) is as obscure as that of Kim Beauharnais’. Like Bender, Kim is only dressed up as an opera Turk. Similarly, Lambert in The Adolescent only wears the mask of a Frenchman, while, actually, he is but a little Bismarck.

[11]

If my hypothesis, according to which Kim Beauharnais was the son of Arkady Dolgoruky, is correct, the blackmailer Lambert must have been his god-father. It was probably Lambert who thought up the surname for Kim and, earlier, procured for his friend Arkasha a “local Josephine.” I would venture to suggest that this Josephine, Kim’s mother, was Lambert's girlfriend Alphonsine (or, as Arkady mentally calls her, Alfonsinka), who will do anything Lambert asks. The diminutive Russified version of her name strikingly echoes the nickname of one of Ada's incidental characters: ‘Alphonse Cinq.’ This is what Van dubs the concierge at the Alphonse Four hotel where his half-sister Lucette stays during her last visit to Lute (the Antiterran name of Paris, Alphonsine’s native city): 3.3. In Russian, Alfons is not only a male given name but also can mean (if written with a small letter) “ponce.” (In The Twelve Chairs [1927], by Ilf and Petrov, Ostap Bender accuses Vorob’yaninov of “alfonsizm,” because the latter lives, like an old lover, at the expense of the younger Ostap. Bender forces Ippolit Matveich to beg alms and induces him to lament in French: "Je ne mange pas six jours." To remember the French word for “six,” Vorob’yaninov has to count in French: “un, deux, trois, quatre, cinq, six...”: chapter XXXVI, “The View of the Malachite Pool.”) The soubriquet Van gave to the concierge thus links the latter not only to Alfonsinka, but also to Lambert, who at one point offers Arkady his services as a pander, promising to marry him to the lady with whom Arkady is in love (but later prefers to blackmail the beautiful Katerina Akhmakov).

Speaking of their physical appearance, Alphonse Cinq (note, by the way, his “Bourbonian” chin) and Alfonsinka have only dark hair and an indefinite age (Lambert’s girlfriend must be, though, much younger than her Antiterran nick-namesake) in common. Arkady describes Alphonsine’s looks as follows: “a strange creature, a tall and skinny girl, thin as a lath, a brunette, with a long waist, long face, roving eyes and hollow cheeks – a terribly worn-out creature!” (Part Two, Chapter 9, III). Judging by this description, Alphonsine could have been the mother of the lanky and dark Kim Beauharnais. That the latter is her son
[12]

by Arkady Dolgoruky (whose surname reminds one of Ostap Bender’s phrase in The Twelve Chairs, chapter XIV, “The Alliance of Sword and Plough:” U nas dlinnye ruki, “We have long amis;” interestingly, the first in the Dolgoruky family, Prince Yuri, received his nickname not because of his long arms, but because of his wide influential connections; in modem times, the proverbial “long arm of Moscow” materialized in Kim Philby and, on Antiterra, in Kim Beauharnais, one of the “spies from Terra,” in whose existence Van secretly believed: 1.38) is also indirectly confirmed by a small slip of the tongue that Van makes in the conversation with Greg Erminin (whom Van meets in Lute a few hours before his visit to Alphonse Four):

“Za tvoyo zdorovie [to your health], Grigoriy
Akimovich.”

“Arkadievich,” said Greg, who had let it pass once
but now mechanically corrected Van. (3.2)

The name of Greg’s father, Colonel Erminin (who is several times mentioned in Ada but never appears in person) is Arkady, not Akim. Van explains his confusion of Greg’s patronymic (Van makes this mistake twice) with a “stupid slip of a slovenly tongue.” This slip was probably caused by the fact that “Grigoriy Akimovich” was the name-and-patronymic of one of Marina’s lovers, the movie man G. A. Vronsky (1.32). But it seems to me that there was another factor that affected Van’s memory. Van last saw Greg thirteen years ago, in 1888, at the picnic at Ardis (1.39). It is then that we have a brief glimpse of Kim Beauharnais (a second, and last, time when we see him by daylight). Immediately after Greg took his farewell of Ada and left the picnic site on his Silentium motorcycle, Kim drove Mile Larivière off in a gig. The name “Kim” sounds not unlike the Russian name “Akim” and could influence Van’s error in some way. However that may be, if Kim indeed is the son of Arkady Dolgoruky, his full name would be “Akim Arkadievich Dolgoruky-Bogarne” (“Beauharnais” in the Russian spelling). His first name’s initial was apparently lost in the process of

[13]

Kim’s transit from Terra, where he was born and christened. This loss somewhat resembles the loss of one of the ten A’s in the scrabble set that was given to Marina’s children by a friend of the family, Baron Klim Avidov (another anagram of “Vladimir Nabokov”): 1.36. At the same time, Kim’s (as well as Van’s) truncated name hints at his illegitimacy (the illegitimate children of Russian aristocrats were often given truncated surnames of their fathers).

An interesting parallel to the above fragment of Van’s dialogue with Greg seems to exist in The Adolescent. At the beginning of this novel (Part One, chapter 2, IV), the old Prince Sokolsky, introducing Arkady to Anna Versilov (Arkady’s half- sister, whom he once saw but with whom he is not acquainted), says: “and this is my young friend, Arkady Andreevich Dol...” Actually, Arkady’s patronymic that he received from Makar Dolgoruky, his “official” father, is “Makarovich.” Unlike Greg, who at first didn’t even notice Van’s confusion of his patronymic, Arkady indignantly reacts to the old Prince’s gaffe (his pride of an illegitimate child is hurt!). On the other hand, Van’s mistake leads to a series of new blunders on both his and Greg’s part. Trying to make amends, Van asks Greg about his father: “how is Arkady Grigorievich?” In reply, Greg not only says that his father had died (“He died. Died just before your aunt [Marina!]”), but, in his turn, asks Van: “where is Adelaida Danilovna [Ada, whose real father is not Daniel but Demon Veen]?” It seems to me that all these patronymic confusions, like the entire theme of illegitimacy, can be traced back to The Adolescent. And hence even Van’s words “Za tvoyo zdorovie” sound like an echo of the nearly identical phrase uttered in The
Adolescent (Part Three, chapter 5, III) by sly Lambert who tries to make Arkady tipsy: Za tvoyo zdorovie, choknemsya! (“To your health, let’s clink glasses!”).

The latter scene is set in a restaurant in Bolshaia Morskaia Street. Somewhere near the house in that street, in which Nabokov was to be born twenty-five years later, another episode of The Adolescent takes place. One morning Lambert finds Arkady (who, after an unsuccessful attempt to set a woodpile on

[14]

fire, spent a cold winter night sleeping on a curbstone) freezing in the street and brings him to his place (Part Two, chapter 9, III). When he leaves him there with Alphonsine, she at once begins her monologue that reminds one (particularly, with its intonation) of Blanche’s pathetic soliloquies in Ada:  “Monsieur, monsieur! ­– she at once started declaiming, striking an attitude in the middle of the room, – jamais homme ne fut si cruel, si Bismarck, que cet être, qui regarde une femme comme une saleté de hasard. Un femme, qu’est-ce que ça dans notre époche? “Tue-la!” voilà le dernier mot de I’Académie français!..” (“Oh, my sir, a man was never so cruel, was never such a Bismarck, as this creature who regards a woman as something dirty and useless. A woman, what is it in our time? “Kill her!” is the latest word of the French Academy!..”) Alphonsine (who quotes Dumas fils, the recently elected member of the French Academy) compares her heartless boyfriend (who actually treats her as if she were a little lap dog) to Bismarck. On the other hand, Arkady points out several times that Lambert’s big-nosed smiling ruddy face resembles a mask. If we now unmask the Frenchman Lambert, we’ll discover not a Turk, as Bismarck believed, but a Prussian - a little angry Bismarck who torments his poor frightened mistress.

Let us recapitulate. Scratch a Russian and you will find a Tartar (Napoleon). Scratch a Prussian and you will find a Russian (Marx). Scratch a Frenchman and you will find a Prussian (Bismarck as corrected by Nabokov). And whom will we find if a Tartar is to be scratched? It seems to me, a Frenchman (which will transform the scratching series into a circle and make the process of scratching perpetual). Moreover, if there is on Antiterra a saying about scratching a representative of this or that nation, it goes as follows: “Grattez le tartare et vous trouverez le français.”

We hear nothing of Napoleon on Demonia, but another dictator, Stalin, is present there, so to speak, in two copies. On the one hand, it is khan Sosso, the ruler of Tartary (or, rather, “the ruthless Sovietnamur khanate:” 2.2), and, on the other, “Colonel St. Alin, a scoundrel,” a second in Demon Veen’s

[15]

duel with Baron d’Onsky (1.2). But why does Nabokov need two Stalins on Antiterra, isn’t one already more than enough? It seems to me that Nabokov needs two Stalins, one of whom is a Tartar and the other, a Frenchman, in order to settle accounts with Napoleon, who has proposed to scratch a Russian. Instead of following Napoleon’s suggestion (incidentally, Nabokov was proud that his ancestor was the Tatar Prince Nabok who lived in the 14th century and who is casually mentioned in Ada: 1.39), Nabokov wants us to scratch a Tartar and see whom we will find. There are in Ada only two Tartars: the fellow who murders Percy de Prey in a ravine near Chufutkale (1.42) and Khan Sosso (the only Tartar who is mentioned by name). For the scratching, Nabokov chooses the latter. He seems to be playing here on the name (that I suppose was familiar to him) of Joseph Stalin’s secretary and “aid-de-camp,” a certain Poskriobyshev. This name derives from the Russian word poskriobysh, which means “the last-born child in a family with many children,” but is semantically kin to the verb poskresti (“to scratch”). It is the very verb that occurs in the Russian version of the saying about scratching: “poskrebi russkogo i naidiosh’tatarina."

By the way, that saying is not always true. If we scratch Poskriobyshev’s chief, we will find not a Tartar, but a Mingrel, or, perhaps, an Ossete. Cf. Mandelstam’s lines (alluded to in Ada) from his famous satire on Stalin: Chto ni kazn’u nego, to malina /I shirokaia grud’osetina. (“Whatever the execution, it’s a raspberry / And he has the broad chest of an Ossete.”) But Nabokov is not interested in scratching Stalin (he would have preferred to destroy him at once). Mandelstam did scratch Stalin with his poem (note, by the way, that “to rasp,” as in “raspberry,” is almost a synonym of “to scratch”) and lost at first his freedom and then his life. So, instead of only scratching a tyrant, who, moreover, was safely dead when Nabokov wrote Ada, Nabokov invites us to scratch Stalin’s representative on Demonia – the ruler of Tartary Khan Sosso. If we do, we will find none other than Colonel St. Alin, a scoundrel! For, while “Khan Sosso” is a caricature on Stalin (Soso is a Georgian version of the Russian name Iosif that hints, via the English

[16]

“so-so,” at the Khan’s mediocrity), “Colonel St. Alin” seems but a Stalin in miniature. The fat Khan embodies, as it were, the lean Colonel and also resembles the comic strip politician dubbed Uncle Joe (5.5). It is as if Nabokov were saying to the reader: “Just scratch the Tartar Khan and you will find the French Colonel.”

It is a kind of Nabokovian wittier reply to Napoleon’s (according to other sources, Joseph de Maistre’s, or even Prince de Ligne’s) witticism. As Blok put it in his poem “The Scythians” (1918): “We [the Scythians] can grasp everything – both the sharp Gallic wit, / And the dark German genius.” In Ada, Nabokov demonstrates that he has a sharper wit than any Gaul’s and that he also can perfectly grasp the dark German genius. Bismarck (whose genius, true, is questioned in The Adolescent by Arkady Dolgoruky: Part One, chapter 5, IV) has famously said: “the great questions of the time are not decided by speeches and majority decisions... but by iron and blood.” Sad as it is, but the twentieth century, in which nations generously spilled their own, as well as foreign, blood deciding this or that question of the time, only confirmed Bismarck’s remark. The bloodiest dictator of this century (actually, of all times) was Stalin, whose chosen name derives from stal’, Russian for “steel,” which is a modified form of iron.

It seems to me that Nabokov plays upon this fact in Ada, as well as on the fact that Alin, part of name “St. Alin,” is also a part of the Russian word malina (“raspberry”). Marina mentions malina in the scene, in which we learn of Van’s and Ada’s love for sladkoe (sweetmeats; incidentally, it was not Dostoevsky but Pushkin and, according to Khodasevich, Osip Mandelstam who had similar tastes). Later we find out that they also are exceptionally, almost abnormally, sladostrastny (voluptuous). In the case of Ada, this manifests itself when - even before she and Van become lovers - she voluptuously scratches mosquito bites on her body (1.17):

During the week following her birthday, Ada’s unfortunate
fingernails used to stay garnet-stained and after a particularly

[17]

ecstatic, lost-to-the-word session of scratching, blood
literally streamed down her shins-a pity to see, mused
her distressed admirer, but at the same time disgracefully
fascinating - for we are visitors and investigators in a
strange universe, indeed, indeed.

Alas, not only individuals, but also whole nations, have scratching fits. The satisfaction of an itch, whoever were suffering it: a person, like Ada, or a nation (like the Russian people in the twentieth century), is always accompanied by the spilling of blood. The stronger an itch’s urge, the more violently we scratch a mosquito-bitten or wounded spot, the more blood we cause to trickle from it. The same happens to a nation when it has, as in a civil war, a scratching fit. But if nations start to scratch each other, then a big war breaks out, and here seas and oceans of blood are spilled. That’s why 1 think that the whole scratching business is one of the most tragic metaphors realized by Nabokov in Ada.

Thanks to Sergey Karpukhin for helping me translate this essay and to Victor Fet for pointing out to me Bismarck’s version of the scratching aphorism.

[18]

NOTES AND BRIEF COMMENTARIES

By Priscilla Meyer

Submissions, in English, should be forwarded to Priscilla Meyer at pmeyer@weslevan.edu. E-mail submission preferred. If using a PC, please send attachments in .doc format; if by fax send to (860) 685 3465; if by mail, to Russian Department, 215 Fisk Hall, Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT 06459. All contributors must be current members of the Nabokov Society. Deadlines are April 1 and October 1 respectively for the Spring and Fall issues. Notes may be sent, anonymously, to a reader for review. If accepted for publication, the piece may undergo some slight editorial alterations. References to Nabokov’s English or Englished works should be made either to the first American (or British) edition or to the Vintage collected series. All Russian quotations must be transliterated and translated. Please observe the style (footnotes incorporated within the text, American punctuation—single space after periods—, signature—name, place, etc.) used in this section.

ZOOLOGICAL LABEL AS LITERARY FORM

Dark pictures, thrones, the stones that pilgrims kiss,
poems that take a thousand years to die
but ape the immortality of this
red label on a little butterfly.
(On Discovering a Butterfly)

These lines are often quoted. With all the wonderful attention to Nabokov’s butterflies these days, it seems, however, that the role of a singular literary tool in Nabokov’s work—the zoological

[19]

label—has not been duly appreciated. The connection, at least to a professional zoologist, is obvious—and yet so complex: so much is contained in one or two tiny pieces of thick paper, pierced by the same pin that passes first through the thorax of a dead but immortalized insect.

The issue belongs to the very interface of science and art where, in the words of Stephen Blackwell, a great challenge is “the question of how the scientific (that is, objective, descriptive) and artistic (subjective, creative) expressions of Nabokov’s genius in fact emanate from a common core” (“The poetics of science in, and around, Nabokov’s The Gift”, The Russian Review, 2003, 62:243-261). I would like to argue here that a label’s precision, brevity, necessity, and triple authority (collector, identifier, author), along with its dual geographic and taxonomic attention, provide a unique source of inspiration for the wider world of literature—a source, of which Nabokov took full advantage.

Haiku-rivaling in its brevity, the label, about 20 x 10mm, placed under a dead insect, gives it a glorious afterlife. Today, we use the smallest legible printer font; a traditional label required meticulous mini-calligraphy skills. From his childhood on, Nabokov wrote those labels in the hundreds, as did Ada Veen, as any entomologist does—mini-versions of his famous future index cards.

Labeling derives, of course, from that ancient dual need of a hunter to: first, identify (name) his catch, and second, to mark the place and time of this specific catch, with the obvious goal of coming back. Thus, we always have, in fact, Wo labels. The first contains the field record, the very specific circumstances of the catch. The second is an invented name of the creature. Thus labels address nature but belong to literature.

A good record label accommodates at least three major parts: locality, date, collector. These are three Aristotelian features, not present in a specimen itself: place, time, and a protagonist who noted them. This information is lifted from

[20]

the protagonist’s field notes, done in a sturdy notebook. Other intermediate documents—manuscripts—accompany the collection process; in butterflies and other insects the record data are penciled on a paper envelope where the insect is placed in the field; or collected creatures are accompanied in their vials or boxes with brief field labels or codes of a sort; all this information boils down to a record label once the creature is pinned, mounted, transferred to a museum collection.

The fourth required attribute—the name—comes later, and
traditionally is put on a separate, second label, which we may
call a name label.

PLACE. Absolutely required; a specimen without a precise locality is useless. Zoologists of old were often vague, and their “habitant in Africa” statements attached to the important descriptions still baffle and annoy experts. By today’s standards, a name of the place (locality) on a museum label should include country, closest town, some indication of a precise point, geographic coordinates (latitude and longitude), as well as altitude—all digitally georeferenced these days. A very brief description of environment (vegetation) is optional but useful.

Geography reigns in the congested mini-universe of an entomological label. I would like to think that, along with more conventional sources such as maps and books, it was the label’s requirement of a precise spatial locality that nourished and inspired Nabokov’s sense of geography. He often and willingly confessed that he remembers certain geographic localities as labels, i.e. places where a certain butterfly was taken (Strong Opinions). This emotion—well known to all field zoologists—is akin to a commonplace ability to associate a place with an especially significant event; only a field zoologist recalls dozens, hundreds of those localities, and a trained memory immediately pins a species’ name to them.

Thus, Nabokov’s geography is a natural rather than earth

[21]

science: it stems from, and celebrates, its biogeographic aspect—the distribution of life on the face of the planet. Our knowledge of this distribution is literally formed by myriad museum labels.

A traveler entering Nabokov’s world is amply provided with attentive and whimsical maps, travelogues, fly-over landscape images, whether of an existing, a conflated, or a completely invented locality. With latitude, longitude, altitude, and time duly noted, a distribution record in biogeography becomes a four-dimensional point in a mapped, dynamic range of a species—equivalent to the space-time map of a literary character. Nabokov’s fans trace with enthusiasm a hero’s trajectory through a small town (Fialta or New Wye), a big city (Berlin), a country (Zembla), a large swath of a continent (North America or Central Asia), or an entire planet (Antiterra). Even in the faraway postmodern Russia of Invitation to a Beheading, the lay of the land is clear for us as we look with Cincinnatus from the prison tower at Tamara Gardens.

Labels of geographical localities supplied with mnemonic, memorable features constantly serve Nabokov as simple props and complex metaphors. Lolita is considered, among many other things, one of the best trans-North American road novels; its travelogue follows Nabokov’s travel in pursuit of butterflies (traced in Dieter Zimmer’s detailed study, http://www.d-e-zimmer.de/LolitalUSA/LoUSpre.htm). Quoting Zimmer, “in those of his novels and stories he [VN] himself called ‘realistic-psychological,’ that is in all except Invitation to a Beheading, Bend Sinister and three of his four last novels, just about all of the seemingly imaginary places have some counterpart on the map. You bet they do.”

Brian Boyd specifically notes the motif of place-names in his “Notes to Ada." These place-names (record labels) often form complex networks. For example, three lakes. Omega, Ozero, Zero in Pale Fire reflect not only Ithaca’s Finger Lakes but (along with Onyx, Eryx, Climax in Lolita) mimic a triad of

[22]

northern Russian lakes closest to Zembla: Chudskoye (Peipus), Ladoga, Onega; the latter gave name to Pushkin’s Onegin; Lake Ladoga (closest to St. Petersburg), finds its place on Antiterra and also mutates to Ladore (Russ. Ladora) in Ada (1.1; 1.22) (for more detail, see my “Notes on Eryx, Omega, and Ata,”
Nabokovian, 2003, 51).

Often Nabokov’s geography might seem excessive and mocking: his “A Guide to Berlin” is hardly a guide; his pseudostate names like Utana sound mocking. Ada's boldly conflated Antiterran geography, I think, not so much mocks as celebrates our earthly efforts of naming “that incompletely named world” (The Gift). Pushkinists may ridicule Nabokov’s “snobbish” attention to exact, scrupulous rendering of natural objects in Eugene Onegin—but those are, for a translator who is also a naturalist, not just name- or rhymeholders but precious data points of biogeographic reality, reduced to its geographic (where) and taxonomic (what) dimensions, always in their historical (when) context. If a translator fails to pay attention to these simple and unmistakable elements of nature, how can he or she be trusted with more complex matters? This is why Nabokov demolishes, with disgust, Babette Deutsch’s “wake the birds in beech and larch” (Eugene Onegin)—sorry, no beeches or larches in northern European Russia. Not knowing a natural fact is no excuse. Nabokov the geographer assigns labels to Pushkin’s vague localities—and literally puts on the map for us two country manors where the action of the famous verse novel takes place, playfully nicknaming them “Larino” and “Onegino.”

Biogeography is what gives poise to one of the most famous Nabokovian images: a boy walking into the picture from a Russian to a US spruce forest. The important detail here, usually not appreciated by the commentators, is that in Russia the spruce forest was latitudinal (zonal), located at the northern latitudes, but in America it is altitudinal (vertical zones in the Rockies); thus Nabokov’s movement is not just east to

[23]

west as any Russian emigrant’s; it is also clearly directed quite literally upward—from the Russian lowlands to the American highlands. A label, recall, includes not only longitude and latitude but also altitude: it is three-dimensional—if a third dimension is an option in your world.

TIME. The date of collection, e.g. “July 22, 1959,” accompanies a locality on a specimen’s label. This information is less critical for a museum scientist than place—but it is absolutely important for a naturalist who wants to return and explore living creatures. A serious collector visits the same locality several times a year, observing seasonal “aspects” of vegetation and the insect life. A writer maps a hero's life; a naturalist returns to Arizona next April to find creatures of the spring again: an ancient idea of cyclic time that does not fly as an arrow. In our temperate latitudes, we talk about “field season” as snow thaws and butterfly nets are prepared.

COLLECTOR. An action has a protagonist; a collector’s name is part of the label record. The very physical act of insect collection was cherished by Nabokov as one of the most rewarding experiences possible; he was eager to talk about this rare experience (see ample details in Brian Boyd & Robert M. Pyle, eds. Nabokov’s Butterflies: Unpublished and Uncollected Writings, Beacon Press, 2000; Kurt Johnson & Steven L. Coates. Nabokov’s Blues: The Scientific Odyssey of a Literary Genius, McGraw-Hill, 2001). In a famous scene in Lolita: A Screenplay, never filmed by Stanley Kubrick, Nabokov the collector himself is engaged in an important dialogue with Humbert, who, among other things, does not know the difference between general (species) and particular (specimen).

More often than not the roles in the label’s quest are split: a collector is a person different from the identifier, and both are different from the past or future author of the species’ name. Thus a label can bear as many as three human names.

[24]

In an ultimate achievement, however, all these three functions may be combined in one expert who collects, identifies, and describes. The most famous collectors’ names are found on museum labels—and the most obscure names are preserved there, just as in a literary text.

A collector is always a traveler (the opposite is woefully not true!). Nabokov’s first passion was to become one; he planned at age 17 to organize an expedition to Central Asia, and probably would have done so—if the October 1917 Bolshevik coup had not happened. Dieter Zimmer tells an exotic story hidden behind a brief label from “Pilgram/The Aurelian” “Tatsienlu, East Tibet—Taken by the native collectors of Father Dejean” (Nabokov reist in Traum in das Innere Asiens, Rowohlt, 2006). Such stories lie behind every label; and sometimes, Nabokov gave us a glimpse into that daring collector’s life. Those are marvelously expanded for Konstantin Godunov-Cherdyntsev in The Gift, and for Paul Pilgram in “The Aurelian.”

SPECIES’ NAME. A separate, second label bears the creature’s full Linnaean name: its genus, species, the species’author, and date of description (for fascinating details of the naming process, central to taxonomy, see Zimmer’s A Guide to Nabokov’s Butterflies and Moths 2001). While a specialist can identify a familiar species by eye, a collector does not have to be an expert, and the name of the catch itself is often not known at the time of collection.

Thus it is not necessarily given on the first, original “field” label but is added later—often years later—when (if) the specimen, long ago dead, is identified. An expert discerns the specimen’s characters and uses reference literature to match them to the characters of known (described) species, i.e. an already existing name.

The identified name is placed on a separate label, and the record is now complete: it accompanies a specimen into a publication. Nabokov’s first publication in English (“A Few

[25]

Notes on Crimean Lepidoptera,” The Entomologist, 1920) is a good example: it is, and was required to be, not more than a compilation of records (labels) of butterflies flying in the Crimea (where the family lodged temporarily) in the summer of 1918, before the Crimea was ravished by the Communist troops.

If a procedure does not yield a known name, there is a chance of a new species, not yet named. The same or another expert—now the author—will go through a process of description and establish a new name according to “the inexorable law of taxonomic priority” (Ada, 1:8); see in more detail Boyd & Pyle, 2000; Zimmer, 2001; and my note “Zoological nomenclature and Kinbote’s Name of God,” Nabokovian, 2004, 53.) Naming a new species was Nabokov’s childhood dream (Conclusive Evidence/Speak, Memory). Naming is ultimately important for the naturalist’s psyche: see The Gift on Fyodor’s father who “was happy in that incompletely named world in which at every step he named the nameless.” Then, in an old tradition, a so-called type specimen will merit a red label mentioned in Nabokov’s famous poem. “Visiting the American Museum of Natural History [in 1942], he gasped with delight when he saw the red type label on his Grand Canyon butterfly” (Boyd, American Years, 53).

LANGUAGE. One has to note that a field record, on which the record label’s text is based, is often a very Nabokovian, congested jumble of languages, with its own delightful history to trace, and endless possibilities for playful riddles. Names of exotic localities vary depending on a map used; a European collector often honestly garbles local toponyms. Spellings are rarely standard, with ample opportunity for errors, further enhanced by abbreviations and mistranslations. Dates can cause problems: no label space to spell out the month; Roman numerals confuse July and August; European (dd/mm) versus American (mm/dd) date formats are further confusing. Collector’s, identifier’s, and author’s names are transliterated in various

[26]

ways; helpful “leg.” or “coll.” are omitted; the collector’s first name is often omitted, leaving his last name to be confused with a locality. Even the name of the species’ author (or, to be more exact, the Creator’s co-author), is often abbreviated (L. or Nab.), unheard of in literature (imagine abbreviating Pushkin as P.)

And, finally, the creature’s name must, of course, be given in its own language: Latin (vernacular names, so beautiful in butterflies, such as Red Admirable, are completely optional!). Linnaean binomial nomenclature—names of taxa (species, genus, family, etc.)—is one of the few strongholds where the “dead” language still lives. It is a special joy for a zoologist, “versed in taxonomic Latin,” that a name of any species is immediately understood by colleagues across the world. Thus, the name on a label—a universal value of natural science— needs no translation: a pre-Babel condition, an ultimate and unachievable goal of literature.

I thank Stephen H. Blackwell, Brian Boyd, and Don Barton Johnson for their valuable comments on this note.

—Victor Fet, Department of Biological Sciences, Marshall University

BAUDELAIRE, MELMOTH, AND LAUGHTER

Humbert Humbert refers to his car as a “Dream Blue Melmoth” (Annotated Lolita, 227). Near the end of the novel, Humbert draws further attention to the name of this car by parenthetically saying hello to it from the text: “Hi, Melmoth, thanks a lot, old fellow” (307). Why Melmoth? The Annotated Lolita explains that “Melmoth” is a reference to both Charles Robert Maturin’s large Gothic novel Melmoth the Wanderer and

[27]

to Oscar Wilde's “post-prison pseudonym” Sebastian Melmoth. Nabokov playfully adds another reference: “Melmoth may come from Mellonella Moth (which breeds in beehives) or, more likely, from Meal Moth (which breeds in grain)” (416-417). These three possibilities do not have great resonance within the novel. They do not quite explain why Nabokov (or Humbert) would choose the name Melmoth. In fact, the name seems to have greater resonance in yet another source, Charles Baudelaire’s essay “On the Essence of Laughter” (ed. and trans. Jonathan Mayne, 147-165, New York: Phaidon, 1964).

Baudelaire’s analysis of laughter contains ideas that can be connected to Humbert and to some themes of Lolita. Baudelaire describes the laughter of the man who lives with a sense of his own superiority: “this laughter ... is ­– you must understand – the necessary resultant of his own double nature, which is infinitely great in relation to man, and infinitely vile and base in relation to absolute Truth and Justice. Melmoth is a living contradiction” (153). Here we have one of Nabokov’s favorite themes, the double-a theme that is clearly expressed by Humbert’s double name. More specifically, we have a sense of Humbert’s character, a man who feels superior to others and, at the same time, commits actions that are “vile and base.” Brian Boyd describes Humbert’s doubleness: “Humbert might wish to introduce Lolita to Baudelaire or Shakespeare, but his false relationship to her, his breach of her mother’s trust, and his crushing of her freedom mean he can only stunt her growth” (Vladimir Nabokov, The American Years, 1991, 6). In fact, this doubleness – or as Baudelaire states, this “living contradiction”– can in part explain the moral difficulty that many readers have with this novel. A number of scholars have discussed this theme of the double, often focusing on Humbert’s apparent doppelganger Quilty; reading with Baudelaire’s thoughts in mind (and Boyd’s), one can see the double within Humbert alone.

[28]

Baudelaire goes on to describe the “satanic” laughter of Melmoth in a sentence that could be read as an insightful analysis of Humbert’s text: “And thus the laughter of Melmoth, which is the highest expression of pride, is forever performing its function as it lacerates and scorches the lips of the laugher for whose sins there can be no remission” (153). Humbert, too, has a pride that lacerates, an arrogance that is thoroughly bound up in his sense of guilt. His “sin” is his “soul” (9). An essay on laughter might seem an odd place to find insight into Humbert, a man who is not prone to great laughter. Nabokov sees Baudelaire's essential ideas, keeps the point about a sense of superiority, and removes the actual laughter - that is, unless one senses some disturbing laughter coming from the entirety of Humbert’s text.

The locale of Humbert’s writing also has some resonance in Baudelaire’s essay. Humbert begins writing this text “in the psychopathic ward,” and he remains in an ambiguous “legal captivity” (308, 3). Baudelaire writes, “[I]t is a notorious fact that all madmen in asylums have an excessively overdeveloped idea of their own superiority: I hardly know of any who suffer from the madness of humility” (152). This too could be seen as a Baudelairean reading of Humbert, who in a previous “bout with insanity” had found “an endless source of robust enjoyment in trifling with psychiatrists” (34). Note Baudelaire’s description of “Satanic” laughter: “Laughter, they say, comes from a sense of superiority. I should not be surprised if, on making this discovery, the physiologist had burst out laughing himself at the thought of his own superiority” (152). Humbert Humbert shares this sense of superiority as well as the self-awareness; Baudelaire sees something Satanic in that sense of superiority, and he also connects this to Melmoth, who he refers to as “that great satanic creation of the Reverend Maturin’’ (153).

It would seem appropriate to Humbert, the author of a “comparative history of French literature for English-
speaking students” (32), to think of Baudelaire when using

[29]

the name Melmoth and comically (or madly) saying hello to his car. In addition, Nabokov apparently had little respect for Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer, stating that “Maturin used up all the platitudes of Satanism, while remaining on the side of the conventional angels” (EO, II, 352). (This comes from Nabokov’s note on “Melmoth” in his annotations of Eugene Onegin. Nabokov quotes Baudelaire’s praise of Maturin’s novel toward the end of that note, as though he associates Melmoth with Baudelaire.) Any reference to Oscar Wilde also seems less relevant to this novel than the presence of Baudelaire. And the idea that the name has to do with a real moth (or two) is most likely some misleading information planted by Nabokov. Appel’s annotations state that “Melmoth” is “a triple allusion” (416), but he does not explain how any of these three allusions (Maturin, Wilde, or moths) add to the texture of the novel. Baudelaire’s sense of Melmoth seems more suited to Lolita.

Of course, Nabokov refers to Baudelaire in other works as well. Baudelaire’s L’Invitation au voyage is directly referenced in the title ofNabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading, and elsewhere in the novel, as Gavriel Shapiro and other scholars have pointed out. There is a telling moment in Baudelaire’s “On the Essence of Laughter” that may have been in Nabokov’s mind when writing the conclusion of his Invitation. Baudelaire describes a scene in which “the English Pierrot” is beheaded:

His head was severed from his neck-a great red and white
head, which rolled noisily to rest in front of the prompter’s
box, showing the bleeding disk of the neck, the split
vertebrae and all the details of a piece of butcher’s meat
just dressed for the counter. And then, all of a sudden, the
decapitated trunk, moved by its irresistible obsession with
theft, jumped to its feet, triumphantly ‘lifted’ its own head
as though it was a ham or a bottle of wine ... (161)

[30]

Nabokov adds a metaphysical dimension to the scene where Cincinnatus arises from his decapitation. Cincinnatus moves toward his double, toward a place that may have a greater sense of “Truth and Justice,” and away from the “base and vile” prison in which he had existed (to use Baudelaire’s terms in describing the double, quoted above). Cincinnatus leaves his head behind. Again, Nabokov removes the direct sense of laughter, and adds a dimension that is not present in Baudelaire’s description. Nonetheless, Nabokov seems to have read Baudelaire’s essay attentively.

This is certainly true when one reads Baudelaire’s thoughts on the laughter of children: “the laughter of children...is altogether different, even as a physical expression, even as a form...from the terrible laughter of Melmoth – of Melmoth, the outcast of society, wandering somewhere between the last boundaries of the territory of mankind and the frontiers of the higher life” (156). Here we have that final scene of Lolita, where Humbert rests high on a mountain road and listens to the sounds of children at play, which includes “an almost articulate spurt of vivid laughter” (308). Baudelaire continues: “For the laughter of children is like the blossoming of a flower. It is the joy of receiving, the joy of breathing, the joy of contemplating, of living, of growing.” This is exactly what Humbert hears (“the melody of children at play”), and exactly, he realizes, what Lolita has been absent from. Baudelaire writes, “Joy is a unity”; Humbert writes, “[T]hese sounds were of one nature.” Nabokov also adds a Baudelairean exclamation aimed at the reader during this scene: “Reader!” (308). The Annotated Lolita explains in an earlier note that this direct appeal to the reader “echo[es] the last line of Au Lecteur, the prefatory poem in Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal” (436).

Interestingly, Humbert keeps this moment pure. Many readers have used this as evidence of Humbert’s knowledge of his crime, perhaps of his sense of guilt or his transformation toward love. Some have gone so far as to judge Humbert with

[31]

less contempt because of this moment (although one should note that this scene does not happen at the end of the story: Humbert only places it at the end, perhaps to manipulate the reader into being more lenient). Baudelaire, however, does not think of this laughter as so pure: “the laughter of children.. .is not entirely exempt from ambition, as is only proper to little scraps of men-that is, to budding Satans” (156). Baudelaire seems more cynical than Humbert here, as he sees budding Humberts – budding Melmoths – in that laughter. Humbert, on the other hand, depicts such laughter as something entirely separate from himself.

There is plenty of evidence of Nabokov’s interest in Baudelaire, as explained by scholars who have been left
unmentioned in this brief article, such as John Burt Foster, Jr., and Robert Alter. My purpose is merely to offer a small addition to that work. There is certainly some affinity between Nabokov’s work and Baudelaire’s “On the Essence of Laughter.” Jorge Luis Borges writes about the idea that we create our own precursors: one who knows Nabokov cannot read “On the Essence of Laughter” without seeing some Nabokovian ideas. In a more chronological sense, Baudelaire’s essay may have inspired the name of a car.

— David Rutledge, University of New Orleans

CYNTHIA VANE: A SOURCE IN PROPERTIUS, ELEGIES 4:7

Nabokov alludes widely, often unexpectedly, and precisely. Humbert quotes Jean Farlow’s one reference to the names of her boxer dogs, “Cavall and Melampus” (Lolita, New York: Vintage, 1989, 89). Neither Jean nor Humbert nor most readers

[32]

know that their names allude, respectively, to King Arthur’s favorite hound in a tale in The Mabinogion and to Actaeon’s lead hound in Ovid’s version of the Diana and Actaeon story, in Metamorphoses, III (Melampus leads the chase after Actaeon, when Diana has enchanted him into the form of a stag). The dual reference extends still further the already elaborate motif of the Enchanted Hunters, so central to Lolita (see my "Lolita: What We Know and What We Don’t,” Cycnos 24:1 [2007], 215-28 and “The Art of Literature and the Science of Literature,” American Scholar 77:2 [2008], 118-27). Like the absurd noms de plume of the authors of pornographic fiction, Cavall and Melampus seem to wink at the reader, in this case to whisper: Wouldn’t you just like to know what’s behind our names? In preparing the Annotated Lolita Alfred Appel, Jr., could not identify the dogs’ names, and Nabokov never divulged to Appel their ultimate sources.

Readers of “The Vane Sisters” (written 1951, published (1959) have noted for some time that Sybil Vane, the lesser heroine of the story, is also the name of a character in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890)—a surprising source, compared with Nabokov’s many admiring echoes of favorites like Shakespeare, Pushkin, Baudelaire, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Joyce and Proust, or his mocking glances at bêtes noires like Dostoevsky, Freud, Mann and Eliot (see Isabel Murray, “ ‘Plagiatisme’: Nabokov’s ‘The Vane Sisters’ and The Picture of Dorian Gray,” Durham University Journal 39 [1977], 69-72). In Wilde’s novelistic fable, Sybil Vane is the name of the heroine who commits suicide when Dorian Gray suddenly rejects her love, as her namesake in Nabokov’s story commits suicide after D. rejects her love (D.’s name also offers a match with the initial of “Dorian”). Unlike “Cavall and Melampus,” “Sybil Vane” in Nabokov’s story does not provoke a search—’’Vane” is a genuine if uncommon surname (unlike “Shade”!)—even if it does yield a find in relatively
recent English literature.

[33]
Cynthia Vane’s name, too, seems in no more need of explanation, especially once we know the Wildean source of Sybil’s name: the matching first syllables of “Cynthia” and “Sybil” would seem reason enough. But Nabokov has taken her name, like Sybil’s, from a literary source. The first word in the first of the elegies of Sextus Propertius (c. 50-c. 5 BCE) is “Cynthia” (“Cynthia prima suis miserum me cepit ocellis, / contactum nullis ante cupidinibus”: “Cynthia first with her eyes ensnared me, poor wretch, that had previously been untouched by desire”: Propertius: Elegies, ed. and trans. G.P. Goold [Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1990], 42-43). Of Propertius’s seventy-two love elegies, sixty focus on his mistress, Cynthia: the subject of the first twenty elegies of book 1, she becomes one subject and one mistress among others in book 2 and receives no mention at all until late in book 3, where Propertius announces himself free of her spell. In book 4 (written c. 20-1 6bce) she features only twice, in two elegies regarded as among Propertius’s finest, 4.7 and 4.8.

Propertius left his elegies untitled, but the translator of the most recent Loeb edition, G. P. Goold, adds titles, and aptly chooses for 4.7 “Cynthia’s ghost.” The poem begins:

Sunt aliquid Manes: letum non omnia finit,
   luridaque evictos effugit umbra rogos.
Cynthia namque meo visast incumbere fulcro,
   murmur ad extremae nuper humata tubae,
cum mihi somnus ab exsequiis penderet amoris,
   et quererer lecti frigida regna mei.

In Goold’s translation:

So ghosts do exist: death is not the end of all, and a pale
shade vanquishes and escapes the pyre. For I dreamt that
Cynthia, who had lately been buried to the drone of the
funeral trumpet, was leaning over my bed when after my
love’s interment sleep hovered over me and I bemoaned
the cold empire of my bed. (408-09)

[34]

In the translation into French by D. Paganelli in the Bude series of bilingual editions, Nabokov’s preferred way of reading Greek and Latin classics:

Les Mânes sont quelque chose: la mort n’est pas la fin
de tout et l’ombre blême échappe victorieusement au
bûcher. Cynthie m’a paru se pencher sur mon lit,—Cynthie
récemment inhumée au bord de la route et de ses bruits,—à
l’heure où le sommeil, après les funérailles de mon amour,
planant sur moi sans se poser, je me plaignais de trouver
trop grande et trop froide ma couche. (Properce, Élégies,
Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1929, 149)

These opening lines immediately suggest multiple implications for “The Vane Sisters.” Cynthia Vane has a theory of the existence of ghosts in the form of “intervenient auras” (Stories of Vladimir Nabokov, New York: Knopf, 1995, 620), but the narrator pooh-poohs it, until on the day of the story he accidentally hears of Cynthia’s death, following closely on that of her sister Sybil, and starts thinking about life after death in a more haunted way. Home alone, he fears “Cynthia’s phantom” (626). He can fall asleep only after dawn, “and when I slipped into sleep the sun through the tawny window shades penetrated a dream that somehow was full of Cynthia.” Nevertheless, he feels disappointed, for the dream seems so vague compared with the crystalline clarity of Cynthia’s art. He tries to find some more concrete sign of her, “to reread my dream—backward, diagonally, up, down—trying hard to unravel something Cynthia-like in it, something strange
and suggestive that must be there.” He continues, in the final paragraph of the story, summing up his disappointment:

I could isolate, consciously, little. Everything seemed
blurred, yellow-clouded, yielding nothing tangible. Her
inept acrostics, maudlin evasions, theopathies—every
recollection formed ripples of mysterious meaning.
Everything seemed yellowly blurred, illusive, lost. (627)

[35]

Attentive readers have been primed, behind the narrator’s back, to read this paragraph as an acrostic message from dead Cynthia and dead Sybil: “Icicles by Cynthia, meter from me, Sybil.” That message reveals to us that Cynthia’s ghost has confirmed the theory of intervenient auras she advanced in her mortal state: she has attracted the narrator’s attention by the shadows that dripping icicles cast on sun-bright walls and thereby lured him out of his usual routes to a place where, with her and her sister’s spectral prompting, he will hear of her death. Late in the afternoon, far from his usual eating-place, he stops for dinner at a restaurant near the end of his wanderings and emerges after nightfall, to be detained another crucial moment as he takes in the strange ruddy tinge in the shadow of parking meters cast—this time with Sybil’s help—by the red light of the restaurant sign. Pausing on the pavement, he is greeted by D., Sybil’s former lover, who happens to mention to him that Cynthia died the previous week.

Like the start of Propertius’s elegy, the start and the finish of Nabokov’s story affirm: “So ghosts do exist: death is not the end of all.” The visitation from Cynthia’s ghost dominates Propertius’s poem. After the five lines quoted above, the next seven describe her apparition (“eosdem habuit secum quibus est elata capillos, / eosdem oculos ... “: “Her hair, her eyes were the same as when she was borne to the grave ... “), the next eighty-two report what Cynthia’s ghost says, and the two lines left report her disappearance (“haec postquam querula mecum sub lite peregit, / inter complexus excidit umbra meos”: “When she had thus brought to an end her querulous indictment, the apparition vanished, baffling my embrace”). Propertius writes that he “dreamt that Cynthia . . . was leaning over my bed” (italics added), but in Greek and Roman literature dreams of the dead or the immortals are regularly considered as actual visitations, not just subjective impressions.

Nabokov’s narrator also has a dream full of Cynthia that he thinks too unfocused to be a message, but that we can see has been part of a continuing visitation. He complains: “Everything seemed blurred, yellow-clouded. . . . Everything seemed

[36]

yellowly blurred, illusive, lost.” But note that he does not fall asleep, because of his fear of Cynthia’s phantom, until dawn: “when I slipped into sleep the sun through the tawny window shades penetrated a dream that somehow was full of Cynthia.” The yellow of the sun comes through the shades—and through the shades or ghosts of Cynthia and Sybil—just as the shadows of the icicles the previous day depend on the sun, like many of the most dazzling effects in Cynthia’s paintings.

Notice that Propertius too uses umbra, “shade,” to mean “ghost,” both at the beginning of the poem (“luridaque . . . umbra”: “and a pale shade”) and the end (“excidit umbra”: “the apparition vanished”). Nabokov echoes the immemorial but also, probably, the specifically Propertian use of “shade” in having his narrator led by the “shades” of Cynthia and Sybil through the “pointed shadows” of the dripping icicles (615) and the “lean ghost, the elongated umbra cast by a parking meter upon some damp snow” (616).

At one point in her monologue, Cynthia commands Propertius:

pomosis Anio qua spumifer incubat arvis,
    et nunquam Herculeo numine pallet ebur,
hic carmen media dignum me scribe columna,
    sed breve, quod currens vector ab urbe legat:

HIC TIBURTINA IACET AUREA CYNTHIA TERRA:
     ACCESSIT RIPAE LAUS, ANIENE, TUAE.
 

Where foaming Anio irrigates orchard fields and, by favour of Hercules, ivory never yellows, there on the middle of a pillar inscribe an epitaph worthy of me, but brief, such as the traveler may read as he hastens from Rome:
 

HERE IN TIBUR’S SOIL LIES GOLDEN CYNTHIA:
FRESH GLORY, ANIO, IS ADDED TO THY BANKS. (ll. 81-86, pp. 416-17)

[37]

Scholars comment: “Columnar grave monuments are well known from ancient landscape paintings. . . . The column seems always to have carried a statue or vase. Inscriptions on columns are often put on a tablet carved about eye level on the shaft” (L. Richardson, Jr., ed., Propertius: Elegies I-IV [Norman, OK: Oklahoma Univ. Press], 461). Three remarks:
1) the inscription commanded by Cynthia’s ghost in Propertius seems pointedly recalled in the inscription Cynthia’s and her sister’s ghosts make into the last paragraph of the narrator’s memorial tribute to them, “The Vane Sisters” itself; 2) “golden Cynthia” in Propertius may be echoed in the association of Cynthia Vane with sunlight, even in the narrator’s sleep and his sense of a dream “yellow-clouded” and “yellowly blurred”; 3) the poem’s column may also lie behind some of the Cynthia Vane effects that the story’s narrator observes:

With ever so slight a note of meretricious appeal, narrow
passages between buildings revealed treasures of brick
and purple. I remarked for the first time the humble
fluting—last echoes of the grooves on the shafts of
columns—ornamenting a garbage can, and I also saw the
rippling on its lid—circles diverging from a fantastically
ancient center. (616: italics added)

Confirming this, surely, is the fact that Cynthia as portrayed by Propertius is usually a meretrix, a whore: “Most of the time Cynthia and the nameless mistresses of the second and third books are meretrices, more or less hard hearted and strong willed women, fiercely independent and accustomed to manipulate their lovers with a high hand” (Richardson 5).

At the start of 1951, unusually, Nabokov kept a medium-format Yearbook to note down observations, thoughts, plans and dreams. On February 16, in the midst of writing “The Vane Sisters,” he wrote there: “From the point of view of evolutionary dialectics the hereafter finds its beautiful proof in the following series: 1. Time without consciousness (the lower animal world) 2. Time with consciousness (man = chelovek =

[38]

conscious Time) 3. Consciousness without Time (the future of the immortal soul)” (Vladimir Nabokov Archive, Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection, New York Public Library). He does not echo these musings explicitly in “The Vane Sisters”—the last chapter of Speak, Memory and the poem “Pale Fire” come closer—but he provides there a kind of fictional “proof’ of the hereafter: at least in this story’s world, ghosts do exist; the narrator’s very expression of his doubts that he can see anything in this dream “somehow .. . full of Cynthia” concrete enough to confirm her presence constitute the proof, the exact, concrete demonstration of the ghosts’ existence and their part in his life. No wonder Nabokov names the female lead of his story after Propertius’s Cynthia, in honor of the dream-apparition of her that Propertius sees after her death: “So ghosts do exist: death is not the end of all, and a pale shade vanquishes and escapes the pyre.”

—Brian Boyd, Auckland

THE ARTIST AND THE APE. ON LUXURIA AND LOLITA

“For we are most artistically caged.”
Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire

In “On A Book Entitled Lolita, ” Vladimir Nabokov recounts
that work’s origin:

The first little throb of Lolita went through me late in
1939 or early in 1940, in Paris, at a time when I was laid
up with a severe attack of intercostal neuralgia. As far as
I can recall, the initial shiver of inspiration was somehow
prompted by a newspaper story about an ape in the Jardin

[39]

des Plantes, who, after months of coaxing by a scientist,
produced the first drawing ever charcoaled by an animal:
this sketch showed the bars of the poor creature’s cage
(Annotated Lolita. Edited with preface, introduction, and
notes by Alfred Appel Jr., 1970; revised and updated edition:
New York: Vintage International, 1991, 311). 

Nabokov’s reader might ask two questions upon reading this account. The first is what about the article in question prompted “the initial shiver of inspiration.” The second is why Nabokov chooses to recount the incident. The answer to both these questions is complicated by the fact that there is every reason to believe that Nabokov invented the incident. In his annotations, Alfred Appel underlines “the prison trope” found therein, but says nothing about the actual newspaper story (Annotated Lolita, 311). The most comprehensive annotations currently available to scholars, those of Dieter Zimmer’s German edition, do turn to Nabokov’s source—or, rather, its absence. Zimmer notes that the many efforts undertaken to find the article, or the experiment it describes, have been unsuccessful, remarking that, “despite extensive efforts, this article.. .has never been uncovered and is perhaps a misremembering or a fiction [falsche Erinnerung
oder eine Fiktion]” (Lolita. Rowohlt: Reinbek bei Hamburg, 1995. Revised edition, 2007,691-692). Nabokov’s son Dmitri has added that neither he nor, to his knowledge, anyone else, has succeeded in locating either it or other reference to the experiment in question (email of Wednesday, November 13, 2002 5:51 AM. See Nabokov List-Serve: http://listserv.ucsb.edu).

Several possibilities present themselves: the highly unlikely one that the experiment was real, as was the article, and that the efforts of scholars to track them down have simply failed to find them. Far more likely is the other option Zimmer presents: that what Nabokov presented as the inspiration for his most

[40]

famous fiction was itself a fiction. As his readers well know, Nabokov was meticulous about details and mischievous about fictions. If the incident of the artistic ape was indeed invented for the occasion, the question becomes: to what end? For playful amusement? As a serious symbol, emblem, parable, or, even, paradox?

I have discussed in passing what shadow these bars might cast on Lolita—what the incident might reveal about Humbert’s art and what separates him from his love (Style is Matter, 182 ff.). I said little, however, about what lies confined behind bars—the ape—and it is to that creature that f would like to turn now.

As critics such as Thomas Frosch have noted, the figure of the ape is not confined to this afterword (cf. “Parody and Authenticity in Lolita” in Ellen Pifer, ed., Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita: A Casebook. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003, 39-56). Humbert describes his particular type of virile handsomeness as “attractively simian” (Annotated Lolita, 106). In mortal danger, Quilty later exclaims, “Show me your badge instead of shooting at my foot, you ape, you” (Annotated Lolita, 298). But it is not only the beastly Humbert but also his jealously guarded Beauty who is party to such associations. Humbert wishes at one point to kiss Lolita’s “delicate-boned, long-toed, monkeyish feet,” and notes not long thereafter her “monkeyish nimbleness” (Annotated Lolita, 53; 61). During Lolita’s captivity Humbert returns with “bananas for [his] monkey” (Annotated Lolita, 221).

“I detest symbols and allegories,” Nabokov remarks later in “On A Book Entitled Lolita,” echoing a statement he had already made on many occasions and was to continue to make for the rest of his life (Annotated Lolita, 314). Nabokov was indeed contemptuous of conventional symbols or allegories placed into works of art, but this does not mean that he did not include artful signs and symbols when they could be woven into the intimate texture of the work. If, then, he invented the

[41]

inspiration for Lolita, what does his artistically caged creature convey to his reader?

Apes are touchingly close to humans. We share with them the vast majority of our genetic heritage and they have mastered skills once thought to be the exclusive province of man. (Appel notes that the name John Ray seems to be borrowed from an English naturalist. He does not mention, however, that, in 1693, this John Ray coined the term “Anthropomorpha” similar to man,” for those animals bearing significant similarities to man—such as primates). Historically, and artistically, we have stressed our difference from them, projected onto them two of our more notable vices: hollow mimicry and brute sensuality. Horace invokes the ape in the context of literary production, referring to “that ape of yours who knows nothing but how to imitate Calvus and Catullus” (Sermones 1.10.18-19). This classical association is handed down to the Middle Ages and the Renaissance; Dante has a counterfeiter boast of his being “a fine ape of nature [di natura buona scimmia]” (the remark can be understood also as being “a fine ape by nature”) and Shakespeare offers a Julio Romano who can fool nature, “so perfectly is he her ape” (Inferno 29.139; The Winter’s Tale 5.2.98). But such acts of hollow imitation, of mere mimicry, are not the only ones associated with the ape.

Nabokov once conceded that “some of my characters are, no doubt, pretty beastly, but I really don’t care, they are outside my inner self like the mournful monsters of a cathedral facade” (SO, 19). When one looks to the exiled figures on cathedral façades, we find amongst the other monstrous apparitions, the ape. The most celebrated instance is to be found on the western façade of the cathedral at Chartres where a woman is accompanied by a tamed ape. “Unfortunately, the lady cannot be readily identified,” writes H.W. Janson in his Apes and Ape Lore In the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, “but the presence of the ape suggests that she must be someone who successfully overcame the vice of luxuria” (London: The Warburg Institute

[42]

and the University of London, 1952,51). The ape was a symbol of luxuria, the mortal sin of lust (or lechery). It is in this same spirit that the thirteenth century German mystic Mechthild of Magdebourg described the soul dedicated to God as having “cast off the ape of worldliness” (“hat den Affen der Welt von sich geworfen”) (ibid.). Three centuries later, Shakespeare will readily and repeatedly associate apes with lechery, having Falstafif refer to someone as “lecherous as a monkey” and Iago invoke those who are “hot as monkeys” (King Henry IV, Part Two 3.2.286; Othello 3.3.409).

In Humbert’s narrative, animalic associations serve to exculpate Humbert the Human. Not only is “monkeyish” Lo described in the ways noted above, she also reaches out a “hot little paw,” just as she later shows her “little claws” (Annotated Lolita, 53; 176). During her captivity, Humbert recounts how, “with the quiet murmured order one gives a sweatstained distracted cringing trained animal even in the worst of plights (what mad hope or hate makes the young beast’s flanks pulsate, when black stars pierce the heart of the tamer!) I made Lo get up... ” (Annotated Lolita, 179). The implicit animal of Humbert’s dark metaphor would seem more like a large cat than an ape (with pulsating flanks), but is nevertheless part of a more and less subtle series of associations linking Lolita with the animal. The subterranean sense of such metaphors is that if Lolita is like an animal, then giving way to animalic desires in her presence seems less of a trespass. The point of such associations is clearly not to introduce the sin of luxuria in the narrow sense of the Church Fathers, but, instead, that of a sensuality gone astray that tolerates, and employs, coercion. Ennius calls “the ape [simia]” “that most repulsive animal,” immediately thereafter noting, “how much it is like [similis] ourselves” (quoted by Cicero De Natura Decorum 1.35). The two terms—simia and similis—are not related, but are, of course, similar enough to seem so. This millennial association is found in modem times, in most striking form in Kafka’s

[43]

“Report to the Academy” (1917). Therein, we find an ape so pained by the bars of its cage that it falls back upon its native gift—mimicry—to find its way out. Through subtle and steady imitation of human behavior, Rotpeter is granted his freedom, becoming something of a cross between a sideshow freak and a testament to the benefits of European civilization. His cage is opened and he enters the world of men. Readers of Kafka will not be surprised to learn that this proves disappointing.

At least three conclusions can be drawn from the first stirrings of Lolita as described— perhaps mischievously—in Nabokov’s afterword. One is the degree to which Nabokov sought to underline the animalic both in Humbert’s actions and his descriptions of Lolita. A second is to stress the role of mere mimicry as it arises in Humbert's reality and Lolita’s fantasies (such as the theatricals that play an important part in her escape). The most poignant as well as most disturbing of the three points to a more fundamental aspect of the story: the unsettling similarity between those we consider to be mournful monsters and ourselves. Part of what renders Lolita so disturbing is its presentation of a monster who is not merely a monster. We like to think that we share nothing with those who commit contemptible acts, that they are utterly unlike us and operate beyond the bounds of understanding and empathy. The reason for this is, of course, that such thinking makes our understanding of the world, and the suffering that abounds in it, easier to understand. That this has everything to do with Lolita is to be seen in the fact that nothing would have been easier than for Nabokov to tell the tale of a pedophile who was completely and utterly repulsive to the reader. What is singular about the book, and what made it such a formidable challenge, is its portrayal of a pedophile who was not everywhere and only unintelligent and brutish, who was not simply and straightforwardly incapable of empathy or understanding, but, instead, a complex character with whom we are tempted to identify. This requires of the reader that he or she walk what

[44]

is often the finest of lines between understanding acts and excusing them, and it is in this light that Nabokov’s subtle inspiration seems most enduringly apt.

—Leland de la Durantaye, Cambridge, Massachusetts

THE BRIDGES IN NABOKOV’S BEND SINISTER AND IN ÖDÖN VON HORVÁTH’S HIN UND HER (BACK AND FORTH)

In the second chapter of Bend Sinister, Adam Krug has to cross the Neptune Bridge on his way home from the hospital (Vladimir Nabokov, Novels and Memoirs 1941-1951, New York: Library of America, 1996,176). Ashe has “a pass” (174), he assumes that he will be able to cross the bridge from its northern end without any trouble. Unfortunately the officials guarding the bridge cannot read, let alone understand, his permit. They eventually let him go, but when he arrives at the other end of the bridge, he learns that the guards should have signed his pass. He is thus sent back to the northern side. The guards do “not recognize him at all” (182) and are puzzled by the document he shows them. A grocer who has also been detained suggests to the guards that he sign Krug’s pass and vice versa. The head guard accepts this solution. Krug and the grocer then walk across the bridge. The grocer fills Krug’s ears with drivel about the great new ruler of the country, while Krug tries to blot out his words by counting the lampposts and thinking of something else. When they arrive at the southern end of the bridge, the guards are gone. Later in the novel, Peter Quist—a man who has just promised to smuggle Krug and his son abroad—suggests that he and Krug meet on that same bridge near the twentieth lamppost. This meeting never
[45]

takes place, of course, as Quist is one of the spies who have been watching Krug.

The idea of developing an extended scene on a bridge guarded at both ends is not surprising in a novel dealing with a totalitarian government and its attempts to control each person’s every step, especially at night. Although the bridge connects two parts of the same city, it is regarded as a sensitive location which might invite subversive activities. A bridge’s usual function of facilitating communication or trade between two places is exchanged with the notion of the bridge as a method of keeping people within a delimited area, of inhibiting travel, of providing a site which grants an opportunity to control all those who need the bridge after all to get from one place to another.

Upon rereading Bend Sinister, I was reminded of a play by Ödön von Horváth (1901-1938), a Hungarian author who wrote drama and fiction in German. He penned Hin und Her (Back and Forth) after leaving Berlin for Vienna in 1933. Horváth, a Hungarian citizen, was born in Fiume (now Rijeka), grew up in Budapest, Munich, Pressburg (now Bratislava), and Vienna. He began to focus on writing in the 1920s and published his first book in 1922. His parents—Horváth’s father was a diplomat—lived in Murnau, a small resort town south of Munich, from 1924 through 1933.

Horváth celebrated his first major success as a playwright in 1929, and he was at the height of his popularity in Germany in 1931 and 1932. Ullstein published his works until 1932. In 1931, he received the prestigious Kleist Prize. Because the Nazis rejected this prize as a decoration supposedly given by foreign-born or Jewish authors to other foreign-born or Jewish authors, they regarded it as an implicit expression of Horváth’s anti-Nazi outlook. In the same year, he served as a witness in court against Nazi bullies who had tried to break up a meeting of the Social Democratic Party in Murnau. As soon as the Nazis took control of the federal government in

[46]

January of 1933, Horváth’s works were forbidden, and his books were publicly burnt. After the SA (short for Sturmabteilung, a special Nazi police unit used to terrorize unwanted citizens) searched Horváth’s parents’ home—obviously because of their son’s well-known and publicly stated antipathy to the National Socialists—the family realized their precarious situation and left Murnau. Horváth’s conduct after 1933 has been regarded as controversial (see Karsten Brandt, “Die Dissoziation eines Schriftstellers in den Jahren 1934-1936: Ödön von Horváth und H. W. Becker,” Ph.D. diss., Humboldt-Universität Berlin, 2004). The playwright and novelist lived primarily in Vienna but returned to Germany in 1934 in the hope of continuing his career by joining the German Writers’ Association. Until 1937, he worked in the German film industry as a screenplay writer under the pseudonym H. W. Becker. At the same time, his plays and novels remained forbidden in Germany, and his works were only sporadically performed in Vienna, Zurich, and Prague. It is curious that a writer who indicted Nazism and any other kind of totalitarianism in his works hoped to find ways of continuing his career in a country in which he was not welcome. In a manuscript written in November 1937, Horváth rejects most of the plays he wrote between 1932 and 1936 as mere experiments. He calls one of his dramas his “fall from grace” because he compromised for the sake of earning a living. In a larger sense, he thus describes his attempts to make ends meet in Nazi Germany (as a dramatist and screenplay writer) and his misguided willingness to compromise as not listening to his conscience and as prostituting himself (for a facsimile and a transcription of this manuscript, see Traugott Krischke and Hans F. Prokop, eds., Ödön von Horváth: Leben und Werk in Dokumenten und Bildern, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1972, 124-25).

In 1937 he was officially expelled from the German Writers’ Association. His 1938 novels Jugend ohne Gott (Youth without

[47]

God) and Ein Kind unserer Zeit (A Child of Our Time) appeared in an émigré press in Amsterdam and were blacklisted by the Nazis. Once Austria joined the Third Reich, Horváth left for Budapest. In the spring of 193 8, he traveled to Paris to negotiate with Robert Siodmak about an American movie version of Jugend ohne Gott. Following a meeting on June 1st, he was walking along the Champs-Elysees towards his hotel during extremely stormy weather when he was hit and instantly killed by a falling tree branch. (This biographical sketch is based on Kurt Bartsch, Ödön von Horváth, Stuttgart: Metzler, 2000, 5-15, and Elisabeth Tworek and Brigitte Salmen, Ödönvon Horváth, 2001, Murnau: Schloßimuseum des Marktes Murnau, 2003, 39-40, 55-61, 76.)

I do not assume that Nabokov and Horváth ever met. I find no evidence which suggests that Horváth and Nabokov were familiar with each other’s works. One can only say that, due to Horváth’s critical acclaim in the early 1930s, Nabokov could have heard or read about Horváth’s plays in Berlin. Horváth could have seen German translations of Nabokov’s works published by Ullstein (German translations of Mashen’ka and Korol’ Dama Valet were serialized by the Ullstein -owned Vossische Zeitung in 1928 and 1930 respectively; the novels appeared as Ullstein books in the same years). But in the bridge scene in Bend Sinister and Horváth’s use of a bridge in Hin und Her, the authors employ the same setting as a means of illustrating the grotesqueness of oppressive regimes and the detrimental effect of such regimes on individual lives.

As described above, in Bend Sinister the bridge separates two parts of a city. In Horváth’s play, a bridge separates two fictitious countries that are not on good terms but that nevertheless resemble each other. The guards on either side are not illiterate and not quite as boorish as the ones in Nabokov’s novel, but the bridge guards and their police colleagues are depicted in rather vulgar terms: for instance, the policeman Mrschitzka who visits the bridge guard Szamek gives himself

[48]

a pedicure with his bayonet (see Ödön von Horváth, “Hin und Her,” Eine Unbekannte aus der Seine und andere Stucke, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2001, 90,92). The title of the play hints at the experience of the character Ferdinand Havlicek who is expelled by one state (because his drug store business went bankrupt; see 82) but cannot enter the other state (because, although he was born there, a recent law requires him to renew his citizenship at regular intervals; see 84). The ex post facto law turns Havlicek into a bridge dweller who is sent back and forth throughout the play. The play closes with the imprisonment of smugglers (for which some of the characters will collect a reward) and with a sequence of ironic songs about happiness and patriotism presented by an array of suddenly happy couples. The threat that the two governments posed to Havlicek and others is only superficially removed. The ability of arbitrary governments to infringe on their citizens’ rights remains intact, as the parody of a stereotypical comedy ending indicates. The lyrics of the all-too-happy couples’ songs reflect the tension between their hope for happiness and their awareness that happiness may not be their lot, between being at home somewhere and finding peace there. Havlicek’s daring demand to abolish borders—both in the sense of frontiers and of restrictions within one’s thoughts and wishes—is immediately criticized by, for instance, the bridge guard Szamek whose livelihood depends on protecting a frontier (152). The exchange on this topic ends with several characters singing jointly: “Without borders [there is] no culture!” (“Ohne Grenzen keine Kultur!” [154]). Havlicek’s protests remain unheeded. The supposed necessity of frontiers remains largely undisputed, although most characters were negatively affected by the separation imposed by the arbitrary borders (also see Paul M. Malone, “Ödön von Horváth‘s Back and Forth: Teetering between Exile and Return,” Modern Drama 46.1 [Spring 2003], 65).

As has become clear, Horváth’s play illustrates the excesses of red tape in countries run by oppressive regimes. While the

[49]

bridge guards complain about their poverty, they enjoy their authority over others and do their best to show their physical power. At the same time, their authority is ridiculed. One of them has his office in the dilapidated tower of a medieval castle (Horváth, “Hin und Her,” 84); the other one accidentally arrests the two heads of state after they meet incognito for secret negotiations on the bridge, mistaking them for drug traffickers (120, 142). While one of the guards admits, “In the overall machinery of the state, individual fates are frequently ground up” (“Im allgemeinen Staatengetriebe wird gar oft ein persönliches Schicksal zerrieben” [85]), he nevertheless insists on enforcing nonsensical laws (see Malone, 62). Similarly, Havlicek is not regarded as a human being, but rather objectified into a “case for the officials” (“Ein amtlicher Fall” [Horváth, “Hin und Her,” 87]). Both of these examples indicate that the officials representing the legal system have certain phrases in their repertoire that have nothing to do with comforting or helping a victim of the legal system.

This is underscored by the fact that, as evening is approaching, Havlicek desperately exclaims that he will sleep on the bridge (107). Nobody is impressed by what is meant to sound like a ludicrous idea or a threat. That a person could be caught in no-man’s-land between two countries—a situation familiar to the émigré Nabokov and to Horváth who was denied Bavarian citizenship in the 1920s and had to travel to Hungary periodically to renew his Hungarian citizenship—is a result of the inhumane system. A similar reference appears in Bend Sinister when one of the bridge guards (who cannot grasp why Krug has returned to the northern end of Neptune Bridge) asks Krug, “Do you live on the bridge?” (Nabokov, 183).

Although Hin und Her was among the plays which Horváth rejected as mere experiments and maybe also for not being clear enough in their stance against oppression and appreciation of humanist principles, this drama leaves no doubt about the negative consequences of totalitarianism on individual lives.

[50]

The role of the bridge and the fact that in the play and in Nabokov’s novel the totalitarian countries are, on the one hand, fictionalized and, on the other hand, reflections of dictatorships existing at the time, stress a similar anti-totalitarian outlook. Krug can only be saved through madness, death, and the departure from his fictive earthly life. Havlicek realizes that he is the only one who speaks up in favor of personal liberty and individual consciousness, whereas the other characters stick to their old ways.

Other works by Horváth also provide interesting comparisons with Nabokov’s, especially regarding the depiction of philistinism and of the detrimental effects of oppression on individual consciousness. Further comparative analyses should reveal ways in which these two writers who both experienced exile, albeit exile caused by different historical events and leading to diverse personal circumstances, dealt with the effects of totalitarianism on the individual and on human interaction. Krug’s verbal prowess clashes with the intellectual backwardness of the bridge guards; his ability to cross the bridge is the result of coincidences (the grocer’s idea of signing Krug’s pass and the head guard’s acceptance of this suggestion). In this sense, his experience on the bridge is as absurd as Havlicek’s. The latter at first appears doomed to shuttle back and forth forever; his sudden prospect of marriage, relative wealth, and a new home is marred by the imminent
threat of being robbed of his livelihood and his national identity by arbitrary rulers and their helpers.

—Nassim W. Balestrini, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz, Germany

[51]

A NEW OR LITTLE-KNOWN SUBTEXT IN LOLITA

How we read a novel often has as much to do with our recent readings and musings as it does with the work’s actual content. Details that we light upon as significant are illuminated by our abiding concerns, both conscious and unconscious. This is not exactly the same as saying that our presuppositions guide and shape our readings, or that our theories often produce and limit our discoveries, but it is a related observation. This phenomenon is a question both of epistemology and of scientific method, and it is one of the guiding forces of Nabokov’s creativity. The mind’s ability to recognize some patterns and completely miss others, no less obtrusive, is a recurring theme in Nabokov’s art. The Gift's Konstantin Godunov-Cherdyntsev warned Fyodor about the “shadow of the instrument” obscuring the truth (Gift 331), and throughout “Father’s Butterflies” he is offered as a model practitioner of the inductive method and scientific work without theoretical bias. Nabokov wants his characters and his readers all to transcend the limits of their own predispositions and preferences when exploring the world around them and the texts they confront.

It is therefore with a sense of irony that I present a little find that was very much guided by my theoretical entrenchment. Having worked for several years now on Nabokov’s relations to scientific discovery, its history and philosophy, I have become a perfect example of a scholar reading with an agenda. With the aid of this bias, I happened to be rereading, or re-remembering, Humbert’s eleventh diary entry in Chapter Eleven (Monday), near the end of which Dolly tells him, “Don’t tell Mother but I’ve eaten all your bacon” (AnLo 50). Only, perhaps, because I had been recently studying the overt connection of Sir Francis Bacon to “grudinka which means ‘bacon’ in several Slavic languages” (in Bend Sinister, 105), did I begin to suspect that this instance, too, must be a case of Baconian encryption, if not exactly a cryptogram. (Recall, too, that Bacon is also cited in

[52]

Pale Fire as the intermediate source of the aphorism, “It is the glory of God to hide a thing, and the glory of man to find it.”)

I was encouraged in this precipitous conclusion by the fact of the entry’s predominantly epistemological tone. Humbert sits in his room, attempting to establish mentally the location of Lo and the contents of the Haze Home’s various rooms:

I am like one of those inflated pale spiders you see in old
gardens. Sitting in the middle of a luminous web and giving
little jerks to this or that strand. My web is spread all over
the house as I listen from my chair where I sit like a wily
wizard. Is Lo in her room? Gently I tug on the silk. She is
not. Just heard the toilet paper cylinder make its staccato
sound as it is turned; and no footfalls has my outflung
filament traced from the bathroom back to her room. Is she
still brushing her teeth? [. . .] No. The bathroom door has
just slammed so one has to feel elsewhere about the house
for the beautiful warm-colored prey. Let us have a strand
of silk descend the stairs. I satisfy myself by this means
that she is not in the kitchen—not banging the refrigerator
door or screeching at her detested mama. . . Well, let us
grope and hope. Ray-like, I glide in thought to the parlor
and find the radio silent. ... So my nymphet is not in the
house at all! Gone! What I thought was a prismatic weave
turns out to be an old gray cobweb, the house is empty, is
dead. And then comes Lolita’s soft sweet chuckle through
my half-open door “Don’t tell mother but I’ve eaten all
your bacon.” (49-59)

This scene takes place before Lolita has been “safely solipsized,” and Humbert’s silky threads of knowledge are, while they last, remarkable for his confidence in what they reveal about the world outside his room. Curiously, they become an old gray cobweb when “the nymphet” is not found, whereas in fact their false news and epistemological ineffectiveness is belied by Dolly’s

[53]

sudden appearance. Humbert’s theoretical conclusions about the home’s contents are disproved by the factual girl, and by the absence of his bacon.

This discovery would have remained an idle fancy had I not decided to start looking for spiders in the works of Bacon, where I soon found them. In The Advancement of Learning, there is a distinctly relevant passage that in some circles is so well-known that there are even articles written about it (because it too apparently has subtexts; see e.g., R. H. Bowers, “Bacon’s Spider Simile,” Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 17, No. 1.
[Jan., 1956]: 133-135. Bowers suggests that the passage is so well known as not to need quotation, but reproduces it anyway for “convenience”). Writing about the contrast between true and false learning, and between true and false scientific work, Bacon wrote:

For the wit and mind of man, if it work upon matter, which
is the contemplation of the creatures of God, worketh
according to the stuff, and is limited thereby; but if it
work upon itself, as the spider worketh his web, then it
is endless, and brings forth indeed cobwebs of learning,
admirable for the fineness of thread and work, but of no
substance or profit. (Bk 1, Pt IV, Sec. 5)

Leaving aside that the targets of Bacon’s critique were the “schoolmen” (scholastics) whose “dictator” was Aristotle, it should be noted that the main contrast here is between the mind’s engagement with the outside world and its tendency to get distracted by contemplation of its own ingenuity. There is “matter,” or the “creatures of God” and “stuff’; and there is “the mind itself.” As many readers have noted, when Humbert succeeds in solipsizing Lolita, she ceases to be “stuff’ for him and becomes only his phantasm, his created image of the nubile nymphet. In this early attempt to ensnare her, Humbert’s web itself represents his knowledge and its attempt to create

[54]

and become his reality and “prismatic weave.” But external, independent Dolly still exists as stubborn stuff, and her appearance and theft of his bacon offers an early warning of the direction in which he is heading and the falsity of his effort. The world he is building is all cobweb and no stuff.

This evocation of Bacon’s insistence on empirical science reinforces the theme’s beginning in the novel’s first paragraph, offered in the voice of John Ray, Jr. That Humbert is “Ray- like” provides one local connection to the seventeenth-century taxonomist John Ray, another early empiricist. The younger Ray’s book, “Do the Senses Make Sense?”, likewise implies the question of mind’s relation to “stuff.” Nabokov chose to echo the very same theme when, in “On a Book Entitled Lolita,” he suggested that his novel was sparked when he read about “the first drawing ever charcoaled by an animal: this drawing showed the bars of the poor creature's cage” (AnLo, 311). Now considered apocryphal, this sad myth represents the same difficulty faced by all of Nabokov’s thinking creatures, but in much starker terms. Humbert’s imprisonment of Dolly becomes, in turn, his own prison, too—both in his inability to see past his phantasm to the real, empirical girl, and in his fears of loss and law (the bars of the future).

In Bend Sinister Bacon is evoked primarily as a token of cryptography via alleged acrostics in Shakespeare (and secondarily as a cipher for science), while in Pale Fire he serves, concealed, as an icon for hidden things that may be discovered by the careful and curious. There is no lack of cryptograms in Lolita, either, and Bacon’s presence along with the “paper chase” and its Shakespearian overtones brings on a double-edged concern. On the one hand, it encourages the continued quest for concealed messages in Lolita and perhaps other works as well (most such quests have been successful in varying degrees); on the other, Nabokov’s disparagement of Baconian acrostic-seekers in Speak, Memory (20) (thanks to Jansy Mello for reminding me of this passage)—they serve

[55]

as his analogue of Freudian symbol-hunters!—combines with the paper chase’s ultimate futility to suggest that such code- breaking may be beside the point.

There is no doubt that anagrams, cryptograms, and acrostics play a significant role in several of Nabokov’s works. To the extent that all of these in some manner hark back to Bacon, they remind us of hidden secrets, of the deceptive simplicity of the visible, and the quest for true knowledge about ultimate sources. Humbert’s situation is much clearer: he could, if he wanted, come to know something of the true Dolly Haze. But his obsession makes it impossible for him to do so; we readers are left to view what we can of her through the bars and cobwebs of his mind.

—Stephen H. Blackwell, University of Tennessee

A BLINKING DEMON: THE ASTRONOMY OF NABOKOV’S ANTITERRA

The location of Antiterra is problematic in Ada or Ardor. Brian Boyd suggests that Antiterra is the planet Venus (Boyd, Brian. Nabokov’s Ada: the Place of Consciousness. 2nd ed. Christchurch, New Zealand: Cybereditions, 2001,311), a theory which fails to adequately explain various components of the novel. My counter-conclusion places Antiterra somewhere already on our telescope, in the Beta Persei system.

Brian Boyd’s hypothesis that Antiterra is modeled after Venus is based on a notion Nabokov mentioned in writing when he was nineteen. He also explains that the mysteriousness of Venus at the time Nabokov was writing Ada or Ardor probably prompted Nabokov to use Venus as his double for Antiterra (Boyd 311). An article Nabokov wrote on inspiration provides further evidence to support Boyd’s theory, perhaps more so

[56]

than the evidence he includes in his book. In a short essay on inspiration, Nabokov provides a draft paragraph he jotted down at the end of 1965. This paragraph, which mentions the location Villa Venus, served as the creative basis for Ada or Ardor, (Strong Opinions 310). This, however, does not necessarily indicate that Antiterra takes place on Venus in later drafts novel. Nabokov changed the name of the Villa to Ardis, which I argue disrupts the validity of the argument that his intent was consistent as work on the novel progressed. Van also, when questioning Lucette about Ada’s “Valentian estanciero, ” tells her to raise her arm and “Point at Paradise! Terra! Venus!” (Ada or Ardor 415), which would apparently disprove the Venus theory, as Lucette could not point up at Venus if she was standing on it. And regarding Brian Boyd’s evidence, while past experience is prevalent in Nabokov’s works it is not a certainty, so in the case of Antiterra I am disregarding biography in favor of space exploration.

The distance between Demonia and Terra/Earth in Ada or Ardor is left undetermined. The only reference is in a description of Van’s philosophical novel Letters From Terra, where he says that “nobody knew how far Terra, or other innumerable planets with cottages and cows, might be situated in outer or inner space” (339). Few specifics about Demonia itself are actually mentioned. Van states that Demonia appears multicolored (301) but admits “His knowledge of physics, mechanicalism and that sort of stuff had remained limited to the scratch of a prep-school blackboard” (338-339). There are other small details that falsely appear trivial regarding the properties of Demonia.

There are three primary facts established about Antiterra: It appears multicolored from Terra, it is in some sort of physical or metaphysical relationship with Terra, and is curiously named Demonia. Demonian physicists Xertigny, Yate, and Zotov have all ‘vanished’ (339), so issues of distance must be ignored, as specified by Van. My research into Van’s Antiterra began with the name Demonia, which eventually led to that “unfortunate”

[57]

star Algol.

Algol, or Beta Persei, is a bright second magnitude star in the Perseus constellation, and its blue pigment is intense enough to be seen without a telescope. It is a binary eclipsing star, and approximately every 2.9 days Algol dims and becomes an orange-red for a few hours, afterwards returning again to its normal color and intensity. This is because the central star, the blue-white sequence star Beta Persei A, is orbited by a more highly evolved giant Beta Persei B, which is much dimmer and regularly eclipses the central star (James Kaler’s webpage on Algol at http://www.astro.uiuc.edu/~kaler/sow/algol.html). In chapter 42 Van reflects on Aqua’s disdain for Demonia and remarks that “this terrible Antiterra, in the multicolored and evil world into which he was born” (301), which would either indicate that Antiterra appears to have many colors at its surface, or that it constantly changes colors, consistent with Algol’s apparent change of color.

In the same passage as ‘multicolored Demonia’, Van puzzlingly announces that “for him [Van] to survive on this terrible Antiterra [...] he had to destroy, or at least to maim for life, two men [...] in two different spots and neither spot represented an exact location” (301). Aqua’s hatred for her binary star system, where Antiterra snugly orbits, is transposed into Van’s hatred for the two men. He cannot identify the locations of these two. Rack and De Prey, in relation to each other. This further suggests that Demonia is part of a binary system, because from Terra it is difficult to distinguish where Beta Persei A and B are in relation to each other.

Ancient astrologers refer to the star Algol as “Demon star” or “Winking Demon star.” The name Algol is actually Arabic, “al Ghul,” and literally translates to “The Demon” in English (Kaler). In astrology Algol is referred to as either “unfortunate” or “evil,” regarded by the Hebrews to represent Adam’s first wife Lilith, and several other cultures identify Algol with misfortune or various evil deities including Medusa, Satan, and

[58]

Gorgon (Olcott, William T. Star Lore of All Ages. Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Company, 1996,304). The connection between the meaning of the name Algol and the name and descriptions of Demonia is far less subtle than some of the other correlations, but it is noteworthy. Demonia is referred to with all sorts of adjectives: terrible (Ada or Ardor 338) and cruel (301) are two of Van’s favorites, though a number of others appear, and the perception that Antiterra is the bad-luck twin is a nagging constant consistent with Terra’s astrological perceptions of Algol. Identifying Demonia with the symbolical “Demon” could not be easier; simple deductions from the planet’s name (301), Walter Dark Veen’s nickname (4), and the alternate cultural perceptions of Demons as mythological creatures on Demonia (20-21) correlate the two. This all seems to validate the presence and significance of astrological components in the structure of Ada or Ardor, which leads to several other compelling symmetries as well as a new way of approaching the book not suggested by Boyd.

The two cousins Demon and Dan have virtually identical names and enigmatic nick-names that have not yet been adequately explained. Durak Walter who is described as a “quite as opulent, but much duller, chap” becomes “Red Veen,” compared to his first cousin Dark Walter, who is called either Demon Veen or Raven Veen (4). Early on in the novel, Ada and Van mention that Demon prefers “to stay by the sea, his dark-blue great-grandmother,” a pun on Demon’s ancestor Prince Ivan Temnosiniy, whose Russian name means “dark-blue” (7-8). Demon’s clinging to the sea identifies him as a “Dark-Blue” Veen, and like the eclipse Algol experiences, Ada manages to discover that her father is Blue Veen not Red Veen. In the family tree the reader is now revising, Red Veen becomes another orbiting satellite of Demon “Dark-Blue” Veen. Therefore the early plot acts as a microcosm of the dimmer red Beta Persei B’s eclipse of blue Beta Persei A, where father Demon is discovered at the center and not Dan. Van comments

[59]

on this after Aqua’s suicide, hinting at a hidden astrological dimension to the events surrounding him, saying “If you want life’s sundial to show its hand [...] we must always remember that the strength, the dignity, the delight of man is to spite and despise the shadows and stars that hide their secrets from us” (29-31).

The entire notion of Algol astronomically and astrologically introduces many other fascinating readings that can be applied to Ada or Ardor, the possibility of an allegorical symmetry between Nabokov’s novel and the myth of Perseus, a hidden literary twist to the cause of the tragic death of Aqua—her name possibly a pun on Aquarius (perhaps she too was star-crossed)? The implications are vast, and perhaps in the future Ada or Ardor will be read with star charts as well as encyclopedias and very thick dictionaries.

—Logan Norris, Harrisburg, PA