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V.V. Nabokov  - Explorer of Russian Literature. Means of Building Macro-text.

 

The modern reader knows Nabokov primarily as le maître of novel. However, it would be a mistake to neglect the fact that in the USA he started out as a writer of non-fiction works, including numerous critical essays and reviews. Besides, a remarkable problem of Nabokovology – the problem of implications in Nabokov’s prose works – is commonly studied with the help of non-fiction texts, their structure still missing proper research. This lack of research caused numerous misinterpretations of novel texts.

Our present study suggests that it’s highly advisable to view Nabokov’s works as a whole, a single macro-text, where heterogeneous elements are artfully interlinked. This approach stems from the individual manner of the author’s writing, which calls for his books to be read as a single text. In this connection, the major feature of Nabokov’s texts is presumably his auto-quotations, which are the common point in both his overlapping prose works and discourse. For instance, Nabokov’s interviews by means of direct or implied auto-quotations announce material of most various genres.

One of the reasons why students of the multi-lingual writer underestimate his critical works, is their misbelief in Nabokov’s self-criticism concerning the quality of his own particular works. However, Nabokov’s literary behavior is just a means to manifest his strategy of camouflage, aimed at keeping a certain distance between the visible and the real on different levels of the author’s macro-text. 

Experimenting with the form of a literary study, in his early works Nabokov labored to find the universal strategy for writing in English the biographies of the two Russian stylistic geniuses – Nikolai Gogol in a book with the same name, and Pushkin in the essay “Pushkin, or the Truth and Truthfulness”. In doing so Nabokov was in desperate need for a device to study and present the contrasting poetic worlds of both Pushkin and Gogol, which would enable him to demonstrate both his multi-lingual and stylistic skills. As a solution, the Russian texts were translated into Nabokov’s English, the result reminding more of  bilingual mystification.

Nabokov studied styles of Russian XIX century geniuses not only against the background of the world literary evolution, but chiefly to affirm himself as an expert in style, who had developed his own concept of poetic language from personal critical observations. His method to convey the original context accurately both in translation itself and in translation commentary is based upon metaphor. Being at once after both  biographical and autobiographical goals, in translation to his language Nabokov combines two reminiscences in metaphor – autobiographic proper and  literary (i.e. implications of the original). This is certainly true for Nabokov’s “Onegin text”, where both personal and Pushkin’s biographies sound more like bibliographies. The literary device, where the bulk of the text is intertwined with second language and autobiographical motives was a borrowing from Pushkin.  It were the autobiographical motives that enabled Pushkin to refresh conventional schemes (imagery, plot-building, thematic …) and make his text truly original.

Nabokov – commentator gives a demonstration of Pushkin’s texts, arranging them into autonomous poetic matter by means of stylization (playing with parody). Being a translator of all accessible materials, including Pushkin’s manuscripts, Nabokov studies them as a single text. He finds traces of Pushkin’s early unpublished pieces in later texts. The so-called  reciprocal quotation and reciprocal announcement in Pushkin’s macro-text are studied in the personal digressions, made by Nabokov in the Commentary to this poetic novel in verse, which gives the “Onegin text” a complex tree-like structure. Moreover, the reality created by Pushkin goes beyond the limits of the text, because it includes such elements as literary behavior, writing strategy and dialogues with the critics. This becomes obvious due to Nabokov’s idea to place events of Pushkin’s life on the same level of the macro-text, though different in nature, as Pushkin’s poetry. Thus, Nabokov becomes interested in Pushkin’s (as well as Gogol’s) works both as linguistic phenomena and as a single text. In this sense according to Nabokov Pushkin’s macro-text makes more perfect a unity than Gogol’s texts.

Nabokov built his own works on the principle of Pushkin’s all-texts-unity. This creates another proof to our assumption that Nabokov-explorer purposefully projected “foreign” experience on the very object of his studies.  Nabokov organized texts of his research in the same way the objects of research were built.  Thus, both the “Gogol text” and the “Onegin text” bear a shadow-like resemblance of their originals, at the same time possessing the content of  subtle parody, which manifests itself in the structural interdependence of both.

Unlike in the “Onegin text”, where the commentator indulges in extensive personal digressions relevant one way or another to Pushkin’s verses, in the “Gogol text”  Nabokov’s interference with quotations from the poem “the Dead Souls” is hardly noticeable. However, these very slight additions to various quotations give the clue to perception of Gogol’s phrases and simplify the text of commentaries in the essay “Nikolai Gogol”. Thus, structural peculiarities of  the original texts determine the choice of a method for their study, which provides for good / poor readability of Nabokov’s scholar “non-fiction”.

Complex nature of Nabokov’s Commentary inhibits study of means used for its creation. We suppose that Nabokov’s devices for building a research text (both the “Gogol text” and the “Onegin text”) are equal to the ones he used to create his own macro-text. Here it is important to stress the structure-building role of parody in the writer’s macro-text. Nabokov’s parody implies skillful play with language. A good example of such play is an ingenious device of borrowing from so-called Pushkin’s “unforwarded texts”, including draft introductions to chapters of “Eugene Onegin”, variants of stanzas, notes and even manuscripts of letters that never went to any publisher. Nabokov translated these publicly unknown texts using his English lexicon. Translations of such professional neologisms from drafts of Puskin’s works as “delight-inspiration”, “truth-truthfulness”  are quoted and developed in Nabokov’s macro-text (e.g. in the article “Inspiration” or in the essay “Pushkin, or the Truth and Truthfulness”). Thus, in the Onegin macro-text Nabokov purposefully re-created Pushkin’s macro-text and revived Pushkin’s manuscripts, which gave him basic concepts for his own macro-text. In other words, he built his own macro-text in the same way he built Pushkin’s one in his research text.

Nabokov interprets parody, in the sense of a play with language, as stylization. Same as Nabokov named the style of “Eugene Onegin”s’ author “style of stylization”,  we dare call Nabokov’s style -  “style of auto-stylization”. We would like to  make a special stress on Nabokov’s digressions in his Commentary to “Eugene Onegin”, which have some common points with the interview given to Alfred Appel (IX. 1966). We are convinced that the basic concepts of Nabokov’s macro-texts (e.g. “parody-play”, “imagination-memory” and others) are concentrated in his thesis-like, promotion (“presentation”) -aimed replies to Appel. At the same time the allusive nature of Nabokov’s axioms becomes clear against the background of the “Onegin text”. For instance, the literary formula “delight – inspiration” serves as a link between the later article “Inspiration”, the early essay “The Art of Literature and Common Sense” and the Commentary. In this very case Nabokov’s discursive texts develop the “delight-inspiration” scheme. The scheme was borrowed from the “Onegin text”, based on Pushkin’s professional neologisms, which Nabokov spotted in the poet’s manuscript and translated into his English.

In Nabokov’s macro-text, the relation between “imagination” and “memory” is like one in a mirror, especially in his autobiographic works. We presume that Nabokov’s formula “imagination - memory” is based on Pushkin’s works. The metaphor-of-imagination line is one of the major themes of the “Onegin text”. Nabokov assumes that Pushkin’s comparison of his own Muse to Burger’s Lenora in the beginning of Ch. VIII, is connected with retrospective nature of the poet’s imagination. Besides, Nabokov interprets Onegin’s recollections in Ch. VIII, stanzas XXXVI-XXXVII, as a form of Onegin’s imagination.

 In the “Onegin text’ we find allusions to a nominative dyad from Nabokov’s macro-text. The formula “truth-truthfulness”, heading the essay of 1937, is a recollection of Pushkin’s words from a draft letter to Rayevski-Junior of the same time the poet was working on his romantic drama “Boris Godunov”. Moreover, Nabokov’s “truth-truthfulness” is a metaphor of Pushkin’s professional (autobiographic) neologisms.

Functions of Nabokov’s “Gogol text” in his own macro-text presumably differ from the “Onegin text” in that they serve to comment Gogol’s implications in   Nabokov’s novels and stories. In order to follow the logic of  Nabokov’s quoting and understand his naturally determined interest in Gogol’s works, one should regard Nabokov’s essay “Nikolai Gogol” (1944) and his prose works as a single text. The study of links existing between  “Invitation for Execution” and the imagery structure of  “Dead Souls”, with “Nikolai Gogol” acting as the intermediary text, shows that Nabokov’s characters combine features that belong to various characters of Gogol’s (both principal and secondary). Messieurs Pier, for instance, takes both after Chichikov and Nozdrev, as well as bearing some features of Sobakevich, Manilov, Petrushka or even the Postmaster from “The Inspector General”.

Nabokov’s certain dependence on Gogol manifests itself on various levels of both macro – and micro-elements of the text. Thus, structures of some syntactic constructions, used by Nabokov, turn out to rest upon samples created by Gogol, resembling them even on the phonetic level. At the same time, however, such dependence manifests itself not through rough imitation, but through a subtle play with parody. In making all parallels between Nabokov’s and classic texts we are guided by the “prompts’, which this writer deliberately creates.  If Nabokov in his essay stresses such features of Gogol’s style as repetitions, like “vdali otdalennye (petukhi)” (lit. far-away remote cockerels), or “kosoi ostrokonechnyi izlom, okanchivaushchiisya kverkhu” (lit. slanting pointed fracture, pointing upwards) it is quite easy to spot outwardly similar samples in Nabokov’s prose works. Thus, in Nabokov’s phrase: “[ogonki zanimali vse bolshuyui ploshchad: vot potyanulis] vdol otdalennoi dolini…”(lit. [Lights were taking more and more space:  they  stretched  along] remote far-reaching valley) from “Invitation to Execution” one can feel the echo of the sound-combination “dali” from “Dead souls” :([“peresvistyvalis] vdali otdalennye [petukhi])” (lit. far-away  remote cockerels [where whistling their greetings]). However, the nature of Nabokov’s repetitions, stylized after Gogol, can be gathered only via  phonetic analysis, which ultimately proves the existence of  mirror-like  relations between Nabokov’s and Gogol’s sound-combinations. We presume, that Nabokov’s “prompts’, whichever level they belong to, are of equal importance and serve as elements for building  the macro-text study method, the way Nabokov himself expected it to be.  It’s noteworthy  that in his 1944 essay Nabokov puts great emphasis on Gogol’s phrases, which he translated into his English. However, his novel “Invitation for Execution” of 1934 in Russian already contains stylization of Gogol’s original phrases.

The essay “Nikolai Gogol” reveals its function of auto-commentary still more expressly against the background of  “Invitation …”, which was translated into English much later as well as the novel “Gift”, during Nabokov’s work on the Commentary to “Onegin”. This gives good reasons for a closer study of the essay “Nikolai Gogol” as this text can serve as the bridge (mediator) between the novel “Invitation …” and Gogol’s original texts, as well as between numerous translated quotations and the translations of  “Invitation for Execution”. The same diversity can be likewise observed in Nabokov’s “Onegin text”. His Commentary provides comment for both Pushkin’s original novel and Nabokov’s own translation.