[EDNote: BTW, there is a 3-page critique of intellectuals in Russia
today, and their recent history, in last Friday's Economist.
~SB]
This reply is mostly about Georgia, a lovely country of mountains and a
few dark-graveled seashores where I spent a strange four months in 1984
when it was still an SSR. After a while I realized how afraid they
were of being caught saying something anti-communist; it has been my
only extended experience of the remnants of a totalitarian state.
Perversely, they were proud of their native son, Stalin, the worst
murderer of all: unlike in Russia itself, monuments to him had not
been torn down, and the excursion to his birthplace (advertised as a
log cabin, just like the birthplaces of American presidents) was a
popular tourist attraction for Tbilisi's two hotels.
I don't know how many literary men in Tbilisi explained to me that they
were a nation of poets, a statement I took with more than one grain of
salt then and later, when they became known as the best smugglers in
post-soviet Russia. Nevertheless, Russian poets had traveled
to Georgia for many generations , and (through someone else's
calculation, I'm sure) I met Yevtushenko there several times.
The most important thing in Nabokov's imaginary view might be whether
his first love, Tamara, is still alive in Georgia after all those years
(I am writing off the cuff, sorry, but she was, I believe, given
that alias by VN because their great queen Tamar was the equivalent of
England's first queen Elizabeth, although a century earlier when
Georgia's greatest poet also flourished). VN might also have paused
to consider Lermentov's Hero of Our Time, who died in the Caucasus and
was later translated by Dmitri with VN's help. Am I correct in
remembering that VN wrote a poem imagining his own death there under
similar circumstances?
As to the rights and wrongs as opposed to the personal feelings, I
think VN would recognize the obvious Dead Souls stink of Putin. I
suspect that unfortunately it would not be much more difficult to
figure out how he would view Bush's outrageous war on the sovereign
state of Iraq, a view which probably would have been far more benign
and pro-Bush than my own, but that's precisely the kind of question
it's pointless for us to raise. (p.s.: I wrote the "Nabokov's
Politics" entry for the Companion.)
Chaz
Charles Nicol