The sequence of quotations from Nabokov's
short-stories quoted below was motivated by a movie, "The Life of Others", in which we hear a poem by
Bertolt Brecht [ “Remembrances of Marie A.,“ in Die Hauspostille (1927),
Gesammelte Werke in acht Bänden, vol. 4, p. 232. Translated by S.Horton
and published in "Harper's Bazar",2007.] Even in
Brecht recollected vanished clouds are all that remain of a particular
youthful embrace...: "On a certain day ...I
held her there, my quiet, pale beloved...over us in the beautiful summer sky/
there was a cloud on which my gaze rested[...]...that kiss too I would have long
forgotten/had not the cloud been present there[...]but that cloud blossomed just
a few minutes/ and when I looked up, it had disappeared in the wind."
"Sounds": "On that happy day [...] came the
resolution of the nebulous something that had imperceptibly arisen between us
after our first weeks of love. I realized that you had no power over me, that it
was not you alone who were my lover but the entire earth. It was as if my soul
had extended countless sensitive feelers, and I lived within everything,
perceiving simultaneously Niagara Falls thundering far beyond the ocean..[...]
And suddenly it was supremely clear to me that, for centuries, the world had
been blooming, withering, spinning, changing solely in order that now, at this
instant, it might combine and fuse into a vertical chord the voice that had
resounded downstairs, the motion of your silken shoulder blades, and the scent
of pine boards...
"Beneficence":
"Here I became aware of the world's tenderness, the
profound beneficence of all that surrounded me, the blissful bond between me and
all of creation, and I realized that the joy I had sought in you was not only
secreted within you, but breathed around me everywhere [...]I realized that the
world does not represent a struggle at all, or a predaceous sequence of chance
events, but shimmering bliss, beneficent trepidation, a gift bestowed on us and
unappreciated."
In "Beneficence" there's a hint about scientist
Nabokov's rejection of Darwin's struggling "survival of the fittest",
expressed in a nutshell:
"the world does not represent a struggle at all, or
a predaceous sequence of chance events..."
In "Sounds" ( "as if my soul had extended countless
sensitive feelers, and I lived within everything, perceiving
simultaneously") there is a hint of Humbert Humbert as a spider
that expands threads and feelers to follow Lolita...
Until Nabokov started to write in English ( what might have provided
him with the distance he needed to transform the innaccessible objects of
experience into foreign words and to shape a very
material "Lolita"), in his Russian short-stories, the register of love, the
loved "object" always disappears in the landscape. It is in the landscape,
its clouds, flowers and animals, that VN's characters identify their
state of love.
"A Letter that Never Reached Russia"
(1925): "I had sworn[...]not to mention the past, especially the trifles in our
shared past; for we authors in exile are supposed to posses a lofty pudicity of
expression [...] Not of the past, my love, do I with to speak to you
[...]"Everything will pass but my happiness, dear, my
happiness will remain, in the moist reflection of a streelamp...in everything
with which God so generously surrounds human loneliness."
In "The Fight" (1924) we
find "Spring in Fialta" (1936) shimmering by:
"Or perhaps what matters is not the human pain or joy
at all but,rather, the play of shadow and light on a live body, the harmony of
trifles assembled on this particular day, at this particular moment, in a unique
and inimitable way"
In Nabokov's 1937 short-story Cloud,Castle,Lake the scene
becomes immutable, like the delusions stimulated by
a mnemic photograph and the imprint of pain. A sharp contrast to
"everything will pass but my happiness"...