NINA BERBEROVA

NOTES ON NABOKOV'S BRIT- ISH LITERARY ANCESTORS

In the course of my rather haphazard reading of the best-selling English authors from the late nineteenth century to the 1930s I have encountered several names of interest in connection with the reading Nabokov did, first as a boy in Russia, under the supervision of his father, and later, after leaving Russia in 1919, in England and Germany, that is, during his first, Russian, period, before he became an American writer. I would like to describe my findings in brief here. It is important to note that all of the writers here were of his father's gener- tion, or older, rather than his own, and he was their collateral and not their direct descendant. Viktor Shkolovskii, the inventor of Russian Formalism, discovered that very often a writer inherits from and depends upon the col- lateral line of his uncles and great uncles more than he does his literary fathers and grandfathers. His basic example was Aleksandr Blok and Apollon Grigoriev, a second-rate poet of the mid-nineteenth century. The truth of Shklovskii's idea is immediately obvious. A couple of years ago I myself dis- covered some unexpected affinities between Andrei Belyi's Petersburg and Ki- tai-Gorod, an 1882 novel by his elder contemporary, the minor but best-sell- ing author, Petr Boborykin, now forgotten. Thus I came to read those English- novelists whom all educted Russians-two or three generation of them-who lived in Petersburg and Moscow between 1900 and 1920 read. Some of their books were translated into Russian, and some were not. This is not our con- cern, however; in the case of Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov, as well as his father, Valdimir Dmitrievich, English prose and poetry were read in the original. Perhaps the names I mention will inspire further reaserach in this field. I am going to point out only the tip of the iceberg. Some of my "discoveries" are quite modest, and I will start with these. From the casual borrowings such as Nabokov may have made form Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, Compton Mackenzie, and Lewis Carroll, I shall move on to more serious matters. In passing we might remark faint echoes from A Child's Garden of Verses in the childhood poems of The Gift, while the eponymous heroine of Kipling's "William the Conqueror" may lurk in the back ground of The Eye's Vania. Compton Mackenzie's novel, Vestal Fire (1927), with the deliberate indirection of its opening and its treatment of homosexual themes might foreshadow similar techniques and topics in Nabokov's own work. I will not go into those fascinating sexual motifs in Carroll that might have im- pressed the author of Lolita, nor will I elaborate on those revealing pages to be found in the memoirs of Frank Harris on Oscar Wilde and Bosie, or in Gide's book on Wilde. Each one of these deserves individual treatment. The disturbing theme of a girl or boy corrupting a grown man demands much more attention, thought, time, and space, and I mention it here only in passing. Then comes the shock of "modernism" in Joseph Conrad, whose "Rus- sian" novel, The Secret Agent (1907), Nabokov certainly could not have missed. You will feel a change of pace when I turn to that great man of En- glish letters, Gilbert Keith Chesterton. Chesterton was a friend of everybody who was anybody, a giant who weighed over three hundred pounds, a con- servative who embraced Catholicism, and the author of perhaps one of the greatest novels written between Jtcde the Obscure (1896) and Sons and Lovers (1923). I am speaking of The Man Who Was Thursday (1908), of course. As a matter of fact, in that book you may find a character who will remind you of Gogol'. It is my opinion that, had Nabokov not read Chester- ton in his youth, he would still be Nabokov but not the Nabokov we know. After Chesterton comes the author of A propos of Dolores, H. G. Wells. This voluptuous female name became forever linked to Nabokov, but he did not invent it: it was already there. In all fairness, though, it should be said that he did not appropriate it lock, stock, and barrel. It appears mainly in two aspects of the novel: a humorous death and a cheerful funeral. The name of the last writer will probably come as a surprise. Norman Douglas did not teach Nabokov the writer anything, but perhaps helped him to construct his persona, to create his image: the haughty genius who despised most of his contemporaries, who also lost his kingdom and his castle, and whose passion was not butterflies but lizards. Nabokov was not the first to translate Alice in Woraderland into Russian. I do not know who the first was, but the second, whose translation every Rus- sian child before the Revolution read, was Poliksena Solov'eva, the sister of the philosopher Valdimir Solov'ev, a notorious Petersburg poetess, a les- bian, and a friend of Zinaida Gippius. A quarter of a century before Dietrich and Garbo, she was wearing trousers, a starched collar, and a tie. But in ad- dition of Alice there was a minor work by Carroll that was never translated- obviously because it is untranslatable. This was Doublets: A Word Puzzle, first published in 1879. Doublets was a game Carroll invented. He went from one word to the next by changing one letter at a time, so that the last word became the opposite or the complement of the first: pen into ink, black into white, pig into sty, and hair into soup. Love became hate as follows: love- lave-have-hate. Carroll's Doublets make their appearance in Nabokov's Pale Fire as Word Golf. Nabokov always loved word games, and in the steps of the English master he too invented many palindromes. It might have been in Joseph Conrad's novels that Nabokov got his first whiff of "modernity": deliberate change of pace; change in the author's