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Genealogy, Nationality, and Ambivalence in Works by Vladimir Nabokov and Gary Shteyngart Michael Darne

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Genealogy, Nationality, and Ambivalence in Works by Vladimir Nabokov and Gary Shteyngart Michael Darne Networks of Displacement: Genealogy, Nationality, and Ambivalence in Works by Vladimir Nabokov and Gary Shteyngart Michael Darnell Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2016 © 2016 Michael Darnell All rights reserved ABSTRACT Networks of Displacement: Genealogy, Nationality, and Ambivalence in Works by Vladimir Nabokov and Gary Shteyngart Michael Darnell In this dissertation I examine Vladimir Nabokov’s and Gary Shteyngart’s use of family metaphors to manage intersecting Russian and American literary and cultural continuities. Both authors fashion their relationships to literary predecessors and common cultural narratives in terms of disrupted filial relationships, describing both an attachment to the conservative ​ narratives of the nation and a desire to move beyond their rigid structure. I articulate this ambivalence as a productive state of transnational subjecthood that allows these authors to navigate apparently oppositional national identities. Central to this reorientation is a critique of the hierarchical schema of the national canon, which frames literary culture as a determinative series of authoritative relationships. By reimagining these relations as part of a branching network of co-constituting associations, we open the space for transnational subjects to move within and overlap these networks. Table of Contents Introduction……………..................………………………………..…......................…....1 Chapter 1. Emigration and the Individual Talent: Parentage, Personality, and Creativity in The Gift and The Real Life of Sebastian Knight………...............……..31 Chapter 2. Embracing Foreignness and Meeting the National Gaze in Lolita and Pnin …..............................................................................................................82 Chapter 3. The Divided Global Subject in The Russian Debutante's Handbook and Absurdistan………………….................………………………......................…..…..… 138 Coda……………………………..............…………………………......................…….187 Bibliography ………………………..................…………………......................……...197 i Acknowledgements This project was made possible by support from throughout the Columbia University and elsewhere. My thanks go to my advisors from the English department, Professor Marianne Hirsch and Professor Rachel Adams, and to the faculty from the Russian department who generously volunteered their time to this project, Professor Valentina Izmirlieva, Professor Cathy Popkin, and Professor Liza Knapp. Much support was offered by Dr. Jeffrey Dyke, Dr. Laurie Weber, Dr. Steven Darnell, and Gillian Rothchild; and valuable feedback was provided by Dr. Catherine Siemann and Dr. Hiie Saumaa. Lastly, my gratitude goes to Professor Catharine Nepomnyashchy, who sadly passed away before I completed this project. Professor Nepomnyashchy enthusiastically welcomed me to the Russian department and guided me through the earliest stages of this dissertation, and for that I am grateful. ii For my wife, Gillian iii Introduction The genesis of this dissertation was rooted in the phrase “Russian-American authors,” a term which began to seem to me too benign. The discourse of hyphenated identities is largely concerned with the contentious intersection of racialized categories, an otherly identity brought into conversation with a separate “American” category that is tacitly understood as white.1 In this context, matters of Russian-American identification seem to lack urgency, the racial difference of Eastern Europeans having long been whitewashed in America. But it is in part this assimilation, or domestication, of difference that impels this project. The difference represented by Russians in America, once viewed through the lens of racialized exoticism and political intrigue, now can seem something uncomplicatedly knowable and consumable. And in this familiarity, the identities attached to categories like “Russian” and “Russian-American” risk seeming naturalized and uniform. This dissertation approaches these identifiers as active spaces of intersection, given specificity by the overlapping and refraction of a litany of political and cultural projections. I am most interested here in the many narratives of Russian displacement, and their close relationship to notions of Russian authorship. In the first wave of Russian emigration immediately following the 1917 revolution, the emigre intelligentsia saw themselves as the last bastion of an old Russian culture held in opposition to the corrupting influence of Sovietism. Decades later, emigre author Vasilii Aksyonov would 1 For an overview of this history, see Annette Harris Powell’s “Critical Contexts: The Hyphenated American in Twentieth and Twenty-first Century America.” 1 write in his essay “Luchshee sostoianie literatury – emigratsia” that emigration was the ​ ​ ideal state for Russian literature, imagining the Russian author as a free thinker operating separately from the demands of the state (Aksyonov 21-22).2 At the same time, we can also articulate distinctly American projections of Russianness and Russian authorship that reframe the experience of Russian displacement as part of American mythologies of immigration and civic virtue. The narrative of Ellis Island era immigration evokes awestruck Eastern European families sailing in under the gaze of the Statue of Liberty. This imagery recalls a genre of twentieth century immigration novels which promoted accounts of noble sacrifice, tireless striving, and just reward, all affirmations of American ideas of democracy and meritocracy. Later, defectors from the Soviet regime would affirm American political ideals as refugees from a corrupt foreign empire. And even today, Soviet writers like Boris Pasternak, Joseph Brodsky, and Alexander Solzhenitsyn evoke a statelessness that is both tragic and triumphant, and a transcendence into art in spite of tremendous suffering under an imperialist nation. Complicating things further, the antithetic parallelism of the Cold War ethos evokes a dread of contact with foreign ideals presented alternately as Old World primitivism or foreboding futurism, and the abstract and alien myth of the “Russian soul” provides an air of intrigue and inscrutability. Meanwhile, classical Russian literature can evoke to many Americans little more than a vague sense of antiquity, and the authors a white-bearded wisdom. 2 Incidentally, the tradition of Russian literature in exile begins even earlier, including such authors as Alexander Pushkin and Ivan Turgenev, and others less well known to American readers. 2 Vladimir Nabokov and Gary Shteyngart are notable for their position among these intersecting narratives, and for their direct engagement of that position in their texts. Central to the work of both authors is their negotiation of the tensions between these often contradictory projections. Cultural production in the Russian diaspora is burdened by the dual expectations of personal autonomy and national identification. Likewise, the American immigration mythos, which affirms American civic virtue by integrating the presence of outsiders, projects for these authors a tenuous dualism of foreignness and familiarity. Even the operative narratives of displacement themselves - emigration, with its out-going trajectory and implications of exilic independence, and immigration, with its in-coming trajectory and its seeking, often aspirational attitudes - suggest a tension that must be dealt with. Both Nabokov and Shteyngart thus find themselves having to navigate narratives of national belonging and established traditions of displacement and nationlessness which, as we shall see, are themselves closely tied to projections of both Russian and American identification. Nabokov in particular inhabits such a proliferation of narratives that he epitomizes one of his own, that of the untouchable cosmopolitan. In fact, we might locate in this legacy an early reference point for the western narrative of transcendent Russian migrants. Nabokov’s modern legacy suggests both access to an authentic pre-Soviet Russia, and a wholehearted embrace of America, its intellectual and popular culture, language, and landscape. And his characterization as a “shuttlecock above the Atlantic” suggests a metaphysical freedom found in emigration, which benefits from modern narratives of creativity in exile (Strong Opinions 117). This close association ​ ​ 3 between Russian emigration and aesthetic enlightenment is likely rooted in the tropes of Russian Formalism, which thrived during the first wave of Russian emigration (1917-1930). But the themes common to the Formalists - the autonomy of literature from material history and an attraction to mythic natural imagery - are today primarily associated with Nabokov for western readers. After him, the model of migration as ascendency was embraced by Joseph Brodsky, whose speech “On the Condition We Call Exile” defines modern exile as a movement away from tyranny toward any freer land that gets the author “closer to the seat of the ideals that inspired him all along” (“The Condition” 2). Readers familiar with Nabokov’s interviews will recognize here an echo of his statement, “It is in America that I found my best readers, minds that are closest to mine. I feel intellectually at home in America” (Strong Opinions 10). Russian ​ ​ authorship and migrant authorship alike thus become a practice of personal autonomy which, as we shall see, becomes a
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