From Russia to America: the Depiction of Nationality in Nabokov’S Work

From Russia to America: The Depiction of Nationality in Nabokov’s Work Julian W. Connolly University of Virginia A truly international writer, Vladimir Nabokov once 26). Of course, even at this point Nabokov had declared: “the nationality of a worthwhile writer is moved on from America to Switzerland, though he of secondary importance […] The writer’s art is his always thought he might return to the States and he real passport. His identity should be immediately never relinquished in American citizenship. recognized by a special pattern or unique coloration” (Strong Opinions, 63). Despite this affirmation, An avid and accomplished lepidopterist as well however, the treatment of nationalities in Nabokov’s as a celebrated writer, Nabokov was a perceptive work is highly individualized and distinctive. He observer of the world around him. It is not surprising, himself traveled along an extraordinarily complex then, that his creative work would feature indelible path through life. Born into a wealthy family in St. portraits of the peoples and places he had come Petersburg, Russia, Nabokov was forced to leave to know in his life. As one looks carefully at his his homeland in 1919 because of the Bolshevik writings, one sees that each of the lands Nabokov Revolution. He attended Cambridge University in depicted is given a distinctive national coloring, England, and after graduation moved to Berlin to and it is likely that Nabokov’s personal experience launch a career as a writer. After a decade and a of living in these different lands had a decisive half he moved again, this time to France when life influence on they way they emerge in his art. In in Germany became unbearable due to the Nazi this essay I would like to retrace Nabokov’s odyssey regime. Three years later, he fled once more, this through the Old and New Worlds and see just how time to the United States, where he eventually took he represented his various dwelling places in his American citizenship. But his travels were not yet work. over. Nabokov would ultimately land in Montreux, Switzerland, where he lived out his days in the Let us start with Russia. Russia was the site of Palace Hotel on the shore of Lake Geneva. Nabokov’s happiest memories. Raised by a loving and indulgent pair of parents in comfortable settings Nabokov alluded to the complexity of his life in St. Petersburg and Vyra, an estate south of the experiences when he declared in a 1964 interview: “I capital, Nabokov regarded Russia as the place where am an American writer, born in Russia and educated three of his most cherished passions arose: first, for in England where I studied French literature, before a warm and secure family environment; second, for spending fifteen years in Germany. I came to America the pursuit, capture, and cataloguing of Lepidoptera; in 1940 and decided to become an American citizen, and third, for the creation of poetry, which received and make America my home” (Strong Opinions, a palpable stimulus when he fell seriously in love 1 for the first time at the age of sixteen. All three of my first thought was for the butterflies it would these passions made their mark in his depiction of engender.” Nabokov then recalls one such butterfly Russia in his work, and it would be worthwhile to he pursued, and he states: “my desire for it was take a quick look at each of these as we begin our one of the most intense I have every experienced” journey with Nabokov the writer and world citizen. (Speak, Memory, 119–22). (1) The Family (3) Poetry (and “Tamara”) Nabokov’s memoir Speak, Memory is full of fond Chapter Eleven of Speak, Memory is devoted to recollections of the author’s family, as well as of a a description of the creation of what Nabokov haunting sense of what would be lost in the years indicates was his first poem (although in reality following the family’s departure from Russia, he had been writing poetry before the experience including the most tragic of these losses—the he depicts here). He recounts in great detail the murder of Nabokov’s father by an assassin trying to trance-like state he found himself in, as well as the kill Pavel Milyukov at a public lecture in Berlin in tremendous struggle he underwent as he sought 1922. One of the most moving passages in Speak, to find the words appropriate to the experience he Memory comes at the end of Chapter Three, when wished to convey. Finally, he recalls the wondrous Nabokov evokes a memory of his uncle’s fondness sense of dissociation he would feel when he for books that the uncle remembers from his youth. awakened from this creative reverie. Here is how Nabokov writes: he describes this last phenomenon, which occurred as he looked at himself in the mirror: “I had the I see again my schoolroom in Vyra, the blue roses shocking sensation of finding the mere dregs of my of the wallpaper, the open window […] A sense of usual self odds and ends of an evaporated identity security, of well-being, of summer warmth pervades which it took my reason quite an effort to gather my memory. That robust reality makes a ghost of again in the glass” (Speak, Memory, 227). When the present. The mirror brims with brightness; a Nabokov met Valentina Shulgina (whom he called bumblebee has entered the room and bumps against “Tamara” in Speak, Memory) in the summer of the ceiling. Everything is as it should be, nothing 1915, he found not only first love, but a focus for his will ever change, nobody will ever die. (Speak, poetic inspiration. Chapter Twelve of the memoir Memory, 77) offers a sensual description of the settings and moods that enveloped the young lovers during that Sadly, Nabokov’s father would fall victim to an first summer and in subsequent months leading up to assassin’s bullet in a matter of years. their final parting. (2) Lepidoptery All of these experiences, which were so lovingly One finds many passages in Speak, Memory that depicted in Speak, Memory, provided ample fuel for display Nabokov’s passion for butterfly collecting. Nabokov’s fiction as well. His first romance with One such passage reads in part: “From the age “Tamara” was distilled into a lyrical evocation of of seven, everything I felt in connection with a young love in Mary, Nabokov’s first novel. Indeed, rectangle of framed sunlight [i.e. his bedroom Nabokov would acknowledge the similarity between window—JC] was dominated by a single passion. the accounts of romance in Mary and Speak, If my first glance of the morning was for the sun, Memory in his introduction to the English-language 2 From Russia With Love translation of the novel, and he claimed there that geographical location of the area, and the vegetal “a headier extract of personal reality is contained composition of the clearing—all this that was living, in the romantization than in the autobiographer’s genuine and eternally dear to him, Fyodor perceived scurupulously faithful account.” He explained this in a flash with one penetrating and experienced peculiar state of affairs by noting that “in terms of glance. Suddenly he placed a fist against the trunk years, Ganin [the protagonist of Mary—JC] was of a birch tree and leaning on it, burst into tears” three times closer to his past than I was to mine (Gift, 133). in Speak, Memory” (Mary, xiv). What is most significant about both of these evocations of young Clearly, Nabokov’s recollections of Russia, and love is that, as Nabokov put it in Speak, Memory, particularly of the rural area around St. Petersburg, “the loss of my country was equated for me with the carried tremendous value for him. Yet is it important loss of my love” (Speak, Memory, 245). Conversely, to note that the rapturous tone found in Nabokov’s the letters that “Tamara” wrote to Nabokov had the highly charged, deeply nostalgic evocations of the power of calling up “with plangent strength every Russia of his youth completely disappears when he whiff of damp leave, every autumn-rusted frond writes about or comments on the state of Russia in of fern in the St. Petersburg countryside” (Speak, its post-Revolutionary Soviet condition. When he Memory, 249). Heady indeed. was asked by an interviewer in 1969 whether he would ever try to go back to Russia “just to look,” Nabokov’s affair with Shulgina informed not only he replied: the novel Mary, but the short stories “A Letter that Never Reached Russia” and “The Admiralty Spire” There’s nothing to look at. New tenement houses and as well. Similarly, Nabokov’s memories of his old churches do not interest me. The hotels there Petersburg childhood helped fashion the scenes of are terrible. I detest the Soviet theater. Any palace childhood depicted in the novels The Defense and in Italy is superior to the repainted abodes of the The Gift, and it is in the latter novel that Nabokov Tsars. The village huts in the forbidden hinterland provides the most evocative depiction in his fiction are as dismally poor as ever, and the wretched of the significance of the butterfly pursuits he peasant flogs his wretched cart horse with the same experienced in his youth. There the protagonist’s wretched zest. As to my special northern landscape recollection of his quest for butterflies is connected and the haunts of my childhood—well, I would not with the theme of his love for his missing father, a want to contaminate their images preserved in my naturalist and explorer who made an untimely exit mind.

Load more