Vladimir Nabokov and the Fictions of Memory Vladimir Nabokov and the Fictions of Memory edited by Irena Księżopolska and Mikołaj Wiśniewski Warsaw, 2019 Board of reviewers: Yannicke Chupin Irene Delic Galya Diment Siggy Frank Monica Manolescu Eric Naiman Marek Paryż Natalia Pervukhina Andrea Pitzer Christine Raguet Matthew Roth Thomas John Seifrid Andrzej Weseliński Barbara Wyllie Cover design: Marta Pokorska Titlepage design: Jacek Malik Co ‑financed by SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities Copyright © Fundacja Augusta hr. Cieszkowskiego ISBN 978-83-65787-12-5 Fundacja Augusta hr. Cieszkowskiego ul. Mianowskiego 15/65, 02 -044 Warszawa e -mail: [email protected] First edition, Warsaw 2019 Text layout: Studio Artix, Jacek Malik, [email protected] Printing: Drukarnia Sowa, Warsaw TABLE OF CONTENTS Irena Księżopolska, Mikołaj Wiśniewski INTRODUCTION .............................. 7 Leona Toker NABOKOV’S FACTOGRAPHY ................. 21 Stephen H. Blackwell NABOKOV’S CRYPTIC TRIPTYCH: GRIEF AND JOY IN “SOUNDS,” “THE CIRCLE,” AND “LANTERN SLIDES” ..................... 51 Péter Tamás VISION AND MEMORY IN NABOKOV’S “A FORGOTTEN POET” ....................... 82 Dana Dragunoiu TIME, MEMORY, THE GENERAL, AND THE SPECIFIC IN LOLITA AND À LA RECHERCHE DU TEMPS PERDU .......................... 100 David Potter PARAMNESIA, ANTICIPATORY MEMORY, AND FUTURE RECOLLECTION IN ADA .................................... 123 Adam Lipszyc MEMORY, IMAGE, AND COMPASSION: NABOKOV AND BENJAMIN ON CHILDHOOD ............ 156 6 Vladimir Nabokov and the Fictions of Memory Gerard de Vries MEMORY AND FICTION IN NABOKOV’S SPEAK, MEMORY ................................... 173 Mikołaj Wiśniewski MEMORY’S INVISIBLE MANAGERS: THE CASE OF LUZHIN ................................ 184 Andrzej Księżopolski TIME, HISTORY, AND OTHER PHANTOMS IN THE REAL LIFE OF SEBASTIAN KNIGHT ..... 203 Irena Księżopolska BIOGRAPHER AS IMPOSTOR: BANVILLE AND NABOKOV ............................ 226 Akiko Nakata MEMORIES TRICK – MEMORIES MIX: TRANSPARENT THINGS ....................... 254 Carlo Comanducci TRANSPARENT THINGS, VISIBLE SUBJECTS .... 274 Vyatcheslav Bart VLADIMIR NABOKOV’S ONTOLOGICAL AESTHETICISM FROM THE RENAISSANCE TO TRANSHUMANISM ...................... 294 Olga Dmitrienko REMINISCENCE AND SUBCONSCIOUS SACRALISATION OF THE KIN IN THE GIFT .... 318 Tatiana Ponomareva Epilogue: THE REALITY OF FICTION IN THE VLADIMIR NABOKOV MUSEUM ............. 330 About the Authors ................................. 344 7 Irena Księżopolska, Mikołaj Wiśniewski INTRODUCtiON In February 2015 the editors of this volume were on their way to a certain conference in Zurich. They decided to take a detour and first visit Montreux, and in particular – the sumptuous Montreux Palace Hotel where Nabokov lived for the last two decades of his life and where he wrote many of his late works. Having arrived at their destination very early in the morning, they ate breakfast at the lakeside, shared some of their canned sardines with a local cat, all the while contemplating the ghastly statue of Nabokov: quite unlike himself, in baggy knickerbockers and with fragments of a pince­‍nez, which must have been broken off by some over- ardent fan, still attached to his nose. The travelers then directed their steps into the hotel lobby and were greeted by the concierge who graciously invited them to explore the hotel, specifying that Nabokov used to live on the sixth floor. The sixth floor looked absolutely characterless: gray walls, gray carpets and narrow corridors, with no pictures, no plaque, no sign whatsoever of Nabokov. After walking in circles for a while, they did find a plaque, but dedicated to the memory of Freddie Mercury, which seemed to sadly signal the oblivion that is the fate 8 Vladimir Nabokov and the Fictions of Memory of writers as opposed to rock stars. Then they stopped and took a moment to reflect on how Nabokov had walked here imagining flying carpets and hotel fires, and Tolstoy who “risked his health by chasing chambermaids down these endless halls.”1 The hallway seemed to light up just a touch and then – the sound of someone’s approaching steps was heard, only partially muffled by the distance of years and the thick carpets. Alas, instead of Nabokov’s graceful ghost, it was one of the chambermaids, pushing along a trolley with cleaning utensils. As she turned the corner, she almost bumped into the pensive scholars who stood there contemplating the mysteries of time texturing. “May I help you?” she asked, somewhat surprised. “Oh, we are just Nabokov fans, he used to live here...” “No he didn’t,” she replied immediately and added, “he lived in another wing.” At first the scholars felt cheated, but in the next move they reflected that this was exactly the moment when Nabokov revealed himself, somewhat mischievously, after his fashion, for he turned them into characters of his novels. They stood where Sebastian Knight waited for the ghost of his mother in the wrong Roquebrune, and where Martin Edelweiss watched the passing trains from Molignac, confident of having captured his dream. They did manage to get to the right place and see all the appropriate memorabilia, and admire the closed door of the “Nabokov suite.” But the previous experience somehow invalidated the claims of the place. Quite to the contrary, the place made the connection with the past impossible, or merely offered a weak cliché of it. A much stronger link was forged through displacement – through being included in a fictional pattern which distorted reality, producing recognition. 1 A. Appel, Jr., “Nabokov: A Portrait” in J. E. Rivers and Charles Nicol, eds., Nabokov’s Fifth Arc: Nabokov and Others on His Life’s Work (Austin: University of Texas, 1982), 3. 9 Vladimir Nabokov and the Fictions of Memory Memory in Nabokov’s works is never what the reader expects it to be. The above anecdote shows Nabokov mocking the sentimental travelers who wish to indulge their nostalgia – just touching the past for one brief moment. As Marek Zaleski writes in Forms of Memory, “the primary quality of artistic nostalgic sensibility is an illusion and a promise that the past may return as an aesthetic echo and as an aura of itself.”2 Nabokov makes his readers recognize the illusory substance of that promise, granting the aesthetic pleasure not through repetition, but through longing itself. And of course, there is no other writer as obsessed with memory as Nabokov. From his very early poems and his first novel Mary to the unfinished manuscript ofThe Original of Laura, Nabokov’s writings abound in characters haunted by their past. This preoccupation is not simply a feature of loss and nostalgia characteristic of emigrant experience in general, but an attempt to examine the mechanisms which control the functions of human consciousness. And this is the first meaning of “the fictions of memory”: exploration of the writings which are fueled by the energy of reminiscence, and which are themselves an exploration of the furtive processes of remembering. But there is also a second meaning: the fictions that memory writes. Mnemosyne may be a “very careless girl”3 or a very clever artist. And while Nabokov explores his own remembrances, transferring his experiences to the characters of his fictions, it is never entirely clear how much of what is being recalled is in fact a construct of the imagination. Memory becomes an obsession for many of Nabokov’s heroes, who may often be described as mnemonic deviants, their crimes resulting from a falsified perception of reality which they constantly filter through the lenses of the past. Conversely, there are characters ennobled by their devotion to every fleeting 2 M. Zaleski, Formy pamięci (Gdańsk: Słowo/obraz terytoria, 2004), 12. 3 V. Nabokov, Speak, Memory (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999), 6. 10 Vladimir Nabokov and the Fictions of Memory detail of their existence, whether past or present. All are trapped by memory – which may not even be their own. In retrospect, they are conditioned to perceive reality in terms of an unfolding pattern, which turns their own lives into fictions. This is only to be expected, since they are literary heroes. But what can we make of Nabokov’s own insistence that “the following of such thematic designs through one’s life should be (...) the true purpose of autobiography”?4 The ostensible pattern that he displays before the reader in his memoir and the Forewords to the English translations of his Russian novels is the following: upon leaving Russia the writer tried to find relief from the burden of his memories, retained in pathological clarity, by giving them away to his fictional characters, whereupon these precise, almost tangible images immediately faded and were replaced by the memory of the fictional situations and surroundings. This produced relief, but also unease, a sense of betrayal, perhaps because the essence of one’s identity is construed precisely out of memories: After I had bestowed on the characters in my novels some treasured item of my past, it would pine away in the artificial world where I had so abruptly placed it. Although it lingered on in my mind, its personal warmth, its retrospective appeal had gone and, presently, it became more closely identified with my novel than with my former self, where it had seemed to be so safe from the intrusion of the artist. Houses have crumbled in my memory as soundlessly as they did in the mute films of yore, and the portrait of my old French governess, whom I once lent to a boy in one of my books, is fading fast, now that it is engulfed 4 Ibid., 16. This sentence reappears in five of the following essays. 11 Vladimir Nabokov and the Fictions of Memory in the description of a childhood entirely unrelated to my own.5 It is not just that the memories bracketed within the fictionalized walls – “somewhere, in the apartment house of a chapter, in the hired room of a paragraph”6 – fade, but their inhabitants “pine away,” are forced into exile and displacement in the invented realm. And thus, the mislaid identity of the writer and the reality of the past had to be reclaimed from the creatures of imagination, thereby proving that the real belonged to a higher order of being than those spurious, fictional selves.