Vladimir Nabokov and the Art of Painting (review)

With Dosso Dossi's Melissa (or Circe) on the cover of this paperback volume gazing glossily off-stage while her dog watchfully observes you, you cannot help but feel that you are in the presence of a secret. The sense of secrecy is reinforced by the text itself. Reading Nabokov and the Art of Painting for the first time, I came upon a pair of sentences from the book's introduction promising to reveal the secret of the true relation between Nabokov's ethics and aesthetics: "Nabokov's reserve and indirection is most extant when moral questions are considered. Referring to paintings which could exemplify his sentiments provided him with excellent hiding places for his ethical concerns" (29). There seemed something not a little curious about someone like Nabokov taking the trouble to hide his ethical concerns but make them available by reference. Less curious was the approach of viewing the paintings Nabokov mentions as if they were yet another ignored "otherworld" of Nabokov's hidden concerns, but keeping that "could" in mind, I kept on reading, spurred on towards my goal by occasionally titillating passages like this one: "Nabokov not only links his favourite protagonists with the paintings he admired, but impugns the taste and character of the less favored by assigning them and their scenes to artists and schools he disliked" (137). With road signs like that, the crown jewels had to be just around the corner, just beyond the turn of the next page. But as discussions of painters in Laughter in the Dark (Baugin, Linard, Seurat), The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Pnin (Rembrandt, Degas, Van Gogh), Lolita (Aubrey Beardsley, Picasso), Pale Fire (Hogarth), "Spring in Fialta" (Leonardo), and Ada (Selov, Rubens, Utamara, Toulouse-Lautrec, Gauguin, and Bosch) rolled on, I became somewhat suspicious of the book's claims to coherence. It did not help me that previous discussions of Nabokov and painting went either under-discussed (Gavriel Shapiro) or unmentioned (Ralph Ciancio, Maxim D. Shrayer, Michael Long).

And when Appendices replaced the discussion, I had to reconsider the path by which I had gotten the impression that the book was really going to discuss the secrets of Nabokov's ethics as revealed by his references and allusions to paintings. And like another reader before me, I wanted to have the epiphany that indirection was the point, that texture rather than text was my gain. Instead I had the epiphany of the befuddled and came to a similar conclusion in the aftermath: "I liked it better when expecting less. And what was that? What was that dim distant music, those vestiges of color in the air?" At this point, Kinbote's "What was that?" seemed the right question to ask in identifying a strategy to use in reviewing a rather different book from the one I thought I was reading.

Once I abandoned the search within Nabokov and the Art of Painting for the secret map of instances where Nabokov's "rapid speech" turned the "vestiges of color" from real life's art into his own moral "vision," I found much to like. These are the riches on which future scholarship will build: There is a listing of just about anything Nabokov has said about the visual dimension of existence; there is a ten-page Appendix I, "List of Passages in Nabokov's Novels, Stories or Autobiography Referring or Alluding to Paintings" (167–77), followed by Appendix II, "List of Artists Mentioned or Obviously Referred to in Nabokov's Works" (178–80). Those artists are duly divided by national origin, and even the distribution percentages are given (180). There is also a helpful table listing the "Corresponding Pages in the Volumes Published by Vintage International and Penguin Books" (212–13). And then there is the art itself. Even if the book had contained nothing other than the thirty-six color (some partials) and forty black-and-white illustrations and the index...