Nabokov and his Fiction: New Perspectives (review)

224 Nabokov Studies Nabokov and his Fiction: New Perspectives. Edited by Julian W. Connolly. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999. 250 pp. ISBN 0521632838. Review by Michael Wood, Princeton. "Without reasoning, without considering," Nabokov writes of the central character in his story "Cloud, Castle, Lake," "Vasiliy Ivanovich in one radiant second realized that here in this little room with that view, beautiful to the verge of tears, life would at last be what he had always wished it to be." Vasiliy Ivanovich doesn't know what this life will be like, he just knows it's possible—"all around him were help, promise, and consolation." This moment will stand for many such moments in Nabokov's work, all cmcial and all fragile. Are we to think of them as moments of escape out of life or into life—or both? The doubt is all the more important because the moments rarely last. Life as one wishes it to be always lapses back into the life one has—even, until the very end, in Ada. Or it lapses into the life one no longer has, since Vasiliy Ivanovich commits suicide at the end of the story. After his vision he joyfully announces to his boisterous traveling companions that he plans to stay "in that little house over there," but they force him to return to Berlin with them, beating him up ingeniously and furiously on the way. "All had a wonderful time," Nabokov announces in his tersest manner, that form of bleak sarcasm he reserves for his fully focused anger. Vasiliy Ivanovich, like Cincinnatus C, is condemned by the mass because he is not the mass, but with an added detail of resentment; he is condemned for having had a chance of happiness, a happiness all his own. Alexander Dolinin, in one of the finest essays in Julian W. Connolly's admirable collection, Nabokov and his Fiction: New Perspectives, suggests that Vasiliy Ivanovich pays "undue respect to his enemies," and so "misses a unique opportunity to slip out of historical reality into timelessness" (210). Nabokov is dramatizing, Dolinin says, the destructiveness of "any surrender to historicism" (209). But is timelessness an alternative to history, and couldn't life as one wishes it to be also occur in historical time? I don't know the answer to these questions, but they do seem to be central to current preoccupations in Nabokov studies, as reflected not only in Dolinin's essay but also in some way or other in most of the other chapters in the book. We have seen, Connolly reminds us, an "aesthetic" Nabokov, followed by an "ethical" Nabokov, in rum overtaken by a "metaphysical" Nabokov. The eleven essays in this book seek, Connolly says, "to move beyond the existing body of work on Nabokov" (7), and they do. They can't arrive, of course, at a "historicist" Nabokov, since everything in the work cries out against the possibility of such a figure. But they can address the paradox which Dolinin so shrewdly identifies. What if the notion of the "transcendence of history in culture" rums out to be historically sound? What if Nabokov's attacks Reviews 225 on history are made on history's behalf, as he unmistakably defends reality against "reality," and life against life—that is, more life or better life against mere life? The first of the two sections of the book is ' dedicated to "Artistic Themes and Strategies," and aptly so, but it is striking how often a historical Nabokov pops up even in seemingly purely textual zones. There is the encoded author of Gavriel Shapiro's essay "Setting his myriad faces in the text"; the apologist of memory and imagination in Galya Diment's "Vladimir Nabokov and the art of autobiography"; the husband of Vera Slonim and the orchestrator of Jewish themes in Maxim Shrayer's "Jewish questions in Nabokov's art and life"; the "authorial figure" of Maurice Couturier's "The near-tyranny of the author." It's true that the last-named personage is not exactly historical because he is "an enunciation-based construct ... the prime enunciator of the text as reconstructed by the reader in the act of reading" (67). But he has all...