Homosexuality and the Aesthetic of Nabokov's Dar

Nabokov Studies 4 (1997) ANNA BRODSKY (Lexington, Virginia) Homosexuality and the Aesthetic of Nabokov's Dar In this article, I plan to discuss the role of homosexuality in Nabokov's novel The Gift (Dar), and in particular, the significance of this theme for the aesthetic Nabokov works out in that novel. The significance runs simultaneously on two levels. First, Nabokov's hostility to homosexuality can be read as an attack on the aestiietics of the Silver Age—the generation of Russian artists who immediately preceded Nabokov's, and who celebrated sexual experimentation and a new, more intense communality (homosexuality, ménages-à -trois) as a vital element of creativity and the perfect artist. The Yasha Chernyshevsky episode in The Gift is central to this attack on the Silver Age: we will see how Yasha's doomed affair reproduces, now as banal clichés, the aesthetics and sexual politics of the preceding generation. The Yasha-episode also figures prominently in the second, more personal layer of significance. In a novel as autobiographical as The Gift, we should not overlook the importance of Nabokov's anguished response to the homosexuality of his older brother, Sergei. Yasha may well represent Nabokov's artistic attempt to purify the Nabokov family's painful history, in order to make it a more suitable setting for the artistNabokov himself. Nabokov links Yasha's homosexuality to his 96 Nabokov Studies banality as a would-be poet, so that he contrasts strikingly with the novel's hero, Fyodor—a heterosexual, whose unclouded and lovingly evoked family life suffuse his robust and artistic gift. Linking these two levels of significance is the idea of the perfect artist. Nabokov rejects a frequent Silver Age definition of the perfect artist as androgynous, bi-sexual, communal, and insists, rather, on the artist as coherent, self-avaüable and individual . Nabokov situates his poet/hero Fyodor GodunovCherdyntsev in a brilliant, sunnily evoked family, who provide the perfect nurturing ground for the artist. The Yasha-episode, however, seems to me to frustrate Nabokov's apparent intention of separating his art from any polluting element. That Yasha is incompletely exorcised—tiiat he continues to stick to Fyodor/Nabokov, despite the attempted expulsion—suggests limits to the ability of art to assimilate and transform reality, and also exposes the equivocation in die claim of Nabokov's art that it is able to do so. More deeply, then, the Yasha episode points to a weakness in Nabokov's conception of art in The Gift, where the very insistence on perfection seems paradoxically to be one of its imperfections. Nabokov would later evolve a less insistent, more nuanced, tragic conception of art, which reaches its apotheosis in Lolita. Yasha is an aspiring but mediocre—although not entirely untalented—poet. He is intense and passionate, as befits a romantic poet, but these qualities are congealed in a kind of preset mold: Yasha is conventionally passionate, and his intensity is all too predictable. Ultimately, Yasha's most urgent feelings have nothing satisfying to connect with, since he has only hackneyed concepts to enthuse about and stale ways of expressing his enthusiasm. He is associated with two other mediocrities, Rudolf (a young Berliner) and OHa (a fellow ex-patriate). Olia is in love with Yasha, Yasha is in love with Rudolf, and Rudolf Homosexuality in Dar 97 is in love with Olia. In despair, the three of them decide to commit suicide. Yasha, however, is the only one who follows through with the plan. Fyodor considers the possibility of turning this triangle into a story, but ultimately rejects it. He disdains Yasha's spiritual throes as tasteless and his poetry as feeble. He notes the pale, haphazard manner of Yasha's artistic expression and his total ignorance of Russian art. Beyond that, the story seems to him trite. The very fact that the story was highly characteristic of its time was a strike against it. Yasha exemplifies the frame of mind of young people in the postwar years—a combination of words, Fyodor comments, that makes him speechless with scorn (The Gift 40). Yasha's stereotypical quality is cunningly presented in the novel. He first appears only covertly in Fyodor's fanciful musings...