Nabokov's World. Volume 1: The Shape of Nabokov's World; Volume 2: Reading Nabokov (review)

230 Nabokov Studies Jane Grayson, Arnold McMillin, and Priscilla Meyer, eds. Nabokov's World. Volume 1: The Shape of Nabokov's World; Volume 2: Reading Nabokov. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, 2002. Published in association with the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London. Vol. 1: xvi + 237 pp.; Vol. 2: xvii + 241 pp. ISBN 0333964152; 0333964179. Review by Jenefer Coates, Middlesex University, London Jointly entitled Nabokov's World, these volumes are the fruit of two lively centennial conferences organized in 1999, one in rime-laced March by Priscilla Meyer at Wesleyan University under the title "1799, 1899, 1999: Pushkin, Nabokov and Intertextuality," and the other in sun-dappled July at the University of Cambridge by Jane Grayson of SSEES, University College London, under the title "Nabokov at the Crossroads." The thirty papers collected here investigate what Jane Grayson's introduction describes as "the agencies and influences that formed Nabokov and helped fashion his art." Volume 1, The Shape of Nabokov's World, considers his artistic universe and broader metaphysical questions, while Volume 2, Reading Nabokov, focuses on reception and relations with other texts. The resulting critical symphony resonates with so many overlapping and interweaving themes, a single volume might have served the reader better than a pair: although each stands alone, they really are two halves of a whole, and not only are few likely to buy just one, it would be misguided to spurn the other. Calling papers chapters fosters a sense of unity, as do the common sources: William James and Henri Bergson, for example, are not the only philosophers to crop up in several places, whilst a stereoscopic effect is created by the same Nabokovian pronouncements being viewed from different angles. The dipping reader will miss nice touches in editorial orchestration, such as John Locke's shadows (discussed by Charles Lock) being closely followed by the light of "Max Lux," with which Stephen Blackwell opens. The vexed—and, in some quarters, vexing—question of Nabokov's "otherworld " is placed here in various contexts. "Since Vera Nabokov designated 'the otherworld' (potustoronnost') as Nabokov's 'watermark' in 1979 there has been increasing discussion of its manifestations in his fiction" (Priscilla Meyer, Vol. 1, 88). Nabokov, however, first used potustoronnost' in his essay on Rupert Brooke in 1922, we are reminded by Don Barton Johnson, who continues: "One of the reasons 'the other world' or 'that world' [has] such great appeal to Walter de la Mare, Nabokov and many other writers, is its very capaciousness, its ability to assume any meaning at all—apart from the mundane here and now" (Vol. 1, 81). Nevertheless, the various meanings of "otherworld" are for the most part conflated and confused in these Reviews 231 pages, and "capaciousness" is eschewed almost exclusively in favor of what Don Barton Johnson describes as "possible survival of the individual consciousness (personality and memory) after death" (Vol. 1, 20). "Otherworld " can mean many kinds of alternative to the world as we know it— alternative facts, alternative knowledge, alternative experience. Fictions are based on alternatives and hypotheses of all kinds. Nabokov explores all of these, not just the idea of life after death. True, though, there are plenty of ghosts, shadows and spectres, but rather than entities, they are often metaphors for what is imagined or remembered, unattained or unattainable. The acrostic in "The Vane Sisters," the enigmas oÃ- Pale Fire, and the mysteries of Transparent Things—all are adumbrations of an afterlife of some sort. But it is not clear what kind of life, or what kind of death even, is being implied. When characters talk of life and death in a self-conscious work of fiction, what do they know about their own existence, the limits and closure of the world they inhabit? What exactly, or even inexactly, does the "hereafter " or "the otherworld" mean, to Nabokov, to his muse, to us? Where is "here" and whose, which, time is it "after"? Whose is the faith, and in what is it placed? Even if we detect an authorial "signature," can we be sure, amid all the carefully wrought frames and glazing, that it's an authentic signature , and not just the painting of...