Death and Immortality in Nabokov's "A Busy Man"

Nabokov Studies, 2 (1995) 213-32. SVETLANA POLSKY (Göteborg, Sweden) DEATH AND IMMORTALW IN NABOKOV'S "A BUSY MAN" In the foreword to Vladimir Nabokov's collected poems, his wife Vera says: "... I wish to direct the reader's attention to Nabokov's main theme. Apparently noticed by no one, it saturated everything he wrote. Like a watermark, it symbolized his entire creative life. I am speaking of "the otherworld," as he himself called it in his last poem, "Being in Love." This theme is already to be remarked in such early Nabokov poems as "I still keep mute—and in the hush grow strong"; it radiates through "How I Love You" ("... and stealthily into the eternal pass through"); in "Evening on a Vacant Lot" ("... for its lid was not tight—and no longer can one take it away from you."), and in many of his other works."' Since these lines were written, many studies touching on Nabokov's "other world" or "two-world" theme have been published. Sergei Davydov , for instance, notes that "the novel Invitation to a Beheading, together with other Nabokov works ... is devoted to the subject of 'the alignment of worlds,' and death ... should be understood as a certain transit point at the border of these worlds."2 On the same subject, D. Barton Johnson writes: "Invitation to a Beheading is Nabokov's earliest major statement of the two world theme that characterizes so much of his oeuvre. The embodiment of each of the two worlds in one of two opposed key terms (tut/tam) and the alignment of each with a series of thematic oppositions affords an almost schematic view of Nabokov's fictional cosmology.... The two worlds cosmology of Invitation to a Beheading is the context for two of Nabokov's reigning themes: the intermediary role of art and the artist, and the meaning of death."3 Speaking 1. Vladimir Nabokov, Stikhi (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1979), p. 3. The first-mentioned poem was written as early as 1919. The English translation of Vera Nabokov's text was supplied by the editor, as was that of the Nabokov poem quoted at the end of the article. All of the poems cited above may be found in both English and Russian in Vladimir Nabokov, Poems and Problems (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970). 2. Sergei Davydov, Teksty-matreshki Vladimira Nabokova (Munich: Otto Sagner, 1982), p. 104. 3. D. Barton Johnson, Worlds in Regression: Some Novels of Vladimir Nabokov (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1985), p. 169. 214 Nabokov Studies of the chapter "Ultima Thule" from Nabokov's unfinished novel Solus Rex, Johnson defines its major theme as that of "death and the hereafter" (206). Further he writes: "The point of contact between the two worlds is death. This aesthetic cosmology and the 'ultimate' question that leads to its revelation, we have termed the Ultima Thule theme" (211). He then continues: "The Ultima Thule theme occupied a dominant position in Nabokov's writing for forty years. From the 1934 Invitation to a Beheading to the 1974 Look at the Harlequins!, it provided a conceptual framework for many, but not all, of his works. It is not present in the early Russian novels..." (218). In this article we will try to show that the "Ultima Thule" theme, as Johnson calls it, is represented in Nabokov's Russian short stories as well. Let us look at how this theme is realized in the short story "A Busy Man," written in Berlin in September 1931 and published in the Parisian émigré newspaper Poslednie novosti of October 20, 1931. The protagonist of the story is a Russian emigrant living in Berlin. In his childhood he had been warned in a dream that he would die at the age of 33. Upon reaching the fateful age, Grafitski (his pen name4—we do not know his real name) begins to dwell on the prophecy and takes "extraordinary measures to protect his life from the claims of fate" (176).5 He stops smoking, foregoes the hazards of shaving, and ceases going out. On June 19, his thirty-fourth birthday, having prepared everything for his party, he hears a noise from the street and then gunshots. As...