Imagining Nabokov: Russia Between Art and Politics (review)

Imagining Nabokov is a singularly apt title. Though at first sight it may look like one, this is not a scholarly work and at no point pretends to be one. Instead, it recounts the process of the author doing just what her title describes—imagining Nabokov. This exercise is conducted in two directions: one aimed at the sort of man Nabokov was and the other at what use he might be. Beginning with the former, Khrushcheva makes clear that she finds him to have been neither a nice man nor a nice writer. He displayed “heartlessness,” “unmitigated arrogance,” “vanity and airs”; he was “petty,” “arbitrary,” “categorical,” “aggressive,” “smug,” and a number of other disagreeable things. She grants him “genius,” but also notes that, “it’s hard to accept that a real genius must be so painfully anxious about his own gifts that he feels the need to belittle the gifts of everyone else.” (189)

Imagining Nabokov is, however, not all disparagement. Alongside of the above, Khrushcheva also finds affinities. “Like him,” she writes, “I am a member of an aristocracy” (2)—though, it bears noting, a very different sort of aristocracy, and one that Nabokov loathed (the author is the granddaughter of Nikita Khruschchev). Khrushcheva declares that this common historical cause—that of a “deposed elite”—guides her reading of Nabokov and leads her from questions of art to politics.

Imagining Nabokov follows Khrushcheva’s oscillating feelings about Nabokov over the course of some twenty years, ending with a pilgrimage to Montreux, Switzerland where she communes with a bronze statue of the departed writer. This personal tale, however, is but one half of her equation—and not the one most likely to hold her reader’s interest. Alongside of tracing her personal image of the author, Khrushcheva tries to imagine what purpose he might serve—and here is where the book becomes truly strange. Khrushcheva’s focus is not the enchantment of art, it is the use-value of the artist. The answer she arrives at is surprisingly concrete: “The ‘American’ Nabokov of the second half of the twentieth century is the most important cultural and literary phenomenon for Russia in the first half of the twenty-first. He is our textbook and our road map for today’s transitional period from a closed and communal terrain to its Western alternative, one open and competitive. How to survive and succeed in this Western world, which Russia always deemed linear, cold and calculating: this is what the art of Vladimir Nabokov teaches us.” (20) In other words, Khrushcheva imagines Nabokov a “hero” of cross-cultural conflict, an icon of individualistic achievement, and a model to imitate.

Imagining Nabokov’s subtitle is “Russia Between Art and Politics” and it is this topic which the book then explores. The irony of doing so under the aegis of Nabokov is great. Nabokov categorically dismissed the importance or interest—both in his works and those of others—of social, political, or moral questions. What is more, he displayed a particularly strong antipathy towards writers and critics whom he saw using literature to advocate political views. In the Introduction to Bend Sinister he stated, “I am not ‘sincere,’ I am not ‘provocative,’ I am not ‘satirical.’ I am neither a didacticist nor an allegorizer. Politics and economics, atomic bombs, primitive and abstract art forms, the entire Orient, symptoms of ‘thaw’ in Soviet Russia, the Future of Mankind, and so on, leave me supremely indifferent.” (Bend Sinister, xii) Nabokov most frequently taxed communism with two things: its love of generalities and its absence of irony. Although Imagining Nabokov is by no means a communist book, affection for generalizations and absence of irony are two of its principal traits.

Imagining Nabokov has been treated harshly by both general-interest and specialist readers. The former, such as Steve Coates writing in The New York Times, have charged the book with conceptual incoherence and stylistic awkwardness. The latter have tended...