What Is Good?

Professor Timofey Pnin, the lovably hapless, 'ideally bald', comic-heroic émigré protagonist of Nabokov's novel, thinks the unthinkable:

In order to exist rationally, Pnin had taught himself, during the last ten years, never to remember Mira Belochkin – not because, in itself, the evocation of a youthful love affair, banal and brief, threatened his peace of mind … but because, if one were quite sincere with oneself, no conscience, and hence no consciousness, could be expected to subsist in a world where such things as Mira's death were possible. One had to forget – because one could not live with the thought that this graceful, fragile, tender young woman with those eyes, that smile, those gardens and snows in the background, had been brought in a cattle car to an extermination camp and killed by an injection of phenol into the heart, into the gentle heart one had heard beating under one's lips in the dusk of the past.

Vladimir Nabokov and Czesław Miłosz – the Russian novelist, and the Lithuanian Polish poet – were, are, secret sharers:

Here, in this garden I held her hand,Her body was like a swallow's bodyFluttering in my palm. Death.And I don't even know whether it could be said,That she was taken away into darkness by Charon's boat,Because of barbed wire, abomination, blood.

('A Warsaw Faust')

Born into the gentry, both idealised a childhood of innocent, sensuous wonder – were forced from their homeland – moved to the States, to teach, like Pnin. They write poetry after Auschwitz (Nabokov, and Miłosz, sometimes, in prose) and cling to the notional sovereignty of art over unspeakable realities. Both were taxidermists. Neither enjoyed music, describing concerts with self-praise of their visual nous: 'a strange ritual was being enacted', writes Miłosz, and 'sound had value only insofar as it set two fields of bows in motion, like wheat bent in the wind'.

Resisters of ideological literature, whatever the risk, they exalted close observation, fusing, like Pnin, conscience and consciousness: 'When gold paint flakes from the arms of sculptures, / When the letter falls out of the book of laws, / Then consciousness is naked as an eye'. Like Nabokov, Miłosz really had some ego. He could be overtly self-admiring – alert to, and keen to describe, the relentlessness which saw him through. Bravura passages in the work of both writers arrest time, preserving in the amber of style the vanishing nanosecond. However influenced by 'the pantheistic strain within Lithuanian folk culture', Miłosz, a friend of Pope John Paul, returned gradually, and idiosyncratically, to Catholicism; Nabokov, like Pnin, appears to have believed, or wanted to, in a 'democracy of ghosts' – elsewhere he hints electricity is made of them. The dead abide, even if it is, to apply Simone Weil, their very absence, our need to think of them, which allows them to return.

Though Miłosz, Franaszek confirms, 'luckily, never had to experience prison or transportation', he had the worse of it – if such things can be measured. (Luck, unstably overhauled as fate, looms large in his life and verse – 'A Ninety-year-old Poet Signing his Books' mentions 'miraculous events / Like the ones that once saved me / From Auschwitz, and also (there's evidence) / From a gulag miner's fate somewhere in Vorkuta'.) Born in Szetejnie, in Lithuania, in 1911 (his family considered itself Polish), he lived through both world wars, the Russian Revolution, and the Nazi occupation. History crept up on him: his memoir of 1955, The Issa Valley, depicts a childhood in which – this is Franaszek – 'nothing much had altered since the nineteenth century … Time was measured by the rhythm of harvesting, with Lithuanian peasants, Polish nobility, Jewish tradesmen, and Russian civil servants bustling alongside each other.' Miłosz tinges this rather artfully and, one feels, retrospectively constructed paradise with hints of what's to come:

Thomas was very fond of his grandfather. He had a nice smell about him and...