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Vladimir Nabokov and Virginia Woolf

2013; Penn State University Press; Volume: 50; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/complitstudies.50.3.0490

1528-4212

Priscilla Meyer, Rachel Trousdale,

Education, Literature, Philosophy Research

Сколько у Вас пишущих дам! Будьте осторожны—это признак проbинциальной литературы (голландской, ческой и т. д.)(You have so many writing women! Be careful—it's a sign of a provincial literature (Dutch, Czech, etc.))—Vladimir Nabokov, letter to Mark AldanovI gradually got used to his manner of … taking something from a great author and then saying he'd never read him.—Nina Berberova, “Nabokov in the Thirties” Nabokov did say he had read Woolf. In fact he claims to have read “all” of Woolf in 1933 in preparation for writing “The Admiralty Spire.”1 Yet the faults for which his story's horrid narrator reviles “lady novelists” have nothing to do with either the subject, method, or stylistic devices of Woolf's novels.2 Nabokov finds lady novelists sentimental and famously wrote to Edmund Wilson, “I dislike Jane, and am prejudiced, in fact, against all women writers. They are in another class.”3 Maxim D. Shrayer reviews Nabokov's largely negative criticism of the works of Russian and anglophone women poets and prose writers, finding that he “fails to offer grounds for his dismissive remarks” about even such a poet as Marina Tsvetaeva.4What led Nabokov to read all of Woolf's work but never anywhere to allude explicitly or covertly, except in his letter to Zinaida Shakovskaia, as far as we know, to one of the most important anglophone modernists publishing while Nabokov was studying literature in England? After all, by 1933 Woolf had written Jacob's Room (1922), The Common Reader (1925), Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), Orlando (1928), A Room of One's Own (1929), and The Waves (1931), works that at the time were overturning the way prose fiction was written no less remarkably than Joyce's Ulysses.5 Woolf's reputation by the 1930s was too well established for him to treat her work as only representative of women's (deridable) authorship.6By the early thirties, Woolf was a major prose stylist whose novels expanded the boundaries of fictional form while exploring the intricate relationship between memory, consciousness, and perception. Woolf's linguistic and formal experiments achieve a novelty and sophistication (and recognition) Nabokov had not at the time yet matched. As we show, his covert use of her work reveals their shared interest in the complex interpenetration of personal memory and literary influence, of public history and private fate. At a time when he was an impoverished émigré known only to a small circle of Russians, Nabokov's discovery that a woman was already engaging, with obvious success, in the kind of experiments he was interested in himself could help account for his dismissal of Woolf. His hidden readings of Woolf demonstrate his determination to maintain his vision of himself as sui generis, an artistic self-description that was daring, liberating, and somewhat overstated. At the same time, his suppression of Woolf's contribution to his work suggests his resemblance to the angry male writers Woolf describes in A Room of One's Own.The dense referentiality that characterizes Nabokov's fiction is one of the most important of his creative methods and takes several forms. Nabokov makes precise textual references (Pale Fire's “bodkin” is a hyperlink to Hamlet, the soliloquy “To Be or Not to Be,” to Shakespeare's life, work, and period, which he wants the reader to be well aware of), which constitutes a subtextual mode. Whole plot lines have identifiable sources (Sally Horner's real-life abduction by Frank Lasalle helps structure part 2 of Lolita) that carry with them their own cultural settings, forming an intertextual method. A third order of reference is the network of secondary texts “standing behind” an initial set of references, in which the system of references makes its own argument, establishing intratextuality.7 Cryptomnesia on this scale in the case of such a highly self-consciously referential writer as Nabokov is a wild hypothesis. There is another, more elusive category, a mode of referentiality that refers to a looming invisible relationship, hidden in not-so-plain view, without detectable sub-, inter- or intratextual clues. Michael Marr, demonstrating Nabokov's appropriations of Thomas Mann's work in “The Potato Elf,” attributes Nabokov's “contempt” and “scorn” for it to jealousy and resentment.8 In The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Henry James's short stories provide, apparently unacknowledged, the theme of the writer's ghost's dialogue with his biographer.9 That book also incorporates several features from Virginia Woolf's novels. We could decide to view the appropriations in Sebastian Knight as part of a continuum of references to the Anglo-American literary tradition that the book seeks to enter, or perhaps Berberova is correct in implying that the author's failure to acknowledge a reference/source/subtext/intertext is a denial of influence motivated by rivalry. We show that Nabokov repeatedly draws on Woolf's work and make the case that tracing Woolf's hidden presence through some of its manifestations in his novels demonstrates not just her influence on his representations of consciousness and his experiments in fictional form but reveals his struggle to resist madness and despair through authorial control.Nabokov was well aware of British literary circles, as Don Barton Johnson shows in his article on Nabokov's critique/translation of Rupert Brooke's poetry.10 Nabokov's “Rupert Bruk” was written in 1921 while he was at Cambridge; three years earlier Virginia Woolf had published “Rupert Brooke,” a review of Edward Marsh's edition of Brooke's poems, accompanied by his own memoir of Brooke.11 Her review, which rued Marsh's romanticization of Brooke, was published anonymously, as was then the custom for book reviews in the Times Literary Supplement. But it was well known that Woolf and Brooke had been friends from childhood (starting in 1893, when they began seeing each other at St. Ives, in Cornwall), and literary circles were so small and closely knit that her authorial identity, like that of others, would be reasonably transparent. Although immersed in émigré grief, given his love of Brooke, the newly arrived Nabokov could not have missed the shaping of the epoch of British thought, art and letters by the Bloomsbury group's activity in the early 1920s, but he apparently nowhere alludes to the group's other members or their work.At the very least, by 1933 when he read “all” of her works, Nabokov would have known that Woolf was a part of a group representing the most important contemporary artists and thinkers in British life. But aspects of The Defense, Invitation to a Beheading, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight and Pale Fire indicate that Nabokov came to Woolf earlier and recognized in her work many of his own concerns.Woolf was seventeen years older than Nabokov. Their first novels (The Voyage Out, 1915, and Mary, 1926) were published eleven years apart. Both writers, influenced by the philosopher Henri Bergson, play with how novels convey the passage of time.12 Both came from prominent intellectual families with whom they spent idyllic summers, which they evoke repeatedly in their novels, and both lost a beloved parent at a comparatively early age: Woolf's mother died in 1895, when Virginia was thirteen, and Nabokov's father was shot in 1922, when Vladimir was turning twenty-three. Woolf's brothers Adrian and Thoby attended Trinity College, Cambridge, and Woolf resented her exclusion from the intellectual life they found there. Nabokov also attended Trinity; as an émigré he felt like an outsider, and he had to make efforts to fit in. More unusually, in defiance of the prejudices of their surroundings, both married Jews.The two writers share a concern with biography and autobiography; their fiction transmutes their lives in a modern way described by Woolf in her essay “The New Biography” (1927): “A method still remains to be discovered” by “the biographer whose art is subtle and bold enough to present that queer amalgamation of dream and reality, that perpetual marriage of granite and rainbow.”13 The biographer should reconcile, without conflating, “granite” and “rainbow,” fact and imagination. Woolf's interest in how biography can and cannot capture an individual's consciousness is influenced by the work of her father, Leslie Stephen, who edited the Dictionary of National Biography; Woolf's experiments in biography, both fictional and nonfictional, examine the relationship between the “granite” reported in the DNB and the actual experience of living. The related question of a person's (especially an artist's) relationship to his or her surroundings—to what degree historical period, “the spirit of the age,” determines self or creative genius—was crucial to both Woolf and Nabokov. And this concern causes both to mock Freudian psychology in their essays and novels.14In The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, V derides Sebastian's biographer, Mr. Goodman, for depicting Sebastian “as a product and victim of what he calls ‘our time’”: “‘Postwar unrest,’ ‘Postwar Generation’ are to Mr. Goodman magic words opening every door,” pushing him to adopt a mechanistic cause-and-effect approach that leads him to call his biography The Tragedy of Sebastian Knight.15 V's quest is for his brother's “real” life, which he sees as lying in Sebastian's sensibility: “Time for Sebastian was never 1914 or 1920 or 1936—it was always year 1” (63). Sebastian's concern is to locate “a certain warm hollow where something very like the selfest of my own self sits huddled up in the darkness” (66–67). Woolf's portrait of a writer in Orlando, the only novel Nabokov singled out in his letter, calling it “poshlost'” (“kitschy pretension”), emphasizes the same writerly self-sufficiency: “So now she was darkened, stilled, and become, with the addition of this Orlando, what is called … a single self, a real self.”16 These portraits of the artist—in Woolf's Jacob's Room, Mrs. Dalloway, The Waves and Orlando and in Nabokov's The Defense, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, and Pale Fire, to name only the works we discuss—are at the center of the authors' similar treatments of the nature of reality, death and immortality, and the nature of consciousness.Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, The Waves, and Orlando and Nabokov's The Defense, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, and Pale Fire feature divided consciousnesses that represent transmuted aspects of each author's concerns: Woolf separates her domestic London self (as represented by the quite different Clarissa Dalloway) from her mad, suicidal self (as embodied in Septimus Smith) and separates her male and female selves in Orlando. Nabokov has his Russian persona (Sebastian) merge with his younger anglophone self (V) in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, attempting to reconcile the loss of Russia and its language; in Pale Fire he separates these into family loss (Shade's daughter) and loss of country—its language and culture (Kinbote's Zembla). Nabokov's losses are so great that his oeuvre is preoccupied with preventing his pain from overwhelming his art. His early work (after Mary), criticized for its coldness, avoids sentiment and any hint of personal involvement; only as he becomes more confident in his art, starting with The Gift, where he tempers the loss of his father and country with the gain of his beloved and maturation of his art, does he allow his experience into his novels.17 In The Defense, however, he is still maintaining emotional incognito; Nabokov heightens the narrative distance from the hero that characterizes his early work, which distinguishes it from the “lady novelist's” more empathic models.Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and The Defense (1929) share several elements of plot, style, and theme. Nabokov appears to borrow key plot points from one of Mrs. Dalloway's narratives. The novels contain remarkably similar climactic moments: a scene in which a man kills himself by jumping out of a window. The suicides point to the novels' shared philosophical concerns, particularly an interest in the First World War's effects on its survivors. But the novels also differ significantly: Nabokov focuses his story only on Luzhin, who echoes elements of Woolf's Septimus narrative. The Defense lacks a counterpart to Mrs. Dalloway herself, focusing instead on how the hero's suicidal madness stems from a desire to transcend reductive accounts of the place of the individual. In particular, Luzhin's similarity to Septimus suggests that Luzhin's escape from the “combination” arrayed against him is also an escape from the reductive, dictatorial “human nature” that hounds Septimus—and that both men's suicides keep them from becoming mere victims of history.In Mrs. Dalloway, the trauma of the war is the main cause of Septimus Warren Smith's mental illness, which he experiences primarily as an inability to feel. Septimus survives the war physically unscathed, but the death of his friend Evans “just before the Armistice” leaves him oddly cold: “Septimus, far from showing any emotion or recognizing that here was the end of a friendship, congratulated himself upon feeling very little and very reasonably. The War had taught him. It was sublime.”18 This inability to feel grief at Evans's death causes him increasing distress. He proposes to his wife, Rezia, shortly thereafter, “when the panic was on him—that he could not feel,” as an attempt to jolt himself into an emotional response (85). This solution fails, and his illness gets worse; he begins to experience messianic delusions and, during his final breakdown, to have visions of the dead Evans.“Not feeling” is Septimus's self-diagnosis. It is apparent to the reader that he feels very deeply but that—like other characters in the novel, including Richard Dalloway, who cannot say to his wife “in so many words” that he loves her (115)—Septimus is unable to articulate his feelings, even to himself. Septimus's madness is in fact an overflowing of feeling, a deep recognition of the beauty of life (“Men must not cut down trees. There is a God”) and the horror of death's incursion into life (“Evans was behind the railings!” [24]). He weeps frequently in joy and distress, and he is overwhelmed with guilt at his own inadequate response to the joys and distresses of humanity.Septimus's suicide is a form of self-defense against his doctors, Dr. Holmes and Sir William Bradshaw. The unsympathetic Holmes has told Septimus that he is merely “in a funk” and has “nothing whatever seriously the matter with him” (21). Bradshaw is worse; he recognizes the severity of Septimus's distress and yet diagnoses it dismissively as shell shock and prescribes a regime of bed rest that would separate Septimus from Rezia and leave him vulnerable to Bradshaw's attempts at “conversion” to a sense of “proportion” (99).19 Both doctors' diagnoses are reductive; they minimize Septimus's mental illness and his self. Woolf, who underwent similar treatment for her own breakdown, considers this cloistering of the mentally ill horrifying: “Worshipping proportion, Sir William not only prospered himself but made England prosper, secluded her lunatics, forbade childbirth, penalised despair, made it impossible for the unfit to propagate their views until they, too, shared his sense of proportion—his, if they were men, Lady Bradshaw's if they were women” (97).20In his resistance to Holmes's and Bradshaw's opposite but equally damaging diagnoses, Septimus has the support of Rezia, who also sees that Bradshaw's “cure” is really conformity. Rezia tries to help Septimus escape his madness by pointing out interesting things in the world around them: “‘Look, look, Septimus!’ she cried. For Dr. Holmes had told her to make her husband (who had nothing whatever seriously the matter with him but was a little out of sorts) take an interest in things outside himself” (21). But her greatest help to him comes in their final moments together, when they construct a hat to give to their landlady's daughter. The couple's collaboration is a return to the intimacy and normalcy Rezia treasures: “Yes, it would always make her happy to see that hat. He had become himself then, he had laughed then. They had been alone together. Always she would like that hat” (141).Paradoxically, this moment of liberatory happiness enables Septimus to take his own life. Septimus jumps out of the window of the Smiths' lodging-house room in part to escape Holmes and Bradshaw, who intend to send him to a sanatorium but primarily to give “human nature” what it demands. He considers several means of suicide, rejecting each: There remained only the window, the large Bloomsbury-lodging house window, the tiresome, the troublesome, and rather melodramatic business of opening the window and throwing himself out. It was their idea of tragedy, not his or Rezia's (for she was with him). Holmes and Bradshaw like that sort of thing. (He sat on the sill.) But he would wait till the very last moment. He did not want to die. Life was good. The sun hot. Only human beings—what did they want? Coming down the staircase opposite an old man stopped and stared at him. Holmes was at the door. “I'll give it you!” he cried, and flung himself vigorously, violently down on to Mrs. Filmer's area railings.“The coward!” cried Dr. Holmes, bursting the door open. Rezia ran to the window, she saw; she understood. (145–46) Unlike the brutal Holmes, Rezia understands Septimus's actions: we learn this not only from Septimus's belief that “she was with him” but from her attempt, before Septimus's suicide, to prevent Holmes's entry and from the words “she understood,” which come after he is capable of providing the narrative perspective. Holmes's judgment is clearly to be rejected in favor of sympathy with the dead man; later, Clarissa Dalloway will recognize Septimus's suicide as “an attempt to communicate” (180). While Septimus intends his death as an atonement for his inability to feel, Clarissa understands it as an effort to preserve the self against the pressures of “conversion” and conformity. Septimus's death is an alternative to the other great peril of the novel, the “death of the soul” (58); it preserves the essence of the individual at the expense of his body.The suicide scene in The Defense is strikingly similar to the one in Mrs. Dalloway. Luzhin too jumps out a window in his rented lodgings. Like Septimus, he is impeded by the physical reality of the window: in this case, because it is stuck. Septimus considers in a flash “the tiresome, the troublesome, and rather melodramatic business of opening the window and throwing himself out” (149), but Luzhin's death takes longer, emphasizing both the trouble and the melodrama. Luzhin first tries to jump out the lower half of the window, but the white-frosted pane is stuck; he smashes the pane and attempts to get through the hole, but he is stopped by shards of glass. Finally he climbs onto a chair and reaches the black upper half of the window. While this is going on, there were voices behind the door. Somebody knocked. Somebody called him loudly by his name and patronymic. Then there was silence and his wife's voice said with absolute clarity: “Dear Luzhin, open, please.” … A fist slammed against the door. Two men's voices were quarreling and his wife's whisper wriggled through the uproar…. He quickly reached up to the upper frame, now feeling that the thumping and the voices were urging him on and that he could not help but hurry. Raising a hand he jerked at the frame and it swung open. Black sky. Thence, out of this cold darkness, came the voice of his wife, saying softly: “Luzhin, Luzhin.”… Meanwhile the voices and the crashing behind the door had grown in volume, there must have been around twenty people out there—Valentinov, Turati, the old gentleman with the bunch of flowers … They were sniffing and grunting, and more of them came, and all together they were beating with something against the shuddering door. The rectangular night, however, was still too high…. After many efforts he found himself in a strange and mortifying position: one leg hung outside, and he did not know where the other one was, while his body would in no wise be squeezed through. His shirt had torn at the shoulder, his face was wet. Clutching with one hand at something overhead, he got through the window sideways. Now both legs were hanging outside and he had only to let go of what he was holding on to—and he was saved. Before letting go he looked down. Some kind of hasty preparations were under way there: the window reflections gathered together and leveled themselves out, the whole chasm was seen to divide into dark and pale squares, and at the instant when Luzhin unclenched his hand, at the instant when icy air gushed into his mouth, he saw exactly what kind of eternity was obligingly and inexorably spread out before him.21 The scenes share key elements: the hostile men trying to gain entrance, the sympathetic presence of the wife, the imagined presence of other, judgmental characters from the world of the book (“human nature,” Bradshaw, and Mrs. Filmer; “Valentinov, Turati, the old gentleman with the bunch of flowers”), and the brief pause halfway through the window.More importantly, both suicides are motivated by metaphysics. Luzhin's jump is an attempt to escape the “combination” of a chess game he believes is being played against him in life, a game that move by move is repeating patterns of earlier defeats; his suicide is an attempt to take a completely “unexpected” direction unforeseen by his “mysterious opponent.” Like Septimus, who jumps to placate “human nature,” Luzhin's death is his response to a metaphysical demand; both men believe themselves to be in dialogue with a superhuman force that challenges them and finds them wanting. While Septimus's suicide is treated as a kind of self-preservation and therefore as a success, however, Luzhin's appears to be a failure: the “inexorable” eternity of “dark and pale squares” below him indicates that Luzhin has not, after all, escaped the chess pattern that has pursued him throughout the novel. His more awkward, extended suicide emphasizes his difficulty in navigating the material world.The resemblances between the two men extend beyond their deaths. Luzhin and Septimus encounter similar treatments for their mental illness. Like Septimus, Luzhin has a doctor who says nothing is the matter with him and prescribes a rest cure: “You have been sick but now you are well. Do you hear? You are quite well…. You must lie quiet. Rest. Get lots of sleep” (160). This doctor, too, has a benign appearance but a materialist understanding of his patients' lives: “Your father owned land, didn't he?” Luzhin nodded. “Land, in the country—that's excellent,” continued the professor. “You probably had horses and cows?” A nod. “Let me imagine your house—Ancient trees all around … the house large and bright. Your father returns from the hunt …” Luzhin recalled that his father had once found a fat, nasty little fledgling in a ditch. “Yes,” replied Luzhin uncertainly. “Some details,” asked the professor softly. “Please. I beg you. I'm interested in the way you occupied yourself in childhood, what you played with. You had some tin soldiers, I'm sure …” (163)22 Like Bradshaw, Luzhin's doctor seeks to make his patient's life conform to a familiar model, replacing the “nasty little fledgling” of reality with the stereotyped vision of a generic father returning from the hunt. Like Luzhin's in-laws, whose apartment is full of nostalgic Russian kitsch, the doctor offers a formulaic version of Russia in place of Luzhin's real childhood memories. Bradshaw's love of “conversion” and Luzhin's doctor's account of a Russian childhood replace the idiosyncrasy of individual experience with bland formulas. In each novel, the patient's suicidal escape from his physician's strictures is also a rejection of such simplistic worldviews in favor of a nebulous but potentially redemptive metaphysical realm—in Septimus's case, a space in which the self can escape the imposition of conformity that Clarissa recognizes in his death and in Luzhin's case, an unknown supernatural beyond.Like Rezia, Mrs. Luzhin repeatedly urges her husband to look at objects in the world around them. While in both cases the source of the instructions is somewhat suspect, the wife's affection is helpful, even though the objects to which she draws her husband's attention frequently reinforce his madness: “So, thought Septimus, looking up, they are signaling to me” (21) when Rezia points out a skywriting airplane; Mrs. Luzhin fears to mention the names of large cities “in order to avoid any harmful reminiscences” (187).Luzhin's madness takes a quite different form from Septimus's, however. Luzhin has no interest in the state of his own feelings and does not appear to react to any trauma; despite having lived through the 1914–1918 period in Europe, he seems bizarrely unaffected by the war and the Russian revolution, which occasioned his exile from Russia. Mrs. Luzhin's avoidance of city names is “a superfluous caution. The world in which Luzhin had traveled in his time was not depicted on the map” (187). We see his apparent immunity through the eyes of his father, as the latter contemplates how to write a novel based on Luzhin's childhood: Now, a decade and a half later, these war years turned out to be an exasperating obstacle; they seemed an encroachment upon creative freedom, for in every book describing the gradual development of a given human personality one had somehow to mention the war, and even the hero's dying in his youth could not provide a way out of this situation. There were characters and circumstances surrounding his son's image that unfortunately were conceivable only against the background of the war and which could not have existed without this background. With the revolution it was even worse. The general opinion was that it had influenced the course of every Russian's life; an author could not have his hero go through it without getting scorched, and to dodge it was impossible. This amounted to a genuine violation of the writer's free will. Actually, how could the revolution affect his son? (80)23 Nabokov both does and does not attempt to pull off the trick Luzhin's father contemplates: his character appears to escape the “encroachment” of the war and the revolution but only as a result of madness and obsession. As Will Norman shows, the political events of the age lurk behind even Nabokov's most apparently aloof novels; here, the half-hidden presence of the war provides both the motive for artistic freedom and a warning against solipsism.24 If Luzhin has survived the war without noticing it, it is he and not Septimus who experiences a failure of feeling. Luzhin is so isolated in his chess world that he seems barely to register his father's death; his refusal to take his wife to visit his father's grave suggests his refusal to confront and experience the loss to death and history of his parents, his childhood, and his country. Clearly Luzhin feels something—he is anxious about his chess game—but that is a measure of his obsession: he succeeds in avoiding all other emotions. In Luzhin, Nabokov imagines what it would mean to suffer from the illness with which Septimus diagnoses himself, examining the possibility that his own desire to escape the war's overdetermination of life and art is solipsistic.Luzhin also echoes Clarissa Dalloway in one paradoxical way, revealing not so much her presence as her absence: the most telling parallel between the characters is in the emphasis both novels place on their names. Clarissa, the title character of Woolf's book, is introduced in the novel's opening line: “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself” (3). This opening establishes through its use of her title and reported speech that she is a well-to-do married woman and at the same time hints at Clarissa's thoughts on the relationship between her name and her identity: as she walks up Bond Street towards the florist, Clarissa “had the oddest sense of being herself invisible, unseen; unknown; there being no more marrying, no more having of children now, but only this astonishing and rather solemn progress with the rest of them, up Bond Street, this being Mrs. Dalloway; not even Clarissa any more; this being Mrs. Richard Dalloway” (10). Clarissa's public persona is impersonal, based more on her social position as the wife of a prominent man than on her character. But her private self remains and is recognized by her intimates: Richard thinks of her gratefully as “his Clarissa” when she understands his love for her despite his inability to speak of it (115), and the novel ends with her former lover Peter Walsh's vision of her at her party: What is this terror? what is this ecstasy? he thought to himself. What is it that fills me with extraordinary excitement?It is Clarissa, he said.For there she was. (190) The shift from Mrs. Dalloway in the opening of the book to Clarissa in the closing of the book encapsulates how Mrs. Dalloway moves from the outer to the inner life, beginning with Clarissa's public identity and moving to her consciousness—a course the novel also follows with many minor characters, whom we first glimpse from the outside and whose minds we then briefly enter.Like Mrs. Dalloway, The Defense is bracketed by its main character's name. The novel opens, “What struck him most was the fact that from Monday on he would be Luzhin” (15). As in Woolf's novel, we are introduced to the main character by his surname alone, in a manner indicating the character's social position. Nabokov's opening line is less transparent than Woolf's, and only after reading the rest of the paragraph can we understand that the initial emphasis on Luzhin's name indicates his transition from young child to schoolboy. His new name marks a shift in his identity, w