If the characters of a fictional work can be readers or spectators, we, its readers or spectators, can be fictitious.”

 THE WORK-WITHIN-THE-WORK. The self-referential devices in Nabokov, mirrors inserted into the books at oblique angles, are clearly of the author’s making, since no point of view within the fiction could possibly account for the dizzying inversions they create. The course of The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, which purports to be an attempt to gather material for a proposed literary biography of the narrator’s half brother but ends by obfuscating even the narrator’s identity, is refracted in Knight’s first novel, The Prismatic Bezel, “a rollicking parody of the setting of a detective tale.” Like an Elizabethan play-within-a-play, Quilty’s play within Lolita, The Enchanted Hunters, offers a “message” that can be taken seriously as a commentary on the progression of the entire novel; and Who’s Who in the Limelight and the class list of the Ramsdale school magically mirror the action taking place around them, including, by implication, the writing of Lolita. The a-novelistic components of Pale Fire—Foreword, Poem, Commentary, and Index—create a mirror-lined labyrinth of involuted cross-references, a closed cosmos that can only be of the author’s making, rather than the product of an “unreliable” narrator. Pale Fire realizes the ultimate possibilities of works within works, already present twenty-four years earlier in the literary biography that serves as the fourth chapter of The Gift. If it is disturbing to discover that the characters in The Gift are also the readers of Chapter Four, this is because it suggests, as Jorge Luis Borges says of the play within Hamlet, “that if the characters of a fictional work can be readers or spectators, we, its readers or spectators, can be fictitious.”[9]

[9] J. L. Borges, “Partial Magic in the Quixote,” in Labyrinths (New York, 1964), p. 196. For an excellent analysis of involuted or self-reflexive fiction, see Robert Alter, Partial Magic: The Novel as a Self-Conscious Genre (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1975). <<

Nabokov - quotes selected from interviews

 Do you still feel in Exile?

Art is exile. I felt an exile when I was a child in Russia among other children. I kept goal on the soccer field, and all goalkeepers are exiles.

Does being a refugee mean being rootless?
Rootlessness is less important than a confirmed refugee’s capacity to branch and blossom in a complete—and very pleasant—void.

In which language do you think, count, and dream?
I do not think in any language, I think in images, with some brief verbal surfacing of a utilitarian sort in any of the three tongues that I know, such as “damn those trucks” or “espéce de crétin.” I dream and count mostly in Russian.

How far do you get involved with your characters while writing? Do you think of them after the book has been published?
I suspect that the Almighty’s interest in Adam and Eve was neither very sincere nor very enduring, despite the success, on the whole, of a really marvelous job. I, too, am completely detached from my characters, while making them and after making them.

What is your opinion of the hippies and the student revolts?
I feel nothing but contemptuous pity for the illiterate drug-dazed hoodlums I have happened to observe, but I do not assume that all hippies are violent cretins. Many of them are young conformists following an American fad, and some are intelligent political agents disguised as students.

What do you think of efforts to enlarge the field of our sensibility and experi- ence’ What do you think of drugs?
Drugs are as degrading as drunkenness. The hallucinations that they arouse ruin health while remaining at the level of the hypnagogic kaleidoscope too well known to the healthy but overworked brain, or of these insipid mirages of mystical neurosis that go back to the Middle Ages. One must be very stupid to follow a fashion which only those whose task is to destroy the mental resistance of still-free nations could approve.

Whom do you write for?
I must say, I have never been interested in commercial success; in other words, I’ve never sought to push my books. I’ve never written except for a single reader, Mr. Nabokov, for him alone. I have a vague impression that my first English books, written and published in the United States—books like The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, or the story of Professor Pnin—found readers here and there, for intellectual life in America has an incomparable intensity and variety, but I didn’t pay much attention to this little plashing of gray glory. Then, when I published my Lolita (almost ten years ago), I was at first surprised by its success. To tell the truth, I sometimes think that people buy this book for reasons not artistic, but, how shall I put it, erotic, but all this doesn’t concern me, although I’m very comfortable that this lovely child is made so much of.

Do you feel that your novels are larger than life?
I’m not sure this isn’t an illusion. For me, life is not an independent, objective entity. Its image depends on the observer. And there are too many observers—coming and going, and turning away, and looking again, and shading their eyes again—too many changing observers and changing lights, too many of them to enable one to establish an average picture of life. If you find I see life larger than life, this implies only a difference between you and me—not between life and my vision of life. We all are the makers of reality, and there are as many makers of reality as there are men. The real unreality is the conventional and the common.

Sartre explains your distance from your characters in Despair in terms of your uprootedness, your émigré status.
I think he’s wrong. I’m not rootless. Even if the Revolution hadn’t happened in Russia, I would have lived in France or Italy. My family, which was politically liberal and cosmopolitan, had me live in an international climate where French and German took the same place as Russian. I am not, as Bunin was, a representative of traditional Russia. I feel much closer to Kafka, for example. And after all I am very close to French literature, and I’m not the first Russian writer to say that!

On his new wealth

Now I don’t need to earn a living, I have a girl called Lolita who earns it for me. In short I’m an old pimp and I have a girl who’s on the game... . Oh, don’t write that. ... What do you think, Véra? All right, do as you like.

Should there be co-education at high school?
Young girls mature so much faster than boys. They become voluptuous and get into the habit of wearing tight woollen sweaters that make for enormous distraction. That just defeats the whole process of education.

Pornography?
Have you read the Marquis de Sade? The orgies? Things start with one person, then five, then fifty, then they invite the gardener! (Enormous laugh.) ‘There’s your pornography: quantity without quality. It’s banal, it’s not literature. The intention of art is always pure, always moral. ...
I hate the Marquis de Sade.
**
Psychoanalysis?
A disgusting racket. Psychoanalysis has something Bolshevik: internal police. And the symbols: those umbrellas, those staircases! Good for the Viennese, perhaps. But for an American of our time, who has no umbrella and uses only elevators? .. . Let’s be serious: Freudianism is dangerous for art: symbols kill the thing, the individual dream. And sexuality! But this depends on art, not the other way around, you see: it’s poetry that has refined love, over the centuries.
**
“Freudian voodoo!” Nabokov replied vehemently. “That's my béte noire. I think he has been one of the most pernicious influences on literature, children and schools. It’s a medieval mind dealing in medieval symbols.

The initial witch doctor and all the little witch doctors. The rather complicated question on which I will write later. A craze that’s passing ..

And why do you object to Freud so strongly?
For the same reason that I object to kitsch and astrology.
**
When did you start learning English?
English was the fashionable language in the kind of Russian family to which I happen to belong. We had English nurses, English governesses, English tutors; and my first books—the books that were read to me—were English books. In the morning Miss Sheldon would read to me Little Lord Fauntleroy; in the afternoon Mademoiselle Miauton, [my French] governess would read to me Les Misérables. And of course I remember all the pictures in Chums or in the Boys’ Own Paper, and later on there was my father’s library, which was full of English and French books; and I just read and read and read.

“I read English before I read Russian. I spoke English with my mother and my nurse—with my brother, I remember, I always spoke French. That was typical. The children would speak one language together and another language at table and another with their father and mother. Sometimes as many as four languages would be spoken.

“After I started going to school, at 11, my tutor stayed on and would tutor me at night for the next day. You learned a great deal that way.

“And we had wonderful courses in French literature. The French governess would read to us three hours a day—the English governess, too. We had all the English magazines and some of the American ones—Little Folks and St. Nicholas.

"I started reading Turgenev and Tolstoy when I was very small. My wife read Anna Karenina at 6. Her nurse said, ‘Come, come, Ill tell that to you in my own words.’ “Even then she knew to beware of condensations,” Nabokov added, laughing.

“I started writing Russian verse very early—when I was 13—and published a little book of verse when I was 15.”
***
Which are your favorite contemporary writers?
Shakespeare.
We said “contemporary.”
Always Shakespeare.

And which Italian writers do you like most?
I know only three languages, Russian, English and French, and hardly ever read translations. In any period of, say, twenty-five years, there is a very small number of absolutely first-rate living novelists, three or four, with that je ne sais quoi about them which designates them as certain to survive.

On D’Annunzio
I read him as a young man, I liked “The Rain in the Pine Forest”. I never knew a man whose head so surprisingly resembled an egg as that of D’Annunzio. .. . I read little, and almost nothing of modern literature. | read a D’Annunzio book in a French translation, but I do not know if the translation was good or bad. So I can’t express an opinion.

Have you read Marcuse?
I have seen excerpts. I wonder if anywhere—perhaps in some African or Asiatic tongue—“Marcuse” is a diminutive of “Marx.” Perhaps the youngest Marx Brother. What I read was intolerably trivial.

Have you read Portnoy’s Complaint?
It is a ridiculous book. It has no literary worth whatever. It is so obvious and not at all funny—a ridiculous book.

Pasternak?
Pasternak is a poet, not a prose writer. Dr: Zhivago, as a novel, is nowhere—though quite in line with the Soviet conservative literary style. It wanders like Gone with the Wind and is filled with all kinds of blunders and melodramatic situations. Compared to Pasternak, Mr. Steinbeck is a genius.

Doctor Zhivago?
A mediocre melodrama with Trotskyist tendencies. It is an antiliberal work, undoubtedly pro-Bolshevik, even if anti-Stalinist. The book is badly written, very badly. Pasternak was never a good prose writer. He is, of course, a good poet. Not as great, of course, as Blok, but good.

Pasternak?
Doctor Zhivago is false, melodramatic, badly written. It is false to history and false to art. The people are dummies. That awful girl is absurd. It reminds me very much of novels written by Russians, of, I am ashamed to say, the gentler sex. Pasternak is not a bad poet. But in Zhivago he is vulgar. Simple. If you take his beautiful metaphors there is nothing behind them. Even in his poems: what is that line, Véra? “To be a woman is a big step.” It is ridiculous.

This kind of thing recurs. Very typical of poems written in the Soviet era. A person of Zhivago’s class and his set, he wouldn’t stand in the snow and read about the Bolshevist regime and feel a tremendous glow.

There was a /iberal revolution at that time. Kerensky. If Kerensky had had more luck—but he was a liberal, you see, and he couldn’t just clap the Bolsheviks into jail. It was not done. He was a very average man, I should say. The kind of person you might find in the Cabinet of any democratic country. He spoke very well, with his hand in his bosom like Napoleon, because it had almost been broken by handshakes.

Yet people like Edmund Wilson and Isaiah Berlin, they have to love Zhivago to prove that good writing can come out of Soviet Russia. They ignore that it is really a bad book. There are some absolutely ridiculous scenes. Scenes of eavesdropping for instance. You know about eavesdropping. If it is not brought in as parody it is almost philistine. It is the mark of the amateur in literature. And that marvelous scene where he had to get rid of the little girl to let the characters make love, and he sends her out skating. In Siberia. To keep warm they give her her mother’s scarf. And then she sleeps deeply in a hut while there is all this going on. Obviously Pasternak just didn’t know what to do with her.

He’s like Galsworthy. Galsworthy in one of his novels gave a character a cane and a dog and simply didn’t know how to get rid of them.

And the metaphors. Unattached comparisons. Suppose I were to say “as passionately adored and insulted as a barometer in a mountain hotel” (he said, looking out at the rain), it would be a beautiful metaphor.

But who is it about? The image is top-heavy. There is nothing to attach it to. And there is a pseudo-religious strain in the book which almost shocks me. Zhivago is so feminine that I sometimes wonder if it might have been partly written by Pasternak’s mistress.

As a translator of Shakespeare he is very poor. He is considered great only by people who don’t know Russian. An example. (His wife helped him to remember a line of a Pasternak translation.) What he has turned it into in Russian is this: “all covered with grease and keeps wiping the pig-iron.” You see. It is ridiculous. What would be the original?

GILLIATT: “Greasy Joan doth keel the pot?” Yes. “Keeps wiping the pig-iron”!

Pasternak himself has been very much helped by translation. Sometimes when you translate a cliché—you know, a cloud has a silver lining—it can sound like Milton because it is in another language.

***
Switzerland?
It is the most pleasant and poetical country in Europe. Gogol, Tolstoy, Byron, Dostoevsky walked here. Gogol wrote Dead Souls here. Dos- toevsky found himself penniless here. Tolstoy caught a good case of venereal disease here. As I say, it is a poetical country.

What do you think of Switzerland?
It’s perfect, but I don’t like the cows much. They drive off the butterflies.

***
Helen Lawrenson’s article, “The Man Who Scandalized the World,” in your issue of August 1960, contains some absurd misstatements: (...)
Finally, let me quote this incredible passage: “He . . . of course, feels that in the good old days of the Czar, ‘a freedom-loving Russian had more freedom than under Lenin,’ without, however, specifying whether he meant freedom-loving aristocrats or freedom-loving serfs.” Irony, of course, is all right, but when starved by ignorance it chokes on its own tail; for surely any schoolgirl should know that no serfs existed in Russia since 1861, one year before the liberation of slaves in this country, and all lovers of freedom certainly realize that it was Lenin who restored serfdom in Russia.

I’m afraid I must ask you to print the following correction to the article published in her memory in Russkaya mysl’ (no. 2048).' The article contains a phrase (supposedly said by me to Princess Shakhovskoy) foisted on me by Mr. Berezov’s imagination: “But what am I to do, Aunt, if American readers are only interested in such themes?” I could not have said this, not only because I never called Princess Shakhovskoy “Aunt,” or discussed Lolita with her, but, most important, because I consider Lolita my best book. Only buoyant blockheads who haven’t actually read the work they’re criticizing could explain away its composition as a vulgar calculation to please some vulgar taste. I doubt that Mr. Berezov was consciously trying to join their number.

Think, Write, Speak
Uncollected Essays, Reviews, Interviews, and Letters to the Editor VLADIMIR NABOKOV 

Nabokov on the pleasure of being knocked out

 Play (Breitenstrater—Paolino) (Essay, 1925)

(...)
Nabokov—who had been taught boxing at home as a child and was ready to use it at school to defend victims from bullies, and was an occasional boxing coach in the mid-1920s—here exults in boxing, its traditions, its champions, its artistry, its courage. He exults even in the pleasure of being knocked out. Most surprisingly of all, this non-crowd-lover, this resolute individualist, exalts the crowds who come to watch boxing in a spirit very much like his.
**
Everything in the world plays: the blood in a lover’s veins, the sun on water, and a musician on a violin.

Everything good in life—love, nature, the arts, and homespun puns—is play. And when we actually play—whether we’re knocking down a tin battalion with a pea or meeting over the barrier of a tennis net—what we feel in our very muscles is the essence of the play engaged in by the marvelous juggler who tosses from hand to hand, in an unbroken sparkling parabola, the planets of the universe.

People have played as long as they have existed. There are eras— humanity’s holidays—when people particularly take to games. So it was in bygone Greece, in bygone Rome, and so it is in the Europe of our own day.

A child well knows that in order to play to his heart’s content he must play with someone else or at least imagine somebody, he must become two. Or, to put it another way, there is no play without competition; which is why some kinds of play, such as those gymnastic festivals in which fifty-odd men or women, moving as one, form patterns across a parade ground, seem insipid, since they lack the main thing which gives play its ravishing, thrilling charm. That’s why the communist system is so ridiculous, since it condemns everyone to performing the same tedious drills, not allowing that anyone should be fitter than his neighbor.

Not for nothing did Nelson say that the Battle of Trafalgar was won on the football and tennis grounds of Eton.' And the Germans, too, have lately realized that the goose step won’t take you far, and that boxing, football, and hockey are more valuable than military or any other drills. Boxing is especially valuable, and there are few sights healthier or finer than a boxing match. A highly strung gent, who dislikes washing stark naked in the mornings and inclines to surprise that a poet working for two and a half connoisseurs earns less money than a boxer who works for a crowd of many thousands (a crowd which, by the way, has nothing in common with the so-called masses and is filled with a delight far more pure, sincere, and good-natured than that of the crowd welcoming home its civic heroes), this highly strung gent will feel indignation and disgust toward a fistfight, just as in Rome, probably, there were people who frowned at the sight of two huge gladiators demonstrating the very best in the gladiatorial arts, slugging each other with such iron blows that not even the pollice verso” was necessary, they’d finish each other off anyway.

What matters, of course, is not at all that a heavyweight boxer is a little bloodied after two or three rounds or that the white waistcoat of the referee looks as though red ink has leaked out of a fountain pen.

What matters is, first, the beauty of the very art of boxing, the perfect accuracy of the attacks, the side jumps, the dives, the range of blows— hooks, straights, haymakers—and, second, that fine manly excitement this art arouses. Many writers have depicted the beauty and the romance of boxing. Bernard Shaw has a whole novel about a professional boxer.’ Jack London, Conan Doyle, and Kuprin have all written on the subject. Byron, that darling of all Europe, except exacting England, eagerly befriended boxers and loved to watch their fights, just as Pushkin and Lermontov would have loved it, had they lived in England. Portraits have survived of the professional boxers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The famous Figg, Corbett, Cribb’ fought without gloves and fought skillfully, honorably, tenaciously, more often to utter exhaustion than to a knockout.

And it was not at all the commonplace of humaneness that led to the appearance of boxing gloves in the middle of last century, but, rather, a desire to protect the fist, which could otherwise be too easily broken in the course of a two-hour bout. They have all long since stepped down from the ring, those famous, champion pugilists, having won their supporters quite a few pounds sterling, and lived to a ripe old age, and in the evenings, in taverns, over a pint of beer, they would talk with pride of their former exploits. They were followed by others, the teachers of today’s boxers: the massive Sullivan, Burns, with his looks of a London dandy, and Jeffries, the son of a blacksmith, “the white hope,” as they called him, a hint that black boxers were already becoming unbeatable.

Those who had hoped that Jeffries would beat the black giant Johnson lost their money. The two races followed this fight closely. But despite the furious enmity between the white and black camps (the event took place in America twenty-five or more years ago), not a single boxing rule was broken, even though Jeffries, with every one of his blows, kept repeating, “Yellow dog ... yellow dog.” Finally, after a long, splendid fight, the enormous Negro struck his opponent so hard that Jeffries flew backward from the ring, over the surrounding ropes, and, as they say, “fell asleep.” Poor Johnson! He rested on his laurels, gained weight, married a beautiful white woman, began appearing as a living advertisement on the music-hall stage, and then, apparently, ended up in jail, and only briefly did his black face and white smile flash out from the illustrated magazines.

I was lucky enough to see Smith, and Bombardier Wells, and Goddard, and Wilde, and Beckett, and the wonderful Carpentier, who beat Beckett. That fight, which paid the winner five thousand, and the runner-up three thousand pounds, lasted exactly fifty-six seconds, so that someone who had paid twenty pounds for his seat had only enough time to light a cigarette, and when he looked up at the ring, Beckett was already lying on the boards in the touching pose of a sleeping baby.

I hasten to add that in such a blow, which brings on an instantaneous blackout, there is nothing terrible. On the contrary. I have experienced it myself, and can attest that such a sleep is rather pleasant. At the very tip of the chin there is a bone, like the one in the elbow which in English is called “the funny bone,” and in German “the musical bone.” As everyone knows, if you hit the corner of your elbow hard, you immediately feel a faint ringing in the hand and a momentary numbing of the muscles. The same thing happens if you are hit very hard on the end of the chin.

There is no pain. Only the peal of a faint ringing and then pleasant instantaneous sleep (the so-called knockout), lasting from ten seconds to half an hour. A blow to the solar plexus is less pleasant, but a good boxer knows just how to tense his abdomen so that he won’t flinch even if a horse kicks him in the pit of the stomach.

I saw Carpentier this week, on Tuesday evening. He was there as trainer to the heavyweight Paolino, and the spectators seemed not to recognize immediately, in that modest, fair-haired young man, a recent world champion. His fame has faded now. They say that after his fearsome fight with Dempsey he sobbed like a woman.

Paolino appeared in the ring first and sat down, as is customary, on a stool in the corner. Huge, with a square dark head, and wearing a magnificent robe down to his heels, this Basque resembled an Oriental idol.

Only the ring itself was lit, and in the white cone of light falling on him from above, the platform looked like silver. This silvered cube, amid a gigantic dark oval, where the dense rows of countless human faces called to mind kernels of ripe corn strewn against a black background— this silvered cube seemed lit up not by electricity, but by the concen- trated force of all the gazes fixed on it out of the darkness. And when the Basque’s opponent, the German champion Breitenstriter,  stepped onto the bright platform, fair-haired, in a mouse-colored robe (and for some reason in gray trousers, which he immediately began to pull off), the enormous darkness trembled with a joyful roar. The roar did not die down when the photographers, jumping onto the edge of the platform, pointed their “monkey-boxes” (as my German neighbor called them) at the fighters, at the referee, at the seconds, nor when the champions “pulled on their boxing gloves” (which reminds me of “the young oprichnik and the valiant merchant”). And when both opponents threw off their robes (and not “velvety furs”) from their mighty shoulders and rushed toward each other in the white gleam of the ring, a slight moan went through the dark abyss, through the rows of corn kernels and the misty upper tiers, for everyone saw how much bigger and stockier the Basque was than their favorite.

Breitenstrater attacked first, and the moan turned into a rumble of delight. But Paolino, hunching his head into his shoulders, answered him with short uppercuts, and from almost the first minute the German’s face glistened with blood.

With every blow that Breitenstrater took, my neighbor took in air with a whistle, as if he himself were taking the blows, and all the darkness, all the tiers croaked a kind of enormous supernatural croak. By the third round it became noticeable that the German had weakened, that his punches could not push off the hunched orange hill moving toward him. But he fought with extraordinary courage, trying to make up with his speed for the fifteen pounds by which the Basque outweighed him.

Around the luminous cube, across which the boxers danced with the referee twisting between them, the black darkness froze, and in the silence the glove, shiny with sweat, smacked juicily on the live naked body. At the start of the seventh round Breitenstriter fell, but after five or six seconds, jerking forward like a horse on black ice, he stood up.

The Basque fell upon him immediately, knowing that in such situations you must act decisively and swiftly, put all your strength into your punches, for sometimes a blow that is stinging but not firm will, instead of finishing off your weakened opponent, enliven him, wake him up.

The German bent away, clinging to the Basque, trying to win time, to make it to the end of the round. And when once more he went down, the gong did in fact save him: on the eighth count, he got up with great difficulty, and dragged himself to his stool. By some sort of miracle he had survived the eighth round, to mounting peals of applause. But at the start of the ninth round Paolino, striking him beneath the jaw, hit him just the way he wanted. Breitenstriter collapsed. The darkness roared furiously, chaotically. Breitenstrater lay twisted like a pretzel.

The referee counted down the fateful seconds. He kept lying there." So the match ended, and when we had all emptied out onto the street, into the frosty biueness of a snowy night, I was certain that in the flabbiest family man, in the humblest youth, in the souls and muscles of all this crowd, which tomorrow, early in the morning, would disperse to offices, shops, factories, there would be one and the same grand feeling, for the sake of which it was worth bringing together two excellent boxers, a feeling of dauntless, flaring strength, vitality, courage, inspired by the play in boxing. And this playful feeling is, perhaps, more valuable and purer than many so-called higher pleasures.

***
A. Znosko-Borovsky, Capablanca and Alekhine (Review, 1927) Lovers of the art of chess will find this small book a most entertaining novel, or, rather, the novel’s first volume, since its main characters have only now really clashed, and the future holds no shortage of entrancing tussles. Znosko-Borovsky, a talented player himself, writes about chess in a masterly way. The book begins with the story of how the bright, intoxicating combination play of former years (Anderssen, Pillsbury, et al.) turned into positional play under the influence of Steinitz, Schlechter, Rubinstein, Lasker, cold masters, admirers of rigor and dryness in chess.

“Capablanca,” the author writes, “brought chess back from the province of severe science to the sphere of jolly and joyful art,” and goes on to describe his wonderful career, his defeat of Lasker, triumphs, triumphs, an unexpected period of weakness, and again triumphs.

There’s “play in space,” characterized by a concern for the safety and strength of every position, and “play in time”—1.e., a play of motion, of development. And this is Capablanca, a dynamic player, the “knight of fast-flowing time.” Znosko-Borovsky is just as accurate in describing Alekhine’s game. Comparing him with Capablanca, he refers to the latter as classical and technical, and Alekhine as romantic and tactical.

Capablanca is calm, and in his play there’s the harmony of genius; Alekhine is fiery, his imagination knows no limits, his combinations are fantastical. “His game spreads out like a fan, which will snap shut only at the moment of the final blow.”

The text comes furnished with some interesting diagrams, and at the end of the book there are fourteen selected chess Capablanca-Alekhine games with splendid brief commentaries.

I would like to mention the unusual vividness of some of the author’s expressions, and the brisk, heady pace of the whole narrative. Znosko-Borovsky writes about chess with gusto, juicily and aptly, just as a mas- ter should write about his art. The undersigned, a humble but ardent admirer of Caissa,' welcomes the appearance of this thrilling book.

***
Although Nabokov’s reviews of other émigré writers in the mid- 1920s are sporadic and mostly negative, in the late 1920s he began to review frequently and mostly enthusiastically. He reported with glee on another sport or game with which we associate him much more than we do boxing, in his review of a chess book on Alekhine and Capablanca. Two weeks before Alekhine became world champion, Sirin recommended this “thrilling” book as “a most entertaining novel, or rather, the novel’s first volume, since its main characters have only ” He particularly relished the characterization of now really clashed, the contrasting styles of the two grandmasters. About fifteen months later, he would conceive of and rapidly compose his own chess novel, The Luzhin Defense, named perhaps with a nod to the famously bold Alekhine Defense, just as the beginning and end of Aleksandr Ivanovich Luzhin’s name, if not his chess style, also seem a nod to Alekhine.

Like the nonfiction chess reporting that Nabokov extols as a “novel,” his own novel would reach a high point in the description of the final tussle between the styles of a Russian master and his Latin opponent (the fictional Turati replacing the real-life Capablanca).

Think, Write, Speak

Uncollected Essays, Reviews, Interviews, and Letters to the Editor VLADIMIR NABOKOV

What connection do you see between chess and the work of art?

There’s no connection between literature and the game of chess. But there’s certainly a connection between the art of literature and the art of chess problems. Problems and games are two different things. It’s not easy to speak of these two things, because not everybody, not even all chess players, can appreciate the difference between the game of chess, which is journalism, and the chess problem, which is poetry.

The link between the composition of a chess problem and that of a novel lies in the originality of the combinations and the economy of their realization.

It’s a magnificent, complex, and sterile art, akin to the ordinary form of the game only to the extent, for example, that a juggler, in inventing the interlacings of a new sleight-of-hand trick, draws on something in the properties of a sphere. In fact, most chess players, masters and amateurs, take only a moderate interest in these refined enigmas, purely invented and requiring great specialization, and although they appreci- ate a problem with a trap inside, they would be absolutely disconcerted if they were asked to compose one.

In common there are themes, stratagems, ambushes, sacrifices, pinning and unpinning, and all sorts of maneuvers, but combined in a certain way. Because it’s the combination of the different themes that makes a problem. Deceit pushed to the point of diabolism. In this sense, I think one can find a certain parallelism between the chess problem and the problem of literary compositions.

And on the level of characters’ strategies?

No, that’s something else. This is becoming allegory. One thinks of those chess figurines.

(...)

When a chess problem comes into my mind I don’t see the chessboard, I don’t see squares as they are, I see perhaps little abysses, not holes, but different tensions, positive, negative. It’s not a question of form. It seems to me that in literary art there’s no privileged form, at the com- positional level. One could speak of a spiral, of a certain structure, but these are metaphors.

In terms of form, it would be, rather, “anything goes,” everything works, doesn’t it, all is allowed. I always have an interesting combination, complicated and with a certain form, but not each part of the combination.

Vladimir Nabokov

SPEAK, MEMORY

An Autobiography Revisited

Nabokov on chess problems

 In the course of my twenty years of exile I devoted a prodigious amount of time to the composing of chess problems. A certain position is elaborated on the board, and the problem to be solved is how to mate Black in a given number of moves, generally two or three. It is a beautiful, complex and sterile art related to the ordinary form of the game only insofar as, say, the properties of a sphere are made use of both by a juggler in weaving a new act and by a tennis player in winning a tournament. Most chess players, in fact, amateurs and masters alike, are only mildly interested in these highly specialized, fanciful, stylish riddles, and though appreciative of a catchy problem would be utterly baffled if asked to compose one.

Inspiration of a quasi-musical, quasi-poetical, or to be quite exact, poetico-mathematical type, attends the process of thinking up a chess composition of that sort. Frequently, in the friendly middle of the day, on the fringe of some trivial occupation, in the idle wake of a passing thought, I would experience, without warning, a twinge of mental pleasure as the bud of a chess problem burst open in my brain, promising me a night of labor and felicity. It might be a new way of blending an unusual strategic device with an unusual line of defense; it might be a glimpse of the actual configuration of men that would render at last, with humor and grace, a difficult theme that I had despaired of expressing before; or it might be a mere gesture made in the mist of my mind by the various units of force represented by chessmen – a kind of swift dumb show, suggesting new harmonies and new conflicts; whatever it was, it belonged to an especially exhilarating order of sensation, and my only quarrel with it today is that the maniacal manipulation of carved figures, or of their mental counterparts, during my most ebullient and prolific years engulfed so much of the time I could have devoted to verbal adventure.

Experts distinguish several schools of the chess-problem art: the Anglo-American one that combines accurate construction with dazzling thematic patterns, and refuses to be bound by any conventional rules; the rugged splendor of the Teutonic school; the highly finished but unpleasantly slick and insipid products of the Czech style with its strict adherence to certain artificial conditions; the old Russian end-game studies, which attain the sparkling summits of the art, and the mechanical Soviet problem of the so-called ‘task’ type, which replaces artistic strategy by the ponderous working of themes to their utmost capacity. Themes in chess, it may be explained, are such devices as forelaying, withdrawing, pinning, unpinning and so forth; but it is only when they are combined in a certain way that a problem is satisfying. Deceit, to the point of diabolism, and originality, verging upon the grotesque, were my notions of strategy; and although in matters of construction I tried to conform, whenever possible, to classical rules, such as economy of force, unity, weeding out of loose ends, I was always ready to sacrifice purity of form to the exigencies of fantastic content, causing form to bulge and burst like a sponge-bag containing a small furious devil.

It is one thing to conceive the main play of a composition and another to construct it. The strain on the mind is formidable; the element of time drops out of one’s consciousness altogether: the building hand gropes for a pawn in the box, holds it, while the mind still ponders the need for a foil or a stopgap, and when the fist opens, a whole hour, perhaps, has gone by, has burned to ashes in the incandescent cerebration of the schemer. The chessboard before him is a magnetic field, a system of stresses and abysses, a starry firmament. The bishops move over it like searchlights. This or that knight is a lever adjusted and tried, and readjusted and tried again, till the problem is tuned up to the necessary level of beauty and surprise. How often I have struggled to bind the terrible force of White’s queen so as to avoid a dual solution! It should be understood that competition in chess problems is not really between White and Black but between the composer and the hypothetical solver (just as in a first-rate work of fiction the real clash is not between the characters but between the author and the world), so that a great part of a problem’s value is due to the number of ‘tries’ – delusive opening moves, false scents, specious lines of play, astutely and lovingly prepared to lead the would-be solver astray. But whatever I can say about this matter of problem composing, I do not seem to convey sufficiently the ecstatic core of the process and its points of connexion with various other, more overt and fruitful, operations of the creative mind, from the charting of dangerous seas to the writing of one of those incredible novels where the author, in a fit of lucid madness, has set himself certain unique rules that he observes, certain nightmare obstacles that he surmounts, with the zest of a deity building a live world from the most unlikely ingredients – rocks, and carbon, and blind throbbings. In the case of problem composition, the event is accompanied by a mellow physical satisfaction, especially when the chessmen are beginning to enact adequately, in a penultimate rehearsal, the composer’s dream. There is a feeling of snugness (which goes back to one’s childhood, to play-planning in bed, with parts of toys fitting into corners of one’s brain); there is the nice way one piece is ambushed behind another, within the comfort and warmth of an out-of-the-way square; and there is the smooth motion of a well-oiled and polished machine that runs sweetly at the touch of two forked fingers lightly lifting and lightly lowering a piece.

I remember one particular problem I had been trying to compose for months. There came a night when I managed at last to express that particular theme. It was meant for the delectation of the very expert solver. The unsophisticated might miss the point of the problem entirely, and discover its fairly simple, ‘thetic’ solution without having passed through the pleasurable torments prepared for the sophisticated one. The latter would start by falling for an illusory pattern of play based on a fashionable avant-garde theme (exposing White’s King to checks), which the composer had taken the greatest pains to ‘plant’ (with only one obscure little move by an inconspicuous pawn to upset it). Having passed through this ‘antithetic’ inferno the by now ultra-sophisticated solver would reach the simple key move (Bishop to c2) as somebody on a wild goose chase might go from Albany to New York by way of Vancouver, Eurasia and the Azores. The pleasant experience of the roundabout route (strange landscapes, gongs, tigers, exotic customs, the thrice-repeated circuit of a newly married couple around the sacred fire of an earthen brazier) would amply reward him for the misery of the deceit, and after that, his arrival at the simple key move would provide him with a synthesis of poignant artistic delight.

I remember slowly emerging from a swoon of concentrated chess thought, and there, on a great English board of cream and cardinal leather, the flawless position was at last balanced like a constellation. It worked. It lived. My Staunton chessmen (a twenty-year-old set given to me by my father’s Englished brother, Konstantin), splendidly massive pieces, of tawny or black wood, up to four and a quarter inches tall, displayed their shiny contours as if conscious of the part they played. Alas, if examined closely, some of the men were seen to be chipped (after traveling in their box through the fifty or sixty lodgings I had changed during those years); but the top of the king’s rook and the brow of the king’s knight still showed a small crimson crown painted upon them, recalling the round mark on a happy Hindu’s forehead.

A brooklet of time in comparison to its frozen lake on the chessboard, my watch showed half-past three. The season was May – mid-May, 1940. The day before, after months of soliciting and cursing, the emetic of a bribe had been administered to the right rat at the right office and had resulted finally in a visa de sortie which, in its turn, conditioned the permission to cross the Atlantic. All of a sudden, I felt that with the completion of my chess problem a whole period of my life had come to a satisfactory close. Everything around was very quiet; faintly dimpled, as it were, by the quality of my relief. Sleeping in the next room were you and our child. The lamp on my table was bonneted with blue sugar-loaf paper (an amusing military precaution) and the resulting light lent a lunar tinge to the voluted air heavy with tobacco smoke. Opaque curtains separated me from blacked-out Paris. The headline of a newspaper drooping from the seat of a chair spoke of Hitler’s striking at the Low Countries.

I have before me the sheet of paper upon which, that night in Paris, I drew the diagram of the problem’s position. White: King on a7 (meaning first file, seventh rank), Queen on b6, Rooks on f4 and h5, Bishops on e4 and h8, Knights on d8 and e6, Pawns on b7 and g3; Black: King on e5, Rook on g7, Bishop on h6, Knights on e2 and g5, Pawns on c3, c6 and d7. White begins and mates in two moves. The false scent, the irresistible ‘try’ is: Pawn to b8, becoming a knight, with three beautiful mates following in answer to disclosed checks by Black; but Black can defeat the whole brilliant affair by not checking White and making instead a modest dilatory move elsewhere on the board. In one corner of the sheet with the diagram, I notice a certain stamped mark that also adorns other papers and books I took out of France to America in May 1940. It is a circular imprint, in the ultimate tint of the spectrum – violet de bureau. In its center there are two capital letters of pica size, R.F., meaning of course République Française. Other letters in lesser type, running peripherally, spell Contrôle des Informations. However, it is only now, many years later, that the information concealed in my chess symbols, which that control permitted to pass, may be, and in fact is, divulged.

Vladimir Nabokov

SPEAK, MEMORY

An Autobiography Revisited

Dream Textures A Brief Note On Nabokov

At the very beginning of Nabokov’s autobiography, programmatically entitled Speak, Memory, there is the story of a man who, we must assume, is still very young, and who suffers a panic attack when he first sees a home movie shot in his parents’ house a few weeks before his birth. All the images trembling on the screen are familiar to him, he recognizes everything, everything is right except for the fact, which disturbs him deeply, that he himself is not where he has always been, and the other people in the house do not seem to mourn his absence. The sight of his mother waving from one of the windows on the upper floor is felt by the distressed viewer to be a farewell gesture, and he is terrified by the sight of the new baby carriage standing on the porch—“with the smug, encroaching air of a coffin; and even that was empty, as if, in the reverse course of events, his very bones had disintegrated.” Nabokov is here suggesting an experience of the anticipation of death in the memory of a time before life, something that makes the viewer a kind of ghost in his own family. Nabokov repeatedly tried, as he himself has said, to cast a little light into the darkness lying on both sides of our life, and thus to illuminate our incomprehensible existence. Few subjects therefore, to my mind, preoccupied him more than the study of spirits, of which his famous passion for moths and butterflies was probably only an offshoot. At any rate, the most brilliant passages in his prose often give the impression that our worldly doings are being observed by some other species, not yet known to any system of taxonomy, whose emissaries sometimes assume a guest role in the plays performed by the living. Just as they appear to us, Nabokov conjectures, so we appear to them: fleeting, transparent beings of uncertain provenance and purpose. They are most commonly encountered in dreams, “in surroundings they never visited during their earthly existence,” and are “silent, bothered, strangely depressed,” obviously suffering severely from their exclusion from society, and for that reason, says Nabokov, “they sit apart, staring at the floor, as if death were a dark taint, a shameful family secret.” Nabokov’s speculations about those who tread the border between life and the world beyond originate in the realm of his childhood, which vanished without trace in the October Revolution; despite the evocative accuracy of his memories, he sometimes wonders whether that Arcadian land ever really existed. Cut off irrevocably as he was from his place of origin by the decades of terror in Russian history, he must surely have felt that retrieving one of its images caused him severe phantom pains, even though he usually looks discreetly, only through the prism of irony, at what he has lost. In the fifth chapter of Pnin he speaks at length and in different voices of the price you must pay on going into exile: not least, besides the material goods of life, the certainty of your own reality. The young emigrants of the early novels, Ganin, Fyodor, and Edelweiss, are already marked much more deeply by the experience of loss than by their new and foreign surroundings. Unexpectedly finding themselves on the wrong side of the frontier, they are airy beings living a quasi-extraterritorial, somehow unlawful afterlife in rented rooms and boardinghouses, just as their author lived at one remove from the reality of Berlin in the twenties. The strange unreality of such an existence in a foreign land seems to me nowhere more clearly expressed than in Nabokov’s remark, made in passing, that he had appeared as an extra in evening dress in several of the films shot in Berlin at that time, which frequently included doppelgängers and such shadowy figures among their characters. There is no proof anywhere else of these appearances of his, so we do not know whether any of them may still be faintly preserved on a brittle strip of celluloid or whether they are now all extinguished, and it seems to me that they have something of the ghostly quality to be found in Nabokov’s own prose, for instance in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight in the passage where the narrator, V., in conversation with Sebastian’s student friend at Cambridge, has a feeling that the ghost of his brother, whose story is on his mind, is moving around the room in the light reflected from the fire on the hearth. This scene of course echoes the ghost stories that were so popular in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries while a rational view of the world was making itself felt. Nabokov liked to make use of such clichés: dust swirls in circles above the floor; there are inexplicable drafts of air, curiously iridescent effects of light, mysterious coincidences, and strange chance meetings. In the train to Strasbourg, V. finds himself opposite a gentleman called Silbermann whose shape blurs to an indistinct outline in the evening light as the train goes on and on straight into the sunset. Silbermann is a traveling salesman by profession, one of those restless spirits who often cross the narrator’s path in Nabokov’s books. Silbermann asks whether V. is a traveler too, and on getting an answer in the affirmative wants to know exactly what he travels in. V. tells him that he travels in the past, a remark that Silbermann instantly understands. Ghosts and writers meet in their concern for the past—their own and that of those who were once dear to them. As V. tries to trace the real life of Sebastian, that vanished knight of the night, he feels a growing suspicion that his brother is looking over his shoulder as he writes. Such intimations occur with striking regularity in Nabokov’s work, perhaps because after the murder of his father and the death of his brother Sergey, who died of consumption in Hamburg in January 1945 while he was in a concentration camp, he had a vague sense of the continuing presence of those who had been violently torn from this life. As a result, one of Nabokov’s main narrative techniques is to introduce, through barely perceptible nuances and shifts of perspective, an invisible observer—an observer who seems to have a better view not only than the characters in the narrative but than the narrator and the author who guides the narrator’s pen; it is a trick that allows Nabokov to see the world, and himself in it, from above. In fact, his work contains many passages written from a kind of bird’s-eye view. From a vantage point high above the road, an old woman picking herbs sees two cyclists and a car approaching a bend from different directions. From even higher up, from the dusty blue of the sky, an aircraft pilot sees the whole course of the road and two villages lying twelve miles apart. And if we could mount even farther up, where the air grows thinner and thinner, we might perhaps, says the narrator at this point, see the entire length of the mountain range and a distant city in another land—Berlin, for instance. This is to see the world through the eye of the crane, as the Dutch painters sometimes did in painting scenes like the Flight into Egypt, when they rose above the flat panorama surrounding them down on earth. In the same way writing, as Nabokov practiced it, is raised on high by the hope that, given sufficient concentration, the landscapes of time that have already sunk below the horizon can be seen once again in a synoptic view. Nabokov also knew, better than most of his fellow writers, that the desire to suspend time can prove its worth only in the most precise re-evocation of things long overtaken by oblivion. The pattern on the bathroom floor at Vyra, the white steam rising above the tub at which the boy looks dreamily from his seat in the dimly lit lavatory, the curve of the doorframe on which he leans his forehead—suddenly, with a few well-chosen words, the whole cosmos of childhood is conjured up before our eyes as if pulled out of a black top hat. A large oil lamp on an alabaster stand is moved through the darkness. It hovers gently in the air, and gently settles in its place. The white-gloved hand of a servant, which is now the hand of memory, sets it down in the middle of the round table. We are attending the séance staged by Nabokov, and strangely familiar characters and objects emerge surrounded by that claritas which has always, since Saint Thomas Aquinas, been regarded as the sign of a true epiphany. Even for Nabokov, recording such visionary moments was a very arduous business. A short sequence of words often needed hours of work before the rhythm was right, down to the last cadence, before the gravity of earth had been overcome and the author, now as it were disembodied himself, could reach the opposite bank across his precarious bridge of written characters. Where that undertaking succeeds, however, one is borne along by the current of lines sweeping on and on into a radiant realm which, like everything that is wonderful, has a touch of the surreal about it, and finally seems to stand on the threshold of the revelation of an absolute truth, “dazzling,” as we are told at the end of The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, “in its splendor and at the same time almost homely in its perfect simplicity.” To set something so beautiful in motion, according to both Nabokov and the messianic theory of salvation, no gaudy show is necessary, only a tiny spiritual movement which releases the ideas that are shut inside our heads and always going around in circles, letting them out into a universe where, as in a good sentence, there is a place for everything and everything is in its place. Nabokov has compared the shifts to which the writer must resort in composing such a sentence to the moves of a game of chess, one in which the players themselves are chessmen in a game played by an invisible hand. A steamer moves slowly away from the roadsteads of Sebastopol and out on the water. From the banks the sounds of the Bolshevist revolution still echo—shouting and salvos of gunfire. But on the ship’s deck, father and son face each other over a chessboard, already immersed in the looking-glass world of exile ruled by the White Queen where one easily becomes dizzy simply by living backward. “Life is a Chequer-board of Nights and Days / where Destiny with Men for Pieces plays: / Hither and thither moves, and mates, and slays, / And one by one back in the Closet lays.” Nabokov would certainly have subscribed to the notion of eternal movement expressed in these lines translated from the eleventh-century Persian poet by Edward FitzGerald, one of his distant predecessors at Trinity College, Cambridge. It is not surprising that from the moment of his exile Nabokov never had a real home, not in his years in England or in Berlin, or in Ithaca where he famously lived only in rented accommodation and kept moving on. His final place of residence in Montreux, where he could see above every earthly obstacle from his front-of-the-circle seat on the top floor of the Palace Hotel and out into the sun setting above the lake, was surely his dearest and most appropriate home after the Vyra estate of his childhood, just as a visitor called Simona Marini, who went to see him on February 3, 1972, tells us that the cable railway, particularly the chairlift, was his favorite means of transport. “I find it delightful and dreamlike in the best sense of the word to hover in the morning sunlight on this magical perch between the valley and the treeline, observing my shadow from above as, in a seated position—a ghostly butterfly net in its ghostly hand—it moves gently down the flowery slope like a scissor-cut seen sideways among the dancing alpines and fritillaries. One day,” adds Nabokov, “yet subtler dream material will meet the butterfly hunter as he glides away upright over the mountains, borne aloft by a small rocket strapped to his back.” This image of an ascension into heaven with its final touch of humor evokes another such passage, in my opinion the finest he ever wrote. It is at the end of the first chapter of Speak, Memory, and is an account of a scene that often took place at Vyra when the peasants from the village came up to the manor house with some petition or other, usually at midday when the Nabokovs were in their first-floor dining room. Once the lord of the manor, Vladimir Dimitrievich, had risen from table and gone out to see the petitioners and hear their request, then if the matter could be settled to the delegation’s satisfaction it was their custom to throw him into the air three times by their united powers and catch him again as he came down. “From my place at table,” writes Nabokov,

I would suddenly see through one of the west windows a marvelous case of levitation. There, for an instant, the figure of my father in his wind-rippled white summer suit would be displayed, gloriously sprawling in midair, his limbs in a curiously casual attitude, his handsome, imperturbable features turned to the sky. Thrice, to the mighty heave-ho of his invisible tossers, he would fly up in this fashion, and the second time he would go higher than the first and then there he would be, on his last and loftiest flight, reclining, as if for good, against the cobalt blue of the summer noon, like one of those paradisiac personages who comfortably soar, with such a wealth of folds in their garments, on the vaulted ceiling of a church while below, one by one, the wax tapers in mortal hands light up to make a swarm of minute flames in the mist of incense, and the priest chants of eternal repose, and funeral lilies conceal the face of whoever lies there, among the swimming lights, in the open coffin.

From: Campo Santo

By Sebald