Man From the USSR & Other Plays (2 page)

 

In dank and melancholy London I
gave lessons in the science of duelling. I
sojourned in Russia, playing the fiddle at
an opulent barbarian's abode....
In Turkey and in Greece I wandered then,
and in enchanting Italy I starved.
The sights I saw were many; I became
a deckhand, then a chef, a barber, a tailor,
then just a simple tramp.

 

His words are echoed by Fleming in
The Pole:

 

....I've been a ship's boy and a diver,
hurled my harpoon upon uncharted seas. Oh,
those years of seafaring, of wandering,
of longing....

 

And, in
The Man From the USSR,
Fyodor Fyodorovich repeats the theme: “For over two years now I've enjoyed the most humble professions—no matter that I was once an artillery captain.” More about the artillery captain later. Meanwhile, lest the reader misconstrue, let me make it clear that the point of these examples is not to spot some hypothetical symbolism or sublimation of the displaced person's lot. Rather, it is to illustrate ways in which Father's creative process integrated this element—whose embryo may perfectly well be traceable to one aspect of his own émigré existence—into new and exciting combinations.

Nabokov's second unfulfilled longing was for a lepidopterological expedition to some exotic, uncharted region. Father had dreamed of the Caucasus, of Mount Elbrus, but, in later years, spoke most often of the Amazon. Again, what is fascinating here is not the simple association of ideas or the romanticizing of an unrealized fantasy, but the poetry of the pattern into which the thoughts were recombined to produce “Terra Incognita,” the elder Godunov-Cherdyntsev's fantastic entomological journeys in
The Gift,
the prophetic space adventures of “Lance,” and the touching mini-tragedy of
The Pole.

This last work is a deliberately free synthesis of the Scott diaries. Nabokov's aim is not a precise journalistic reproduction but a rearrangement of elements into a concentrated interpersonal drama. Even the epigraph and its attribution—

 

“He was a very gallant gentleman”
(from Scott's notebook)—

 

are deliberately approximate. Scott did not write those words. They were left at the scene by the rescue expedition of 1912, led by E. L. Atkinson and A. Cherry Gerrard, which found the body. The exact wording was: “Hereabouts died a very gallant gentleman.” This inscription was mentioned in chapter twenty-one of
Scott's Last Expedition,
of which Nabokov presumably saw the 1913 or 1915 edition in the South of France. The names, too, went through several generations of change and (except for Scott) never corresponded exactly to those of the actual expedition members. Scott, himself, incidentally, was named “Bering” in an early manuscript version. The passage, near the end of the play, that is purportedly excerpted from Scott's diary was also deliberately adapted by Nabokov, as were many of the concrete details such as dates and distances. Even “Aurora australis” is changed to “Aurora borealis,” I imagine because only the latter term was current in Russia at the time and had, by extension, come to represent the southern lights as well as their northern analogues. Significantly, the only two passages that retranslate into direct citations from Scott are the most touching lines of all: “.... I may well be some time ... pronounced by Johnson in the play and Oates in Scott's diaries, while taking leave of the others with the conscious intention of dying in the snow in order to lighten their burden; and Scott's “I'm very sorry for my loyal companions.” The lines

 

It seems a pity, but I do
not think I can write more....

 

are the verbatim text of the final sentence of Scott's diary, except for his signature and the post scriptum, “For God's sake look after our people.” I returned to the original text for “It seems a pity...” because Father unquestionably had made a literal Russian translation of these lines, even though he has Scott speak them to Fleming rather than read them from his notebook.

What had drawn Nabokov so strongly to these heroic explorers? Robert Falcon Scott was Britain at its best: unflinching in the face of danger, hardship, and pain, ever mindful of his companions' welfare, and tenacious to the end in his pursuit of a goal that was at once physical exploit and scientific adventure. His pure courage, his passion for the precision and poetry of nature, and his compassion for all that surrounded him were not unlike Father's own (and were later to be prototypical for the equally doomed Gregson of “Terra Incognita” and, to a degree, for the protagonist of “Lance”); Scott had a sense of humor as well, even in the direst circumstances (he addressed a final letter “To My Widow,” a thought transferred by Nabokov to the fictional Fleming, who says: “Kingsley has a fiancee, almost a widow”). Fleming tries stoically to be—or seem—an optimist, to express a glimmer of hope even when calamity seems certain. Kingsley, in mortal delirium, dreams of bringing his fiancee a penguin who will be “smoo-smoo-smooth.” (How Father loved saying
“gla-gla-gladen'kiy ”
to me when I was very small, and what a delicious memory I have of those liquid Russian syllables!) Scott and Johnson, in the play, are based on real persons, with a change of name in the second case; Fleming and Kingsley less so (there was a Kinsey, but he was not a member of the final party). But no matter: here, again, the characters and events of the actual Scott expedition are only a point of departure. What counts is how they are refocused and recombined into the world and the poetry of this touchingly human drama. A writer, said Nabokov, must see “the marvels of this century, the little things...[and:] the bag things, like the sublime liberty of thought, and the moon, the moon. I remember with what tingles of delight, of envy, of anguish, I watched on the television screen the first floating footsteps of man in the talcum of our satellite and how I despised those who maintained it was not worth all those dollars to walk in the dust of a dead world.”
³
(And I remember with what consternation I heard a writer very popular in some circles announce, at a radical-chic dinner, that he hoped our astronauts would be marooned forever in space.)

Incidentally, Amundsen's victory in the race to the South Pole was, in a manner of speaking, not permanent. A couple of years ago the pole's exact locus was found to have shifted so that it had to be “rediscovered” and marked anew. That task was undertaken by the journalist Hugh Downs, with a strong assist from resident cartographer Loreen Utz of the U.S. Geographical Survey, for a segment of the television program
20/20
(whose programmers presumably realized that the pole has not lost its magnetism).

If, in
The Pole,
art in a sense deliberately imitates life, there exists also a perfect case of the inverse process: life (unknowingly) imitating art. Not only was Nabokov's politico-military premise in
The Waltz Invention
prophetic of current issues and events, but the play recently had a hauntingly specific echo in the Italian press. We recall how Waltz threatened to explode a substantial and fairly distant mountain if his conditions were not met by the government, and then, in the “preliminary” or “dream” ending, proceeded to do so. Not long ago, a chauffeur appropriately named Antonio Carrus, residing in a village near Genoa, telephoned the major Italian news agency to predict a good-sized telluric tremor in distant Pozzuoli within the following twenty-four hours. After the event had duly occurred, he retelephoned to “claim” his quake, but would give no explanation of his prescience. “It might be a device, a discovery, a system,” he said. “I shall explain only when the government begins to take me seriously.” One can, in translation, almost hear Waltz speaking, so similar are the situation, the manner, and the words.

In addition to those already discussed, certain other Nabokovian themes, or subthemes, make preview appearances in the plays. In
The Grand-dad,
in particular, we find embryos of images that were to figure prominently in later works of Father's. I have already mentioned the executioner—the prototype of M'sieur Pierre—whom de Merival, the Passerby, re-encounters in
The Grand-dad.
The play's surreal microcosm is curiously paralleled by the burgeoning nightmare of “A Visit to the Museum.” The gradual inklings, the “strange associations” de Merival begins to have as he is told how Grand-dad fondles the stems of lilies, to all of which he has given names “of duchesses, of marquesses,” and how he has hurled Juliette's juice-incarnadined cherry basket into the stream are a chilling re-evocation of Revolutionary France akin to the protagonist's hallucinatory progression in “Visit” through the museum's rooms and into a post-Revolutionary Russia.

The burning scaffold that allows de Merival to escape is a portent of the fires that will flicker or rage in other works. In
Lolita,
Humbert's whole destiny is changed by the conflagration that destroys the house where he would have lived. The burning of the “Baronial Barn” is the “contrived coincidence” that sets the scene for the crucial encounter between Van and Ada. Fire in
Transparent Things
spreads from theme to obsession to resolution.

As de Merival flees from the blaze he plunges amid “torrents of smoke,” “rearing steeds,” “running people.” One recalls Anton Petrovich's headlong tumble to salvation down the ever steepening, elder-overgrown slope in “An Affair of Honor.” The “falling-through” theme, of course, was also to develop into the metaphysical traversal of solid objects, of levels of time and space, in
Pale Fire
and
Transparent Things.

I stated at the outset of this introduction that particular recurring traits of Father's plays, as of his other works, merited discussion. Having examined them, however briefly, let us ponder where they lead.

As I suggested, there emerge certain fundamental considérations—two in particular—regarding Nabokov's work. The first is his fascination with transforming life into art on the chessboard of combinational possibilities. Just as he invented “scientifically possible” butterflies and “a new tree” (at Ardis),
⁴
so he recombined life into a fantastic but plausible reality. “I do not doubt,” said Nabokov, “that there exists an intimate bond between certain images of my prose and the brilliant but obscure chess problems—magical enigmas—each of which is the fruit of a thousand and one nights of insomnia.”
⁵

Nabokov's point of departure may be pure conjecture (as in
Laughter in the Dark, Despair, Lolita, The Waltz Invention),
personal experience transformed (as in
Mary
and
The Gift),
a deliberate doubling of reality (as in
Ada, Pale Fire,
and, for a moment,
The Event),
a refraction of private fantasy (as in
The Defense, Glory, The Man from the USSR),
the personal adventures of others (as in “Terra Incognita,” “Lance,”
The Pole),
or history (as in
The Grand-dad
and, through a lens, in
Bend Sinister).
But his destination is a recombination of those materials into a kind of Hegelian triad (perceived by Nabokov as a spiral). The thesis of the triad (the basic plot, event, or idea) is dissected under the artist's microscope and made to reveal its mysteries and ambiguities, in which one perceives the antithesis (the
antiterra incognita,
the warp of time and space peeking through the fabric of the fiction). When superimposed and melded, the first two elements, or coils, of the triad yield the synthesis (the elements recombined into an original artistic whole).

“I discerned in nature the non-utilitarian delights that I sought in art,” Nabokov said. “Both were a form of magic, both were a game of intricate enchantment and deception.”
⁶
Who but an artist or a deity can rearrange reality? It is a rare creative thrill. But such recombination would be a sterile exercise if performed for its own sake. The doubling, the ambiguity discussed earlier, is not simply a game. In considering the plays included in this volume, we have seen that it appears fleetingly in
The Man from the USSR,
gives an unexpected twist to
The Granddad,
and momentarily warps time and stage in
The Event.
Elsewhere, we are allowed a closer peek. In
The Gift,
for instance:

 

The following day [(Alexander) Chernyshevski] died, but before that he had a moment of lucidity, complaining of pains and then saying (it was darkish in the room because of the lowered blinds): “What nonsense. Of course there is nothing afterwards.” He sighed, listened to the trickling and, drumming outside the window and repeated with extreme distinctness: “There is nothing. It is as clear as the fact that it is raining.”

And meanwhile outside the spring sun was playing on the roof tiles, the sky was dreamy and cloudless, the tenant upstairs was watering the flowers on the edge of her balcony and the water trickled down with a drumming sound.

 

If it is as clear as the fact that it is raining, it is not clear at all, for the rain is an illusion. Does that mean there might be
something?

The sensation of fragile, twinned reality is more explicit in
Pale Fire.
While clinically dead, Shade sees a fountain, rather than the more common tunnel. His fascination with this phenomenon leads him to track down a woman who, according to a newspaper item, has had the same experience. Only it turns out she had seen a
mountain,
and not a very convincing one at that: “Life Everlasting—based on a misprint.” There follows a curious reversal of the Chernyshevski syllogism: