Man From the USSR & Other Plays

Title Page

Table of Contents

Copyright

PLAYS

Nabokov and the Theatre

Chronology

The Man from the USSR

The Event

The Pole

The Grand-dad

ESSAYS

Introduction

Playwriting

The Tragedy of Tragedy

Books by Vladimir Nabokov

Footnotes

Copyright ©1984 by the Article 3b Trust Under the Will of Vladimir Nabokov English translations and Introductions copyright ©1984 by Dmitri Nabokov “The Event” copyright 1938 by Vladimir Nabokov, copyright renewed 1966 by Vladimir Nabokov

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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Nabokov, Vladimir Vladimirovich, 1899-1977.

The man from the USSR and other plays.

Translated from the Russian.
1. Nabokov, Vladimir Vladimirovich, 1899-1977—
Translations, English. I. Nabokov, Dmitri. II. Title.
III. Title: Man from the U.S.S.R. and other plays.
PG3476.N3A26 1984 891.72'42 84-10862
ISBN 0-15-156882-0
ISBN 0-15-656945-0 (paperback)

eISBN 978-0-544-10322-1
v1.1012

The relegation of writers to schools, movements, or social contexts, and the shrouding of their individuality in the mists of “influence” offer a fertile field for futile exercise. Father believed that the point of “comparative” literature was the exaltation of originality, not similarity. What mattered to him were the unique peaks, not the platitudinous plateau.

The hunt for leitmotifs and other echoes within a given author's oeuvre can also be an engrossing but pedestrian pursuit. Yet, certain special images and themes that flash and reverberate among Nabokov's peaks do merit comment, because they illuminate key facets of his works.

A fleeting refraction in many of Father's compositions, and a constant undercurrent in most of his dramatic writing, is the theatricality of all things, the ambiguity of the fictional reality, the deliberate glimpse through the fabric of the fictional world, into its wings, under its surface. The
butaforstvo—
“proppiness”—of what shows through can be (deliberately) a little shoddy, as the bowels of real theatres tend to be; or comforting, if it allows us respite from some unsettling nightmare being played out onstage; or eerie, when we think that the world may be a stage, but that here the stage becomes a world whose workings are not limited to the progression of the play or novel on its more obvious levels, and where even the reality of unreality comes into doubt.

The plays contain striking instances of such rippled reality: the “alternative” ending of
The Waltz Invention,
which is, in a sense, the protagonist's dream self-edited; the key scene of
The Event,
where for a fragile, magic moment a totally new dimension transforms the secondary characters into painted decorations and Troshcheykin and his wife into what are perhaps their real selves, reinforcing what a reviewer called the “somnambulistic atmosphere”; the last page of
The Grand-dad,
where the protagonist, the Passerby, suddenly finds himself questioning the authenticity of all that has supposedly occurred; Kuznetsoff who, in
The Man From the USSR,
is challenged by Marianna's barely camouflaged entreaty, “Why don't you say something?” and replies, “Forgot my lines”; Olga Pavlovna saying to Kuznetsoff, “I don't love you. There was no violin.”—even though we all clearly heard one at the beginning of the act. Indeed, the fourth act's disordered, jumbled props and the “uneven gaps and apertures” through which peek the klieg lights of reality once removed (the film being shot in the offstage studio demystified by the exposure of its mechanical trappings) in themselves suggest the evanescent fragility of all that transpires before the audience. One is reminded of the haunting vacillations of reality in “A Visit to the Museum” and “Terra Incognita”; of the implication, with which
Invitation to a Beheading
concludes, that all the previous doings have been but theatrical artifice or someone's nightmare; and, of course, of the juxtapositions of worlds and realities in
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Ada,
and
Pale Fire.

Closely related to the aura of a double reality is the double character, the so-called Nabokovian
doppelgânger.
The degree and the nature of the similarity between original and double—in the broad sense—may vary widely. The “pair” may consist of incidental characters with a modicum of physical resemblance, such as Meshaev One and Two in
The Event:
“...my brother and I were played by the same actor, only in the part of my brother he was good, and in mine he was bad.” Or they may be near-twins in name only and belong to opposing camps within the world of the play, like the intimidating, offstage Barbashin and the farcical Barboshin hired to foil him. The doubles may even exist only in portrait form : "...I painted two versions of him simultaneously on the sly: on one canvas as the dignified elder he wanted, and on the other the way
I
wanted him—purple mug, bronze belly, surrounded by thunderclouds” (a hint to the perceptive that there is something more to Troshcheykin than the rather unsympathetic façade he displays most of the time). Or there may be a dissimilar
doppelg&nger,
an unwelcome companion : the executioner who travels by tumbrel with his victim to the scaffold in
The Granddad
and ominously foreshadows the grotesque M'sieur Pierre of
Invitation to a Beheading;
or a stand-in whose resemblance to the protagonist exists only in the latter's fantasy, as in
Despair.
The phenomenon of the double, in new and ingenious forms, was to play a crucial part in other novels as well:
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight,
the unfinished
Solus Rex
and its reincarnation in
Pale Fire,
and, of course,
A da,
where the whole world is twinned. Nor let us forget “Scenes From the Life of a Double Monster”—a fragment of a larger, uncompleted work—and, of course, “The Original of Laura,” where Flora's “exquisite bone structure slipped into a novel—became in fact the secret structure of that novel, besides supporting a number of poems.”
¹

The voyage, in general; the scientific expedition, in particular; and what is, in a sense, their antithesis—return to Russia—comprise another recurring arpeggio in Father's plays and other works. The idea of travel had tantalized him since childhood ; the adventures of Phileas Fogg were among his most exciting early reading (as they were the young Luzhin's in
The Defense).
Ironically, the circumstances of exile would force him to travel more miles than Verne's hero had covered by choice, but that travel, too, was often food for inspiration: consider the émigrés of his stories and novels jouncing in their fourth-class compartments, or poor Pnin who does not know that he is on the wrong train, or Humbert's and Lolita's crosscountry peregrinations. The conveyances and paraphernalia of travel had a romance all their own for Nabokov: witness the loving descriptions, autobiographical and fictional, of the veneered luxury expresses in their heyday, the lights of passing towns glimpsed upon lifting the leather blind of the Wagon-Lits, the trunks and
nécessaires
that accompanied the voyager. Witness also the elegant, appetizing, carefully selected baggage that survives Father in Montreux.

But the voyage with a special purpose had even more importance in Father's works. The thrill of the expedition always enchanted him. He confided to me once, late in life, that his life had been marvellously happy, his ambitions achieved, and most of his dreams realized. Two of his intense yearnings, however, did remain unfulfilled, and both were related to travel.

The first was to return to a non-Bolshevik Russia. Transformed by the kaleidoscope of his art, this idea finds its way,
inter alia,
into
Glory
(Martin's disappearance into the depths of the Soviet Union), “A Visit to the Museum” (until an orthographic detail makes the hero realize that his nightmarish traverse of the museum has transported him spatially but not temporally, and he has exited into contemporary, Soviet Russia), and, of course,
The Man From the USSR.

Not only are Kuznetsoffs mysterious trips to the Soviet Union the central theme of the play, they are also the key to its whole atmosphere. Nabokov creates the illusion (as he does, in a different way, with the offstage Barbashin in
The Event)
that the real action is taking place elsewhere. This is true in a general sense: one has the feeling that the interpersonal relations around which the play itself revolves are overshadowed by much larger events occurring outside the stage, outside the theatre, outside the country. Kuznetsoff, in fact, sacrifices his sentiments and his married life in Berlin exile to his dangerous underground activities in Soviet Russia. In a more theatrical sense, as well, there is a curious contrast, in two of the acts, between the visible action and the physically larger, invisible happenings offstage (but which are, in fact, all only a backdrop for the onstage dialogue): the loud applause rewarding an inaudible lecture in the unseen auditorium; and the film set, the thundering megaphone, the repeated takes of the uprising scene beyond the prop-cluttered stage.

These instances of juxtaposition are curiously reminiscent of the conclusion of
Carmen
(offstage, Escamillo executing the bull to the public's cheers; onstage, the final, fatal exchange between Carmen and Don José in the deserted square outside the bullring). While
Carmen
was one of the operas Father liked, I would not go so far as to suggest that the parallel is intentional. Yet, not only is there a kinship between the theatrical tingles this effect generates in the two works, but one's attention returns to how we perceive, or are meant to perceive, different levels of reality or of illusion, with a new twist. What presumably happens or exists offstage is, in the simplest sense, as much an illusion as what we see played out before us. We know perfectly well that a stage set is not a real room or a real square, and we know just as well that there is no real bullring beyond the operatic
plaza,
no forest marching on Macbeth, no plunge to the pavement for Tosca from the crenel of the Castel Sant' Angelo. Yet there is also an intermediate theatrical reality: is the spectator expected to consider offstage structures or events
as real
as what transpires onstage? Of course the offstage sham may be shattered by the intrusion of real-life proppiness, as when a plumpish Floria Tosca bounces visibly from an overly resilient mattress just beyond the battlement. But it may also be
intended
to be perceived as nothing more than sham compared to onstage events, or at least to have its credibility questioned. One suspects that Nabokov, while suggesting momentous goings-on elsewhere, tips his hand to the spectator just enough to make him doubt the authenticity of the offstage lecture hall and movie set and of Kuznetsoffs cloak-and-dagger doings; of Barbashin's murderous intentions; of de Merival's nightmarish recollection. Why is this done? The purpose—and effect—in these and other works of Nabokov's is to make the spectator's, or reader's, attention rebound from somewhat dubious offstage matters,
travel
back, and focus with increased intensity on the
visible
microcosm of the play, causing him to perceive it in a relief that would not otherwise be so vivid.

Theatrical works in general, when adapted to the screen, can cause a blurring of parameters. The cinema can even transport us from a rebuilt Globe Theatre to a realistic Battle of Agincourt, or from the grounds surrounding the Stockholm Opera House to a surreal recreation of Tamino's trials in a cinematic limbo somewhere beyond the actual stage. Although Nabokov acknowledged that certain works of his had a “cinematic slant,”
²
perhaps the
Lolita
screenplay should not be included in a list of his theatrical works, as it is here, but should instead be the nucleus of a separate essay entitled “Nabokov and the Cinema.”

Related to the “theme” of travel that has led us to the above considerations is that of the impoverished wanderer, a fictional relative of the Russian émigré who moves from place to place and job to job. De Mérival describes his roamings and occupations (in
The Grand-dad
), after he has escaped from the scaffold: