Man From the USSR & Other Plays (29 page)

Yet Nabokov's own plays demonstrate that it is possible to respect the rules of drama and still be original, just as one can write original poetry without neglecting the basic requirements of prosody, or play brilliant tennis, to paraphrase Robert Frost, without taking down the net.

There were those who considered Father's professorial persona odd and vaguely improper. Not only was he unsympathetic to the intrusion of administrative matters on the academic and to the use of valuable time for jovial participation in campus life, but he lectured from carefully composed texts instead of chattily extemporizing. “All of a sudden,” says Nabokov, “I realized that I was totally incapable of public speaking. I decided to write in advance a good hundred lectures....Thanks to this method I never fumbled, and the auditorium received the pure product of my knowledge.”
¹
I suspect that, since the day when the various Nabokov lectures, resurrected from notes made more than three decades before, began to appear in print, at least some of those objectors have realized that Father's single-mindedness and meticulous preparation had their advantages.

There were even those who resented Nabokov's being allowed to teach at all, lest the bastions of academic mediocrity be imperiled. Which brings to mind Roman Jakobson's uneasy quip when Nabokov was being considered for a permanent position at Harvard: “Are we next to invite an elephant to be professor of zoology?” If the elephant happens also to be a brilliant scholar and (as his former Cornell colleague David Daiches put it) a lecturer whom everyone found “irresistible,” why not? Anyway, time has put things in perspective: those who (attentively) attended Nabokov's lectures will not soon forget them. Those who missed them regret it but have the published versions to enjoy. As for Professor Jakobson (and I intend no malice), I have been racking my brain but cannot, for the life of me, recall whether or not I took a course of his at some point during my four years at Harvard. Perhaps what I need is the memory of an elephant.

 

DMITRI NABOKOV

The one and only stage convention that I accept may be formulated in the following way: the people you see or hear can under no circumstances see or hear you. This convention is at the same time a unique feature of the dramatic art: under no circumstances of human life can the most secret watcher or eavesdropper be absolutely immune to the possibility of being found out by those he is spying upon, not other people in particular, but the world as a whole. A closer analogy is the relation between an individual and outside nature; this, however, leads to a philosophical idea which I shall refer to at the end of this lecture. A play is an ideal conspiracy, because, even though it is absolutely exposed to our view, we are as powerless to influence the course of action as the stage inhabitants are to see us, while influencing our inner selves with almost superhuman ease. We have thus the paradox of an invisible world of free spirits (ourselves) watching uncontrollable but earthbound proceedings, which—a compensation—are endowed with the power of exactly that spiritual intervention which we invisible watchers paradoxically lack. Sight and hearing but no intervention on one side and spiritual intervention but no sight or hearing on the other are the main features of the beautifully balanced and perfectly fair division drawn by the line of footlights. It may be proved further that this convention is a natural rule of the theatre and that when there is any freakish attempt to break it, then either the breaking is only a delusion, or the play stops being a play. That is why I call ridiculous the attempts of the Soviet theatre to have the spectators join in the play. This is connected with the assumption that the players themselves are spectators and, indeed, we can easily imagine inexperienced actors under slapdash management in the dumb parts of attendants just as engrossed in watching the performance of the great actor in the major part as we, ordinary spectators, are. But, besides the danger of letting even the least important actor remain
outside
the play, there exists one inescapable law, a law (laid down by that genius of the stage, Stanislavsky) that invalidates all reasoning deriving from the delusion that the footlights are not as definite a separation between spectator and player as our main stage convention implies. Roughly speaking, this law is that, provided he does not annoy his neighbors, the spectator is perfectly free to do whatever he pleases, to yawn or laugh, or to arrive late, or to leave his place if he is bored with the play or has business elsewhere; but the man on the stage, however inactive and mute he is, is absolutely bound by the conspiracy of the stage and by its main convention: that is, he may
not
wander back into the wings for a drink or a chat, nor may he indulge in any physical exuberance that would clash with the idea of his part. And, vice-versa, if we imagine some playwright or manager, brimming over with those collectivist and mass-loving notions that are a blight in regard to all art, making the spectators play, too (as a crowd, for instance, reacting to certain doings or speeches; even going so far as to hand round, for instance, printed words that the spectators must say aloud, or just leaving these words to our own discretion; turning the stage loose into the house and having the regular actors mingle with the audience, etc.), such a method, apart from the ever-lurking possibility of the play's being wrecked by the local wit or fatally suffering from the unpreparedness of impromptu actors, is an utter delusion to boot, because the spectator remains perfectly free to refuse to participate and may leave the theatre if he does not care for such fooling. In the case of his being forced to act because the play refers to the Perfect State and is running in the governmental theatre of a country ruled by a dictator, the theatre in such case is merely a barbarous ceremony or a Sunday-school class for the teaching of police regulation—or again, what goes on in theatre is the same as goes on in the dictator's country, public life being the constant and universal acting in the dreadful farce composed by a stage-minded Father of the People.

So far I have dwelt chiefly on the spectator's side of the question: awareness and nonintervention. But cannot one imagine the players, in accordance with a dramatist's whim or thoroughly worn-out idea, actually seeing the public and talking to it from the stage? In other words, I am trying to find whether there is really no loophole in what I take to be the essential formula, the essential and only convention of the stage. I remember, in fact, several plays where this trick has been used, but the all-important thing is that, when the player stalks up to the footlights and addresses himself to the audience with a supposed explanation or an ardent plea, this audience is not the actual audience before him, but an audience imagined by the playwright, that is, something which is still
on the stage,
a theatrical illusion which is the more intensified the more naturally and casually such an appeal is made. In other words, the line that a character cannot cross without interrupting the play is this abstract conception that the author has of an audience; as soon as he sees it as a pink collection of familiar faces the play stops being a play. To give an instance, my grandfather, my mother's father, an exceedingly eccentric Russian who got the idea of having a private theatre in his house and hiring the very greatest performers of his time to entertain for him and his friends, was on a friendly footing with most of the actors of the Russian stage and a regular theatregoer. One night, at one of the St. Petersburg theatres, the famous Varlamov was impersonating someone having tea on a terrace and conversing the while with passersby who were invisible to the spectators. The part bored Varlamov, and that night he brightened it up with certain harmless inventions of his own. Then at one point he turned in the direction of my grandfather, whom he espied in the front row, and remarked, quite naturally, as if speaking to the imaginary passersby: “By the way, Ivan Vasilich, I'm afraid I shall be unable to have luncheon with you tomorrow.” And just because Varlamov was such a perfect magician and managed to fit these words so naturally into his scene, it did not occur to my grandfather that his friend was really and truly canceling an appointment; in other words, the power of the stage is such, that even if, as sometimes has happened, an actor in the middle of his performance falls in a dead faint or, owing to a blunder, a stagehand is trapped among the characters when the curtain goes up, it will take the spectator much longer to realize the accident or the mistake than if anything out of the ordinary happens in the house. Destroy the spell and you kill the play.

My theme being the writing of plays and not the staging of plays, I shall not develop further what really would lead me into discussing the psychology of acting. I am merely concerned, let me repeat, with settling the problem of one convention, so as to fiercely criticize and demolish all the other minor ones that infect plays. I will prove, I hope, that continuously yielding to them is slowly but surely killing playwriting as an art, and that there is no real difficulty in getting rid of them forever, even if it entails inventing new means, which in their turn will become traditional conventions with time, to be dismissed again when they stiffen and hamper and imperil dramatic art. A play limited by my major formula may be compared to a clock; but when it comes out hobnobbing with the audience, it becomes a wound-up top, which bumps into something, screeches, rolls on its side and is dead. Please note, too, that the formula holds not only when you see a play performed, but also when you read it in a book. And here I come to a very important point. There exists an old fallacy according to which some plays are meant to be seen, others to be read. True, there are two sorts of plays: verb plays and adjective plays, plain plays of action and florid plays of characterization—but apart from such a classification being merely a superficial convenience, a fine play of either type is equally delightful on the stage and at home. The only thing is that a type of play where poetry, symbolism, description, lengthy monologues tend to hamper its dramatic action ceases in its extreme form to be a play at all, becoming a long poem or full-dress speech—so that the question whether it is better read than seen does not arise, because it is simply not a play. But, within certain limits, an adjective play is no worse on the stage than a verb play, though the best plays are generally a combination of both action and poetry. For the time being, pending further explanation, we may assume that a play can be anything it likes, static or tit-for-tatic, round or fancy-shaped, nimble or stately, provided it is a good play.

We must draw a definite line between the author's gift and the theatre's contribution. I am speaking only of the former and refer to the latter insofar as the author has imagined it. It is quite clear that as bad direction or a bad cast may ruin the best play, the theatre may turn everything into a couple of hours of fugitive glamour. A nonsense rhyme may be staged by a director or actor of genius and a mere pun may be turned into a splendid show owing to the sets of a gifted painter. But all this has nothing to do with the dramatist's task; it may clarify and bring to life his suggestions, it can even make a bad play look—and only look—like a good one; but the merits of the play as disclosed by the printed word are what they are, not more, not less. In fact, I cannot think of a single fine drama that is not a pleasure both to see and read, though, to be sure, a certain part of footlight-pleasure is not the same as the corresponding part of reading-lamp pleasure, the one being in that part
sensual
(good show, fine acting), the other being in the corresponding part
purely imaginative
(which is compensated by the fact that any definite incarnation is always a limitation of possibilities). But the main and most important part of the pleasure is exactly the same in both cases. It is the delight in harmony, artistic truth, fascinating surprises, and the deep satisfaction at being surprised—and, mind you, the surprise is always there even if you have seen the play and read the book many times. For perfect pleasure the stage must not be too bookish and the book not too stagy. You will note that complicated setting is generally described (with very minute details and at great length) in the pages of the worst plays (Shaw's excepted) and, vice versa, that very good plays are rather indifferent to the setting. Such ponderous descriptions of paraphernalia, generally allied with a prefaced description of the characters and with a whole string of qualifying adverbs in italics directing every speech in the play, are, more often than not, the result of an author's feeling that his play does not contain all it is meant to contain—and so off he goes in a pathetic and long-winded attempt to strengthen matters by decorative addition. More rarely, such superfluous ornamentation is dictated by the strong-willed author's desire to have the play staged and acted exactly as he intended—but even in this case the method is highly irritating.

We are now ready, as we see the curtain rise, or as we open the book, to examine the structure of a play itself. But we must be quite clear on one point. Henceforth, once the initial convention is accepted—spiritual awareness and physical non-intervention on our side, physical nonawareness and significant intervention on the part of the play—all others will be ruled out.

In conclusion, let me repeat in slightly different words—now that I have defined the general idea—repeat the primary axiom of drama. If, as I believe it to be, the only acceptable dualism is the unbridgeable division between ego and non-ego, then we can say that the theatre is a good illustration of this philosophical fatality. My initial formula referring to the spectators and the drama onstage may be expressed thus: the first is aware of the second but has no power over it; the second is unaware of the first, but has the power of moving it. Broadly speaking, this is very near to what happens in the mutual relations between myself and the world I see, and this too is not merely a formula of existence, but also a necessary convention without which neither I nor the world could exist. I have then examined certain consequences of the formula convention of the theatre and found that neither the stage overflowing into the audience nor the audience dictating its will to the stage can break this convention without destroying the essential idea of the drama. And here again the concept can be likened, on a higher level, to the philosophy of existence by saying that in life, too, any attempt at tampering with the world or any attempt by the world to tamper with me is extremely risky business even if in both cases the best intentions are implied. And finally I have spoken of how reading a play and seeing a play correspond to living one's life and dreaming of one's life, of how both experiences afford the same pleasure, if in somewhat different ways.