Stalking Nabokov (37 page)

Fyodor finds the generosity of fate in his own life in exactly what had seemed his most acute frustrations. His being locked out of his lodgings on the first night of the novel triggers off a new poem; the very move to these cramped quarters seems in retrospect a first attempt by fate to bring Zina and him together; when his landlady asks him to move again, it brings to an end his work on the life of his father—although this had in any case been headed for an impasse—but the shift to a new room also introduces him to Zina, his future fiancée, already living in this apartment; and even the frustration of the last night of the novel, implied beyond the final paragraph, turns out in the long run to be the perfect place to end his account of his own life:
this
time being locked out supplies him not just with a poem but with a whole book.

We can recognize all this shortly after reaching the last page of the novel, but as we reread we can see still deeper. Fyodor repeatedly tries to
see
and
be
his father, to imagine traveling on his expeditions into Central Asia; he records his father’s sense of the innate strangeness of human life (
Gift
131) and again and again associates him with patterns of rainbow and shade and paradise that he highlights at turning points in his own life. The last of these turning points comes on the eve of the book’s last day, in a dream in which his disconcertingly vivid image of his father seems to give a clue to his death, to give Fyodor approval for what he has written about him, and to lead to his full recognition, the next day, of the generous role of fate in his life, which gives him the key idea for
The Gift
(
VNRY
470–77). And now the biography of his father, which could never have stood alone, will find a perfect part in his own life’s story. As we reread, we can see that the patterns in the novel do not merely imply a generalized, somewhat playful fate but record Fyodor’s own sense that his father’s spirit has guided him toward Zina and the achievements of his art.

In
Pale Fire
, as I explain elsewhere (
NPFMAD
), Nabokov similarly allows us to see that Shade himself has been helped by his daughter Hazel after
her
death. When a suicidal and crazily egocentric Russian named Botkin moves into the house next door to her father’s, she helps stabilize his fancies into the imagined refuge of Zembla and the image of himself as Kinbote, disguised former king of Zembla. He feels so elated by this vision that he presses it on John Shade as the subject of a long poem he must write. Shade, of course, cannot write such a saga, but Hazel appears to have designed Zembla to satisfy not only Kinbote’s needs and her own but also her father’s. Details that Kinbote passes on, especially the escape through the tunnel, trigger Shade to write an autobiographical poem about his attempt to explore the passage to death. Some Zemblan scenes even precipitate specific images, such as the waxwing of the poem’s opening line. When Shade dies, he joins his daughter beyond death and from there adds a new element to Kinbote’s Zemblan fantasies, the Gradus story, developed from the Jack Grey who has killed Shade. In prompting Kinbote to imagine Gradus, Shade provides a close structural counterpoint between the composition of the poem and the approach of the poet’s killer that offers Kinbote’s commentary a shape and tension it would otherwise lack.

But beyond the roles of the familiar dead in the lives of the living—a pattern that can be seen more overtly in other Nabokov fiction, such as “The Vane Sisters” and
Transparent Things—
stands a more remote source of creative energy, still personal, not yet ultimate. In
Dar
that source is identified with Pushkin. Fyodor’s father “took little interest in poetry, making an exception only for Pushkin: he knew him as some people know the liturgy, and liked to declaim him while out walking” (160). When he dismisses the modern poetry Fyodor once devoured, Count Godunov’s “mistake was not that he ran down all ‘modern poetry’ indiscriminately, but that he refused to detect in it the long, life-giving ray of his favorite poet” (161). On the last day of his mother’s visit, Fyodor reads some Pushkin prose—the
Journey to Arzrum—
“when suddenly he felt a sweet, strong stab from somewhere. Still not understanding, he put the book aside” (107). After his mother’s departure, he feels “vaguely tormented by the thought that somehow in his talks with his mother he had left the main thing unsaid” and again picks up his one-volume Pushkin. “Again that divine stab! And how it called, how it
prompted
him.…Thus did he hearken to the purest sound from Pushkin’s tuning fork—and he knew already what this sound required of him. Two weeks after his mother’s departure he wrote her about what he had conceived” (108): the plan of writing a life of his father. He cannot start immediately, and, “continuing his training program during the whole of the spring, he fed on Pushkin, inhaled Pushkin (the reader of Pushkin has the capacity of his lungs enlarged).…To strengthen the muscles of his muse he took on his rambles whole pages of
Pugachyov
learned by heart as a man using an iron bar instead of a walking stick.…Pushkin entered his blood. With Pushkin’s voice merged the voice of his father.…From Pushkin’s prose he passed to his life, so that in the beginning the rhythm of Pushkin’s era commingled with the rhythm of his father’s life” (109–10).
¹

Early in this chapter, Fyodor has been traveling to work on a Berlin tram and has been filled with the usual revulsion: “He was going to a lesson, was late as usual, and as usual there grew in him a vague, evil, heavy hatred for the clumsy sluggishness of this least gifted of all methods of transport”— “least gifted” (
bezdarennyy
): a strangely loaded word in a novel called
The Gift (Dar
)—“for the hopelessly familiar, hopelessly ugly streets going by the wet window, and most of all for the feet, sides and necks of the native passengers” (92). He knows that his Russian contempt for Germans is “a conviction unworthy of an artist,” but he cannot stop himself fixing his hatred on one archetypal German who bumps him as he makes his way to the seat in front, while Fyodor stares at him and silently ticks off all the reasons
why
he hates the Germany that this man so perfectly embodies. Then this passenger takes out a Russian émigré newspaper and coughs with a Russian intonation, and Fyodor thinks: “That’s wonderful.…How clever, how gracefully sly, and how essentially good life is!” (94). Here in miniature is the pattern of the whole novel: initial frustrations and vexations compensated for by the playfully deceptive generosity behind life.

That this reversal offers a paradigm for
The Gift
as a whole is indicated by the word “ungifted” oddly applied to tramcars. This passage, in a chapter so saturated with Pushkin, seems to confirm Alexander Dolinin’s suggestion that the very title of the novel comes from Pushkin, from his great lyric:

Dar naprasnyy, dar sluchayniy,

Zhizn’, zachem ty mne dana?

Il’ zachem sud’boyu taynoy

Ty na kazn’ osuzhdena?

Vain gift, chance gift,

Life, why were you given to me?

Or why by some secret fate

Were you sentenced to death?
²

Just as Fyodor fuming at the “ungifted” tramcar system is then made to realize “how clever, how gracefully sly and how essentially good life is,” so Pushkin, desolately bemoaning life as a vain gift in this poem, answers himself in a poem that Fyodor soon quotes:

O, net, mne zhizn’ ne nadoela

Ya zhit’ hochu, ya zhit’ lyublyu.

Dusha ne vovse ohladela,

Utratya molodost’ svoyu.

Oh, no, life has not grown tedious to me,

I want to live, I love to live.

My soul, although its youth has vanished,

Has not become completely chill.

So far it has been genuine Pushkin, but now comes an addition that Pushkin is supposed to have added in an album and that a memoirist whom Fyodor reads has recalled:

Eshchyo sud’ba menya sogreet,

Romanom geniya upyus’,

Mitskevich pust’ eshchyo sozreet,

Koy chem ya sam eshchyo zaymus’—

Fate yet will comfort me; a novel

Of genius I shall yet enjoy,

I’ll see yet a mature Mickiéwicz,

With something I myself may toy—
³

Just as Fyodor finds himself fostered rather than frustrated by fate, and even finds that fate has bestowed on him the gift of a novel of genius, so Pushkin himself continues to toy with life, perhaps by, for instance,
becoming
in part the fate that helps Fyodor to
his
gift, his life neither in vain, nor chance, nor sentenced to death.

When at last Fyodor introduces Zina into the novel, by way of a poem in her honor that he composes as he waits for her, he comments: “And not only was Zina cleverly and elegantly made to measure for him by a very painstaking fate, but both of them, forming a single shadow, were made to the measure of something not quite comprehensible, but wonderful and benevolent and continuously surrounding them” (189). Fyodor turns that sense of a very painstaking and benevolent fate into the structure of
The Gift
itself and saturates the sense of life’s and art’s gifts with the implied presence of his father and of Pushkin behind him as the source of all that flowed from him in Russian literature, as an example of creative perfection, as a font of personal inspiration, flowing all the way from the “Pushkin Avenue” of the first apartment, through which fate hoped to bring Fyodor and Zina together and in which Fyodor writes his Pushkinesque Journey to Asia, to the “Gogol Street” of the second apartment, in which Zina actually lives and into which they are about to enter together when the story breaks off with a final
Eugene Onegin
stanza.
⁴

As John Shade nears the end of his poem, he announces as if offhandedly: “
this
transparent thingum does require/Some moondrop title. Help me, Will!
Pale Fire
.” Kinbote glosses: “Paraphrased, this evidently means: Let me look in Shakespeare for something I might use for a title. And the find is ‘pale fire.’ But in which of the Bard’s works did our poet cull it? My readers must make their own research. All I have with me is a tiny vest pocket edition of
Timon of Athens—
in Zemblan! It certainly contains nothing that could be regarded as an equivalent of ‘pale fire’ (if it had, my luck would have been a statistical monster).” If Kinbote does not know or bother to find out, Nabokov’s alert readers have already been given many clues, pointing in the same direction as this one: the phrase indeed comes from
Timon of Athens
, from the disenchanted Timon’s hysterical denunciation of the cosmos as a chain of theft:

I’ll example you with thievery:

The sun’s a thief, and with his great attraction

Robs the vast sea; the moon’s an arrant thief,

And her pale fire she snatches from the sun;

The sea’s a thief, whose liquid surge resolves

The moon into salt tears.

(4.3.438–43)

A few lines later in his poem, Shade, who has tried all his life to probe the riddle of death and who has centered his poem on the death of his daughter Hazel, writes:

I’m reasonably sure that we survive

And that my darling somewhere is alive,

As I am reasonably sure that I

980  Shall wake at six tomorrow, on July

The twenty-second, nineteen fifty-nine,

And that the day will probably be fine.

But instead he is killed that very evening by a madman, killed before he can write the thousandth line he had probably planned for his poem. Like Fyodor he has trusted in the ultimate benevolence of things, despite the losses we mortals must endure, but his trust seems to be shattered and even mocked as if by some malevolent fate.

But as I have already intimated, as we reread we can discover the evidence for both Hazel’s and then her father’s survival after death—evidence I do not have time even to summarize here, although Nabokov prepares it with all his usual exactness (see
NPFMAD
, part 3). Hazel dies in 1957, and a year later, apparently under her influence, although not knowing the source of his inspiration, her father writes a poem, “The Nature of Electricity,” that suggests playfully how the dead may light up the lives of the living:

The dead, the gentle dead—who knows?—

In tungsten filaments abide,