Stalking Nabokov (41 page)

Nabokov’s note comments perceptively on the sound-link between “
lyubímoy
” and “
drugím
” in the last line, which makes the inevitability and the surprise both greater. “
Drugím
,” coming last, rhyming quietly and expectedly with “
tomím”
but also happening to echo the “
lyubímoy”
it is linked so closely to in sense, sets off the whole poem’s explosive emotional charge in its final word, without resorting to anything conventionally “poetic.” As Alexander Zholkovsky notes, moreover, a Russian might well expect a short poem beginning “Ya vas lyubíl” and leading up to a rhyme with “
tomím”
to end with the word “
lyubím
,” “(be)loved”; instead it ends with “
drugím
,” “by another,” as if to compress the difference between the “
ya
,” the “I” who
used to
love you in the poem’s first word and this “
drugím
,” this “other” in the poem’s last word, who perhaps
will
love you so well.
¹⁵

Nabokov first tried to translate this poem, uncharacteristically, in 1929, when he was developing as a Russian writer and almost always translating into rather than from Russian. (The occasion was the centenary of the poem’s composition, and since Nabokov was born a hundred years after Pushkin, he was translating it at the age at which Pushkin wrote it.) The translation opens with the eyebrow-raising “I worshipped you.” Although not strictly equivalent to Pushkin, this phrase reflects the sense that the speaker has indeed worshipped the beloved “wordlessly, hopelessly,” passively, and distantly rather than actively and intimately, and its stress provides a reasonably close match for the metrical force of Pushkin’s opening “
Ya vas lyubíl
.” But “I worshipped you” becomes increasingly a liability as the poem progresses and it has to be repeated each time “loved” or “love” would normally return. In general, the translation sacrifices too much sense to keep Pushkin’s stresses and his alternating feminine/masculine rhymes. Nabokov chooses the same “ember”/”remember” rhyme that Duffy independently arrives at, but maintains the rhyme where Duffy abandons the effort halfway through. But his rhymes are trite (fashion-passion, true-you) and the whole poem too compliantly follows tired English verse conventions.

By the 1940s, Nabokov’s verse translations into English were far more assured and often superb. By the 1950s he had committed himself to literalism, but sometimes with uneasy compromises, if not for the sake of rhyme then for the sake of rhythm. In the case of “Ya vas lyubíl,” his “lexical” translation often seems closer than the literal translation not only to Pushkin’s words but to his power. The line “now by shyness, now by jealousy oppressed,” which I have gladly drawn on, captures the order, the sense, and, except for the tight sound patterns, the impact of Pushkin’s “To róbost’yu, to révnost’yu tomím.” For some reason Nabokov “improved” this into a literal version, “either by shyness irked or jealousy,” supposedly better English and no less accurate, yet in fact both less accurate and more awkward. The last line of the literal version does improve the last line (“as give you God to be loved by another”) of the lexical, but only into “as by another loved God grant you be,” which has the sense but neither the clarity nor the éclat of Pushkin’s line.

Nabokov writes that he regularly felt the urge to tinker with his translations, and he may well have continued to do so here had he prepared his own
Verses and Versions
. But the difficulties he had translating his favorite Russian poet—difficulties he expresses eloquently and ironically in his own voice—are as interesting as, and deliberately more challenging than, his successes. Nabokov uncompromisingly translates the second line of “Ya vas lyubíl” as “not quite extinguished in my soul.” I rendered it as “in my heart has not quite gone out.” In Russian, “
dushá
,” “soul,” is far more common than its English equivalent and covers much of the territory of the heart as the conventional seat of the emotions. Nabokov, in refusing to compromise on “soul,” points to a difference between Russian and English that lies at the core of the difference between an English speaker’s and a Russian’s sense of self and other and of life and death.

Pushkin famously compared translators to horses changed at the post houses of civilization. In his earlier and more accessible translations, Nabokov makes us feel the post-horses have arrived, that we are meeting Pushkin, Lermontov, Tyutchev, or Hodasevich almost face to face. In his later work, translation is not the illusion of arrival but the start of a journey—glimpses of the destination but also of the bracing rigors of the intervening terrain. Through the contrasting strategies within
Verses and Versions
, as through the special methods of
Eugene Onegin
, Nabokov continues to prod English-speaking readers into persisting on our journey toward the peaks of Russian poetry.

17. Tolstoy and Nabokov

I adore Tolstoy, but as a member of an English rather than a Slavic department did not teach him until I launched a graduate course in narrative in 1993, which included both
Anna Karenina
and
Ada—
whose first sentence Nabokov lifts from the first sentence of
Anna Karenina
.

In the Laurence and Suzanne Weiss Lecture at Amherst College in 1992, I compared Tolstoy and Nabokov. To offer examples that presupposed no other knowledge of the works, I opted for the opening of
Anna Karenina
and the start not of
Ada
but the better known and less complex
Lolita
. I wanted to show how great writers say things so differently, even as they learn from their predecessors, because they see so differently.

Nabokov once recalled the novelist and Nobel laureate Ivan Bunin telling him about visiting Tolstoy for the first time and being almost shocked “to see suddenly emerge from a small door a little old man instead of the giant he had involuntarily imagined.” Nabokov added in his own voice: “And I have also seen that little old man. I was a child and I faintly remember my father shaking hands with someone at a street corner, then telling me as I continued our walk, ‘That was Tolstoy.’ ”
¹
The only other overlaps I have found between these two lives was that both were photographed in the same year by the great Petersburg photographer Karl Bulla, Tolstoy in his seventies or eighties, Nabokov at seven or eight, each with his own trademark, a peasant costume or a butterfly book, and that both lived at Gaspra, the estate of Countess Sophia Panin, Tolstoy during a spell of ill health in 1902, Nabokov when his family was fleeing the revolution in Petrograd in 1918.

So much for biography. I wish it was always so easy to dispose of.

I’d like to compare Tolstoy and Nabokov by looking at the openings of
Anna Karenina
and
Lolita
. When I contrast the two novels, it will be to highlight the individuality of the two novelists, not to set an example of “classical realism” against an example of “postmodernism.” Tolstoy’s realism is very much his own, as Gary Morson argues so persuasively in his superb book on
War and Peace
.
²
And Nabokov’s manner, whether you want to call it realistic or not, is his own: he is not a modernist (despite affinities with aspects of Joyce and Proust), nor a postmodernist (despite the influence he has had on some writers so labeled, he has never shared the common epistemological presuppositions, whatever they are, that are supposedly possible in “this era,” whatever that means). And although he does share some traits with the symbolists, he is mostly just himself.

As a young man, Nabokov thought
Madame Bovary
“2000 metres higher than
Anna Karenina
.”
³
By the end of the 1940s he had reversed the rankings and had come to think
Anna Karenina
the greatest of all novels (Meras interview). He taught it and agreed to annotate it and to retranslate it, and although that project remained incomplete because of the pressure of other work, he went on to pay tribute to the novel in his own fiction.

In line with his general reestimation of
Anna Karenina
, Nabokov’s response to its first two paragraphs changed revealingly over twenty years. In late 1939 or early 1940, before arriving in the United States, he began to prepare lectures on Russian literature in the hope he would find a university literature post much sooner than he did. He jotted down: “
Anna Karenin
: Grand looseness of style: The word ‘house’ is repeated
8 times
in the course of the first paragraph—17 lines.”
⁴
But in the annotations he began for the Modern Library
Anna Karenina
fifteen years later, we find this: “the word
dom
(house, household, home) is repeated eight times in the course of six sentences. This ponderous and solemn repetition,
dom
,
dom
,
dom
, tolling as it does for doomed family life (one of the main themes of the book), is a deliberate device on Tolstoy’s part” (
LRL
210). From grand looseness to deliberate design.

But I’m not sure that this is entirely correct. I’ve translated the start of the novel myself in order to highlight the startling, dogged insistence of Tolstoy’s verbal repetitions that surely can’t all be explained as sounding one’s theme in the first few bars.

“All happy families are like one another, every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”: all right, repetition, but only for the sake of pointing a contrast.

Then:

All [remember what we were told at school: don’t start consecutive sentences and especially consecutive paragraphs with the same word] was confusion in the Oblonsky household. [I have used “house” here as a kind of chemical marker for the Russian syllable “
dom
”] The wife had found out that the husband was linked [I picked this word because Tolstoy recycles the same word two sentences later: normally we would translate “was having an affair”] with the former French governess in their house, and told her husband that she couldn’t live in the same house as him. This situation had been going on for three days now and was felt painfully by the couple themselves and all the members of their family and the household staff. All the members of the family and the household staff [a very characteristic repetition: Nabokov himself defines it, in an unpublished note in quite a different context: “the phantom of Tolstoy’s style: the bringing over of the last definition of one phrase into the beginning of the next one, as solid supports for the development of a logical sequence”
⁵
] felt [and that was the last verb used in the previous sentence] that there was no sense in their cohabitation and that people who had accidentally converged at any wayside inn were more linked [there’s
that
repetition] to one another than they [and here it comes again], the members of the Oblonsky family and household. The wife did not come out of her rooms, the husband had not been in the house for three days now. The children ran all over the house; the English governess had argued with the [housekeeper]
⁶
and had written a note to a friend asking her to find her a new place; the cook had gone out yesterday right at dinner time; the under-cook and the coachman had given notice.

What we have here is not so much the sounding of a theme as Tolstoy’s relentlessly analytical mind in action, his ruthless, uncompromising desire to define. He likes to turn something over patiently, facet by facet, and refuses to stop where ordinary decorum expects. Here it leads, I think we have to admit, to some awkwardness, but this awkwardness is intricately allied to his own special greatness, his readiness to take things apart, his ignoring received explanations, his rejecting ordinary limits.

Though he admired Tolstoy above all other novelists, Nabokov was very different. He was quick to spot the logical flaws in the arguments of others and held that “next to the right to create, the right to criticize is the richest gift that liberty of thought and speech can offer” (
LRL
ii). But he was highly impatient with analysis as a means of arriving anywhere: he thought that logic could lead you in a straight line all the way around the globe, only to bring you back to where you started, to mark out once more the closed circle of human thought. And given the odd conclusions Tolstoy could argue himself into by patient logic—that sex is immoral even within marriage, for instance, in the afterpiece to “The Kreutzer Sonata”—Nabokov has a point. Nabokov preferred the aside of consciousness, the knight move of mind, the sidestep of fancy, to the dogged step-by-step of analytical thought.

I chose the opening of
Anna Karenina
partly to take issue with Nabokov. In teaching Tolstoy, Nabokov stressed the visual detail. “What one would like to do,” he told his students, “would be to kick the glorified soapbox from under [Tolstoy’s] sandalled feet and then lock him up on a desert island with gallons of ink and reams of paper—far away from the things, ethical and pedagogical, that diverted his attention from observing the way the dark hair curled above Anna’s white neck” (
LRL
140). When he taught, he focused on detail and expected his students to “caress the details”; the most notorious of his notorious exam questions was: “Describe the wallpaper in the Karenins’ bedroom” (
VNAY
358).

But if you look at the opening of
Anna Karenina
, Tolstoy incorporates far less visual detail than so-called classical realists are supposed to employ. There is nothing corresponding to the description of Verrières on the opening page of
The Scarlet and the Black
; or the description of the new schoolboy, Charbovari, at the start of
Madame Bovary
; nothing to match the view from Miss Pinkerton’s academy at the beginning of
Vanity Fair
; or the description of Dorothea as
Middlemarch
opens; or any of Dickens’s views of London—although if there were space to quote these, you would detect a cast of mind in each of these authors sufficiently distinct, even if they all happen to start with description, to make you suspect that a label like “classical realism” seems hardly a classification.