The Tragedy of Mister Morn
Read The Tragedy of Mister Morn Online
Authors: Vladimir Nabokov,Thomas Karshan,Anastasia Tolstoy
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Introduction copyright © 2012 by Thomas Karshan
Translation copyright © 2012 by Thomas Karshan and Anastasia Tolstoy
Illustrations by Pablo Delcán
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in Russia as
Tragediya Gospodina Morna
by Azbuka, St. Petersburg, in 2008. Copyright © 2008 by The Estate of Vladimir Nabokov. This translation originally published in the United Kingdom by Penguin Classics, an imprint of Penguin Books Ltd., London, in 2012.
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Originally serialized in Russian, in somewhat different form, in
Zvezda
(1997).
Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data Nabokov, Vladimir Vladimirovich, 1899–1977.
[Tragediia gospodina Morna. English]
The tragedy of Mister Morn / by Vladimir Nabokov;
with an introduction by Thomas Karshan; translation by Anastasia Tolstoy and Thomas Karshan.
p. cm.
“This is a Borzoi book.”
eISBN: 978-0-307-96080-1
I. Tolstoy, Anastasia. II. Karshan, Thomas. III. Title.
IV Title: Tragedy of Mister Morn.
PG3476.N3T8313 2013
891.72′42—dc23 2012037121
Jacket design by Pablo Delcán
v3.1
Introduction by Thomas Karshan
A Note About the Author and the Translators
The Tragedy of Mister Morn
was Vladimir Nabokov’s first major work, and the laboratory in which he discovered and tested many of the themes he would subsequently develop in the next fifty-odd years: the elusiveness of happiness; the creative and destructive playfulness of the imagination; courage, cowardice, and loyalty; the truth of masks; the struggle of freedom and order for possession of the soul; the sovereignty of desire and illicit passion; and what one character calls “that likeness which exists/between truth and high fantasy” (I.ii.
this page
), a likeness under whose inspiration Nabokov would take reality, fancy, art, and impossibility, and twist them together into the four-dimensional knots of
Lolita, Pale Fire
, and his other great novels.
Yet
Morn
, which Nabokov wrote in Prague in the winter of 1923 to 1924, when he was only twenty-four years old, was never performed or published in his lifetime, though several readings of the play did take place in Berlin, then Nabokov’s home, in the spring of 1923. The opportunities in Berlin for staging a Russian play by a nearly unknown writer were limited, and publication cannot have seemed financially attractive to the émigré publishing houses that would later print Nabokov’s novels. In America, and then in Switzerland, Nabokov translated most of his Russian fiction, but not his early plays, and when he died, in 1977, the typescript and fair copy of
Morn
still lay dormant in his personal archive in Montreux. Then, in 1997,
Zvezda
, a Russian literary journal, published the complete Russian text of
Morn;
and in 2008 the play finally became available to a wider (Russian-reading) audience when a revised version of the text was published in book form by Azbuka Press of St. Petersburg. These publications have in turn made possible this current edition—the first translation of
Morn
into English.
While
Morn
is in many respects the seedbed for Nabokov’s major novels, there are also elements in it which are fascinatingly unlike anything in his later work, and which reflect issues in Nabokov’s life at the time of writing. Most prominent of these is revolution. Nabokov came from a distinguished liberal family in St. Petersburg: his father, V. D. Nabokov, had been one of the ministers in the short-lived Kerensky government which ruled between the fall of the Tsar and the ascent to power of Lenin and the Bolsheviks in 1917. That year, the Nabokov family fled St. Petersburg, first for Yalta, then for London, and, eventually, Berlin—where the young Nabokov would rejoin them in 1922, after completing his degree at Cambridge. Even in Berlin, however, the Nabokov family was not safe from the extremist ideologies of right and left which had vied for power in Russia after the failure of the liberal centre, and on March 28, 1922, Nabokov’s father was shot dead by a Monarchist assassin who was in fact aiming not at him but at another émigré politician.
Nabokov’s hatred of the Soviet regime is directly expressed in much of his writing, most prominently his novels
Invitation to a Beheading
(1935–36) and
Bend Sinister
(1947). But he would never again write anywhere nearly so directly about the moment of revolution itself, or so probingly about ideology, as he did in
Morn
. In the play’s two main revolutionaries, Tremens and Klian, Nabokov depicts a politics and poetics of nihilism which, it is implied, was the driving force behind the Russian Revolution. In this Nabokov was refining a critique of revolutionary ideology which can be traced back as far as Turgenev’s
Fathers and Sons
(1862) and Dostoevsky’s
The Possessed
(1872). He would articulate this critique again in his last, and greatest, Russian novel,
The Gift
(1937–38), whose fourth chapter is a mocking biography of Nikolai Chernyshevsky—the revolutionary thinker of the 1860s who was the object of Turgenev’s and Dostoevsky’s conservative critiques, and would become Lenin’s hero. But in
Morn
Nabokov explores more fully and explicitly than he ever would again what he saw as the origins of the revolutionary impulse in a death-instinct and passion for destruction. When Ganus, who had once been a revolutionary, returns from exile and discovers the happiness that the masked King has brought to the kingdom, he asks Tremens why he is not now satisfied. Tremens pours scorn on him. Neither happiness nor equality is Tremens’s purpose, he explains; rather, he is seeking to imitate the violent destructiveness of life itself, which “rushes headlong/into ash, [and] destroys everything in its way” (I.i.
this page
). “Everything,” Tremens explains, “is destruction. And/the faster it is, the sweeter, the sweeter …” (I.i.
this page
). To him, this destruction is beauty:
Did you see,
one windy night, by moonlight, the shadows
of ruins? That is the ultimate beauty—
and towards it I lead the world.
(I.i.
this page
)
Tremens cites as one aspect of that destructiveness the sexual drive itself, in the figure of “the maiden, who prays for the blow of a man’s love” (I.i.294), and one distinctive quality of the play is an unblushing erotic candour to which Nabokov would not fully return until
Lolita
(1955). Thus Klian, the violent-minded revolutionary poet who serves as Tremens’s factotum, tells his fiancée Ella that
… To enter you, oh, to enter,
would be like entering a tight and searing
sheath, to gaze into your blood, to break
through your bones, to learn, to grasp, to touch,
to press your being in between my palms! …
(I.ii.
this page
)
This anticipates Humbert Humbert in Chapter 2, Part Two of
Lolita
saying that “my only grudge against nature was that I could not turn my Lolita inside out and apply voracious lips to her young matrix, her unknown heart, her nacreous liver, the sea-grapes of her lungs, her comely twin kidneys.” Yet, as with so many aspects of the play, in the sphere of desire Nabokov explores opposite poles of experience. Against Klian’s dark vision of sexual appetite is set a more salubrious expression of love’s idealizing power—in the faith that Midia, and the other citizens, place in Morn’s nearly magical beneficence, and in Ella’s idea of love as a force that coalesces experience:
… all is one: my love and the raw sun,
your pale face and the bright trickling icicles
beneath the roof, the amber spot upon
the porous sugary snow mound, the raw sun
and my love, my love …
(III.ii.
this page
)
This, and the tenderly specific attention paid to the minutiae of Ella’s hair, clothes, and make-up, seem to attest to the fact that Nabokov wrote
Morn
soon after meeting and falling in love with Véra Slonim, who would become his wife—and the play’s typist. With her girlishness, humour, and idealism, Ella ranks alongside Lolita as one of Nabokov’s few fully realized female characters.
If, in its treatment of revolutionary ideology, death, and desire,
Morn
shows us elements that Nabokov would not develop again, or not for a long time, there is one respect in which it stands very obviously as the source of Nabokov’s immediately subsequent writing, and this is in its exploration of the twin themes of happiness and make-believe. In 1924, Nabokov would begin writing his first novel,
Happiness
. The novel was aborted and its drafts are now lost, but there is no question that its title expresses one of the central themes of Nabokov’s oeuvre, in which happiness is a mysterious variable, “the zany of its own mortality,” as Sebastian Knight calls it, no sooner found than lost, but always something much more profound than anything “happiness” means in modern use, where it merely names the mirage evoked by the goals we set ourselves. As for make-believe, it is central to Nabokov’s work that any reality worth caring about is one freshly imagined, that, as he puts it in
Strong Opinions
(1973), “average reality begins to rot and stink as soon as the act of individual creation ceases to animate a subjectively perceived texture,” and therefore that, as Vadim’s aunt tells him in Chapter 2 of Nabokov’s final complete novel,
Look at the Harlequins!
(1974), it is a fundamental imperative for every person that in art and life he should “Play! Invent the world! Create it!” The theme of make-believe also links
Morn
to two other verse-plays which Nabokov had written in 1923 before embarking on
Morn
, the one-act closet dramas
Death
and
The Pole
, which together mark out the two poles between which
Morn
moves: in the first, a cynical intellectual related in mentality to Tremens presses the view of illusion as arrant deceit; while the second heroizes Captain Scott, the quixotic Antarctic explorer, a Morn-like figure whose steadfast courage inspires and sustains his followers, who always seems to be playing, even in the face of death, and who is, like Morn, recognized by his laughter.
