A revised version of the article published in: Sign Systems Studies 28. Tartu : Tartu University Press, 2000, pp. 242-263

 

V. Nabokov's “Bend Sinister”: A Social Message or an Experiment with Time?

Marina Grishakova

Or is “outer” and “inner” an illusion too, so that a great mountain may be said to stand a thousand dreams high and hope and terror can be as easily charted as the capes and bays they helped to name? (Nabokov 1974: 146)

Nabokov's Bend Sinister has been evaluated as a strange or not quite successful text. There were few critical responses to it in 1947 when it was published. The novel engendered a critical perplexity, although a number of scholars have paid close attention to it. D. Barton Johnson's thematic analysis (Johnson 1985: 185-223) and P. Tammi narratological analysis in terms of the auctorial “incomplete control” over the text (Tammi 1985: 115-125) are especially revealing. Basing myself on these studies, I shall attempt to place the text into the context of culture and to examine it as a process of interplay of different languages or different versions of reality.

The perplexity was probably caused by Nabokov's flat rejection of any general ideas or social comments applicable to Bend Sinister and his definition of the novel as the author's fantasy (Nabokov 1974: 6-7). Despite the author's will to avoid a “social intent” in the critical appraisal of the novel, the latter has been accepted as a parallel to other anti-totalitarian texts containing a “social message” (Invitation to a Beheading, Tyrants Destroyed, etc.). In the Introduction of 1963, Nabokov denies any didactic or allegorical goal, any serious idea, but admits that “certain reflections in the glass directly caused by the idiotic and despicable regimes” can be distinguished in the book: “worlds of tyranny and torture, of Fascists and Bolshevists, of Philistine thinkers and jack-booted baboons” (Nabokov 1974: 6). The text might be understood as a system of contradictory elements, which both maintain and undermine the “social message”, as an example of the modernist “negative aesthetics”. According to A. Eysteinsson, who follows in Adorno's footsteps, “while subjective experience is to be mediated through objectification, that is, as an objective gestalt […], this objectification, in order to express the negativity of experience, must be constructed in a radically “subjective” manner – it must not take the shape of “rationalized” objective representation to which as social beings we are accustomed. Thus, on the level of representation [...] the outside world is forcefully objectified through all the surface elements familiar to us, but on another level this objectification does not concur with our habitualized perception of the “objective” world, and hence takes on the shape of a radically subjective construct” (Eysteinsson 1990: 43).

The closed world of ideology, which comprises elements of fascism, communism and mass psychology, is deconstructed in the idiosyncratical language of protagonist's thoughts, recollections and dreams. The philosopher Adam Krug rejects the language of “social conspiracy” since the people involved in it (classmates, colleagues and acquaintances) belong to his personal world. He “re-writes” the totalitarian idiom and decomposes it into the private human meanings. Ideology corrupts everyday language, employing it for its own purposes (“the diabolical method […] of tying a rebel to his wretched country by his own twisted heartstrings”, Nabokov: 1974: 7). Krug's philosophical method is defined as a “creative destruction” of any closed, finite, and therefore mythological system. Scientific metaphors are crucial in the destruction. The tension between the languages reaches its top point in the episode of the protagonist's death while he attempts to turn the situation into a schoolgame or fight to subdue the dictator.

 

1. The social message

According to the Introduction, “the greater part of the book was composed in the winter and spring of 1945-46” (Nabokov 1974: 5), but the work started already in 1942. Certain published and unpublished documents of the time should be properly related to the novel since they point at its key motifs and metaphors. On February 4, 1944 , New York Browning Society invited Nabokov to give a talk and sent him a leaflet containing the schedule of meetings and description of lectures. The Society was founded to study and popularize Robert Browning's life and works but was engaged in other educational activities as well. As one can learn from the leaflet, German culture was a focus of the Society's interests in 1944. The description includes a report on Prof. Schneider's lecture on German philosophy accompanied by some observations on totalitarian elements in the German philosophical thought from Hegel to Nietzsche. The editor of the leaflet remarks:

“…though it is a strange indictment to bring against philosophers, of all people, very humbly I would suggest that the German people are less to blame for misapplication of their ideas than are philosophers to blame for failing to see the logical and natural outcome of those ideas, when translated into action”.

Thus, philosophy is seen as a practical activity or a spiritual leadership. The philosophical image of Adam Krug, a solitary, free hunter in the kingdom of thought, might have been consciously opposed to this “applied” philosophy. The leaflet ends with the following statement:

“The German people must save themselves. The final picture cannot be that of a fully armed, powerful world force holding Germany in subjection – the final picture must be that of an aroused higher Germany, armed with the might of truth and right, standing, as does the higher nature of man in George Gray Barnard's famous statue, upon the vanquished form of her own cruel, bestial, depraved nature.

Miss Henrietta Green closed our December meeting with the singing of Schubert's “Gretchen am Spinnrade”. In the last plaintive notes of that fresh, youthful voice, in the words “Mein Herz is sehr”, one could fancy that one heard the pathetic cry of the submerged, tortured Germany , the gentle, kindly, friendly Germany , pleading for a chance to survive. That it be given a chance, is as important for the rest of the world as it is for Germany ” (Letters, folder 118).

The outlook for the future rebirth overshadows the ominous historical events, the actual historical tragedy of Germany related to the similar ideas of national rebirth and might. Nabokov's fierce anti-German letter in reply that evokes the literal, biological meaning of “nature” is the obvious reaction to the bombastic style and presumed political innocence of the leaflet:

“I have lived in Germany for 17 years and am quite sure Gretchen has been thoroughly consoled by the secondhand, somewhat bloodstained, but still quite wearable frocks that her soldier friend sent her from the Polish ghettos. No, I am afraid we shall never see the Barnard statue in a German impersonation. It is useless looking at a hyena and hoping that one day domestication or a benevolent gene will turn the creature into a great soft purring tortoiseshell cat. Gelding and Mendelism, alas, have their limits. Let us chloroform it – and forget” (Nabokov 1991: 47-48).

The letter is directed against a straightforward idealistic interpretation of the European situation. George Gray Barnard's name is a symbol of democracy: the artist was famous for his sculptural illustrations of the American democracy (Struggle of the Two Natures in Man, 31 allegorical figures Broken Laws and Laws We Keep, the statue of Lincoln ). In Bend Sinister, “a tortoiseshell cat” as a metaphor for a “domestic” and “gentle” Germany appears in the episode of an emergency session at the University President's place (Nabokov 1974: 43-44). It is probably worth noting that in the Soviet tradition the sentimental dictator and a cat are the usual pair in children's literature on Lenin. Nabokov made also use of the “Gretchen” metaphor. In the novel, the Bachofen sisters, outwardly erotic and submissive, actually cruel, practical and deceitful, represent Germany-Gretchen. Mariette Bachofen exposed to the violence of soldiers embodies “the gentle, kindly, friendly Germany , pleading for a chance to survive”. The theme of Nazism as violence inflicted “on the gentle, cultured German people” (Boyd 1992: 86) emerges also in Double Talk and Pnin. The following passage recalls the style of the leaflet and discredits the apprehension of culture as an autonomous, safe and “innocent” entity:

“…she was selected to die and was cremated only a few days after her arrival in Buchenwald , in the beautifully wooded Grosser Ettersberg, as the region is resoundingly called. It is an hour's stroll from Weimar, where walked Goethe, Herder, Schiller; Wieland, the inimitable Kotzebue and others. “ Aber warum – but why “ – Dr Hagen, the gentlest of souls alive, would wail, “ why had one to put that horrid camp so near!” for indeed, it was near – only five miles from the cultural heart of Germany – “that nation of the universities”, as the President of Waindell College, renowned for his use of the mot juste , had so elegantly phrased it when reviewing the European situation in a recent Commencement speech, along with the compliment he paid another torture house, “Russia – the country of Tolstoy, Stanislavski, Raskolnikov, and other great and good men” (Nabokov 1997: 113).

Nabokov cites approvingly the following idea of the leaflet: “In Goethe, it is true, were found what seemed to be fundamental flaws in character, flaws which seem also to be inherent in the type of German now in power” (Letters, folder 118). Bend Sinister is permeated by polemical allusions and references to Goethe. For example, a periphrasis of Goethe's famous statement: “I am born to lead as naturally as a bird flies” (Nabokov 1974: 27). The story of the production of Hamlet in the State Theatre where “Osric and Fortinbras have acquired a tremendous ascendancy over the rest of the cast” (ibid., 96) is a reference to the staging in Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship: the actress and the producer, “like Goethe, imagine Ophelia in the guise of a canned peach: ‘her whole being floats in sweet ripe passion”, says Johann Wofgang, Ger.poet, nov., dram.&phil. Oh, horrible” (ibid., 104). The interpretation of Hamlet as “a play founded upon young Fortinbras' attempt to recover the lands lost by his father” with clear racist and anti-Semitic connotations (ibid., 97) presents evidently reductio as absurdum of Wilhelm Meister's version of Shakespeare where an essential part of action is transferred to Norway and Hamlet is a blond and blue-eyed Nordic hero.

All these allusions and explicit statements by Nabokov are, of course, obvious “social comments”. Yet in Nabokov's own words, Bend Sinister is primarily a story of the protagonist and his creator. Nabokov's letter to his fellow-émigré Zenzinov (March 17, 1945) indicates a contradiction underlying the plot of Bend Sinister. It is, in R.Rorty's terms, the theoretical incompatibility of “private autonomy” and “solidarity” (Rorty 1989). Nabokov's indignant remark was evoked by Vasili Maklakov's, the official representative's of the Russian émigrés in France, visit to the Soviet embassy:

“I can understand denying one's principles in one exceptional case: if they told me that those closest to me would be tortured [ to death – M.G.] or spared according to my reply, I would immediately consent to anything, ideological treachery [betrayal of principles – M.G.] or foul deeds and would even apply myself lovingly to the parting on Stalin's backside” (Boyd 1992: 84).

As it seems, the significant metaphors of “mug” (Krug, not a perfect “circle”, but a “mug” in German or “kruzhka” in Russian: the latter might be interpreted as a diminutive of “krug” in Nabokov's playful language) and “handle” (a vulnerable point, a lever to handle, to manipulate a man) are the reverberations of Nabokov's letter to Zenzinov. The letter tells that personal attachments and fears are more powerful than social rules. What is called “historical necessity” consists of personal fears and commitments. One should not be misled by “common goals”. The “social” and “personal” meanings are often polemically juxtaposed in the Nabokovian metaphors. For example, the episode of Krug's death, which might be seen as a heroic suffering, turns out to be a schoolboys' game or fight. The game metaphor is crucial for Nabokov. The episode might refer to the real facts metamorphosed: a mutilation of a Tenishev school student during a football game or Nabokov's own football trauma in Berlin in 1932 (Leving 1999: 131). There is also a possible literary subtext, a fragment from Pascal's Thoughts, which evidently specifies and clarifies the episode. Pascal's as well as Shakespeare's works make the key subtexts of the novel.

“How does it happen that this man, so distressed at the death of his wife and his only son, or who has some great lawsuit which annoys him, is not at this moment sad, and that he seems so free from all painful and disquieting thoughts? We need not wonder, for a ball has been served for him, and he must return it to his companion. He is occupied in catching it in its fall from the roof, to win a game. How can he think of his own affairs, pray, when he has this other matter in hand? Here is a care worthy of occupying this great soul and taking away from him every other thought of the mind. […] And if he does not lower himself to this and wants always to be on the strain, he will be more foolish still, because he would raise himself above humanity; and after all, he is only a man, that is to say capable of little and of mush, of all and of nothing; he is neither angel, nor brute, but man” (Pascal 1952, f. 140; 1963, f. 522).

The game has both a metaphysical and an esthetical meaning. It gives an opportunity to act at random, to play by guess in the situation of Deus absconditus or “uncertainty of the sentence” (in Pascal's words), to act as if one's own principles were absolute while knowing their relativity (the Pascalean theory of probability). In the game episode Krug loses his permanent characteristics of heaviness and inertia and becomes, like King Lear, “only a man”.

The moment of death is especially significant as a realization of the major Nabokovian theme of crossing a border (Levin 1998): the process of passage resists any general interpretations and the very idea of passage is usually eclipsed by sharp sensory, especially visual impressions. For example, Nabokov's poem The Execution (1928) equates shooting (execution) with a photographic flash (see Emerson 1912, Barthes 1981 on photography as death; cf. also the simultaneity of the photographic flash and death in Transparent Things). The wordplay involves different meanings of the English verb “shoot”: “to hit or kill with firearms”, “to take shots/ pictures”, “to send a ball (in sports)”.

Certain letters of 1944 support my interpretation. It is clear, for example, from Dr. Leon Dinkin's letters (Letters, folder 42) that the Nabokovs consulted him about their son's health in 1944 (stomachache of uncertain origin). The “exploratory laparotomy” (incision into the abdomen) was proposed by doctors, but Dinkin was resolutely against it and suggested bringing Dmitri to New York for further observation under his control. Dmitri might even enter some New York school: “It may sound horrible to you, but it is still better than eviscerate him, excuse me for such a word. I am definitely against the operation” [the translation is mine - M.G.]. It is noteworthy that Nabokov sent a copy of Bend Sinister to Dinkin. The doctor thanks him in his letter of August 20, 1947, and reports: “I read it through one evening and half of the night and did not sleep the rest of the night. It is really sinister”. Obviously, the “horrors” of the radical medicine may have no less impact on individual sensitivity than the violence of totalitarian rule that uses “the diabolical method […] of tying a rebel to his own wretched country by his own twisted heartstrings” (Nabokov 1974: 7). A “release game”, one of the most unpleasant episodes of Bend Sinister, combines the aforementioned meanings (the cruelty of school games, medical horrors) with the rudeness and falsity of imaginary psychoanalytical manipulations aimed at the release of the “collective unconscious”. “Personal” (autobiographical) and “social” (historical, cultural, and philosophical) subtexts are systematically brought together in Nabokov's work into singular polygenetic textual constructions (see Tammi 1999: 34-64 on Nabokov's polygenetism).

In April of 1946, Nabokov received a letter from M. Kaminka. From this and following letters (Letters, folder 83) he found out the destiny of his Berlin friends and acquaintances. Mikhail Kaminka was a former Tenishev student like Nabokov. His father, August Kaminka, a prominent Russian lawyer, scholar and political figure, fled to Berlin from the Bolshevist regime. M. Kaminka describes the death of his father in a German camp in Latvia or Lithuania: as evident from the letter, he had stayed in the camp voluntarily, despite a permit to go free obtained by his wife from the German authorities. Mikhail expresses the hope that his father could have used the poison he had prepared in case of Bolshevist arrest. But the Bolsheviks turned out to be tolerant to both A. Kaminka and Nikolai Vasilievich (Jakovlev?). These men took refuge in the Baltic after they left Berlin and soon found themselves between the two dangerous regimes. Their fate was different.

Another significant man mentioned in M. Kaminka's letter is the philosopher Grigori Landau. In my opinion, he might have been a prototype for Adam Krug, the philosopher who started from the philosophy of history and ended as an aphorist (cf. Landau's The Twilight of Europe and Epigraphs). The Bolsheviks offered him a return to Russia and collaboration. M. Kaminka assumes that Landau might have been either subjected to “Gletkin” tortures (see A. Koestler's Darkness at Noon) or, on the contrary, might have been one of the very few Jews who survived in Latvia. Now it is known that Landau died in the Soviet camp in Siberia (Ravdin 1994).

Adam Krug's “intermediary” position on the bridge is a metaphor for the Russian émigré's “in- betweenness”. It highlights multiple counterpositions inherent in the novel: the English- and the Slavic/ German-speaking world, the reality and dream, life and death, body and consciousness, “autonomy” and “solidarity”.

The Twilight of Europe illuminates inner tensions in the European space between the two world wars. It also explains Nabokov's distrust for the populist slogans, which sometimes disguise totalitarianism. According to Landau, in World War I the allies destroyed Germany in the name of an ideal, unhistorical aim of the “absolute peace”. They proclaimed this sacred idea, not their profit or benefit, to be the genuine goal of the war. It was not a war against Germany but the war against premises of any future war and injustice nesting in Germany. Pacifism itself became a tool of the war to compel all dreamers and compassionate people not indifferent to the suffering of other human beings to take the side of the enemies of Germany. I would suggest naming such an ideological challenge the “abuse of solidarity”, following R.Rorty's understanding of “solidarity” as a capacity to sense cruelty and other people's humiliation (Rorty 1989).

Landau presumes that easy birth and spreading of “absolute” ideas are maintained by the common history of modern Europe. The common space of European culture produced an extremely intense network of communications and the feeling of accessibility of any goals. Idealistic maximalism is inherent in the proud and arrogant European culture. In creative work, this pride is justified: being ineffective without competence and beneficial in “experts” or “professionals”, it becomes dangerous while descending from “heroes” and “creators” to the ignorant “public”. The pride spreads with consummate ease in the social and political sphere where everyone participates in action and shares self-confidence with others. Mass culture is governed by approximateness: it lacks exact notions and motivated promises of experts. It is clear, says Landau, where this slope leads us when a crowd of professional leaders of society (politicians, journalists, priests, ignorant writers and teachers) steps on it: shepherds themselves belong to the herd. The common ground of contemporary communications produces an effect of “flatness”: the society overgrows old systems of thought developed by humankind by means of hard work and inherits only naivety instead of spontaneity and rationalism instead of wisdom.

According to Landau, Germany accumulated a considerable creative potential by the early 20th century. The defeat of Germany in the First World War was a defeat of Europe. The triumph of masses started. Nabokov's “Party of an Average Man”, the “Ekwilism” teaching, the symptoms of oblivion of history and Padukgrad inhabitants' mental degeneration are clear parallels to Landau's historical diagnosis. According to A. Dolinin, Landau's pathos of European energies and creativity had probably influenced the conception of Glory (Dolinin 1999: 206). Bend Sinister is, on the contrary, permeated by anxious thoughts on the European history, which are rather close to Landau's reflections on the unstable balance between democracy and totalitarianism.

Landau's thesis on the easy accessibility of extreme goals could also catch Nabokov's eye: the real growth of knowledge consists in the accumulation of axiomata media, intermediate steps. The utopianism of the “ideal aim” destroys the living reality. The idea of the destructiveness of “idealistic maximalism” is also prominent in Lolita where it assumes a form of the Romantic-decadent solipsistic quest for the lost or imaginary beloved and entails Humbert's obsessive actions.

Landau's book contains polemics with Spengler, especially his notions of organic growth and decline of cultures (cf. polemics with Spengler in Glory and The Gift, Dolinin 1999: 204-206). Landau argues that the highest functions of culture contradict its “organic whole”. The superdevelopment or supertension of an isolated function would undermine the "organic wholeness". The existence of the highest functions of culture (such as, for example, philosophical thinking) is possible thanks to the forces and resources free from organic development. The contradiction is an essential form of life and dissatisfaction its basic principle. The more developed a culture the sharper this tragic contradiction. Nabokov's constant opposition to the systems, which pretend, like Marxism or psychoanalysis, to be able to resolve contradictions or fulfil wishes, is well-known. A contradiction is inherent in the structure of the novel: Adam Krug's heavy body belongs to the limited physical reality whereas his consciousness strives for infinite freedom. The hypertrophied body of a thinker (Krug, Luzhin, John Shade) is a result of ascetic inner life: “His misshapen body, that grey mop of abundant hair, the yellow nails of his pudgy fingers, the bags under his lustreless eyes, were only intelligible if regarded as the waste products eliminated from his intrinsic self by the same forces of perfection which purified and chiselled his verse” (Nabokov 1991: 23). Yet the contradiction is not a pure expression of the traditional Romantic-Symbolist duality of nature (the inward versus outward reality): it is inscribed into scientific metaphors.

 

2. The philosophy of time: Nabokov and Dunne

 

In the unpublished chapter of Conclusive Evidence, Nabokov, who refers to himself in the third person, mentions “Mr. Nabokov's method of referring to himself in the third person as ‘Sirin'”:

“One is reminded of those problems of “objectivity” that the philosophy of science brings up. An observer makes a detailed picture of the whole universe, but when he has finished he realizes that it still lacks something: his own self. So he puts himself in too. But again a “self” remains outside and so forth, in an endless sequence of projections, like those advertisements that depict a girl holding a picture of herself holding a picture of herself holding a picture that only coarse printing prevents one's eye from making out” (Nabokov 1999: 128; written in 1950).

The outlined problem arises together with the discovery by relativist physics of the impossibility to describe the world without including a human observer. The Eisnteinian theory is based on the observations made by two or more observers but ignores the existence of the “last” outside observer: there must be the third (the fourth, the fifth, etc.) observer observing the previous observers. That was the point of the critique directed against the theory of relativity by John William Dunne, a British philosopher of science. Modern physics actually refers to the Pascalean problem of the “Hidden God” and the “truth” as a matter of point of view or perspective. Blaise Pascal “aura été le premier à jouer systématiquement du paradigme à des fins philosophiques et/ou apologétiques, et à en jouer en pleine conscience de ses implications théoriques” (Damish 1987: 63).

The Pascalean subtext and the fiction of the “invisible observer” as the Author of the World vs. the author of the text appears already in Nabokov's Russian novels. Vera Nabokov's letter of June 15, 1961, on behalf of her husband, to the American publisher of “Lolita” Walter Minton contains a significant indication: “ DAR consists of five chapters, four of these are written by the author (an invisible observer), the fifth (No. 4 in the sequence) purports to be the work of the main protagonist” (Letters to G. P. Putnam's sons). Another important Nabokov's remark accompanies M. Scammell's typescript translation of “The Gift” (the end of chapter 3, Busch's speech on the atom-universe): “Busch in his grotesque way expresses a deep and important theory, and its meaning should be brought out clearly, despite the ranting” (Dar: 249). Busch's ranting and grotesque speech refers to fragment 72 (Brunschwicg's numeration) of Pascal's “Thoughts”, where the idea of immensity of the universe is developed: “The whole visible world is only an imperceptible atom in the ample bosom of nature. No idea approaches it. We may enlarge our conceptions beyond all imaginable space; we only produce atoms in comparison with the reality of things. It is an infinite sphere, the center of which is everywhere, the circumference nowhere”. Each smallest part of nature is an “abridged atom” of its immensity: there is “an infinity of universes, each of which has its own firmament, its planets, its earth, in the same proportion as in the visible world” (Pascal 1958: 16-18). Man is “a mean between nothing and everything”:

“What will we do then, but perceive the appearance of the middle of things, in an eternal despair of knowing either their beginning or their end. All things proceed from the Nothing, and are borne towards the Infinite. Who will follow these marvelous processes? The Author of these wonders understands them. None other can do so” (Pascal 1958: 16-18).

Pascalean allusions are related to Nabokov's implicit polemics with relativity theory (see also Grossmith 1991; Grishakova 1999; on Pascal's "Two Infinities" in Nabokov see Johnson 1993: 51, 62). The distinction between the “inward” and “otward” space is illusory: it is just a habit of thinking since the world comprises immeasurable worlds enclosed one within the other. Human knowledge is inevitably partial, only the Author of the Universe could play the role of the privileged “objective” observer. The polemics is taken up again in Ada's letter on “physics fiction” in Ada:

“Elaborating anew, in irrational fabrications, all that Cyraniana and “physics fiction” would have been not only a bore but an absurdity, for nobody knew how far Terra, or other innumerable planets with cottages and cows, might be situated in outer and inner space: “inner”, because why not assume their microcosmic presence in the golden globules ascending quick-quick in this flute of Moët or in the corpuscles of my, Van Veen's – (or my, Ada Veen's) – bloodstream” (Nabokov 1970: 258-259).

J. W. Dunne suggested the theory of serialism to resolve the problem of the “last” observer. In chapter 2 of Serial Universe he uses the following example to illustrate his ideas. A painter who escaped from the lunatic asylum began to draw a picture of the universe. He painted a landscape as he saw it, but noticed that something was missing and soon understood that he himself was missing as a part of the universe. “With the remorseless logic of the lunatic” (Dunne 1934: 30) the insane artist proceeds to expand his picture, portraying himself as a part of the universe, and then adding again himself who is aware of his own existence, etc. etc. – the multiple pictures with an increasing number of artists of increasing capacity:

“The artist is trying to describe in his picture a creature equipped with all the knowledge by the picture which the pictured creature would draw. And it becomes abundantly evident that the knowledge thus pictured must always be less than the knowledge employed in making the picture. In other words, the mind which any human science can describe can never be an adequate representation of the mind which can make that science ” (Dunne 1934: 32).

According to Dunne, one can systematically treat the condition that we are self-conscious creatures aware of something other than ourselves, only exhibiting it in the form of an infinite regress: “The notion of absolute time is a pure regress. Its employment results in exhibiting us as self-conscious observers” (ibid, 34). In the above-cited passage from the unpublished chapter of Conclusive Evidence Nabokov apparently borrowed the argument from Dunne. But was not the parable of the insane artist the conceptual kernel of Pale Fire: mad Kinbote imposing himself on Shade's life and poetry by means of his obsessive commentary, but also the author who endeavours to express himself through a series of imaginary literary substitutes? A similar parallel between the “self-conscious” novel technique and the “self-conscious” landscape painting appears already in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941):

“The Prizmatic Bezel can be thoroughly enjoyed once it is understood that the heroes of the book are what can be loosely called “methods of composition”. It is as if a painter said: look, here I'm going to show you not the painting of a landscape, but the painting of different ways of painting a certain landscape, and I trust their harmonious fusion will disclose the landscape as I intend you to see it (Nabokov 1995: 79).

Nabokov used the edition of 1945 of The Serial Universe by Dunne (1 st ed. 1934) for his manuscript Notes for Texture of Time (1957-1968; partly incorporated in the Fourth Part of “Ada”). Later, in the 60-ies, he used the edition of 1934 of An Experiment with Time (1 st ed. 1927) to examine his own dreams following Dunne's method (see Boyd 1992: 487). Dunne became famous in the 1930-ies: it is quite feasible Nabokov heard of him and was influenced by his ideas at the time. In his lecture The Art of Literature and Commonsense (1951, the original version of 1941 The Creative Writer), Nabokov says: “That human life is but a first instalment of serial soul and that one's individual secret is not lost in the process of earthly dissolution, becomes something more than an optimistic conjecture, and even more than a matter of religious faith, when we remember that only commonsense rules immortality out” (Nabokov 1980: 377). The “serial soul” belongs to Dunne's terminology whereas rejection of “optimistic conjecture” and “religious faith” as conclusive evidence of immortality is also in tune with Dunne's attempt to find a scientific explanation for the problem of death. Nabokov might have had in his mind Dunne's idea of the “serial universe” while creating his own fictional universes or his “worlds in regression”, as Donald Barton Johnson puts it.

In his Experiment with Time, Dunne argues that the things which belong to the core of human experience (sensations of colour, sound, etc.) are not explainable in the frame of objectivist science for whom the observer is a mere abstraction: “Physics is, thus, a science which has been expressly designed to study, not the universe, but the things which would supposedly remain in that universe if we were to abstract there from every effect of a purely sensory character” (Dunne 1973: 18). The scientific procedure consists in pushing the observer as far back as possible,

“reducing him to the level of a helpless onlooker with no more capacity for interference than has a member of a cinema audience the ability to alter the course of the story developing before him on the screen […]. It is a permanent obstacle in the path of our search for external reality that we can never entirely get rid of this individual. Picture the universe how we may, the picture remains of our making” (ibid, 21).

According to J.W. Dunne, this obstacle cannot be avoided but can be acknowledged and used in experimental knowledge based upon the notions of time and the moving observer. It is not Time but the observer who moves. He observes, i.e. his field of presentation (a brief span of attention, the “now”) moves within Time. The Time substratum exists constantly: the past, the present and the future are simultaneous. But the observation itself (the movement within the Time dimension) takes time. It is another time, the time of the higher order: it penetrates the primary time in its past, present and future. So the distinction is drawn between events observed and observational events. Time is serial and there is the serial observer. The first observer exists in the usual three-dimensional space where the fourth dimension is time. The primary time is the fourth spatial dimension for the four-dimensional second observer whose time is the fifth dimension, etc. etc. The field of the primary observer is absent in dreams, therefore dream observation is wandering hither and thither (along the past and the future) by flashes. That is why the “anticipation” of the future events happens in dreams. A mental barrier between the past and the future exists only when we are awake: “In reality, the associational network stretched, not merely this way and that way in Space, but also backwards and forwards in Time” (Dunne 1973: 60). On waking, the usual three-dimensional interpretations are applied to the dream logic. The dream results from the process of observation of the higher-order observer whom man has hypostatized into the figure of “animus”, the mysterious soul that is actually equal to his own mental states: “Although the “higher-order observer” is nothing more magnificent or more transcendental than one's own highly ignorant self, he is beginning to look perilously like a full-fledged "animus"” (Dunne 1973: 167). One may suppose that the death is a phenomenon of three-dimensional continuum, a break similar to sleeping and other alternative states of consciousness:

“Any world which is described from observation must be, as thus described, relative to the describing observer. It must, therefore, fall short of accordance with reality in so far as it cannot be thought of, by anyone who accepts the said observer's description, as capable of containing that observer. Consequently, you, the ultimate, observing you, are always outside any world of which you can make a coherent mental picture. If you postulate the existence of other observers making different descriptions, then it turns out that you and these observers must together form a composite observer who is not includible in the world as thus conjointly described. You, as part of that composite observer, retain your individuality [ …]

The picture you draw shows the real world in its relation to yourself – shows, that is to say, how that world is capable of affecting you. If drawn as the composite effort of many observers, it shows how the physical world is capable of affecting Mind in general. The most important fact which emerges is that you prove to be the immortal part of an immortal composite observer..." (Dunne 1973: 190).

The device of the “serial observer” is at its most obvious in Bend Sinister, Pale Fire and Transparent Things. Bend Sinister may be understood as a composite dream: a preliminary title A Person from Porlock refers to Coleridge's famous vision. The author/ narrator is “dreaming” of Krug's life. Both dream and narration are the forms of absence in three-dimensional space accompanied by the “transparency” of the latter acquired due to the higher level of observation and by the spatialization of the lower-order time. Thus the metaphor of “observation” is metafictional: it points at the process of writing (cf. Iser 1993: 16: an act of fictionalizing turns elements of the given world into objects for observation; the fictive “implies creating a position from which the represented world becomes observable”). The time of the observation intersects the space-time where Krug lives, acts and dies. Krug is also dreaming of himself. This is a multilevel dream (cf. “I want to wake up. Where is he? I shall die if I do not wake up”: Nabokov 1974: 186). His dreams are permeated by the presence of a “mysterious intruder” or “genius” (Dunne's animus), the “higher-order observer” whose associational network stretches backwards and forwards in time (Dunne 1973: 60) and who is apparently common to both the protagonist and the author. In the state of madness, which is another form of absence in three-dimensionality, Krug “suddenly perceives the simple reality of things and knows but cannot express in the words of his world that he and his son and wife and everybody else are merely my whims and megrims” (Nabokov 1974: 7). The border between the two worlds becomes transparent: “Krug's consciousness has at least partly merged with that of his creator, for he is now aware of events in both worlds” and hears “the cautious crackling of a page” thrown into the author's wastebasket (Johnson 1985: 192). In the end, an author's sudden breaking through of the imaginary space of the text occurs. It is a new level of serial time where Krug's schoolgame, death and return to his higher “self” are simultaneous, - yet not the last level since the real Author of the text stands behind the author/narrator. As it is known from Nabokov's letter to Edmund Wilson (cit. in Johnson 1985: 193), his initial intention was the confrontation of the protagonist and the author, which would apparently mean the inclusion of auctorial “unlimited freedom” into the finite mode of the “real” being.

As it often happens in Nabokov, Transparent Things seems to be the twin-text for Bend Sinister and Pale Fire, the text employing and parodying the same device of the serial observer. The “dead author”, the floating identity of characters (a “person”, a “pilgrim”; “a person dancing in a variety of forms around his own self” – Nabokov 1972: 92), the dreamlike reality, anticipations – all these features have been already noticed. Nabokov creates an illusion of the exact chronology based on number 8, the reversed symbol of infinity. Person comes to Switzerland at the age of 22; his father's death follows; he is 32 at the time of his second visit, he meets and marries Armande; he is 40 at the time of his last, fatal visit, therefore exactly 18 years have passed since his first and 8 years since his second visit. It was August when he met Armande 8 years ago. He is apparently back again in August: “there was to be, or would have been (the folds of tenses are badly disarranged in regard to the building under examination) quite a nice little stream of Germans in the second, and cheaper, half of August” (Nabokov 1972: 100). There is a number of hints that point at the 8-year interval between the hypothetical murder and Person's last visit to Europe: last 8 years, one fifth of Person's life, "engrained by grief"; the story of a man who murdered his wife eight years ago in Transatlantic; eight as the recurrent and symbolic number. The "real" time spent with Armande (from August to March) is absent in this chronology. One may suppose that Armande might have been only an imaginary point in the networks of time.

The very notion of “transparency” has the special, Dunnian meaning in Transparent Things. R.'s last letter ironically hints at both the “composite observer”, whose shape he is assuming while dying, and its creator Dunne:

“I believed that treasured memoirs in a dying man's mind dwindled to rainbow wisps; but now I feel just the contrary: my most trivial sentiments and those of all men have acquired gigantic proportions. The entire solar system is but a reflection in the crystal of my (or your) wrist watch. The more I shrivel the bigger I grow. I suppose this is an uncommon phenomenon. Total rejection of all religions ever dreamt up by man and total composure in the face of total death! If I could explain this triple totality in one big book, that book would become no doubt a new bible and its author the founder of a new creed. Fortunately for my self-esteem that book will not be written – not merely because a dying man cannot write books but because that particular one would never express in one flash what can only be understood immediately ” (Nabokov 1972: 84).

The early 20th century literature and philosophy discovered the individual perceptual time. Nabokov's intention was apparently embedding of several individual time-orders, their “objective” exposition as different perceptual fields within the single subjective field of perception. The device of the “serial observer” discloses an affinity between the metafictional and metaphysical problems: the status of the fictional world, its development in time, the fiction of the creator. It apparently had a personal significance for Nabokov who experienced multiple shifts in space and time before he escaped the awful “dream” of pre-war Europe.

The Shakespearean subtext provides probably the most important key to the novel. P. Tammi has pointed out a Shakespearean allusion embedded into the Pascalean “infinte spaces” mentioned in Bend Sinister. It is Hamlet's complaint “O God, I could be bound in a nut-shell, and count myself a king of infinite space, where it not that I have bad dreams” (Tammi 1992). Both the Shakespearean and Nabokovian hero wants to “wake up”. They need to “translate” the reality into their idiosyncratical language to handle it. Returning to R.Rorty's analysis, we agree that Nabokov's ability to sense cruelty (“solidarity”) was very high and his faith in a possibility to rationalize social life and make it free of cruelty was very weak. But the conflict of Tyrants Destroyed and Bend Sinister does not rest in the incompatibility of “private autonomy” and “solidarity”: it is rather a matter of choice between a “private autonomy” and a “bad solidarity”. The latter means an abuse of the human capacity for “solidarity” (i.e. the capacity to share other people's feelings) based on some false idea assuming a form of common emotion or conviction. For Nabokov, there is no principal difference between the psychology of advertising and the psychology of totalitarianism. Both use the vocabulary of “solidarity” and different modes of hypnotic suggestion or “collective mysticism” to achieve their goals. A similarity between political profiteering and advertising devices is highlighted also in The Gift. The bolshevist regime is an “eternalized, ever more monstrous in its heartiness” repetition of “the Hodynka coronation festivities with its free candy packages – look at the size of them (now much bigger than the original ones) – and with its superbly organized removal of dead bodies…” (Nabokov 1963: 339).

The choice is difficult since the protagonist (in both Shakespeare and Nabokov) is linked to “bad” solidarity by personal ties and memories forming a part of his private idiosyncrasy and making him especially vulnerable. He can only perceive the reality through the language of his “private autonomy” since the language of “solidarity” is misused and compromised. It is not his “solipsism” or indifference to the outward world, but the historical paradigm, which does not leave him any choice.

The impossibility of choice complicates also the metafictional task of “creating a position from which the represented world becomes observable” (Iser 1993: 16). The text unfolds as a “serial dream” of multiple observers or the different independent modes of auctorial vision. On the one hand, the author is an anonymous space of the intersection of different fictional worlds. On the other hand, the narrative “is evolving by degrees towards an ever greater individuation” of the author-narrator whose personal presence might be traced throughout the whole text, but whose control over the fictional worlds is “only a comparative matter” (Tammi 1985: 115). It seems that the text construction is determined not so much by the unfolding of the Gnostic Infinite Consciousness, but rather by the paradoxicality of an attempt to imagine or to describe infinity. The final coincidence of finity and infinity in the author-persona recalls those riddles which agitated European science in the 1920-50-s: the “last” observer in relativist physics, logical paradoxes, Gödel incompleteness theorem in response to Russell's hierarchy of restrictive “types”. Escher's strange pictures of the 1930-50s presented the visual analogies for logical paradoxes:

“[…] one single theme can appear on different levels of reality. For instance, one level in a drawing might clearly be recognizable as representing fantasy or imagination, another level would be recognizable as reality. These two levels might be the only explicitly portrayed levels. But the mere presence of these two levels invites the viewer to look upon himself as part of yet another level; and by taking that step, the viewer cannot help getting caught up in Escher's implied chain of levels, in which, for any level, there is always a level below, “more” imaginary than it is” (Hofstadter 1980: 15).

The Russellian-Gödelian analogy was applied to Nabokov's prose for the first time by Dr. Dinkin in his comments to Ultima Thule (January 19, 1949), a proto-text of Bend Sinister, a fragment of the unfinished novel Solus Rex, where the knowledge of death and afterlife is regarded as a logical paradox: “Not long ago I read a similar thought in Bertrand Russell (History of Western Philosophy): if a philosophical system is perfectly logical, without any errors or contradictions, and thus well-balanced and absolutely closed in itself, it inevitably comes to incongruous results, is monstrous and loses any contact with “reality” “ (Letters, folder 42; translation is mine – M.G.). Ultima Thule is a poem in a language unknown for the narrator. The narrator sets to illustrate the poem: the illustration is a parallel to his “narratological” task, an attempt to understand the mad Falter's “unspeakable” message. The latter, as a result of a certain playful combination of thoughts, is self-evident, logically inexplicable and improvable. All attempts to prove the existence of afterlife or to answer the question whether the world “heterological” is itself heterological (the Richard paradox; Nabokov 1990: 461) would end in a vicious circle. There is, nevertheless, a mysterious correlation between the world and the “another world”, a kind of cross-reference. D.B.Johnson has noticed a reverberation of the narrator's dying wife's words in the madman's speech (Johnson 1985: 208), which is apparently to confirm the mysterious interaction of the worlds. The auctorial point of view could be reconstructed as the result of their interplay and located at the metametalevel where “the riddle of the universe” is to be solved.

In Bend Sinister the story is also conveyed in different languages: the finite, closed and therefore “monstrous” totalitarian language; science languages; the idiosyncratical language of protagonist's thoughts and recollections; more and more incomplete and indefinite dream languages, etc. Put through the various realities and evolving towards infinity, the story finally withdraws back into the author-persona. The author is the “otherworld” observer of the fictional space: he is identical with the “consciuosness” of the text. Being also involved in the text from the inside and “embodied” in it, he becomes together with it a part of the outside physical reality. So the quest for infinity ends in a “strange loop”, a finite representation of infinity: it “occurs whenever, by moving upwards (or downwards) through the levels of some hierarchical system, we unexpectedly find ourselves right back where we started” (Hofstadter 1980: 10, 15). The fictional space of Bend Sinister is unfolding as a chain of levels to be finally turned into a paradoxical self-reference.

 

I am deeply grateful to Pekka Tammi for his valuable comments, to Mikhail Jampolski and Richard Sieburth for the professional support, to Irina Shevelenko and Olga Skonechnaya for their assistance. I want to thank Diana Burnham and Stephen Crook who helped my work in the New York Public Library Berg Collection. I thank also the Open Estonia Foundation for the scholarship that made this work possible.

 

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