COMMEDIA DELL’ARTE AND ALEXANDER BLOK

Commedia dell’arte is the name for theatrical productions that origi-nated in Italy in the eighteenth century. The performances were based on stock characters and stock plots that served as a mainstay for impro-visations. To enliven the action it was interspersed by sequences of acro-batics, juggling, and ballet. The main characters are Pantalone, Pierrot, Harlequin, Columbine, and Pulchinella, sometimes masked. The genre branched out into new forms such as pantomime, and its most caricatural

roles survive in puppet shows like Punch and Judy. A more artistic off-shoot was Carlo Gozzi’s play The Love for Three Oranges (1761).

The more simpler forms of entertainment mentioned above were well practiced in St. Petersburg in the nineteenth century (Senderovich and Shvartz, “The Juice of Three Oranges” 77). But far more artis-tic achievements were inspired by the commedia dell’arte during the Russian Silver Age, all well known to Nabokov (see Stephanie Merkel;

Senderovich and Shvartz; and Susan Elizabeth Sweeney “Looking at Harlequins”). The many fairy-like Harlequin paintings by Konstantin Somov, with their luminous ethereal colors, illustrate the impact of the commedia dell’arte on artists of the Silver Age. The influence of Gozzi’s play was so widespread that Senderovich and Shvartz write that Nabokov “found in the orange motif a major symbol for his adored Silver Age” (83). The commedia dell’arte has permeated Nabokov’s work in many ways but with respect to The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (Mr. Goodman, for example, with his mocking cognomen and his mask, consumes lozenges which resemble the diamond pattern of the typical Harlequin costume) one particular aspect deserves attention.

In his “Introduction” to The Annotated Lolita, “Nabokov’s Puppet Show,” Alfred Appel writes that there are “at least two ‘plots’ in all of Nabokov’s fiction: the characters in the book, and the consciousness of the creator above it—the ‘real plot’ which is visible in the ‘gaps’ and

‘holes’ in the narrative” (xxvi). This “real plot,” the “riddles” Nabokov has composed with its “elegant solutions” have to be executed by the characters as well (Strong Opinions, 16). This is especially significant for The Real Life of Sebastian Knight with its “true ‘inside’ story” as Lucie Léon Noel mentions (she worked for many hours with Nabokov to prevent the novel’s English from sounding “foreign”) (215). As Siggy Frank puts it “[t]he tension between the seeming autonomy of the per-forming object which seems to have a life of its own and the tight con-trol of the puppeteer over the performing object is exploited throughout Nabokov’s work” (132). Or should one compare Nabokov’s “galley slaves” not with puppets on a string, but with chess pieces which have such very different qualities but are for their movements entirely depen-dent on the chess player (SO 95)?

Alexander Blok’s adoption of the traditions of the commedia dell’arte may be of particular interest for Sebastian Knight. Nabokov has often expressed his great esteem for the art of Alexander Blok, the

greatest poet of Russia’s Silver Age. (See Boyd, VNRY 93–94; Boyd and Shvabrin 320–321; Karlinsky, Dear Bunny 103.) Despite his life-long regard for Blok’s work, his admiration was not without reserva-tions as Nabokov did not share Blok’s despondency and presentiment of apocalyptic doom (see Alexandrov 216, and Bethea, who elaborates on an earlier article by Dolinin in Russian, 378–381). This dichotomous appreciation is obvious in the references to Blok in Nabokov’s autobi-ography, Speak, Memory. One can read these as a poetical garland that links Nabokov’s love for his parents with his first love, Tamara (49, 224, 229). At the same time these references can be considered as harbingers of doom: the murder of his father, the Russian Revolution and the loss of his first love (Speak, Memory 49, 229, 241). Blok’s despondency, the

“gloom and despair” according to D. S. Mirsky, are characteristic of Blok’s later work (459).

To Blok’s early poetry belong his Verses on the Beautiful Lady (1904), much admired by Nabokov (as well as by his father, see Boyd, VNRY 186). The poetry’s many “chivalric codes” reveal the extent to which the poet considered himself as the “Knight of the Beautiful Lady”

(Bethea 379; Mochulsky 69). In 1906 Blok composed his famous poem

“The Strange Lady,” who shares her small bejeweled hand and close fitting attire with Nina Rechnoy (see comment on lines 152/ 14–15 and 24). In the same year Blok’s lyrical drama Balaganchik appeared (translated as The Puppet Show or, more literally, The Fairground Booth). Its dramatis personae are Pierrot, Harlequin, and Columbine;

its theme “Rivalry, deceit and inconstancy of love” (Senderovich and Shvarts, “The Juice” 80). The ominous heroine, Columbine, is claimed by Pierrot as his bride, and although he knows that she will poison him, he “follows her along a sinister road” (Mochulsky 124). Konstantin Mochulsky, focusing on the autobiographical sides of Blok’s poetry, suggests that it was because of the unfaithfulness of Blok’s wife, Lyubov, that “the Beautiful Lady . . . changed into a Columbine,” unsatisfied by the “knight’s chaste adoration” (304, 152). The knight changes as well.

Savely Senderovich and Yelena Shvarts, who paraphrase Andrei Bely’s 1922 memorial speech on Blok, write that the poet’s obsession turned away from the Beautiful Lady to Columbine, thus changing the Lady’s

“Knight” into a Harlequin (87).

The parallels with Sebastian Knight can easily be noticed: despite the extreme difference between the sweet and gentle Clare and the

baleful Nina, Sebastian cannot withstand the latter’s delirious-making charms.

6. CONJURORS

Most of the entertainers mentioned in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight—conjurors, clowns, jugglers—are associated with Sebastian;

either they appear in his novels or he is compared to them. In Lost Property Sebastian recalls how he enjoyed reading in the boys’ paper Chums about inter alia a conjuror. As a writer he is compared to someone “juggling with themes” and his style to “a clown developing wings.” He is censured for being “conradish” and advised to cultivate the “radish.” The word “con” has the same root as “can” and “cun-ning,” words suggesting, according to the Merriam Webster’s “wiliness and trickery,” skills not unlike those of conjurors. The radish, a down to earth plant, may indicate the contrary.

A rabbit, the most familiar element of a conjuror’s tools, is seen four times. The first time, “the field with its rabbits,” is interfused between two citations from poems by Rupert Brooke and Thomas Gray. The second rabbit will—when necessary—be hired by the old conjuror from Sebastian’s novel, Success, which means that it will be well looked after.

Quite different is the rabbit’s future once owned by Madame Lecerf as it will end as a dish for a Sunday luncheon. Finally, as may be expected, the old conjuror’s rabbit turns up on the novel’s last page, alive and well. The conjurer par excellence seems to be Uncle Black as “he can play the violin standing upon his head, and he can multiply one tele-phone number by another in three seconds.” That he is a real magician, however, is because he can conjure up an animal (“a little squirrel”) by words alone. Uncle Black is a Russian and it is interesting to note that the conjuror from Success, as has been discerned by Rory Bradley, is also “not a native speaker” (22).

7. ELENCTIC

“Elenctic” means “given to refutation or cross-examination.” In Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the Caterpillar harangues Alice with end-less questions and retorts. But “elenctic” has another meaning, as it has the same Greek root as “elenchus,” which suggests the Socratic mode

of eliciting the truth. (Maurice Couturier translated “elenctic” into the French “socratique” for the second volume of Nabokov’s novels in the Bibliothéque de la Pléiade.) The nagging the interrogated person expe-riences is one aspect of this, that the questioner tries to share his knowl-edge, the other. In Alice’s Adventures she is asked “Repeat ‘you are old, Father William,’” which she does, but when she has finished the poem she is chided by the Caterpillar that it is “wrong from beginning to end.” What Alice’s recites begins:

“You are old, Father William,” the young man said,

“And your hair has become very white;

And yet you incessantly stand on your head—

Do you think, at your age, it is right?”

The poem has seven more stanzas, but it has, apart from the first line, nothing in common with the original poem on Father William by Robert Southey, “The Old Man’s Comforts, and How he Gained Them” (Southey 124). The Caterpillar seems to make sense with his stern rebukes. By analogy the hotel-manager who, after seven years remembers so well the bath Sebastian took every morning, might well be right about the sort of companion Sebastian had in the hotel.

8. GERMANY

In 1921 or 1922 Sebastian has a short vacation in Germany. In 1926 Sebastian decides to take a month’s holiday at the German seaside.

When Clare arrives some two weeks later Sebastian is not there because

“he had come across a man he had known ages ago, in Russia, and they had gone in the man’s car to . . . a place on the coast some miles away.” (The second explanation Sebastian gives for his absence, the visit to “a doctor,” is questionable, see comments on lines 85/ 26 and 87/

18.) Then, in The Doubtful Asphodel, a “gentle old chess player” has a German surname, “Schwarz.” And somehow V., writing in English, and living in France for almost two decades, notices “a chess board, ein Schachbrett,” rather conspicuously as this is the only German word in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight. As the German ‘schwarz’ means

‘black’ in English, it seems most likely that the “chess player Schwarz”

and the chess player Uncle Black, the one called “gentle” the other

behaving gently, are one and the same and that this is the man Sebastian has met in Russia and Germany.