The very Western reluctance to accept metaphysics as being at the heart of all of Nabokov’s “stratagems” (his word) is understandable. The fatigue and mistrust of metaphysics in twentieth-century Western criticism, in contrast to the opposite vision in Russian literary discourse, can be best illustrated by a relatively recent anecdote. At a joint conference aimed at the advancement of Russian-American cultural exchange, an American poet and professor of humanities warmly praised his Russian guests, representatives of a Moscow literary magazine, some of them themselves poets, for their “courage” in addressing largely metaphysical issues in their work. The Russian visitors exchanged glances of incomprehension. Was it their English? What “courage”
was he talking about? What could be more natural than addressing metaphysical issues? In the West, the un-ironic Almighty is not exactly a frequent “visitor” of contemporary poetic creations, often called “texts” rather than “poems.” Perhaps Russian literary tradition conspired, as it were, with the very “irreality” of twentieth-century Russian history, premature political “post-modernism” with
all its nebulous simulacra, and created the pre-disposition for the opposite fatigue—fatigue of the so called “real,” while addressing metaphysical issues became the most natural thing in the world.
The vantage point of the vast majority of Nabokov studies in the West was of Nabokov as primarily a “metaliterary” writer.12 This reputation started to build rather early, when the writer was still known as Sirin and his fellow Russian émigrés delighted in or cringed at the sight of his unusual talent. His friend and contemporary Vladislav Khodasevich contributed to it by perspicaciously pointing to the role played by literary device in Nabokov’s fiction.
Nabokobv’s foes were upset by this preoccupation with form, perceiving the ostensible lack of concern for grand social issues as
“un-Russianness.” His American/Western reputation made him a “master of style,” a genius of artifice and intertextual play. As his fame grew considerably after Lolita, Nabokov himself molded his reputation by projecting his public persona through carefully crafted interviews. Playfulness and mimicry, the two characteristics most often evoked in connection to Nabokov’s art, applied to the projected image of the “artist” himself. The undeniable fact is that Nabokov, most likely intentionally, created intricate patterns and coincidences without explicit interpretation. He allows them to be read in diametrically opposite ways: either as “fatidic patterns”
(Vladimir Alexandrov’s term) or as the deliberate interpolation of the text’s artificiality.
However, the evidence that Nabokov’s perceived artificiality goes against the grain of his work has always existed in plain view.
It was explicitly stated in his poetry (especially his poem “Slava”
[”Fame”]) and his public pronouncements, including those in Strong Opinions and Speak, Memory. There is also the blunt statement by Véra Nabokov in the Foreword to the collection of Nabokov’s Russian poetry in 1979, claiming potustoronnost—the “otherworldliness,” the metaphysical “beyond”—as the main theme of her husband’s art, as well as direct assertions in Nabokov’s own posthumous “The Art of Literature and Commonsense.” Finally, the evidence is everywhere, cumulatively, in Nabokov’s own fiction.
The critical approach started to change in the 1980s. One of the early examples is W. W. Rowe’s Nabokov’s Spectral Dimension.13 The
book does a valuable service, as it assembles concrete evidence of specters swarming in Nabokov’s fiction. However, it never goes beyond the acknowledgement of specific ghosts, as it were, and the situations in which they usually reveal their presence. Gennady Barabtarlo’s and Alexandrov’s books reached beyond the specifics and rightfully emphasized Nabokov’s metaphysics.14 Alexandrov characterized Nabokov’s transcendental beliefs thus: “an intuition about a transcendental realm of being.”15 Both Barabtarlo and Alexandrov are Russians (albeit American professors), and it might be tempting to dismiss their emphasis on metaphysics as a natural Russian idiosyncrasy. Boyd’s excellent studies of Pale Fire and Ada therefore should be credited for firmly placing Nabokov’s metaphysics on the radar of the Western Nabokovian studies. One cannot help feeling grateful to these scholars: no longer does one need to spend time proving that Nabokov’s preoccupation with metaphysical issues was profound—as asserted by the author himself. For a concise summation of the “shape” in which the metaphysical reveals itself, I would resort, as many before me, to the much quoted “Fame” of Poems and Problems. It talks about a
“secret,” a motif evoked either vaguely or more or less explicitly in many novels of Nabokov (Invitation to a Beheading, The Defense, and The Gift, to name just a few):
. . . I am happy that Conscience, the pimp of my sleepy reflections and projects, did not get at the critical secret. Today I am really remarkably happy.
That main secret tra-tá-ta tra-tá-ta tra-tá—
and I must not be overexplicit;
this is why I find laughable the empty dream about readers, and body, and glory.
. . . I admit that the night has been ciphered right well
but in place of the stars I put letters,
and I’ve read in myself how the self to transcend—
and I must not be overexplicit.
Trusting not the enticements of the thoroughfare or such dreams as the ages have hallowed, I prefer to stay godless, with fetterless soul in a world that is swarming with godheads.
But one day while disrupting the strata of sense and descending deep down to my wellspring I saw mirrored, besides my own self and the world, something else, something else, something else.16
The secret cannot be made explicit, and it is nothing new. Tiutchev wrote in his famous “Silentium!” (1833): “An uttered thought is a lie.”
On the other hand, on those occasions when Nabokov tries to articulate the secret and convey the actual details of the afterlife, his fiction suffers (Look at the Harlequins and Transparent Things).
Metaphysical secrets notwithstanding, Nabokov’s explicitly expressed desire to stay “godless” testifies to the impossibility of reducing this metaphysical “something else” to any conventionally understood religion or spirituality. Nabokov squarely avoided being placed with any and all religious denominations: “In my metaphysics, I am a confirmed non-unionist and have no use for organized tours through anthropomorphic paradises.”17 Nabokov’s characters are on a quest for glimpses of that metaphysical “beyond.”
It is the central quest of Shade’s life in Pale Fire: Shade writes his poem “projecting himself imaginatively beyond death. …”18 As a rule however, Nabokov’s characters, including Shade, have to admit their failure in such quests, though the quest is never without gratification.