In the 1880s Leo Tolstoy began to preach his ethical Christianity, which became the fi rst point of contact between the religious rationalism of the intelligentsia and the rationalist dissent of the people. But on the whole Tolstoy’s religious infl uence was stronger abroad than in Russia. In the words of Nabokov’s contemporary,
“the eighties, though a period of general gloom and disillusion that refl ected the economic depression and political reaction of the time, produced a beautiful Indian summer of realistic fi ction in the work of Anton Chekhov, an intellectual of plebeian birth, and an artist of unsurpassed ethical delicacy” (Mirsky 272). This period was followed by the livelier pre-revolutionary nineties. In literature this decade introduced Maxim Gorky, the last great realist of pre-Soviet Russia, and the only major writer who came out of the ranks of the genuinely revolutionary intelligentsia.
Even before 1905 the leadership in most cultural endeavors had begun to pass from the old civic liberal and radical intelligentsia to a new elite, aggressively individualistic and “highbrow,” art-loving and anti-social. On the eve of the revolution a second generation of Modernists and Symbolists in arts and literature was growing, “more bohemian than bourgeois, less sophisticated
and freer from the infl uence of Dostoevsky, free also from all fi n de siècle aestheticism, and, for the most part, from all ideas and philosophies” (Mirsky 273). The distinct voice of this younger generation became especially apparent after 1917, but the aesthetic revival strongly affected all the arts even earlier. In music it fi rst produced “the gushing expressionism of Skryabin, but afterwards the severe constructive formalism of Stravinsky, one of the Russians who had the greatest infl uence on European art” (Ibid.). In painting and in the decorative arts Russian modernism “did not show itself to be very creative,” although Mikhail Vrubel must be considered the country’s fi rst original painter prior to the Russian futurists’ invasion. It is clear that during this time the level of artistic culture rose in Russia, “art became a vital element in the cultural make-up of the intelligentsia, and understanding native and foreign beauty became the duty of every educated citizen” (Ibid.). The Moscow Art Theatre, with its psychological realism, achieved its record triumphs in the early years of the century in staging the plays of Chekhov; this theatrical success was soon catapulted to even greater achievements by one of Russia’s most famous entrepreneurs, Sergei Diaghilev.
The best composers and stage designers worked for Diaghilev, who succeeded in producing and developing a whole galaxy of dancers surpassing anything ever seen on a European stage. Next to the Russian novel, Diaghilev’s ballet was perhaps the most spectacular success of Russian culture in the West.
Petersburg and the Rise of Russian National Identity
The cultural construction of citizenship in Russia had largely foreign underpinnings. Nabokov remembers his own family with its traditional leaning toward “the comfortable products of Anglo-Saxon civilization” (“I learned to read English before I could read Russian”; Speak, Memory 79). Citizenship in the Russian “republic of letters” presupposed a cosmopolitan upbringing, the sense that one’s roots were as much in Paris, London or Gottingen (the romantic poet Lensky in Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin is said to have a “Gottingen soul”) as they were in Moscow or St. Petersburg. To be fully Russian, one had to be a citizen of the world. On the one hand, this meant that Russian intellectuals of the nineteenth century “had the broadest and most universal culture to be found in any European nation. But it also meant that Russian elite culture and learning were more cut off from both the church and the ordinary people than elsewhere in Europe” (Hosking 290).
According to the critic Vladimir Stasov, who undertook a survey of the arts in 1882-83 during the reign of Alexander iii, Russian architecture was a “Janus-like art with two faces, one of which looked backward with an eye to the saleable potential of past civilizations” (quoted in Buckler 34). Stasov emphasized the relationship between eclecticism and the nineteenth-century search for a national
identity. Russian Slavophiles and nationalists made use of eclecticism to forge a modern Russian identity out of Eastern cultural referents from Byzantium and old Russia. The second face of architecture, in Stasov’s view, was the new
“Russian” style used for churches, museums, theaters, apartment housing, and administrative buildings, which he heartily endorsed. The nationalists believed that “Western-style eclecticism was the logical extension of a classicism that had excluded Russia’s own cultural legacy” (Ibid.).
The modern city, especially such a Westernized locus as St. Petersburg, the Russian capital during the imperial era, was a dangerous place: “As the site of commerce and exchange, it was governed by desire, driven by psychological and mate rial need and selfi sh interests. Like the marketplace, the city challenged established social hierarchies with new and transient relations of wealth”
(Engelstein 359). Nabokov has always been fascinated by urban spaces and explored their metapoetic nature in fi ction (Leving 18-20). Like a litmus test, Petersburg underscores the raging debates that are associated with the status of the contemporary European city.
The question of national identity was an impor tant one in both political and cultural life in the sprawling multinational empire of the nineteenth century.
Jeffrey Brooks maintains that educated Russians infl uenced by Western ideas and culture sought new ideas to defi ne Russianness: the spread of education and secular thinking infl uenced all classes, as did social and geographic mobility. Contact with new groups led to expanded aspirations and stimulated curiosity — a quest for the defi nition of Russianness was shared by Russians of all cultural levels (Brooks 214).
Nabokov’s Anglophone family illustrates this intensive search for a new and revitalized Russian idea. If we look at the portrayal of the Russian people in The Gift, they appear to be a collection of ignorant outsiders, mostly servants, who are totally out of place in the special world inhabited by the main character.
When they are described gawking uncomprehendingly at the mysterious rites of the elite Entomological Society, whose members are huddled together studying a rare species in the woods, Fyodor comments: “To this day I am wondering what the coachmen waiting on the road made of all this” (G108), a remark that constitutes at least a muted recognition of the gulf separating the classes. But, as David Rampton observes, instead of developing this insight, Nabokov proceeds to exploit the comic consequences of such a gap (96). One may get the distinct sense that we are reading about the self-satisfi ed snobbery of callow youth which the author is about to expose and condemn, but Nabokov’s aims are quite different: he concludes with a sarcastic “The Russian common people know and love their country’s nature” (G108). As a matter of fact, it is even more complex than that. As the narrator embarks on the mental travels either to the bygone Russia of Chernyshevski or to the distant Asian steppes of Godunov-Cherdyntsev,
Nabokov — a displaced citizen with a Jewish wife, a writer who rejected all forms of political affi liation and detested pathos in letters — quietly continues his own search for an answer to the core questions of his people’s origins and future destiny.
The Myth of the City
By 1918 St. Petersburg no longer existed either in name or, according to Katerina Clark’s poetic remark, “as those circles around a dot on the map which proclaim it to be the capital. Yet it has persisted in Russian culture to this day as an idea, an ethos, an ideal, and above all as a language of clichés that Russians have deployed in debating the country’s way forward” (6). The myth of Petersburg continued to captivate the imagination while Russian writers found many of their
“Petersburg” tropes among those that Balzac, Hugo, and others applied to Paris.
This semi-real Petersburg of the turn of the century serves in The Gift as an anti-city and counter-space vis-à-vis Berlin of the 1920s.
It is not by chance that Osip Mandelstam’s name appears in The Gift (fi rst as an unnamed allusion in the Russian original, then stated explicitly in the translation). It was Mandelstam who pronounced in 1920, “We shall gather again in Peters burg,” suggesting that, though a dark cloud had obscured the sun of the Great Tradition, “we,” its torchbearers in the Soviet night, might yet triumph. As Clark states, “Petersburg became the locus, actual or symbolic, of certain segments of the intelligentsia who saw themselves as not implicated in the [Soviet] regime’s cul ture and who declared themselves bards of Petersburg.
The clichés of the myth had become so standardized that they could be used as a code” (7). Nabokov appeals to the very same code shared by the disciples of the Symbolist and Acmeist poetic schools who were contributing to the creation of the so-called “Petersburg text” of Russian literature based on the myths and cult of the city.
For Fyodor (and his creator) the remembrance of childhood in Russia also evokes images of the family estate, Leshino, not far from Petersburg (“the dusty road to the village; the strip of short, pastel-green grass, with bald patches of sandy soil, between the road and the lilac bushes behind which walleyed, mossy log cabins stood in a rickety row”; Speak, Memory 30). In fi ction of the early twentieth century the modern industrial city was often juxtaposed with the symbolic terrain of rural space embodied in dachas and villages: “metaphor as much as memory shaped this pastoral nostalgia” (Steinberg 170). Nostalgia for the lost countryside was sometimes explicit even in the writings of Soviet workers “longing for the village they left behind . . . for country pleasures, and for the beauties of nature” (Ibid.). To avoid unabashed sentimen tality Fyodor’s/
Nabokov’s memories are frequently tinted with sarcasm (as in the episode
describing Fyodor’s encounter with a peasant who “had taken out a box from his gaunt breast and given it to him unsmilingly, but the wind was blowing, match after match went out before it had hardly fl ared and after every one he grew more ashamed, while the man watched with a kind of detached curiosity the impatient fi ngers of the wasteful young squire”; G78). In Soviet poetry, “hard labor in the fi elds was left in the dark ness” of things that would best be forgotten; Marxist contributors to “proletarian” anthologies and periodicals offered memories of bucolic peasant life as part of a deliberate commentary on the aesthetic and ethical meanings of modern industrial life (Steinberg 170). Nabokov employs a similar device, but in The Gift he contrasts the Russian landscapes of Fyodor’s youth with noisy Berlin of the late 1920s.
St. Petersburg — Petrograd — Leningrad
Nabokov lived in St. Petersburg during the period that would later be called the
“Silver Age” of Russian arts, presuming that their “Golden Age” is associated with the epoch of Pushkin and his contemporaries. Symbolism emerged as the fi rst dominant style during this period of cultural renaissance. It embodied a protest against the positivism and materialism prevalent in Russian art, and above all it challenged the hegemony of socially oriented and utilitarian civic art associated with the generations of Belinsky and Chernyshevski.
In the private Tenishev School the Futurist poet Vladimir Mayakovsky and the Acmeist poet Osip Mandelstam (who graduated from the same school a few years before Nabokov) gave public readings; the Symbolist Andrey Bely was writing his novel “Petersburg,” devoted to the city, and poets and painters frequently met and held debates in the artsy downtown cabaret “The Stray Dog.” Nabokov’s own mansion became the hub of activities for progressive liberal politicians of the time, but culture had a strong presence there alongside politics — the hospitable Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov attracted musicians, artists and critics alike. The walls of the house on Morskaya Street were decorated with fi ne paintings by Alexander Benois and Leon Bakst, important members of the Mir iskusstva (World of Art), an artistic movement that helped revolutionize Russian and European art during the fi rst decade of the twentieth century. Young Vladimir’s teacher of painting was Mstislav Dobuzhinsky, an active member of the World of Art circle.
Nabokov was born at the turn of the century. The fi n de siècle was both a thrilling and a troublesome period for Russia. It started with the grand coronation of Nicholas ii in Moscow in 1896, resulting in a disaster at Khodynka Field with thousands of casualties when innocent participants in the festivities tried to take advantage of the free food, drink, and souvenirs offered to commemorate the occasion. St. Petersburg was not short of celebrations during the early 1900s. The year 1902 marked the hundredth anniversary of the government reform in which
[Ill. 2-10] Th e 1911 postcard depicting Morskaya Street, where the Nabokovs lived
Alexander I established the ministries. In May 1903 the Russian capital founded by Peter the Great celebrated its 200th anniversary. The new Trinity Bridge was offi cially unveiled in the presence of the Tsar, and then a church service took place at Senate Square next to the “Bronze Horseman,” the monument to the city’s creator that acquired an almost mythological status due to Pushkin’s poetic masterpiece of the same name.
Serious trouble arrived in 1905 as the war against Japan became more and more of a disaster. In what became known as “Bloody Sunday,” on January 9, 1905, a peaceful demonstration of workers was fi red on by troops at the Palace Square. This led to public outrage and the start of the revolution. The new phenomenon that dominated the entire period was the emergence of the popular masses into the political arena. This action infused the whole opposition movement with a special energy that made it seem a genuine threat.
Despite the apparent quelling of the revolution at the end of 1905, Nicholas ii and his government “kept their promise to hold elections for the lower house (the State Duma), to grant broader (though by no means unrestricted) rights of free speech and assembly, to allow workers to form unions, and to confer various other rights. The old State Council, formerly appointed by the tsar, was transformed into an upper house; one half was still appointed by the supreme ruler, the balance elected from mostly conservative institutions on a very restricted and undemocratic franchise” (Zelnik 220). Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov, the writer’s father, became a member of the parliament representing the party of Constitutional Democrats (or the Kadets, as they called themselves). Hopes for liberal democratic reforms were short-lived during the so-called Constitutional Experiment associated with the Third (1907-12) and Fourth (1912-17) Dumas, since the tsarist government soon curtailed many of the freedoms and often blocked the Duma’s initiatives.
Everything ended with the cruelest of wars that humankind had known to that point — World War I. When it broke out in August 1914, it was decided to change the name of the Russian capital from St. Petersburg to Petrograd.
Germany was now the enemy of Russia and the old name sounded too German.
Most of the city’s industry was diverted to support for the war effort and many of Petrograd’s buildings, including a large portion of the Winter Palace, were turned into hospitals. Most construction work in the city was halted.
The Tsar’s government became largely discredited and political tensions started rising. To make matters worse, the food supply of the Russian capital deteriorated signifi cantly towards the end of 1916. Petrograd entered the New Year with its inhabitants infuriated by the long lines in front of food shops. To prevent the Soviet (workers’ councils) from overwhelming Petrograd, moderate and conservative members of the Duma demanded Nicholas’ abdication and struggled to form a Provisional Government. On March 2, 1917 Nicholas “bowed to
the inevitable and signed a manifesto of abdication. Petrograd’s workers cheered the tsar’s abdication . . . For a few days, the palaces and townhouses of the well-to-do became fair game, as ‘searches’ inevitably ended in pillaging and looting”
(Lincoln 231). Just a few blocks away from the Nabokovs’ residence, a huge red fl ag replaced the imperial banner above the Winter Palace, and cheering crowds stripped the two-headed imperial eagles from government buildings and threw them onto bonfi res.
For the next eight months, the revolution gripped Petrograd. Command of democratic Russia passed formally to the Provisional Government on the day after Nicholas abdicated, but the reality was “Dual Power” (dvoevlastie) with the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies controlling the munitions plants, railroads, army, postal service, and telegraph, so that it alone commanded the masses and had real power (Ibid.). The political and economic crisis continued through 1917 and in the fall the Bolshevik party led by Lenin captured political power. When on October 25, 1917 (based on the Julian calendar used in Russia until 1918), a blank shot from the cruiser “Aurora” gave workers and soldiers the signal to storm the Winter Palace (there is some question whether this actually occurred), the future author of The Gift and Lolita had already escaped the city for his lifelong exile.
In 1924 the name of the city was changed to Leningrad, which symbolized its fi nal transition to a socialist city. A gradual recovery began under the New Economic Policy (NEP) in 1921 immediately following the Civil War that consolidated the Bolshevik coup. But expunging the symbolic evidence of the old order did not satisfy the revolutionary nihilists who wanted to clear the ground for a new cultural order. Naming streets and hauling down statues was only the beginning, as Richard Stites explains it: “The entire corpus of pre-revolutionary culture had to be emphatically and enthusiastically repudiated. The roots of cultural nihilism go deep into the traditions of the nineteenth century intelligentsia — especially the ‘nihilism’ of the 1860s, an outlook that [Nikolai]
Berdiaev once defi ned as a secular version of religious asceticism that held art, thought, and religion in utter revulsion” (68). The earlier nihilists preferred science over faith, artifacts over art (‘a pair of boots is worth all of Pushkin’), and realism over romanticism. Although the milieu for nihilism in 1917 was different from that of the 1860s and 1870s, the cultural nihilists of the revolution inherited much from this lingering tradition. In his “The Life of Chernyshevski” Nabokov attempts to settle accounts with this entire legacy at its grass roots. History had made a full turn, and the circle was closed.