BLACK AS BAT WINGS
By Ray H. Greenblatt

Read at the Meeting of
The Chicago Literary Club
on Monday, April 18, 1994

Copyright 1994 Ray H. Greenblatt

On April 15, 1919, a shoddy Greek cargo ship set off hastily from Sebastopol harbor. On board were a cargo of dried fruit and the ministers of the Crimean Regional Government with their families fleeing the Bolshevik siege.

Seated on deck playing chess, as the ship zigzagged to evade the fire of Bolshevik machine guns wildly strafing the waters, were V.D. Nabokov and his son Vladimir, age 19. V.D.'s wife, Elena, and their four younger children were below. Except for a handful of her jewels the Nabokovs were destitute.

On may 20, 1940, as Hitler's army advanced on France, Vladimir, his wife Vera and their six-year old son, boarded at St. Nazaire in Brittany a Canadian ship chartered to transport refugees to New York.

During the 21 years between the escape from the Bolsheviks and the flight from Hitler, Nabokov, residing mostly in Berlin, wrote prolifically in Russian for the large emigre community in Europe and abroad. By the end of the period, he was generally acknowledged, in that highly literate community, to be the greatest living Russian-language novelist and, under the name Sirin, one of the emigration's best poets. Save for a hundred dollar bill -- the gift of a friend -- the Nabokovs were destitute.

By 1961, 21 years after his arrival here, Nabokov, now writing in English, was widely regarded in this country as its greatest contemporary novelist. In another ten years, with the worldwide explosion of Lolita, he would be world famous, published in many languages and permanently residing in a luxury hotel in Montreux Switzerland. He would be regarded as a 20th Century author whose work, when tested by time, would likely endure. Nabokov himself believed that he would fare well at the hand of posterity. Asked to identify his favorite authors, he named three: Shakespeare, Pushkin and himself.

Nabokov's novels opened the imagination to new ways of thinking about the novel and the world. At the same time, their content can be traced more readily than that of most novels to the author's own experience and background. His extraordinary life and family are brilliantly illuminated by Nabokov himself in Speak, Memory, a lyrical account of his childhood and youth, and in New Zealander Brian Boyd's magisterial two-volume biography.

Nabokov was born in St. Petersburg in 1899 to fabulous wealth and privilege. The Nabokovs were highly placed in the Russian nobility. Grandfather Dmitri Nabokov was Minister of Justice under two Tsars.

Dmitri, who had a bland, sedate public image, was at age 33 the lover of Baroness Nina Von Korff, the beautiful and passionate wife of a Russian general. At his mistress's suggestion, Dmitri agreed to marry her 17 year old daughter, Maria, so that he could accompany his mistress and her family on an extended trip to France and they could continue their dalliance under his cover as Maria's fiancé. Although Maria resented the role of reverse chaperone for her fiancé and mother, after the menage returned to Russia, and Dmitri's affair with the Baroness ended, Maria married Dmitri to enhance her social position. Their children became ladies in waiting ang gentlemen of the Tsar's chamber and she a hostess in the grand style, but her receptions were said to resemble trips to the dentist, short but agonizing.

In Lolita, Nabokov would use this bizarre story as material for art, inverting it as he so often did when adapting art from life. Humbert Humbert would seek to gratify his obsessive attraction for a 12-year old nymphet by marrying the girl's fleshy, boring mother.

V.D. and Elena Nabokov were devoted to each other and to their children. Among Nabokov's most vivid recollections of early childhood are moments spent with his mother in the parks and gardens of the family's country estate in Vyra, 50 miles south of St. Petersburg. In Speak, Memory, Nabokov recalls that Elena, who cherished memories of her own childhood at Vyra, had a charming way of urging her gifted son to observe and remember the wonders that nature served up in profusion there. Nabokov's evocation of these moments illustrates how well she succeeded.

"Vot zapomni [now remember]," she would say in conspiratorial tones as she drew my attention to this or that loved thing in Vyra -- a lark ascending the curds-and-whey sky of a dull spring day, heat lightning taking pictures of a distant line of trees in the night, the palette of maple leaves on brown sand, a small bird's cuneate footprints on new snow.

Speak, Memory teems with lyrical memories of an enchanted childhood.

Vladimir and his brother had a succession of English and French governesses, followed by English and Russian tutors and valets. They learned to read and write English before Russian and later would attend university at Cambridge. The boys and their father chased butterflies, bicycled and took tennis lessons at Vyra, and in the panelled library that housed V.D.'s vast collection at their St. Petersburg town house, took boxing and fencing lessons. There were also drawing masters for Elena and the children. One asked Vladimir to draw from memory familiar objects such as a nearby street lamp or the design of stained- glass lozenges on the front door. The boy discovered that he had not observed the objects carefully enough to draw them accurately.

Nabokov would do better later. His need for precision became almost an obsession: Before writing Lolita, he took bus trips around the city and, for hours, observed the behavior and attire, and listened to the conversation, of adolescent girls.

In Speak, Memory, when he could not devise a more apt characterization for the accordion-like soft walls that enclose the passageway connecting two train cars, he referred to them as "intervestibular connecting curtains, black as bat wings."

In his novels, Nabokov used precise detail to infuse a sense of reality into highly- inventive fictional worlds.

In Lolita, the imprisoned Humbert -- recalling his drive to the gothic home of his doppelganger rival, whom he will surrealistically murder in revenge for taking Lolita from him -- writes of the properties of headlights:

[N]ight had eliminated most of the landscape and as I followed the narrow winding highway, a series of short posts, ghostly white, with reflectors, borrowed my own lights to reflect this or that curve. I could make out a dark valley on one side of the road and wooded slopes on the other and, in front of me, like derelict snowflakes moths drifted out of the blackness into my probing aura.

Enrolling in school for the first time at age 15, Nabokov attended Tenishev, chosen by V.D. for its liberal outlook and a student body cutting across class lines. Although he excelled there, Vladimir much preferred home to school. He resented teacher criticism of his tendency to be a loner -- not volunteering for group activities, always choosing to play goalie in soccer. He also resented the headmaster's request that he take the tram to school like other students or at least not permit the others to see him arrive in a family limousine driven by a liveried chauffeur. Although his unwillingness to conform created tensions, Vladimir's teachers appreciated his creativity. One set the class an essay on "laziness;" Vladimir turned in a blank page and received a good grade.

Throughout his life, Nabokov resisted enforced conformity of any kind. He loathed and ridiculed tyranny over the individual whether practiced by Lenin, Stalin and Hitler or by a majority in a free society. He believed fervently in representative democracy, but, as a U.S. citizen -- a devoted one -- never voted in an election in this country.

When Vladimir was 16, one of the gardeners at Vyra informed Elena that Vladimir's tutor was watching by telescope his charge's amours with the 15 year old Valentina Shulgin. Elena ordered the tutor to stop. Then, discovering that Vladimir bicycled each night to the country estate of her vacationing brother for nocturnal trysts with Valentina, Elena, according to Nabokov, "contented herself with shaking her head dubiously though not untenderly and telling the butler to leave every night some fruit . . . on the lighted veranda."

Back in St. Petersburg, Vladimir cut whole days of school to meet and make love to Valentina in musty, unfrequented museum exhibit-rooms.

Nabokov's tender memories of this time find their way -- refracted -- into at least three novels: Mary, his first novel, written at age 26, deals with the irretrievability of first love. Ada, written at age 66 and set on another planet, deals with incestuous first love that matures and continues into old age. In Lolita, written at age 52, Humbert and Annabel, each 13, attempt to consummate their agonizingly unfulfilled passion but are thwarted first by the untimely intrusions of parents and chance strangers and then by Annabel's sudden death. There follows a tragicomic parody of first love -- the 42-year old Humbert's doomed effort to retrieve his lost bliss with the 12-year old Lolita.

When Lolita was published, some readers speculated that it was autobiographical. They were surely led to that inference by the lyrical beauty of Humbert's evocation of Lolita. Lionel Trilling decided that the novel, though intensely erotic, is about love, not sex. "In recent fiction," Trilling observed, "no woman has been so charmingly evoked, in such grace and delicacy as Lolita; it is one of the few examples of rapture in modern writing." Moreover, Humbert, keen witted and supremely self aware, disarmingly admits that he is a monster, that his behavior has been vile -- and then goes on to rationalize that behavior with such wit and insouciance that he almost wins over the reader.

One must remember, however, that, before the 12-year old Lolita, to Humbert's huge surprise, seduces him, he tried to drug her with what he believed to be a powerful sleep inducer so that when she nodded off he could enjoy her sexually without destroying her innocence.

Nabokov loathed what he called poshlost, an untranslatable Russian term for a kind of smug or pseudo-genteel vulgarity. Cloaking uncivilized behavior in the vestments of civilized sentiments was, for Nabokov, the essence of poshlost. In Invitation to a Beheading, Nabokov likened hypocrisy comparable to the rapist Humbert's affected concern for Lolita's innocence to a "pail of the milk of human kindness with a dead rat at the bottom." Although he captures the subtle shadings and ambiguities of both characters, for Nabokov, Lolita -- with her frankness and steadfast kindness to others, even when she herself is Humbert's prisoner and without hope -- is a sympathetic character, Humbert a virulent specimen of poshlost. Humbert's redemption -- equivocal at best -- comes only when events finally force upon him the realization that Lolita has been deprived of her childhood.

V.D. Nabokov, intelligent, elegant and courageous, was an extraordinary father. His keen interest and extensive knowledge of butterflies fueled Vladimir's boyhood enthusiasm and ultimately his lifelong passion for and considerable professional contributions to lepidoptery.

Despite his noble birth and vast wealth, V.D. viewed himself, not as an aristocrat, but a member of Russia's classless intelligentsia. A noted liberal journalist, law professor and criminologist, he was a founder and major figure in the Constitutionalist Democratic Party, a leader in opposition to Tsarist despotism and, during Kerensky's brief tenure, the holder of several high government posts.

In 1904, V.D., age 33 , published, without government approval, a celebrated monograph condemning the role of the Tsar's police in promoting a violent pogram. For this, and his refusal to drink the Tsar's health at an official banquet, he was deprived of his court title by imperial decree. The principal spokesman for the majority in Russia's first democratic parliament, V.D., when the Tsar dissolved the parliament, reluctantly joined other members in signing a manifesto which V.D. had sought to abort urging the Russian people to disobey the government. For this, he was sentenced to three months in solitary confinement. He used the enforced solitude to catch up on his reading -- smuggling out letters to Elena on toilet paper. In one, he asks what butterflies Volodya has managed to catch at Vyra, and identifies the two species he has detected in the prison yard.

On the night of March 28, 1922, as Pavel Milyukov -- who in Russia had been a leader of the Constitutionalist Democrats and Kerensky's foreign minister -- was delivering a speech to a liberal emigre audience in Berlin, a right-wing Tsarist emigre rose from his seat and ran toward the podium pointing a gun at Milyukov. V.D., whose Berlin daily was in the midst of a bitter dispute with Milyukov's Paris emigre paper, sprang from his seat to shield Milyukov from the attacker. Seizing the would-be assassin, V.D. disarmed him and with help wrestled him to the floor. The gunman's accomplice then rose and shot V.D. three times at close range, killing him instantly. Neither gunman had had the remotest idea of who V.D. was. Unharmed, Milyukov, sat vigil until the body was removed the following day.

Nabokov's admiration for his father, and lifelong grief over his sudden, violent death, figure prominently in his work. In Nabokov's best Russian novel, The Gift, the narrator's heroic, missing father bears an unmistakable resemblance to V.D.

A prose elegy to V.D. appears at the end of the first chapter of Speak, Memory. V.D. would on occasion be called away from the family's noonday meal at Vyra to confer with a delegation of local peasants assembled at the manor house door to request a favor. If, as usual, he granted their request, V.D. would be tossed repeatedly in the air by the jubilant peasants. Nabokov recalls this childhood scene and conflates it:

From my place at table I would suddenly see through one of the west windows a marvelous case of levitation. There, for an instant, the figure of my father in his wind-rippled white summer suit would be displayed, gloriously sprawling in midair, his limbs in a curiously casual attitude, his handsome imperturbable features turned to the sky. Thrice, to the mighty heave-ho of his invisible tossers, he would fly up in this fashion, and the second time he would go higher than the first, reclining, as if for good, against the cobalt blue of the summer noon, like one of those paradisiac personages who comfortably soar, with such a wealth of folds in their garments, on the vaulted ceiling of a church while below, one by one, the wax tapers in mortal hands light up to make a swarm of minute flames in the mist of incense, and the priest chants of eternal repose, and funeral lilies conceal the face of whoever lies there, among the swimming lights, in the open coffin.
And in Pale Fire, written at age 60, almost 38 years after his father's death, Nabokov once more works through the pain left by the senseless, chaotic assassination. John Shade, still grieving for a daughter who has taken her own life, composes a long, personally-revealing poem which, save for a missing last line, appears in full in the novel. As Shade works on the final lines of the poem, his neighbor, Charles Kinbote, seeing Shade's wife drive off on an errand, rings the doorbell to invite Shade for a walk. Kinbote, who lives alone, has a life as barren as the happily-married Shade's is full. A homosexual, Kinbote has a romantic interest in Shade which, given to delusions, he erroneously believes reciprocated. Although he finds Kinbote repellant, Shade, out of kindness to his lonely neighbor, agrees to join him for the walk. Having just written the penultimate verse to his poem, in which he says that the only thing of which he is certain is that he will awake tomorrow to another day, Shade steps out of the house and is shot dead by Jack Gray, a released convict, who had intended his bullet for the judge by whom he had been jailed, Kinbote's landlord, whom Shade physically resembles.

The unfinished last line of Shade's poem would have been a reprise of the opening line:
"I was the shadow of the waxwing slain."

Nabokov believed that those who observe with precision the world surrounding them - - who bring to bear every ounce of intelligence and imagination to decipher each succeeding layer of revelation that it so generously casts up -- are infinitely rewarded. Mimicry in nature fascinated Nabakov. The fact that the deceptive patterns on butterfly wings are far more intricate than required for the butterfly to evade its predators suggested to Nabokov that there may be design and meaning in the world intended to be accessible only to humans. Of all life offers for man, Nabokov viewed the miracle of human consciousness as foremost. Repeatedly in his novels, he creates enchanted but credible worlds within which he tests the outer limits of consciousness, its relationship to time, man's inability to retrieve the past and the possibility of a life beyond mortal life where consciousness is no longer limited and the past retrievable -- perhaps even a lost father reclaimed.

In society and as a college teacher Nabokov was playful, charming and kind. Here is an excerpt from a diary kept by one of his students in a Russian language class at Wellesley:

He asks us to read aloud in Russian -- "Aloud" proves to be three brave souls muttering under their breath in a confused jumble. After the sentence has fallen, mutilated, he sighs rapturously, "so good to hear Russian spoken again! I am practically back in Moscow."

"a city," noted Boyd, "where he had never been, and whose accent he deplored."

A friend, Elena Levin, the wife of a distinguished Joyce scholar at Harvard, observed:
"When he tells you the truth, he winks at you to confuse you."

Conversely, according to Boyd, Nabokov would often concoct highly impromptu inventions, delivering them straight -- without winks -- and pay his listeners the compliment of assuming that they could see through his antic deceit.

When Nabokov was being considered for a position at Harvard, Mikhail Karpovitch, earlier a Nabokov colleague on the Cornell faculty, worried that Nabokov might tell Harvard undergraduates that Dostoevsky, whom Nabokov deplored, was a mystery writer.

Alfred Appel, a Northwestern University professor and former student of Nabokov at Cornell, visited the Nabokovs in Montreux in 1970. Asked by Nabokov whether the turmoil of the 60's had disrupted Appel's classes at Northwestern, Appel said "no" but told him about a nun who sat in the back row and one day complained after class that a couple near her were always spooning. "Sister," Appel had said, "in these troubled times, we should be grateful if that's all they were doing." "Ohhh," moaned Nabokov clapping his hand to his head in mourning for the lost opportunity, "you should have said, Sister, be grateful that they were not forking.'"

Nabokov had a gift for intuiting the thought processes and emotions of others -- even those dramatically different from himself. As his fictional narrators he often chose brilliant, solipsistic, self-indulgent sociopaths -- the obsessive pedophile Humbert, the twisted, egomaniacal Kinbote. He places them in precisely-wrought, fanciful, yet credible construct worlds. In these invented worlds which mimic and often parody realty, Nabokov succeeds in portraying believably the innermost thoughts and emotions of these essentially repellant characters. Nabokov's fiction requires readers to stretch -- to employ maximum intelligence and imagination -- to comprehend. The subtlety of his art reflects his enormous regard for the reader.

Return to PAPERS
Return to Main Menu