The Caning of Modernist Profaners: Parody in Despair
by Alexander Dolinin
page three of five

Despair can be read as a double-edged lampoon aimed simultaneously at both waves of "dostoevshchina." First, Hermann's initial idea of committing a perfect murder that would be aesthetically comparable with the greatest artistic creations24 parodies the Symbolist philosophy of "zhiznetvorchestvo" (life-creation) and decadent writings based on the concept of the artist as a Nietzschean superman standing "beyond good and evil" and projecting his "creative dreams"25 onto malleable reality. On the other hand, the style and tone of Hermann's pseudo-confessional narration, which combines the feigned sincerity of a "human document" with the flashy, self-reflective authorial commentary laying bare the devices of the text, as well as his pro-communist political views,26 mimic various Soviet novels of the 1920's. Judging by his explicit "authorial" intentions and favorite devices, Hermann, like Shirin in The Gift, is a mock-modernist, a "literary Bolshevik" who defiles the tradition instead of continuing and enriching it through circumspect innovation.

The original text of Despair is permeated by veiled parodic allusions to the two consecutive stages of Russian modernism that are either eliminated or nearly unrecognizable in the translation. Among the most obvious Symbolist subtexts of Despair one should mention several of Valerii Briusov's stories, especially his first-person narratives "Now When I Have Awakened (Memoirs of a Psychopath)" in which the hero blurs the demarcation line between his illusions and reality, and kills his wife thinking that he is dreaming27 and "In the Mirror. From Archives of a Psychopath"--a story of a paranoid woman who takes her reflection for her double and tries to change places with it.28 An artist-murderer named Modest who commits a crime in cold blood and then explains it away as "a whim of his artistic soul" is the hero of Briusov's "The Last Pages of A Woman's Diary." The story's narrator, Modest's lover, admires his genius and his tenacity; for her he is a genuine "Übermensch"--"a great artist" persecuted by the rabble of mediocrities who are unable to understand his genius.29

Briusov's heroine absolves and vindicates the murderer with the help of the same argument Hermann uses to justify and vindicate himself: a great artist stands above ordinary people, "the rabble," and therefore has a license to kill if the crime satisfies his "innate disposition toward the constant exercise of the creative faculty"(13); "the rabble," for its part, "due to the inertia, pigheadedness, prejudice of humans" (204) fails to recognize the greatness of the genius and persecutes him with the "drivel and dirt" of their incompetent "criticism." This cheap aestheticised modification of Raskolnikov's "Napoleon theory," based on denying the distinction between art and life, became such a commonplace in Russian literature of the Silver Age that it would be impossible to list all the objects of Nabokov's parody. In fact, Hermann, an inept impostor, travesties the stereotyped general idea rather than its specific manifestations. Yet there is one text that is especially worth mentioning, since it seems to have provided Nabokov with a model for both the central character of Despair and parts of its imagery and plot: Leonid Andreev's story "The Thought" ("Mysl'"), another first-person account of a murder committed by a conceited narcissistic narrator and a good example of "dostoevshchina" popular at the turn of the century.

Like Hermann, Anton Kerzhentsev, the narrator-protagonist of "The Thought," plans and executes a "perfect crime" (killing his closest friend Alexis out of sheer spite and jealousy of his happy marriage30), and afterwards revels in writing a memoir wherein he relates the circumstances of the murder, extols his own numerous virtues and talents ("the precise, powerful workings of [his] thought," extraordinary imagination, "supple, exceedingly cultivated mind" (43) "the strength of his will," even the chess genius of a potential world champion31), and at the same time gives vent to his fears that he is a lunatic, not a superman. Striking parallels to Andreev's story can be found on various levels of Despair. Both texts, for example, reproduce the narrative structure and intonations of Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground--a soliloquy which, in Nabokov's words, "presupposes the presence of a phantom audience" jeering at the narrator who tries "to thwart their mockery and denunciations by the shifts, the doubling back, and various other tricks of his supposedly remarkable intellect." (Lectures on Russian Literature, 115-16). Both actualize and play upon the contrasts between the immediate present of writing a memoir and the past retold in it.

Despair evidently develops a number of themes and motifs originating in "The Thought." Hermann's assertion that "God does not exist, as neither does our hereafter" (112) connected with his recurrent dream of something "unimaginably terrible; to wit, a perfectly empty, newly whitewashed room" (56; cf. also 58) correspond to Anton's paraphrase of the famous Nietzschean proclamation that Gott ist tot :

In one of the dark chambers of your humble house dwells someone very useful to you, but in my house that room is vacant [ta komnata pusta]. He who lived there died long ago, and I have erected a sumptuous monument on his grave. He is dead, [...] and shall not be resurrected.32

An inclination toward dissimulation [pritvorstvo] has always been part of my character and was one of the forms whereby I strove for inner freedom. [...] I maintained my apartness from other people: for them I had a special smile, special conversations and confidences. I perceived that people do much that is stupid, harmful to themselves, and futile. It seemed to me that if I would tell the truth about myself, I would become like everyone else, and I would become possessed by all this stupidity and futility. [...] And the more I lied to people, the more mercilessly truthful I became with myself -- a merit that few could claim.33

Altogether it seemed to me that an exceptional actor was hidden within me, one capable of combining a naturalness of performance [...] with a relentless, cold control of the mind. [...] As to the quality of my own act, you may judge it by the fact that many fools consider me even now to be the most sincere and truthful of men. [...] All in all there was nothing accidental about any of this. On the contrary, every detail, no matter how small, had been carefully thought through. [...] At home alone I laughed and rejoiced in what an astounding, magnificent actor I was. [...] A great talent is measured by the fact that while it builds structures for itself, it knows how to change as circumstances change [...] Like a true artist I went too far in my role.34

Fragments of lines from my role passed through my head; in my mind I repeated some of the gestures I had made, and occasionally a criticism drifted by: at this or that point it could have been done better. However, I was very pleased by my improvised command, "Wait!"35

Should one of you ever have to live through what I did that night, make sure to cover the mirrors in the room where you will be thrashing around. Do cover them! [...] I came up to the mirror -- Cover the mirrors! Cover them!36

24. As Sergej Davydov has indicated, Hermann's attempts to aestheticize crime echo Thomas De Quincey's triptych "On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts" (see Davydov's "Teksty-matreshki" Vladimira Nabokova, 93-99 and his article on Despair in The Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov, 91 and note 7). I would also suggest another source that in the Silver Age was known much better than De Quincey's piece: Oscar Wilde's essay "Pen, Pencil and Poison. A Study in Green"--a sympathetic portrayal of Thomas Griffith Wainewright who, in Wilde's definition, "sought to find expression by pen or poison" and became famous as a painter, art critic and writer as well as a vicious murderer. As Wilde argues, Wainewright, a dandy in "pale lemon-colored kid gloves" (cf. Hermann's yellow gloves) was a real artist having "the thorough dislike of what is obvious or commonplace" and comprehending that "Life itself is an Art and has its modes of style." Possessing "the dangerous and delightful distinction of being different from others," he elevated murder to a thing of beauty, which had "an important effect upon his art" and "gave a strong personality to his style." Wilde regrets that Wainewright's "diary in which he carefully noted the results of his terrible experiments and the methods [...] he adopted has unfortunately been lost to us" (The Works of Oscar Wilde. Ed. by G. F. Maine. New York: E. P. Datton & Co, 1954, 933-946). Nabokov's depiction of murder and the murderer refutes Wilde's assertions that "there is no essential incongruity between crime and culture" (The Works of Oscar Wilde, 947), and "no crime is vulgar" (1113) because it is "a mode through which [the artist] could realize his conception of the beautiful" (115). It is important that in Despair Hermann admires Oscar Wilde and tries to imitate his style (D, 108). For a different treatment of Oscar Wilde in Despair based on parallels with Dorian Gray, see: William C. Carroll. "The Cartesian Nightmare of Despair," 88-90

25. "Tiazhelye tvorcheskie sny minovali..." (R 453… "heavy creative dreams have passed") is Hermann’s phrase which metaphorically describing the completion of his book. It telescopes two Symbolist subtexts: the title of Fyodor Sologub's first novel Tiazhelye sny (Heavy Dreams) and Aleksander Blok's line "I vidit tvorcheskie sny" ("And has creative dreams") -- the ending of his poem "Sredi poklonnikov Karmen...," a part of the Carmen cycle. The expression "tvorcheskie sny" originally comes from Pushkin's Eugene Onegin (1, 55).

26. Hermann's defense of communism parodies the political rhetoric of the Soviet regime and its supporters among "fellow-travelers." Cf., for example: "[...]I used to say that Communism in the long run was a great and necessary thing; that young, new Russia was producing wonderful values, [...] that history had never yet known such enthusiasm, ascetism, and unselfishness, such faith in the impending sameness of us all" (20); "In fancy I visualize a new world, where all men will resemble one another as Hermann and Felix did; a world of Helixes and Fermanns; a world where the worker fallen dead at the feet of his machine will be at once replaced by his perfect double smiling the serene smile of perfect socialism" (159). The satirical strategy of Nabokov follows that of Zamiatin's We which also postulates (through the mouth of the narrator) the utopian ideal of total "sameness" in order to discredit and debunk it.

27. V. Briusov. Zemnaia os'. Rasskazy i dramaticheskie stzeny. (1901-1906). Moskva: Skorpion, 1907, 83-91. See the English translation in: The Silver Age of Russian Culture. An Anthology Edited by Carl Proffer & Ellendea Proffer. Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1975, 303-308. The subtitle of the story should be added to the list of memoirs or notes (zapiski) in Russian prose evoked by Hermann's proposed title--"something beginning with 'Memoirs of a--' of a what? I could not remember; and, anyway, "Memoirs seemed dreadfully dull and commonplace" (211). Some of the other important analogs, including Gogol's and Tolstoy's "Memoirs of a Madman," Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground, and Bely's Memoirs of a Crank, have been discussed in William C. Carroll's "The Cartesian Nightmare of Despair," 93-95. The title of the novel Memoirs of a Scoundrel by an émigré writer A. Vetlugin (A. Vetlugin. Zapiski merzavtsa. Berlin: Russkoe tvorchestvo, 1922) would also be an apt definition of Hermann's project.

28. Zemnaia os', 95-106.

29. V. Briusov. Nochi i dni. Vtoraia kniga rasskazov i dramaticheskikh stzen. 1908-1912. Moskva: Skorpion, 1913, 58.

30.Cf. the name of the victim in Despair (Lat. felix--happy, fortunate, lucky), which in the Russian original is connected with Hermann's unpardonable metaliterary sin--his sacrilegiously twisting the plot of Pushkin's short story "The Shot." In the story a duelist named Silvio delays his shot at a rich and handsome Count who is characterized as "the constant favorite of fortune" ["vechnyi liubimets schast'ia" ] until the latter learns to appreciate his life; six years later Silvio comes to require his due at the moment of his adversary’s greatest happiness, but after humiliating and provoking him lets the Count off without shooting. In his paraphrase of the story Hermann tampers with Pushkin's sacred text and makes Silvio kill his adversary (R 359), which parallels his own killing of Felix -- another "happy/lucky man," and it is for these transgressions that he is punished. In the English translation Nabokov traded "The Shot" for Othello: when rendering the plot of the tragedy Hermann "made the Moor skeptical and Desdemona unfaithful" (56) thereby foreshadowing his own cuckolding.

31. See Leonid Andreev. Visions: Stories and Photographs. Ed. and with an Introduction by Olga Andreyev Carlisle. San Diego-New York-London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987, 58, 42, 39, 59.

32. Leonid Andreev. Visions, 70. Both images of the other world as an empty room, of course, echo Svidrigailov's image of eternity as a bath-house "black with soot, with spiders in every corner" in Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment.

33. Ibid., 42-43.

34. Ibid., 43, 46, 48, 57, 69. Another self-indulgent parallel both murderers draw is to contemporary Polar explorers. Anton exclaims, "You would not dare call Nansen, that great man of the past century, mad. Moral life, too, has its poles, and I wanted to reach one of them. You are dismayed by the lack of jealousy, vengefulness, greed, and other truly stupid motives [...] But then, you men of science will condemn Nansen, along with the fools and ignoramuses who regard his enterprise as madness" (ibid., 69). Cf. in Despair: "Somebody told me once that I looked like Amundsen, the Polar explorer. Well, Felix, too, looked like Amundsen. But it is not every person that can recall Amundsen's face. I myself recall it but faintly, nor am I sure whether there had not been some mix-up with Nansen" (26) And again: "People have told me I reminded them of Amundsen" (51).

35. Ibid., 63. Anton alludes to his command "Wait!" (Pogodi!) addressed to the victim a moment before the murder. It is hardly a coincidence that Hermann uses the same command in a similar situation, just before shooting Felix: "Wait, let me have a thorough... " (181; in Russian: "Pogodi, dai mne khoroshen'ko..." [R 437]).

36. Ibid., 64, 66.