The Caning of Modernist Profaners: Parody in Despair Anton's frenzy will be repeated by Hermann in a similar situation when after the murder he tries to hide from his new identity and is therefore unable "to put up with mirrors" (187). In his own words, he "gets into a devil of a state about such trifles as a reflection in a dark looking glass" (187) and shouts at his presumed readers-cum-judges-cum-tormentors: ...mirror. Now that is a word I loathe, the ghastly thing! I have had none of the article ever since I stopped shaving. Anyway, the mere mention of it has just given me a nasty shock, broken the flow of my story [...] Enough, it is not all so simple as you seem to think, you swine, you! Oh, yes, I am going to curse at you, none can forbid me to curse. And not to have a looking glass in my room -- that is also my right! (31).37But even driven to the wall and wallowing in despair, both murderers remain unrepentant to the very end. Anton asks himself: Do I feel remorse now, regret for what I have done? None at all. I feel weighed down [mne tiazhelo]. I feel dreadfully weighed down, more than anyone else on earth; and my hair is turning gray, but that is something else [eto drugoe]. Something else.38Hermann also arrogantly refuses to cast off his phony mask of "a poet misunderstood" and to repent the evil of his crime: Any remorse on my part is absolutely out of the question: an artist feels no remorse, even when his work is not understood, not accepted (177).The recognizable affinities between "The Thought" and Despair are far too numerous and compelling to be dismissed as mere coincidence. It is not improbable that Nabokov obliquely alludes to Andreev's story in the first chapter of the Russian version when Hermann not quite accurately uses the word "mysl'" [thought] in quotation marks as the Church Slavonic name of the letter M:39 U menia na lbu naduvaetsia zhila, kak nedocherchennaia mysl', no kogda ia spliu, u menia lob takzhe gladok, kak u moego dublikata (R 342) [On my forehead a vein stands out like a capital M imperfectly drawn, but when I sleep my brow is as smooth as that of my double (27)]."Nedocherchennaia mysl'," or, to add quotation marks, "The Thought" imperfectly drawn, is a witty and apt description of the literary "double" Hermann's narration resembles--the story that, like everything Andreev wrote, combines trendy "dostoevshchina," vulgar sensationalism, lack of taste, and florid style with flashes of psychological insight and original imagery. Nabokov, so to speak, tries to redraw the imperfect design of his predecessor and at the same time parodies the paradigmatic set of literary conventions underlying the fallacies of "The Thought." Yuri Tynianov's elegant suggestion that comedy can be seen as a parody of tragedy in this case seems especially appropriate since Nabokov mocks Andreev's (and, for that matter, the overall decadent) treatment of egomaniac transgressors as neo-Byronic tragic heroes. If Andreev or Briusov never doubt their murderers' claims to intellectual superiority or outstanding artistic talents and dissociate from them only on strictly moral grounds, Nabokov adheres to the century-old aesthetic principle of Pushkin: "genius and villainy are two things that are incompatible." In spite of all his pretensions to literary greatness as well as to the other excellencies of intellect and character, Hermann not infrequently betrays his utter lack of understanding, judgment, imagination, originality and talent. The tension between the narrator's self-praise and the implied reality produces a strong comic effect; from under the mask of a self-proclaimed genius there slowly appears the deformed mug of a malicious buffoon, a mad impostor and imitator whose gaudily pretentious style lacks all of the alleged originality and inventiveness. In this context his oversights become more revealing than his overt statements. Thus he is unaware that thematically his book parrots not Dostoevsky but the second-rate "dostoevshchina" of "The Thought." Hermann is similarly unable to notice that stylistically he, like many of his Soviet contemporaries, often imitates Andrei Bely, another founding father of Russian Modernism, whose influence on the Russian literature of the 1920s was all-pervasive. At the beginning of Chapter Three Hermann demonstrates his literary versatility and Proteanism by offering "several variations" of chapter openings. All of them burlesque certain stylish narrative devices, common in the prose of Russian modernists, but one aims directly at Andrei Bely's autobiographical writings of the 1920s with their cinema-like montage "dodges," cadenced periods, and rich alliterations: In the meantime... (the inviting gesture of dots, dots, dots). [...] In the meantime... A new paragraph, please.The passage parodies a chapter of Bely's novel Kotik Letaev ostentatiously entitled "In the meantime" (Mezhdu tem) and begun much like the Hermann's stilted passage: the truncated first line repeats the chapter title and is followed by a sudden dash in the end ("In the meantime..."); another dash opens a new paragraph which, in its turn, breaks off at the end.41 Not only have the two passages comparable beginnings and rhythmical structures (Nabokov's dactyl against Bely's anapest); even more important is their similar tongue-in-cheek references to the color white (cf. "whitewashed trunks" in Despair and "belyi blesk" [white glitter] in Kotik Letaev) and hence to Andrei Bely's name (in Russian belyi means "white"). Due to this parody the expression "Mezhdu tem" [In the meantime] becomes a marker of Bely's presence; thus its conspicuous reappearance at the beginning of the pivotal restaurant scene in Tarnitz (the very scene in which, as I mentioned before, Hermann recognizes a shadow of Dostoevsky's "thumb-screw conversations" in "stage taverns" )--causes one remember that it was Andrei Bely who in his Petersburg initiated the canonization of a Dostoevskian tavern dialogue as an indispensable topos of the Russian modernist novel. In his review of Petersburg Nikolai Berdiaev insightfully remarked that several scenes in the novel, for example the one in the tavern and the one with the detective, are direct copies of Dostoevsky's manner. And precisely in these places Bely goes off into another style, which is certainly not his, thus breaking the rhythm of his novel-symphony. He is internally tied to Dostoevsky, and cannot be blamed for this.42Berdiaev alludes to Chapter Five of Petersburg, in which Pavel Morkovin/Voronkov, a double agent, coaxes Nikolai Ableukhov, a protagonist of the book, into a seedy "stage tavern" and there, like Dostoevsky's Porfiry in Crime and Punishment, teases him with perverse hints and suggestions. Among other things, Morkovin claims that he and Nikolai are bound by ties of kinship, or blood ties which, as he puns, have nothing to do "with the shedding of blood." He declares himself to be Nikolai's illegitimate brother, "the fruit of your father's affair with a seamstress," and then says that he was just having a little joke: That was probing, to see how you would react. I must both vindicate you and cause you pain. All that's left to point out is that we are brothers ... but by different fathers.43In the Tarnitz scenes of Despair Hermann and Felix also discuss possibility/impossibility of their kinship. "Mightn't one suppose my father had sinned with your mother," banters Felix but Hermann takes his joke quite seriously and answers: Our blood, Felix, is not the same. No, my good chap, not the same. I was born a thousand miles from your cradle and the honor of my parents--as of yours, I hope--is unstained. You are an only son: So am I. Consequently neither to me nor to you can there come that mysterious creature: a long-lost brother once stolen by the gypsies (87).Yet in the tavern Hermann thinks that he and Felix look like "the fortunate brother and the luckless brother [...] facing each other both sitting alike; elbows on the table and fists at the cheekbones" (99). It is curious that the identical poses of Hermann and Felix seem to mimic those of Bely's fake brothers: in the tavern Nikolai Ableukhov and his tormentor "sat and placed their elbows on the table."44 Of course, similarities between the tavern scenes in Despair and Petersburg are not limited by setting, subject of conversation or incidental detail. Bely connects this episode of his novel with the theme of Bronze Horseman, the essential element of St. Petersburg's cultural mythology, which symbolizes the demonics of the doomed "artificial" city. On their way to the tavern Ableukhov and Morkovin pass by the monument to Peter the Great: Here was the square. In the square [there] loomed [the same] crag; the [same] steed flung out its hooves [but what a strange sight] A shadow covered the Horseman: [and it seemed that] there was no Horseman.45On his way back Nikolai, shattered by the talk with the double agent, approaches the Bronze Horseman again: Nikolai Apollonovich raised curious eyes toward the immense outline of the Horseman. Not long before it had seemed that there was no Horseman (a shadow had covered him); but now the metal lips were parted in an enigmatic smile.46Nabokov's characters seem to repeat Ableukhov’s circular route through Petersburg, for in Tarnitz Hermann discovers or fantasizes an uncanny reincarnation of the Bronze Horseman, a statue of some duke that "might have passed for that of Peter the Great in the town he founded" (78). It is the starting point of this route that is marked by the Bely-esque introductory "in the meantime": In the meantime night was approaching; the sparrows had long disappeared; the monument loomed darker and seemed to have grown in size. From behind a black tree there came out noiselessly a gloomy and fleshful moon. A cloud slipped a mask over it in passing, which left visible only its chubby chin (88).After their conversation in the tavern, Hermann and Felix wander the streets of the town and finally find themselves at the same point as before--on the bewitched square with the monument mirroring the mythologized cityscape of Petersburg: It was a sharp bleak night. Among small clouds curled like astrakhan, a shiny flat moon kept sliding in and out. [...] We again walked past the duplicate of the Bronze Rider (101-102).The entrapment of Hermann in Bely's stock images and situations, in their turn derivative of Dostoevsky, reflects and comments upon the depravities of his insane creative mind. Unable to free itself from secondhand clichés, stale fancies and solipsistic platitudes, Hermann's artistic imagination generates only an eclectic mixture of incongruous imitations, counterfeits, fake "doubles"--the pseudo-innovative hodgepodge in which Leonid Andreev's "dostoevshchina" commingles with Andrei Bely's self-conscious fictions, and Briusov's or Savinkov's trite narcissism merges with plots of Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, and tabloid journalism.
[ page four | page five ]
Notes 37. The recurrent mirror motif is more prominent and elaborated in Despair than in "The Thought" insofar as Hermann from the very beginning perceives Felix as his mirror reflection. Among other things, Hermann's futile attempt to appropriate the image of a shattered mirror as an omen of death (34) through using it to ensnare and deceive his presumed readers can be decoded as an indirect allusion to Andreev's story and hence just another ensnarement of the ensnarer: Hermann is not aware of a literary allusion he makes, a lapse that reveals his madness. Cf. also Nabokov's remark in his essay "The Art of Literature and Commonsense" concerning an essential difference between a real artist and a lunatic: "a madman is reluctant to look at himself in a mirror because the face he sees is not his own: his personality is beheaded; that of the artist is increased" (Lectures on Literature, 377). 38. Andreev, Visions, 40. In Despair there are several phrases intonationally close to Anton's hysterical exclamations. Cf.: "No, these are not the throes of creation... but something quite different [eto--sovsem drugoe]" (15; R 335). "My restlessness grows... [Mne tiagostno...]" (53; R 358). "But how tired I am, how deadly tired [No kak ia ustal, kak ia smertel'no ustal‘" (205; R 453). "That mortal inextricable pain...[Kakaia smertel'naia, nevylaznaia muka...]" (220; R 461). 39. In fact a capital M in Church Slavonic is named "myslete" rather than "mysl'." 40. Cf.: "Mezhdu tem... (priglasitel'nyi zhest mnogotochiia). [...] Mezhdu tem... Novyi abzats... ...po raskalennoi doroge, staraias' derzhat'sia v teni iablon', kogda popadalis' po kraiu ikh krivye iarko belenye stvoly..." (R 358). 41. See: Andrei Bely. Sochineniia v dvukh tomakh. Moskva: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1990. T.2, 425. 42. Nikolai Berdyaev. "An Astral Novel: Some Thoughts on Andrei Bely's Petersburg." The Noise of Change: Russian Literature and the Critics (1891-1917). Ed. by Stanley Rabinowitz. Ann Arbor, Michigan: Ardis, 1986, 201. 43. Andrei Bely. Petersburg. Translated, annotated and introduced by Robert A. Maguire and John E. Malmstad. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978, 145. 44. Ibid., 144. 45. Ibid., 141. 46. Ibid., 149.
[ page four | page five ]
Zembla depends on frames for navigation. If you have been referred to this page without the surrounding frame, click here.
NABOKOV SOCIETY | THE NABOKOVIAN | NABOKOV STUDIES | NABOKV-L |