"vasiliy shishkov"

Poetry, Exile, and Prophetic Mystification in "Vasiliy Shishkov" (1939)
by Maxim D. Shrayer
page six of nine

When offering Nabokov the second, "much more tattered," notebook with "good" poems ("Here's my real passport. ... Read just one poem at random, it will be enough for both you and me"; Stories, 495), Shishkov also confronts him with an unexpected and unwanted critical judgment of his work:

By the way, to avoid any misapprehension, let me warn you that I do not care for your novels [note that Nabokov renders knigi as "novels" and not literally as "books," thereby narrowing the circle of Shishkov's response to fiction only; the Russian "books" could refer to both poetry and prose; by 1939 Nabokov had published in emigration two separate volumes of poetry plus the collection The Return of Chorb with fifteen stories and twenty-four poems], they irritate me as would a harsh light or the loud conversation of strangers when one longs not to talk, but to think. Yet, at the same time, in a purely physiological way--if I may put it like that--you possess some secret of writing, the secret of certain basic colors, something exceptionally rare and important, which, alas, you apply to little purpose, within the narrow limits of your general abilities--driving about, so to speak, all over the place in a powerful racing car for which you have absolutely no use, but which keeps you thinking where could one thunder off next. (Stories, 495-496).

Shishkov's comments sum up a view of Nabokov as a metaliterary writer, that goes back to the 1930s and was later embraced by a pleiad of Western critics and postmodernist writers. This formulation, "in a purely physiological way," suggests that Nabokov possesses an inherently golden pen that ensures the brilliance of his style and the effectiveness of his devices. Such physiological writing--so one is compelled to assume from Shishkov's critique-does not open any metaphysical horizons. The "metaliterary" view prevailed in the pre-World War II émigré criticism, only to experience a second upsurge in Western academia in the 1960s-1980s. By the end of the 1930s, depending on whether the émigré critics were well disposed toward Nabokov (Khodasevich, Bitsilli, Struve, N. Andreev) or against him (Gippius/Merezhkovskii, Adamovich), they would either hail or belittle him on quite similar grounds. Compare, for instance, this seminal formulation by Khodasevich from his essay "O Sirine" ("On Sirin," 1937) with the judgment of Adamovich's in the aforementioned "Sirin."

For Khodasevich,

...Sirin becomes predominantly the artist of form, of literary device, and not only in the sense--now common and widely recognized--that the formal side of his writings stands out for its exceptional diversity, complexity, brilliance, and novelty.... Sirin not only masks or hides his devices, ...but rather reveals them like a conjurer.... Here, I feel, lies the key to Sirin. His works are inhabited not only by dramatis personae, but also countless devices which--like elves or gnomes-- ... carry out enormous tasks.... They create the world of a work of art and become its indispensable characters. This is why Sirin does not hide them: his main goal is to show how devices live and work ... I actually think, or am almost sure that Sirin ... will one day open up and present us with a ruthless satirical portrayal of a writer. Such a portrayal would be a natural stage in the development of this central theme which possesses him.48

And now Adamovich:

Sirin's prose resembles Chinese shadows: a perfectly white background which nothing can disturb or stir up. And against this background weaving the most quaint patterns are what seem to be either people, or passions, or fates. Try looking through the chinks into what's gaping in between: there is nothing there, one loses vision in milky-white emptiness.... Could it be that he would prefer the rubber smoothness of style over everything else? It is suffocating, cold, and strange to read Sirin's prose. And it matters not whether we look inside it or glance at its surface. But let me repeat it, he is a remarkable writer, a most original figure ... The remaining doubts concern only what he does with his gift.49

While Adamovich wrote three years earlier than Khodasevich, both claim--the former with skepticism, the latter with optimism--that Nabokov's potential is still to unravel in the future. The critics expect different things from Nabokov, although both fashion him as a metaliterary gamesman. For Adamovich, who makes the mistake of separating artistry from ethics in Nabokov's indivisible world, "a moral criterion is inapplicable" to Nabokov. Apparently oblivious to the fact that in most of his pre-1934 mature works (especially Kamera obskura and The Defense) Nabokov makes ethical judgments about his characters, Adamovich challenges him to become a writer concerned with the human condition. Between January 1934 and March 1936 Despair and Invitation to a Beheading were published, as it were, in response to Adamovich's requests. Khodasevich's wish also came true in several works of the late 1930s that feature writers as their major characters. Already in "Spring in Fialta," which Khodesevich does not discuss in his essay, we encounter a successful Hungarian-French writer, Ferdinand, the story's "salamander of fate." The protagonist of "Spring in Fialta," the Russian émigré Vasen'ka, makes the following comment about Ferdinand's writing:

At the beginning of his career it had been possible to distinguish some human landscape, some old garden, some dream-familiar disposition of trees through the stained glass of his prodigious prose... but with every new book the tints grew still more dense, the gules and purpure still more ominous and today one can no longer see anything at all through that blazoned, ghastly rich glass, and it seems that were one to break it, nothing but a perfectly black void would face one's shivering soul (Stories, 420).

Notice how close this comes to both Adamovich's and Khodasevich's remarks on Nabokov. The complexity here lies in the fact that although Vasen'ka (Vasiliy), the narrator of "Spring in Fialta," and not his rival, Ferdinand, happens to be Nabokov's privileged character in the story, Ferdinand also shares much with his creator. Note the narrator's comment regarding Ferdinand's responses to unwilling critics: "But how dangerous he was in his prime [Nabokov was reaching his prime in the late 1930s], what venom he squirted, with what whips he lashed when provoked! The tornado of his passing satire left a barren waste where felled oaks lay in a row, and the dust still twisted, and the unfortunate author of some adverse review, howling with pain, spun like a top in the dust" (Stories, 420-21). I have demonstrated above that the 1930s witnessed precisely a "tornado" of Nabokov's counterattacks, overt at times, covert at others, but always elegantly hitting the target. In "Vasiliy Shishkov" Nabokov's duel with the critics reached a high point: the short story finalized what the novel The Gift and the story "Spring in Fialta" had done with such elegance and poignancy.

Notes

48. Khodasevich, Literaturnye stat'i i vospominaniia (New York: Izdatel'stvo imeni Chekhova, 1954), 249-250; the essay originally appeared in Vozrozhdenie 4065 (February 13, 1937): 9.

49. Adamovich, "Sirin," Poslednie novosti 4670 (January 4, 1934): 3.

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