Poetry, Exile, and Prophetic Mystification in "Vasiliy Shishkov" (1939) Nabokov's postface "On a Book Entitled Lolita" (1956) offers an insight into his post-émigré assessment of his search for a new language in which to write: "My private tragedy, which cannot, and indeed should not, be anybody's concern, is that I had to abandon my natural idiom, my untrammeled, rich, and infinitely docile Russian tongue for a second-rate brand of English, devoid of any of those apparatuses--the baffling mirror, the black velvet backdrop, the implied associations and traditions--which the native illusionist, frac-tails flying, can magically use to transcend the heritage in his own way" (L, 316-17). Look at how precisely Nabokov puts it. The "baffling mirror" transforms him into Shishkov against the contextual "backdrop" of "associations and traditions,"--the native Russian heritage preserved and yet transformed in exile. This is exactly what Nabokov says and does in "Vasiliy Shishkov." He rescues the heritage of Russian émigré culture. He preserves its texts--Shishkov's poems. But insofar as Nabokov as a quintessential Russian émigré author creates Vasiliy Shishkov in his text, this very text decreates Nabokov as émigré author by pronouncing his own verdict: to disappear in "his art," to dissolve in "his poetry." There is after all inexplicable illusionism in Shishkov's disappearance. To quote the narrator's remark in the story, "Where the deuce did he go?" (Stories, 499). Still, Shishkov's otherworldly disappearance into the "transparent and sound" world of his liminal poems is not the worst alternative for the culture of the Russian emigration. It is revealing to compare Nabokov's skepticism regarding the future of the Russian emigration circa 1939 with his optimistic and inspirational jubilee remarks on the tenth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1927: We are the wave of Russia gone out of its shores; were have been spilled all over the world.... We celebrate ten years of freedom. Perhaps no other people has known the freedom we know. In this invisible Russia that surrounds us, nourishes our lives, fills our souls, and colors our dreams there is no law other than our love for her, and no other authority than our own conscience.... Nowadays, when they celebrate the USSR-gray anniversary [otmechaetsia seryi, èsèsèsèrnyi iubilei], we celebrate ten years of contempt, faithfulness, and freedom. Let us not blame our exile. Today let us repeat the words of the ancient warrior of whom Plutarch wrote: "At night, in tents, amidst a desert far away from Rome: I put up my tent, and my tent was Rome for me."59Some twelve years later Nabokov's creation, the émigré poet Shishkov, "implored" his homeland to leave him alone: Will you leave me alone? I implore you!One stanza later, the poet is ready to sacrifice so much--his name, his native tongue--only for his homeland to let go of him: I'm prepared to lie hidden foreverThe latter stanza anticipates what Nabokov would say twenty years later in "On A Book Entitled Lolita." When "Will you leave me alone?..." came out in the last issue of Contemporary Annals under the name "Vas. Shishkov," Nabokov had less than two month left to enjoy his ambivalent status as a Russian émigré with an unwanted Nansen refugee passport. On May 19, 1940, he would sail to America, no longer Vladimir Sirin, but Vladimir Nabokov the would-be Russian-American writer. The cultural climate in the United States was not conducive to preserving and developing the émigré heritage. In America, as Nabokov put it in his foreword to The Gift, the rich world of Russian émigré culture "remained unknown to American intellectuals (who, bewitched by Communist propaganda, saw [Russian émigrés] merely as villainous generals, oil magnates, and gaunt ladies with lorgnettes)". Incidentally, one of his foes, Zinaida Gippius, did in fact look like a "gaunt lady" with a lorgnette and is disguised in "Vasiliy Shishkov" as "an ample female (a translatress...or perhaps a theosophist) with a gloomy little husband resembling a black breloque" (Stories, 498)--one pictures Dmitrii Merezhkovskii right away! Nabokov needed his last Russian short story not only to triumph over his émigré literary foes before exiting gracefully. He needed to make a closing statement regarding the destiny of Russian emigration. In fact, while he parted with his Russian voice, which he would never quite regain thereafter ("Vasiliy Shishkov" is both a valediction and a last testament), the creation of a new English-language persona was in the works. The name of the narrator in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1938, pub. 1941) is "V," suggesting that the English-speaking voice in the novel was not yet ready for a full-fledged (named) narrator. The move to America placed the Russian Nabokov in a "transparent and sound coffin." While in the United States, and especially after the success of Lolita, he hardly participated in the cultural life of the Russian émigré community.60 His literary name in Russian underwent transformations from Vladimir Sirin to Vladimir Nabokov-Sirin to Vladimir Nabokov. The "coffin" or the "sepulcher" of Vasiliy Shishkov's verse benefits from a very literal reading, especially since the narrator uses the expression "bukval'no . . . ischeznut'" (to disappear literally). Additionally, Vasiliy Shishkov--however much he is constructed as Nabokov's literary persona--emblematizes the destinies of other émigré poets during World War II. Many émigré writers died between 1939 and 1945. A number of them (both Jewish and non-Jewish) like Iurii Fel'zen, Il'ia Fondaminskii-Bunakov, Iurii Mandel'shtam, and Elizaveta Kuz'mina-Karavaeva (Mother Maria) perished in Nazi concentration camps.
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Notes 59. Vladimir Nabokov, "Iubilei," Rul' 2120 (November 19, 1927): 2. 60. He did continue to publish in Russian in the leading New York émigré periodicals, Novyi zhurnal and Vozdushnye puti; several of his Russian books also appeared after World War II, including the first complete edition of The Gift (1952), and the first edition of the Russian collection Spring in Fialta (1956). Those publications, as well as the Russian versions of Lolita and Speak, Memory and the translated excerpts from the Eugene Onegin commentary, were tributes to Nabokov's Russian years. In America Nabokov wrote no fiction in his original Russian. He also "disappeared" from émigré cultural life and gave very few readings in Russian. He did continue to write occasional poems in Russian.
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