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Pushkinian Subtexts in Nabokov’s
Invitation to a Beheading*
by Alexander Dolinin
Translated from the Russian by Jeff
Edmunds
Numerous critical studies have been written on the theme “Pushkin
and Nabokov,” exposing the powerful substratum of diverse Pushkinian
citations, reminiscences, allusions, and parallels that appear in nearly
all Nabokov’s Russian works.1 Much
of the attention of specialists has focused on The Gift, the
heroine of which, according to Nabokov himself, is Russian literature.
In the aesthetic education of the protagonist, the budding poet and prose-writer
Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev, Pushkin plays a defining role: Fyodor “feeds”
on Pushkin, “inhales”2 him,
absorbs him into his creative circulatory system (“Pushkin entered
his blood” [G 98]), shows him filial love (“With
Pushkin’s voice merged the voice of his father. He kissed Pushkin’s
hot little hand, taking it for another, large hand smelling of the breakfast
kalach (a blond roll)” [G 98]); he continually
refers to Pushkin in his writing, cites him (sometimes without quotation
marks) and even attempts to complete one of Pushkin’s unfinished
poems, “O, net, mne zhizn’ ne nadoela….”
[Oh no, my life has not grown tedious…]. In fact, the entire history
of Russian literature is presented in the novel as the struggle, continually
renewed in fresh forms, of two primordial principles: a Pushkinian untrammeled
and inspired “service of the Muses” and a Chernyshevkian-Dobroliubovian
service of “general ideas.” In the biography of Chernyshevkii
that constitutes the fourth chapter of The Gift, the hero is
explicitly and implicitly contrasted with Pushkin in everything—from
the stamp of his character as a man, made apparent by his unhappy marriage,
to the stamp of his artistic and critical thought.
Given that Invitation
to a Beheading was composed while Nabokov was working on The
Gift, and, as has been heretofore pointed out more than once, shares
with the latter a distinctive thematic kinship,3
it is easy to see clear parallels with Chernyshevskii’s fate (an
unfaithful wife who deceives her husband right before his eyes, imprisonment
in a fortress, public execution in a square, etc.). Starting from these
more or less obvious thematic correspondences, two specialists, Nora Buhks
and A. Danilevskii, in recent works on Invitation to a Beheading,
arrive at the conclusion (apparently independently), that the image of
Cincinnatus C., the novel’s main character, is a parodic reflection
of Chernyshevskii and his Utopian dreams. According to this extremely
doubtful interpretation, Nabokov realizes, as it were, the Utopia depicted
by Chernyshevskii in the novel “What Is to Be Done?” and places
in it a most luckless “dreamer.”4
Although the grotesque image
of a future world in Invitation to a Beheading certainly has
evident dystopian features and thus can be compared to the “New
Russia” from Vera Pavlovna’s fourth dream, identifying Nabokov’s
Cincinnatus with Nabokov’s Chernyshevskii is fundamentally incorrect.
In his cast of mind, the “nearsighted” Chernyshevskii—a
militant doctrinaire with “eyes like a mole” (G 208),
an apologist for vulgar, platitudinous “common sense” in which
a “fatal flaw” lurks (G 207), an ungifted graphomaniac,
to whom an understanding of poetry is inaccessible—is the complete
antithesis of the “lawlessly lucid” dreamer Cincinnatus, who
is gifted with secret knowledge, genuine gnosis, and who sees the “fatal
flaw”5 in the world surrounding him.6 In terms of the central historico-cultural
dichotomy of The Gift, Cincinnatus belongs not to the lineage
of Chernyshevskii, but to the lineage of Pushkin; it is for this reason
that Nabokov himself in an interview bluntly refers to Cincinnatus as
a poet.7 He insists on this conception of Invitation to a Beheading
in his recommendations to the author of a stage adaptation of the book:
“C. must be seen as a poet, a creator,” Véra Nabokov
wrote to the playwright on behalf of her husband. “This characterizes
his thought, his approach to life and to his compatriots, and, of course,
to his wife. My husband thinks there should be some samples of what C.
thinks or writes.”8
Not having written a single line of poetry, but
by means of his “criminal intuition” (I 93) sensing
“how words are combined, what one must do for a commonplace word
to come alive and share its neighbor’s sheen, heat, shadow”
(I 93), Cincinnatus is a poet in the Blokian sense: he is a “son
of harmony” who feels a secret connection with a “native realm”
and who wishes to express it “in spite of the world’s muteness.”
He recognizes in himself “a force which urges [him] to express [himself]”
(I 95); he is moved by a desire to “to record, to leave
something” (I 52); he writes his untrammeled lyrical prose
with no hope at all of being read and understood, for, besides himself,
“there is in the world not a single human who can speak [his] language”
(I 95), but only to embody his vision of the world: “all
that impossible, dazzling freedom” (I 122). When Nabokov
speaks of the impulse of his hero for freedom, of his almost incorporeal
lightness, calling imagination his “secret life” (I
75) his “secret medium” (I 32), wherein he creates “freely
and happily” (I 32), he is clearly referring to the central
thesis of Blok’s well-known article “On the Poet’s Calling,”
in which Pushkin’s poetical consciousness takes shape through the
notion of light, happy creative will and “secret freedom,”
which is stripped from the poet by a militant mob.9
Echoing Blok, Nabokov himself
in an article on Pushkin notes that “a poet must be as free, savage,
and solitary as Pushkin intended a hundred years ago,”10 and this
trait he allots in full measure to the hero of Invitation to a Beheading.
It is precisely because of the “secret freedom” they despise
in him that Cincinnatus is persecuted by his watchful fellow citizens—the
same mob, which, as defined by Nabokov always “requires death for
those who rise above platitudinous equality”11 that destroyed Pushkin.
But in the novel Cincinnatus
is not merely the persecuted, hounded, castigated poet, sent to the scaffold
by an exultant mob. He is also in the most literal sense the last poet,
like the hero of Baratynskii’s “The Last Poet,” who
finds himself in an “enfeebled world,” from which “all
childish dreams of poetry … have vanished,”12
or in the formulation of Cincinnatus himself: “the ancient inborn
art of writing is long since forgotten […] today it seems just as
incredible as the music that once used to be extracted from a monstrous
pianoforte” (I 93). If we recall Pushkin’s “Pamiatnik”
(Monument, or, in Nabokov’s own translation, “Exegi Monumentum”),
then Cincinnatus is that “one last bard” in the sublunar world,13
in which the spirit of Pushkin, his “sacred lyre,” endures.
Placed in a situation that recalls Chernyshevskii’s fate, Nabokov’s
hero reveals a secret kinship not with the author of “What Is to
Be Done?” but with Pushkin, to whom his creative genealogy can be
traced.
The blood ties between Pushkin
and Cincinnatus are hinted at even by the latter’s odd Latinate
name, which in the critical literature is either left without explanation
or traced to the historical commander and ploughman Cincinnatus, the model
of Roman civic virtue, and to his son, also Cincinnatus, exiled from Rome.14
But this association with the Roman heroes is a false trail, a snare deliberately
laid by Nabokov. It is disproved in the scene of the pre-execution banquet,
in which the legend of Cincinnatus, who consistently refused power and
honors in favor of the modest joys of country life, is forthrightly projected
not onto the hero-martyr, but onto his executioner, M’sieur Pierre.15
“It may seem odd to you”—says the executioner to the
“sated guests, their bellies gurgling”—“but fame
and honor are nothing to me compared to rural quiet. […] The love
of nature was bequeathed to me by my father, who never lied either”
(I 186). The legend of the Roman Cincinnatus is here ironically
combined with the legend of General George Washington—the “Cincinnatus
of the West” as Byron referred to him in his “Ode to Napoleon”16
—who, according to the widely known myth, “cannot tell a lie.”17
The “civic” line originating with the historical Cincinnatus
(and, undoubtedly, implicitly including Chernyshevskii18), leads, in Nabokov’
view, to the executioner; for the hero of Invitation to a Beheading,
the very semantics of his name are timely, since it signifies “curly-headed,”
“frizzy-haired,” thereby referring us to the stock description
of Pushkin’s visual appearance.19
Gathering material for The Gift, Nabokov
carefully studied Vikentii Veresaev’s compilation Pushkin in
Life,20 and certainly could not have failed to notice the selection
of uniform descriptions of the poet’s outward appearance tabulated
therein:
“Pushkin was small in
stature, lean, with curly, very dark-brown, almost black hair” (N.I.
Tarasenkov-Otreshkov);
“A.S. Pushkin of medium stature, thin, as
an infant had curly blond hair” (D.N. Bantysh-Kamenskii);
“Pushkin was short in stature and of unprepossessing
appearance. Curly hair, however, more chestnut-colored than completely
black… recalled his Moorish parentage” (Heinrich Koenig based
on information obtained from N. A. Mel’gunov).21
Pushkin’s curly hair,
invariably emphasized by both memoirists and in the iconographical canon,
gives a stable epithet to his name in the literature, which eventually
developed into the antonomastic phrase “curly/frizzy poet.”22
The first person to use the epithet “frizzy” in relation to
Pushkin seems to be F. Glinka in the poem “Recollections of Pushkin’s
Bardic Life” (1837), who sets off the epithet as an innovation with
italics and explains in a footnote: “In a portrait of Pushkin as
he appeared for the first time as a captive in the Caucasus, he is depicted
with a cheerful countenance, with frizzy hair.”23 The new term quickly
became a poetic cliché. In the work of Apollon Grigor’ev,
for example, Pushkin is the songster “with frizzy head crowned by
laurels”; in Benediktov, “black-frizzed, fiery-eyed”;
in Apukhtin, a “curly[-headed] boy”24 in Nekrasov’s poem,
“Russian Women,” Mariia Volkonskaia “rushed past with
the curly[-headed] poet.” In the 20th century, the formula crossed
over to historical and biographical prose. Tynianov in Kiukhlia
first uses it in the scene of the hero’s entrance to the Lyceum,
when the “curly-[headed], sharp-eyed boy” Sasha approaches
him, and later is “estranged” in the final episode of Kiukhel’beker’s
dying vision: “Directly above him was a frizzy head. It laughed,
bared its teeth, and, in jest, tickled his eyes with its reddish curls.
The curls were fine and cold.”25 It is curious that in Ivan Lukash’s
story “The Bad Negro Child,” the newborn Pushkin already has
“curly hair.”26 Even Nabokov himself, who habitually shunned
clichés, mentions in The Defense a large volume of Pushkin
with a “portrait of a thick-lipped, curly-headed boy.”27
The traditional epithet continues
to be used by many poets—Sasha Chernyi, for example, in whose “Pushkin’s
Nanny” we glimpse the “shadow of a poet with a curly head,”28
or Marina Tsvetaeva in the early “Meeting with Pushkin,” in
which he is called a “curly[-headed] magus.”29 In the late poem
by Tsvetaeva “Peter and Pushkin,” frizzy hair is a symbol
of Pushkin’s love of freedom and rebelliousness:
And having smacked his
Curly nape (trimmed -- untrimmable!)
“Go then, sonny boy, on leave
Into your African wilds!”30
Since Nabokov, as a rule,
carefully considered the semantics and associative aura of the names of
his characters, it is difficult to imagine that he did not take into account
the connection between the name Cincinnatus and the “curly[-headed]
magus.” The kinship of the hero of Invitation to a Beheading
with Pushkin is also obliquely pointed to by his distinctive physical
characteristics—small stature, unusual lightness, bright curls.
The key that compels us to see in these parallels not chance coincidence
but a disguised Pushkinian code is served in the novel by the “rag
dolls for schoolgirls” (I 27) the manufacture of which
Cincinnatus is engaged in prior to his arrest. Their enumeration reveals
a “little hairy Pushkin in a fur carrick” (I 27)31
—in a way, the model after which the slight, curly-headed Cincinnatus
has been fashioned.32 Even the deliberately inaccurate epithet “hairy”
here clearly replaces the implied (and anticipated, in accordance with
tradition), “curly[-headed],” a device typical of Nabokov
for concealing an especially significant word that is easy to restore
from the immediate context.
The clothing worn by the doll-like Pushkin was
chosen with equal care by Nabokov. The mention of the “fur carrick”
should be seen as a reference to very important testimonies included in
Veresaev’s book. First, a carrick (bekesh’) occupies
a central place in a fragment from the recollections of N.M. Kolmakov:
“Amidst the public strolling along the Nevsky it was often possible
to glimpse A.S. Pushkin, but he, arresting and attracting the attention
of each and everyone, was not startling because of his dress, on the contrary,
his hat was far from being distinguished by its newness, and his long
carrick was also old-fashioned. I will not be sinning against posterity
if I say that his carrick was missing a button on the waist at the back.
The absence of this button embarrassed me every time I met A. S-ch and
saw it.”33
Nabokov, seeing this missing
button as a kind of symbol of poetical disdain for the “full-dress
uniform of worldly existence,” is undoubtedly alluding to this very
story, for he juxtaposes this figure of Pushkin with the doll of Dobroliubov,
“all buttoned up” (I 27). The pair of dolls reproduces
in miniature, as it were, the central antithesis in The Gift,
thanks to which Cincinnatus’s undisciplined nonconformity, his “unbuttonedness,”
is endowed with a cultural-typological motivation.
No less significant for Invitation to a Beheading
is the carrick mentioned in Zhukovskii’s notes on Pushkin’s
preparations for his duel with Dantès: “Began to dress; thoroughly
washed, everything clean; ordered he be given his carrick; went out to
the stairs – came back – ordered he be given the large fur
coat in his study and went on foot to the cab driver. – This was
at 1 o’clock sharp.”34
Pushkin in a fur carrick is thus Pushkin at the
fatal moment when his destiny will be definitively decided, Pushkin on
the eve of his duel and of death. Pushkin’s death, the almost sacred
archetype of the theme of the death of the poet in Russian literature—a
theme that lies at the foundation of Invitation to a Beheading—is
reflected in a series of key episodes in the novel. Sentenced to execution,
Cincinnatus is not given a moment’s peace from the same question
which the dying Pushkin addressed to Dal’: “Dal’, tell
me the truth, will I die soon?”35 Cincinnatus addresses Emmie, who
has promised him escape, using almost exactly the same words “Tell
me, when shall I die?” (I 47). As Gavriel Shapiro has shown,
another of Pushkin’s dying exclamations, brought out in Dal’s
notes, is echoed in the novel: “Ah, what anguish! My heart is tormented!”36
A similar phrase first crops up as a refrain in the “speech zone”
of the narrator, who seems to address his character (“What anguish!
Cincinnatus, what anguish! What stone anguish, Cincinnatus…”
[I 48]),37 and is then transposed into the hero’s interior
monologue (“What anguish, Cincinnatus, how many crumbs in the bed!
[…] Anguish, anguish, Cincinnatus. Pace some more, Cincinnatus,
brushing with your robe first the walls, then the chair. Anguish!”)
and, finally, repeated in his first authorial experiment: “Oh, my
anguish—what shall I do with you, with myself? […] What anguish,
oh, what anguish…” (I 48-53).38 Alluding to Pushkin’s
demise, this exclamation, on the one hand, foreshadows Cincinnatus’s
imminent agonizing death, but on the other, points him toward his destiny,
impelling him to begin reading the books and newspapers of “a barely
remembered age” (I 50), and then to begin to write.
But Pushkin’s dying words are not the only
subtext of the Nabokovian refrain. According to the account of N.M. Smirnov,
when Pushkin was in low spirits, he would “walk mournfully around
the room, pursing his lips, his hands thrust into the pockets of his wide
trousers, and dejectedly repeat ‘Sad! Anguish!’”39
Finally, in “Fragments of Onegin’s Journey”
and in the emphatic “Anguish, anguish” in the stanzas removed
from them, just as in Nabokov’s work, a refrain expressing the hero’s
frame of mind “dimmed by sadness” remains. Commingling all
these sources, Nabokov in a lecture on Pushkin places Onegin’s formula
in the mouth of the poet himself, who, as he writes, triumphs over anguish
and despair: “Let misfortune nip at his heels, let slanderers scribble
lampoons and denunciations, let all life be barbarous and dulled, like
a feverish night in a sordid cook-shop beside a washed-out road […]
– and so burdensome is it to live that one can only sigh ‘Anguish,
anguish’ […] – but what does it matter – wrongs
irresistibly retreat as soon as lines of verse, along with the country
drizzle, begin to sputter forth.”40
The subtexts are commingled in precisely the same
way in Invitation to a Beheading, in which Cincinnatus—as
a poet overcoming anguish and the fear of death—is correlated with
the high standard set by Pushkin’s biographies, but—as a conventional
literary character originating in the consciousness of an all-seeing and
omniscient author—is correlated with the forms and hero’s
of Pushkin’s works. In the fourth chapter of the novel, for example,
after Cincinnatus’s question “tell me, when shall I die?”
(I 47) and the repeated exclamation “What anguish!”
which introduces the theme of the death of the poet, there follows the
phrase “He lamented for a while, groaned, cracked all his joints,
then got up from the cot, put on the abhorred dressing gown, and began
to wander around [poshel brodit’]” (I 48-49).
The expression “poshel brodit’,” which Nabokov
in his commentary to Eugene Onegin renders as “began to
roam,” immediately evokes three of Pushkin’s texts: the lines
from Onegin’s Journey devoted to the poet Tumanski (“Upon
arriving, he, like a true poet / went off to roam [poshel brodit’]
with his lorgnette / alone above the sea; and then / with an enchanting
pen / he glorified the gardens of Odessa”41);
“The Bronze Horseman” (“He stood; began to roam and
suddenly / Stopped – and all around / Quietly cast his gaze / With
wild fear on his face”); and to “The Wanderer”:
I began to roam anew, -- tormented by dejection
And turning my eyes with dread around me,
Like a prisoner contemplating escape from jail
Or a wayfarer fleeing rain towards a night’s lodging.
As surprising as it may seem,
all three Pushkinian subtexts turn out to be thematically relevant for
Invitation to a Beheading. The lines from Onegin’s
Journey—a tribute of friendship to an obviously less gifted,
but aesthetically not dissimilar poet—models the relationship of
the author to the hero in the novel (cf. also the important motif of the
Tamara Gardens, which “glorify” Cincinnatus). The terrible
clarity of thought and the seditiousness of the “poor madman”
in “The Bronze Horseman” recalls the clarity of thought and
seditiousness of Cincinnatus (it is hardly by chance that the narrator
of the novel addresses his hero exactly as Pushkin does Onegin: “My
poor little Cincinnatus” [I 65]; “But my poor, poor Eugene…”).
Finally, the allegory of “The Wanderer,” in which deliverance
from the worldly, overcoming fear of death, and spiritual enlightenment
are depicted as escape from a city that is doomed to “flames and
winds” (cf. the whirlwind that demolishes the city in the finale
of Invitation to a Beheading) and equated with the escape of
a prisoner from prison, finds itself a close parallel to the novel’s
poetics and to the hero’s existential situation.42 The lament of Pushkin’s
“spiritual toiler”:
…I am condemned to death and summoned to a postexistent
court –
And by this am I grieved; for justice I am not ready,
And death fills me with dread –
corresponds directly with what Cincinnatus writes before his execution:
It makes me ashamed to be afraid, but I am desperately afraid.
[…] For I know that horror of death is nothing really, a harmless
convulsion—perhaps even healthful for the soul […] nevertheless,
look, dummies, how afraid I am, how everything in me trembles, and dins,
and rushes—and any moment now they will come for me, and I am not
ready… (I 192-193).
Especially distinct references
to “The Wanderer” (as well as his lexically similar “The
Prophet”) are to be found in the passage in which Cincinnatus uses
the image of a “third eye” as a symbol of his secret knowledge:
“a mad eye, wide open, with a dilating pupil” (I 92-93; cf.
in “The Wanderer”: “With painfully open eye began to
stare”; in “The Prophet”: “Prophetic pupils opened”
and “stirred in my opened breast”).
It is significant that the phrase cited above, recalling
both “The Wanderer” and “The Prophet,” immediately
follows a direct allusion to Eugene Onegin in the novel, when
Cincinnatus exhibits his own kinship with Lenski: “…I write
obscurely and limply, like Pushkin’s lyrical duelist” (I
92). Even the central theme of Invitation to a Beheading links
the novel to those of Pushkin’s works in which the untimely demise
of a young poet is at issue. Besides Eugene Onegin, reference
should be made foremost to “André Chénier,”
in which a thirty-year-old (and at that time almost unknown) French poet
is depicted in a dungeon on the eve of his execution by guillotine. As
has been repeatedly mentioned above, Cincinnatus’s desperate pre-death
supplication, addressed to the void (or to the otherworld):
Save these jottings [eti listy, literally, these sheets]—I
do not know whom I ask, but save these jottings [eti listy]—I
assure you that such a law exists, look it up, you will see!—let
them lie around for a while—how can that hurt you?—and I ask
you so earnestly—my last wish—how can you not grant it? (I
194)
paraphrases the pre-death monologue of Pushkin’s Chénier:
Fulfill my last wish:
…………………………………………
Poems, the careless creations of flighty thought
Multiform, cherished traditions
Of my entire youth. Hopes, and dreams,
And tears, and love, friends, these sheets
Contain my whole life. Avel, Fanny,
I implore, find them, tributes to a guiltless muse
Preserve.
………………………………………….
Soon I shall wholly die. But out of love for my shade,
Keep the manuscript, O friends, for yourselves!43
By placing Cincinnatus on
the same footing as André Chénier and Lenski, Nabokov accentuates
and sharpens the most important aspect of the theme of the death of the
poet—the question of the immortality of his works, in which he will
remain alive for the ages, or, in the classical formula of Horace, Derzhavin
and Pushkin, “not wholly die” (non omnis moriar).
Pushkin’s Chénier sets out to be executed, certain that oblivion,
rather than immortality, awaits his “sheets”:
…the austere world, lofty renown
Will not know them. Alas, my head
Will prematurely fall: my unripe genius
Has crafted no sublime work for fame;
Soon I shall wholly die.
But this law of the poet’s
fate, to which Cincinnatus appeals, gathers these “sheets”
into the cultural memory, as evidenced by Pushkin’s verses devoted
to Chénier, framed by the epigraph and commentary with citations
from the poems he wrote on the eve of his death.
The youth-poet in Eugene Onegin (whom
the author, incidentally, calls “my poor Lenski” and treats
with the same gentle, affectionate irony with which the narrator of Invitation
to a Beheading speaks of Cincinnatus) also foresees oblivion for
himself:
Whilst I, perhaps—I shall descend
into the tomb’s mysterious shelter
and the young poet’s memory
slow Lethe will engulf;
the world will forget me… (6, XXII)44
But as the author emphasizes,
Lenski’s dying elegiac verses “chanced to be preserved,”45
and the author includes fragments of them in his novel, thanks to which
even the naïve and unskilled “young bard” does not wholly
die.
Although Cincinnatus dreams that “Some day
someone would read it and would suddenly feel just as if he had awakened
for the first time in a strange country” (I 51-52), his
absolute solitude in a world that has forsaken the creative spirit leaves
him no hope of repeating the posthumous fate of André Chénier.
At the very end, even he himself understands that to await recognition
from the world of “here” is senseless, and that he is destined
for “dust and oblivion” (I 211).
My papers you will destroy, the rubbish you will sweep out,
the moth will fly away at night through the broken window, so that nothing
of me will remain within these four walls, which are already about to
crumble (I 211).
Cincinnatus is compelled to write only by the feeling that the “force
which urges [him] to express [him]self” (I 95), having
endowed him with the “guilty flame” (I 75) of imagination
and freedom, is not of this world and that he is addressing not the imaginary
transient “here” but the eternal “there,” where
“the freaks that are tortured here walk unmolested” (I
94) and where their works are preserved.46 He realizes that the artist’s
task (the same as “the poet’s calling” according to
Blok), is “a task of not now and not here” (I 93),
and this is why, comparing his prose with the timeless forms of “ancient
verse,”47 he falls to despairing over his own creative inferiority.
In fact, one of the fundamental themes of his notes is their inadequacy
to express his secret knowledge. Cincinnatus speaks continually of his
zavist' k poetam (envy of poets; cf. I 194), of his
lack of skill in combining words, of his inability to express thought
and attain harmony. But his self-reflection is itself poetic in nature,
and in it a Pushkinian voice distinctly sounds:
Or will nothing come of what I am trying to tell, its only vestiges
being the corpses of strangled words, like hanged men… evening silhouettes
of gammas and gerunds, gallow crows— (I 90).48
Cincinnatus’s metaphors
and the musicality of his sentences hearken back to Pushkin’s last
major poem, “Alphonse on Horseback,” which remained unfinished:
Encircled by wasteland, desolation, the destitute
Whilst to one side a gamma looms
And from this gamma two bodies
Hang. A black throng of crows
Having begun to caw, flew off,
As soon as he rode up to them.
Cincinnatus’s lyrical
prose, to use the formula from The Gift, “feeds on Pushkin,”
absorbs and transmutes Pushkin’s forms, thereby demonstrating it
own participation in timeless tradition.
It is precisely this tradition with which the godlike
author, preserving Cincinnatus’s writings in the novel, identifies,
just as the author of Eugene Onegin preserves Lenski’s
poems. The name itself, what Blok called “the cheering name Pushkin,”
becomes his secret watchword—a sign that he gives both to the hero
and to readers in those key moments in which the theme of poetic immortality
is touched upon. An anagram of “A.S. Pushkin” is easy to discern
in the Russian original in the first description of “litsa tsinitsINnatA,
S PUSHKom na upalykh shchekakh”
(“Cincinnatus’s face […] with fuzz on its sunken cheeks”
[I 120]), which underlines not the outward, but the internal
indications of the hero—those to which his “fleshy incompleteness”
(I 120) points, the transparency of his skin and hair, the radiance
of his eyes, as if “one side of his being slid into another dimension”
(I 121). The “real life” of Cinicinnatus, about which
Nabokov speaks in this passage, is an emanation from the immortal creative
spirit, a “draft” from the otherworld, and Pushkin’s
name, concealed in the portrait, reveals the dual significance inherent
in Nabokov’s plan.
Analogous anagrams are to
be found in the novel’s culminating scene, when the hero, having
just written on the last sheet of paper the word “death” and
then immediately crossing it out, notices “korIchNevyi
PUSHoK” (“little brown
fuzz” [I 206])49—the trace left in his cell by the
mysterious moth—and soon discovers the moth itself, with “visionary
wings” (I 206): “…vot tol’ko zhalko
bylo mokhnatoi spINy, gde PUSHoK
v odnom meste stersia […] no gramadnye temnye kryl’ia s ikh
pepl’noi oPUSHKoi I vechNo
otverstymi ochami, byli neprikosvenny…” (“…only
he was sorry for the downy back where the fuzz had rubbed off leaving
a bald spot […] but the great dark wings, with their ashen edges
and perpetually open eyes, were inviolable…” [I 206]).
The expression vechno
otverstye ochi (“perpetually open eyes”), which again
refers us to the open pupils of “The Prophet” and the painfully
open eye of “The Wayfarer,” is evidence that the echoes of
Pushkin’s name in the description of the moth are by no means chance
coincidences or a researcher’s fantasy. In Nabokov’s view,
Pushkin’s “divine spirit”50 is eternal, and the authorial
consciousness in the novel is but one of its embodiments. It is Pushkin’s
heir, and bequeaths, in its turn, “open eyes” and a gift for
language to the novel’s hero, who vanquishes (“crosses out”)
death. The Pushkinian moth seen at that moment by Cincinnatus (and be
it noted, only by Cincinnatus) is a sign granted to the hero of parental
benevolence, recalling that for heirs to the eternal spirit of poetry,
death is only a stage of metamorphosis.
In an especially important episode in the novel,
when Cincinnatus attempts to learn from his mother who his mysterious
father is, she utters the deeply significant phrase “‘Tol’ko
golos, -- litsa ne vidala’” (“‘Only his voice—I
didn’t see the face’” [I 133]). It is impossible
not to notice that this phrase (like his mother’s other reply, “‘Bol’she
vam nichego skazhu’” [“‘I am not going to
tell you anything more’” (I 134)], a paraphrase of
Fet’s “I will tell you nothing”) takes the form of a
line of verse—anapestic trimester, which in and of itself discloses
Cincinnatus’s secret lineage. He is a son of the poetical word,
the divine Logos,51 referred to in Eugene
Onegin as a “life-creating voice,” and the story of his
conception is but a concretization of Pushkin’s metaphor. If we
recall that the mother of the “curly-headed” hero bears the
sacred name Cecilia, revered in Romantic literature as the patroness of
harmony,52 his genealogy acquires the
features of the universal myth about the birth of poetry as the union
of language and music. This is confirmed by yet another line (this time,
amphibrachic), with which Cecilia C. responds to her son’s questioning
about his father: “On tozhe, kak vy, TSintsinnat”
(“He was also like you, Cincinnatus…” [I 133]).
At issue, of course, is the essential intrinsic affinity of all creative
intelligences, the blood ties between all genuine artists in world culture—right
down to the imaginary last poet in a future world. Taking leave of Cincinnatus,
Cecilia C. (or, more accurately, the godlike author pulling the strings
of his obedient marionette) gives him a veiled sign of his immortal stock,
“delaia neveroiatnyi malen’kii zhest, a imenno stavliaia
ruki s protianutymi ukazatel’nymi pal’tsami, kak by pokazyvaia
razmer, --dlinu, skazhem, mladentsa…” (“making
an incredible little gesture, namely, holding her hands apart with index
fingers extended, as if indicating size—the length, say, of a babe…”
[I 136]). Nabokov uses here to good effect not only the Biblical
aphorism “...and the measure with which you measure will be measured
out to you” (Matthew 7:2)53 but
also the musico-literary meaning of the word razmer (measure,
implied rather than explicit in the English version) as the basis of harmony,
of rhythmic structure. The word takes us back to the theme of the poet’s
immortality, insofar as in an ode that serves as a model for poems entitled
“Monument” by Derzhavin and by Pushkin, Horace calls his chief
merit, thanks to which “the best part of [him] evades burial [literally,
‘escapes the goddess of death’” (“multaque
pars mei vitabit Libitinam”), bringing “Aeolian song”
into Italic “measures” (“ad italos… modos”).54
The maternal farewell gesture thus promises immortality to the “best
part” of Cincinnatus55—his
poetical voice, which, like the voice of his primogenitor, belongs not
to time, but to eternity.
In Baratynskii’s “The Last Poet,”56
the hero, like Cincinnatus the “unheralded child of Nature's dying
strength,” “Apollo’s heir,” a solitary rebel,
rejected by humankind, which has degenerated into a “lifeless skeleton”—casts
himself into the sea, in which he buries “his vision and his futile
gift,” while the world continues to shine with “heartless
splendor.” In the finale of Invitation to a Beheading,
Nabokov inverts Barantynskii’s gloomy prophecy. When the head of
his “last poet” is chopped off, not the poet, but the “sublunar
world,” having lost the last reason for its existence, dies.
Everything was coming apart. Everything was falling. A spinning
wind was picking up and whirling: dust, rags, chips of painted wood, bits
of gilded plaster, pasteboard bricks, posters; an arid gloom fleeted;
and amidst the dust, and the falling things, and the flapping scenery,
Cincinnatus made his way in that direction where, to judge by the voices,
stood beings akin to him (I 223).
As is the case with Cincinnatus’s
invisible father, the sole attribute of the beings “akin to him”
who meet him in the otherworld is their voices: borne of voice and having
found his own voice, the hero “does not wholly die,” and his
“best part” returns to its “native realm.” The
voice motif compels us to see in the novel’s finale a variation
on the classical theme of the meeting of poets in the hereafter, which
had undergone a wide diffusion in the Russian poetry of the first half
of the 19th century.57 It is paid tribute by, among others, Pushkin, who
in the first stanza of “André Chénier” responds
to Byron’s death, placing his shade in a poetic Elysium, where it
hearkens to a “choir of European lyres / near Dante.” Nabokov
himself uses the archaic topic of an Elysian meeting in early, rather
unsuccessful poems on the deaths of Blok and Gumilev: his Blok finds himself
in paradise, where he is welcomed by the shades of the “divine bards”
Pushkin, Lermontov, Tiutchev, and Fet, while his Gumilev “in the
Elysian silence” converses with Pushkin of “bronze Peter and
of the wild African winds”58
But the main subtext of the concluding sentence
of Invitation to a Beheading must be sought not in “André
Chénier” and not in Nabokov’s early verse, but in the
Dante referred to by Pushkin—more specifically, in the fourth canto
of “Hades,” in which a meeting with the spirits of the great
poets of antiquity is recounted. Making his way toward them after awakening
from a dream, Dante at first cannot clearly discern the noble inhabitants
of Limbo and only hears a certain voice (voce), addressed to
his guide Virgil:
Intanto voce fu per me udita:
“Onorate l’altissimo poeta:
l’ombra sua torna, ch’era departita. »
Poi che la voce fu restate e queta,
vidi quattro grand’ombre a noi venire :
sembianza avian ni trista ni lieta (IV, 79-84).
[At that moment I heard a voice:
“Welcome, exalted poet!
Returned is his shade, which had departed.”
When this voice ceased and silence fell,
I saw that toward us came four great shades:
in aspect neither melancholy nor cheerful.]
Immediately after this, Virgil
explains to Dante that the shades of Homer, Horace, Ovid, and Lucien are
greeting him, since they are all linked by a common name, uttered by a
“lone voice” (“la voce sola”)—or,
in other words, they all share the lofty title of poet and possess a voice
conferring immortality upon them.
The finale of Invitation
to a Beheading, in which the hero-poet, having awoken from a worldly
dream, approaches an assembly of beings akin to himself and hears their
voices, is a clear parallel to the episode from “Hades.” Throughout
the novel, his author does not conceal the fact that Cincinnatus is no
more than a fiction borne of his fantasy,59 and therefore we cannot know
exactly what kind of Elysian meeting has been prepared for him—that
same meeting with Pushkin, which Nabokov imagined for Blok and Gumilev
(and, perhaps, for himself), or a gathering of other literary character-poets
like Pushkin’s André Chénier and Lenski. Only one
thing can be said with certainty: whatever the case, at that meeting it
is not the “high, edifying voice” of Chernyshevskii, but the
“life-creating voice”60 of Pushkin that must surely resound.
(From the author’s Istinnaia
zhizn’ pisatelia Sirina: raboty o Nabokove [Sankt-Peterburg:
Akademicheskii proekt, 2004]. Translated and published here by permission
of the author.)
Notes
1. See especially the works of S. Davydov: S. Davydov,
“Nabokov and Pushkin,” in Transactions of the Association
of Russian-American Scholars in the U.S.A., 1987, Vol. 20, pp. 190-204;
S. Davydov, “‘Pushkinskie vesy’ V. Nabokova,”
in Iskusstvo Leningrada, 1991, No. 6, pp. 39-46; S. Davydov,
“Weighing Nabokov’s Gift on Pushkin’s Scales,”
in Cultural Mythologies of Russian Modernism: From the Golden Age
to the Silver Age, ed. by Boris Gasparov et al. (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1992), pp. 415-439; S. Davydov, “Nabokov and
Pushkin,” in The Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov,
ed. by V. Alexandrov (New York: Garland, 1995), pp. 482-495.
2. V. Nabokov, The Gift, trans. by Michael
Scammell with the collaboration of the author (London: Weidenfeld and
Nicolson, 1963), p. 97. Subsequent page references, preceded by G,
are to this edition.
3. On this topic see B. Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov:
The Russian Years (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 1990), pp. 416-417;
A. Dolinin, “The Gift,” in The Garland Companion
to Vladimir Nabokov, pp. 136-137; J. Connolly, “Invitation
to a Beheading: Nabokov’s Violin in a Void,” in Nabokov’s
Invitation to a Beheading: A Critical Companion, ed. by Julian
W. Connolly (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press : American
Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages, 1997),
pp. 32-33.
4. See N. Buhks, Eshafot v krustal’nom
dvortse. O russkikh romanakh Vladimira Nabokova (Moskva: Novoe literaturnoe
obozrenie, 1998), pp. 115-137 (the chapter referred to was published earlier,
twice, in article form: Cahiers du monde russe et sovietique,
1994, Vol. XXXV, No. 4, pp. 821-838; Zvezda, 1996, 1996, No.
11, pp. 157-167); A. Danilevskii, “N.G. Chernyshevskii v ‘Priglashenii
na kazn’’ V. Nabokova (Ob odnom iz podteksta romana),”
in Trudy po russkoi i slavianskoi filologiii. Literaturovedenie
(Tartu: Tartu Ülikooli Kirjastus) 1996, T. II (Novaia seriia), pp.
209-225.
5. V. Nabokov, Invitation to a Beheading,
trans. by Dmitri Nabokov in collaboration with the author (New York: G.P.
Putnam’s Sons, 1959), p. 205. Subsequent page references, preceded
by I, are to this edition. Page references to Priglashenie
na kazn’ are to Sobranie sochinenii russkogo perioda v
piati tomakh (Sankt-Peterburg : Simposium, 1999-2000), t. 4, and
are preceded by P.
6. For a Gnostic interpretation of Invitation
to a Beheading, see S. Davydov, “Teksty-matreshki”
Vladimira Nabokova (München: Sagner, 1982), pp. 100-102.
7. See V. Nabokov, Strong Opinions (New
York, N.Y.: Vintage Books, 1990), p. 76.
8. B. Boyd. “‘Welcome to the Block’:
Priglashenie na kazn’ / Invitation to a Beheading,
a Documentary Record,” in Nabokov’s Invitation to
a Beheading: A Critical Companion, p. 166.
9. Cf. A. Blok. Sobranie sochinenii v vos’mi
tomakh (Moskva : Gos. izd-vo khudozhestvennoi lit-ry, 1960-1963.),
t. 6, Proza 1918-1921, pp. 160-168.
10. V. Nabokov, “Pushkin, or the Real and
the Plausible.” Trans. Dmitri Nabokov. New York Review of Books,
Vol. 35, no. 5, 31 March 1988, pp. 38-42.
11. An early lecture by Nabokov on Pushkin is held
in his archive (Berg Collection. The New York Public Library).
12. E.A. Baratynskii. Polnoe sobranie stikhotvorenii
(Leningrad : Sov. Pisatel’, Leningradskoe otd-nie, 1989), p. 179.
13. The important theme in Invitation to a Beheading
of the moon, linked to the hero’s exits—both imaginary and
real—beyond the confines of the enclosed space can probably be traced
to the line from “Pamiatnik” “I slaven
budu ia, dokol’ v podlunnom mire / Zhiv khot’ odin piit”
(which Nabokov once translated as “And my sublunar fame will dwell
/ As long as there is one last bard alive”). Cincinnatus’s
first fantasy of escape includes a reference to a poet’s monument:
“Cincinnatus ran out into a circular plaza where the moon stood
watch over the familiar statue of a poet” (I 19). Cincinnatus’s
departure from the fortress to the banquet before the execution, to which
he is led along “kremnistiymi tropami” (“a
flinty path” [I 181]—an obvious allusion to Lermontov’s
image of a “kremnistyi put’” [stony path]),
also comprises the moon motif: the episode concludes with the ambiguous
phrase “The moon had already been removed” (I 191),
which presages the imminent destruction of the “sublunar world.”
14. See N. Buhks, op. cit., p. 132, footnote
18; A. Danilevskii, op. cit., p. 223, footnote 22; A. Field,
VN: The Life and Art of Vladimir Nabokov (New York: Crown, 1986),
p. 145.
15. Characteristic signs accentuated in descriptions
of the executioner—his “wonderfully white skin” (I
114) and “white biceps” (I 219)—as well as
a series of details in the episode of the execution (heavy axe, jovial
executioner, buzz of the crowd) recall the execution scene in Pushkin’s
“Poltava”:
In the middle of the field the fatal stage,
Upon it strolls, makes merry
The executioner and avidly awaits the victim,
Now with white hands grasping
Playfully the heavy axe,
Now jesting with the merry mob.
In the roar of voices everything has merged:
A woman’s cry, abuse, and laughter, and murmuring.
It should be noted that the words topor (axe) and ropot
(murmuring) appear in close proximity in Pushkin’s text and constitute
a palindrome that is actualized in Invitation to a Beheading. Cf.
“Voz'mi-ka slovo "ropot", -- govoril TSintsinnatu ego
shurin, ostriak, -- i prochti obratno. A? Smeshno poluchaetsia? Da, brat,
-- vliapalsia ty v istoriiu” (P 108) (literally, “Take
the word ropot [murmur],” Cincinnatus’s brother-in-law,
the wit, was saying to him. And now read it backwards. Eh? Comes out funny,
doesn’t it? Yes, friend, you’ve really got yourself in a mess.”
The palindrome being lost in English, Nabokov settled for wordplay that
retains the reference to axe: “Take the word ‘anxiety,’”
Cincinnatus’s brother-in-law, the wit, was saying to him. “Now
take away the word ‘tiny’, Eh? Comes out funny, doesn’t
it? Yes, friend, you’ve really got yourself in a mess” [I
103-104]; Translator's note).
16. Cf.: “Yes—one—the
first—the last—the best— / The Cincinnatus of the West”
(The Works of Lord Byron [Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions,
1994], p. 74).
17. The apocryphal phrase “I cannot tell a
lie” derives, of course, from the legendary incident in which the
young Washington, when asked by his father who chopped town his favorite
tree, acknowledges his guilt.
18. It is interesting that in an article dedicated
to memory of the Kazan jurist D.I. Meier, Chernyshevskii writes: “The
characters of ancient heroes, with poetical embellishments, have come
down to us—the Reguluses and Cincinnatuses, who ploughed the soil
of their tiny plots with the same zeal as they worked for the salvation
of the motherland—we do not believe that they were thus in reality.
But such natures are to be encountered in our midst.” Among contemporary
Cincinnatuses he counts “heroes of civic life, all of whose powers
are dedicated to the realization of the ideas of truth and goodness”—and
that such men, like the “inflexibly upright” Meier, thereby
recall the “great commander and ruler” George Washington as
the epitome of “civic valor” (See N.G. Chernyshevskii. Polnoe
sobranie sochinenii v piatnadtsati tomakh [Moskva: Gosudarstvennoe
izd. "Khudozh. Lit-ra,"1939-], t. 4, Stati i retsenzii 1856-1857,
pp. 670-672. A question arises: was it this article that prompted Nabokov
to give the “civic” name to his hero-poet and thereby invert
the opposition poet/citizen common in the 1860s?
19. In the literature on Invitation to a Beheading
the meaning of the Latin adjective cincinnatus has previously
been noted, but the explanations offered for the theme of “curly-headedness”
cannot be considered fully satisfactory. Nora Buhks avers that Cincinnatus
is a fallen angel and that his golden curls mimic an angel’s halo
(See N. Buhks, op. cit., p. 133, note 18), whereas Gavriel Shapiro
sees in the hero’s significant name an allusion to Lenski’s
“shoulder-length black curls” in Eugene Onegin (See
G. Shapiro, Delicate Markers: Subtexts in Vladimir Nabokov’s
Invitation to a Beheading [New York: Peter Lang, 1998], p. 135, note 21).
20. See A. Dolinin, Kommentarii in V. Nabokov,
Izbrannoe (Moskva, Izd-vo "Raduga," 1990), pp. 657-658.
21. See V. Veresaev, Pushkin v zhizni: sistematicheskii
svod podlinnykh svidetel’stv sovremennikov, 6-e izd., znachitel’no
dopolnennoe, v 2 T. (Moskva: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1936), T. 2, pp.
252-254.
22. The prototype for this formula appears to be
a line about Korsakov from “19 oktiabria” (19 October)
by Pushkin himself: “He did not come, our frizzy songster”—
and the fact that Pushkin applies the term to someone else (as if forwarding
mail originally addressed to him) heightens its significance. I am indebted
for this observation to B.A. Kats, with whom I discussed the basic ideas
of this article to great benefit and to whom I am grateful for advice
and encouragement.
23. Cited in V. Kallash. Russkie poety o Pushkine:
sbornik stikhotvorenii (Moskva: Tip. G. Lissnera i A. Geshelia, 1899),
p. 95.
24. See Venok Pushkinu, 2-e izd., ispr.
I dop. (Moskva: "Sov. Rossiia," 1987), pp. 61, 65, 77.
25. IU. Tynianov. Kiukhlia ; Smert’ Vazir-Mukhtara
(Leningrad: Lenizdat, 1971), p. 12.
26. See I. Lukash, “Durnoi arapchonok,”
in Taina Pushkina: Iz prozy i publitsistiki pervoi emigratsii
(Moskva: Ellis Lak, 1998), p. 39.
27. See Sobranie sochinenii russkogo perioda
v piati tomakh (Sankt-Peterburg : Simposium, 1999-2000), t. 2, p.
320. The Defense (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1964), p. 33.
28. Cited in Venok Pushkinu: iz poezii pervoi
emigratsii (Moskva : Ellis Lak, 1994), p. 75.
29. See M. Tsvetaeva. Sobranie stikhotvorenii,
poem i dramaticheskikh proizvedenii v trekh tomakh (Moskva: Prometei,
1990-1993), t. 1, pp. 191-192.
30. M. Tsvetaeva. Stikhotvoreniia i poemy,
Izd. 3-e (Leningrad : Sov. Pisatel’, Leningradskoe otd-nie, 1990),
p. 414. Translation by JE.
31. The Russian word Nabokov chose to render as
“fur carrick” is bekesh’, defined in Dal’s
dictionary as a “siurtuk, kaftanchik ili chekmenek na mekhu”
(frock-coat, short caftan or chekmen of fur). A more recent Russian dictionary,
Slovar’ russkogo iazyka v chetyrekh tomakh (Moskva: Gos.
izd-vo inostrannykh i natsional’nykh slovarei, 1957-1961) gives
the term in an alternate form, bekesha, defines it as a “muzhskoe
pal’to starinnogo pokroia so sborkami v talii” (a man’s
overcoat of old-fashioned cut with gathers at the waist), and cites an
example of its usage from Lev Tolstoy’s Detstvo (Childhood).
The word derives from the Hungarian bekeš. Elsewhere Nabokov
uses “carrick” to render the Russian word shinel’
(overcoat, greatcoat), the original title of Gogol’s famous short
story “The Overcoat.” For Nabokov’s sketch of a “furred
carrick,” see his Lectures on Russian Literature (New York:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich/Bruccoli Clark, 1980), p. 56. The carrick coat,
named after English actor David Carrick, supposedly the first person to
have had one made, features a deep cape and ample sleeves and is akin
to the Inverness cloak or overcoat worn by coachmen to protect them from
inclement weather (Translator's note).
32. If Cincinnatus’s physical features can
be seen as equating him with the Pushkin doll, the original Russian text
of this article allows Dolinin to extend the metaphor further by seeing
Cincinnatus as poetic genius in its pupal form: the original Russian for
“rag dolls for schoolgirls” is “miagkikh kukol dlia
shkol’nits.” The word kukol’ka (diminutive
of kukla, doll) means both “dolly, little doll” and
“chrysalis, pupa.” The same etymological kinship exists in
English: both puppet and pupa ultimately derive from
the Latin pupa meaning girl, doll. Note too that if Cincinnatus
is destined to pass, in the novel’s final paragraph, from the third
to the final stage of metamorphosis (pupa to imago), his officious inversion,
M’sieur Pierre, now nameless, is destined to move in the opposite
direction: “The last to rush past was a woman in a black shawl,
carrying the tiny executioner like a larva in her arms” (I
223) (Translator’s note).
33. V. Veresaev, op. cit., p. 251. Gavriel
Shapiro groundlessly traces the image of Pushkin in a fur carrick to a
well-known drawing by Pushkin, in which he depicts himself and Evgenii
Onegin on the embankment of the Neva (see G. Shapiro, op. cit.,
pp. 132-133). Shapiro’s assertion notwithstanding, both figures
in the drawing, illustrating stanzas XLVII-XLVIII of the novel’s
first chapter, are not in fur carricks, but in frock-coats, which is entirely
natural given the “summer-tide” being described by Pushkin.
34. V. Veresaev, op. cit., p. 388.
35. Ibid., p. 419.
36. Ibid., p. 422. Cf. G. Shapiro, op. cit.,
p. 131.
37. It should be noted that the chief themes of
the two preceding retorts are libraries and books, both of which can be
linked to Pushkin’s dying vision, which he succeeded in relating
to Dal’: “I dreamt that I was clambering with you upon these
books and shelves, high up—and my head began to swim” (V.
Veresaev, op. cit., p. 426). In the early poem “The Death
of Pushkin,” Nabokov accentuates precisely this moment: “On
the wound – ice. In his delirium he climbed / Bookshelves –
higher, to the skies… / Ah, higher!... Sweat glistened on his brow.
In short, -- / He died; but for a long time from the earth / could not
part…” (cited in Pushkinu : iz poezii pervoi emigratsii,
p. 46; translation by JE).
38. The theme of anguish arises again in the scene
of Cincinnatus’s second meeting with his wife, the Pushkinian subtext
being introduced in this case by means of a reference to the second part
of his dying exclamation: “My heart is tormented,” and also
by means of the repeated “’Tis time, ‘tis time,”
characteristic of Pushkin’s poetry. Cf. “At the same time
his heart was aching […] but it was time, it was time to wean himself
from all this anguish” (I 199). Khodasevich writes of Pushkin’s
“exceptional fondness” for the exclamation “’Tis
time!” in “Pushkin’s Poetic Economy” (see the
most recent edition: V. Khodasevich. Pushkin i poety ego vremeni:
v trekh tomakh, pod redaktsiei Roberta Kh’iuza (Berkeley, CA:
Berkeley Slavic Specialties, 1999- ), T. 1, Stat’i, retsenzii,
zametki 1913-1924 gg., p. 126).
39. V. Veresaev, op. cit., p. 120.
40. Berg Collection. New York Public Library. Nabokov
V. Box 6. Album.
41. Nabokov’s literal rendering; see Eugene
Onegin: A Novel in Verse (New York: Bolligen Foundation; distributed
by Pantheon Books, 1964), v. 1, p. 340.
42. On Invitation to a Beheading as allegory,
see P.M. Bitsilli, “Vozrozhdenie allegorii,” Sovremennye
zapiski, 1935, No. 61, pp. 191-204.
43. On this topic, see, for example, S. Davydov,
Nabokov and Pushkin, p. 488; A. Dolinin, “Thriller Square
and The Place de la Révolution: Allusions to the French Revolution
in Invitation to a Beheading,” The Nabokovian,
No. 38 (Spring 1997), pp. 43-49. It cannot be ruled out that also reflected
in Invitation to a Beheading is the “Andrei Shen’e”
(André Chénier) of Marina Tsvetaeva. In any case, the stanza
“Hands drop the notebook, / Touch the thin neck. / Morning sneaks
in, like a thief. / I cannot finish writing” (M. Tsvetaeva, Stikhotvoreniia
i poemy, p. 376; translation by JE) correspond to two passages in
the novel—the scene in which Cincinnatus mechanically touches his
“awfully thin” neck, which M’sieur Pierre examines carefully
(I 109), and the hero’s statement, “To finish writing
something” (I 209), uttered just before he is led off to
his execution.
44. EO, 6, XXI, Nabokov’s translation,
Eugene Onegin, v. 1, p. 246.
45. EO, 6, XXXI, Nabokov’s translation,
Ibid., v. 1, p. 245.
46. From a whole series of possible subtexts for
Nabokov’s play on the oft-repeated tam (there), Pekka Tammi
specifies lines about the theater from the first chapter of Eugene
Onegin: “there, there, beneath the shelter of coulisses / my
young days sped” (XVIII, lines 13-14; see Pekka Tammi, Russian
Subtexts in Nabokov’s Fiction: Four Essays [Tampere, Finland:
Tampere University Press, 1999], p. 53). But the anaphoristic and emphatic
repetition of tam in various positions is encountered so often
in Russian poetry (including Pushkin’s) that in the given case it
seems impossible in principle to establish any concrete subtext. Nabokov,
it might be said, is quoting the language of poetry rather than a specific
poetic text. It should be noted in this regard that tam in the
novel signifies an imaginary other world, and therefore its repetition,
if one were to choose from the dozens of analogous cases in Pushkin, one
should sooner recall the Prologue to Ruslan and Liudmila, in
which tam is repeated fourteen times. In an unpublished lecture
on Pushkin, Nabokov singles out this prologue and writes, in part: “‘Tam
na nevedomykh dorozhkakh / sledy nevidannykh zverei’ (‘There
on unfamiliar paths / The tracks of unknown beasts’)—these
are two of the most magical, most enigmatic lines penned by him”
(translation by JE).
47. In Invitation to a Beheading the English
translation of this phrase is singular, “an ancient poem”
(I 53), whereas the Russian original is plural, drevnikh
stikhov, literally “[of] ancient poems”; in the context
of Dolinin’s argument, the term “verse” has been supplied
(Translator’s note).
48. In the English translation, as if to point more
explicitly to Pushkin’s unfinished poem by linking the letter “G,”
(corresponding to the Russian letter shaped like a capital Greek gamma)
with a gallows, Nabokov adds the words gerund and gallow,
both lacking in the Russian original: “Ili nichego ne poluchitsia
iz togo, chto khochu rasskazat’, a lish’ ostanutsia chernye
trupy udavlennykh slov, kak visel’niki… vechernie ocherki
glagolei, voron’e…” (literally, “Or will
nothing come of what I am trying to tell, only the black corpses of strangled
words remaining, like hanged men… the evening outlines of gammas
[glagolei], crows”). While the evening silhouette of a
gamma is easy to visualize, the silhouette of a gerund is not. Aside from
its initial “g,” gerund—a verb form—may have been
suggested to Nabokov by the similarity of glagol’, an antiquated
name for the Russian gamma, to glagol, meaning verb, or more
broadly, in obsolete usage, word (Translator’s note).
49. Note too that the Russian phrase is immediately
followed, set off by commas as if for emphasis, by the “otherworldly”
tam: “korinevyi pushok, tam, gde ona nedavno trepetala….”
Cf. note 45 above (Translator’s note).
50. “Pushkin, or the Real and the Plausible.”
51. Note that in Russian, logos (Logos,
word) is an anagram of golos (voice). Cf. the end of note 14
above (Translator's note).
52. See especially the poem about Cecilia included
in the well-known book by Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder and Ludwig Tieck,
Herzensergiessungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders [Outpourings
of an Art-Loving Friar] (Berlin: Bei Johann Friedrich Unger, 1797), translated
into Russian by S.P. Shevyrev as Ob iskusstvie i khudozhnikakh. Razmyshleniia
otshel’nika, liubitelia iziashchnago (Moskva: B Tip. S. Selivanovskago,
1826, republished in 1914). In the Platonic excerpt by V.F. Odoevskii
“Cecilia” from the book Russkie nochi (Russian Nights),
the hero is likened to a prisoner attempting to catch, through the iron
bars, the sounds of gilded organs, “playing in a temple, dedicated
to the patroness of harmony,” but “only vague reflections
and confused echoes” reach him (V.F. Odoevskii, Russkie nochi
[Leningrad: Nauka, Leningr. otd-nie, 1975], p. 59; translation by JE).
53. Cf. the inscription left on the wall of Cincinnatus’s
prison cell by his anonymous predecessor: “Smer’te do
smerti, -- potom budet pozdno” (“Measure me while I live—after
it will be too late” [I 26]).
54. See also the expression “harmonious measures”
in Pushkin’s “Conversation of a Bookseller with a Poet.”
55. It should be noted that Nabokov anticipates
the portrait of Cincinnatus in which Pushkin’s name is anagrammatically
embedded with the authorial explanation that defines his creative consciousness
as his “greater part” which finds itself “in a quite
different place” (I 120)—in my view indisputably
a reference to Horace’s “best part.”
56. Cf. http://www.litera.ru/stixiya/authors/baratynskij/vek-shestvuet-putem.html.
57. It is appropriate to recall here, in connection
with the scene of the action and the plot of Invitation to a Beheading,
that this theme is treated in a whole series of poems by Kiukhel’beker,
written in a fortress and in exile: in “My Mother,” in which
the poet prophecies for himself an Elysian meeting with Dante, Tasso,
and Homer; in “Elizaveta Kul’man,” with its
image of an otherworldly “there” (tam), a land “where
poets suffer not”; in “October 19, 1937,” depicting
Pushkin in a circle of “transcendental friends” (literally,
“friends beyond the clouds”), etc. (cf. V.K. Kiukhel’beker.
Izbrannye proizvedeniia v dvukh tomakh [Moskva; Leningrad: Sov.
Pisatel’, 1967], t. 1, p. 249, 281, 296). The line from Kiukhel’beker’s
“Three Shades,” “Vse obmanulo, krome vdokhnoven’ia”
(“All deceives, except inspiration”) (Ibid., p. 303) seems
to be echoed by a phrase in the last fragment written by Cincinnatus:
“Vse obmanulo, soidias’, vse” (“Everything
has duped me as it fell in to place, everything” [I 205]).
58. V. Nabokov, Sobranie sochinenii russkogo
perioda v piati tomakh (Sankt-Peterburg : Simposium, 1999-2000),
t. 1, pp. 449, 605 (translation of fragments by JE).
59. The relationship of the author and character
in the novel has been studied in detail and convincingly interpreted in
Julian W. Connolly’s remarkable book on Nabokov’s Russian
prose (Julian W. Connolly, Nabokov’s Early Fiction: Patterns
of Self and Other [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992],
pp. 166-184).
60. The contrast between the two phrases is more
pronounced in Russian, making Dolinin’s juxtaposition more striking.
The first (“tonkii, nazidatel’nyi golos”) is
taken from Dar; the second (“zhivotvoriashchii glas”)
from Evgenii Onegin. In The Gift, the former was rendered
by Michael Scammell (presumably with Nabokov’s approval, since he
collaborated with Scammell on the translation) as “high, edifying
voice.” Nabokov translated the latter quite literally for his Eugene
Onegin as “life-creating voice.” These renderings have
been retained. The translator would like to have captured more of the
contrast inherent in the original, particularly the distinction between
the terms golos (the common Russian word for voice, which, when
spoken, causes the speaker to round the lips) and glas (the poetical
word for voice, a more regal and resounding term, the utterance of which
causes the speaker to sketch a smile) by rendering the former as “shrill,
didactic speech” while retaining Nabokov’s literal rendering
of the latter: “life-creating voice” (Translator's note).
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