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Gogolesque Perception-Expanding Reversals in Nabokov
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 January 2017
Extract
Vladimir Nabokov's acrobatic disclaimers may often be safely qualified, and his strenuous self-estrangement from Gogol is no exception. Indeed, these two very different writers are surprisingly alike in many ways, ranging from a fondness for depicting poshlust to a deep preoccupation with painting. Parallels and parodies are of course mostly unlabeled. But perhaps more important than the artistic purpose behind Gogolisms in Nabokov is that the mechanisms of many similar effects are nearly identical. And uniquely so. Both writers frequently contrive very similar “reversal effects” that conduce to a sudden, fresh view of “reality” and, somewhat paradoxically, a simultaneous and unsettling awareness of human perceptual limitations.
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References
1. “Desperate Russian critics, trying hard to find an Influence and to pigeonhole my own novels, have once or twice linked me up with Gogol, but when they looked again I had untied the knots and the box was empty.” Vladimir, Nabokov, Nikolai Gogol (New York, 1944), p. 1944 Google Scholar. “It is Gogol's world and as such wholly different from Tolstoy's world, or Pushkin's, or Chekhov's or my own” (p. 144). Both assertions deceptively effect an illusion of dissimilarity far greater than that which is in fact claimed. Also typically, they seem carefully calculated to discourage attempts at comparing Nabokov with—and perhaps thus finding him partly dependent upon—Gogol. When asked in 1967 if Gogol had influenced him, Nabokov replied: “I was careful not to learn anything from him. As a teacher, he is dubious and dangerous… . at his best, he is incomparable and inimitable.” Vladimir, Nabokov, “The Art of Fiction,” Paris Review, no. 41 (1967), p. 106 Google Scholar. To deny being the pupil of a sometimes inimitable writer is still not necessarily to deny natural affinity and perhaps even influence.
2. This evocative transliteration of the Russian word poshlost' is Nabokov's. See Nikolai Gogol, p. 63, and “Art of Fiction,” p. 103. A long passage in The Gift strikingly parallels Nabokov's famous explanation of poshlust. For example, “the father with a prize growth on his pleased face, the mother with her imposing bosom; the dog is also looking at the table, and envious Grandma can be seen ensconced in the background“ (The Gift [New York, 1963], p. 22); “mother clasps her hands in dazed delight, the children crowd around, all agog, Junior and the dog strain up to the edge of the table where the Idol is enthroned; even Grandma of the beaming wrinkles peeps out somewhere in the background” (Nikolai Gogol, p. 66).
3. In cases where Nabokov alludes to Gogol, the potential influence seems relatively obvious: “Luzhin was sitting sideways at the table on which, frozen in various poses like the characters in the concluding scene of Gogol's The Inspector General, were the remains of the refreshments, empty and unfinished glasses” (The Defense [New York, 1964], p. 232).
4. Not without good reason, perhaps, has Nabokov spoken of Gogol's “Pandora's box mind” (Nikolai Gogol, p. 118).
5. Ibid., p. 142. Dmitry Chizhevsky has of course written extensively on Gogol's often astonishing usage of the word “even” (dazhe). See his “O ‘Shineli’ Gogolia,” Sowemennye zapiski (Paris), 67 (1938): 173-74, 178-84. Nabokov himself also uses the words “even” and “almost,” among others, in a similar way, and he has even revealed the device in his own writing: “Almost nightly—and what monstrous melancholy lurked in that ‘almost'—… .” King, Queen, Knave (New York, 1968), p. 81. On the next page: ”… he perceived almost without looking the tense sheen of her stocking… .“ Consider also the perversely evocative potential of Gradus's stop in a “nice, modern, almost odorless lavatory” (Pale Fire [New York, 1966], p. 193), which combines Gogolian poshlust (“nice“) with faintly disturbing suggestiveness (“almost“). The poshlusty “nice” echoes and re-echoes in Gradus's “nice” stay at the Beverland Hotel (p. 195) and his drinking “two paper-cupfuls of nice cold milk from [of course] a dispenser“ (p. 198). The word “really” works similarly tainted wonders in King, Queen, Knave.
6. Nabokov's Dozen (New York, 1958), p. 145, my italics.
7. King, Queen, Knave, pp. 7, 81, 83, my italics.
8. Laughter in the Dark (New York, 1966), p. 16, my italics.
9. Despair (New York, 1966), pp. 19, 20, 71, my italics.
10. Lolita (New York, 19S9), p. 257, and King, Queen, Knave, pp. 22, 206, my italics.
11. Gogol, N. V., Sobranie sochinenii, 6 vols. (Moscow, 1959), 1: 44 Google Scholar, my italics. For two more see 3: 32. Subsequent references to Gogol's work will be to this edition; unless otherwise specified, all translations are my own.
12. Pale Fire, p. 16, my italics. For two more see Laughter in the Dark, p. 21, and The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (Norfolk, Conn., 1959), p. 28.
13. Gogol, , Sobranie sochinenii, 3: 159 Google Scholar. The translation and italics are Nabokov's (Nikolai Gogol, p. 148).
14. Gogol, , Sobranie sochinenii, 5: 124, 4: 45, 1: 32Google Scholar, my italics.
15. Borges, Jorge Luis, Labyrinths (New York, 1964), p. 1964 Google Scholar.
16. Despair, p. 59, and King, Queen, Knave, pp. 102, 202, my italics.
17. With amazing accuracy, Nabokov reversely translates “blessed” into Russian as “cursed” (prokliatoe) in the Russian version of Lolita (New York, 1967), p. 122.
18. With what one suspects may be the natural, if unwitting, symmetry of true genius, inquisitive cockroaches earlier seem to transfer to a nosy hotel neighbor some of their own silent attentiveness. Gogol, , Sobranie sochinenii, 5: 8 Google Scholar, echoed on p. 181.
19. Speak, Memory (New York, 1966), p. 101.
20. Pnin (New York, 1965), p. 30.
21. Incidentally, these two men are next described by a false contrast similar to that which introduces Gogol's arguing Ivans, whereupon they even seem “early evening“ Gogolian Amateurs of Boots: “both wore elegant jackboots of soft black leather, and the sky turned away showing its ethereal vertebrae.” (They are “silhouetted against the now flushed sky.“) If the parallels with Gogol are intended, they are now complete even with Gogolian reaction to Gogolian poshlust. Moreover, the reaction itself derives from a typically eerie reversal of point of view. Similarly, it seems possible that Nabokov has spread Gogol's famous garrison-soldier-uniform sky ( Gogol, , Sobranie sochinenii, 5: 23 Google Scholar; Nikolai Gogol, p. 78) over three places in his own works: “The Poets,” Tri- Quarterly, Winter 1970, pp. 4-5; The Eye (New York, 1966), pp. 6, 84.
But such tempting potential parallels are virtually endless. In a corner-room shop of the hotel where Chichikov first stops, there is a man in the window “with a samovar of red copper and a face exactly as red as the samovar, so that from afar one could have thought that in the window were standing two samovars, if one samovar had not been with a black as pitch beard” (Gogol, 5: 8). The Russian word order has here been ruthlessly maintained in translation because it contributes to the humorous reversal. For example, the words “two samovars” should immediately precede and thereby enhance the deception of “one samovar,” which, in turn, should be deprived of the word “beard“ as long as possible to sustain the deception.
Nabokov may be seen to stop “prudently” short of a similar reversal in telling us that Mr. Piffke (King, Queen, Knave) had “a profile that had prudently stopped halfway between man and teapot” (p. 77). In The Gift one finds “Mme Chernyshevski, becoming for a moment—as usually happens—remarkably similar to her own (blue, gleaming) teapot” (p. 43).
Nabokov's world, as he claims, is surely quite different from Gogol's, yet also surely, there are similarities—from apparent territorial “reality” to minute verbal ritual.
22. Gogol, , Sobranie sochinenii, 5: 105 Google Scholar. The translation and brackets are Nabokov's (Nikolai Gogol, p. 98).
23. Gogol, , Sobranie sochinenii, 5: 447 and 313Google Scholar.
24. The Walts Invention (New York, 1966), pp. 53-54.
25. The denial may even be deemed a triple one, since the “narrator” (the story is in the form of a letter) repeatedly claims his wife “never existed” (Nabokov's Dozen, pp. 103, 109, 111).
26. Ada (New York, 1969), p. 445.
27. And thus the treatment may be seen to reach disturbingly on beyond Borges, who raises similar questions, but with much less near-sadistic relish. See, for example, Labyrinths, pp. 28, 50.
28. “Gogol's guns,” Nabokov writes, “hang in midair and do not go off—in fact the charm of his allusions is exactly that nothing ever comes of them” (Nikolai Gogol, p. 44). Humbert's gun does not shoot Lolita, nor Albinus's gun Margot, nor Van's gun himself. Neither is Hermann's “double” his double, the “doomed” Dreyer is not drowned, and so on. Gogol's Inspector General ends in an almost inevitable reversal, just as Dead Souls—as it has survived and is discussed by its author—evokes a ghostly, projected about-face. Even the famous ending of a Gogol short story—“It is dreary in this world, ladies and gentlemen!” (2: 245)—may be taken as a disturbing reversal simply by emphasizing the word “this.“
29. “No I . . I cannot 1 . . Give me another pen!; ( Gogol, , Sobranie sochinenii, 2: 240 Google Scholar); ” … all New England for a lady-writer's pen!” exclaims Humbert (Lolita, p. 47).
30. Gogol, , Sobranie sochinenii, 3: 43 Google Scholar.
31. Speak, Memory, p. 296.
32. Nikolai Gogol, p. 149.