More
about Nabokov, about whom I could go on and on--and will. He is cold and
unfeeling, a mere manipulator of human pawns, say the ignorant or bloody-minded
(or career Nabokov-haters, a rabid school of troglodytes motivated as much by
class hatred and inverted snobbery as anything: Les aristos à l'échafaud). That this is utter nonsense can be
proved at a glance, by reading any of his works; few writers I know of have
anything like his instinctive, heartfelt reaction to adumbrations of cruelty
and hints of malice. (I corresponded on this topic with Patrick Kurp, he of the excellent blog Anecdotal
Evidence, not long ago.) In The Gift, Nabokov's Russian masterpiece, he
foreshadows the monstrosities of Lenin and Stalin through the ardent and quite
harmless lucubrations of Siberia-exiled Chernyshevsky, his real-life nineteenth-century
antihero, who lays the ground for the beast to come. Laughter in the Dark is a chilling Grand Guignol of sadism, with
the author firmly and clearly in opposition. Of Lolita, what more can be said than that VN drew the portrait of foul
perversion once and for all, and drove the stake through the perpetrator's
heart against a black curtain of the poor girl's tragic fate.
And,
from wonderful, underrated Pnin, there's
this quick, devastating evocation of Pnin's old love, a victim of the Nazis:
"...In order to exist rationally, Pnin had taught himself . . .
never to remember Mira Belochkin – not because . . . the evocation of a
youthful love affair, banal and brief, threatened his peace of mind . . . but
because, if one were quite sincere with oneself, no conscience, and hence no
consciousness, could be expected to subsist in a world where such things as
Mira's death were possible. One had to forget – because one could not live with
the thought that this graceful, fragile, tender young woman with those eyes,
that smile, those gardens and snows in the background, had been brought in a
cattle car and killed by an injection of phenol into the heart, into the gentle
heart one had heard beating under one's lips in the dusk of the past."
Pretty unfeeling/cold/indifferent,
eh? Martin Amis, in an excellent and illuminating essay, points out how this
paragraph resonates in light of "Primo Levi's crucial observation that we
cannot, we must not, 'understand what happened' [at Auschwitz]. Because
to 'understand' it would be to 'contain' it. 'What happened' was 'non-human,'
or 'counter-human,' and remains incomprehensible to human beings."
Nabokov's
compassion runs deep, and is the very essence of his art. "Beauty plus pity," as he famously said, "that is the closest
we can get to a definition of art. Where there is beauty there is pity, for the
simple reason that beauty must die: beauty always dies, the manner dies with
the matter, the world dies with the individual."
