#19 - JRL 8034
From: "Melvin Anders" <melvinanders@usa.com>
Date: Sun, 25 Jan 2004 22:05:54 -0600
Subject: Whispers of Nabokov's Ghost

The central theme in Russian life these days is what might generously be called, in the words of Vladimir Nabokov, an “incredible flexibility to pardon evil.” After assuming the presidency at the turn of the 20th century, Russian president Vladimir Putin (a proud lifelong member of the KGB) has made innumerable moves pushing Russia back into line with its dark authoritarian past, and faced virtually no opposition either within Russia or in the international community. A Google search for “dying Russia” yields 155,000 entries.

The Soviet national anthem (written to glorify dictator Josef Stalin) has been resurrected, millionaire businessman Mikhail Khodorkovsky (thought to be a potential presidential contender and an ardent, solitary reformer of Russia’s corrupt corporate culture) has been arrested and held without bail, and the most recent edition of a respected high school history text in wide circulation has been pulled from the shelves on Kremlin orders because it asked students to think critically about whether Putin is an autocrat.

Rife with allegations of fraud, recent parliamentary elections have obliterated both of the opposition political parties and inundated the legislature with cronies of the president, and the economy continues to languish in classically Soviet doldrums. It is hardly inappropriate to refer to a “neo-Soviet Union” arising now in Russia, and frightening to see how little opposition in the world community it faces. Analogies to Munich come too easily.

The life of Nabokov sheds considerable light on these proceedings: His biography is characterized by fleeing. Born at the turn of the 19th century, his family fled Russia after the Bolshevik revolution, came to rest in Germany, and then fled again to escape the Nazi regime. Having settled in the U.S. he became a citizen in 1945, only to flee fifteen years later to Switzerland where he died in 1977. As Nabokov blanched at communism and fascism, he likewise eschewed the kind of capitalist notoriety that only America can bestow upon the author of such a book as “Lolita.” Throughout his life, Nabokov undertook virtually no effort to use his literary talent criticize or seek to reform any of the three societies from which he fled. He preferred to simply run away.

Most aficionados of Russian literature know that in 1964 Nabokov published a translation of Alexander Pushkin’s novella-in-verse “Eugene Onegin” -- an effort that required four entire volumes so that Nabokov could explain in excruciating detail all the fine nuances of writing and culture embodied in that Russian masterpiece, most famous of all literature in Russia. The one thing that Nabokov forgot in translating Onegin was to make the work itself charmingly readable in English, as it is in Russian (something that in fairness no other translator has achieved either, and Pushkin remains very much obscure in the wider world -- so too, the Russians’ affinity for him).

What even aficionados may not know, however, is that in 1958 Nabokov also published his translation of the prose novella “A Hero of Our Time” by the writer whom Russians consider to be Pushkin’s successor, namely Mikhail Lermontov (the 194-page translation contains 129 footnotes by Nabokov). This translation was eclipsed by the sensation created by “Lolita,” published in the United States for the first time in the same year, and is now almost impossible to find on the shelves.

More’s the pity, because there is high irony in Nabokov translating Lermontov when we see Nabokov’s life and personal attitudes in perspective, and we can see what attracted him to the work. The first chapter of Nabokov’s translation contains the following paragraph (these words are being spoken by Lermontov himself, in the guise of the narrator): “I could not help being struck by the capacity of the Russian to adapt himself to the customs of that people among which he happens to be living. I do not know whether this trait of the mind deserves blame or praise, but it attests to his incredible flexibility and the presence of that lucid common sense that pardons evil wherever it recognizes its necessity or the impossibility of its abolishment.”

The other side of this coin comes when Lermontov even more directly addresses the reader in his preface to the novel: “You will say that morality gains nothing [from recognizing human character flaws]. I beg your pardon. People have been fed enough sweetmeats; it has given them indigestion: they need some bitter medicine, some caustic truths. However, do not think after this that the author of this book ever had the proud dream of becoming a reformer of mankind’s vices. The Lord preserve him from such benightedness! He merely found it amusing to draw modern man such as he understood him, such as he met him -- too often, unfortunately, for him and you. Suffice it to say that the disease has been pointed out; goodness knows how to cure it.”

Oddly, these words were hardly applicable to Lermontov himself, who was banished to the Causcus mountains in 1837 by the Tsar as punishment for writing an acidic poem attacking the Tsar’s court for allegedly engineering the death of Pushkin in a duel. Lermontov believed, as do many others, that Pushkin was seen as a political threat to the monarchy (the groundswell of revolution was just beginning), and that the palace needed him out of the way. Ironically, the same rumors circulate about Lermontov himself, who was killed in a duel four years later after returning to Russia and continuing his provocative, revolution-sympathetic behavior. The time Lermontov spent in the Caucuses provided him the background for “A Hero of Our Time.”

But Nabokov himself did not even go as far as Lermontov’s narrator, much less Lermontov himself. He assimilated, and then when assimilation perturbed him, he disappeared like a ghost. Russians like Lermontov and Pushkin -- and Solzhenitsin, and Dosteovsky -- who are willing to take the monumental risks of confrontation are few and far between and seem to have lived and died in vain (further discouraging successors).

And most Russians do not even go so far as Nabokov. Most Russians, of course, do not have the luxury of fleeing because, unlike Nabokov, they were not born into a family of means and nobility. And instead of seeking to acquire the means to flee, or struggling to alter reality, these Russians by and large choose to live at home just as did Lermontov’s Russia’s abroad -- with an incredible flexibility to pardon evil. Goodness knows how to cure this disease, and more important, goodness knows whether the Russians themselves wish to cure it. Neither the “bitter medicine” or “caustic truths” of Peter I, nor of Lermontov, nor of Lenin, nor of Chubais and Gaidar, have dented the Russian “flexibility,” and lesser means have dissipated as a snowflake in the sun. Perhaps this fate will soon befall the country herself?