Man From the USSR & Other Plays (3 page)

 

I'm reasonably sure that we survive
And that my darling somewhere is alive
As I am reasonably sure that I
Shall wake at six tomorrow, on July
The twenty-second, nineteen fifty-nine,
And that the day will probably be fine;
So this alarm clock let me set myself,
Yawn, and put back Shade's “Poems” on their shelf.

 

He is killed the same afternoon, shortly after having finished his poem. The reasonable certitude of his daughter's surviving in an afterworld is therefore just as precarious as that of his being alive the following morning. (The implication for Chernyshevski is: yes, there may be something; for Shade it is: no, chances are there is nothing.)

The deduction in Shade's case, however, is individual and not conclusive. Nabokov had a profound conviction, revealed in certain poems of his, in passages of
The Gift
and
Transparent Things,
and elsewhere, that he carried within him a knowledge of otherworldly truths to which others could not be made privy. It was a conviction that gave him a unique serenity (not unlike that of Scott) in the most trying circumstances, and of which he actually spoke publicly only in one interview. To the question, “Do you believe in God ?” Father replied: “To be quite candid—and what I'm going to say now is something I never said before, and I hope it provokes a salutary little chill—I know more than I can express in words, and the little I can express would not have been expressed, had I not known more.”
⁷

Before
he
dies Shade does, for a moment, speak for Nabokov the artist. The essence of Shade's art is, as we have learned in Canto Three,

 

...Making ornaments
Of accidents and possibilities.

 

Now, at the end of the fourth and final canto, he goes further:

 

...I feel I understand
Existence, or at least a minute part
Of my existence, only through my art,
In terms of
combinational delight;
^*
And, if my private universe scans right,
So does the verse of galaxies divine
Which, I suspect, is an iambic line.

 

The plays open a second, related, Nabokovian vista as well, an aspect of his works even less widely understood than the “combinational delights” just discussed.

To quote Martin Amis, Nabokov depicts his nastier characters with “such plangency ... such moral unease,” writing always more in their expiation, so that “the moral picture is always clear.... But to take the nastiness of the novels and impute it to Nabokov in any way seems to me futile. [It is] just part of what Nabokov is interested in, [this] possible nastiness of Art.”
⁸

There are those who, like the late Edmund Wilson, with his imputations of
Schadenfreude,
consider Nabokov to have been a heartless puppeteer, aloof and indifferent to the misfortunes of his characters and of the world around him. Those who were closely acquainted with him know that nothing could be further from the truth. And for those who were not, a careful and sensitive reading of Nabokov reveals that he was (as Professor Denis Donoghue puts it) “extraordinarily tender toward broken things, maimed lives, and people who are completely ignorant of themselves.”
⁹

How pathetic are the elderly, evicted, not very pleasant Oshivenskis, in the last act of
The Man From the USSR.
Some of their attitudes may be suspect, and Oshivenski may detest that violin; but now they are penniless and are about to become homeless. Fyodor Fyodorovich arrives with the news that he has found them quarters at a different address. But the address is in Paradise Street, care of Engel. There is more than parody to “Paradise.”
¹⁰
There is an echo here of Oshivenski's line immediately prior to Fyodor's arrival: “We'll meet in Paradise, God willing,” and of an exchange that took place between the Oshivenskis a few minutes earlier:

 

MRS. OSHIVENSKI
And where are we supposed to go now? Oh my dear God....

 

OSHIVENSKI
We'll move straight into the Kingdom of Heaven. At least there you don't have to pay the rent in advance.

 

These words also foreshadow Kuznetsoff's penultimate speech: “Olya, I'm going to the USSR so that you will be able to come to Russia. And everybody will be there.... Old Oshivenski living out his days, and Kolya Taubendorf, and that funny Fyodor Fyodorovich. Everybody.” This suggests that they are all going to the same destination; that the Oshivenskis' new address will in fact be not Paradise Street, but Paradise, care of Angels; and that Kuznetsoff's voyage to the USSR (which will never again become “Russia”) will be his last. The violin, that pitiful fourth-rate violin, plays again; Kuznetsoff pauses, recognizes the tune, and the tenderness that it has evoked and he has suppressed all through the play swells, on the final page, to the surface.

This whole, delicate work is unique, with its subtle play of nuance set in the special atmosphere of the Berlin emigration that Father knew so well. In addition to the bad violin there is Kuznetsoffs bad German, his colorful Russian, his basically rather amateurish secret agenting. There is the serene, resigned, desperately loving Olga Pavlovna, who is the only person to bring cash to the hopelessly indigent Oshivenskis. There is also the lighthearted Fyodor, whose statement (at the beginning of the play) that he “was once an artillery captain” is curiously echoed by Kuznetsoff in the final two lines:

 

OLGA PAVLOVNA
(pressing against him)
And you, Alyosha—where will you be?

 

KUZNETSOFF
(...somewhat mysteriously)
Listen—once upon a time there lived in Toulon an artillery officer, and that very same artillery officer—
(They leave.)

 

Has he made some secret arrangement with Fyodor? Is Fyodor being groomed to march, like Napoleon (who, as an artillery officer, had lived in Toulon), on Russia? Will he be more successful? Or is Kuznetsoff simply confirming the omniscience he has already hinted at (“Everybody will be there....”): I shall be in a place from where I shall
know,
and perhaps can even pull some strings.

The reactions of some 1985 readers of
The Man from the U.S.S.R.
compel me to underline an aspect of that play of which those without a frame of reference may be only dimly, if at all, aware. To the characters of the play, however, it is immediate, essential, all-pervasive.

Many of us have lived through crises and upheavals, but more often than not as distant spectators or else only temporary, or marginal, participants. In most cases our outlook is conditioned, no matter how much we may protest about sundry matters, by a security of foundations and a constancy of parameters. We may grow alarmed when the framework creaks or sways, but we seldom if ever truly imagine what it would be like to have our souls and bodies either caged or torn up by the roots, implacably, irrevocably. Yet the microcosm of the stateless Russian émigré in Europe in the twenties and thirties was totally shaky, rootless, and frightening. Nothing was certain and nothing was constant. His Russia was gone, the Europe to which he had fled was heaving with the tremors of imminent cataclysm, his status was spectral, his livelihood and his survival were a matter of wits and luck. The story and the atmosphere of the emigration will, in time, be codified by the imprimatur of perspective, but the events are too recent, and their historical niche too extraordinary.

On this nightmarishly precarious stage the play acquires a very special aura. There is far more here than nostalgia for the Motherland. The real backdrop for the shabby, bittersweet, temporary existence of the characters is one of terror and of doom. After examining other aspects of the play we must return perforce to the tragic realization that the destiny of these people, with all their dreams, their quirks, their foibles, is sealed. And only the less perceptive will fail to understand that the protagonist is not only an anti-Bolshevik, but an ardently courageous one; that his imminent journey to Russia will in all probability be his last; that he is very human, a little pathetic, and has, incidentally, missed his train.

Let us look again, through a different facet of the prism, at
The Event.
The key scene I have already once discussed may be surreal, but it is rich in very real compassion. The sometimes shrewish Lyubov' suddenly becomes human, gentle, understanding. Both she and Troshcheykin struggle to hold on to this aberration of space and time. The magic moment begins to slip away from both of them. She pronounces Tatiana's famous line from
Eugene Onegin:

Onegin, I was younger then,
I daresay, and better-looking

 

and it is over. Money problems, the horrid maid Marfa, the fear of Barbashin all return to haunt them. But Lyubov' has had time to say (and nobody can take this away): “Our little son broke the mirror with a ball today. Hold me, Alyosha. Don't lose your grip.” The son is long since dead. The only balls around are those being used as props for the portrait of an extraneous child. And if anyone broke a mirror it was that child. Troshcheykin's grip loosens. The mad turn-of-the-century chess master Rubenstein preferred to play facing not his adversary but an empty chair and a mirror where he saw “his reflection or, perhaps, the real Rubenstein.”
¹¹
The mirror—and the spell—are broken. Which was the real Troshcheykin?

The Pole
is a play with a more constant sense of pathos. The noble sportsmen-scientists are doomed. Kingsley (though it is Scott who, in other respects, foreshadows the later Gregson) is delirious. The bleak and unambiguous polar surroundings (subsequently, perhaps, deliberately recombined into the vacillating tropical trappings of “Terra Incognita”) are a background for the sometimes surreal atmosphere created within the human soul. The polar nightmare, incidentally, is somehow reminiscent of the eerie visions and sensations reported by the early Everest mountaineers and even by Whymper, whose party saw fogbows of mysterious pattern on the Matterhorn (was it all caused by lack of oxygen and conditioning, or was it also the newness of the mountain adventure—and the polar one—to the human psyche?).

Finally let us turn again, for a moment, to
The Grand-dad.
Just as conjecture, adventure, and autobiographical experience were the raw materials for the combinational process elsewhere, here the
materia prima
is historical, while the central theme is a perennially current moral issue.

In an age when I, for one, find it hard to disapprove of capital punishment as a means of protecting our society from its more ruthless and demonstrably guilty members, Father steadfastly opposed it, as had his father Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov. It was Father's conviction that the remotest possibility of erroneously destroying even a single human life makes the death penalty fundamentally wrong. (I recall that his first concern upon seeing the bruised Oswald under guard was that he might have been arrested and beaten up unjustly.)

Nabokov makes his point, in
The Grand-dad,
more effectively than the most socially “involved” contemporary author. Granted that he was interested in the combinational possibilities of whatever subject he chose. But a viewpoint is a viewpoint, and true art is perhaps the most effective medium for its expression.

A condemned man who has escaped the guillotine through pure luck has a chance encounter, many years later, with his executioner. The latter is possessed by his need to complete the interrupted task: society has made him so, for new murderers are generated by the process of execution. He is obsessed by the urge to kill until his final moment. And here the artist takes over to explore the patterns the situation can create.

The creative process revealed in
The Grand-dad
is the necessary key, perhaps, for those who do not fully understand Nabokov, who criticize him for artistic aloofness,
Schadenfreude,
sterile gamesmanship, lack of concern, and so forth.

The executioner, so deeply tainted by the society in which he lived, reveals, like the despot Paduk in
Bend Sinister,
like the invisible manipulators of power in
Invitation to a Beheading,
a very profound involvement on Father's part. Who is to say that his involvement is less genuine or less effectual because it is refracted through the artistic prism?

Speaking of what Prof. Donoghue defines as Nabokov's “aesthetic relation to Russian literature and thè tensions it exerts between art and propaganda,”
¹²
Alfred Kazin has pointed out that Nabokov perpetuates and develops the tradition of certain Russian formalist poets and scholars who were “very much concerned with art in a very special sense.” It was not “art for art's sake” with the traditional connotations, but rather “the idea of art as a new reality,...an idea Nabokov never lost....He felt—in this he was a prophet—that....Lenin was aiming at something very different from social reform or even social revolution.... [Nabokov] understood that Lenin wanted a separate reality. And we now know, for example, that one of the reasons for the absolute murderousness of totalitarianism is [the insistence].... that communism is a separate reality that has entirely replaced capitalism [and] anyone who even [questions this] becomes an enemy of the system, so that we have an exclusive idea of salvation, which is quite frightful. And Nabokov understood this.”
¹³

It is too bad that the climate of the times and the limitations of Nabokov's audience prevented his prophecies from affecting the course of events. But if art is indeed reality, and a part of that reality is opinion on public matters, can one justly accuse Nabokov of lacking a social consciousness?