Occasional Prose (10 page)

Ada
is his supreme revenge. There he at last reinstates himself in a supra-national, supercilious palace of culture, with a queen by his side; the mirror pair of children, like the Ptolemys, are brother and sister. “A Family Chronicle” is the subtitle; “Dynastic” would be better. Nothing could be more remote from the Family of Man or Here-Comes-Everybody of
Finnegan’s Wake
, which takes place in a pub.

Ada
, in my view, is a failure, a misfired
coup d’état
, and this, I think, is not unrelated to the crows of triumph that shrill through it. The theme of need in all its sad and threadbare forms (Gogol’s overcoat), so characteristic of the author, has here been cast aside or molted, like last year’s set of feathers. But this theme and the allied one of insuperable distance, which everybody has experienced, if only when in love, have up to now supplied a human element, compensating for a great deal of extravagance and foppery in Nabokov’s writing. We forgive the vanity and arrogance of the Pretender exile because, like Pnin, like Humbert Humbert, like Botkin, he is at least half a refugee. In
Ada
, there is no shared mass misery of furnished rooms, German boarding-houses and park benches, underpaid language lessons,
émigré
magazines and newspapers, sectarian bickering all leading on to American lectureships, missed trains, common-room snubs, motels. One of the chief interests, instead, is genealogy. It is as if the author, once a Russian exile in America, with all that implies of loss and grieving, had metamorphosed into an American expatriate living on a Swiss mountaintop “above it all.”

Nabokov insists that he is indifferent to current Russian events, but that is only his way of snubbing the Soviet Union, just as his pose of being indifferent to politics is a snub to
engagé
literature. Actually, he is far from apolitical and continues to feud in books and interviews with left-wingers as a body and with Russian left-wingers in particular, including Chernyshevsky, author of
What is to be done?
, who died in 1889. More peculiar is his malice toward Pasternak, whom he half admired as a poet and who was dead too, and disgraced when
Ada
came out, in which Nabokov cites, among other repellent titles,
Les Amours du Docteur Mertvago
—i.e.,
mertv
(death plus
merde
). This must be a case of novelist’s jealousy. Nabokov, an exile, envied Pasternak, an “internal
émigré
”—a Soviet term of abuse often applied to Pasternak and meaning something like an internal expatriate, if that can be conceived.

As novelists, Nabokov and Pasternak were in rivalry for “the Russian land,” a legacy they had from Tolstoy and Aksakov. They belonged to the same milieu, the old educated class—what the Soviets called “former persons,” like ghosts—though Pasternak’s family were lower on the tsarist social scale, artists and bohemians, city people and apartment-dwellers, rather than well-to-do landowners. And the external exile, despite his much greater worldly success, envied the internal exile—the man-in-possession.

Perhaps it was sometimes mutual. In
Dr. Zhivago
(page 312 of the English edition) Pasternak appears to be emitting a signal of some kind to the other writer. “Folding and unfolding like a scrap of coloured stuff, a brown speckled butterfly” flies in and out of the story for the length of a paragraph, giving rise to some reflections on mimicry and protective coloring. Yury Zhivago, says Pasternak, has alluded to this subject in his medical publications. But Nabokov too, as a professional lepidopterist, has published on protective mimicry—a fact probably known to Pasternak, who certainly was aware of him as a butterfly-hunter. Yet if the passage was intended as a fraternal greeting, it got a cold response.

The characters in
Dr. Zhivago
, many of them exiles from their former way of life, are swept up by the storm of the Revolution and become refugees. Sooner or later, everybody is in flight or hiding—refugees from war, from the Red terror, from the White terror, peasants who have lost their homes, townspeople driven into the countryside by hunger. The long and beautiful train trip across the Russian land into the Ural Mountains, which recalls a trip in Aksakov’s memoirs, is the great major sequence of the book, combining an idyll with an epic trek. The revolutionary storm spares nobody, not even the commissar Antipov, who is found toward the end hiding in a farmhouse encircled by wolves. With one big exception, the evil genius Komarovsky, Lara’s seducer. He is last seen riding off in a
wagon-lit
to become, not an exile, for he has never been “political,” but a true expatriate, doubtless smoking a cigar and heading for Manchuria. Another exception, another immune figure—who does not belong, though, to the naturalistic plane of the novel and who, like Komarovsky, is not even listed among the principal characters—is Yury’s half-brother and miraculous protector, Yevgraf, the Angel of Death. According to Nadezhada Mandelstam, in her book
Hope against Hope
, the mysterious Yevgraf is simply some high-up bureaucrat whose miracles are worked by knowing “the right people,” that is, by having a transmission belt to Stalin.

Pasternak’s own situation varied between periods of internal exile and official favor and protection. With Solzhenitsyn, you get internal exile at its bleakest and in nearly all its forms and stages. Deportation, forced labor in a camp, forced residence, confinement in a cancer ward—in his novel of that name the sick are treated by the staff and people outside rather as if they were wilful exiles from a healthy society. His books take place in a climate so frozen and immobile that Pasternak’s orphans in the storm, by comparison, are enjoying the wildest liberty. The revolution described by Pasternak still has something of a Tolstoyan natural force, awesome and fierce, but in Solzhenitsyn, the savage natural is replaced by the universal ordinary. He does not write about former people but about Soviet people and about Soviet society, almost as if there had never been any other kind. Nobody is homeless or buffeted by circumstance, since everyone must be registered. There are no outlaws hiding in the forest: Pasternak’s red rowanberry trees have probably been leveled by a bulldozer to make a detention camp.

Nor is there any refuge in memory. For most writers-in-exile—e.g., Joyce, Nabokov, the internal exile Pasternak—recollections of childhood are a literary food source and have been hoarded, squirrel-wise, against the winter; it does not appear to matter whether the childhood was happy, like Nabokov’s, or dingy, like Joyce’s. Solzhenitsyn, a Soviet man (born in 1918), seems to have had no childhood to look back to for sustenance. That other dimension, the past, is seldom glimpsed in his books up to now, unless it is through the old peasant woman Matriona, who is herself a reminiscence, a piece of stout material left over from some prehistoric eon.

Unlike Pasternak, he has no influential connections, which would relate him to a sphere “higher up.” At present he is being sheltered by the cellist Rostropovich, who is risking his passport by harboring him. His only “outlet” seems to have been teaching mathematics. One of the most interesting things about the drama of his getting the Nobel Prize award was the official threat not to let him back into the country if he went to Stockholm to receive it. They knew their man: Solzhenitsyn did not go to Stockholm. But he accepted the prize. He chose internal exile against the other kind—a decision some Westerners found mysterious since so many Soviet citizens are doing their best to get out. Solzhenitsyn insisted on his right to stay
and
to receive the prize.

The decision was typical of today’s internal exiles in the Soviet Union, not only writers but scientists. Probably Mme Mandelstam, Sinyavsky, and Daniel would respond in the same way in the circumstances, and Akhmatova too, if she were alive. It is a question of politics and of pride—in fact, of national pride.
*
The internal exiles seem to have made it a principle to behave toward the Soviet Union as if it were a normal country, with an operative constitution. As though by their determination they could oblige the “as if” to come true. To go into exile, on the one hand, or conform, on the other, would be to give up any hope of that happening and to accept the Soviet Union as some sort of clinical monstrosity outside the norms of law. This notion they refuse. And they do not compare Soviet justice with U.S. justice or English justice or tsarist justice, but with articles in the Soviet constitution and laws in the statute books. Thus their frame of reference is Soviet reality, which they also occupy with their bodies rather like sit-in strikers.

This political determination is clear in Solzhenitsyn’s books. He writes as coolly as if there were no censorship and no conceivable interference with publication. His books appear as simple statements of fact, without exaggeration or fantasy. That may be why memory of the distant kind (“the laundryman in the lavender flannels”) has no place in them. One of the few rhetorical reminders of anything “outside,” of a larger frame, is the title of
The First Circle
, which refers to Dante’s Hell. The prisoners there are relatively privileged spirits, like Dante’s virtuous heathen, the First Circle being Limbo. Their punishment is light, compared to Ivan Denisovich’s, and consists simply of exclusion, but it has the hellish characteristic of permanence. A better metaphor for internal exile might be Purgatory, a place where you wait, like exiles in a foreign land, to go home. Solzhenitsyn
is
home, and yet he declines to recognize the immediate political geography as permanent. This might be a definition of the internal exile: a man who has taught himself to behave as if he had already crossed a frontier while refusing to leave his house.

London, February 1972

*
In this connection, see A
Question of Madness
by Zhores and Roy Medvedev.

Language and Politics

T
HE OTHER DAY A
headline caught my attention in the financial pages of the
International Herald Tribune
. I normally don’t look at the business section or the sports and avoid anything about astronauts. But that day—November 13—turning the pages I saw
CHILEAN JUNTA WINS PRIVATE FINANCIAL AID.
Then in smaller type: “‘Work spirit’ Praised by American Banker.” The news story related that private U.S. bank loans had suddenly become available for Chile—a dramatic turnabout following on the overthrow of the Allende government. The previous Friday, Manufacturers Hanover Trust had announced that it was extending a $24-million loan to a Chilean bank. According to unnamed banking sources, described as reliable, Manufacturers Hanover had lent an additional $20 million to the central bank of Santiago. In any case, the $24 million was the largest credit given to Chile by a U.S. bank since Salvador Allende took office three years ago. Altogether, eight to ten U.S. banks and two Canadian banks have offered Chile commercial loans amounting to about $150 million in the two months since Allende was overthrown.

You may wonder what all this has to do with language; the connection with politics is fairly clear. Well, toward the bottom of the page the writer quoted a vice-president of Manufacturers Hanover, James R. Greene, who on making the announcement spoke at length—I quote—“about the renewal of U.S. business faith in Chile.” This is Greene talking: “The work spirit that I have seen in Chile leads me to fully trust that the international press will correct the negative image that is being spread about this country abroad.” You will note one split infinitive, two superfluous “that”s, and two cliché phrases, “work spirit” and “negative image,” that also seem to be circumlocutions. Aside from the question of whether an image can be spread, like butter or like a disease or like a rumor, one asks what the speaker can be alluding to by the blanket word “negative.” It is indeed a blanket covering the summary executions of thousands of oppositionists, the countless illegal arrests, the setting-up of camps, the abolition of Parliament, the suppression of left-wing political parties, the suspension of all other political parties, press censorship, purges of the universities, factories, and state enterprises. This is what the colorless “negative image” translates into, and the selection of the word “image”—in its current PR definition, not yet, I see, admitted to my dictionary, copyright 1957—assigns a kind of deniability to all those public facts, as though they were bodiless, insubstantial, mere refractions of evanescent appearance, as opposed to reality.

By contrast to his handling of the negative, Greene eventually defines what he understands by the “work spirit.” Something positive. Here he is again: “The fact that Chileans are working on Saturday is a very good antecedent, as far as my bank is concerned. This is very important in the financial world.” So work spirit means that the forty-hour week has been abolished by the junta. He does not say, at least in the
Herald Tribune
quotes from him, that the junta has promised to return to private capital the “vast majority” of the more than three hundred foreign and domestic enterprises that were nationalized by the Allende government without compensation. Nor that it has announced that it is prepared to renew negotiations on compensation to the three U.S. companies whose copper mines were taken over—assets worth between $500 and $700 million. That, the joyful undersong of the announcement he had to make, possibly did not need to be put into words. It was tacit. But what about the word “antecedent”? Working on Saturday is a very good antecedent, he says, as far as his bank is concerned. I have been asking myself what word he was reaching for. “Precedent”? But “precedent,” though slightly closer to the mark, does not make sense either. Precedent for what, unless he means working on Sunday? The thing he is trying to articulate, evidently, is that his bank takes the extension of the work week as a good sign. Then why not say so? Maybe, to his ear, sign was too commonplace a word for a $24-million occasion. Or maybe, grope as he would, he couldn’t remember “sign.” Not for the life of him. Was he speaking off the cuff or reading a prepared statement? The news story does not tell.