Literary Stereography: Nabokov Drawing and Reading Maps

Leona Toker

Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas, Volume 19,
Number 2, June 2021, pp. 361-369 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/pan.2021.0020

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/794661

[ Access provided at 19 Aug 2021 16:46 GMT from University of Glasgow Library ]
Literary Stereography: Nabokov Drawing and Reading Maps

Leona Toker
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

When the novelist Vladimir Nabokov taught literature at Cornell and

Harvard, he was known to draw maps, diagrams, or schematic illustra-
tions to accompany his lectures. His published text on Jane Austen’s
Mansfield Park, for instance, comes with a topographical map of So-
therton Court (1980: 31), and his map of England (1980: 62) marks the
settings of that novel and of Dickens’s Bleak House. In a 1969 interview
with Allene Talmey for Vogue, Nabokov explained that the exactness
of detail in a literary text yields “the sensual spark without which the
book is dead”: one needs, for instance, to visualize “the larch labyrinth in
Mansfield Park” in order to respond to Austen’s “stereographic charm”
(1973: 157).
This paper is devoted to reflections on “stereographic charm,” created,
enhanced, or experienced by Nabokov. “Stereography” is, among other
things, the art of drawing a solid figure on a flat surface or, metaphorical-
ly speaking, the ways of conjuring up the illusion of three-dimensional
bodies by means of the markings, verbal or graphic, on the flat surface
of the page. This is not the same as the metaphor of “round” rather than
“flat” characters as suggested by E. M. Forster (103). What “the sensual
spark” means is that one’s senses, especially the visual and auditory, are
activated by something in the text in a way that yields a split-second aes-
thetic experience, of the kind aligned with Kant’s principle of disinter-
estedness or with Schopenhauer’s belief in the aesthetic moment as the
silencing of the will. Hence the “charm,” the enchantment, that Nabokov
sought in his own work and that of others, though, pace Richard Rorty,1
that was not the only thing that he sought.
A useful lens for Nabokov’s agenda is provided by Hans Ulrich Gum-
brecht’s The Production of Presence. This book distinguishes between
two kinds of aesthetic effects — the effects of meaning and those of pres-
ence (see, e.g., 98–100). Meaning effects dominate in verbal art and are a
1
See Rorty’s chapter on Nabokov in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. For a critique of
this chapter in an otherwise inspiring book see Toker 1994. See also Foster 67n25; Connolly
7; cf. Rampton.

Partial Answers 19/2: 361–369 © 2021 Johns Hopkins University Press

362 Leona Toker

grateful subject of hermeneutics. Presence effects dominate in visual arts

and music, but literature seeks to evoke them too — not merely through
formatting texts as material artefacts which can give pleasure to biblio-
philes but mainly through appealing to our imagination in a way that
helps us conjure up sense experience: for instance, to visualize the color
green, when we read “green,” rather than file the motif of “greenness”
away in our memory as the text’s notional component with multiple
connotations.2 Presence effects can also be a matter of style, especially
through auditory impressions. Thus, in the opening of Mansfield Park —
“Maria Ward, of Huntington, with only seven thousand pounds, had the
good luck to captivate Sir Thomas Bertram, of Mansfield Park” (5) —
Nabokov hears not only what Marianne in Austen’s Sense and Sensibil-
ity would call “illiberal” vocabulary (the meaning effects of “with only
seven thousand pounds” and “the good luck to captivate”) but also the
rhythm that joins these connotations to produce the “middle-class flutter
of the event” (1980: 12).
Yet the immediate sensual response to the images in the text must
often be supplemented by a mental effort of combining these images
into a complicated picture, a solid three-dimensional setting, such as the
“larch labyrinth” of Mansfield Park. A maze, a planted labyrinth, is a
frequent feature of country-house grounds (in reality and in fiction, up to
Harry Potter), but it is not present in Mansfield Park. Nabokov is refer-
ring to the episode of the main characters’ excursion to Mr. Rushworth’s
Sotherton estate, where, after being bored to depression in the mansion
house and in the heat of the terrace, the characters step out into the “wil-
derness,” which is “a planted wood of about two acres,” chiefly “of larch
and laurel” (65). Nabokov withholds the “laurel” (laurels he would rather
keep for Dickens), and traces the figurative labyrinth of the characters’
movements, in pairs, toward and away from the bench on which Fanny
Price is settled in front of the ha-ha, clearly marked on his map. This is
Nabokov’s tribute to one of the most striking features of Austen’s novels
— the subtlety of the characters’ self-positioning in space.
A locked iron gate keeps the young characters of Mansfield Park from
walking further out into the park. Mr. Rushworth has not brought the key
and goes away to fetch it. Nabokov is indifferent to the proto-Freudian
symbolism of Rushworth’s lacking a key as well as to the social symbol-
ism of the ha-ha, the sunken fence which, in the sparse symbolic code of
the novel, stands for inconspicuous control of movement. His attention is
diverted by what he sees as Austen’s reminiscence of Laurence Sterne’s
2
For an insightful analysis of presence and meaning effects in Dickens’s Little Dorrit,
see Kerner.
 Literary Stereography: Nabokov Drawing and Reading Maps 363

A Sentimental Journey, following the direct allusion to Sterne in Maria

Bertram’s complaint “I cannot get out, as the starling said” (Austen 71).
The conjured-up image of a bird in a cage (Maria cannot get out of the
internalized, mind-forged manacles of social expectation), indeed con-
nects with another absent key, associated with Yorick’s narrow escape
from arrest and the Bastille in France: a breeze of continental history is
blown into the seclusion of Austen’s Regency Northamptonshire.
Nabokov’s resistance to the hunt for symbolism is most clearly ex-
pressed in his comments on James Joyce’s Ulysses. Writing his lectures
after Stuart Gilbert’s chart of the episodes of Joyce’s Ulysses but be-
fore Gifford and Seidman’s maps in Ulysses Annotated, Nabokov tries
to warn instructors and students against “the pretentious nonsense of
Homeric, chromatic, and visceral chapter headings” and advises them
to “prepare maps of Dublin with Bloom’s and Stephen’s intertwining
itineraries clearly traced.” Nabokov’s own map of Ulysses is published in
his posthumous lecture notes of the 1950s (1980: 303). Nabokov’s prin-
ciple of “the passion of the scientist and the precision of the artist,” well
remembered by his students (Wetzsteon 242), is behind his jotting down
of, among other things, the topography of specific episodes of Ulysses,
the plan of Leopold Bloom’s house on Eccles street (1980: 305), the lay-
out of Doctor Jekyll’s house (with a student’s help, 1980: 187), and the
scheme of Gregor Samsa’s apartment (257).
And yet something of the opposite nature happens when Nabokov
attempts to orient himself among the traditions that cluster around the
origins of Alexander Pushkin and anchor these traditions in hand-drawn
geographical maps and travel narratives. While working on his transla-
tion of and commentary to Eugene Onegin, in which Pushkin mentions
“my Africa,” Nabokov is moved to research and write up the biography
of Pushkin’s African great-grandfather, Abram Gannibal, the so-called
“Blackamoor of Peter the Great,” on whom he has already lectured in
1942, with great success, at Spelman College (see Nabokov 2014: 469–
70).
Contemporary artists O. A. Kiprensky and V. A. Tropinin endowed
Pushkin’s portrait with features that were meant to suggest his African
heritage.3 Evidently, this romantically tinged heritage fascinated Push-

3
See the 1827 portraits of Pushkin by Kiprensky and by Tropinin: https://he.wikipedia.
org/wiki/%D7%A7%D7%95%D7%91%D7%A5:Portrait_of_Alexander_Pushkin_(Orest_
Kiprensky,_1827).PNG and https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Pushkin#/media/
File:AleksandrPushkin.jpg (February 1, 2021). On the relevance, or lack of it, of Pushkin’s
origins, see Nepomnyashchy and Trigos.
364 Leona Toker

kin’s audiences; the poet himself kept returning to it in works of different

genres (see Shaw). Nabokov’s processing of the theories about the pos-
sible origins of Pushkin’s maternal great-grandfather is a scholarly en-
deavor which yields moments of “sensuous spark” and artistic inspiration.
Present-day research tends to situate Abram Gannibal’s origins south
of lake Chad, in the territory of Cameroon (see, for instance, Teletova
46), yet the more traditional legend-based theory places his birthplace
in Ethiopia. Somewhat skeptically faithful to that tradition,4 Nabokov
studies the maps of Ethiopian riverbeds, and they seem to give him the
“sensual spark” that he talks about in the Vogue interview. In writing
his essay “Abram Gannibal,” eventually published as an appendix to his
commentary on Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin in his own translation, Nabo-
kov follows Joyce in suffusing stereographic detail with the flavor of
symbolism. What he rejects in his lectures on Ulysses is symbolism as
the scaffolding of the novel, yet he seems receptive, in an understated
way, to the way literal details may accrue symbolic ramifications.
This, indeed, seems to be happening in Nabokov’s brief account of
the river Mareb. Nabokov’s text reproduces the remarks of the Victorian
traveler J. Theodore Bent, in The Sacred City of the Ethiopians, but with
corrections of both geographical and stylistic nature, turning a descrip-
tion into an evocation, with alliterating sounds conveying the rustle of
the waters:

J. Theodore Bent, The Sacred Vladimir Nabokov, Notes on

City of the Ethiopians, Being a Prosody and Abram Gannibal
Record of Travel and Research in
Abyssinia in 1893.

The Mareb below Debarroa is [The Mareb] is a tiny rivulet with

only a tiny stream with a narrow
bed. It makes from here a great
bend eastwards, and then turning
south, and collecting numerous
other streams from the Hamasen
mountains, flows westwards
towards the Nile. (87–88)
a narrow bed below Debarwa;
then it swells, sweeps south,
turns west, and, collecting
numerous other streams from the
northern mountains, flows west
toward the Sudan frontier, to dis-
appear in the soil near Kassala,
though in very wet weather an
ultimate trickle reaches Atbara.
(121)

4
Brian Boyd regards Nabokov’s “Abram Gannibal” as “a comic demonstration of the
elusiveness of particulars and the degradation of ‘facts’ as they are repeated from mouth to
mouth and book to book” (348). In my reading, however, the lyrical component of the essay
is at least as strong as the comic one.
 Literary Stereography: Nabokov Drawing and Reading Maps 365

Part of the Mareb is now the natural border between Ethiopia and
Eritrea. The Wikipedia entry on that river contains the following map, a
god’s-eye view, considerably clearer than in 19th-century cartography but
eliding the fact that the last lap of the river, before it reaches Black Nile
(Atbara), is most often dry:

But what is the Mareb doing in Nabokov’s essay? This river is not
mentioned in the extant documents dealing with Abram Gannibal’s ori-
gins. Nor is Gannibal’s own claim to being a son of an Abyssinian sei-
gnior undisputed. Nabokov, however, is willing to accept the tradition
that the French-educated military engineer Abram, or Ibrahim, Gannibal,
Tsar Peter’s godson, had been brought to Russia, via Turkey where he
had been enslaved, from Ethiopia, where, Nabokov says, “we have been
following, through bibliographical dust, the mules and camels of several
adventurous caravans” (125). Nabokov studies the documents available
to him, as well as general historical sources, travelogues, and maps — not
in order to prove this theory but in order to argue for its plausibility, not-
ing that the burden of proof is on those who reject the tradition.
And according to the tradition, young Ibrahim, or Abram, could have
been a captured child of one of the nomadic tribes that haunted the prov-
ince of Tigré, or else a descendant of King Solomon and the Queen of
366 Leona Toker

Sheba, to whom Abyssinian nobility traced its origins. What makes the
latter possibility attractive for Nabokov is the recurrence of motifs —
music, gentleness, and cruelty to the gentle — beyond the borders of
texts, maps, and historical periodizations. In the late 1690s, as part of
his anticorruption move, king Jesus I of Abyssinia exacted a tribute from
provincial governors; this tribute must have included young children: the
pharmacist traveler Charles Poncet was supposed to take a group of them
to Louis XIV, along with elephant tusks, as a gift from the Abyssinian
emperor. The consignment of children never reached Poncet: they were
captured on the way and sent to the sultan of the Ottoman Empire. In-
deed, the tradition has it that young Abram was somehow obtained by the
Russian envoy Peter Tolstoy from the sultan’s seraglio, though a regular
Istanbul slave market is not out of the question.
The romanticized German-language biography of Gannibal, written
by his son-in-law, suggests that he had been slated for deportation be-
cause he was the son of the youngest and least powerful wife of the
governor of his home region. His only full sibling was an older sister,
who “accompanied him to the very deck of the small ship,” tried to buy
him out and, according to his melancholy reminiscences as an old man,
when her efforts proved fruitless, “cast herself in despair into the sea
and was drowned” (125). It is unlikely that an Abyssinian maid could
have ventured on a trek to the shores of the Red Sea; indeed, Nabokov
comments that the ship, “in whose wake swam — somewhat ahead of
the romantic era — a passionate sister, might be easily condemned to
dwindle to a reed raft on a seasonable river” (126). He leaves it to us to
surmise that this may well have been the Mareb or a similar wadi in the
season of flooding.
What keeps Nabokov from dismissing the whole fairy tale is the sis-
ter’s name, “Lahann,” as recollected by Gannibal. It is “a plausible Abys-
sinian name” (126), probably associated with Arabic and Hebrew words
for “melody” — “lahin” and “lakhan,” and possibly with “layan,” the
Arabic for “gentleness.”5 A young wife of Ras Fares, the governor of
the province of Tigré in the 1690s, was called “Lahia Dengel or Lahya
Dengel (meaning in Tigré ‘beauty of the Virgin’), which has a striking
resemblance to that of the girl who may have been her daughter” (127).
Towards the conclusion of his essay Nabokov cites the memoirs of
pharmacist Charles Poncet, the same traveler who had failed to deliver

5
For a more detailed discussion see Toker 1989, where, however, the emphasis is on the
functions of heteroglossia in “Abram Gannibal.”
 Literary Stereography: Nabokov Drawing and Reading Maps 367

the group of children “as samples of Abyssinian nobility to the court

of a Frankish king” (131). In the summer of 1700, which is a couple
of years before Abram’s deportation, Poncet was entertained by two
governors in Debarwa, during which “women with tabors [tambours de
basque] ... began to sing [commencerent des récit en forme de chansons]
... in so doleful a tone that I could not hinder being seized with grief.
…” (161). Among the many “pleasing possibilit[ies]” conjured up by
Nabokov’s “marginal imagination” is the surmise that one of Poncet’s
doleful singers “was none other than Pushkin’s great-great-grandmother;
that her lord, either of Poncet’s two hosts, was Pushkin’s great-great-
grandfather” (161). What connects the dots for Nabokov is the motif of
the “melody,” “lahin,” “Lahann.” Pushkin’s Abyssinian heritage is, for
Nabokov, not a matter of legendary “African passions” (158)6 but the
musical gene traceable to a politically powerless Abyssinian woman, a
victim of intrigues.
Nabokov notes that the “gene that participated in the making of Push-
kin” (145) was endangered by intrigues in Russia, when courtiers toyed
with the idea of marrying Abram Gannibal to some court jester or some
other lusus naturae — Tsar Peter preempted this, for which some of his
sins might be forgiven. Gannibal himself, writes Nabokov, became “a
sour, groveling, crotchety, timid, ambitious, and cruel person; a good
military engineer, perhaps, but humanistically a nonentity; differing in
nothing from a typical career-minded, superficially educated, coarse,
wife-flogging Russian of his day” (158). And yet, he may have been the
carrier of that blessed gene. Nabokov’s essay mentions a tributary of the
Mareb, the river Belessa, which follows “the example of the Mareb by
disappearing under the sands during the dry season, when, however, a
little digging provides one with plenty of water” (121). In Gannibal, the
talent for poetry, for song, lakhan, did not come to the surface but ran un-
derneath, like the waters of the Mareb or the Belessa (Balasa) in the dry
season, to surface and flow enchantingly again three generations later.
I do not go so far as to claim that, in Nabokov’s essay, an Abyssinian
wadi symbolizes a genetic map for poetic talent. Yet, in addition to be-
ing an exercise in the critique of sources, this essay, as its author notes,
is “the outcome of a few odd moments spent in the admirable librar-
ies of Cornell and Harvard universities” (108). Those must have been
the moments of the “sensuous spark,” when the stereographic charm of

6
As Dana Dragunoiu notes, Nabokov “gleefully strips Gannibal’s story of its orientalist
accretions.”
368 Leona Toker

riverbeds on maps (by Bent, Bruce, or Baratieri, as the case may be7) in-
spired solidifying images. The images must have converged with histori-
cal data and philological reverberations to produce the “odd moments”
of aesthetic experience, when the effects of presence harmonized with
the effects of meaning. After all, one of the striking features of maps as
artefacts is precisely their combined affordance of presence and meaning
effects, often touched by an elusive sense of mystery.

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